Irina Bauder-Begerow

Echoing Dickens: Three Rewritings of Great Expectations

Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations enjoys masterpiece status in the history of English litera ture. This paper discusses two twentiethcentury novels which use Dickens as a central pretext. Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997)1 is a postmodernist rewriting of Dickens. The novel recon structs the text from the returning convict’s point of view and adds a metafictional aspect with the introduction of Dickens’ ‘alter ego’character Tobias Oates. Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip (2006)2 thematises the recipient’s role in a totally unliterary context – depicting the response to Great Expectations of mostly illiterate South Pacific islanders in the context of political upheaval in the early 1990s. With Carey’s splitting up of Pip’s original autobiographic tale into multiple plot lines and Jones’ bringing in a female protagonist to narrate an iconoclast reading of Great Ex- pectations, these texts share the concentration on formerly marginalised foci. Employing a postcolonial narratological stance, my paper outlines the different narrative techniques these novels use to provide an audible countervoice to Dickens’ ‘hegemonic master text’.

Introduction Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations is undoubtedly the epitome of a literary classic. A student of English literature is sure to find this masterpiece men tioned in any textbook on Victorian fiction: young Pip telling the story of his traumatic childhood darkened by his tyrannical sister and his encounter with the convict in the marshes. The reader witnesses Pip’s efforts to leave his marginalised social background behind, observes him developing feelings for the supercilious Estella and learns to see Pip’s convict benefactor Magwitch in a certain light – as insinuated by the autodiegetic narrator Pip himself. As the plot unfolds, the reader unawares absorbs the events through the protago nist’s lens: Pip emplots his autobiography as the suffering orphan’s social rise and his inner growth from egocentrism to altruistically taking responsi bility for his patron.3 In this paper, two recent rewritings of Great Expectations will be ana lysed with respect to the challenges they present to the ‘natural givens’ of their pretext. Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs gives priority to the formerly ostra cised convict figure, assigning both protagonist status and the narrator role to the – slightly renamed – Australian outcast Jack Maggs. Dealing with a late

1 Carey’s novel will be referred to as JM in the following. 2 The abbreviation MP will be used to denote Lloyd Jones’ novel in this essay. 3 Morris (1987) problematises Pip’s depiction of his moral character.

120 Irina Bauder-Begerow twentiethcentury warridden village’s reading of Great Expectations, Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip – shortlisted for the Booker in 2007 and winner of the Commonwealth Prize in the same year – is about an illiterate setting as in compatible with the fictional world of a Victorian classic as can be. Although these novels are set in different time frames, they both relate to Australia or its immediate geographical vicinity and present a new image of this formerly peripheral colonial place. As a result, these texts are situated in the wider context of the “writing back” paradigm, which was fittingly devised by Aus tralian scholars.4 Carey and Jones, however, transfer London’s importance as the central hub to formerly antipodal places. This essay will investigate the interplay of form and content and their functions with respect to their shared Dickensian pretext. Furthermore, it deals with the epistemological implications of narrating in regard to the un dermining of absolutist claims of storytelling. I will begin with a short survey of what postcolonial narratology has to offer for a fruitful analysis of the texts. In the analytical chapters, I will explain how both texts cite themes from Great Expectations and renegotiate central issues of the pretext. I shall look into the question which characters are granted an audible voice and whether there are shifting narrative ‘power balances’. I will point out what plot motifs of Great Expectations are echoed in the rewritings and in what ways the rearrangement of both character constellation and conception re evaluates Dickens’ work. In the final part, I will shift the discussion to an other level and ask in what way Carey’s and Jones’ novels go beyond a mere rewriting, thus questioning the legitimacy of the concept of a literary ‘classic’ as such.

Postcolonial Narratology Postcolonial narratology offers a useful theoretical framework for an analysis of what Carey’s and Jones’ rewritings do with their Dickensian pretext. This approach is productive for my interpretation as it combines the systematic analytical tools of structuralism with more contextconcerned variables. Post colonial narratologists interpret narrative forms as conveyor of semantic implications in that they inform the primarily textimmanent narratological approach with the discernment of postcolonial thought.5 Both Jack Maggs and Mister Pip play with the narrative situation of the pretext. They confer the narrative authority upon the ‘colonial other’ who thus obtains a hearing. In Great Expectations, Pip as the sole narrator deter

4 Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin (1989). 5 The idea behind the contextualisation of narratology does not suggest, however, that there is such a thing as the theory of postcolonial literature (cf. Birk and Neumann 116).