A Plea for Eros

word I’ve written, a word like
than,
and I wonder what in heaven’s name it means and if I have spelled it correctly. At moments like this I come face-to-face with the utterly arbitrary and mysterious character of language. The sign or, as semioticians would have it, the signifier, the inscribed letters
t-h-a-n,
seems to float away from meaning and sits there on the page in front of me, stark naked and absurd.
    Our Mutual Friend
is a book that insists on the chasm between words and things. The comedy of “Lady Tippins” is that this name, supposedly meant to designate a whole and visible person, refers instead to an ad hoc collection of mobile feminine accoutrements. Society, however, is indifferent to the world out there because it fetishizes the name over the referent. The fact that Tippins can’t be made out at all is of little importance. When Veneering runs for Parliament, he hopes that the powerful Lord Snigsworth will “give his name as a member of my committee. I don’t go so far as to ask for his Lordship; I ask only for his name.” Veneering bribes his way into office, so that, the reader is told, “he may write a couple of initials after his name at the extremely cheap rate of two thousand five hundred per letter.” He exchanges pound notes for the letters
M.P.
As the dominant cultural fiction of developed societies, money is the ideal nonsensical sign. I have always found it amazing that in exchange for paper I can get a book or a dress, that the stock market actually rises and falls on rumor—mere talk—and that people trade in something called Futures, as if such a thing were possible. I accept that all this is part of my world, and yet I continue to find it bizarre. Dickens obviously shared this bafflement. As powerful as it is, money refers to nothing real. Currency floats. Dickens reiterates Marx’s idea of money as society’s founding gibberish, as “the general confounding and compounding of all things—the world upside down.” When money is hoarded, it becomes even more meaningless because it buys nothing. It just accumulates like so much wastepaper.
    Why money should be so precious to an ass so dull as to exchange it for no other satisfaction, is strange; but there is no animal so sure to get laden with it, as the Ass who sees nothing written on the face of the earth as the three dry letters L.S.D. not Luxury, Sensuality, Dissoluteness, which they so often stand for, but the three dry letters.
    In an age when designer
labels
and celebrity
names
are used to sell everything from cars to lipstick, when meaningless slogans and lyrics and acronyms are constantly beamed and displayed and written on screens and billboards and the covers of magazines, when right-wing politicians hammer out the same empty phrases ad nauseam, corrupting words like
freedom
and
truth
until they are no longer recognizable and refer to absolutely nothing, Dickens’s satire on dry letters is hardly irrelevant to us. The ugly side of this is that such nonsense has power when it is delivered in the guise of authority.
    As a young man Dickens studied shorthand. He called the cryptic squiggles of this new alphabet “the most despotic characters I have ever known.”
    The changes that were wrung upon dots which in such a position meant such a thing and in such another position meant something entirely different; the wonderful vagaries that were played by circles; the unaccountable consequences that resulted from marks like flies’ legs, the tremendous effect of a curve in the wrong place, not only troubled my waking hours but reappeared before me in my sleep.
    I have a similar relation to numbers. Algebra, in particular, remains impenetrable to me. Many people can remember struggling in school under the weight of some unfamiliar set of hieroglyphs they were supposed to master and being threatened with failure if they didn’t. Children are expected to digest all sorts of arbitrary systems, and the demands from on high can be crushing. Despite the fact that he fathered ten children, Dickens, the writer, never gave up his position as a child. He identified with children and with the child-like—those who are not in power and who suffer under the fickle and often sadistic demands of those who are. The list of brutalized children in Dickens is so long that I could fill up pages with their names. But unlike
Nicholas Nickleby
or
David Copperfield,
where the miseries of having learning beaten into you by a cruel