The Partners' Tale: Dickens and Our Mutual Friend

Abstract

The Partners’ Tale: Dickens and Our Mutual Friend John P. Farrell For friendship is a partnership, and as a man is to himself, so he is to his friend. Nichomachean Ethics The title of Dickens’s last great work enigmatically evokes the presence of a sociality that the novel itself seems determined to negate. Both the mutual friend and the “our” to whom he belongs are only minimally identified in the text. We are left with a generalized reference to mutuality and sociality at the head of a novel that plunges us at once into a thicket of bleak estrangements. My concern here is to uncover an affirmation of mutuality in Our Mutual Friend that runs much deeper than the title’s official allusion and that abides, not just in spite of the estrangements, but in resolute opposition to them. 1 More broadly, my interest here is to suggest through a re-reading of Our Mutual Friend how Dickens’s social imagination might be seen as not quite so encumbered by the ideological incoherence that is persistently ascribed to him. Interestingly, wherever we go in the thicket of the text we find people in partnership. To be sure, many of the partnerships are predatory. In the very first chapter, we get a chilling example as Gaffer trolls for corpses in the river: Riderhood: I a’most think you’re like the wulturs, pardner, and scent ‘em out. . . . Gaffer : I have been swallowing too much of that word, Pardner. I am no pardner of yours. 2 The narrative opens several major questions at this point: just who is partnered with whom? Why are they partners? And how does the figure of partnership play into the broad nature of human relationships and into the text’s rendering of social reality itself? The scene before us alludes to these matters in the multiple forms of partnering it dramatizes. We have, most explicitly, the sleazy alliance of Riderhood and Gaffer which in itself is complicated by their simmering contempt for [End Page 759] each other. But the scene shadows their predatory partnership with two more partnerings: the reluctant apprenticeship of Lizzie Hexam, who accompanies her father, and the ghoulishly contrived bond that Gaffer has just established (by means of his billhook) with a decaying body. In Our Mutual Friend any given partnership is itself partnered with other telling alliances in a manifold of relationships that complicate the economic, social, and moral meanings of mutuality. These relationships cannot, however, be assessed only thematically since they involve, at the deepest levels, the performative nature of the novel. Our Mutual Friend is a novel that persistently images for us the problematics of writing, of reading, of textual construction, and the performative tasks of narrator, characters, and audience. 3 The novel brings to a climax Dickens’s long and profound reflection on narrative art as a performative act. It becomes essential to consider that performance is inherently a partnering, and it is in this connection that Dickens’s concern with symbolic action engages with his perspective on social action. The discussion that follows, then, describes a number of underlying assumptions in Dickens’s treatment of the identity of self, society, and mutuality by tracing the intricate interplay the novel constructs between its reflections on performance and its diagnosis of social being. I. Mutualities: Taylor, Bakhtin, Williams In proposing to read Our Mutual Friend in the light of its social horizons, its performative action, and its representation of partnership, I take my general orientation from Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism and his model of the dialogical self. This last term is not precisely Bakhtin’s but Charles Taylor’s. By using the term Taylor acknowledges the compatibility of his brilliant and bracing Sources of the Self with Bakhtin’s emphasis on the dialogic structure of identity. 4 Taylor has argued that a “crucial feature of human life is its fundamentally dialogical character” and he has attempted to detail, in much of his work, “the way in which the ‘I’ is constituted as an articulate identity defined by its position in the space of dialogical action.” 5 It has seemed to me useful to foreground Taylor’s analysis of the dialogic...