[In the following essay, Solomon discusses the critical controversy surrounding two confusing plot lines within Our Mutual Friend: the one involving John Harmon's “death” and the one involving Noddy Boffin's feigned change of character.]

But more extraordinary than any chapter is the preface, or postscript, or apology, for we don't know what to call it, which closes the work. It is divided into five sections, and each section contains a separate fallacy, except one, which contains two. In the first, Mr. Dickens lays down the proposition “that an artist (of whatever denomination) may, perhaps, be trusted to know what he is about in his vocation.” Mr. Dickens's later works are the best refutation of his own words.

[J. R. Wise, from a review of Our Mutual Friend]¹

“When I devised this story,” Charles Dickens declares rather testily in the “postscript” to his last completed novel, “I foresaw the likelihood that a class of readers and commentators would suppose that I was at great pains to conceal exactly what I was at great pains to suggest: namely, that Mr. John Harmon was not slain, and that Mr. John Rokesmith was he.”² Just how the reader of Our Mutual Friend is to receive this “explanation,” however, is not very clear. Our choice, at any rate, is not very attractive, for Dickens appears to confess here either that he had known all along that the Harmon plot of the novel had been badly handled or that he had deliberately written it, as J. Hillis Miller remarks of Bleak House, “in a way calculated to make the reader a bad detective.”³ Either way, it appears, the reader loses, which may explain why the Harmon plot has so dissatisfied those generations of readers who, like J. R. Wise in Westminster Review, have experienced a sudden feeling of aesthetic betrayal when, in the thirteenth chapter of the second book of the novel, John Harmon abruptly gives away the secret to his “murder” with fully one half of the story to go. Why, we ask, has Dickens given us so few clues heretofore, only to spring his trap suddenly without allowing us sufficient time to guess the truth for ourselves? Why has Dickens tantalized us with a mystery only to sweep it away in a single revelatory stroke? Has Dickens simply written a bad plot, or is it possible that he has indeed deliberately planned to make both his audience and the characters in his story bad readers as well as bad detectives? And if so, why?

To be fair to Dickens, it is true that there is some evidence supporting his claim to the “pains” that he had taken to suggest “that Mr. John Harmon was not slain, and that Mr. John Rokesmith was he.” Rokesmith's rather clumsy attempt (at least in hindsight) to deflect any suspicion on Boffin's part that he might have some previous acquaintance with the name of “Harmon”—“Harmoon's … Harmarn's. How do you spell it?” Rokesmith stammers—(p. 143) is certainly a clue of some sort. And it is also true that in the notes to the chapter in which the doubly disguised Rokesmith confronts Rogue Riderhood (“More Birds of Prey”), Dickens reminds himself to “work on to possessing the reader with the fact that he [John Rokesmith] is John Harmon.”⁴ The trouble with this latter set of clues, however, is that Rokesmith's confrontation with Riderhood only occurs in the chapter immediately preceding the one in which the mystery is suddenly given away. We simply are given too little preparation for this revelation too late, and with so much of the story remaining to be told the reader might well be forgiven for feeling that he has been needlessly tempted into a maze. At any rate, a good deal of wind is taken from the sails of the Harmon plot, making it difficult not to sympathize with Stephen Gill's conclusion that “the Harmon plot is the albatross about Dickens's neck. The interest of what is revealed about Bella is out of all proportion to the fantastic technical problems presented in the disguise story, which has, in itself, no interest at all. The result is that Dickens is forced to employ desperate measures to keep the plot moving intelligibly at all. Book II, Chapter 13 is a confession of breakdown.”⁵

Other critics have remained equally unimpressed. “At a half way point even the dullest reader has the mystery solved for him through Harmon's confessional monologue,” writes Andrew Sanders; while Philip Collins remarks that the Harmon plot constitutes “a silly and trivial mystery, but fortunately Dickens could feel that he had thus done his duty in providing the obligatory ‘mystery’ element for this novel.”⁶ In defense of Dickens, H. M. Daleski argues that the Harmon disguise plot dramatizes London society's “absence of true identity,” so supporting the novel's thematic search for a “true identity, one that will sustain life in the city of death.”⁷ And to a certain extent, Gill concurs. Dickens, he writes, “does draw good things from this plot” since he “has always been fascinated by the problem of identity, of the difference between people's real selves and their social selves.” Still Gill concludes, Dickens's success here “hardly compensates for the clumsiness.”⁸

In the midst of such criticism it is possible to conclude that Dickens himself simply lost interest in the Harmon mystery halfway through the novel and decided to concentrate his energies on the development of the Headstone-Wrayburn rivalry, which, in Gill's judgment, constitutes “the commanding success of the novel.”⁹ Having anticipated his readers' dissatisfaction with this abandonment, such an argument might run, Dickens accordingly penned his “postscript” hoping to fend off his critics while implicitly acknowledging the legitimacy of their complaints. Closer scrutiny of the offending chapter indeed seems to confirm our suspicions of authorial indifference here, for in John Harmon's soliloquy we find not only the abrupt solution to his mystery but also the appearance of a brand new mystery that Dickens never even begins to pursue. Why are we tantalized with the prospect of a continuing mystery if it is not to be developed? Why did Dickens fail to exploit his own story's possibilities? If “indifference” is not the explanation (and I do not suggest that it is), then how else can we account for this “failure”? To answer such questions we might look more closely at what Harmon does tell us in “A Solo and a Duett,” searching both for the “mystery” that never quite gets off the ground and for possible reasons for its sudden grounding.

Significantly, there is as much mystification in Harmon's monologue as there is revelation. All that we discover for certain from it is the apparent fact that Harmon was shanghaied by George Radfoot and that both men were thrown into the Thames. But as many questions are raised by this plot revelation as are answered. Who, we might well ask, threw Harmon and Radfoot into the river? Rogue Riderhood? For his part, Harmon has his suspicions of Riderhood's complicity in the affair, and we can be fairly certain that Riderhood provided the near-fatal drug, but even Harmon is “far from sure” about this (pp. 424-25), and there are still many more unanswered questions surrounding the case. Who, for instance, is the “black man” in steward's dress who serves Harmon the doctored coffee, and had he any active role in the matter? Who are the men who struggle over Harmon's valise as he lies insensate on the floor? Was Riderhood among them? Again, Harmon has his suspicions, but in his confrontation with the Rogue we find what appears to be genuine surprise on Riderhood's part when he learns of Radfoot's death. “Now then!” Riderhood exclaims in his confrontation with the disguised Harmon, “I want to know how George Radfoot come by his death, and how you come by his kit?” (p. 417). These are not bad questions, and the reader might want to ask at least one of them too, but Harmon only replies, to Riderhood and to us as well, that “if you ever do know, you won't know now” (p. 417).

The reader, as it turns out, will never be much more enlightened about the affair than will Riderhood, for Harmon explicitly determines not to pursue the case any further, refusing to “enlighten human Justice concerning the offence of one far beyond it who may have a living mother” or to “enlighten it with the lights of a stone passage, a flight of stairs, a brown window-curtain, and a black man” (p. 429). Thus, while in all of these clues we have the ingredients for a fully revived mystery plot, the fact remains that Dickens makes no attempt to revive it. The excuse that Harmon himself gives for this neglect—that is, his fear of the effect on the Boffins and on Bella Wilfer of his “coming to life again”—is not convincing, however, both because Harmon does come back to life for the Boffins in the hidden action of the very next chapter (though the reader is given no hint of this) and because Dickens could very easily have reactivated his “Night Inspector” in order to solve the case after all. Instead, the Night Inspector effectively vanishes from the story, only to return late in the going with the wry narrative suggestion that while he was “once meditatively active in this chronicle” (p. 830), he now appears merely as a foil for Harmon's final revelations. In other words, nothing within the story itself prevented Dickens from continuing the already introduced detective element in his novel. All the ingredients are there for the kind of developed “mystery” that Dickens's readers apparently demanded (if we may believe Collins). So the question remains, then, why does Dickens abandon both his mystery and his detective at the risk of disappointing his readers? Is it simply to provide more space for the testing of Bella Wilfer and for the development of the Wrayburn-Headstone rivalry?

Certainly it might be argued that Dickens indeed deliberately submerged the explicit Harmon mystery in order to make room for his notoriously well-concealed Boffin plot, but then we have to ask just why Dickens kept this new development so completely in the dark. Might he not have provided the kind of clues into Boffin's true intentions that an astute “mystery” reader would appreciate (as he does in the “testing” of Esther Summerson in the concluding chapters of Bleak House), thus making the final revelation of the scheme less of a shock? Dickens's failure to provide such clues, his failure even to tempt us into decoding Boffin's behavior, certainly appears to justify Gill's complaint that, in comparison with the Harmon mystery, the “story of Boffin's feigned degradation is not just clumsy, it is a major tactical error. Paradoxically, it is so damaging just because Dickens's art is so good, because he (and Mr. Boffin) deceive the reader so completely.”¹⁰ In short, because Boffin's apparent slide into miserliness fits in so nicely with the novel's condemnation of money worship, it “is a shock to the reader to find that all this is deceit, that open, friendly Noddy Boffin has never changed at all. It is a shock, however, not just because we resent being kept in the dark, but because the development of Mr. Boffin has seemed so completely natural, so in keeping with the rest of the novel's social analysis.”¹¹ Thus, not only does the Boffin plot constitute a bad (because too well-concealed) “mystery element” in Our Mutual Friend, but it appears to undermine the larger themes of the novel as well.

But it is not my purpose here to condemn the Harmon-Boffin plot as an aesthetic failure. Rather, what I wish to examine here is the possible significance of the fact that the “mystery element” in the Harmon-Boffin plot does fail so badly. I do not believe that we can attribute this failure to mere authorial incompetence. After all, the creator of Inspector Bucket still had in him an Edwin Drood to conclude his career, so we can hardly question either Dickens's ability to write a good tale of crime and detection or his continuing interest in the genre. But why, then, is the “mystery element” in the novel so unsatisfactory? Is it really only a sop to Dickens's readers, and thus better left out to begin with if it is not to be pursued effectively? Or can we see the very failure of the “mystery element” in Our Mutual Friend as a positive component in the novel's overall thematic design, that is to say, as a calculated aesthetic strategy in Dickens's social criticism?

To answer such questions we might compare the world of Our Mutual Friend to the Bleak House world as it has been rather programmatically interpreted by Hillis Miller. “Bleak House is a document about the interpretation of documents,” a dramatization of the moral effects of “the act of interpretation itself, the naming which assimilates the particular into a system, giving it a definition and a value, incorporating it into a whole.”¹² The world Dickens dramatizes might be seen accordingly to correspond to the “modern times” that Mathew Arnold apprehends in his essay on “Heinrich Heine,” times that “find themselves with an immense system of institutions, established facts, accredited dogmas, customs, rules, which have come to them from times not modern. In this system their life has to be carried forward; yet they have a sense that this system is not of their own creation, that it by no means corresponds exactly with the wants of their actual life, that, for them, it is customary, not rational.”¹³ Thus inscribed within an already accomplished institutional system governed by such objectively impersonal documents as constitutions, legal codes, and, significantly, Wills, modern man has suffered a diminution of subjective vitality. As Georg Simmel has put it, the “development of modern culture is characterized by the preponderance of … the ‘objective spirit’ over the ‘subjective spirit.’” This preponderance, Simmel continues, is reflected in the domination of modern life by “that organ which is least sensitive and quite remote from the depth of the personality,” that is, by the calculating “head” rather than by the sympathetic “heart.”¹⁴ Subjective, sympathetic human activity, Simmel suggests, has been replaced by the reifying forces of a capitalist economy—and a “capital,” of course, is first of all a “head.”

The literary repercussions of urban capitalism, Georg Lukács has argued, have been reflected in a historical division between aesthetic realism and aesthetic naturalism. “The truly great realists,” Lukács explains, “present social institutions as human relationships,” while in the naturalistic novel “man and his surroundings are always sharply divided.”¹⁵ That is, where the realistic novel represents a dialectical relationship between subjective free will and the will of the social group, the naturalistic novel represents the breakdown of this dialectical equilibrium, leading to a breakdown of subjective freedom itself as all subjects come to be determinately constrained by their objective environments. “I would classify as naturalistic,” Philip Rahv writes accordingly, “that type of realism in which the individual is portrayed not merely as subordinate to his background but as wholly determined by it—that type of realism, in other words, in which the environment displaces its inhabitants in the role of hero.”¹⁶

Consider, for example, the rooftop world of Pubsey and Company as Dickens describes it in Our Mutual Friend, a world in which the paradoxical vitality of an “encompassing wilderness of dowager old chimneys” that “[twirl] their cowls and [flutter] their smoke” (p. 332) seems to overwhelm the lives of the human characters who enter it both as a haven from the harsh realities of urban London and as a place to be “dead.” Is it any accident that the imaginative mistress of this scene is a cripple in the “employ” of wealthy dolls whose own prestige and privilege have reified the subjective worth of their dressmaker? Indeed, with her peculiarly dwarfed appearance and the mechanical chop of her jaw, Jenny Wren is almost indistinguishable from the dolls that she serves.

Death itself in Our Mutual Friend can be a force for capitalistic reification, as victims of the Thames become commodities in Gaffer Hexam's grisly trade, while skeletal and embryonic remains are routinely commodified in the dark recesses of Venus's shop. It is no anachronism here to blame finance capitalism for these reifications in Dickens's novel, for it is the cash economy of mid-century London that provides the dominant metaphor for the story. Money, like “dust,” is wholly impersonal and objective. As Simmel puts it, it “is concerned only with what is common to all: it asks for the exchange value, it reduces all quality and individuality to the question: How much?”¹⁷

Dickens's caustic response to the reifying effect of a capitalist economy, to the ways in which it transforms all things, subjects as well as objects, into a system of exchangeable commodities, is inscribed in the often comic rhetoric of his novel. The reductions of Twemlow to the status of a dining table, of the Veneering baby to an “article” for sentimental exhibition, and of Bradley Headstone's mind to a “warehouse” for economically saleable knowledge are pointed examples. Such “characters” as “Boots and Brewer,” the “Member,” the “Payer-off of the National Debt,” and the “Poem on Shakespeare” similarly have all been metonymically reduced from what they subjectively are to what they objectively do, with the broad implication that they are nothing at all. Thus the Veneerings themselves, though ostensibly presented with a proper name, are simply rhetorical caricatures: filmy, vacuous, parvenu, the clan fairly reeks of the scent of freshly painted lacquer. As figures for London's capitalists, money-people connected to a world founded on nothing more solid than a stock exchange, the Veneering circle thus appears to us in a play of rhetorical signs that signify nothing more substantial than the repeated exchange of monetary signifiers, or “shares,” that “grounds” it. Neither share nor shareholder, in other words, has an axiological grounding in any substantially motivated value system. In effect, the shareholding class thus becomes indistinguishable from what it holds: both shareholder and share are tropes, impersonal substitutes for a world of value that is forever deferred. In such a world, Dickens laments, the best strategy indeed is to have “no antecedents, no established character, no cultivation, no ideas, no manners; have Shares” (pp. 159-60).

But it should be stressed that these are the novel's (comic) villains, and Dickens so presents them to ridicule them, not to represent them as the necessary essence of urban character. Dickens's portrait of a society based on an ungrounded play of monetary signs, in other words, does not represent his conviction that tropological substitution is simply in the nature of things or that the “only escape from the circle of signs would be the end of the world or death.”¹⁸ Miller's interpretation of the Dickens world thus only pertains to a particular segment of it. For Our Mutual Friend, as I shall argue, does present us with a way of escape, a way allegorized by John Harmon's refusal to submit to the system that oppresses him by his building of a new family untainted by the “evil” that Miller, paradoxically enough, finds in “any social organization based on membership in a family.”¹⁹

In order to grasp the precise nature of Harmon's escape, we must first investigate the logical connection between the urban experience as such and the genre of detective fiction in which Our Mutual Friend so notably fails, because Harmon's scheme, as we shall see, is precisely an attempt to subvert the very logic of the detective novel. This connection can be found in the semiotic quality both of urban life in general and of detective work in particular. For as the city fills up with objects—that is, with reified subjects and depersonalized (as well as depersonalizing) things and institutions—it ceases to appear to us as a construct designed for human purposes by human wills and begins to appear more as a mysterious sequence of mere signs, of objective signifiers with no apparent signified meanings. The sheer multiplication of objects in the city drains each object of meaning even as it teases us into interpreting it. And so, Geoffrey Hartman observes, with our very environment reduced to a mysterious play of signs, even the art that represents this environment comes to feel “itself to be écriture, signs of signs.”²⁰ Thus, as the representation of a man who “reads” his environment successfully where the rest of us fail, giving meaning to the apparently meaningless signs of our experience, the detective novel proper comes to perfectly reflect urban consciousness. As Hartman puts it, “the detective novel … suggests at once the desire and the difficulty of giving to daily existence that ‘seriousness’ which Erich Auerbach saw emerging in the great realistic novels of the nineteenth century. For the hopeful and productive aspects of industrialization are being replaced by a purely semiotic and indifferent urbanization. ‘We are surrounded by emptiness,’ Lefebvre sighs, ‘but it is an emptiness filled with signs! Metalanguage replaces the missing city.’” And from this space of unlimited signification, Hartman concludes, there emerges “the ghostly sensationalism of detective fiction, in which every detail, howseover small, is potentially a telltale sign of human purposes, even if it disappoints an imagination it excites into voyeurism.”²¹

Is Our Mutual Friend, then, a naturalistic novel by such criteria or a realistic one? Is it a tale of urban reification and semiotic emptiness, or does it reflect “the hopeful and productive aspects of [nineteenth-century] industrialization?” I suggest that it is something of both, with its rhetorical texture functioning pessimistically (or naturalistically) and its plot functioning hopefully (or realistically). John Harmon's struggle to subvert the Harmon Will can be interpreted as a kind of “realistic” allegory of subjective resistance to the naturalistic determination of signs because the Harmon Will comes down to the living characters of the story much as the institutions come from the past that Arnold sees as failing to correspond “exactly with the wants of … [modern] life.” The Will, accordingly, can either be surrendered to with a kind of naturalistic shrug or ignored on behalf of more subjective values. The novel's characters, in other words, have a choice in the face of the Will. They can either bow to its dictates or rebel against it. Bella Wilfer, before her testing, simply bows and appears ridiculous for it, draping herself in mourning for a “husband” she has neither met nor married. Silas Wegg, in a different spirit, still serves the Will by trying to make it serve him, seeking, like the Smallweeds of Bleak House, “to find out the hidden place of another in the system” in order “to be able to manipulate him, to dominate him, and of course to make money out of him.”²² But howsoever “clumsy” it may appear as a plot device, the Harmon-Boffin disguise plot represents the contrary choice, dramatizing a deliberate rebellion by a group of people who refuse to be manipulated by their world. No one can manipulate Harmon because no one (excepting the Boffins) can guess his secret before Harmon himself reveals it. In short, Harmon's scheme subverts the naturalistic (and semiotic) dictates of the past (as represented by the Will) on behalf of a subjective plan to take control of his own life. And the fact that Harmon so rebels against a world dominated by coldly objective signs can at least partly explain why the mystery, or detective, element in Dicken's story must fail.

To see this we might review the fundamental nature of a typical detective story. As Hartman suggests, a detective is a reader of signs. He decodes clues presented to him from an already completed past, giving meaning to his world, so to speak, retroactively. For this reason, the detective's work, while certainly active and ingenious, is profoundly uncreative. Nothing new can emerge from his interpretations except either judgment or revenge (and not always that, as we can see from such morally futile tales as Poe's “Murders in the Rue Morgue”). Because the detective story points to no future events, its proper narrative tense, in Robert Champigny's words, is thus properly the “what will have happened” rather than the “what will happen” or “what should happen.”²³ In a sense, then, the detective is essentially amoral. He is not concerned with values as such, only with interpretation.

It is accordingly of some interest to us to note the kind of treatment that the “detectives” in Our Mutual Friend receive. The Night Inspector, of course, is a conventional figure from the genre of detective fiction. There is no question that we are made to sympathize with “Mr. Inspector” in the novel, but as Jerry Palmer has suggested, the motives for Dickens's portrayal here were more political than aesthetic. Palmer attributes the sympathetic representations of Dickens's detectives to a desire to redeem the London police force from its general unpopularity.²⁴ In other words, Dickens can be said to be doing a little public relations here, and the fact that the Night Inspector virtually vanishes from the pages of Our Mutual Friend following the discovery of Gaffer Hexam's drowning does suggest a certain ironic coolness toward the figure of the detective in this novel.

The figurative detectives of Our Mutual Friend receive even worse treatment. Silas Wegg, for example, is one such “detective.” Not only does he follow Noddy Boffin around like a bloodhound, but his entire connection with the Boffins is as a reader of signs, both as a hired “literary man” and as a reader of the Will with which he seeks to control his employer. Like Krook in Bleak House (who, of course, is literally illiterate), Silas Wegg is a believer in the power of signs (Charley Hexam's arrogant pride in his literacy offers another example of this), and this is why he is so greatly thwarted by the Harmon-Boffin scheme, for he is unable to imagine that anyone might have the capacity to rebel against the sign, against the written Will that Boffin so blithely ignores apparently in detriment of his own material interests. Boffin is more concerned with what he believes to be right than with the decodeable dictates of a dead man's Will, and it is on this quiet subversion of the testamentary institutions of nineteenth-century England that the Harmon plot stands.

There are at least two more “detectives” in Our Mutual Friend with which we are certainly not intended to sympathize. Rogue Riderhood is one such “detective,” for this man who places such faith in the inscribed power of an “Alfred David” is very good at decoding other people's intentions through the reading of their actions. For example, Riderhood is able to sniff out Bradley Headstone's attempt to incriminate him by the simple act of correctly interpreting Headstone's strategy of dressing exactly like him. Riderhood's decoding of Headstone's red bandana is worthy of a more conventional detective, and his bloodhound-like tracking of Headstone ironically resembles good police work rather than a blackmailer's plot.

But, of course, Riderhood is unredeemable, and it is significant that he perishes in the murderous embrace of Bradley Headstone, who is himself a kind of detective. For Headstone's careful reading of the Eugene Wrayburn-Lizzie Hexam affair, too, turns upon his decoding of external signs, and his constant tracking of Wrayburn through the streets of London and beyond into the countryside again resembles the work of a competent policeman. In an oddly parallel fashion, Eugene Wrayburn's own guilt feelings after playing the detective in the stakeout for Gaffer Hexam constitute yet another example of the sinister appearance of detective work in Our Mutual Friend. The detective’s work, that is to say, appears to be more criminal than heroic in this novel. And indeed, it is John Harmon, alias Julius Handford, the chief suspect in the Harmon “murder,” who turns out to be the true hero of the tale, not the detective who searches for him.

Thus, it is the suspect, not the policeman, who emerges at the center of the novel. And it is significant that John Harmon, even in his own underworld operations, never plays the detective; because as the center of his own mystery, Harmon already knows everything that there is to know about his “murder.” When he does perform what looks like a little detective work in his pressuring of Rogue Riderhood, he simply acts on what he already knows and, as we have already seen, more or less ignores what he does not know. That is, Harmon could easily seek to illuminate the remaining mysteries in his story, but he does not pursue the “case.” His only reason for approaching Riderhood at all is to remove the cloud from Lizzie Hexam’s name. Rather than attempting to read the signs from his past in order to resolve that past, Harmon is only interested in the future moral effects of his actions. Realizing that his disguise plot has injured an innocent woman, Harmon acts to undo the injury. Otherwise he is apparently uninterested in the unanswered questions as to his own “mystery,” refusing to play the detective in spite of the great temptations he has for doing so.

When Harmon and the Boffins finally do reveal their machinations to Bella, the scene had all the appearance of a detective story’s typical denouement—but in reverse. That is, at the conclusion of a conventional detective tale, our interest is focused not on what will happen next to the characters but on the clever deductive process by which the detective has solved a crime that has been completed before the deductive action, and the visible story itself, can begin. Poirot makes his little speech and everything becomes clear. But what Harmon reveals to Bella is how he himself plotted to bring out her “true” identity, an identity that is projected forward to the moment when it is completed at the very instant of Harmon’s revelation. In other words, Bella’s testing is not really over until she hears all of the details of the “plot” upon her and approves of them. She could, after all, resent the whole thing and walk out (as she has walked out before), but she does not. Bella’s learning of the plot is thus a part of the plot; it is not simply a device for telling the reader “who did what and when” because nothing has been fully accomplished yet: it is only being accomplished in the course of a dynamic narrative.

To put this another way, Harmon is less Poirot than Jeeves, for just as Wodehouse’s valet cleverly plots to produce certain social results within the course of the action, so too does Harmon direct his actions towards the achievement of as yet unactualized goals. Both Jeeves and Harmon, then, as reverse detectives, read the present in order to produce potential future results. And what such figures can reveal at the end is not how they have decoded someone else’s already accomplished deeds, but how they themselves have interpreted the dynamic potentialities of the present (e.g., the moral potential of Bella Wilfer) in order to produce the actual circumstances that obtain at the end of their stories (Bella’s moral redemption). It is a case not of the detective’s “what will have happened” but rather, of the “what has been made to happen.”

Harmon’s inversion of the standard mystery story, his creation of a kind of antidetective tale, can be seen, then, to be part of Our Mutual Friend’s general thematic attack on urban reification. For rather than serving the signs of the past (the Will), Harmon subjectively constructs his own social present, answerable to his own needs. In essence, he does escape from the circle of signs without dying precisely by building a family. In this sense, then, the novel can be seen as a product of realism, in spite of its naturalizing rhetoric, because its solution is achieved through the working out of human social relations undaunted by naturalistic, or objectifying, forces.

If we return now to the chapter that has offended so many readers with its bald declaration of the Harmon “mystery,” we may discern yet another instance of the “realistic” allegory at work here: the allegory, that is, of a subjective rebellion against the city’s reifying effects. So let us look more closely at the precise words by which Harmon describes his state just preceding his ejection into the river. The passage is worth quoting at some length:

I heard a noise of blows, and thought it was a wood-cutter cutting down a tree. I could not have said that my name was John Harmon—I could not have thought it—but when I heard the blows, I thought of the wood-cutter 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, without my knowledge.

[P. 426]

Harmon’s temporary loss of subjective identity under the influence of the drug can be seen as a kind of allegory of a life lived in the face of reifying forces ever prepared to convert the living “I” into an objectified “it” for the sake of a quick profit. Such indeed is the literal fate of those Londoners who, having fallen into the Thames, become “property” of the rivermen, of the Gaffer Hexams to whom they are no longer subjects capable of holding their own property but objects to be cashed in for some reward. And it is also the figural fate for any Londoner “drowned,” so to speak, by life in the urban crowd, a drowning whose significance has been more starkly represented in T. S. Eliot’s own symbolic depiction of the Thames as a sterile stream dominated by the figures of the drowned sailor and the fisher king. Dickens’s nineteenth-century sailor thus seems to anticipate Eliot’s twentieth-century one. But there is, of course, a difference between John Harmon and Phlebas the Phoenician.

Harmon survives, rising both from the water and from the metaphoric objectivity of the forest floor, and the course of his actions taken after his escape dramatizes his subjective rebellion against the objectifying forces around him—a rebellion that succeeds precisely because everyone thinks that he is dead. For the Harmon Will still lingers over the son's life, the living man trapped in the inscribed web of a dead man's desire. And so, Harmon himself is content to be “dead” for a while, playing his own sexton by interring the name of Harmon fathoms deep beneath “alp” upon alp of burial clay. In thus disguising himself, Harmon voluntarily enters into his own semiotic play, passing from Harmon to Handford to Rokesmith, and even, for a short time, becoming a “Secretary” in both senses of the term, confused by Noddy Boffin for the article of furniture that “secretary” also names (pp. 141-43). But Harmon consents to this sort of semiotic displacement, or rhetorical figuration, in order to defeat the designs of the written Will and the money-worship (itself a form of sign worship) that have poisoned his world.

“The physical world,” Raymond Williams has written, “is never in Dickens unconnected with man. It is of his making, his manufacture, his interpretation. That is why it matters so much what shape he has given it.”²⁵ But this is precisely the problem with the London of Our Mutual Friend: it has ceased to be designed by living wills and is simply dictated to by lifeless Wills from the past and dominated by a political economy founded on nothing more solid than impersonal contracts and monetary scrip: representations of representations. Such a society relates to its members as language does to a parrot, and the city it builds is a city of furnished rooms. And so Harmon builds his own world by creating a new family, one that includes the creatively imaginative members of London, the Lizzie Hexams and Jenny Wrens, rather than the readers of dead signs (we do not see Charley Hexam reunited with his sister). Symbolized by the Harmony Mansion, Harmon's refashioned society is thus subjectively constructed on the defeat of the past, as “Uncle Parker's” townhouse (so often employed by Wegg to condemn the creative freedom of his “enemies”) is redesigned to accommodate a new family. It is as if the old city of the furnished room and of the dead man's inscribed desire has been invaded by a living host of interior decorators. For the house here is no mere sign, no evanescent facade before the inherent emptiness of the city. In its restoration from its ironic and destructive entrapment in the “Harmony Jail,” the name of Harmon reachieves its true value in the creative (and procreative) “Harmony Mansion.” The building of the house parallels the building of a family, just as the hoarding of a dust mound once accompanied the destruction of one.

Still, Dickens faces what is perhaps an insuperable difficulty in the end that can threaten to undermine his entire program. That is, the denouement of the Harmon plot is not only sentimental; it also cannot escape the fact that it is indeed only an allegory. Nothing in the London that is outside the novel has been changed by Harmon's scheme, and that is the London with which Dickens is most concerned. What is more, the allegory of the Harmon plot must itself be read—decoded by the literary detective, so to speak. Is there any way that we can move from the semiotic activity of reading to the moral activity of social action? I believe that there is, but in order to make the move from the allegorical text to a nonallegorical reality we must first be convinced by that text's rhetoric, by which I mean the rhetoric of persuasion rather than that of figuration. And here, perhaps, is where Our Mutual Friend most sorely fails, for its failure to “keep contract” with its readers in its development of the Harmon mystery plot simply distracts us from the message behind the medium. We expect a detective story (the medium) and, missing it, miss the message as well. Still, if in spite of this rhetorical failure we may see Harmon's refusal to play the detective, to serve the signs that the city has already written for him, as a symbol for a general rebellion against the very world that produces a desire for detective stories, then perhaps we may be persuaded in spite of all to make the kind of moral commitments that the Harmon plot allegorizes and, by so doing, break out of the circle of signs. Allegories, after all, are didactic, and while there is no necessary connection between the allegorical text and what it may persuade us to do, there is a potential connection because, as in Brecht's theater, there is nothing to prevent us from acting on its message. In other words, while Our Mutual Friend, like Bleak House, may indeed locate the causes of social decay “in the ineradicable human tendency to take the sign for the substance,”²⁶ it denies that this tendency, or disposition, is “ineradicable.” Rather, like John Harmon, we may exercise our potential not simply to make and interpret more signs but to refashion our world around solid human relationships. In the end, what the city and its society have wrought is not so important in Our Mutual Friend as what we might yet bring to pass. The hero of the novel, and, by extension, of the extranovelistic world, is not the reader of signs, not the Silas Weggs nor the Night Inspectors or even the passive reader of its tale: it is the active reader, the reader who in reading the story resolves to create a better world.

Notes

1. J. R. Wise, “Belles Lettres,” in the Westminster Review, N.S. 29 (April 1866): 584.

2. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, ed. Stephen Gill (New York, 1971), p. 893. All subsequent page references will be given in the text.

3. J. Hillis Miller, introduction to Charles Dickens, Bleak House (New York, 1971), p. 20.

4. See Ernest Boll's “The Plotting of Our Mutual Friend,” Modern Philology 42 (November 1944): 96-122.

5. Stephen Gill, introduction to Our Mutual Friend (New York, 1971), p. 22.

6. Andrew Sanders, “‘Come Back and Be Alive’: Living and Dying in Our Mutual Friend,” The Dickensian 74 (September 1978): 140. As cited in H. M. Daleski's Dickens and the Art of Analogy (London, 1970), pp. 274-75.

7. Daleski, p. 275.

8. Gill, p. 22.

9. Ibid., p. 25.

10. Ibid., p. 23.

11. Ibid., pp. 23-24.

12. Miller, pp. 11, 21-22.

13. Matthew Arnold, “Heinrich Heine,” in his Essays in Criticism (Boston, 1866), p. 143.

14. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in his On Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago, 1971), p. 337.

15. Georg Lukács, Studies in European Realism, trans. Edith Bone (London, 1950), pp. 92-93.

16. Philip Rahv, “Notes on the Decline of Naturalism,” in his Image and Idea (New York, 1949), pp. 132-33.

17. Simmel, p. 326.

18. Miller (n. 3 above), p. 28.

19. Ibid., p. 27.

20. Geoffrey Hartman, Easy Pieces (New York, 1985), p. 19.

21. Ibid., pp. 106-7.

22. Miller, p. 19.

23. See Robert Champigny, What Will Have Happened (Bloomington, Ind., 1977), passim.

24. Jerry Palmer, Thrillers (London, 1978), pp. 134-35.

25. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York, 1973), p. 161.

26. Miller (n. 3 above), p. 33.