A Plea for Eros

Dickens
knew
what he was doing, if he knew that his work was metaphysical. I said, “No,” and he agreed with me. But in art, knowing isn’t everything—the unknown often pushes its way to the surface. In recent years, neuroscience has demonstrated that Freud was surely right in this sense: A huge part of what the brain does is unconscious. And every novelist can tell you that while writing, things happen. You don’t know why the characters or their words appear to you or where they come from, but there they are, and often these peculiar ghosts and their voices, rising up from nowhere, are exactly the ones that are most crucial to the story.
    The novel’s plot turns on the identity of the drowned man Mr. Inspector calls “you,” “him,” and “it.” This body is hauled from the Thames by Gaffer Hexam and his daughter, Lizzie, who then hand the corpse over to the authorities. The papers found on the body lead them to identify it as John Harmon, son of a London dust mogul and heir to a fortune. With the son dead, the money goes to the Boffins, The Golden Dustman and his wife, formerly loyal servants to Old Harmon. Silas Wegg, a sly observer of the Boffinses’ new wealth, plots against them. A cash reward, offered for information leading to the perpetrator of the crime, inspires Rogue 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 falsely accuses Gaifer Hexam, the man in the boat who found the body, of murder. This brings the highborn Eugene Wrayburn and the lowborn Lizzie Hexam together, and their love story begins. But the authorities are wrong. The body found in the river did not belong to John Harmon but to George Radfoot, a friend of Harmon’s who bore a resemblance to the heir. This mistake allows John Harmon, who has been away from home for many years, to pose as someone else and become a spectator of his own death. He changes his name to Rokesmith, goes to live in what was once his father’s house, works as a secretary to Boffin, and there 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—and their rocky courtship begins. Through social connection or simple coincidence all the dispersed elements of the story intersect: Lizzie and Bella meet. Bradley Headstone, schoolmaster to Lizzie’s brother, and Eugene Wrayburn are thrown together and become rivals for Lizzie. In the grip of a terrible and fatal passion for Lizzie, Headstone allies himself with Riderhood. Mayhem ensues. Riderhood, Headstone, and Gaffer all drown. Eugene Wrayburn almost drowns, but in the end couples are united, the wicked are punished, and most of the good characters seem headed for the fairy-tale state known as “happily ever after,”

Seeing Things
    Metaphor always changes the way we see things in our minds, When one thing is compared to another in a sentence, I merge the two in the mental picture I create while I’m reading. Dickens’s metaphors, however, are more radical than those of most writers because they dismantle the lines of conventional perception, and I am continually reorienting the images I see in my mind as I read his books. Normal vision is determined to a large degree by our expectations. We learn to distinguish things as isolated identities
out there
through the way our brains develop to order visual and linguistic material that make “whole object” representations possible. To put it simply, we don’t see a naked world but a visual field that has been determined by experience, memory, and language. Every reader of Dickens notices that in his work objects often have human traits and people often resemble things. This mixing of the inanimate and the animate is both funny and subversive. When Fascination Fledgeby wants to gain entrance to a house, for example, the reader is told, “he pulled the house’s nose again and pulled and pulled … until a human nose appeared in the doorway.” When the metaphorical nose is followed by a literal nose, the comic tension it creates undermines the status of both noses, making the “real” one appear alien and disembodied, as if it were floating alone in the dark space of a doorway. Dickens’s language plays havoc with whole object representations by breaking them down. Rather than