A Plea for Eros

say it explicitly, but this internal representation or brain image, which he delineates as subjectivity, is dialectical—
the image of a relation.
He doesn’t confine it to the relation between
“
I
”
and “you” but includes all external objects as well. Damasio is less interested in the role of language in subjectivity than others and proposes a nonverbal narrative for the self. He does write, however, “Language may not be the source of the self, but it is certainly the source of the ‘I.’“ I don’t think that the self is constituted in language but rather that language plays a vital role in perception and memory and necessarily mingles with an individual human narrative. Elizabeth Bates, who has been studying language and the brain at the University of California, San Diego, states it clearly: “The experience of language helps create the shape and structure of the mature brain.”

“There Was No Such Thing as I”
    Wegg’s labile, necrotic
I
reflects an anxiety he is able to express perfectly: “I should not like—under any circumstances, to be what I may call dispersed, a part of me here and a part of me there, but 1 should wish to collect myself like a genteel person.” Mr. Dolls, a minor character in the novel and a shuddering alcoholic wreck, cannot collect himself at all. His
I
doesn’t wander like Wegg’s. It has disappeared altogether. “Circumstances over which had no control,” Dolls mutters repeatedly, and, resorting to the third person, “Poor shattered invalid. Trouble nobody long.” Faithful to the book’s logic, the narrator refers to Dolls as
it,
not
he.
And, like Headstone, Dolls has a mechanical aspect: “The very breathing of the figure was contemptible as it laboured and rattled in that operation like a blundering clock.” Dolls’s
I
has gone underground, buried there with his real name—Cleaver, another word among many that suggest cutting and shredding. Mr. Dolls is a nickname given to him by Eugene Wrayburn because the ruin’s daughter is “the dolls’ dressmaker,” Jenny Wren. Mr. Dolls’s first-person pronoun has been drowned in drink, and without it he can’t engage another person directly. Dolls is a grown-up who behaves like a child. His daughter Jenny never calls him “you” or “father.” She prefers the infantile and more accurate “Bad Boy.” Young children often refer to themselves in the third person before they master the mysterious flux of the
I
, and Dickens’s novel is uncannily perceptive about this pronoun. In its pages the
I
is never taken for granted.
    How does a person lead a coherent life with a stable self, whatever that self may be?
Our Mutual Friend
proposes a route to a whole or more or less whole self through memory, mirroring recognition, dialogue, and finally telling and fiction. As the connective tissue of time, memory is certainly essential to the internal narrative we create for ourselves. When I was hospitalized for a migraine in 1983, I was in a bed in the neurology ward at Mount Sinai Hospital across from a woman who had suffered a severe stroke. She spoke rarely and only in fragments. Every day her husband came to visit her, but she had lost the ability to recognize him. She was a tough old lady who escaped the fetters the nurses bound her with every night, but she had no self that existed from one moment to another—no story over time. That had vanished. A number of years ago, a woman contacted my husband and told him the story of her husband, a gifted composer and musician, whose memory was destroyed by meningitis. He kept a notebook, and in it he wrote hundreds and hundreds of times the same exclamation, “12:00. Where am I? 12:01. Where am I? 12:02. Where am I?” And on and on. Trapped in the nightmare of eternal repetition, he was unable to connect one minute to another but retained enough self-consciousness in those isolated moments to feel his disorientation. It is hard to think of a worse plight than living in a state of continual agony without any context for it. For this man, time had lost all meaning.
    One of the most moving accounts of a man’s struggles to regain a continuous identity is recorded in A. R. Luria’s
The Man with a Shattered World.
Luria’s patient, Zazetsky, was injured during World War II. Shell fragments damaged the left occipito-parietal region of his brain, leaving him with severe amnesia and aphasia. His field of vision was destroyed, and he had great difficulty recognizing