A Plea for Eros

it is continually present in the story from its beginning. The novel opens in the gloom of twilight on the Thames. The narrator points out two people in an unmarked boat, which has “no identifying marks whatsoever.” Four paragraphs later, the setting sun illuminates the craft’s hull for an instant, and the reader catches a glimpse of “a rotten stain” that bears “some resemblance to the outline of a muffled human form.”
Muffled
and
muddled
are words that pertain to the whole world of the book. Perceiving what’s out there is difficult. Dust blows in the streets. Obscure figures appear and disappear. “Misty, misty, misty,” says another character, Jenny Wren, as she tries to make sense of who is who and what is what in her own life. “Can’t make it out.”
    Making out the world is a perceptual conundrum in
Our Mutual Friend,
and Mr. Venus’s job is rebuilding splintered bodies. In a startling little parable about isolating, recognizing, and naming things, Mr. Venus gives Wegg a tour of his shop. “I’ve gone on improving myself,” he says, “until by sight and by name I’m perfect.”
    “A wice. Tools. Bones, warious. Skulls warious. Preserved Indian baby. African ditto … human warious. Cats. Articulated English baby. Dogs. Ducks. Glass eyes, warious. Mummied bird. Oh dear me, that’s the general panoramic view.” Having so held and waved the candle as all these heterogeneous objects seemed to come forward obediently when they were named and retire again.
    The candle makes the objects visible and recognizable, but it is the names that seem to call forth each thing from the murk and make it legible. Venus articulates his anatomies in space and in language, creating sense from nonsense through categorization. Wegg expresses admiration for the anatomist’s work by saying, “You with the patience to fit together on the wires the whole framework of society—I allude to the human skelinton.” By collapsing the “framework of society” and the bones of the human body into one, Wegg again makes a brilliant hash of things. Of course people in society need their bones, but the wooden gentleman’s allusion to this
framework
reverberates throughout the novel on two levels—how the body is represented visually in space and in language.
    We all need to assemble ourselves, to have a working image or framework that we carry around with us as an inner representation of our own bodies, to which we attach an identity. Pathologies of body image, whether caused by lesions in the brain or emotional distress, make it clear that these representations are both essential and mysterious. “Phantom limb syndrome,” for example, in which amputees feel the presence of a missing leg or arm, and often suffer pain in it, is a form of Weggism. These people have an ongoing relationship with a part of them that has, in fact, disappeared.
Anosognosia,
another disorder, caused by damage to the right hemisphere of the brain, leaves patients unaware of what they’ve lost. They refuse to acknowledge what’s obvious to others—that they’re paralyzed or can’t move their left hand, or whatever their handicap happens to be. Others are afflicted with a condition simply called “neglect.” They ignore the left side of their bodies and the entire left side of space, as if it weren’t there. People with severe neglect may even deny, against all reason, that an impaired arm or leg belongs to them—reverse Weggism. Anorexics, bulimics, as well as many people who wouldn’t be considered clinically ill are also prone to deranged images of their own bodies. Contemporary Western culture is full of people who feel fat when they are actually thin, who obsess about their thighs and stomachs, their bags and their wrinkles, and even those who have a relatively stable body image are subject to mutations in their dreams. I lose parts of myself regularly when I’m asleep, often my teeth and hair, but I’ve also lost hands and feet. Distorted, partial, and broken visions of the body make it clear that these representations are far more precarious than we might like to think. It is precisely this inner fragility that Dickens maps with astounding acumen.
    Wegg’s allusion to
articulation
is double. Words are articulated as well as bones, and language might well be called “the framework of society,” because it makes our collective life possible. In the world of the book, the word
society
refers to a specific group of