Great Expectations

“It was a rimy morning, and very damp. I had seen the damp lying on the outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying there all night, and using the window as a pocket handkerchief. Now, I saw the damp lying on the bare hedges and spare grass, like a coarser sort of spider's webs; hanging itself from twig to twig and blade to blade. On every rail and gate, wet lay clammy; and the marsh-mist was so thick, that the wooden finger on the post directing people to our village — a direction which they never accepted, for they never came there — was invisible to me until I was quite close under it. Then, as I looked up at it, while it dripped, it seemed to my oppressed conscience like a phantom devoting me to the Hulks.”


This passage is near the beginning of Great Expectations. Isn’t it fabulous! I don’t normally think of Dickens as a landscape artist but this novel is full of vivid descriptions of both the outer and the inner world. Here’s another one much later in the novel:

“We got ashore among some slippery stones while we ate and drank what we had with us, and looked about. It was like my own marsh country, flat and monotonous, and with a dim horizon; while the winding river turned and turned, and the great floating buoys upon it turned and turned, and everything else seemed stranded and still. For, now, the last of the fleet of ships was round the last low point we had headed; and the last green barge, straw-laden, with a brown sail, had followed; and some ballast-lighters, shaped like a child's first rude imitation of a boat, lay low in the mud; and a little squat shoal-lighthouse on open piles, stood crippled in the mud on stilts and crutches; and slimy stakes stuck out of the mud, and slimy stones stuck out of the mud, and red landmarks and tidemarks stuck out of the mud, and an old landing-stage and an old roofless building slipped into the mud, and all about us was stagnation and mud.” It’s J.M.W Turner in print isn’t it. Turner died about ten years prior to the publication of Great Expectations – but you can see that both men had been in the same terrain.

I first read this novel in 1963 when I was fourteen. It’s fair to say that I did not like it. At all. So it was with unexpected pleasure that I came to read it again many years later. I think the reason I found it going when I was 14 was because of the main character, the first person narrator, Pip. In an era that predates Freud and Jung, Pip really seems, for much of the novel, to embody our shadow side (and given the physical shadows and mists on the marshes, this seems appropriate). All our shame and guilt is writ large in his behaviour and feelings about himself. Written by an older man as a reflection of his younger self, it is unsparing and merciless. I think I found Pip’s false ideas, his desire for social mobility, his churlish treatment of Joe Gargery, and his hopeless unrequited love for Estella almost unbearable. It’s very hard for the main character to bear this kind of burden; he behaves very badly for at least half the novel. G K Chesterton, who wrote a lot about Dickens, described this novel as “A novel without a hero … it is a novel which aims chiefly at showing that the hero is unheroic.” He also said: “It is a study in human weakness and the slow human surrender.”

A lot of it is about shame. Here’s Pip reflecting on this: “It is a most miserable thing to be ashamed of home. There may be black ingratitude on the thing, and the punishment may be retributive and well deserved; but, that it is a miserable thing, I can testify.”

It’s also about unrequited love. Here’s a lovely, evocative piece: “I said to Biddy that we would walk a little further and we did so, and the summer afternoon toned down into the summer evening, and it was very beautiful. I began to consider whether I was not more naturally and wholesomely situated, after all, in these circumstances, than playing beggar my neighbor by candlelight in the room with the stopped clocks, and being despised by Estella. I thought it would be very good for me if I could get her out of my head, with all the rest of those remembrances and fancies, and could go to work determined to relish what I had to do, and stick to it and make the best if it.

I asked myself the question whether I did not surely know that if Estella were beside me at that moment instead of Biddy, she would make me miserable? I was obliged to admit that I did know it for a certainty, and I said to myself "Pip, what a fool you are!" As Pip says at one stage - "so throughout life, our worst weaknesses and meannesses are usually committed for the sake of people that we most despise." I think my teenage self knew this to be true but wanted to run a mile from its grim view of human behaviour.
As with all Dickens, there is a thousand small phrases that add colour and vigour to the writing. “I sat silent, recalling what a drudge she had been until Mr Wopsle's great aunt successfully overcame that bad habit of living.” You have to love this. Dickens described this novel as atragi-comedy and it’s easy to let the dark side dominate but there are many great comic touches: the unctuous and ingratiating Pumblechook, Mr Wemmick with his postbox of a mouth and his castle and drawbridge and the Aged P, and the slipperiness of Trabb’s boy.

Chesterton again: “Great Expectations, which was written in the afternoon of Dickens's life and fame, has a quality of serene irony and even sadness, which puts it quite alone among his other works. At no time could Dickens possibly be called cynical, he had too much vitality; but relatively to the other books this book is cynical; but it has the soft and gentle cynicism of old age, not the hard cynicism of youth.”

The most recent edition of the novel that I’ve seen has an image of convict leg-irons on the cover. In some ways I think that is the most apt metaphor for the whole novel. Most of the characters are imprisoned by something or someone. All the women are literally almost house-bound (Ms Havisham through madness, Mrs Joe after her accident, Estella growing up in a lonely house captive to a delusional woman), Pip sees his life as circumscribed by his social class and education, until his fate changes, Jaggers is a lonely workaholic who sees emotions as having the potential to derail him.

The great joy in the novel is as Pip finds his moral centre and begins to appreciate the qualities that we see in Herbert Pocket, in Joe, in Magwich and in Wemmick. It’s ultimately a story of redemption; that it is possible to live differently; to live a good and kind life. I think it’s a great book.

Bleak...

Past the Shallows by Favel Parrett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I started this novel because I’ve just been to Tasmania where it’s set but was immediately filled with a sense of bleakness and found it hard to come to the novel willingly. You know, from the very first pages, that what the characters face is grim and that there may be no redemption or hope. And I won’t spoil the plot to say more about this. What I want to stress about the novel is how good it is.
It’s a debut novel, it’s slight in length and sparingly told. It reminded me of the outset of Cormac McCarthy, because it is about men and boys, but more importantly because it takes no prisoners. Ultimately I couldn’t put it down though I wanted to look away at times. The story revolves around three brothers and their dysfunctional father, a fisherman in the southernmost part of Tassie. In my recent travels there we went on a boat eco tour along the coast – from Adventure Bay down to the seals at the base of the south island. If you go south from there, there’s very little between you and the Antarctic. The water is deep and wild, with big kelp forests, mile long swells, seals and as many albatross as I have ever seen. Bruny Island, along with the Tasmanian mainland, is the setting for this novel and very beautifully described too. We were lucky enough to see it when it was calm, and when it was angry.
The environment is significant to the novel but so are hidden secrets of this small community that emerge during the narrative. I was scared reading it – the father is violent and it reminded me of things that have happened in my own extended family. Of how scary men can be when they drink and are out of control. The writer manages to build our connection with the two young boys who live with their father, even though the prose is sparse. (A minor quibble; I thought the surfing scenes were a little gushy and over lyrical, but I am not a surfer and the writer is. I preferred the way that Malcolm Know wrote about surfing in his recent novel ‘The Life’.) I hope to read more from her.


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Ego integrity and despair

I like listening to Radiotherapy on RRR on Sunday mornings. It’s a bunch of doctors chewing over medical stuff and sometimes they do film reviews. I don’t know if it’s the same reviewer every time but he often comes at things from a psychoanalytic POV – often quite a different take on films. Yesterday he reviewed Gran Torino which he and I both liked. He talked about Erik Erikson’s work on the 8 stages of man – the last one is Ego Integrity vs. Despair - old age. “Some handle death well. Some can be bitter, unhappy, dissatisfied with what they accomplished or failed to accomplish within their life time. They reflect on the past, and conclude at either satisfaction or despair.” (Wikipedia)

This had huge resonance for me because I think this is where my father is at; reflecting on his life and in his case, I think he fluctuates between the two Erikson categories of despair and ego integrity. In the case of Gran Torino, it’s Clint Eastwood who plays an angry, lonely old bastard, a man who has just lost his wife and who has the slightest of relationships with his family. I’m not going to write at length about the film; I liked it despite the fact that most of the plot is a basic redemption plot - dysfunctional person is led to a better, happier life almost in spite of himself. It is also about the Hmong community in the USA, a community I know a little about because of the book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. While Gran Torino is not a great film, the baddies (Hmong gangsters) look like total baddies and it is largely though not entirely predictable, it was oddly satisfying seeing this old curmudgeon gradually accept friendship even though he never lost the surface elements of racism. I really enjoyed it. We love seeing bad guys get what they deserve. And Eastwood obviously had a lot of fun with the non-PC aspects of the character he plays - there are some very funny moments. He is great – and brave – he looks his age. Which is old.

I thought of the film gain yesterday after watching The Wrestler which I thought was great. Mickey Rourke was playing a man at the end of his wrestling career, held together by steroids, bandages and headlines from the glory years of his character, “Randy the Ram”. His life is crap: trailer park trash, he’s lonely, broke and damaged. Like Eastwood, he has fucked up relations with the only family he has, his daughter. It’s a stretch applying the Erikson stage to it because Rourke’s character is, I think, meant to be in his fifties but steroid abuse and the damages perpetuated by wrestling have really aged him and one of the events in the film causes him to want to change his life. Rourke is really fabulous. It’s painful watching him try to connect with the lap-dancer character played by Marissa Tomei. He is embarrassingly gauche and shambling with the Tomei character Cassie/Pam, as he also is with his daughter. The Cassie/Pam character has a twofold purpose in the film; she represents new possibilities for Randy and her own life parallels his – they are both struggling with jobs that require a specific and damaging kind of performance that is at odds with the “real” or regular lives that other people live. Both have a performance persona, they frock up (or down in Tomei’s case), they play for the punters and suffer humiliations as a result. (One of the best scenes in the film shows the small cohort of deadbeat wrestlers seated at card tables in a community hall, selling videos (not DVDs) of past glories and signing autographs for the meagre numbers of fans that trawl through this bleak and wintery town)

I can’t do justice to the treatment of wrestling in the film. It is remarkable. The wrestling scenes are violent and theatrical and there were segments in the film which were hard to sit through even though I watched knowing that it was all about performance. Like lap-dancing. The film avoids predictability; I thought it was great. In an interview conducted by James Rocchi, director Aronofsky credited a 1957 Charles Mingus song "The Clown," an instrumental piece with a poem read over the music about a clown who accidentally discovers the bloodlust of the crowds and eventually kills himself in performance, as a major source of inspiration for the movie.