A Plea for Eros

Dumpty, in pieces, and there is no way to put broken eggshells back together again. I am cracked up.” Catherines silence is as important as her final words. The shattered self must raise defenses or die, and words to express this state do not come easily. In Bradley Headstone, Dickens gives the reader a man whose plural inner turmoil brings him to violence and then tears him apart.
    Headstone suffers from a radical disconnection between his inner and outer self, his feelings and his words. Despite the monstrous struggles that are being waged inside him, his schoolteacher persona is dull, dry, and emotionless. This bifurcation between inner disturbance and external deadness also has a clinical dimension. One of my favorite stories about the English pediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott is told by M. Masud R. Khan in his introduction to Winnicott’s book
Holding and Interpretation.
In 1971, near the end of his life, Winnicott met with a group of Anglican clergymen. The question they asked him was simple. They wanted to know how to distinguish between an ill person who needed psychiatric help and a person who could be helped by their counseling. Dr. Winnicott didn’t answer immediately, but after some thought, he said: “If a person comes and talks to you and, listening to him, you feel he is boring you, then he is sick, and needs psychiatric treatment. But if he sustains your interest, no matter how grave his distress or conflict, then you can help him alright.”
    The brilliance of this comment is that it unearths a truth about many people who are mentally ill: In their preoccupation with what is happening inside them, they are walled off from other people, and this barrier prevents them from engaging another person in genuine conversation. The speaker’s lack of connection inevitably creates boredom in the listener. Headstone, like Podsnap, like countless other characters in the novel, is shut off from language as
a means of communication with another person.
The symbols of paternal authority Dickens indicts with such fury reveal themselves through the telling adjective he uses to incriminate the letters:
dry.
Everybody knows what a dry text is—one that has left out feeling, one that bores you stiff because it doesn’t speak to anything human, hides the obvious under obfuscation, or is simply incomprehensible.
    The exponent [Headstone] drawling on to My dear Childern-err, let us say for example about the beautiful coming to the Sepulchre; the repeating of the word Sepulchre (commonly used among infants) five hundred times and never once hinting what it meant.
    In this evocation of Headstone’s pedagogy, Dickens typically wrings every possible meaning out of the word
Sepulchre.
The reader knows the word means tomb, the receptacle for a dead body. The reader also knows that in the story being told, the tomb is empty when the women of the “beautiful coming” arrive. For the children who don’t know the word’s meaning, the letters themselves are vacant symbols, more verbiage coming from the mouth of their teacher.
Sepulchre
also points to the exponent issuing the nonsense, Headstone, a word that signifies a marker for the dead, a mere
name
aboveground announcing what once existed but has now become mere fragments of flesh and bone in the earth. Furthermore, the schoolmaster’s lessons, like the word
Centralization,
disguise a “terrible event.” The dull rhythms of his droning instruction become the frame for Headstone to relive his assault on Eugene, whom he has beaten to a bloody pulp and left for dead: “As he heard his classes he was always doing it again and improving on its manner, at prayers, in his mental arithmetic, all through his questioning, all through the day.” Language is a veneer, beneath which lies pure inarticulate rage.
    Headstone is caught in a treadmill of obsession, compelled to relive his crime again and again. The word
mechanical
is used several times to describe the schoolmaster, signaling a growing resemblance to machinery and the inanimate. Repetition is meaning. Without it there is no memory, no recognition, no language, but compulsive repetitions that won’t allow for difference may also be a sign of sickness. In
Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
Freud first made the connection between the human urge to repeat and the death instinct. In the essay, he notes what every parent knows: Children never tire of playing the same games and hearing the same stories over and