A Plea for Eros

over and have little tolerance for even the slightest change. For Freud, this voracious appetite for identical repetition is the child’s way of mastering his environment, but in adulthood the desire for this disappears. In his patients he noticed that their need to repeat childhood events “disregarded the pleasure principle in every way.” The compulsion to return to the same thing time and again was actively self-destructive. In
Our Mutual Friend,
repetition without variation is both pathological and moribund. A character like Podsnap, whose entire existence is summarized in the routine “getting up at eight, shaving close at quarter past, breakfasting at nine, going to the City at ten, coming home at half past five, and dining at seven,” is the bourgeois version of Headstone’s insular cycle of
doing it again.
The rhythm that allows no change, no difference, is one that seeks to stop time, and stopping time means death. The teacher has lost the possibility of an ongoing story because he is trapped in the trauma of a single moment and is never released.
    Headstone is the perpetrator of a crime against another person, not the victim, but his inner savagery partakes of both sides, not unlike Dickens’s incarnation as both Sikes and Nancy. “The man was murderous and he knew it. More, he irritated it with a kind of perverse pleasure akin to which a man has in irritating a wound upon his body.” Torturer and tortured occupy the same psychic ground. In the end, the schoolmaster’s body can’t bear the strain, and it erupts. He loses control of his movements and suffers from spasms, nosebleeds, and then seizures, epileptic fits he can’t remember and which leave him completely drained. He loses control of his body in space, and his amnesia disrupts all sense of time. True to Dickens’s storytelling, the ravages of this explosive inner campaign aren’t confined within Headstone. They move outward onto the larger canvas of the novel and are acted out through others in disguise, doubling, and mistaken identity. This is the
written-ness
of Dickens, the dreaming, overdeter-mined quality of his work. Once unleashed, a Dickensian theme is unstoppable; it spreads and bleeds from one character and one story within the story into another.
    In order to commit the crime, Headstone disguises himself as Rogue Riderhood, the “Waterside Character,” and in these clothes he appears to be not less but more himself: “And whereas in his schoolmaster clothes he usually looked as if he were in the clothes of some other man, he now looked in the clothes of some other man or men, as if they were his own.” He “owns” these clothes because they suit what has been hidden, the suppressed
other.
The inside has come out. The word
Other
becomes a signal in the novel that boundaries are tumbling and people are going to pieces. Riderhood dubs the schoolmaster “T’Otherest.” He arrives at the name through three men he associates in his mind: Lightwood, “The Governor”; Wrayburn, “T’Other Governor”; and Headstone, “T’Otherest Governor,” who then becomes simply “T’Otherest.” T’Otherest is an apt name for a double, but it also describes the extremity of Headstone’s position and alludes to his slide toward verbal incoherence and eventually
T’Other World,
a phrase Riderhood also uses—the place of death and decay. The two men serve as mirror selves, and this reflective quality is also a form of confusion, not only of identity—which one is which—but of an erosion of the line between inside and outside. When Riderhood sees the disguised Headstone float by him on a barge, he makes a remark that reverberates with the pronominal play in the book as a whole: “Never thought myself so good-looking afore.” I am you. You are I.
    Years ago, a psychiatrist told me a story I have never forgotten. Before a meeting with a schizophrenic patient, the doctor had been to the hairdresser and had her long hair cut short. When the patient entered the room for his session, he looked at her and said in a shocked voice, “You cut my hair!” “I” and “you” mingle in a single utterance that confuses self and other and echoes Riderhood’s ironic comment that uses the word
myself
to designate his double. Such confusion isn’t uncommon in schizophrenia, and this overlap is a familiar theme in works of literature where doubles and mirror images and ghostly selves appear and reappear. In his famous essay on the