Making out the world is a perceptual conundrum in Our Mutual Friend, and Mr. Venus’s job is rebuilding splintered bodies. In a startling little parable about isolating, recognizing, and naming things, Mr. Venus gives Wegg a tour of his shop. “I’ve gone on improving myself,” he says, “until by sight and by name I’m perfect.”
“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’s 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 retire again.
The candle makes the objects visible and recognizable, but it is the names that seem to call forth each thing from the murk and make it legible. Venus articulates his anatomies in space and in language, creating sense from nonsense through categorization. Wegg expresses admiration for the anatomist’s work by saying, “You with the patience to fit together on the wires the whole framework of society — I allude to the human skelinton.” By collapsing the “framework of society” and the bones of the human body into one, Wegg again makes a brilliant hash of things. Of course people in society need their bones, but the wooden gentleman’s allusion to this framework reverberates throughout the novel on two levels — how the body is represented visually in space and in language.
We all need to assemble ourselves, to have a working image or framework that we carry around with us as an inner representation of our own bodies, to which we attach an identity. Pathologies of body image, whether caused by lesions in the brain or emotional distress, make it clear that these representations are both essential and mysterious. “Phantom limb syndrome,” for example, in which amputees feel the presence of a missing leg or arm, and often suffer pain in it, is a form of Weggism. These people have an ongoing relationship with a part of them that has, in fact, disappeared. Anosognosia, another disorder, caused by damage to the right hemisphere of the brain, leaves patients unaware of what they’ve lost. They refuse to acknowledge what’s obvious to others — that they’re paralyzed or can’t move their left hand, or whatever their handicap happens to be. Others are afflicted with a condition simply called “neglect.” They ignore the left side of their bodies and the entire left side of space, as if it weren’t there. People with severe neglect may even deny, against all reason, that an impaired arm or leg belongs to them — reverse Weggism. Anorexics, bulimics, as well as many people who wouldn’t be considered clinically ill are also prone to deranged images of their own bodies. Contemporary Western culture is full of people who feel fat when they are actually thin, who obsess about their thighs and stomachs, their bags and their wrinkles, and even those who have a relatively stable body image are subject to mutations in their dreams. I lose parts of myself regularly when I’m asleep, often my teeth and hair, but I’ve also lost hands and feet. Distorted, partial, and broken visions of the body make it clear that these representations are far more precarious than we might like to think. It is precisely this inner fragility that Dickens maps with astounding acumen.
Wegg’s allusion to articulation is double. Words are articulated as well as bones, and language might well be called “the framework of society,” because it makes our collective life possible. In the world of the book, the word society refers to a specific group of characters, the most important of whom are the Podsnaps, the Lammles, and the Veneerings. Despite the fact that Mr. Venus’s shop and fashionable society couldn’t be more removed from each other in terms of the story, Dickens binds them metaphorically. They are linked by the morbid fragment, the piece or part, which, like Wegg’s bone, refuses to be incorporated into a meaningful framework — the thing that cannot be articulated. “I can’t work you into a miscellaneous one, nohow,” Venus tells Wegg. “Do what I will, you can’t be got to fit. Anybody with a passable knowledge would pick you out at a look, and say — No go! Don’t match!”
In a scene at the Veneerings’, Dickens’s “society” is depicted as a broken anatomy, not seen directly but in a mirror. The long passage is written entirely in sentence fragments, as if the piecemeal nature of what the narrator is describing has invaded his syntax.
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.
As a reader, I see a depthless field of reflected shards, in which torso and teeth are equivalent to studs, buttons, and even talk, an image that again evokes the bits and pieces of Mr. Venus’s bone shop and his articulations of the “warious.” By using a mirror, Dickens clearly wants to depict society as a world of surface, artifice, illusion, as a veneer, but he doesn’t have to shatter the conventional boundaries of the body to do that. In fact, mirrors are the only place where we experience ourselves as a visual whole from the outside. The “I” takes the position of a “you.” Most of the time we see ourselves only in parts, our hands moving in front of us, our arms, fingers, torso, or our knees and feet. This total view of the body in the mirror is what led the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to posit his theoretical mirror stage, which for him meant the moment a child recognizes itself as a whole person in a reflection through the eyes of what he calls the Other, which is both a real other person and the whole symbolic landscape in which the child lives — namely language. Lacan was not Piaget. He wasn’t a great observer of children, and I don’t believe that his mirror stage corresponds to an actual event in the story of human development. Rather, it was his way of speaking to the fact that we as human beings are born without an awareness of our corporeal boundaries. Infants are fragmented beings who come together as whole selves only over time, and the borders and categories established in language are crucial to the creation of a separate and complete idea of the self. This psychoanalytic model of development that moves from a fragmentary to a whole body image becomes more potent as an idea when it is linked to cases of brain damage or mental illness like the ones I mentioned earlier. For Lacan, the person seen in the mirror represents a form of therapeutic wholeness, a kind of ideal body, one that is never completely achieved because it has been built over a substrata of fragmentation.