Great Expectations

It’s a novel about class that’s not interested in being a novel of labor. Orpan Pip, raised in southern-marshes artisan quasi-poverty by his stern sister and her kindly husband Joe, helps (under duress) an escaped convict with food and a file. Later, he’s invited to visit the decaying old house of the impacted Miss Havisham, whose hot adopted daughter Estella treats Pip scornfully. Then, when Pip’s around college-age, he’s visited by a lawyer who informs him he has a wealthy benefactor and stands to inherit a great deal—enough to establish himself as a gentleman. He moves to London, befriends Herbert, wastes some money, plans to marry Estella, and neglects Joe. Estella frustrates him by being distant and instrumentalist—Havisham, having been taken advantage of by a former lover, seems to have brought her up to disdain romantic mutuality. In the meantime Pip leans that his benefactor isn’t Havisham (as he’d suspected) but the escaped convict from that first chapter, Provis, who’s returned from Australia (risking execution) and made lots of money and wants now to be friends with Pip. Provis brings also an old conflict with another convict, Compeyson, established as a kind of shadowy criminal mastermind, and though Pip’s initially appalled by Provis’ criminality—Pip’s a gentleman now!—in the course of figuring out how to keep Provis safe from both cops and Compeyson Pip discovers a real affection for the guy. Provis’ attempt to escape to Hamburg on a steamship prompts a sorta-ineffective maritime action sequence that ends with Compeyson drowned and Provis mortally wounded. This wounding—coupled with the continuing kindness of Joe and distance of Estella—gives the novel fuel to end on a celebratory recognition of kinship and solidarity. While we had Great Expectations, of inheritance and of love with Estella, the real greatness was pretty literally the friends he made along the way—the kind and obscure Joe and Biddy, the lawyer’s clerk Wemmick, the helpful Provis, and Herbert who eventually employs the reduced Pip.

As noted a lot of this is about class, and about mobility, and about the affects associated therewith: local blacksmiths like Joe are better than convicts, and local merchants like Pumblechook think they’re better than blacksmiths, and Pip’s perfectly happy with his marshside life until Estella suggests he’s common, and even then content enough until he learns he has a real alternative. Then he’s self-impressed and a little scornful, he starts staying in hotels, he never means to treat people badly but he ends up doing so anyway: contra Berlant his optimism isn’t itself cruel (there’s real money!) Meanwhile the coldness Havisham transfers to Estella is the product of a defensiveness grounded in consciousness of capital’s defense: her fiance (Compeyson too, somehow?) was only attempting to defraud her, so she’s taught Estella that there’s only utility between men and women. It’s still not entirely clear why Estella picks the noxious Drummle, but there seems to be a general effort to prove Havisham’s grim theories of transaction.

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Technically, one big thing that stands out about Dickens is his reliance on dramatized exposition. I’m not at all saying he’s the first to do this, but I think it’s closer to a central strategy here than I’ve previously seen it. Of course we’ve had no shortage of expositional drama before—Odyssey consists extensively of explanatory speeches, Aethiopika has a ton of explaining, etc. And more recently part of that iconic Emma recipe has been how the dramatized resolves questions posed in the narration: we know we’re wondering what will happen with Frank, who’ll marry who, and we can only find out by entering the dramatized, by getting in the carriage, by finding out. In Frankenstein, as well, long portions of the story are told within the technically-dramatized brackets of various monologues, and Jane Eyre thrives with a kind of essayistic dramatized, conversations where a known-but-layered romantic interaction is explored and further-contoured by long conversations between the lovers.

Dickens uses the dramatized—and in particular the conversation—as a fundamental episteme. Basic information about the world and its occupants arrives—for the reader as for Pip—not through the narrator’s telling but through people talking. We watch along with Pip as Mrs. Pocket struggles to mother, as Jaggers practices his profession, etc. It’s fun for sorta-standard cocreation reasons, but it also makes room for a couple of things. One’s the incredibly fun mystery/reveal/misdirection plot, not the first but one of the first to do it so centrally, which is grounded in the narration’s readerly reliance on inference. The textual thing is that this makes room for comedy to climb into the narration—especially early, before the drama comes through, Pip’s narration consistently lands jokes of the ‘formal description of kid shit’ form. Harder to do when the narrator’s also obliged to do authoritative informing.

This kind of thing is word-count expensive, though, and one of the critical things about both this book and Dickens overall is how long it is—not just in word count but in feeling: the book feels long. Partly that’s because it’s so dramatized, but partly it’s so dramatized, I think, because of Dickens’ famous serialization. Each of these chapters were printed, one every week, in his magazine, and then the whole book was basically just printed as a compilation. In reading you feel particularly the stand-aloneness of the chapter. Each one, almost without fail, has: an amusing personage, an extended dramatized interaction, a running joke, and a few other things. We think of fantasy novels as built this way these days: three thousand words of atmosphere, and then at the end the plot advances. Rowling, Martin, Jordan. Dickens works this way too. There’s something here about episodic television, about primary entertainment media being obliged to offer weekly wholeness while the more art-coded forms of the contemporary ‘literary’ novel can deliver wholeness at a different resolution. But there’s also something about how long the book feels: every chapter is a full meal! And a lot of these details just aren’t going to be integral to the like climactic action, or are going to be wedged in uncomfortably—I personally do not need to see Pumblechook at the end of the book. A paradox that isn’t actually a paradox: the rigorous integrality of the chapters can leave the whole book feeling less than integral, a little vague, a little cloudy.

By the end of the book, though, I found myself softening a little on these one-chapter performances, found myself thinking of them as a kind of tender paratext, a second novel about loss and attention and presence that runs underneath maybe not just this novel but the rest of Dickens too—all these people, all these fascinating names and Identifiable Traits, pastors and blacksmiths and tailor’s boys and mathematicians and Aged Parents, all of whom we see, and maybe briefly notice, and then don’t see any more. So often our life’s composed of those encounters, people who show up for a week or an hour or a degree or a job and then just—don’t pay off their plots. No big event, no involvement in the height or lowness of our fates—just these flickering dramatics, one chapter at a time. Dickens isn’t really on the ‘love your main characters’ train in the same way that some are, but there’s something radical in his offer of attention to these one-chapter operators, in the dignity he often lends them. Wopsle’s still out there somewhere, still acting badly, and I don’t think you can think of Dickens’ greatness without honoring his honoring of Wopsles—an honoring, a stalwart recollection, that mirrors the way the novel presents Pip’s moral maturation as connected to his ability to honor Joe and Biddy. So here there is not a manual for marriage, but perhaps a manual for Dickens’ fiction: love thy Wopsles as thyself.

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It says something about hte maturity of the romance as genre that it’s now eligible for the kind of fake-out that Great Expectations delivers: we’re meant to read this for a long time as ‘how I married Estella,’ a story about rise. Instead it’s something else: things are bad up there in the monied classes, there’re brutes like Drummle and incompetents like Mrs. Pocket, and what we’re supposed to do, really, is love the folks who are good to us wherever they came from—marshes or hulks or big weird familes. They’re the ones who’ll love us back, more reliably than we’ll even love them. So we have solidarity—the emphasis on lateral relations, the importance of allyship—and we have class as a separating, conflicted force. But that class situation isn’t, for Dickens, grounded in any kind of relationship to work or economy—it’s social! It’s about who you relate to, who you think you’re better than and why. We’re not yet, as in Germinal, grounding this in the practical tasks—and so here capital’s presented as kind of a solution to the various affective problems presented by class: money here literally buys solidarity, whether between Provis and Pip or Pip and Herbert, or even Havisham and Pip. Perhaps this is a legibly British construction: money’s presented as a solvent, a tool for mobility that can overcome the limiting prejudices of prior social class. For Pip et al money’s a historical relaxant, a way the bonds can be a little looser, a widening of horizons. But then I think of the Havishams, mere et fille. And wonder if it’s possible to read them as great-granddaughters of Austen’s Eltons—heiresses of a merchant family who, a couple generations after scorning the nearby inheritors, now find they’ve got a lot to lose. In response they construct themselves grimly. It’s an account of how capital’s lysis becomes paralysis, maybe also an account of how a bourgeoisie can slide toward fascism: history’s earlier winners, preoccupied with the possibility of their own victimization, are drawn instinctively toward a kind of preemptive brutality. Maybe that’s what my earlier reading was lacking: Estella likes Drummle because his violence is predictable and promises to be on her side. I guess it is for a while. By the time they’re divorced, she and Pip have missed each other.