[In the following essay, Gaughan explores the various characters in Our Mutual Friend and the different strategies they employ to negotiate their way around the roles each has been assigned by a rigid social system.]

So many of Dickens' characters in Our Mutual Friend are so entrapped and mutilated by the roles they are forced to play and by the rules and values of their society that meaningful action seems all but impossible. Characters like Lizzie Hexam and John Harmon are forced to live stories they did not author and cannot rewrite. Jenny Wren, the attenuated and battered symbol of imagination in the novel and a parody of childhood and all that childhood means to Dickens, is a reminder of the irreversible damage the social world has already done to the hopes of any escape from that world through innocence or imagination. The only characters who seem to have any freedom at all are those who, like Fascination Fledgby and Lammle, manipulate and dominate others through the secret exercise of their will behind the mask of social propriety. But, even this freedom is illusory. Lammle and Fledgeby are so bound to each other and so completely defined by the version of the social game that they play that their schemes amount to little more than the rearrangement of players in a closed and zero-sum game.

The reason meaningful action seems impossible in this novel is because the narrative world is so closed and self-sufficient that it is, or pretends to be, a complete and impenetrable reality independent of the characters who comprise it. All the apparent divisions within the social world, like the division between the world of Podsnap and the world of the waterfront, are only superficial. The waterfront community's values, its tolerance of the robbing of dead men but intolerance of even the hint of scandal, perfectly parallel Podsnap's tolerance of political corruption and his peremptory dismissal of everything that does not conform to his narrow morality. Gaffer Hexam disinherits his son as impetuously as old man Harmon disinherits his and tries to impose his own ideas on his family as rigorously as “My Respectable Father” does on Eugene Wrayburn. There are, ultimately, only the values and rules of the social world endlessly repeated, sometimes unintentionally parodied, but almost always embraced even by those characters, like Charley Hexam and Bradley Headstone, who are partly or wholly excluded from respectable society. The apparent social mobility of characters, though it may seem vertical—a climbing or descending the social ladder—is always lateral and cyclical. There is no up or down in this world,¹ no winners or losers, only the relentless repetition of a fixed set of social roles. Movement and change are only the occasional exchange of roles by actors who are individually dispensable.

There seems to be no alternative to the dehumanized world presented in the novel except the alternative of what Adorno calls negation. Adorno claims that art and thought realize themselves most fully not in what they can assert as positive and systematic but in what is discovered through the negation and decomposition of what can be positively thought or systematically expressed.² Whatever is positive and can be formalized is, by virtue of that fact alone, antithetical to the critical dialectic of thought and is, to some extent, oppressive and dehumanizing. Similarly, in Our Mutual Friend Dickens presents a social world that is both positive and dehumanized and must enact the decomposition of thematic and formal coherence to find in negation what is denied or perverted by both the social and narrative systems.

Since the triumph of the human will, especially the will to subdue everything to a coherent order, seems to be at the root of the problem³ (hence the elaborate pun on Harmon's will), Dickens uses passivity in the character most centrally involved in the novel's plots, John Harmon, to find in the negation of will the human qualities that have been lost in its exercise. The suspension of Harmon's will frees him from his narrowly defined social identity so that he can create an identity based on his relationship with others. This is not to say that Harmon is free to create an identity sui generis. The identity he can create will be social but in a broader sense than the identity prescribed by the closed system of social conventions and values. This identity will be social in the sense that it is based on the relationships Harmon can establish with other characters, but these relationships must develop outside socially prescribed roles. To establish these relationships, Harmon uses temporary and symbolic versions of himself—his disguises—to test the responsiveness of others.

Harmon's use of symbolic versions of himself to discover his identity, however, is perilously close to society's use of masks to manipulate and dominate others and, in particular, to Bradley Headstone's use of disguise to stalk Lizzie Hexam and Eugene Wrayburn. The only difference between Harmon's and Headstone's use and understanding of symbolic disguises is the fine but significant distinction between using symbolic forms as a way of responding to and understanding a world that is not defined entirely by the social will and imposing symbolic forms as realities in and of themselves. As slight as this distinction may seem, it is one that frees Harmon to search for an authentic identity and condemns Headstone to live out to the death the spiritual sterility of the society whose values he has so completely embraced.

The way John Harmon escapes from the tyranny of social conventions and the fatal repetition of his family's history sets the pattern for how the novel will proceed. Harmon's presumed death places him outside the social world and the influence of his father's will, but he is not free of the effects of the values that control the social world. He can create and sustain a new identity only through deception and duplicity—the very methods society thrives on. John Harmon cannot successfully escape the tyranny of the past unless he conceals the fact that he is still alive and finds a way back into the world that is not already controlled by social values. This forced concealment and Harmon's need to find out the truth about his world make him act in ways that are reminiscent of the way society functions. There is, however, a difference in purpose. Like Jenny Wren, Harmon is aware that his deceptions and disguises are a self-conscious means of protecting himself in a hostile world. His disguises are at once decoys to draw off the predators, or even the predator in any given character, and a filter through which he can clarify possible relations between himself and others. They are questions he asks of others so that he can define himself in terms of a response and not a fixed social role. By using his disguises to sift through his world to find something authentic, Harmon reverses and redeems his father's greedy sifting through the mounds of dust for lost and discarded valuables.

Although both Harmon's disguises and the conventions and values of society are artificial and self-conscious, there is an important difference in the way each is self-conscious. Harmon's disguises are self-conscious not only because he is aware that he is not, or is not entirely, the person he pretends to be, but also because he is aware that these symbolic versions of himself alter the way others can be seen as well as the way others see him. In his disguise as John Rokesmith, Harmon gives up the social power he could have by laying claim to his father's legacy so that he can learn how others will act towards him in the position of relative powerlessness. Only by circumventing the power relationships on which society thrives in ways such as this can Harmon make his relationships to others authentic.

The self-consciousness of social values and conventions, on the other hand, is little more than the awareness of the arbitrariness of those values and conventions—the awareness, in other words, of the need to exclude everything that is not defined by the closed system of those values and conventions. Paradoxically, because social roles and identities are understood as arbitrary they must be imposed on others as absolutely true to conceal their arbitrariness. The only trick is making others recognize and accept any given social persona: the outward appearance of wealth, success, or power. Since there is no provision in the collective mind of society for the possibility that the ways society orders and understands the world might not be entirely true, surface appearances that conform to social values must be accepted as true. This is why masks and social positions are exchanged and circulated with the same rapidity and ease as currency and with the same uncritical belief in an assumed and usually inflated value. Nevertheless, as Lammle and Fledgby understand, the complacency and self-satisfaction of the guardians of society in their splendid and shining structure is neither the whole of the social reality nor even its most crucial part.

The self-reflective nature of conventionalized social life, in fact, indicates the troubling leap of faith made by society to conceal the grave discrepancy between its elaborate displays of power and luxury and the precarious resources on which those displays rest. Implied in self-reflection is a sense of limited resources which must be expanded through increasingly elaborate interpretive structures. The more elaborately resources are circulated, the longer it takes for the exhausted system to crash. Because Harmon's use of disguise eventually produces something new—an identity that is based on relationships that are outside the system—it is a resource for establishing a relationship to the world and not, as are social masks, a shell game to protect dangerously depleted resources.⁴

Although Harmon's disguises do help keep him safe from society, he must also somehow use the advantage of disguise to reenter that world. This advantage, the ability to change identities, however, is based on his own lack of identity. After Harmon, in disguise, revisits the scene of his betrayal, he quite literally becomes the Man from Nowhere (an ironic fulfillment of the role assigned him by Mortimer Lightwood during his narration of the Veneerings) but only once his disguise is off:

“It is a sensation not experienced by many mortals,” said he, “to be looking into a churchyard on a wild windy night, and to feel that I no more hold a place among the living than these dead do, and even to know that I lie buried somewhere else, as they lie buried here. Nothing uses me to it. A spirit that was once a man could hardly feel stranger or lonelier, going unrecognized among mankind, than I feel.”⁵

Immediately after this reflection Harmon admits, “‘But this is the fanciful side of the situation. It has a real side, so difficult that, though I think of it every day, I never thoroughly think it out’” (422). Harmon's recollection of his drugging and near death, the events which have made him the man from nowhere, leads him to an even more radical confusion of identity and more total alienation from the world:

“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 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, within my knowledge.”

(426)

Disguise serves many purposes, but, because it is self-conscious, it cannot alleviate Harmon's alienation from the world. He must use disguises to rediscover his “I” and not as substitutes for that identity. Harmon needs to find a way to reintegrate himself among the living without submitting to his father's legacy. This is the “real” side of his dilemma, the side which involves losing the security and power of disguise. The only way available to him is to accept a suspended or interrupted identity, to be a stranger even to himself, so that his identity can be a process of responding to the world and not a submission to predetermined social roles.

A version of this necessary passivity in the face of a predetermined social world is the phenomenon of near-death. Miller has commented on the baptismal character of the river and the rebirth signified by near-death (Miller, Our Mutual Friend, p. 177). Near-death, however, is also the suspension of the human will. It is the state in which human life itself exists only as pure potential. As such, it escapes the tyranny of social conventions and any definition as simply materiality. A conscious desire to live in the world does not have much to do with this suspension of life or its subsequent recovery, as this description of Riderhood suggests:

Now he is struggling harder to get back. And yet—like us all, when we swoon—like us all, every day of our lives when we wake—he is instinctively unwilling to be restored to the consciousness of this existence, and would be left dormant, if he could.

(505)

It is the suspension itself that is important because it undermines the assumption that things have to be the way they are. Even in the case of the incorrigible Riderhood, the witnesses, to his revival instinctively hope that he will return from his state of suspended animation a changed and better man. The very fact that he has fallen between the cracks of the ordinary conceptual categories that both he and his society use to order and define the world means that those categories might not entirely define the way things are and that a radical change in the way the world is imagined is possible.

To bring about such change, however, whether through near-death or disguise, requires not only the relinquishing of power over others but also the surrender of certainty about personal identity. For Riderhood to have a new life means he must surrender his old habit of thinking solely in terms of calculated self-interest. He must, as Harmon does, accept an identity that is open and responsive to others. When this opportunity to relinquish certainty about identity is refused, as it is in the case of Riderhood, the values of society, especially the power relations that underlie society, take over as the source of personal identity. This is what happens to the unfortunate Bradley Headstone whose refusal to be responsive to the reality of himself and others perverts the depths of his character and turns the respectable schoolmaster into a psychotic killer.

In many important respects Bradley Headstone is the character who best personifies the thematic forces at work in the novel. Like Lizzie and Charley Hexam, Headstone comes from a socially disreputable class. He aspires to and attains a measure of respectability by accepting respectability as an end in itself and by repressing himself into the appropriate shape for his role in respectable society. When he meets Lizzie, however, the mechanisms of this repression fail him and he is forced to come to terms with that part of himself which exceeds the conventions of respectability, and he must do this without the aid of those conventions and his veneer of respectability.

This division in Bradley Headstone is more than just a conflict between good and evil or between the emotional and the rational (Wilson, p. 82). Headstone embodies the conflict that pervades the novel between what is real and what is accepted as real. His passion for Lizzie alienates him from the conventionalized social world and forces him to find a new relationship to himself and his world that can better accommodate that part of him that cannot be reduced to respectability. For this reason, Headstone is a genuinely tragic character. He is forced to confront, on an isolated and intensely personal level, a conflict of values which is characteristic of the world in which he lives. All that is admitted by society as real and all that is not converge in Bradley Headstone when he has lost the safety of his respectable life. He is the logical consequence of the values of the world in Our Mutual Friend and must face the consequences of these values in a way no other character does. The novel is, in many ways, the story of Bradley Headstone writ large.

The tragedy of Bradley Heastone is so powerful that it threatens to dominate the novel and overshadow Harmon's redemptive mission. Headstone's tragedy, however, is compromised by his unwillingness to forego the values dictated by society. Even in the midst of his suffering Headstone never surrenders his subservience to the idea of respectability. He refuses to see Lizzie in any way other than as a lower class woman who can be recuperated to respectability under his tutelage. In spite of his passion, Headstone never acknowledges Lizzie's reality as an independent character. Lizzie is, at first, a symbol of his repressed past (perhaps even a symbol of his mother), and later, she becomes a symbol of the passions he can no longer repress for the sake of respectability.

Headstone's use of Lizzie as a symbol betrays the relationship between symbol and reality. Symbolic apprehension of reality, as it is practiced by Jenny Wren and Harmon, attempts to interpret possible relationships between self and world without pretending to appropriate the world in the symbol.⁶ Jenny and Harmon try to build a relationship between themselves and the world that can then be adjusted and that is responsive to others. Headstone's passion for Lizzie, too, can put him in a new and more adequate relation to the reality of his own feelings but he forfeits this opportunity by turning Lizzie into an object to be possessed.

Just as society mediates everything through its conventions, Bradley Headstone, ultimately, mediates his love for Lizzie through his personal mythology. Similarly, he makes Wrayburn and Rogue Riderhood into symbolic characters in his private psychodrama. Wrayburn comes to represent the easy respectability that must always elude Headstone because of his class origins and Riderhood comes to represent the class that Headstone has left but from which he can never escape. By forcing these characters into symbolic roles which are themselves defined by society's values, Headstone translates the depths of his inner self into terms commensurate with the values and conventions of society. Instead of apprehending his own inner reality and the reality of others outside the conventions of society, Headstone turns himself into a character in a conventional and fairly trite social and literary melodrama and becomes a victim and villain rather than a tragic figure.

Headstone's inability to free himself from the values of society makes his use of disguises a way to impose his will, that is, the will of society, on others. Harmon's disguises, on the other hand, are intended as ways to allow a relationship between himself and others to develop. Harmon's identity depends entirely on the way others respond to him not on what he can make others do by concealing himself. Headstone's identity depends on denying relationships to others and on restraining and concealing himself. Headstone, in other words, fails to use his disguises symbolically, as the medium of an encounter with the world. As a result, Headstone repeats Harmon's experience of lost identity with a chillingly ironic twist. Headstone becomes literally and permanently the Man from Nowhere: he loses his personal identity entirely, because he clings so tenaciously to the phantom identity assigned him by society. Not surprisingly, then, it is Headstone, and not Harmon, who loses all control over his disguises. By the end of the novel it is virtually impossible to say whether the role of schoolmaster fits Headstone any better than the role of bargeman.

Because Headstone stakes so much on his disguise, because he identifies symbol and reality, any frustration of his will locks him into a spiraling need for more fictions, all of which serve to justify the image of respectability. Even when he is frustrated in his pursuit of respectability, he erects perverse justifications for his frustration:

The state of the man was murderous, and he knew it. More; he irritated it, with a kind of perverse pleasure akin to that which a sick man sometimes has in irritating a wound upon his body.

(609)

Headstone imposes a contrived and self-serving structure on events which then becomes his only reality. However perverse Headstone's behavior, he is consistent in seeking to support the image he has of himself and is forced constantly to substitute one fictitious version of himself after another once his passion for Lizzie obliterates his fiction of respectability and leaves him with nothing but his conflicting desires.

Like the society of Lady Tippins, the Veneerings, and Podsnap, Headstone gets lost among his own constructs. From the start society is immersed in mutually supporting fictions, but Bradley Headstone shows that the origins of such self-enclosed and self-generating systems lie in the choices an individual makes in the attempt to define a self and a world. Headstone, stripped of his veneer of respectability, is the embodiment of the conflict between the conventional and all that exceeds the conventional and can, like John Harmon, defy society by making this conflict the basis of his identity. Instead, he denies this conflict, thereby effectively denying himself, and locks Wrayburn, Riderhood, Lizzie, and himself in a personal and nightmarish version of society's more dressed-up dance of death. His selection of the bargeman's disguise only reflects his loss of himself and completes his regression into fixed social and conventional patterns that have long since splintered his character and condemned him to destruction.

This is the darker and more individual relationship to the personal and social values that are the origin of the larger self-enclosed and self-generating social systems. In Headstone's decision to force his deeper nature into the confines of the conventional are the origins of Chancery, the Circumlocution Office, and Podsnappery. Bradley Headstone is a Pip whose expectations are exposed more savagely and more honestly. If Bradley Headstone is an evil character, he is evil for very specific and very familiar reasons. He is evil because he chooses to make his life into a fiction and because he denies anything outside that fiction. He refuses to establish a relationship between himself and his own inner reality and the reality of others. Instead, he chooses the grim struggle for power that has always lurked just beneath the surface of respectable restraint.

When Headstone drowns Riderhood in a fatal embrace, he is doing more than killing a past he has worked so hard to deny. He is killing that part of himself that rejected a more authentic approach to the depths of himself and the complexities of his world. The man who rejects a new life and the man who rejects a new sense of what is real fall into the lock, the mechanism designed to alter and control the water's natural flow, and die in the stagnant slime of their refusals.

As important as the contrast between Harmon and Headstone is for the thematic concerns of the novel, it is even more important as a clue about a conflict in formal tendencies and values that Dickens uses to develop an identity for his novel that is independent of the constraints of the world depicted by the novel. Harmon and Headstone are not only characters who represent or embody thematic categories (for example, good and evil, passivity and will, etc.), they are also characters who represent or embody the more purely symbolic and narrative problems in the novel that produce and are reflected by the thematic conflicts. Taken as contraries in Blake's sense, they represent the two tendencies that define the novel as a symbolic form: its tendency to impose formal coherence and its capacity to express multiple and often incongruous perspectives on experience. These more purely narrative concerns are not, like the values of society, arranged in a static and self-reflecting order. Instead, they are set into direct and creative conflict with each other.

Each of these tendencies, through the character who embodies it, asserts itself as preeminent—as a definitive description of the novel as a symbolic form. But, each assertion also calls forth its contrary assertion, in effect, its own negation. The demands of formal coherence, for example, cannot be asserted without exposing the need for a contrary: the multiple and heterogeneous ways the novel symbolically represents and explores the world. There is no resolving the conflict between these contraries since the contraries continually change how each can be understood at any given moment in the novel. As a result, Dickens is not exorcising any artistic, let alone moral, demons in the conflict between Headstone and Harmon but is displaying and using self-consciously the novel as a symbolic form so that a relationship to the world that is obscured by the self-reflecting symbolic systems of the social world on the thematic level can be recaptured on this symbolic and more purely narrative level. These contraries and the ways they define each other become a kind of purely symbolic story about narrative concerns that parallels and, in some ways, redeems the thematic story.

In this narrative about narrative, the novel at times is represented by Bradley Headstone. In many ways, the novel shares Headstone's Pygmalion fantasy and sets about to shape its thematic content into its own chosen coherent image. This is a necessary part of what the novel does and what the novel is, and though it is not the only or, given the values criticized, the most savory part, the novel is always at least a little like Bradley Headstone and can, unless there is a balancing contrary, share his fate. The novel also shares John Harmon's search for a responsive relationship to the world it depicts. It is a symbolic form through which new and inclusive relations to experience can be imagined. To the extent that it is like this, however, the novel, like Harmon, cannot be presented by Dickens as nothing more than a self-sufficient coherent reality. It must be open—a pattern of reciprocally related imaginative responses to experience rather than a coherent system in which symbols and truth are hastily equated. The novel must have, like Harmon, a suspended identity.

That Dickens features both Harmon and Headstone so prominently in the novel is one important way Dickens can escape repeating in his exploration of the novel's symbolic and narrative identity not only Headstone's self-destructive identification with his fictions but also the sterile coherence of the social world. What is at issue here is not just the moral ambiguity of Dickens making symbolic forms that are every bit as tyrannous as the social world that is depicted, it is that the novel as a symbolic form is inherently and formally ambiguous and that Dickens deliberately uses this ambiguity as an alternative to the dehumanizing certainties of the social world.⁷

Nor are Harmon and Headstone the only characters who represent such purely narrative concerns about the novel. Silas Wegg, for example, expresses, in comic form, his society's values and parodies the stories of other characters. Wegg's extortion scheme and his prospecting for treasure are a pointed parody of Harmon's relationship to Bella and Headstone's relationship to Lizzie and a less direct parody of both the narrator's and Harmon's attempts to sift and pan the social world for authenticity. But, because he knows, or thinks he knows, what he is looking for he simply repeats the errors of the social world and, like Headstone, ends up chasing a phantom of his own making.

Wegg's habit of chasing his own phantoms also serves another important purpose in the novel. Wegg, together with Venus, represents the potential failure of the novel to achieve a balance between responsiveness to the world and the demands of coherence. Wegg, who mimics the values of the social world, and Venus, who articulates creatures out of their remains, represent what the novel would be if it limited itself simply to reproducing the values of the social world. For this reason, Wegg and Venus haunt the novel like a comic bad conscience. That Venus is eventually saved may have less to do with any redeeming moral qualities he may have than with the fact that he never fully believes in Wegg's schemes. This gives Venus the self-consciousness he needs to save himself, a self-consciousness that resembles in its saving purpose Harmon's self-consciousness. Wegg, on the other hand, is adept at creating fictions, like the one about “Our House,” which he then accepts as true. This disastrous habit of believing in his own fictions not only parodies society's and Headstone's belief in their own fictions, it serves as a constant reminder of what the novel must not do.

If Wegg and Venus illustrate some traps the novel must avoid, Jenny Wren illustrates the kind of complex relationship the novel can establish to its world. As the dolls' dressmaker, Jenny, like Dickens, reproduces in miniature the world of the glamorous and captures it in its most characteristic costumes. But, this reproduction of the social world, like the novel's own, only serves to highlight the terrible price that society exacts for the sake of its carefully controlled show. That Jenny is physically crippled and emotionally hurt by the very world she reproduces so faithfully indicates the very real effects the narrow and self-serving symbol system of society has on those it excludes and ignores.

Jenny responds to this oppressive world with a sadly precocious cynicism that makes what should be her fairytale dreams of romance into fantasies of defensive and retaliatory violence. But Jenny also acts in a way that is directly contrary to the values of the world that has hurt her. She uses her hands and her quick observation not only to reproduce the world of the glamorous but to find and make contact with her own world. Unlike the hands that grasp for power and money or the clenched fist Bradley Headstone slams down on the burial-ground enclosure, Jenny's hands search for a responsive contact with those she loves and trusts. This kind of touching implies a relationship to another who has not been already appropriated and digested by the demands of a system, either personal or social. The touch is the only real alternative on the thematic level to a social system that thrives on sameness and dominance. It is a moment of contact between characters who regard each other as independent fellow creatures, not as objects to be possessed or controlled. Even the most extreme version of touching, violent blows, is a way Harmon and Wrayburn are freed from their imprisoning social roles and are able to reconstitute their relationship to the world.

For Dickens to reenact on the symbolic level of the novel Jenny's touching of others on the thematic level, he must minimize the violent imposition of symbolic forms that produces moral and physical deformity, transform this violence into a form of human response to the world and not simply an act of aggression against it, and delineate the way the social world is made by those who seem to be nothing more than its mirrors. He needs to attack that world at its core, and this core is its certainty about its wholeness. To mount such an attack, Dickens decomposes the social world into the many symbolic perspectives and assertions that go into its making, thereby making the apparently complete social whole a multiform set of assertions about the world that then creates the need for other assertions, no one of which predominates over any other.

The many characters who make these symbolic assertions together form what Bakhtin calls a dialogue about the novel and its relationship to its world.⁸ The characters wrangle with each other over how and what their world means and in so doing wrangle with each other over how and what the novel itself means. Such a dynamic arrangement is decidedly contrary to the neat arrangement of the representatives of society around the Veneerings' dining-room table where the characters act like so many Leibnizian monads, each reflecting, from his own particular angle, the totality of the social world. This static arrangement of monads, however, is an ideological sleight-of-hand used to conceal the underlying struggle for power.⁹ Once this illusion is exposed and dispelled and the characters are understood as incarnations of symbolic assertions about the world, their arrangement becomes something more akin to the structure of an atom. The characters are related as symbolic force fields which determine and shape each other through their energy and momentary configuration rather than through their reflective powers. The coherence they have is the result of these momentary configurations and not of a settled system mirroring itself in all its details. By operating on both levels simultaneously, Dickens can decompose into a search for meaning, on the narrative and symbolic level, the story he is composing into a coherent system of meaning on the thematic level.

On this level of decomposed form, the story about how the novel means, Dickens works out his alternative to the otherwise monolithic social world he creates. For it is on this symbolic level that Dickens can do what the social world he depicts cannot: make not only explicit symbolic assertions about the world but also show the way each assertion, once made, changes the world it seeks to define, thereby changing what the assertion itself can mean. The social world, like its representative, Podsnap, flourishes away whatever does not conform or cannot be reduced to its norms. Characters like Riah and Betty Higden who, because of religion or class, do not fit the mold are relegated to the margins of the social world. Such characters, of course, cannot escape and are not freed from the effects of the society that neglects and ostracizes them. Riah must play the odious role of the Jewish usurer to protect his respectable Christian master and Betty Higden is hounded by the specter of the poor house up until her death. But, such characters are effectively excluded from the way society conceives of itself, from the identity the society develops for itself.

Dickens, on the other hand, not only includes characters like these in his story, he makes the marginalized world they inhabit, a world of symbolic values that is created by the dominance of the social world but that is also a response to all that is ignored by it, an integral part of the novel's identity as a narrative and symbolic form. The novel, in other words, unlike the social world, is about not only what it can assert directly and explicitly about its world and about itself, but also about the effects of all assertions on what the world can mean and, therefore, on how the world is. The world the novel represents, then, is not some truer and fully developed world that has been buried or submerged by society and can be excavated. It is the world that has been obscured by certainty but that is always being revealed through the conflict among the characters' various attempts to define and live in it. This is one reason why the characters never seem to find what they are looking for or find only what they don't expect. The treasure they are looking for is never what it seems because, by searching for the treasure, the characters have changed everything, including the role they play and what the treasure is.

Similarly, for Dickens, the meaning of his novel cannot be simply a nugget sifted out from meaningless dirt. What happens to the dirt and the change that takes place in the landscape and in the prospector, are as important as any nugget that might be found. Like his many failed prospectors but with more foresight and skill, Dickens sets out to sift and pan this curious and dead world to find out what, if anything, is still alive. But, as certainty and system fail, as meaning slips, like so much dirt, through the fingers grasping for power or money, Dickens makes it increasingly clear that the search for meaning itself, the act of sifting and panning, and not any fixed center of meaning, is the only real treasure to be found.

Notes

1. The only real exception to the moral geometry of the novel is Jenny Wren's invitation to Riah to “Come up and be dead!” (335). The paradoxical nature of this invitation already suggests that the formal coherence characteristic of the novel's world will not give the characters the authenticity they seek.

2. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Veso, 1974), 126-127, 144, 227.

3. J. Hillis Miller says of the world in Our Mutual Friend: “Man has absorbed the world into himself, and the transformed world has absorbed him into itself, in an endless multiplication of nothing by nothing.” Charles Dickens: The World of his Novels (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1959), 298. Here, Miller extends the discussion of the ambiguity of will in Dickens, especially the tendency of will, however well motivated, to become just one more form of aggression, to the collective human determination to subdue the world to definite human ends. The results, though entirely human in one sense, are also entirely dehumanizing.

4. I have in mind here Ruskin's idea that labor is an act of creation, similar to the labor of birth, and that profit is based on the production or discovery of something new. In contrast to Ruskin's ideas about labor is Marx's idea that labor is the basis of value in a closed economic system and that profit is the surplus value derived from unpaid labor. The social world of Our Mutual Friend seems to operate according to Marx's ideas, especially the idea of deriving profit from deprivation, while Harmon and, I believe, the novel as a whole operate according to Ruskin's. See John Ruskin, Unto This Last and Other Writings, ed. Clive Wilmer (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 213, 217 and Karl Marx, Wages, Price and Profits (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1975) 48-49, 54.

5. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (New York: Penguin Books, 1971) 422. All future quotations will be from this edition and will be cited in parentheses.

6. The conception of symbolism I am using here is based on Cassirer's ideas. Cassirer claims that symbols, especially language and art, are not mental creations affixed to the world or separate realities derived from or imposed on the world but are ways of objectifying knowledge of and responses to it and therefore are instruments of discovery, rather than simple definitions. See Ernst Cassirer, “Language and Art I,” in Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer 1935-1945, ed. Donald Philip Verene (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979) 148, and An Essay on Man (New Haven: Yale UP, 1944) 143. I take Cassirer's use of the term objective to mean shared knowledge or perception rather than the more usual meaning of a reification of the living world.

7. My ideas about the formal conflicts that go into the identity of the novel are based in part on Adorno's ideas about the dialectical nature of art. Adorno conceives of autonomous art, art freed from serving any purpose other than its own self-defined purposes (for example, religious art), as locked in a struggle, perhaps a losing struggle, with its own contradictions. Foremost among these contradictions is form's relationship to content. Content is assimilated to and integrated with the internal demands of form, but, since content comes from the world outside the art work, this assimilation and integration must always be incomplete. Form, then, at least according to its own laws of integration, must fail if it is to succeed at all. If it were to succeed completely, it would fail even more seriously since it would then produce a kind of art completely divorced from the human world or a kind of art completely divorced from the human world or a kind of art that is fundamentally dishonest. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans, C. Lenhardt, eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedermann (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984). Adorno's ideas about the dialectical nature of art, both in relation to its autonomous concerns and in relation to the world art seems to withdraw from, are scattered throughout the work, but pages 6-11, 201, 207, 255, and 266-267 seem to be fairly representative.

8. M. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans, Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 1981) 259-422. Bakhtin makes this comment that seems directly applicable to Our Mutual Friend:

   Languages of heteroglossia, like mirrors that face each other, each reflecting in its own way a piece, a tiny corner of the world, force us to guess at and grasp for a world behind their mutually reflecting aspects that is broader, more multi-leveled, containing more and varied horizons than would be available to a single language or a single mirror.

   (414-415)

   See also “The Problem of Speech Genres,” in Speech Genres & Other Late Essays, trans, Vern W. McGee, eds., Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: U. of Texas P, 1986) for a more general treatment of the way language necessarily becomes a dialogue about the world.

9. Miller, Charles Dickens: The World of his Novels, p. 291. Here Miller says:

   The proper model of the universe of Our Mutual Friend is not that of a non-Euclidean space filled with incommensurate local monads entirely isolated from one another. It is rather that of a large number of interlocking perspectives on the world, each what Whitehead would call a special prehension of the same totality. But Dickens can never present the totality as it is in itself. Indeed, there is no such thing as the world in itself.

   I would agree that the model of isolated monads is inadequate and that Dickens cannot present the totality directly and explicitly, but I believe that the totality is always changed by the characters' attempts to define it and that Dickens does present the totality indirectly on the symbolic level of the novel as the open totality of all the attempts to define and live in the world.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. C. Lenhardt. Eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedermann (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984).

———. Minima Moralia. Trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Veso, 1974).

Bakhtin, M. M. “Discourse in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: U. of Texas P, 1981).

———. “The Problem of Speech Genres.” In Speech Genres & Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: U. of Texas P, 1986).

Cassirer, Ernst, An Essay on Man (New Haven: Yale UP, 1944).

———. “Language and Art I,” in Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer 1935-1945. Ed. Donald Philip Verene (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979).

Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend (New York: Penguin Books, 1971).

Marx, Karl. Wages, Price and Profits (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1975).

Miller, J. Hillis. Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1959).

———. “Our Mutual Friend,” in Dickens: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Martin Price (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967).

Ruskin, John. Unto This Last and Other Writings. Ed. Clive Wilmer (New York: Penguin Books, 1985).

Wilson, Edmund. “Dickens: The Two Scrooges.” In The Wound and the Bow. (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1970).