A Plea for Eros

taken on a solidity that my real memories don’t have.
    It is interesting that this new fixity arrives only through the task of giving the story to another person. Memories that have never been told aren’t yet solid stories; they are potential stories. It may be that the interlocutor is the self, as in John Harmon’s monologue, but it is always the self in relation to the idea of another, the “I” addressing a “you,” because the desire to tell implies that the tale must become comprehensible to a listener. Zazetsky wrote both for himself as an other and for real others. He hoped that his descriptions of his illness would be of use to those studying brain injury, and in this he triumphed: His writing has proved invaluable to researchers. It is this dialogical character of speech and storytelling that Dickens insists on as
living,
not
dead,
language. Through his telling, Harmon recovers the
I
Headstone loses. The only time Mr. Dolls says the word
I
in the novel is when he asks Eugene Wrayburn for a few pence to buy a drink. However pathetic Dolls’s request, he is engaged in a real dialogue and receives an answer. For a brief moment, he has situated himself in the axis of discourse and emerges as a subject.
    Harmon’s full rehabilitation will come later in the novel. Mrs. Boffin, who acted as a surrogate mother to Harmon when he was young, is subject to strange visions of faces in the decrepit mansion where the boy grew up with his sister. One night Mrs. Boffin sees them everywhere: “For a moment it was the old man’s, and then it got younger. For a moment it was both the children’s, and then it got older. For a moment it was a strange face, and then it was all the faces.” The strange face belongs to the ghostly hero of the novel, and when Mrs. Boffin fills in that blank, she brings the unrecognized spirit back from the dead and is able to call him by name. She also situates him in a narrative that is beyond himself, one that includes his father and images of generational resemblance that link parents and children in a mirroring vision over time.

The Magic of Fiction
    The novel charts a course that moves back and forth between the unrecognizable, unnamed, unconscious drowned no-body to the recognizable somebody who is a conscious, speaking subject. We all travel a path that moves from the relatively oblivious and fragmentary state of infancy to a working internal image of the self, to a conscious, articulated “I” within the structures of language. Nobody has actual memories of intrauterine life or early infancy, but we experienced it nevertheless, and traces of that floating undifferentiated world remain in us and return to haunt us even in the everyday—in fears, anxieties, longings, sex, sleep, and nameless sorrows. It is part of a corporeal life that is mostly hidden from us, and nothing is further from that early experience than the attempt to inscribe that reality or some version of it in writing. And yet I think this is what Dickens was drawn to—that fragmentary unformed space, or what I’ve often thought of as the
underneath.
In hallucinations, in psychoses, in various forms of brain damage, in dreams, and in some moments of making art, the underneath seems to roar to the surface: Whole pictures disintegrate and time is disrupted. This story we call the self and articulate as
I
, Dickens tells us, is fraught and fragile, and we must fight to keep it together.
    The human experience of the world is not direct but mediated through what Wegg calls the “framework of society.” This framework is inescapable and necessary, but its articulations may also be seen as the ordering fictions that make life livable. Both whole object representations in the brain, which organize things in space, and language, which reorganizes that material sequentially through abstract symbols, serve as internal shields from the assault of stimuli coming from the real world. They provide us with categories that create the borders of perception and through expectation give external reality both shape and sense, a truth that many artists, philosophers, linguists, and psychologists have long intuited. Without these shields we would be unable to construct an internal representation of a self. Brain scientists have located these two dynamic structures, the spatial (right hemisphere) and the audio-verbal (left hemisphere), but for me what is fascinating is that Dickens seems to have glimpsed what the world would be