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Earth, Air, Fire And Water: The Struggle For Pips Soul in Great Expectations

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Grahame Smith
University of Stirling

he status of Dickens as a great popular genius is by now one of the monuments of received opinion, at the level of media hype as much as critical discourse. In the former case, this is expressed in the a-historical nonsense of the if Dickens were alive today formula, one of the most frequent expressions of which is if Dickens were alive today he would be a writer of series for television. Critics and scholars are more discriminating than this, of course, but it does seem as if its time to rethink some of the approaches that have been inuential in recent thinking about the writer and his work. And perhaps Im as good a person as any to make this attempt since I have made my own contributions to helping us to see Dickens as, for example, a literary producer of commodity ctions, texts that can be understood as having a vital relationship to the market-place and the myriad of forces technical, social and historical that helped to bring serial ction into being. I am prompted to my own rethinking partly by the experience of teaching Dickens over many years and especially my use of the technique of having the class read extended passages before subjecting them to discussion and analysis. To hear a group of highly educated young people stumble over what is unavoidably revealed to be the complexity of Dickenss writing is often a painful experience. It is quite clear that, apart from the rhythmic complications of his prose, they are encountering hard words, many evidently for the rst time, of whose meaning they are completely in the dark. This leads one to wonder whether the Victorian public, taken in the mass, were better educated than my young people, attuned to the absorption of verbal complexity, in the way one must assume was the case with even the illiterate groundlings listening to a Shakespeare play. From their responses to his meanings as well as his form, it seems clear that to most of my students Dickens is a writer coming to them enveloped in the full panoply of high art. In any event, Great Expectations is clearly not what they mean by popular! These thoughts, circulating in my mind for some time, were brought to
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a focus some years ago by the quite extraordinary fuss generated, in Britain as well as the United States, by the lm American Beauty, the lm debut of the distinguished theatrical director Sam Mendes which starred, amongst others Kevin Spacey. I may have to ask you to jog your memories here a little, but I think its worth it for the sake of the point I want to make. This was a work hailed as a justication for a popular form in its ability to produce art, and encomiums were heaped on Sam Mendes to the extent of seeing his debut as akin to that of a real, and great, lm artist, Orson Welles. Discussion of the lm centered on its moving evocation of a middle aged man transgured, in the moments before his death, by a sacrice, a sacrice which is, in my view, akin to my renunciation of pudding in an attempt to restrict my waistline. This event, the sexual withdrawal from a nymphet, followed by a voice uttering platitudes from the great beyond plumbs the depth of moral and spiritual vulgarity, but was received on all sides, it seems, as a moment of genuine signicance. It is, of course, quite unfair, to make an aesthetic judgement of a lm on anything other than the lm experience itself, but I still think that the quality of this scene in the cinema is captured by the stupefying banality of the published screenplay at the point when Angela confesses that, contrary to all appearances, she is a virgin: Lester looks down at her, his grin fading Angela lies beneath us, embarrassed and vulnerable. This is not the mythically carnal creature of Lesters fantasies; this is a nervous child. The deadening portentousness of the this in this context says it all. The quality of Lesters wisdom from beyond the grave, after he has been killed, is equally suspect when we hear his voice on the soundtrack telling us that I cant feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life. This recourse to the supernatural is spiritualist, rather than spiritual, and is not far removed from the embarrassing evocation of the after-life which closes another recent popular success, Ridley Scotts Gladiator. You may remember that after his death our hero, played by Russell Crowe, is reunited with the family who had been brutally murdered earlier in the lm. Such moments are the merest gestures, devoid of any foundation in belief or conviction, whether intellectual or spiritual. By way of contrast I would recommend, for those who havent seen it, a great lm by a great director, the Russian Andrei Tarkovskys The Sacrice which is enough, I believe, to relegate American Beauty to the dustbin where it belongs. The end proposed by this lm, to save the world from nuclear destruction, and the means oered, perpetual silence for a husband and father, and with it the permanent loss of contact with a beloved child, belong to a dierent universe of discourse from the sentimental indulgences of the protagonists of Mendes and Scotts lms. The fact is that lm as a work of art simply annihilates lm as product at even the more superior end of popular lm-making. And if we turn to Great
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Expectations at this point, the dignity and moral purity of Joes sacrice when he leaves Pip in London having nursed him back to health clearly aligns Dickens with Tarkovsky rather than Sam Mendes. Im sure you will remember this wonderful moment:
When I got up in the morning, refreshed and stronger yet, I was full of my resolution to tell Joe all, without delay I went to his room, and he was not there. Not only was he not there, but his box was gone. I hurried then to the breakfast-table, and on it I found a letter. These were its brief contents. Not wishful to intrude I have departed fur you are well again dear Pip and will do better without Jo. P. S. Ever the best of friends. (47172; ch. 57)

Thats what I call sacrice and thoughts such as these have led me to wonder if it isnt time to begin to think of Dickens again as a creative artist, and not simply a literary producer, and of Great Expectations, say, as a work of high art, distinguished by rigorous complexity of language, form and theme. This may not seem a particularly challenging task, although it is worth remembering just how often Dickenss claims to the highest forms of artistry have been questioned. G. H. Lewes, by no means an uncritical writer on Dickens, has interesting things to say in 1872 about contemporary responses:
there probably never was a writer of so vast a popularity whose genius was so little appreciated by the critics he impressed a new direction on popular writing, and modied the Literature of his age, in its spirit no less than its form they nevertheless spoke of him either with condescending patronage, or with sneering irritation How are we to reconcile this immense popularity with this critical contempt? (Wall 19192)

A good question, I would say, especially since, even in the eras of real appreciation since his death, there is often a note of yes, but in even the most positive responses to Dickenss work. However, the question I wish to pose at this point is where Dickens himself stands in relation to his own artistry. An answer may be provided by one of the many fascinating aspects of the later volumes of the letters, the revelation that Dickens took himself very seriously indeed as an artist, a fact that can be illustrated in a number of interestingly dierent, but related, ways. For example, one of the central propositions bolstering the reading of Dickens as a popular genius is his presumed total commitment to the theatre of his own day in all its forms. But a reading of the correspondence reveals that his attitude to popular theatre was far from unambiguous. For
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example, in a letter to W. W. F. de Cerjat of 1867 he has this to say:

On the whole, the Theatres, except in the articles of scenery and pictorial eect, are poor enough. But in some of the smaller houses, there are actors, who if there were any Dramatic Head-Quarters as a School, might become very good. The most hopeless feature is, that they have the smallest possible idea of an eective and harmonious whole, each going in for himself or herself. (Letters 11: 293)

It is the harmonious whole that I want to draw attention to here, a point that can be taken further by the precise terms in which he praises the acting of his friend Charles Fechter as Hamlet which he found by far the most coherent, consistent, and intelligible Hamlet I ever saw, one rooted in a remorseless destruction of all conventionalities (Letters 10: 53). It is not too dicult, I think, to see the link from these observations to Dickenss view of his own work as presented, for example, in his biting rebuttal, in the sardonically entitled Curious Misprint in the Edinburgh Review, of the failure of James Fitzjames Stephen in 1857 to understand what he was up to in Little Dorrit. The destruction of Blandois/Rigaud and the Clennam house was
carefully prepared for with a painful minuteness and reiterated care of preparation, the necessity of which (in order that the thread may be kept in the readers mind through nearly two years), is one of the adverse incidents of that serial form of publication. (Slater 3: 415)

We can see Dickens the craftsman and the artist at work in this mordant piece, aware of some of the limitations of seriality and yet at the same time intent on overcoming these limitations through the strength of his artistry. It is a long time now since Philip Collins advanced his argument that one key source of Dickenss self-awareness and self-estimation was to be found in the Examiner reviews of his work by Forster. For Collins, Dickenss input into these reviews is crucial, centering as they do on three areas of praise: the insistence on the unity of the novels from David Coppereld onwards with an idea as their central organising force; a repeated comparison of Dickenss art to that of the past; and a growing impatience with serialisation with a concomitant stress on reading or rereading each novel as a whole (33). We can nd the seeds of all this as early as 1855 in Dickenss comments on the diculty of condensing David Coppereld for a public reading because he had constructed the whole with immense pains, and have so woven it up and blended it together (Letters 7: 515). And in another letter we can nd what amounts to an artistic credo in correcting a correspondent on his mistake in thinking
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There is something almost Flaubert-like in these assertions, and they might be rounded o with a near Joycean armation of delight in creation in some remarks to Forster on A Tale of Two Cities:
Nothing but the interest of the subject, and the pleasure of striving with the diculty of the forms of treatment, nothing in the mere way of money, I mean, could so repay the time and trouble of incessant condensation. (Letters 9: 112)

It is no part of my purpose here to sweep away entirely the gains in understanding that have owed from the historicist and materialist readings of Dickens. But there is another Dickens to be placed beside these, the artist passionately addicted to his art, in its minutiae as well as what I think we have to call its organic wholeness, and taking the most intense pleasure in the joyful agony of creativity. This is what I call high art. However, there is no incompatibility between the creation of great art and the day-to-day realities of book production especially, perhaps, in the case of Dickens. I am sure were all familiar with the revealing little story about how Great Expectations came to be published as a serial in his magazine All the Year Round in 1860. Dickens originally intended Great Expectations to be one of his big novels on the pattern of Little Dorrit which he had published in 1857. But he was alarmed by the fall in sales of the magazine caused by an unsuccessful serial (Charles Levers A Days Ride) and so he decided that he would have to repair the periodicals fortunes by providing a serial of his own. All the Year Round could not accommodate a novel of the length of Little Dorrit and so Dickens had to change his intentions on this important matter. Needless to say, this had the desired eect of making the weekly sales soar! It is more than time that I moved on to my title, the struggle for Pips soul in relation to the elements. Water is, of course, central here and in only the third paragraph of the novel we nd river and sea inextricably linked as theyll continue to be throughout the book. Again, in this third paragraph the novel initiates what is to be a central focus of attention, Pips consciousness, by registering the very moment when the child becomes aware of himself as a separate entity in the world, his rst most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things. As he registers the detail of the world round about him, he also registers that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it
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all and beginning to cry, was Pip. Of course, Pip no sooner becomes selfconsciously aware of himself as a separate being in the world than he becomes aware of what the novel presents as an ineradicable feature of consciousness and that is conscience. The double burden of keeping his meeting on the marshes a secret from his sister and, above all, from Joe plus the necessity of stealing food to keep his promise to the convict produces a situation whose comedy does nothing to lessen its emotional seriousness: Conscience is a dreadful thing when it accuses man or boy; but when, in the case of a boy, that secret burden co-operates with another secret burden down the leg of his trousers, it is (as I can testify) a great punishment (13; ch. 2). We know that when the novel rst appeared many critics and readers welcomed it as a return to an earlier Dickens, the Dickens of a light-hearted comedy that many felt had been lost or, at least, marginalized, in later works such as Bleak House and Little Dorrit. No doubt this was the kind of passage they had in mind, but surely we can see, with the benet of later developments in the novel, that there is no incompatibility between such comedy and a deep seriousness in relation to the internal struggles that Pip is going through from such an early stage in his development. After Pips return from giving succour to the convict, he is greeted by his sister with a question: And where the deuce ha you been? was Mrs Joes Christmas salutation, when I and my conscience showed ourselves (22; ch. 4). Doesnt this suggest that, like Magwitch, Pip too is shackled, although his chains are internal, the fact that his consciousness of himself as an individual in the world is inseparable from the pressures of his conscience? This theme of Pip himself being a kind of prisoner, in his case an internal one, is reinforced by passages of great dramatic intensity. For example, at the moment when Mrs. Joe is heading for the pantry to retrieve the pie which is no longer there, the panic-stricken Pip makes a dash for it, but he runs no further than the house door, for there I ran head foremost into a party of soldiers with their muskets: one of whom held out a pair of handcus to me, saying, Here you are, look sharp, come on! (30; ch. 4). This strand in the novel culminates in what seems to me a profound insight, although in a way characteristic of Great Expectations, one expressed with unpretentious clarity. At the beginning of chapter 6, we learn that Pips state of mind regarding the pilfering from which I had been so unexpectedly exonerated, did not impel me to frank disclosure It was much upon my mind that I ought to tell Joe the whole truth. Yet I did not, and for the reason that I mistrusted that if I did, he would think me worse than I was (41). This internal struggle is summarized in what seems to me a wonderful passage: In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong. I had had no intercourse with the world at that time, and I imitated none of its many
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inhabitants who act in this manner. Quite an untaught genius, I made the discovery of the life of action for myself (41; ch. 6). What enables Pip to make the discovery for himself is what in Christian terms would be called original sin, although in our secular age we might wish to nd other terms in which to express this ineradicable aspect of what we might still want to call our fallen nature. The quality in the novel I am trying to isolate here might be summed up by a wonderful insight of Graham Greenes. Writing about Oliver Twist in his 1950 essay The Young Dickens, Greene isolates what he calls the tone of Dickenss secret prose, that sense of a mind speaking to itself with no one there to listen (Ford and Lane 24647). What Dickens is Greene referring to here? Not the entertainer or popularizer, I would suggest, not the social critic or reformer but, rather, the artist seeking to explore the deepest levels of the material he is creating through this secret prose. But I want to suggest also that Dickens is using this secret prose not merely to explore Pip, but also to examine himself at the deepest possible level. Dickens was, quintessestially, a self-made man in the admired Victorian mold while Pips good fortune has come to him as the result of one good deed. Nonetheless, Dickens is able to play out the internal struggle in his own soul, or inner life, through the story of Pip and that this struggle is elemental is demonstrated I think by the concrete details of the ordeals Pip must endure especially towards the end of the novel. It is entirely appropriate, of course, that Pip should be lured back to the marshes as the setting for this nal drama, and that some of the depths of his own betrayal of Joe and Biddy should be brought home to him by what he hears from the landlord of the inn where he has dinner which is that everyone knows that his benefactor is Mr Pumbechook. The eect of this lie on him is devastating: I had never been struck at so keenly, for my thanklessness to Joe, as through the brazen imposter Pumblechook. The falser he, the truer Joe; the meaner he, the nobler Joe (42121; ch. 52). Pip is thus in the most appropriate state of mind, of soul even, to strike out through the earth, air and water of the marshes towards the re of his confrontation by Orlick, the Orlick who is, of course, his double, his other self, the darker Pip. This is made clear in Orlicks unanswerable challenge to Pip that it was he who did for your shrew sister. Pip denies the challenge, of course, but Orlicks response is devastating: I tell you it was your doing I tell you it was done through you it warnt Old Orlick as did it; it was you. You was favourerd, and he was bullied and beat. You done it; now you pays for it (426; ch. 53). At the deepest psychological level, this must be true. The boyish Pip never says he wishes his sister were not part of his life with Joe, but that surely is the unspoken truth of his situation. Fire enters the equation at this point as Orlick ares the candle at me
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again, smoking my face and hair, and for an instant blinding me, a blinding that will play its part in Pips eventual acquisition of sight at the moral and spiritual level. And this moment reinforces another ordeal by re that Pip has already been through, in his attempt to save Miss Havisham: I saw a great aming light spring up. In the same moment, I saw her running at me, shrieking, with a whirl of re blazing all about her, and soaring at least as many feet above her head as she was high (402; ch. 49). I am nervous about making fanciful comparisons here, but doesnt this moment with its great aming light a whirl of re blazing all about her soaring at least as many feet above her head as she was high remind us of certain kinds of paintings that Dickens may have seen in his visits to Italy? There is a quality of almost baroque extravagance at this moment which helps to reinforce the fact that the novel frequently operates beyond the level of realism that it is sometimes said to inhabit. I am not suggesting a direct relationship to a particular painting or painter here, but more a reference to old systems of belief that Dickens may be drawing on, pagan as well as Christian, and which may be said to lie behind much of the greatest Western art. This heightening of eect is continued in Pips attempt to save Miss Havisham when they fall to the ground struggling like desperate enemies the closer I covered her, the more wildly she shrieked and tried to free herself (402; ch. 49). How profound all this is! Just as Pip, at some secret level, willed the disappearance of his sister, so Miss Havisham was Pips enemy in the harm she inicted on him. These two ordeals by re are dramatically exciting, of course, and give the novel the tension and drama often associated with popular ction, but here they are also being used for the purposes of self-revelation and recovery at the deepest level. And it is typical of the novel that the internal transformation in Pip is objectied in external description:
Wednesday morning was dawning when I looked out of the window. The winking lights upon the bridges were already pale, the coming sun was like a marsh of re on the horizon. The river, still dark and mysterious, was spanned by bridges that were turning coldly grey, with here and there at top a warm touch from the burning in the sky. As I looked along the clustered roofs, with Church towers and spires shooting into the unusually clear air, the sun rose up, and a veil seemed to be drawn from the river, and millions of sparkles burst out upon the waters. From me too, a veil seemed to be drawn, and I felt strong and well. (433; ch. 53)

Strong and well enough perhaps to face his last challenge from the elements in his attempt, with Herberts assistance, to save Magwitch from the forces of authority in what turns into a trial by water rather than a legal trial in a
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court of law which will, of course, come later. This scene, on the Thames, is presented to us in a series of visual fragments of great power:
I saw the prisoner start up, lean across his captor, and pull the cloak from the neck of the shrinking sitter in the galley. Still in the same moment, I saw that the face disclosed, was the face of the other convict of long ago. Still in the same moment, I saw the face tilt backward with a white terror on it that I shall never forget, and heard a great cry on board the steamer and loud splash in the water, and felt boat sink from under me. (444; ch. 54)

The result is another moment of absolute terror for Pip: It was but for an instant that I seemed to struggle with a thousand mill-weirs and a thousand ashes of light; that instant passed, I was taken on board the galley. Herbert was there, and Startop was there; but our boat was gone, and the two convicts were gone [my italics]. The result of passing through this ordeal by the elements is transformational for Pip, of course, in relation to Magwitch:
For now, my repugnance to him had all melted away, and in the hunted wounded shackled creature who held my hand in his, I only saw a man who had meant to be my benefactor, and who had felt aectionately, gratefully, and generously, towards me with great constancy through a series of years. I only saw in him a much better man that I had been to Joe (446 ch. 54).

The unremitting depth and seriousness of this great novel is embodied, I think, in Magwitchs own attitude to his life: The kind of submission or resignation that he showed, was that of a man who was tired out. I sometimes derived an impression from his manner or from a whispered word or two which escaped him, that he pondered over the question of whether he might have been a better man under better circumstances. But, he never justied himself by a hint tending that way, or tried to bend the past out of its eternal shape (456; ch. 56). Bending the past out of its eternal shape: here, it seems to me, we are also in the presence of the simplicity of great art, the world of Lady Macbeths What is done, cannot be undone, one of the most basic but also one of the most terrible truths of human life. Pip reaches almost the end of his journey, his moral and spiritual pilgrimage, in the great court scene where he holds the hand of the man who is to be condemned and thereby forfeits his position as a respectable member of society, just as he forfeits the expectations Magwitch sought to bless him with. The fact that Magwitchs trial is a kind of theatrical display is reinforced by the role of its spectators, the audience which got up at the
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end of the proceedings, putting their dresses right, as they might at church or elsewhere and [pointing] down at this criminal or that, and most of all at him and me (458; ch. 56). But even at this point, Pips pilgrimage is not yet over as he is forced to abandon his nal settled purpose as he calls it, his belief that he can return to the forge, resume his previous life with Joe and marry Biddy. But Biddy and Joe have, of course, found their own happiness by turning to one another and so, to that extent, rejecting Pip. What I have tried to argue here, then, is that the complexity of Great Expectations and the depth of its insights at the local level, as well as structurally, enforce comparison with the greatest works of the western tradition. Literary production and commodity texts notwithstanding, this is great art, high art, and perhaps we need to keep reminding ourselves of fully this particular dimension of Dickenss genius especially in a context when it sometimes seems as if he is too often seen as an entertainer whose main function is to provide material for our television screens.
WORKS CITED
Collins, Philip. Dickens Self-Estimate: Some New Evidence. Dickens the Craftsman: Strategies of Presentation. Ed. Robert B. Partlow, Jr. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1970. 2143. Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. London: Penguin, 1996. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Pilgrim Edition. Ed. Madeline House and others. 12 vol. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 19652002. Ford, George H. and Lauriat Lane, Jr. The Dickens Critics. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1961. Slater, Michael. Ed. The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens Journalism. Vol. 3. Columbus: Ohio UP, 1999. Wall, Stephen. Ed. Charles Dickens: A Critical Anthology. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.

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