A Plea for Eros

calm, and after some time—I have no idea how long—my vision dimmed and grayed and I felt myself going under. Then, as if by magic, there was a man speaking to me. He reached in through the broken window from the side, put his hands on my face, and told me not to move my neck. I remember he said he was a paramedic who just happened to be walking by and that he had seen the accident. “I’m losing consciousness,” I said to him. “What is your name?” he said. I told him. “What day is it?” I told him. He asked me my name again, and I told him again. I am convinced that this simple dialogue, combined with the stabilizing touch of his hands, kept me conscious until the firemen arrived.
    Eugene is repeatedly called back by Lizzie, but in his semiconscious mutterings he seems to be searching for another word he can’t find. Jenny Wren gives it to Mortimer Light-wood, who then passes it on to Eugene. The word is
wife.
Eugene’s movement is from unrecognizable near-corpse, a not-I, to being named and identified as a person who belongs to other people. Exactly the same threefold movement occurs in two short sentences spoken by Lucy Manette in
A Tale of Two Cities.
A door is opened onto the broken figure of a man, a man who has been confined to darkness in a tower cell for many years, a man who has forgotten his former life and his own name, a man with a voice so thin from disuse that it is “like a voice underground.” When she first sees this ruined person, Lucy says, “I am afraid of it,” and then a moment later, “I mean of him, my father.” The Dickensian shift from
it
to
him
takes a third step to include
my father.
Like
wife, father
articulates a human connection, and through this spoken bond a process of reclamation and recollection begins. This is the
mutuality
announced by the book’s title. The words
Our Mutual Friend
go beyond duality. They imply at the very least three people.
    A crucial moment in the novel occurs when the hero, John Harmon, tries to piece together the story of his own near death, a story that took place before the novel begins, and after he has been living a painful pseudononymous existence for some time. “A spirit that once was a man could hardly feel stranger or lonelier going unrecognized among mankind than I feel.” As the son of a punitive but indecisive father and a long dead mother, Harmon lives a ghostly borderline existence because he is unwilling to claim his rightful name by accepting his father’s will. He can’t be called back into a family. He returns to England “divided in my mind
afraid of myself.”
The self he fears is incarnated in the double, Radfoot, a man with whom he has been confused on board the ship that takes him home. Headstone’s inner division ends in death. Harmon nearly drowns, but he eventually manages to reunify his torn being. His monologue marks the beginning of that reconstruction:
    Now I pass to sick and deranged impressions; they are so strong that I rely upon them; but there are spaces between them I know nothing about, and they are not pervaded by any idea of time.
    I had drunk some coffee, when to my sense of sight he began to swell immensely … We had a struggle near the door …. I dropped down. Lying helpless on the ground I was turned over by a foot …. I saw the figure like myself lying on a bed. What might have been, for anything I knew, a silence of days, weeks, months, years, was broken by a violent wrestling of men all over the room. The figure like myself was assailed and my valise was in its hand. I was trodden upon and fallen over. I heard the noise of blows, and thought it was a woodcutter cutting down a tree. I could not have said that my name was John Harmon—I could not have thought it—I didn’t know it—but when I heard the blows, I thought of a woodcutter and his axe, and had some dead idea that I was lying in a forest.
    This is still correct? Still correct, with the exception that I cannot possibly express it to myself without using the word I. But it was not I. There was no such thing as I, within my knowledge.
    It was only after a downward slide through something like a tube, and then a great noise and a sparkling and crackling as of fires, that the consciousness came upon me, This is John Harmon drowning! John Harmon struggle for your life! John Harmon call on heaven and save yourself! I think I cried it aloud in a great agony, and then a heavy, horrid unintelligible something vanished, and it was