Great Expectations
by
Charles Dickens
(Dickens’ Techniques)
Soliloquy
Some
of the most wonderful scenes in Great Expectations are those in which people, presumably
in the act of conversation, raptly soliloquize; and Dicken’s technique, in
these cases, is usually to give the soliloquizer a fantastic private language
as unadopted to mutual understanding as a species of pig Latin. Witness Mr. Jagger’s interview with Joe Gargery, in which
the dignified lawyer attempts to compensate Joe financially for his part in
Pip’s upbringing, and Joe swings on him with unintelligible pugilistic jargon.
“Which
I meantersay... that if you come into my place bullbaiting and badgering me, come
out! Which I meantersay as such if you are a man, come on! Which I meantersay
that what I say, I meantersay and stand or fall by!”
Or
Miss Havisham’s interview with Joe over question of Pip’s wages; for each
question she asks him, Joe persists in addressing his reply to Pip rather than
herself, and his replies have not the remotest relation to the questions.
Sometimes, by sheer repetition of a phrase, the words a character uses will
assume the frenzied rotary unintelligibility of an idiot’s obsession, as does
Mrs. Joe’s ‘Be grateful to them which brought you up by hand’, or Pumblechook’s
mincing ‘May I?’ The minimal uses of language as an instrument of communication
and intellectual development are symbolized by Pip’s progress in the school
kept by Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt, where the summit of his education consists in
his copying a large Old- English ‘D’, which he assumes to be the design for a
belt buckle; and by Joe’s pleasure in the art of reading, which enables him to
find three J’s and three O’s and three ‘J-O, Joes’ in a piece of script.
“Give
me (he says) a good book, or a newspaper, and sit me down afore a good fire, and
I ask no better. Lord! when you do come to a J and a O, and says you, ‘Here, at
last, is J-O, Joe’, how interesting reading is!”
Language
There
is perhaps, no purer expression of solipsism in literature. The cultivation of
the peculiar Dickensian value of language reaches its apogee when the convict
Magwitch, with a benefactor’s proud delight, asks Pip to read to him from a
book in a foreign language, of which he understands no syllable.
The
book opens with a child’s first conscious experience of his aloneness.
Immediately an abrupt encounter occurs- Magwitch suddenly comes from behind a
gravestone, seizes Pip by the heels, and suspends him upside down. “Hold your
noise!” cried a terrible voice, as a man starts up from among the graves at the
side of the church porch. “Keep still, you little devil, or I ‘ll cut your
throat!”
Perhaps,
if one could fix on two of the most personal aspects of Dickens’ technique, one
would speak of the strange languages he concocts for the solitariness of the
soul, and the abruptness of the tempo. His human fragments suddenly shock
against one another in collisions like those of Democritus’ atoms or of the
charged particles of modern physics. Soldiers, holding out handcuffs, burst
into the blacksmith’s house during the Christmas dinner at the moment when Pip
is clinging to a table leg in an agony of apprehension over his theft of the pork
pie. A weird old woman clothed in decayed satin, jewels and spider webs, and
with one shoe off, shoots out her finger at the bewildered child, with the
command; “Play!” A pale young gentleman appears out of a wilderness of cucumber
frames, and daintily kicking up his legs and slapping his hands together, dips
his head and butts Pip in the stomach. These sudden confrontations between
persons whose ways of life have no habitual or logical continuity with each
other suggest the utmost incohesion in the stuff of experience.
Projecting
Vision of Life
Dickens’s
technique is an index of a vision of life that sees human separateness or loneliness
as the ordinary condition, where speech is speech to nobody and where human encounter
is mere collision. But the vision goes much farther. Our minds are so
constituted that they insist on seeking in the use of language an exchange
function, a delivery and a passing on of perceptions from soul to soul and
generation to generation, binding them in some kind of order; and they insist
on finding cause and effect, or motivation, in the displacements and encounters
of persons of things. Without these primary patterns of perception we would not
have what we call minds, And when these patterns are confused or abrogated by
our experience, we are forced, in order to preserve some kind of psychic
equilibrium, to seek them in extraordinary explanation- explanations again in
terms of mutual exchange of cause and effect.
Dickens
saw his world in pieces, and as a child’s vision would offer some reasonable
explanation as to why such a world was that way- and, by the act of
explanation, would make that world yield up a principle of order, however,
obscure or fantastic- so, with a child’s literalism of imagination, he
discovered organization among his fragments.
Pathetic
Fallacy
Dickens’
fairly constant use of the pathetic fallacy (the projection of human impulses and
feelings upon the non- human, as upon beds and houses and muffins and hats)
might be considered as incidental stylistic embellishment if his description of
people did not show a reciprocal metaphor; people are described by non-human
attributes, or by such an exaggeration of, or emphasis on one part of their
appearance that they seem to be reduced wholly to that part, with an effect of
having become ‘tinged’ into one of their own bodily members or into an article
of their clothing or into some inanimate object of which they have made a fetish.
Dickens’
devices for producing this transposition of attributes are various. To his
friend and biographer, Forester, he said that he was always losing sight of a
man in his diversion by the mechanical play of some part of the man’s face,
which ‘would acquire a sudden ludicrous life of its own’. Many of what we shall
call the ‘signature’ of Dickens’ people – that special exaggerated feature or
gesture of mannerism which comes to stand for the whole person- are such
dissociated parts of the body, like Jaggers, huge forefinger which he bites and
then plunges menacingly at the accused, or Wemmick’s post office mouth, or the
clockwork apparatus in Magwitch’s throat that clicks as if it were going to
strike. The device is not used arbitrarily or capriciously. In this book, whose
subject is guilt and atonement, Jaggers is the representative not only of civil
law but of universal law, which is profoundly mysterious in a world of
dissociated and apparently lawless fragments; and his huge forefinger, into
which he is virtually transformed and which seems to act like an ‘it’ in its own
right rather than like a member of man, is the Law’s mystery in all its fearful
impersonality. Wemmick’s mouth is not a post-office when he is at home in his
castle but only when he is at work in Jaggers’ London office, where a mechanical
appearance of smiling is required of him. And as Wemmick’s job has mechanized him
into a grinning lot, so oppression and fear have given the convict Magwitch a
clockwork apparatus for vocal cords.
Association
Association
is a powerful device employed in the novel to convey the essence of objects and
persons. Mrs. Joe wears a large apron, ‘having a square’ impregnable bib in
front, that was stuck full of pins and needles- she has no reason to wear it,
and she never takes it off a day in her life. Jaggers flourishes a large white
handkerchief- a napkin that is the mysterious complement of his blood-smeared
engagements. Estella- who is the star and jewel of Pip’s great expectations-
wears jewels in her hair and on her breast; ‘I and the jewels’, she says, as if
they were interchangeable. This device of association is a familiar one in
fiction; what distinguishes Dickens’s use of it is that the associated object
acts not merely to illustrate a person’s qualities symbolically- as novelists
usually use it- but that it has a necessary metaphysical function in Dickens’s
universe : in this universe objects actually usurp human essences ; beginning
as fetishes, they tend to- and sometimes quite literally do- devour and take
over the powers of the fetish- worshipper.
Coincidences
It
is necessary to view Dickens’ ‘coincidences’ under the aspect of this wholesale
change in the aptitudes of external nature. Coincidence is the violent
connection of the unconnected. Life is full of violent connections of this
sort, but one of the most rigorous conventions of fictional and dramatic art is
that events should make a logically sequential pattern; for art is the
discovery of order. Critics have frequently deplored Dickens’ use of
coincidences in his plots. But in a universe that is nervous throughout, a universe
in which nervous ganglia stretch through both people and their external
environment, so that a change in the human can infect the currents of the air
and the sea, events and confrontations that seem to abrogate that the laws of
physical mechanics can logically be brought about. In this sense, the apparent
coincidences in Dickens actually obey a causal order- not of physical mechanics
but of moral dynamics. ‘What connection can there be’, Dickens asks in another
novel, ‘between many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who,
from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously
brought together!
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