Yonder: Essays

O.M.F. Revisited

1 Metaphor

The act of reading still surprises me, especially reading novels. The fact that I can look down at little symbols on a page and translate them into images and voices continues to astonish me. When I remember books, I don’t remember the words on the page. I remember what I saw and heard the way I remember the real world. Sometimes when I go back to a book, I realize that I remembered wrong. And yet, every reading is an encounter with words, nothing more and nothing less. Over the years, I have read many books. Some of them have vanished. Others have lingered in my mind and changed me forever. One of them is the last novel Charles Dickens finished, Our Mutual Friend. It is a book about the world’s secrets, about what we know and what we can’t know, about what is spoken and what is unspoken. In it I found not answers but ultimate questions. More than any other writer I have read, Dickens is close to the metaphysical strangeness of things, to living and dying, and to the desire to put all of it into words.

The novel begins at twilight. The narrator looks over the dark water of the Thames and notices a boat, but it’s hard to see in the bad light. Through the magic of omniscience, he moves closer. The boat has “no inscription,” no identifying marks whatsoever. It is nameless. In it we see a man and a girl. Suddenly a slant of light from the waning sun illuminates the craft’s bottom, “touching a rotten stain there which bore some resemblance to the outline of a muffled human form.” The secret of the book is here. The stain will generate a world of muffled human forms, because this is a story of bodies, both dead and alive, and the marks they leave on the world, and it is a story of recognition and identification, which turns out to be a very murky business indeed.

The plot in a nutshell is this: The rotting body that left its stain in the boat is soon discovered, and the papers found on it lead the authorities to identify it as John Harmon, son of a London dust mogul and heir to a fortune. But the officials are wrong, and this case of mistaken identity will turn the world of the book upside down. The Boffins, loyal servants to old Harmon, become heirs to the fortune. Silas Wegg, a sly observer of the Boffins’ new wealth, plots against them. A cash award, offered for information leading to the perpetrator of the murder, inspires Riderhood, a low-life river rat, to a deception that takes him to the offices of Eugene Wrayburn and Mortimer Lightwood, lawyers for the Harmon estate. Riderhood then accuses Gaffer Hexam, the man in the boat who found the body, of murder. This, in turn, brings the highborn Eugene Wrayburn and the lowborn Lizzie Hexam together, and their love story begins. Most important, the false identification of the body allows the real John Harmon, who has been away from home for many years, to pose as someone else, to become a spectator of his own death. He goes to live in what was once his father’s house, where he works as a secretary to Boffin and observes the beautiful but spoiled Bella Wilfer, ward to the newly flush servants and the woman to whom he has been given in his father’s will — his marriage to her being a condition of his inheritance. Another rocky courtship begins. Through social connection or simple coincidence, all the dispersed elements of the story intersect or collide: Lizzie and Bella meet. Bradley Headstone, schoolmaster to Lizzie’s brother, and Eugene Wrayburn are thrown together and become rivals for Lizzie, and in the grip of what proves to be a fatal libidinous passion for Lizzie, Headstone allies himself with Riderhood. Our Mutual Friend is a story of love, money, greed, and dying — usually by drowning.

At one time or another, almost all the book’s male characters end up dead or almost dead in the river. The cadaver dredged from the river slime turns out to be George Radfoot. When Radfoot is killed, Harmon, too, nearly drowns. Gaffer Hexam eventually drowns as he goes about his business of robbing the bloated bodies he dredges up from the Thames. Riderhood comes close to drowning once, before he finally goes under with Bradley Headstone. Eugene Wrayburn is rescued from a watery grave by Lizzie Hexam. Jenny Wren, Lizzie’s friend, loses her grandfather to the river — an old man, dragged from the depths by Hexam, still wearing his nightshirt.

In the book, drowning and near drowning have a nearly cyclical rhythm that is echoed by events on dry land. A man goes under and vanishes forever or resurfaces as an unrecognizable body. The story the book tells is a movement between what is there and what is not there, a flux from the seen to the unseen. You can’t have presence without absence, and language itself is born from this rhythm. The words can speak to what is missing. Where do words live if not in a zone between presence and absence?

This dilemma begins with the book’s title, which is itself a nod to between-ness, an evasion of a proper name that would refer directly to the book’s hero. This is not Oliver Twist or David Copperfield, in which the title introduces the hero. The title implies a relationship between or among people, points to a person defined through his connection with others. John Harmon is “our mutual friend,” but you have to read the book to know that. Dickens’s middle names were John Huffam, a fact that illuminates the author’s stake in the book’s mystery. He has buried his own middle names in his hero, whose pseudonymous adventure ends in rediscovering the name Harmon. To put it another way, even before you open the book to read it, you encounter a reference that is fundamentally obscure, because it points to nobody as of yet. Once inside the book, you find yourself confronted with more obscurity — the dim twilight, an incoherent form, dark water, dust flying through the streets — and before long you are swept up into a wilderness of unknowing at every level. Perhaps the problem of the novel is articulated best by one of its minor characters, Jenny Wren: “Misty, misty, misty. Can’t make it out…”

The way into this foggy world is through metaphor. In Dickens, metaphor is the mode of perception. His books are veritable jungles of tropes, figures that became more and more unbridled as his abilities as a writer grew, and the careful reader must begin to unravel this dense metaphorical structure. It isn’t easy. The entanglement of one trope with another is like a fast-growing vine that keeps sending shoots here and there, until separating its climbers becomes an awesome job. In Our Mutual Friend, tropes rarely appear as isolated moments of comparison that briefly yield new meaning. Instead, they linger and mark the narrative permanently, so that after a metaphorical event, the new meaning is adopted as if it were literal — the “vehicle” is changed forever. For example, early in the novel a servant in the Veneering household is compared to an “Analytical Chemist.” From that moment on, he is simply “Analytical.” The figure remains as a proper name, and the original simile is digested by the text. A roasted haunch of mutton served at a dinner party is compared to a vapor bath and the guests to bathers:

And now the haunch of mutton vapour-bath, having received a gamey infusion, and a last few touches of sweets and coffee, was quite ready and the bathers came.… Bald bathers folded their arms and talked to Mr. Podsnap.… sleek whiskered bathers … lunged at Mrs. Podsnap and retreated; prowling bathers went about looking into ornamental boxes and bowls.… bathers of the gentler sex sat silently comparing ivory shoulders.

By the time the reader has reached the naked shoulders, the bath has been superseded by the bathers themselves. Early in the book, Mrs. Podsnap is compared to a rocking horse: “Quantity of bone, neck and nostrils like a rocking horse.” Over a hundred pages later, she is seen in the act of “rocking.” Metaphor is metamorphosis, and the changes are so swift that everywhere you look, people and things are shuddering as if the world won’t sit still to be named.

Dickens also creates movement between the animate and the inanimate. The inanimate often looks human, and people often look like objects. When Fascination Fledgeby tries to gain entrance to a house, the reader is told that “he pulled the house’s nose again and pulled and pulled … until a human nose appeared in the doorway.” The metaphorical nose is followed by a literal nose, and the comic tension it creates undermines the status of both, making the “real” nose appear alien and disembodied, as if it were floating alone in the dark space of the doorway. The two “noses” are confused through similarity and proximity in a form of contagious magic — the stuff of animism. But Dickens’s animism isn’t truly magical. His nose doesn’t disguise itself and run around St. Petersburg assuming dangerous social pretentions, as Gogol’s does. It just hangs there. What does happen is that the seemingly stable boundaries between the man and the door are confounded. The ordinary world of houses and doors and door knockers and human bodies is not fixed. The lines of perception float.

Living in this world means instability, means being part of a shuddering dance of words that refuses easy definition. By tracing a single minor character, we can begin to understand how literal and metaphorical meanings play themselves out in the book and enfeeble conventional boundaries. From the descriptions of Silas Wegg, the reader is led through a maze of connections that find their way to the heart of the book’s obsession with the body and its abstract associate: the self. Wegg, a shady street vendor, is often called just “the wooden gentleman.” One of many characters in Dickens who has lost a limb, Wegg “seems to have taken to his wooden leg naturally.” Silas suffers from what might be called creeping wood syndrome: the material of a dead limb is encroaching on his entire body, but this syndrome isn’t limited to Wegg. He exists within a lavishly developed network of wood metaphors that splinter in all directions. Wood links him to the city in general, which the narrator calls a great “sawpit,” blinding and choking its citizens, to “sawdust”—which links him to all dust — the overwhelming real and metaphorical presence in the novel. Dust mounds loom on the horizon — shapeless hills of valuable waste. Boffin, the “Golden Dustman,” digs through dust mounds for objects not yet reduced to unintelligible particles. Silas Wegg seems to attract waste. The corner where he sells his wares is both chaotic and dirty: “… shelterless fragments of straw and paper got up revolving there, when the main street was peace; and the water cart as if it were drunk or short-sighted came blundering and jolting around it, making it muddy when all else was clean.” Boffin’s dead master, Harmon Senior, miser and dust mogul, made an empire from dust. Dust is good business, and it turns a profit, but it is still garbage, a fact which links Wegg to urban pollution in general, as well as to the corruption of the city’s prominent “lords and gentlemen and honourable boards,” who are accused of “dust shovelling” and “cinder raking” and producing a “mountain of pretentious failure.” The route from Wegg to leg to wood to sawpit to dust to pollution, to paper, money, and city government is surprisingly direct. And each link in this metaphorical chain produces more associations, equally rich and simultaneous, which find their way back to the human body and how to articulate it.

As it turns out, the wooden gentleman has stayed in touch with his amputated limb and goes calling on it. Walking through the door of Mr. Venus’s gloomy shop of bones, Wegg inquires:

‘And how have I been going on, this long time, Mr. Venus?’

‘Very bad,’ says Mr. Venus uncompromisingly.

‘What am I still at home?’ asks Wegg, with an air of surprise.

‘Always at home.’

The “I” here is the bone, and Wegg’s linguistic contortion is both hilarious and profound. To arrive at this “I,” he must in fact turn himself inside out and adopt the third person as the first, but the comedy is also logical. At what point does the part cease to be I? Where is the threshold between the “I” and the “not-I”? Mr. Venus, who registers no surprise at Wegg’s pronominal misuse, is an articulator of bones, a man who makes his living piecing together death waste. Therefore, it also comes as no surprise to the reader to discover that Mr. Venus has “dusty hair.”

The absurdity of Wegg’s wandering “I” returns when John Harmon tries to reconstruct the events that led up to his near death by drowning. This passage not only makes explicit the naming difficulty announced by Wegg but revives in new form the wood metaphors associated with Wegg, metaphors that have only an impoverished meaning when read in isolation. The comedy of Wegg’s amputation becomes the image of an axe felling a tree and annihilation of the self:

‘I was trodden upon and fallen over. I heard a noise of blows, and thought it was a woodcutter cutting down a tree. I could not have said that my name was John Harmon — I could not have thought it — I didn’t know it — but when I heard the blows, I thought of the woodcutter and his axe, and had some dead idea that I was lying in a forest.’

Reading Wegg is like reading the novel in miniature — a plunge into a pool of language in which narrative and metaphor mingle and meaning accumulates until it overflows. As a model, Wegg’s character suggests, first, that there is a relation between bodies going to pieces and the disintegration and pollution of London in general, and, second, that this erosion, both corporeal and environmental, is somehow connected to dislocations in language.

2 The Framework of Society

Good order depends entirely on the correctness of language.

— Confucius

Naming people and things is fraught with difficulty in this novel. Dickens wills us back to the dawn of first questions, to what it means to call the world by name. Identification is Mr. Venus’s business, and it’s not a simple one. His murky shop brings to mind the novel’s initial images of obscurity. Wegg looks into “the dark shop window” and sees only “a muddle of objects vaguely resembling pieces of leather and dry stick, but among which nothing is resolvable into anything distinct.” Venus, however, is undaunted. “I’ve gone on improving myself,” he says, “until both by sight and by name, I’m perfect.” Dickens insists on the double meaning of articulation by making Mr. Venus an encyclopedist of the dead, a comic version of the Enlightenment man classifying decay. Wegg is given a verbal tour of the shop by its owner:

‘A wice. Tools. Bones, warious. Skulls warious. Preserved Indian baby. African ditto … human warious. Cats. Articulated English baby. Dogs. Ducks. Glass eyes, warious. Mummied bird. Oh dear me that the general panoramic view.’ Having so held and waved the candle as all these heterogeneous objects seemed to come forward obediently when they were named and then retire again.

It is Mr. Venus’s voice that makes each object distinct, that calls forth individual objects from the muddle. Individuality comes out of the act of naming, not the other way around, and this ability makes Mr. Venus a creative figure in the book, acknowledged by Wegg as a man with a monumental task: “… you with the patience to fit together on wires the whole framework of society — I allude to the human skelinton.” The “skelinton” is articulated bones. The bones of perception are articulated in words. Words are the “framework of society,” but in this society, something dreadful has happened to them.

The word society refers to a particular group of characters in the novel, and this domain of the Podsnaps and their “bathing” guests, the fraudulent Lammles, and the Veneerings is given the full treatment of Dickens’s crushing satire. When the Veneerings give a dinner party, the scene is described not directly but through its reflection in a mirror. Significantly, this long passage is written as a series of sentence fragments, each one beginning with the word Reflects. A single fragment gives the feeling:

Reflects mature young lady; raven locks and complexion that lights up well when well powdered — as it is carrying on considerably in the captivation of mature young gentleman; with too much nose in his face, too much ginger in his whiskers, too much torso in his waistcoat, too much sparkle in his studs, his eyes, his buttons, his talk, and his teeth.

The use of the mirror damns society as flat, superficial, and illusory, but the reflection is also a field of brokenness, an image of piecemeal, not whole, bodies that returns the reader to Mr Venus’s bone shop. Like Dickens’s joke of the two noses, the mirror subverts the conventions of body image. The dissection of the “mature young gentleman” makes no distinction between his garments and his body parts. There is no inside or outside, only a flat visual impression signaled in the refrain “too much,” which applies equally to eyes and to buttons. The aged Lady Tippins, omnipresent at all of “society’s” functions, is also hard to grasp as a whole being: “Whereabout in the bonnet and drapery announced by her name any fragment of the real woman may be concealed is perhaps known to her maid.” There is inevitably something morbid about these descriptions of “society” and its creatures, a sense that these fragments smell of death. When Tippins rattles her fan, the noise is compared to the rattling of her bones, and when Eugene Wrayburn looks down at the ruined corpse of Radfoot early in the novel, he comments, “Not much worse than Lady Tippins.”

Like many of her cohorts, Tippins is little more than a name. When Veneering decides to run for Parliament, he asks Twemlow, a meek little man, if his powerful cousin Lord Snigsworth “would give his name as a member of my committee. I don’t go so far as to ask for his Lordship; I ask only for his name.” In terms of the narrative, this is entirely reasonable. The name is what counts in society. The gentleman himself is quite dispensable. The cleft between words and the world resists closing. This is the story’s metaphysical ache. Naming is arbitrary: signs appear to refer not to experience but to other signs.

While there is something noble about Mr. Venus’s efforts to articulate bits and pieces of the dead, because his work is an attempt to make order from what is in the end hopelessly “warious,” society resists meaning and order by allowing itself to be ruled by signs that have no referents. In Our Mutual Friend “the whole framework of society” is disintegrating under the weight of its dominant sign — money — which, not surprisingly, acts very much like dust:

That mysterious paper currency which circulates in London when the wind blows, gyrates here and there and everywhere. Whence can it come? Whither can it go? It hangs on every bush, flutters in every tree, is caught flying by electric wires, haunts every enclosure, drinks at every pump, cowers at every grating, shudders upon every plot of grass, seeks rest in vain behind legions of iron rails. In Paris where nothing is wasted, costly and luxurious city though it be, but where wonderful human ants creep out of holes and pick up every scrap, there is no such thing. There it blows only dust.

As the dominant cultural fiction of developed societies, money is an ideal nonsensical sign. Dickens penetrates the peculiar fact that paper can be exchanged for something real, that money serves as a society’s founding gibberish, what Marx called “the general confounding and compounding of all things — the world upside down.” But money is just one of a host of meaningless signs. One empty letter gives birth to the next. Veneering, for example, buys entrance to Parliament so that “he may write a couple of initials after his name at the extremely cheap rate of two thousand five hundred per letter.” L.S.D. is exchanged for M.P.:

Why money should be so precious to an ass so dull as to exchange it for no other satisfaction, is strange; but there is no animal so sure to get laden with it, as the Ass who sees nothing written on the face of the earth, but the three dry letters L.S.D., not Luxury, Sensuality, Dissoluteness, which they so often stand for, but the three dry letters.

Dry letters are everywhere. Dickens had a penchant for mysterious initials, acronyms, for alphabet jokes and pure nonsense. He brings his reader close to the abstractness of signs, to the surprise that these markings can be interpreted at all. As a young man, he studied shorthand, and the account of his struggles with that new alphabet is revealing. He called them “the most despotic characters I have ever known”:

The changes that were wrung upon dots which in such a position meant such a thing and in such another position meant something entirely different; the wonderful vagaries that were played by circles; the unaccountable consequences that resulted from marks like flies’ legs, the tremendous effect of a curve in the wrong place, not only troubled my waking hours but reappeared before me in my sleep.

Dickens’s use of the word despotic to describe the unintelligible characters is significant, because it suggests a hierarchy — the reader laboring under the tyranny of signs. In Our Mutual Friend there is a strong connection between despotic written characters and paternal human characters. Fathers, real ones and figurative ones, are the keepers of letters, member of a ruling class eager to sire not children but paper. Veneering, for example, hosts the “Fathers of the Scrip-church” and among them is “the father of three hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds.” Eugene Wrayburn’s overbearing father, who has pushed him into the law but never actually appears in the book, is called simply M.R.F. (My Respected Father) by his son. The ironic acronym stands in contrast to the meaning of the words, which are in effect devoured by the cryptogram. Twemlow, that modest participant in society’s gatherings, has a father figure, too — Lord Snigsworth. He never enters the story in person, either. He appears only as a portrait hung on the wall. John Harmon’s father, also invisible in death, is paper only, a figure who survives as nothing but text in the several conflicting wills he has left behind. These are paper men, mere ghostly markings somewhere between presence and absence. They are there, and they are not there.

Paternity, when associated with society, is usually mediated through signs or mirror images; and despite the fact that the thing these mediated forms represent is often unattainable, the paternal has power. Eugene stages several inner dialogues with M.R.F., and the paternal voice crushes the son with its blanket prohibitions. Harmon’s ghost manipulates his heirs through his dust fortune. And other paternal figures, although they may appear bodily in the narrative, are similarly unapproachable. Podsnap never once addresses his daughter Georgiana by name. For her, he is a specular image. The narrator tells us that Miss Podsnap’s “early views of life” were “principally derived from the reflections of it in her father’s boots.” Podsnap equates fatherhood with censorship. His job is to cut short conversations that he considers potentially injurious to “the young person”: With “a flourish of his arm,” he waves all undesirable subjects “from the face of the earth.” And again the text brings us back to the dead body through a meaningless name. When Podsnap insists that the half dozen people who have recently starved to death in the streets of London are themselves to blame, Twemlow, the mild arbiter of good sense in the novel, objects. Podsnap accuses him of “Centralization”:

He was not aware (the meek man submitted of himself) that he was driving at any ization that he knew of.… But he was certainly more staggered by these terrible events than he was by names, of howsoever many syllables.

Podsnap is the novel’s supreme middle-class being, a man ruled by repetition and summed up in the routine that signals his character: “Getting up at eight, shaving close at quarter past, breakfasting at nine, going to the City at ten, coming home at half past five and dining at seven.” The ritual allows for nothing but an insular domestic rhythm. What happens in the “city” is not included. The city where dust flies and people starve falls out of the system. A reified language of resistance to the world, a language of exclusion and forgetfulness, Podsnappery resides in the territory of the despotic signifier — of L.S.D. and M.P. and M.R.F., and of “ogolies” and “izations,” systems that are meant to explain experience. But the very idea of a system is that nothing is forgotten. Forgetfulness is the outlaw of system, and yet the language of the fathers, the lawmakers, turns on repression and silence.

Paternity is a crisis of meaning in the novel, an alphabet soup of nonsensical directives. Harmon Senior has left wills all over his property, inheriting and disinheriting his son according to his latest whim. Twemlow’s powerful cousin, Lord Snigsworth,

puts him [Twemlow] under a kind of martial law; ordaining that he should hang his hat on a particular peg, sit on a particular chair, talk on a particular subject with particular people, and perform various exercises; such as sounding the praises of the Family Varnish (not to say Pictures), and abstaining from the choicest of the Family Wines unless expressly invited to partake.

The law of Snigsworthy Park is an absolute, arbitrary, military law erecting boundaries and thresholds that cannot be questioned: hang your hat here, sit here, say this. Paternal figures in the guise of military men appear several times in the book. Bella Wilfer dreams of a General husband, and Eugene explains that he chose M.R.F. because it sounds “military and rather like the Duke of Wellington.” But the language of the despot is the blather of edict. Like Podsnappery, like last wills and testaments, it does not and cannot tolerate a reply. There is no rejoinder to this kind of speech, because even if an answer is given, it isn’t heard. It is speech that annihilates the interlocutor.

If the law is by definition paternal — the site of symbolic separations through language — then Dickens presents us with a failure of that function. Symbolic structures appear as a muddle of blurred boundaries and meanings. But what is this all about? The failure is visited on the children. Denomination means being adopted into a community of speakers, and names are given by the father. Patronyms are signs of genealogy, legitimacy, and therefore coherence. They carry the weight of the past and a line of descendance. The father’s name, borne by the legitimate and lost to the illegitimate, is the nexus for what becomes in Dickens a battle for a single name and a fixed identity. To have no legitimate name is to be no one. In Our Mutual Friend, Betty Higden explains to the Boffins that the love child she has informally adopted has “no right name.” He is called “Sloppy,” a name that unearths and repeats the novel’s myriad metaphorical threads — sloppy, slop, garbage, waste, mud, fog, dust. Random coupling is a plague that destroys barriers and erases distinctions, for it creates a world in which children cannot identify their fathers, and therefore cannot identify themselves. But the issue of identity that shapes the stories of the novel cannot be posed as a simple polarity between a lawful name and an unlawful one; it is far more subtle than that.

Although John Harmon is legitimate, he suffers from the same fragmentation on the level of naming that Sloppy does. With typically ingenious metaphorical leaps, Dickens satirizes the law through the alphabet and then links its failure to the person of Harmon and his problems with his dead father. The law in the novel is exemplified in the droopy legal practice of Lightwood and Wrayburn. The young but already world-weary Eugene Wrayburn has gone into the law to please M.R.F., and his chief contribution to the office is not enthusiasm but a piece of furniture: a secretaire, described as “an abstruse set of mahogany pigeon holes, one for each letter of the alphabet.” The lawyers, however, have few clients and the pigeonholes are empty. The alphabetical filing system refers to no real persons. It is the clerk, suitably named Blight, who invents clients for the firm when Boffin comes seeking legal advice from Lightwood and Wrayburn—“Mr. Aggs, Mr. Baggs, Mr. Caggs, Mr. Daggs…” But later in the story, the secretary comes up again when illiterate Boffin confuses this piece of furniture with the human Secretary, John Harmon, alias Rokesmith, who comes to ask for a job. “We have,” he says, “always believed a Secretary to be a piece of furniture, mostly of mahogany.” Within the world of the book, the mistake is a consistent one. Like the ghostly nobodies invented by the clerk for the law office, Harmon’s pseudonymous existence is plural and arbitrary — a spectral existence indicated by the many names he is given in the book: Julius Handford, John Rokesmith, Secretary, Jack a Manory, Chokesmith, Artichoke, Sexton Rokesmith, Fortune Teller, Captain, Blue Beard, Mendicant, The Man from Somewhere, The Man from Nowhere, Ghost, and Nobody. Significantly, the missing name is the patronym: Harmon. In the pseudonym he keeps longest, Harmon holds on to his Christian name: John. The son’s mock death becomes a way of circumventing the father’s will, becoming invisible through a name change. What remains is a secretary, and whether furniture or human, it is a multiple anatomy of holes.

The mistrust of signs in Our Mutual Friend includes a mistrust of literacy itself. Wegg tries to teach Boffin to read, but the wooden gentleman’s grasp of words is riddled by frequent mispronunciations and half-understood meanings. Lizzie Hexam accepts reading lessons from Eugene Wrayburn only after much thought, afraid not only of the seductive powers of her teacher but of the seduction of the signs themselves. Everyone who is normal acquires language. Not everybody learns to read. Reading is a further entrance into the abstraction of language and, in this novel, acquiring signs implies both distance and loss. But what does one lose? A critical connection to one’s origin. For Lizzie Hexam’s brother, Charley, literacy is a denial of his father and life on the river. He leaves home against his father’s wishes and becomes the protégé of the schoolmaster, Bradley Headstone. The chapter in which Charley leaves home is called “Cut Adrift.” The boy is disowned by his father, separated from his family, and refuses to heed his sister’s warnings about remembering where he comes from. Education makes Charley blind — to his sister’s goodness, to Headstone’s treachery, and to his own selfishness. Charley learns to read signs, but he loses his past.

Gaffer Hexam is a unique father in the novel. He is the only paternal figure who cannot read. Even more than that, his attitude toward literacy borders on the phobic. He is also a real presence, not a reflection, ghost, or sign. The man has lovingly brought up his daughter, and this counts for a lot in a book populated by indifferent, cruel, or disconnected fathers. Hexam is identified closely with the river — the place of the drowned and the unrecognizable, of found corpses and refuse, the place where John Harmon forgets his name, a place where names disappear, where one thing mingles with another. It is liquid in the same way that maternal space is liquid — like being in the womb and the time of early infancy: a time before consciousness or when consciousness is just dawning, a time before language, or before language has properly taken hold of us, before words have beaten what is free-floating into a defined shape. Gaffer Hexam himself refers to the river’s maternal function when he scolds his daughter for being squeamish about his “business” in the river. “How can you be so thankless to your best friend, Lizzie? The very fire that warmed you when you were a babby, was picked out of the river along side the coal barges. The very basket that you slept in, the tide washed ashore. The very rockers that I put it upon to make a cradle of it, I cut out of a piece of wood that drifted from one ship or another.” The splintering wood of countless metaphors in the novel, from sawdust to the woodcutter in John Harmon’s delirium, appears here as real wood dragged from the river. Gaffer recycles the river’s debris to sustain life like a mother — warming, rocking, and caring for the infant. And that “best friend” is somewhere in the past, a debt to be remembered. If language is the ordering feature of our world and means immersion in the Symbolic Order, to use Jacques Lacan’s term for it, it is clearly a gain, but it is also a loss. That early world is inaccessible except perhaps in isolated moments of unreason, not available to words. Our Mutual Friend is a book that in spite of itself wills the inclusion of the unarticulated, the forgotten, and the missing. Its language investigates the limits of language.

The novel creates a divide between dry letters — signs, symbols, literacy, which are associated with paternity, on the one side — and a liquid formlessness, on the other — the river, which is associated with the maternal. Characters caught between the divide face a double lure: a desire to drown themselves in oneness and a desire to back away in terror. But in the end, this simple division between two poles of human experience is not neat. It is troubled. The definition and clarity promised by the fathers usually don’t arrive. Order and identity are supposed to issue from the very figures who are themselves immersed in filth and chaos.

3 Waste

The father is the one who punishes. Guilt attracts him as it does the court officials. There is much to indicate that the world of the fathers and the world of the officials are the same.… The similarity does not redound to this world’s credit; it consists of dullness, decay and dirt. The father’s uniform is stained all over; his underwear is dirty. Filth is the element of the officials.

— Walter Benjamin

Benjamin is writing about Kafka, but the passage applies equally well to Dickens. Despite their function as the keepers of law and order, many figures of paternal authority are subject to the obscuring properties of filth. Waste is the miser’s domain in particular, and the book’s particular miser is John Harmon’s father, the king of refuse, who has so badly neglected his property that it, too, is turning to dust. It is helpful to remember that there were garbage brokers, or dustmen, in London during the nineteenth century and that Dickens is describing a real way of turning a profit in the city. Dust was shorthand for garbage, because of the immense quantities of ash that were discarded at that time. When the illiterate Boffin finds himself the garbage heir, he hires Wegg to read to him, among other things, Merryweather’s Lives and Anecdotes of Misers. Among its tales is one about a Mr. Dancer, who lives in a house that has been reduced by neglect to a “heap of ruins.” After he dies, “one of Mr. Dancer’s richest excretoires was found to be a dung-heap in a cow-house; a sum but little short of two thousand five hundred pounds was found in this rich piece of manure.” The parable makes money literally indistinguishable from feces. Freud made much of the connection between money and excrement, between holding back money and controlling one’s bowels. In Our Mutual Friend coin and feces join together as the property of the “filthy rich.” But there is something more to the story of Mr. Dancer. In order to uncover the treasure, the seeker had to bury himself in manure.

Waste is by definition that stuff we don’t want. Waste from our own bodies is particularly important because it was once us, and by getting rid of it, we make sure it is not us anymore. Wegg’s bone problem is essentially a question of symbolic borders and distances. When he says, “I should not like to find myself dispersed, a part of me here and a part of me there,” he articulates a real human fear. The fact is our bodies are not closed but open. We breathe and eat and cry tears. We urinate and defecate, feed our children and enter each other sexually. The world comes into us and goes out of us. And when we die, we are waste. The rituals for the dead help us to draw a firm line between the living body and what it will inevitably become — a corpse. But what happens if those lines are not well drawn, if they wobble and begin to move, if we lose our grip on the symbolic boundaries that keep us from falling out of ourselves?

4 Madness

… the horror of the thing hideously behind …

— Henry James, The Golden Bowl

Bradley Headstone goes mad. In him the failure of symbolic definition becomes psychosis, and the schoolteacher suffers from a loss of self in doubling, delirium, and seizures. Dickens does not give us Headstone’s personal history, and this blank is significant. All we know is that, like Charley Hexam, the schoolteacher has cut himself off from his past. There are no parents or siblings in his story, and their absence speaks to his utter isolation. Dickens gives a portrait of an unintegrated personality that goes to pieces under the strain of an overpowering libidinous desire.

The narrative presents Headstone’s psychic turmoil in terms of signs, their failure, and the disintegration that follows. In his classroom, the schoolmaster is the embodiment of the dry and empty letters that crop up everywhere in the novel. As master to children, Headstone plays a paternal role, and like other fatherly figures, his relation to signs is one that does not bother with meaning:

… the exponent drawling on to My dear Childernerr, let us say, for example, about the beautiful coming to the Sepulchre; the repeating of the word Sepulchre (commonly used among infants) five hundred times. And never once hinting what it meant.

In this passage the word sepulchre resonates as a kind of double tomb: for the pupils its meaning is absolutely vacant, while for the reader it signifies the container of a corpse. But the word also refers to the “exponent,” Headstone, whose name means a marker for the dead, a name above ground. What you don’t see are the fragments of flesh and bone that lie underground. Headstone’s relation to language reiterates the narrative’s alarm about that which cannot be articulated — a fissure between the name on the surface and the mess below. His language, in the form of repetitive lessons in the schoolroom, provides a form through which he can indulge in the unspeakable — the reenactment of his brutal attempted murder of Eugene. Like a headstone, the words conceal a ruined body:

… as he heard his classes he was always doing it again and improving on its manner, at prayers, in his mental arithmetic, all through his questioning, all through the day.

This zone behind or beneath words in Headstone is given the startlingly apt name “T’Otherest.” It is Rogue Riderhood who gives Headstone the nickname, derived from his perception of three men he links in his mind: Lightwood, whom he calls “The Governor”; Wrayburn, whom he calls “T’Other Governor”; and Headstone, who is “T’Otherest Governor” and then simply “T’Otherest.” The three designations are like successive images in a multiple mirror, terms descriptive of the increasing instability that marks the three men. But “T’Otherest” is also a sign of internal shifting in the character of Headstone. When Headstone disguises himself as Riderhood, to carry out his planned murder of Wrayburn, we are told that the clothes of his double suit him better than his own. He moves between one persona and another, between schoolmaster and T’Otherest, shucking off his identity as master to become like Riderhood, the Waterman, and is eventually sucked into the river, where identities vanish.

Headstone is a character who literally cannot contain the forces inside him: “The state of the man was murderous and he knew it. More, he irritated it with a kind of perverse pleasure akin to that which a man has in irritating a wound upon his body.” The schoolmaster’s sadism is also masochism — torturer and tortured occupy the same psychic ground. The battle tears him apart. He can’t control his movements. When he speaks to Lizzie, his face “works” horribly. The spasmodic movement of his hand is compared to “flinging his heart’s blood down before her in drops on the pavement stones.” He pounds a tombstone in the graveyard and his knuckles bleed. He suffers nosebleeds, too, that come from nowhere, and then from seizures, sudden epileptic fits. He says to Lizzie, “I have no government of myself when you are near me or in my thoughts.” The bleeding, the seizures, the words that rush from him are linked as expressions of violated boundaries, volcanic eruptions from unknown depths. His confession of rage and turmoil, hopelessly inappropriate, pours from him like a running wound. The fits affect his body as if there were no controlling consciousness; each part flies into involuntary movement. And when it is over, he cannot remember what has happened to him.

The metaphorical pulse of the novel quickens when Headstone is present. The images of ruin and filth that proliferate in relation to the novel’s landscape assume force as metaphors of pyschic reality. The inner states of delirium and unconsciousness mirror the outer conditions of fog and filth that obscure the body. Of Eugene, Headstone says, “He crushed me down in the dirt of his contempt.” As he nears death, his face turns pale, “as if it were being overspread with ashes.” Headstone loses the edges of himself, and his speech disintegrates. The narrator tells us that he has increasing difficulty “in articulating his words.” He stammers and chokes, his words are enunciated in a “half suffocated” voice. To Lizzie he confesses: “It is another of my miseries that I cannot speak of you without stumbling at every syllable, unless I let the check go altogether and run mad.” These are lapses of otherness, of a monster that finds no category except the monstrous. Like Wegg’s bone, T’Otherest cannot be articulated into a comprehensible form.

5 I and It

“This world,” Riderhood says, and “T’Other world.” The relation between the living and the dead is a frame for the novel as a whole, and the word other comes to designate the tug-of-war between the two. Otherness in Headstone and in the narrative as a whole does not signify what passes between one subject and another, between I and you, but what passes between I and what once was I but is now it. There is nothing clean about the separation between what is alive and what is dead in Our Mutual Friend, and the lack of a hygienic cut is seen in the novel’s play with pronouns. How do you refer to a corpse? Mr. Inspector, the policeman called in to investigate Gaffer Hexam’s death, gives his version of the man’s demise: “He sees an object that’s in his way of business floating. He makes ready to secure that object.… His object drifts up, before he is quite ready for it.… he falls overboard.… The object he expected in tow floats by, and his own boat tows him dead.” But the Inspector addresses the “object” he is bringing in as “you” and then further complicates matters by announcing over the corpse, “I still call it him, you see.”

The Inspector’s pronominal difficulty reverberates with Wegg’s wandering I. You has become it, but perhaps not completely so, and may still deserve to be called him. Wegg’s confusion of subject and object, which both animates his dead limb and dislocates the I as the sign of human consciousness, effectively dismantles the I/you axis of discourse, or what Emile Benveniste calls “the polarity of person,” by confusing it with “non-person” he, she, or it. Benveniste writes,

There are utterances in discourse that escape the condition of person in spite of their individual nature, that is, they refer not to themselves but to an “objective situation.” This is the domain we call the “third person.” The heart of the difference between person and non-person is seen in the fact that the polarity of person is reversible — I can always become you, and you, I, while this is not true of non-person — she, he, and it.

But all pronouns are shifters, and they have a fragility that nouns don’t have, a greater motion and flexibility that Dickens readily seizes upon in the book. When learning language, children acquire pronouns last of all words, and aphasics lose them first. Schizophrenics may confuse I and you, as if the difference between them can’t be grasped. I is not a simple designation but a complex one. It is where we all live inside language. Losing it means losing ourselves.

Jenny Wren’s alcoholic father cannot say the word I. Robbed of his paternal function by his own drunkenness, he is infantalized by his daughter, who calls him “bad boy” and “wicked child.” Mr. Dolls is a walking area of devastation, consistently referred to by the narrator as “it” rather than “he”:

The whole indecorous, threadbare ruin, from the broken shoes to the prematurely grey scanty hair, grovelled. The very breathing of the figure was contemptible as it laboured and rattled in that operation like a blundering clock.

Mr. Dolls is given his name by Eugene Wrayburn, because Jenny Wren is the “doll’s dressmaker.” But the name points to him as a person who is like a thing, and Mr. Dolls either refers to himself in the third person or drops the I altogether: “Poor shattered individual. Trouble nobody long,” he says, but the muttered phrase he repeats over and over in his defense is: “Circumstances over which had no control.” These are the same circumstances under which Harmon is supposed to have died: “and that the said John Harmon had come by his death under highly suspicious circumstances” and also, “He [Harmon] had lapsed into the condition in which he found himself, as many a man lapses into many a condition, without perceiving the accumulative power of its separate circumstances.” The word circumstances acts as a synonym for otherness in the novel — that inchoate zone of the third person that rises up to disfigure, erase, and silence. A man has trouble speaking. He begins to stutter and loses control of language — the very stuff that makes him human. He loses himself. Without an I, there can be no you.

Dialogue is possible only with mutual recognition. When Bradley Headstone cries out, “I have been set aside and I have been cast out,” he has reached the end of reciprocal speech. Wrayburn insults Headstone by referring to him as “Schoolmaster,” not by his name. “I don’t know why you address me—” Headstone says, and Eugene snaps back, “Then I won’t.” The humiliation annihilates. I do not address you. You do not exist. Self-consciousness is born in another person. It grows from that essential relation and can’t exist without it. Dickens’s story of recognition is Hegelian, dialectical. We are all made through the eyes of another, the place where we are recognized and called by name. As John Harmon says, “A spirit that once was a man, could hardly feel stranger or lonelier going unrecognized among mankind than I feel.”

Later, an unrecognized man who was once John Harmon tries to piece together the mystery of his own narrative, the circumstances of his own “death,” but his memory is spotty. Here is the passage in full:

‘Now, I pass to sick and deranged impressions; they are so strong, that I rely upon them; but there are spaces between them that I know nothing about, and they are not pervaded by any idea of time.

‘I had drunk some coffee, when to my sense of sight he [Radfoot] began to swell immensely.… We had a struggle near the door.… I dropped down. Lying helpless on the ground, I was turned over by a foot.… I saw a figure like myself lying on a bed. What might have been, for anything I knew, a silence of days, weeks, months, years, was broken by a violent wrestling of men all over the room. The figure like myself was assailed and my valise was in its hand. I was trodden upon and fallen over. I heard a noise of blows, and thought it was a woodcutter cutting down a tree. I could not have said that my name was John Harmon — I could not have thought it — I didn’t know it — but when I heard the blows, I thought of the woodcutter and his axe, and had some dead idea that I was lying in a forest.

‘This is still correct? Still correct, with the exception that I cannot possibly express it to myself without using the word I. But it was not I. There was no such thing as I, within my knowledge.

‘It was only after a downward slide through something like a tube, and then a great noise and a sparkling and crackling as of fires, that the consciousness came upon me, “This is John Harmon drowning! John Harmon, struggle for your life. John Harmon, call on heaven and save yourself!” I think I cried it out aloud in great agony, and then a heavy, horrid, unintelligible something vanished, and it was I who was struggling there alone in the water!’

This remarkable monologue encapsulates the novel as a whole. Harmon’s return to life comes with the memory of his proper name at the very moment he recognizes himself from outside himself — as a person who has been named, as someone who is part of a community of speakers and therefore part of the world. And this event of regaining the self is imagined as taking place after the violence of a birth or rebirth, complete with a bizarre slide “through something like a tube.” After he emerges from the tube, he finds the name and sees himself. Before the drowning, he is doubled in Radfoot. Only when he calls himself by name does he reclaim the double as himself. This time, the double as mirror image serves as a therapeutic vision of the self as whole. Harmon’s telling is an agonizing re-collection of the broken, unrecognized body that lies at the heart of the novel. This alienating moment of seeing one’s self — of doubling and reflection — is a moment of crisis that results in either cohesion or distintegration. John Harmon, Bella Wilfer, and Eugene Wrayburn are rehabilitated through others and find a place within the community. Bradley Headstone, Riderhood, and Mr. Dolls go to pieces. By pronouncing his own name, Harmon expels the it, the “heavy, horrid, unintelligible something”—the abject corpse of the other man — which is also his own drowning, his own death, and his own corpse. Then and only then is it possible for Harmon to find himself inside language and to use the word I.

6 The Dream of a Common Language

When one does not possess the categories of recollection and repetition the whole of life is resolved into void and empty noise.

— Kierkegaard, Repetition

From recognition and singular naming comes an image of wholeness — the fully articulated body and the I. Those characters who have stable names, who are not beset with myriad nicknames and pseudonyms, display a power to revive and heal that is not given to characters with multiple appellations. Lizzie Hexam, for example, is only called Lizzie. The purity of Lizzie’s name throughout the novel contrasts starkly with the fickle Bella Wilfer, who is riddled by many designations. Lizzie watches the fire and sees images of “fancy” in it, while Bella looks in her mirror at a reflection she calls, among other things, “Beast” and “Dragon”—further images of the monstrous, unknowable self. But Lizzie is the one who hauls Eugene from the river, a body so badly disfigured that, the reader is told, his own mother might not have recognized him. When he hovers between life and death, the word Lizzie becomes a vehicle of rescue for Eugene: “The one word Lizzie, he muttered millions of times.” The repetitions are agitated, fitful. He utters the name in “a hurried and impatient manner with the misery of a machine” and then “in a tone of subdued horror.” Eugene’s palilalia recalls both Headstone’s teaching and the mechanical sputterings of Mr. Dolls, and like these pathological repetitions, it is a symptom of a fall into that borderland between life and death, the very place where John Harmon loses and then finds himself. Indeed, the narrator calls Eugene’s feverish utterances “the frequent rising of a drowning man from the deep.” When Lizzie touches him, the palilalia stops. In a moment of lucidity, he says to her, “When you see me wandering away from this refuge that I have so ill deserved, speak to me by my name, and I think I shall come back.” Again and again, Lizzie recalls him from insentience. Hers is a purely human magic, which gives language the confidence of creation — of calling something — someone — into being. The critical distinction between demonic and magical utterance lies in the difference between speaking to no one and speaking to someone.

The name Lizzie is a bridge between death and life. But Lizzie is also an incantation on the road to a word Eugene has been unable to speak. Jenny Wren gives Mortimer Lightwood the word to say to Eugene:

He stooped, and she whispered in his ear. She whispered in his ear one short word of a single syllable. Lightwood started, and looked at her.

‘Try it,’ said the little creature, with an excited and exultant face …

Some two hours afterwards, Mortimer Lightwood saw his [Eugene’s] consciousness come back, and instantly, but very tranquilly bent over him.

‘Don’t speak, Eugene. Do no more than look at me, and listen to me. You follow what I say.’

He moved his head in assent.

‘I am going from the point where we broke off. Is the word we should have come to — is it — Wife?’

‘O God bless you, Mortimer.’

The potential sentimentality of this passage is undercut by its oddness. Dickens frames the entire scene around a word — which he points out is “of a single syllable.” The word wife is passed on from one speaker to another as a translation or transformation of Lizzie into its collective context, the proper name changed into a signifier of a social role. Wife refers to a relation between people. It is the claiming of an identity that is formed through another and in the presence of others, and in this way it is like the novel’s title — a designation that may be claimed by many through others. Eugene cannot arrive at the word by himself. It must be given to him, and this single word begins the process of his rebirth. In this moment, among these people, language is being reclaimed as a structure of meanings that brings definition to human relations.

Lizzie’s power is rooted in memory. She is able to rescue Eugene, because she has learned the skill from her father and has not forgotten how to haul a body from the depths. The novel’s primary mnemonists are all women, and all women whose names are not subject to change. They are also characters conspicuously not prone to drowning. Drowning and its metaphorical associates — doubling, going to pieces, scattering into plural identities — are all part of the book’s driving fear: the fear of the corpse or of the unintegrated, formless body, which is identified with maternal space through the river. But these female, often maternal characters are not threatening representives of the chaotic space. On the contrary, they tame the wilderness through imaginative memory. Betty Higden, for example, who is a kind of lower-class saint, pulls together what is left of her family, ripped apart by poverty and death. She is subject to mild fits or visions that she calls the “deadness.” “There’s a deadness steals over me at times.… Now I seem to have Johnny in my arms — now, his mother — now his mother’s mother — now, I seem to be a child myself, a lying once again in the arms of my own mother.…” The word dead, associated with corpses, filth, and disintegration throughout the novel, is regenerated here through a vision of coherence that links the past and the present in the single physical act of holding and being held. Similarly, Mrs. Boffin, surrogate mother to the Harmon children when they were small, is haunted by faces that appear before her in “Harmony Jail”—the name given to Harmon Senior’s decrepit mansion:

‘The faces of the old man are all over the house tonight.… For a moment it was the old man’s, and then it got younger. For a moment it was both the children’s and then it got older. For a moment it was a strange face, and then it was all the faces.’

Both Betty Higden and Mrs. Boffin bind together in space what has flown apart in time: a family. Haunted by visions of resemblances, Mrs. Boffin, the only mother John Harmon has ever known, fills in the identity of the strange face as the lost son and, in doing so, brings the unrecognized spirit back from the dead. Betty Higden’s and Mrs. Boffin’s visions stand in opposition to the disintegrating surfaces of mirrors in the book, because they are pictures of relations among families that bring together the dead and the living. This rhythm of generations is part of a natural cycle of giving birth, growing old, and dying, and herein lies the healing impulse of the novel. What these women imagine is essentially what Mikhail Bakhtin describes as “idyllic time,” the time of folklore, which connects human life to the literal ground of experience. Time and space come together through countless generations who have shared the same earth. Bakhtin opposes “idyllic time” to “biographical time,” which is the temporal sequence of an individual life cut off from nature and so from regenerative possibility. But Dickens’s use of idyllic time is not purely folkloric. It is not the earth that binds one generation to another but the articulation of that common ground through a common language.

When Harmon recalls the event of his near death, his speech is an attempt to gather the fragments of the past into a semblance of coherence, into a narrative. His memory is pervaded with gaps that disturb time, disturb story, gaps that are metaphorically bound to Mr. Venus’s incompletely articulated bodies. The “French Gentleman,” at first only a ribcage, gains a few more parts here and there as the story progresses, growing like a tiny model of narrative. When utterance becomes story, the coherence of narrative can fight the corrosion of forgetting. And a tale always presumes a listener, even if the one who hears is within the self. Dickens portrays the task of recollection as wrenching labor. The holes in Harmon’s narrative remain unfilled, but the telling, with its insistence on accuracy (“Is this still correct?”), is a struggle to articulate cryptic pieces into a whole as Harmon plays detective, investigating his own near death. The narrative must pass over “spaces” and “silences”—spots of absence and forgetfulness. It is impossible not to read the events Harmon recounts as an inner battle. Its only characters are a number of faceless men, “a figure like myself,” an “unintelligible something,” and a teller who denies the validity of using the word I to tell his tale. Like Oedipus, Harmon is both subject and object of his investigation, a search that at every turn unveils a version of the self.

“I find myself an embodied conundrum,” says Eugene Wrayburn and “Riddle-me-ree.” Headstone suffers a seizure and forgets. Harmon cannot remember. “My mystery,” he says. Memories are pieces of the self — the mysterious jumble of the past in the present — and the novel’s central act of reconstruction, which comes to mean going home, making a narrative circle that takes the hero or heroine back to his or her origin. John Harmon must travel back before he can begin again. Memory must be movement, supplying the effective concatenation between one moment of life and the next. It must be repetition, but repetition with difference.

Jenny Wren, who supplies the magic word wife to Lightwood, is another feminine visionary in the novel. With the scraps and refuse from Fledgeby’s corrupt business she dresses her dolls, each one filled with the novel’s primary stuff: sawdust. Unlike Mr. Venus, who uses waste to articulate dead bodies, Jenny uses it to form new, imaginary bodies, lilliputian beings she manipulates to tell stories. And unlike Betty Higden’s and Mrs. Boffin’s visions, what Jenny sees are transcendent fictions. Her strange hallucinations of radiant children dressed in white, and of beautiful birds and flowers, are drawn from the stuff of story and myth: “I smell the white and the pink May in the hedges and all sorts of flowers that I was never among.” From the rooftop she calls to Riah:

The call or song began to sound in his ears again, and looking above, he saw the face of the little creature looking down out of a glory of her long bright radiant hair, and musically repeating to him, like a vision, Come up and be dead! Come up and be dead!

Like Betty Higden’s “deadness,” Jenny Wren’s call reverses the spatial scheme of dying in the novel, in which bodies disintegrate underground or sink into invisibility in the river. The strange song also reverses the emptiness of the chanted word sepulchre in Headstone’s classroom. Her repetition is a call for resurrection, a movement up to air and sky, with which Jenny identifies herself through her name Wren.

But Jenny Wren has named herself. Her real patronym is Cleaver, a word which, through its allusion to cutting, summons the countless metaphors for fragmentation that sweep through the novel. And Cleaver remains a haunting subtextual presence in Wren, because along with her rapturous visions, the doll’s dressmaker delights in sadistic fantasies, dreaming of the day when she can torture her imaginary future husband, whom she refers to only with the pronoun Him. She will pour burning liquid “down his throat … and blister it and choke him.” Cleaver is Jenny’s “T’Otherest”—the part of her that was born into a paternal vacuum and the part of her that is crippled. She cannot walk without a crutch. The difference between Headstone and Wren is not a difference between real sadism and fantasy (Jenny fulfills a torturous wish by putting pepper on the plasters she uses to bandage Fledgeby) but a difference between incomprehensible and meaningful signs, of replacing dry letters with meaningful ones. Indeed, when Headstone and Jenny meet, their encounter is figured through a sign. The schoolmaster lies, and one of Jenny’s creatures, Mrs. T. for Mrs. Truth, hides her head in shame. The letter T. in Mrs. T. marks the only time in the novel that a letter or initial is used to signify full meaning. Jenny, like her creator, is an artist, and in Our Mutual Friend, art is in the business not only of restoration but of reincarnation through narrative: the stuff of truth.

The secret of Jenny’s art is that it employs a common language. The children of her hallucinations resemble popular Victorian representations of angels, and the birds and flowers are taken from pastoral conventions. By transfiguring people from her life into the stock characters from fairy tales, she orders a chaotic world into a secure narrative scheme. Riah is her “fairy godmother” or “the Wolf,” depending on what she sees; Fledgeby is “the Fox” or “Little Eyes.” Her use of fairy tale is also a bid for idyllic repetition, a way to counter past losses. She asks Riah to “change Is into Was and Was into Is.” Her desire to tamper with time, to turn the present into the past and the past into the present, is part of the novel’s idyllic movement toward the time of folklore and fairy tale. “Once upon a time…” is no time, and it is in this unspecified time, with minor qualification, that Dickens chose to set his novel: “In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise.…” Jenny Wren asks her friend for the magic of narrative itself, which turns the written past into the present time of reading.

Many tales are alluded to in Our Mutual Friend, but none more often than “Little Red Riding Hood.” The name Riderhood collapses the story’s title into a single name through which the waterman becomes devouring wolf, a role that strikes at the very heart of the novel’s dread: a child is deceived, eaten up, and then freed by a passing huntsman, who cuts open the beast and frees the grandmother and the child from the wolf’s belly — an image that mimics birth. The perfect story about the fear of engulfment and disappearance, about the loss of identity in something boundless and monstrous, “Little Red Riding Hood” reenacts Harmon’s story of drowning and rebirth. The paternal cut of the huntsman’s knife restores boundaries, breaks inside from outside, and resurrects the heroine.

The story is a frightening one, but the form of the telling is itself a weapon against fear, and in this novel, the chief artist and storyteller is a little girl. Fairy tales, like Dickens’s own books, are stories about children; the youngest of three sons or three daughters — often the child who is thought to be stupid and has been sadly neglected at home — sets out on a journey. Many of Dickens’s children are real or emotional orphans, and the paths they take must eventually lead them home. But in Our Mutual Friend, home is not real. You cannot really go back, after all. Time has passed. Home is a fiction, an idyllic landscape of the mind — a language, not a place — through which otherness, chaos, and absence are tamed by stories that reinstate the true law.

And so, near the end of the book, we find Lizzie and Jenny quietly reading on the rooftop. Beyond the roof’s edge, smoke billows and dust flies, but the girls have made themselves a meager garden from a few “humble flowers and evergreens.” When Fledgeby arrives and tells them that “not much good” will come of such literary efforts, Jenny snaps back at him, “Depends upon the person.” This sensible retort answers the other, debased readers in the book. Neither the act of reading nor signs are in themselves evil. Double meanings, ideological rhetoric, nonsense, pathological repetitions, and cryptic codes make language dangerous, simply because these words cannot be understood. Jenny and Lizzie are readers, and their book lies at the heart of an idyllic garden of common words, as does Dickens’s own.

And we find Bella telling her father stories by the river. The place of disappearances is rehabilitated through her projections of the voyages she imagines upon it. In these stories, Bella mends her father. Her stories turn the weak, browbeaten, childlike “Pa,” known by innumerable names, among them “R.W.,” “Rumpty,” and “Cherub,” into a figure of respect and power:

Now, Pa in the character of owner of a lumbering square-sailed collier, was tacking away to New Castle, to fetch black diamonds to make his fortune with; now Pa was going to China in that handsome three masted-ship … to bring home silks and shawls without end for the decoration of the charming daughter. Now John Harmon’s disastrous fate was all a dream, and he had come home and found the lovely woman just the article for him … and they were going away on a trip in their gallant bark … [with] Pa established in the great cabin. Now John Harmon was consigned to his grave again, and a merchant of immense wealth (name unknown) had courted the lovely woman, and he was so enormously rich that everything you saw upon the river sailing belonged to him.

Like Scheherazade, Bella tells one story after another, a series of seductions that postpone ending. One voyage becomes another and another while the blank of the husband’s name remains unfilled. Bella’s temporary resurrection of John Harmon echoes Dickens’s own narrative play with Harmon’s life and death and with his name and namelessness. Only at the very end of the novel is the gap filled permanently with the name Harmon, the name that Bella will share. Even Jenny Wren’s HE, that pronominal blank associated with her negligent father, gains a proper name — Sloppy, and it is to Sloppy that she acknowledges Riah as her “second father,” substituting the protective and kind friend for the shattered infant father. Lizzie Hexam, whose love for Eugene is bound up with her love for her dead father, depicts her desire as an opening—“Only put me in that empty place, only try how little I mind myself, only prove what a world of things I will do and bear for you.” And Harmon says of Bella, “I will go into a blank life, leaving her.” Desire is that empty place that propels the story forward, that moves toward an ending in which absence is filled.

Closing these gaps is an act of the imagination. The rooftop garden is not beautiful, but the readers there imagine that it is. Rumpty doesn’t change. He is refashioned by Bella’s stories. Eugene tells Mortimer of his love for Lizzie: “The glow that shone upon him as he spoke the words, irradiated his features so that he looked for the time, as though he had never been mutilated.” Eugene is mutilated. His speech seems to counteract disfigurement, because it is lodged in real dialogue with another person, and it uses the magic words of love.

I am made through your eyes. Because of you, I can imagine myself as whole. I remember some things. I forget others, but when I tell you my life, I give it the shape of a story and that story is myself. Without it, I am nobody. This is not a Cartesian view of human identity. The self in Our Mutual Friend is not a given. It discovers its singularity through others and then within the structure of language itself, which is both inside us and outside us. Our very selves are articulated from these common words. But language is not identical to the world, and in all of us there live the muffled forms of what came before words. Every once in a while, those forms return in the delirium of a fever or in a dream, in a fear we cannot explain, or when we look on the dead. Those are the moments when we lose ourselves. Finding ourselves again is a trick of “fancy,” as Dickens calls it, a mutual understanding of the stories we share.