Harmon’s full rehabilitation will come later in the novel. Mrs. Boffin, who acted as a surrogate mother to Harmon when he was young, is subject to strange visions of faces in the decrepit mansion where the boy grew up with his sister. One night Mrs. Boffin sees them everywhere: “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.” The strange face belongs to the ghostly hero of the novel, and when Mrs. Boffin fills in that blank, she brings the unrecognized spirit back from the dead and is able to call him by name. She also situates him in a narrative that is beyond himself, one that includes his father and images of generational resemblance that link parents and children in a mirroring vision over time.
The Magic of Fiction
The novel charts a course that moves back and forth between the unrecognizable, unnamed, unconscious drowned no-body to the recognizable somebody who is a conscious, speaking subject. We all travel a path that moves from the relatively oblivious and fragmentary state of infancy to a working internal image of the self, to a conscious, articulated “I” within the structures of language. Nobody has actual memories of intrauterine life or early infancy, but we experienced it nevertheless, and traces of that floating undifferentiated world remain in us and return to haunt us even in the everyday — in fears, anxieties, longings, sex, sleep, and nameless sorrows. It is part of a corporeal life that is mostly hidden from us, and nothing is further from that early experience than the attempt to inscribe that reality or some version of it in writing. And yet I think this is what Dickens was drawn to — that fragmentary unformed space, or what I’ve often thought of as the underneath. In hallucinations, in psychoses, in various forms of brain damage, in dreams, and in some moments of making art, the underneath seems to roar to the surface: Whole pictures disintegrate and time is disrupted. This story we call the self and articulate as I, Dickens tells us, is fraught and fragile, and we must fight to keep it together.
The human experience of the world is not direct but mediated through what Wegg calls the “framework of society.” This framework is inescapable and necessary, but its articulations may also be seen as the ordering fictions that make life livable. Both whole object representations in the brain, which organize things in space, and language, which reorganizes that material sequentially through abstract symbols, serve as internal shields from the assault of stimuli coming from the real world. They provide us with categories that create the borders of perception and through expectation give external reality both shape and sense, a truth that many artists, philosophers, linguists, and psychologists have long intuited. Without these shields we would be unable to construct an internal representation of a self. Brain scientists have located these two dynamic structures, the spatial (right hemisphere) and the audio-verbal (left hemisphere), but for me what is fascinating is that Dickens seems to have glimpsed what the world would be like without these protections, that fragmented, inchoate reality we all must have experienced as infants before our brains had structured that external “stuff” into things and words. It seems obvious that because our genetic identities and personal histories are all different, our brains, while similar to one another, are also unique. In other words, some people are more sensitive to stimuli than others. They feel what’s happening inside and outside themselves. Dickens was one of these people. He understood or rather felt what Karen Kaplan-Solms and Mark Solms describe, using words that echo Dickens’s own. “From a subjective viewpoint, an excited state of arousal in which the organism is forced to respond equally to all stimuli necessarily produces ego-fragmentation or annihilation. The ‘I’ is overwhelmed by a multitude of ‘its.’“
We are always accommodating its into articulated frameworks that make life livable, but there are times when that integration fails, when the bone, as Mr. Venus says, won’t fit, nohow. I think of these moments or states as holes in the structure — windows onto nonsense. We all long for fixity— and for some of us it’s found in writing. Zazetsky’s desire to record what he could of his life was sparked by a need to fill in the holes, to re-create coherence from what refused to cohere and to make his account sensible to a reader outside himself. Whatever its strengths or weaknesses, a written text has a solidity and permanence that spoken language can’t have. We forget or misremember conversations, but a book can be quoted again with assurance. It doesn’t change. In Our Mutual Friend, Dickens includes a tacit acknowledgment of his own fiction as a response to a shattered reality that is both outside and inside the self and a desire to make whole what has been broken in space and time. His artist is a crippled visionary child — Jenny Wren, once Fanny Cleaver, who has reinvented herself as an unhurt, airborne, fictional being. Like a novelist, she has characters — her dolls — whom she moves through stories borrowed from the known vocabulary of fairy tales and whom she dresses in scraps of fabric, which are referred to as “damage and waste.” Jenny Wren’s fictions are born from this damage, and although they don’t allow her to throw her crutch away, in her reveries and stories she is whole and uninjured.
Dickens was preternaturally sensitive to distortions of language. He knew that words could be used as a tool for obfus-cation, hypocrisy, and self-deception. He also knew that language was arbitrary and limited, that there were parts of human experience where words fall apart — in the choked stammerings of loss, of madness and delirium, and when we come close to the reality of our own inevitable deaths. He knew that the memory of every person is broken, interrupted by lapses and silences, and that our wholeness and continuity aren’t givens but made in us and by us. He knew deeply that the self is an entity under threat and the trick of piecing it together isn’t a solitary game. It is rooted in the other, where we find a mirroring wholeness, dialogue, and finally story. The journey in the book is from “it” to “I”to “We.” This Dickensian We is language itself and the essential stories made from it, which not only bind us together but make sense of the world out there and keep the morbid fragment at bay.
2004
Extracts from a Story of the Wounded Self
THE FIRST STORY BELONCS TO MY MOTHER. SHE IS THE ONE who tells it, and when she tells it, she always includes a single terrible moment. She was at home taking a bath, and she thought to herself, How is it possible for a person to be as sad as I am? My mother was miserable because I was born too early. My lungs were undeveloped, and the doctor told my parents I might die. For two weeks, I lay in an incubator while my mother and father waited for my fate to be decided. In those days, the nurses didn’t touch or massage babies left in incubators. I was separated from my mother in the first days of my life, and I now think that experience marks the beginning of a particular personality When I suffered from convulsions on the day of my christening party, I scared my mother yet again. If I felt warm, my mother grew alarmed, and a single sound from my crib brought her to me. I was the firstborn child of a loving mother who lived in fear that she might lose me. We can’t remember our infancies, but they live in our bodies, and had I not been frail at birth, I would have been someone else, and I would have had other thoughts. When I look back, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t carry around inside me a sensation of being wounded. The feeling ranges from the very slight to the acute, but the ache in my chest, dim or strong, has remained a constant in my life.