A Plea for Eros

isolate the human body from its environment and make neat distinctions between the living and the nonliving, Dickens confuses these “normal” separations until, over time, he rearranges our expectations entirely.
    In Silas Wegg, Dickens creates a character who is already
literally
part object. He has a wooden leg, which the narrator tells us Wegg seems “to have taken to naturally,” perhaps because the man is also
metaphorically
wooden: “Wegg was a knotty man, and a close grained, with a face carved out of very hard material, that had just as much play of expression as a watchman’s rattle.” Both his body and facial tics are more thing-like than human. Then, in a chapter titled “Mr. Wegg Looks After Himself,” we discover that the wooden gentleman has been reluctant to give up what he has lost, and obeying a wonderful logic all his own, he goes to a dingy little shop in London and calls on
himself:
    “And how have I been going on, this long time, Mr. Venus?”
    “Very bad,” says Mr. Venus, uncompromisingly.
    “What am I still at home?” asks Wegg with an air of surprise.
    ‘Always at home.”
    The first time I read this passage, I had no idea what was going on, but when it became clear to me that the “I” in this remarkable exchange is Wegg’s lost leg bone, I burst out laughing. In order to arrive at this
“
I
,”
Wegg has to wrench the familiar pronoun from its usual place and force it into another: He adopts what is normally the third person as the first. The French linguist Émile Benveniste makes an important distinction between what he calls the
polarity of person
and
non-person:
“There are utterances in discourse that escape the condition of person in spite of their individual nature, that is, they refer not to themselves but to an ‘objective situation.’ This is the domain we call the ‘third person.’“ The difference between polarity of person and nonperson is clear—in dialogue person is always reversible. I can become you, and you, I, while this is not true of he, she, and it. By moving the first person outside of dialogue, Wegg’s
person
has become
nonperson,
a leap that brings me back to Mr. Inspector’s earlier confusion about how he should address a dead man. The “I” bone, after all, is a corpse piece of Wegg, one that has made its way to the morgue a little earlier than the rest of him.
    Wegg is only one of many characters in Dickens who has a body that has fallen apart. The novels abound with amputees, bloody messes, bodies that explode, disintegrate, or liquefy, as well as countless metaphorical references to going to pieces. In
Dombey and Son,
a train steams over Carker with “its fiery heat and cast his mutilated fragments into the air.” In
Bleak House,
Krook spontaneously combusts. In
Oliver Twist,
Sikes leaves the murdered Nancy “a dark heap in a blood-stained room.” In
Little Dorrit,
Blandois is crushed and found “in a dirty heap of rubbish,” his head “shivered to atoms.” In
Martin Chuzzlewit,
Joseph Willet loses an arm and Simon Taper-tit’s legs are crushed and replaced by wooden ones. In the unfinished
The Mystery of Edwin Drood,
it’s obvious that Jasper has disposed of his nephew with quicklime, an acid that eats skin and bone. And this is the short list. The crushed body is a leitmotif in Dickens—an image central to the writer’s imagination. In
Our Mutual Friend,
this destroyed corpse becomes the vehicle for the obsessive question: How does one construct a self?
    Wegg’s dearly departed leg is in the possession of Mr. Venus, a man in the business of articulating bones. I like to think that in this dingy bone shop Dickens gathered together all the smashed corpses from his earlier books and gave Venus the impossible task of rebuilding them. Venus faces three problems— seeing, recognizing, and finally identifying the fragments he has in front of him. Throughout the narrative, Dickens isolates each step, which echoes the realities of perception. In a dense fog I may
see
shapes in front of me but not
recognize
any of them, or, as often happens, I may recognize a face but can’t
identify
it with a name. Venus, underworld Encyclopedist that he is, sets about trying to order the bits and pieces of the dead from what the narrator tells us is “a muddle of objects vaguely resembling pieces of leather and dry stick … . among which nothing is resolvable into anything distinct.” This “muddle” isn’t limited to the bone shop;