A Plea for Eros

characters, the most important of whom are the Podsnaps, the Lammles, and the Veneerings. Despite the fact that Mr. Venus’s shop and fashionable society couldn’t be more removed from each other in terms of the story, Dickens binds them metaphorically. They are linked by the morbid fragment, the piece or part, which, like Wegg’s bone, refuses to be incorporated into a meaningful framework—the thing that cannot be articulated. “I can’t work you into a miscellaneous one, nohow,” Venus tells Wegg. “Do what I will, you can’t be got to fit. Anybody with a passable knowledge would pick you out at a look, and say—No go! Don’t match!”
    In a scene at the Veneerings’, Dickens’s “society” is depicted as a broken anatomy, not seen directly but in a mirror. The long passage is written entirely in sentence fragments, as if the piecemeal nature of what the narrator is describing has invaded his syntax.
    Reflects mature young lady; raven locks and complexion that lights up well when well powdered—as it is carrying on considerably in the captivation of mature young gentleman; with too much nose in his face, too much ginger in his whiskers, too much torso in his waistcoat, too much sparkle in his studs, his eyes, his buttons, his talk and his teeth.
    As a reader, I see a depthless field of reflected shards, in which torso and teeth are equivalent to studs, buttons, and even talk, an image that again evokes the bits and pieces of Mr. Venus’s bone shop and his articulations of the “warious.” By using a mirror, Dickens clearly wants to depict society as a world of surface, artifice, illusion, as a
veneer,
but he doesn’t have to shatter the conventional boundaries of the body to do that. In fact, mirrors are the only place where we experience ourselves as a visual whole from the outside. The
“
I
”
takes the position of a “you.” Most of the time we see ourselves only in parts, our hands moving in front of us, our arms, fingers, torso, or our knees and feet. This total view of the body in the mirror is what led the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to posit his theoretical mirror stage, which for him meant the moment a child recognizes itself as a whole person in a reflection through the eyes of what he calls the Other, which is both a real other person and the whole symbolic landscape in which the child lives—namely language. Lacan was not Piaget. He wasn’t a great observer of children, and I don’t believe that his mirror stage corresponds to an actual event in the story of human development. Rather, it was his way of speaking to the fact that we as human beings are born without an awareness of our corporeal boundaries. Infants are fragmented beings who come together as whole selves only over time, and the borders and categories established in language are crucial to the creation of a separate and complete idea of the self. This psychoanalytic model of development that moves from a fragmentary to a whole body image becomes more potent as an idea when it is linked to cases of brain damage or mental illness like the ones I mentioned earlier. For Lacan, the person seen in the mirror represents a form of therapeutic wholeness, a kind of ideal body, one that is never completely achieved because it has been built over a substrata of fragmentation.
    Whenever things are going to pieces in Dickens, the reader can be sure that identities are wobbling and the smell of death is in the air. A moribund quality pervades Dickensian
society.
These are people who, like Wegg’s bone, escape articulation. The aged Lady Tippins, for example: “Whereabout in the bonnet and drapery announced by her name any fragment of the real woman may be concealed is perhaps known to her maid.” When this bonnet-and-drapery shakes a fan, the noise is compared to the “rattling of bones,” a sound that echoes a comment Eugene Wrayburn made earlier in the novel. Looking down at the bloated corpse of Radfoot, he quips, “Not much worse than Lady Tippins.” The morsel on the traveler’s plate is reincarnated in biting satire. The question is: How can you identify with a name what you can’t make out?

Floating Signs
    There is no magical connection between words and things, or as the Old Soldier put it in
David Copperfield,
“Without Dr. Johnson or somebody of that sort we might have been at this present moment calling an Italian iron a bedstead.” Every once in a while, I find myself staring long and hard at a