A crucial moment in the novel occurs when the hero, John Harmon, tries to piece together the story of his own near death, a story that took place before the novel begins, and after he has been living a painful pseudononymous existence for some time. “A spirit that once was a man could hardly feel stranger or lonelier going unrecognized among mankind than I feel.” As the son of a punitive but indecisive father and a long dead mother, Harmon lives a ghostly borderline existence because he is unwilling to claim his rightful name by accepting his father’s will. He can’t be called back into a family. He returns to England “divided in my mind afraid of myself.” The self he fears is incarnated in the double, Radfoot, a man with whom he has been confused on board the ship that takes him home. Headstone’s inner division ends in death. Harmon nearly drowns, but he eventually manages to reunify his torn being. His monologue marks the beginning of that reconstruction:
Now I pass to sick and deranged impressions; they are so strong that I rely upon them; but there are spaces between them 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 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 the 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 the 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 a 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 aloud in a great agony, and then a heavy, horrid unintelligible something vanished, and it was I who was struggling there alone in the water!
Harmon’s telling is an agonized re-collection of the events that led to his near drowning, during which he loses himself as subject of the story he wants so badly to remember: “There was no such thing as I.” The monologue includes more wood and cutting imagery and a bizarre slide through “a tube” that precedes his regained consciousness. At first, Harmon is divided between the mirrored figure like myself (Radfoot) and the I. After the birth-like slide, his name returns to him, but he calls out to himself as if he were somebody else and addresses that other as you: “Struggle for your life!” Only after he has recognized himself as another, a separate and distinct whole being, does the corpse vanish, and he is able to assume the first person and his own story. In order for the self to exist, it must be able to represent itself as another, a mirror image, and the recognition of that whole self gives birth to the subject.
The fear of contamination Dickens’s traveler has for the dead body that keeps returning to him in his imagination has escalated in Harmon’s speech to the terror of complete annihilation. The abject weight that disappears underwater is no longer “1” or “you” but “it”—the not-I, or no longer I, not an other but an otherest. Harmon’s speech is the account of a man trying to pull himself together by remembering, despite the fact that his memory is both marred by the distortions of hallucination and filled with the holes of unconsciousness. The telling takes the form of an internal dialogue during which the speaker interrogates himself, “This is still correct?” As with Zazetsky’s need to record the fragments of his life on the page, Harmon arranges pieces of the past to articulate some kind of order despite his unstable state of mind. Drugged, beaten, intermittently unconscious, and then thrown overboard into the water, Harmon admits that his reflections are “deranged.” He has carried these sick impressions or memories around with him for some time, and remembering them isn’t enough; it’s the telling or reconstruction of the pieces that is therapeutic and eventually reassembles an identity.
It’s important to stress that the absence of a continuous self-narrative isn’t only pathological — the result of psychotic breaks, brain damage, drugs, or near-death experiences. Normal life includes making sense of fragmentary memories. As Henry Adams writes in The Education, “His identity, if one could call a bundle of disconnected memories an identity, seems to remain; but his life was once more broken into separate pieces.” We all collect and re-collect these pieces through self-image, memory, and language. I have long felt the cleft between my inner memories and the telling of them. My own recollections usually appear as images accompanied perhaps by a sentence or sentences spoken by another person or by me, moments that for one reason or another are entrenched in my mind, but fuzzy patches or large gaps remain. Yet am-other corpse story will serve as an illustration. I remember seeing Mao Tse-tung’s preserved body in China in 1986.1 have a picture of the waxy dead man in my mind, but it is no longer perfect, and I can’t recall exactly how he, or rather it, was displayed. It was a peculiar experience but not a scary one. The body looked too unreal for that. I have a visual impression of the people around me — my sisters, friends, our Chinese guide, and others waiting on line — but they are not precisely drawn. I do remember clearly that my friend Eric said to me, “Why are hundreds of people waiting for hours to see his body?” Without thinking, I replied, “They want to make sure he’s really dead.” Our guide, who had suffered a humiliating and painful exile to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, started to laugh, and in her hilarity she began to pound me on the back. I remember the feeling of her hand hitting my lower spine, but I could no longer give you a description of her face. When I tell the story, however, I rely on the context of the experience and on the conventions of language, on syntax, to turn the bits of memory into a narrative that has the appearance of something far more whole than the various pictures in my brain. After I had told the story several times, the telling began to supplant the images. I had learned how to tell it, and my narrative of that little incident has taken on a solidity that my real memories don’t have.
It is interesting that this new fixity arrives only through the task of giving the story to another person. Memories that have never been told aren’t yet solid stories; they are potential stories. It may be that the interlocutor is the self, as in John Harmon’s monologue, but it is always the self in relation to the idea of another, the “I” addressing a “you,” because the desire to tell implies that the tale must become comprehensible to a listener. Zazetsky wrote both for himself as an other and for real others. He hoped that his descriptions of his illness would be of use to those studying brain injury, and in this he triumphed: His writing has proved invaluable to researchers. It is this dialogical character of speech and storytelling that Dickens insists on as living, not dead, language. Through his telling, Harmon recovers the I Headstone loses. The only time Mr. Dolls says the word I in the novel is when he asks Eugene Wrayburn for a few pence to buy a drink. However pathetic Dolls’s request, he is engaged in a real dialogue and receives an answer. For a brief moment, he has situated himself in the axis of discourse and emerges as a subject.