This is my call for eros, a plea that we not forget ambiguity and mystery, that in matters of the heart, we acknowledge an abiding uncertainty. I honestly think that when we are possessed by erotic magic, we don’t feel like censoring Kafka or much else, because we are living a story of exciting thresholds and irrational feeling. We are living in a secret place we make between us, a place where the real and unreal commingle. That’s where the young philosopher took the woman with the belligerent question. He brought her into a realm of the imagination and of memory, where lovers are alone speaking to each other, saying yes or no or “perhaps tomorrow,” where they play at who they are, inventing and reinventing themselves as subjects and objects; and when the woman with the question found herself there, she was silent. Maybe, just maybe, she was remembering a passionate story of her own.
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: