A Plea for Eros

over the theater,” Dickens wrote, “that couldn’t have been surpassed if I had been going to be hanged.” This was a period of disillusionment in Dickens’s life, of sadness and a nagging emptiness. “What was there but the fearful stimulus of the readings,” his biographer Edgar Johnson writes, “and returning to them as Jasper in
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
would return to the dangerous excitement of his drugged visions.” The readings became a kind of opiate for Dickens, and as he performed he worked himself into a feverish trance of high emotion. Ladies fainted, men gasped, and when it was over the author would limp off the stage exhausted, tears streaming down his face. He played all the parts, Fagin, Sikes, and Nancy. As Nancy, he begged and screamed for his life; as Sikes, he mercilessly clubbed his victim to death. Writing novels means being plural, being divided among your creatures and suffering with them. While he was onstage, Dickens lost himself in his characters and the horror of what he was reading, and by all accounts it took a terrible toll on his health. In his biography, Peter Ackroyd notes that early in 1869 the author reported that he was “at present nightly murdered by Mr. W. Sikes” and around the same time also wrote in a letter to a friend, “I am murdering Nancy …. I have a vague sensation of being ‘wanted’ when I walk the streets.” Dickens’s use of the first person is significant, if only because it demonstrates that these two beings were close enough to him to be “I.”
    Dickens continually explored extreme states of disintegration, and in
Our Mutual Friend
he created a character, Bradley Headstone, whose breakdown is in part presented as pathological repetition—the machine-like churning in his mind of an attempted murder. The connection to Dickens’s own performances is striking. While Dickens’s fictional character Headstone is guilty of a crime, and his creator was guilty only of invention and empathy for those inventions, Headstone nevertheless repeats the crime in his imagination long after it is over, just as Dickens couldn’t resist performing his murder again and again. A powerfully imagined event can evoke the same emotions as a real event. Few artists would contradict this, and yet there are no doubt people who would find it odd that a fiction, when fully imagined, can create something parallel to the disruptions of mental illness. Dissolution in art is preferable to dissolution in madness, but what Freud called “sublimation” is the transformation of inner dramas, fears, and wounds into something else: a work of art outside the body of the artist. This is true for all arts except acting, in which the body is the instrument for transformation. There are parts of my books that I have never read aloud and never will—they are simply too painful for me. I resist embodying my own words and characters and prefer to keep them at a safe distance on the page. Dickens had long been reluctant to perform “the murder,” but once he had witnessed the horrifled response of his friends on whom he tried out his “reading,” their shocked faces became the impetus for repetition. Bradley Headstone, the mad schoolmaster and criminal in
Our Mutual Friend,
is
not
a stand-in for Charles Dickens. I am suggesting something quite different: Dickens’s reading obsession provides a window into the writer’s personality and his plural and complex inner identifications—ones that included both
I
am being murdered
and
I
am murdering.
    In Bradley Headstone, the reader is presented with a character who suffers from what would now be called “psychosis.” The language of psychiatry has changed over the years, and diagnosing a character in a novel is naïve at best, but Headstone’s madness fascinates me because it broadly depicts clinical realities that have always been present in some forms of insanity. In his book
Aggression in Personality Disorders and Perversions,
Otto Kernberg states it simply: “There is a profound sense of loss or dispersal of identity in psychosis.” Of course,
Our Mutual Friend
as a whole expresses both
a profound sense of loss
and
a dispersal of identity,
but it is not. a psychotic text; it treats these losses coherently. Dr. Daniel Dorman, in his narrative account of a single schizophrenic patient, Catherine, relates that after she had sat in stony silence for nearly an entire session she announced just before it ended, “I am Humpty