Authors: Siri Hustvedt
The brilliance of this comment is that it unearths a truth about many people who are mentally ill: In their preoccupation with what is happening inside them, they are walled off from other people, and this barrier prevents them from engaging another person in genuine conversation. The speaker’s lack of connection inevitably creates boredom in the listener. Headstone, like Podsnap, like countless other characters in the novel, is shut off from language as
a means of communication with another person.
The symbols of paternal authority Dickens indicts with such fury reveal themselves through the telling adjective he uses to incriminate the letters:
dry.
Everybody knows what a dry text is—one that has left out feeling, one that bores you stiff because it doesn’t speak to anything human, hides the obvious under obfuscation, or is simply incomprehensible.
The exponent [Headstone] drawling on to My dear Childern-err, let us say for example about the beautiful coming to the Sepulchre; the repeating of the word Sepulchre (commonly used among infants) five hundred times and never once hinting what it meant.
In this evocation of Headstone’s pedagogy, Dickens typically wrings every possible meaning out of the word
Sepulchre.
The reader knows the word means tomb, the receptacle for a dead body. The reader also knows that in the story being told, the tomb is empty when the women of the “beautiful coming” arrive. For the children who don’t know the word’s meaning, the letters themselves are vacant symbols, more verbiage coming from the mouth of their teacher.
Sepulchre
also points to the exponent issuing the nonsense, Headstone, a word that signifies a marker for the dead, a mere
name
aboveground announcing what once existed but has now become mere fragments of flesh and bone in the earth. Furthermore, the schoolmaster’s lessons, like the word
Centralization,
disguise a “terrible event.” The dull rhythms of his droning instruction become the frame for Headstone to relive his assault on Eugene, whom he has beaten to a bloody pulp and left for dead: “As he heard his classes he was always doing it again and improving on its manner, at prayers, in his mental arithmetic, all through his questioning, all through the day.” Language is a veneer, beneath which lies pure inarticulate rage.
Headstone is caught in a treadmill of obsession, compelled to relive his crime again and again. The word
mechanical
is used several times to describe the schoolmaster, signaling a growing resemblance to machinery and the inanimate. Repetition is meaning. Without it there is no memory, no recognition, no language, but compulsive repetitions that won’t allow for difference may also be a sign of sickness. In
Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
Freud first made the connection between the human urge to repeat and the death instinct. In the essay, he notes what every parent knows: Children never tire of playing the same games and hearing the same stories over and over and have little tolerance for even the slightest change. For Freud, this voracious appetite for identical repetition is the child’s way of mastering his environment, but in adulthood the desire for this disappears. In his patients he noticed that their need to repeat childhood events “disregarded the pleasure principle in every way.” The compulsion to return to the same thing time and again was actively self-destructive. In
Our Mutual Friend,
repetition without variation is both pathological and moribund. A character like Podsnap, whose entire existence is summarized in the routine “getting up at eight, shaving close at quarter past, breakfasting at nine, going to the City at ten, coming home at half past five, and dining at seven,” is the bourgeois version of Headstone’s insular cycle of
doing it again.
The rhythm that allows no change, no difference, is one that seeks to stop time, and stopping time means death. The teacher has lost the possibility of an ongoing story because he is trapped in the trauma of a single moment and is never released.
Headstone is the perpetrator of a crime against another person, not the victim, but his inner savagery partakes of both sides, not unlike Dickens’s incarnation as both Sikes and Nancy. “The man was murderous and he knew it. More, he irritated it with a kind of perverse pleasure akin to which a man has in irritating a wound upon his body.” Torturer and tortured occupy the same psychic ground. In the end, the schoolmaster’s body can’t bear the strain, and it erupts. He loses control of his movements and suffers from spasms, nosebleeds, and then seizures, epileptic fits he can’t remember and which leave him completely drained. He loses control of his body in space, and his amnesia disrupts all sense of time. True to Dickens’s storytelling, the ravages of this explosive inner campaign aren’t confined within Headstone. They move outward onto the larger canvas of the novel and are acted out through others in disguise, doubling, and mistaken identity. This is the
written-ness
of Dickens, the dreaming, overdeter-mined quality of his work. Once unleashed, a Dickensian theme is unstoppable; it spreads and bleeds from one character and one story within the story into another.
In order to commit the crime, Headstone disguises himself as Rogue Riderhood, the “Waterside Character,” and in these clothes he appears to be not less but more himself: “And whereas in his schoolmaster clothes he usually looked as if he were in the clothes of some other man, he now looked in the clothes of some other man or men, as if they were his own.” He “owns” these clothes because they suit what has been hidden, the suppressed
other.
The inside has come out. The word
Other
becomes a signal in the novel that boundaries are tumbling and people are going to pieces. Riderhood dubs the schoolmaster “T’Otherest.” He arrives at the name through three men he associates in his mind: Lightwood, “The Governor”; Wrayburn, “T’Other Governor”; and Headstone, “T’Otherest Governor,” who then becomes simply “T’Otherest.” T’Otherest is an apt name for a double, but it also describes the extremity of Headstone’s position and alludes to his slide toward verbal incoherence and eventually
T’Other World,
a phrase Riderhood also uses—the place of death and decay. The two men serve as mirror selves, and this reflective quality is also a form of confusion, not only of identity—which one is which—but of an erosion of the line between inside and outside. When Riderhood sees the disguised Headstone float by him on a barge, he makes a remark that reverberates with the pronominal play in the book as a whole: “Never thought myself so good-looking afore.” I am you. You are I.
Years ago, a psychiatrist told me a story I have never forgotten. Before a meeting with a schizophrenic patient, the doctor had been to the hairdresser and had her long hair cut short. When the patient entered the room for his session, he looked at her and said in a shocked voice, “You cut my hair!” “I” and “you” mingle in a single utterance that confuses self and other and echoes Riderhood’s ironic comment that uses the word
myself
to designate his double. Such confusion isn’t uncommon in schizophrenia, and this overlap is a familiar theme in works of literature where doubles and mirror images and ghostly selves appear and reappear. In his famous essay on the double, Otto Rank connected its insistent presence in art to the mirror image and death, and Dickens doesn’t betray this theory. The reflected double is a harbinger of disintegration, both of the body and of words. When Bradley Headstone cries out, “I have been set aside and I have been cast out,” the schoolmaster has reached the end of reciprocal speech—no dialogue is possible for him anymore. When he is near his end, the narrator tells us that Headstone has “trouble articulating his words.” He stammers and hesitates and can’t get them out. His language is falling apart, and these speech fragments, like the sentence fragments used to describe the mirror at the Veneer-ings’, signal a self in bits and pieces. Like Humpty Dumpty, it is all cracked up. The reflected selves, Riderhood and Headstone, cannot remain separate. They fight to the death and end up in the river, where they drown, one corpse’s limbs entangled in the other’s.
Our Mutual Friend
turns on this relation between the self and the other. The mirroring between the two can be sick and confused or more autonomous and healthy, but the novel never lets go of this dialectic. If the relation is cut, the self vanishes. Those who are walled off, isolated, and unrecognized drown. For me, this is a simple human truth, one that Dickens elaborates more fully and with greater subtlety than any writer I know. Although I have never been interested in narrow “readings” of books through the lens of this or that philosophy or system, the geography of the self and the other that Dickens maps in
Our Mutual Friend,
one that treats mirroring and the role of language, reverberates strongly with ideas in both psychoanalysis and neurobiology that seek answers to fundamental questions about human identity.
Winnicott, who read Lacan’s essay on the mirror stage when it was published in 1949, grounded Lacan’s idea of mirroring in his clinical experience of the relation between mother and child and bore witness to the fact that the child comes to recognize itself in the answering face of its mother. This dialectic bears a close relationship to Allan Shore’s comment in his book
Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development:
“The early social environment, mediated by the primary caregiver, directly influences the evolution of structures in the brain responsible for the future socioemotional development of the child.” In other words, the old dualism between nature and nurture is rendered moot. The outside also becomes us. A human being is born an unfinished organism and as the person develops experience with others becomes a physical reality. The
I
and the
you
are not as neatly separated as the culture likes to believe.
Language plays an essential part in our development, and brain research has begun to verify physically what linguists like Benveniste had codified long before. G. Rizzolatti’s studies on monkeys led him to discover a class of neurons he calls “mirror neurons,” which are activated in the brains of monkeys not only when they are performing certain actions like grasping or tearing but when they are watching the same activity in another monkey. Although Rizzolatti doesn’t mention it, this seems closely related to the phenomenon in children called
transitivism.
Simply put: If one toddler falls down and starts crying, the child watching the tumble also begins to howl. In his article “Language Within Our Grasp,” published in 1998, Rizzolatti and his fellow researchers argue that a similar neuronal action takes place in human beings in the left hemisphere of the brain and that this reflecting activity forms the foundation for language: “The development of the capacity of the observer to control his or her mirror system is crucial in order to emit (voluntarily) a signal. When this occurs a primitive dialogue is established. This dialogue forms the core of language.” Mirroring makes speech possible; language relies on the reflective quality of
I
and vow through which verbal interaction becomes possible.
In
Descartes’ Error,
Antonio Damasio suggests that what we call the self is a representation of our organism that is continually regenerated in the brain: “The self is a repeatedly reconstructed biological state,” and that what he designates as
subjectivity
is another
image
or
representation
of “an organism in the act of perceiving and responding to an object.” Damasio does not say it explicitly, but this internal representation or brain image, which he delineates as subjectivity, is dialectical—
the image of a relation.
He doesn’t confine it to the relation between
“
I
”
and “you” but includes all external objects as well. Damasio is less interested in the role of language in subjectivity than others and proposes a nonverbal narrative for the self. He does write, however, “Language may not be the source of the self, but it is certainly the source of the ‘I.’“ I don’t think that the self is constituted in language but rather that language plays a vital role in perception and memory and necessarily mingles with an individual human narrative. Elizabeth Bates, who has been studying language and the brain at the University of California, San Diego, states it clearly: “The experience of language helps create the shape and structure of the mature brain.”
Wegg’s labile, necrotic
I
reflects an anxiety he is able to express perfectly: “I should not like—under any circumstances, to be what I may call dispersed, a part of me here and a part of me there, but 1 should wish to collect myself like a genteel person.” Mr. Dolls, a minor character in the novel and a shuddering alcoholic wreck, cannot collect himself at all. His
I
doesn’t wander like Wegg’s. It has disappeared altogether. “Circumstances over which had no control,” Dolls mutters repeatedly, and, resorting to the third person, “Poor shattered invalid. Trouble nobody long.” Faithful to the book’s logic, the narrator refers to Dolls as
it,
not
he.
And, like Headstone, Dolls has a mechanical aspect: “The very breathing of the figure was contemptible as it laboured and rattled in that operation like a blundering clock.” Dolls’s
I
has gone underground, buried there with his real name—Cleaver, another word among many that suggest cutting and shredding. Mr. Dolls is a nickname given to him by Eugene Wrayburn because the ruin’s daughter is “the dolls’ dressmaker,” Jenny Wren. Mr. Dolls’s first-person pronoun has been drowned in drink, and without it he can’t engage another person directly. Dolls is a grown-up who behaves like a child. His daughter Jenny never calls him “you” or “father.” She prefers the infantile and more accurate “Bad Boy.” Young children often refer to themselves in the third person before they master the mysterious flux of the
I
, and Dickens’s novel is uncannily perceptive about this pronoun. In its pages the
I
is never taken for granted.