A Plea for Eros

schoolmaster or stepfather are played out fully and poignantly in the stories of particular characters,
Our Mutual Friend
addresses the abstract nature of paternal authority itself.
    The dead father, the missing father, the estranged father, and just the distant father are all figures of loss that reverberate deeply in life and in literature. Fathers are essentially different from mothers because we were all once in our mother’s bodies, are born out of those bodies, and as infants take food from them. Paternity is more distant and less direct than maternity; it’s a
claim
we accept as children, one inscribed in our legitimate, that is, legal, names. In
Our Mutual Friend,
a number of fathers never appear in the flesh— their bodies are out of the story. Like the letters and names that float in “society,” the
paternal figures
in the book are also
figures of the paternal
—more despotic characters that children find indecipherable, difficult to understand or speak to. They appear as signs or images of the law that can’t be addressed directly, because the person they refer to is either deaf to others or missing altogether. As a description of the law, this makes good sense. In societies that aren’t absolute monarchies or dictatorships, the law doesn’t reside in the body of a living person. It is
written
—inscribed in documents that proclaim rules, which carry the threat of punishment when broken.
    Dickens’s patriarchy—Lords, MPs, judges, and fathers— are by and large an inscrutable group. Some of them exist only as paper or letters. Harmon Senior, dead before the book begins, speaks through the multiple “last testaments” and codicils he hid around his property, each one dispensing his money in a different way. There is no final will, no coherent word, just contradictory edicts. Eugene Wrayburns father appears only as an acronym,
M.R.F.
(Most Respected Father). In the imaginary arguments Eugene conducts with M.R.F., the internalized father crushes the son with his blanket prohibitions. Another character, Twemlow, has a father figure as well, the tyrannical Lord Snigsworth, from whom Veneering solicits a
name
only. Like M.R.F., Snigsworth never appears bodily in the narrative. He is only represented by a portrait that hangs on the wall. What we do know is that when Twemlow visits Snigsworthy Park, he is put under “a kind of martial law.”
    All written language has a ghostly aspect—the disembodied voice speaking to you from the page—but Dickens’s paternal signs are also oppressive, fickle, and drained of meaning. When the fathers speak, they use the language of a mad king on a distant mountaintop issuing directives that merely confuse the poor subjects below who are expected to act on them. There is no dialogue with the fathers—the talk runs only one way. It’s easy to understand why Kafka admired Dickens so much. K.’s peregrinations through alien corridors inhabited by dirty bureaucrats and invisible authorities resonate strongly with Dickens’s bewildered children trying to locate and interpret the mysterious despotic signs hurled down at them from above. These are the words of dead languages that disguise rather then delineate reality. When Podsnap is told that six people have starved to death in London, the bourgeois patriarch makes the familiar argument that they deserved it. Twemlow, modest spokesman for the child’s position, objects. Podsnap swiftly accuses his guest of “Centralization.” Twemlow manages to reply that “he was certainly more staggered by these terrible events than he was by names, of howsoever many syllables.”
Centralization
is a word like
freedom.
In the mouths of politicians, bureaucrats, and ideologues, it is used to disguise the dead bodies that lie beneath it and the particular human stories that belong to each of those lost lives. At its worst, this language is only noise. The twentieth century and the new century we have now entered provide us with countless examples of ideological terms used to hide and distort the politics of neglect and murder.

Madness
    When Dickens was writing
Our Mutual Friend,
he was also giving readings, performances his family and friends thought strained him to the breaking point and probably hastened his death. Over and over, Dickens performed what he and those close to him simply referred to as “the murder”: Bill Sikes’s murder of Nancy from
Oliver Twist.
“There was a fixed expression of horror of me all