All written language has a ghostly aspect — the disembodied voice speaking to you from the page — but Dickens’s paternal signs are also oppressive, fickle, and drained of meaning. When the fathers speak, they use the language of a mad king on a distant mountaintop issuing directives that merely confuse the poor subjects below who are expected to act on them. There is no dialogue with the fathers — the talk runs only one way. It’s easy to understand why Kafka admired Dickens so much. K.’s peregrinations through alien corridors inhabited by dirty bureaucrats and invisible authorities resonate strongly with Dickens’s bewildered children trying to locate and interpret the mysterious despotic signs hurled down at them from above. These are the words of dead languages that disguise rather then delineate reality. When Podsnap is told that six people have starved to death in London, the bourgeois patriarch makes the familiar argument that they deserved it. Twemlow, modest spokesman for the child’s position, objects. Podsnap swiftly accuses his guest of “Centralization.” Twemlow manages to reply that “he was certainly more staggered by these terrible events than he was by names, of howsoever many syllables.” Centralization is a word like freedom. In the mouths of politicians, bureaucrats, and ideologues, it is used to disguise the dead bodies that lie beneath it and the particular human stories that belong to each of those lost lives. At its worst, this language is only noise. The twentieth century and the new century we have now entered provide us with countless examples of ideological terms used to hide and distort the politics of neglect and murder.
Madness
When Dickens was writing Our Mutual Friend, he was also giving readings, performances his family and friends thought strained him to the breaking point and probably hastened his death. Over and over, Dickens performed what he and those close to him simply referred to as “the murder”: Bill Sikes’s murder of Nancy from Oliver Twist. “There was a fixed expression of horror of me all over the theater,” Dickens wrote, “that couldn’t have been surpassed if I had been going to be hanged.” This was a period of disillusionment in Dickens’s life, of sadness and a nagging emptiness. “What was there but the fearful stimulus of the readings,” his biographer Edgar Johnson writes, “and returning to them as Jasper in The Mystery of Edwin Drood would return to the dangerous excitement of his drugged visions.” The readings became a kind of opiate for Dickens, and as he performed he worked himself into a feverish trance of high emotion. Ladies fainted, men gasped, and when it was over the author would limp off the stage exhausted, tears streaming down his face. He played all the parts, Fagin, Sikes, and Nancy. As Nancy, he begged and screamed for his life; as Sikes, he mercilessly clubbed his victim to death. Writing novels means being plural, being divided among your creatures and suffering with them. While he was onstage, Dickens lost himself in his characters and the horror of what he was reading, and by all accounts it took a terrible toll on his health. In his biography, Peter Ackroyd notes that early in 1869 the author reported that he was “at present nightly murdered by Mr. W. Sikes” and around the same time also wrote in a letter to a friend, “I am murdering Nancy …. I have a vague sensation of being ‘wanted’ when I walk the streets.” Dickens’s use of the first person is significant, if only because it demonstrates that these two beings were close enough to him to be “I.”
Dickens continually explored extreme states of disintegration, and in Our Mutual Friend he created a character, Bradley Headstone, whose breakdown is in part presented as pathological repetition — the machine-like churning in his mind of an attempted murder. The connection to Dickens’s own performances is striking. While Dickens’s fictional character Headstone is guilty of a crime, and his creator was guilty only of invention and empathy for those inventions, Headstone nevertheless repeats the crime in his imagination long after it is over, just as Dickens couldn’t resist performing his murder again and again. A powerfully imagined event can evoke the same emotions as a real event. Few artists would contradict this, and yet there are no doubt people who would find it odd that a fiction, when fully imagined, can create something parallel to the disruptions of mental illness. Dissolution in art is preferable to dissolution in madness, but what Freud called “sublimation” is the transformation of inner dramas, fears, and wounds into something else: a work of art outside the body of the artist. This is true for all arts except acting, in which the body is the instrument for transformation. There are parts of my books that I have never read aloud and never will — they are simply too painful for me. I resist embodying my own words and characters and prefer to keep them at a safe distance on the page. Dickens had long been reluctant to perform “the murder,” but once he had witnessed the horrifled response of his friends on whom he tried out his “reading,” their shocked faces became the impetus for repetition. Bradley Headstone, the mad schoolmaster and criminal in Our Mutual Friend, is not a stand-in for Charles Dickens. I am suggesting something quite different: Dickens’s reading obsession provides a window into the writer’s personality and his plural and complex inner identifications — ones that included both Iam being murdered and Iam murdering.
In Bradley Headstone, the reader is presented with a character who suffers from what would now be called “psychosis.” The language of psychiatry has changed over the years, and diagnosing a character in a novel is naïve at best, but Headstone’s madness fascinates me because it broadly depicts clinical realities that have always been present in some forms of insanity. In his book Aggression in Personality Disorders and Perversions, Otto Kernberg states it simply: “There is a profound sense of loss or dispersal of identity in psychosis.” Of course, Our Mutual Friend as a whole expresses both a profound sense of loss and a dispersal of identity, but it is not. a psychotic text; it treats these losses coherently. Dr. Daniel Dorman, in his narrative account of a single schizophrenic patient, Catherine, relates that after she had sat in stony silence for nearly an entire session she announced just before it ended, “I am Humpty Dumpty, in pieces, and there is no way to put broken eggshells back together again. I am cracked up.” Catherines silence is as important as her final words. The shattered self must raise defenses or die, and words to express this state do not come easily. In Bradley Headstone, Dickens gives the reader a man whose plural inner turmoil brings him to violence and then tears him apart.
Headstone suffers from a radical disconnection between his inner and outer self, his feelings and his words. Despite the monstrous struggles that are being waged inside him, his schoolteacher persona is dull, dry, and emotionless. This bifurcation between inner disturbance and external deadness also has a clinical dimension. One of my favorite stories about the English pediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott is told by M. Masud R. Khan in his introduction to Winnicott’s book Holding and Interpretation. In 1971, near the end of his life, Winnicott met with a group of Anglican clergymen. The question they asked him was simple. They wanted to know how to distinguish between an ill person who needed psychiatric help and a person who could be helped by their counseling. Dr. Winnicott didn’t answer immediately, but after some thought, he said: “If a person comes and talks to you and, listening to him, you feel he is boring you, then he is sick, and needs psychiatric treatment. But if he sustains your interest, no matter how grave his distress or conflict, then you can help him alright.”