In Mister Pip, Mr. Watts introduces himself to the village children as their teacher with a promise that he will always be honest with them. On their second day together, he begins reading aloud his favorite novel, Great Expectations, following the first chapter with the observation, "When you read the work of a great writer, you are making the acquaintance of that person. So you can say you have met Mr. Dickens on the page, so to speak. But you don't know him yet" (Jones 21). Implicit is a second promise, that the children will eventually know Mr. Dickens through hearing the text that Mr. Watts will eventually call "Mr. Dickens' greatest book," when he asks them to help him retrieve the text through their memories, after his copy of the book has disappeared, so that it will not be "lost forever" (129).
Yet the entire novel challenges the stability of a text, the stability of a reading of a text, through a series of accidental conflations of Pip, Dickens, and Mr. Watts himself, a circumstance that Mr. Watts himself will eventually take advantage of in spinning out his supposedly autobiographical tale to the rebel soldiers, emulating Scheherazade in forestalling their violence by playing on their love of story to keep the village safe until a boat can arrive to pick up a select handful of islanders who have arranged an escape. In the narrator Matilda's evolving understanding of the text and the first interpreter of that text in her life, we find confirmation of Roland Barthes's assertion in "The Death of the Author" that "Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing." The more Matilda seeks to know Dickens, and Mr. Watts, the less she knows him. Ultimately she concludes that she must seek her own individual identity by returning home, not by studying literature. Yet it is the teaching of that elusive interpreter, Mr. Watts, that lover of story, that steers her to this conclusion: ". . . my Mr. Dickens had taught every one of us kids that our voice was special, and we should remember this whenever we used it, and remember that whatever else happened to us in our lives our voice could never be taken away from us" (256).
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Reflecting on Reading
Just finished rereading Mister Pip with my ENG 102 class. I assigned it as an introductory text to two themes--the role of reading in our lives and the impact of Western culture on colonized peoples. I liked Mister Pip because I read Great Expectations in school in ninth grade and I didn't like it much then. I was in my 40s before I reread it, and then I really liked it. I can't help but think my experience of the novel might have been different if I'd heard it read aloud, as Mr. Watts reads it to his class in Jones's novel. In ninth grade, I found the dialogue unpleasantly challenging, especially to the eye, and the situations sometimes incomprehensible. It's difficult, though, to recreate much more than that of my initial reading experience, because by the time I reread it, I was so much more practiced as a reader. Matilda helps me recreate first impressions.
I appreciate Matilda's effort to enter into Dickens's/Pip's world--because I had a similar response to reading, from an early age. Reading was my gateway into other times and places and communities, and ultimately I would find nineteenth-century England my favorite place to dwell imaginatively. I had a secure childhood in a rural setting that now, in retrospect, seems idyllic--beautiful wooded Western PA hills, creeks to dabble in, abundant wildflowers, fossils to stir my curiosity about the distant past. But sometimes I remember my early reading more vividly than that quiet sylvan world. I have a reading memory of sitting on a log, reading Treasure Island, being simultaneously in the sunlit woods and on a ship with Jim Hawkins, weighing the fascination and threat of Long John Silver. Some of the time, no doubt, the ship was more present to me than the forest smell of leaf mold--despite the appeal of my surroundings.
If I lived in a community menaced by warring factions, like Matilda, I would no doubt spend more imaginative time in that remote world of the book than in my own, because the possible sights and sounds and smells of my present would not bear imagining. Fear would drive me to disconnect with the present.
Yet, reading Mister Pip as an adult, I have to sympathize with Matilda's mother, too, when she expresses her disapproval of Matilda's being caught up in an imagined Victorian England. Yes, Dolores is unpleasant and narrow-minded and judgmental, but she is right about the importance to Matilda of knowing her roots, of learning her family tree all the way to its mythological origins. The connections that Dolores tries to teach to Matilda are the skeleton of who she, Matilda, is. The made-up English boy has nothing to say to Matilda about how to live in her own world. When Dolores contemptuously points out that Mr. Watts knows nothing about feeding and sheltering himself on the island, with his white man's knowledge, she has a valid point--for what is an education that does not teach us how to live in the world that we actually inhabit?
But what does Matilda learn about from imaginatively dwelling in Pip's world? Courtesy. That people fall short of our expectations because they are only human. That we can love and long for someone/something that we can never have, and that desire can drive our lives and mold our understanding of our circumstances. That we can reinvent ourselves. That benefactors can deliver us from the limiting circumstances in which we find ourselves. That even though we know what it means to be treated cruelly by those we love, we can nonetheless treat others whom we love equally cruelly. That people can become stuck in a particular time, refusing to move on with life. Are these life lessons of equal value to lessons in catching and preparing fish for our dinner and building a home out of jungle materials? Mr. Watts makes room for both kinds of knowledge in his classroom. It seems that the only knowledge that is denied a place in his school is a narrow, literalist reading of the Bible, which Dolores sees as eminently practical, determining where one will spend eternity.
I appreciate Matilda's effort to enter into Dickens's/Pip's world--because I had a similar response to reading, from an early age. Reading was my gateway into other times and places and communities, and ultimately I would find nineteenth-century England my favorite place to dwell imaginatively. I had a secure childhood in a rural setting that now, in retrospect, seems idyllic--beautiful wooded Western PA hills, creeks to dabble in, abundant wildflowers, fossils to stir my curiosity about the distant past. But sometimes I remember my early reading more vividly than that quiet sylvan world. I have a reading memory of sitting on a log, reading Treasure Island, being simultaneously in the sunlit woods and on a ship with Jim Hawkins, weighing the fascination and threat of Long John Silver. Some of the time, no doubt, the ship was more present to me than the forest smell of leaf mold--despite the appeal of my surroundings.
If I lived in a community menaced by warring factions, like Matilda, I would no doubt spend more imaginative time in that remote world of the book than in my own, because the possible sights and sounds and smells of my present would not bear imagining. Fear would drive me to disconnect with the present.
Yet, reading Mister Pip as an adult, I have to sympathize with Matilda's mother, too, when she expresses her disapproval of Matilda's being caught up in an imagined Victorian England. Yes, Dolores is unpleasant and narrow-minded and judgmental, but she is right about the importance to Matilda of knowing her roots, of learning her family tree all the way to its mythological origins. The connections that Dolores tries to teach to Matilda are the skeleton of who she, Matilda, is. The made-up English boy has nothing to say to Matilda about how to live in her own world. When Dolores contemptuously points out that Mr. Watts knows nothing about feeding and sheltering himself on the island, with his white man's knowledge, she has a valid point--for what is an education that does not teach us how to live in the world that we actually inhabit?
But what does Matilda learn about from imaginatively dwelling in Pip's world? Courtesy. That people fall short of our expectations because they are only human. That we can love and long for someone/something that we can never have, and that desire can drive our lives and mold our understanding of our circumstances. That we can reinvent ourselves. That benefactors can deliver us from the limiting circumstances in which we find ourselves. That even though we know what it means to be treated cruelly by those we love, we can nonetheless treat others whom we love equally cruelly. That people can become stuck in a particular time, refusing to move on with life. Are these life lessons of equal value to lessons in catching and preparing fish for our dinner and building a home out of jungle materials? Mr. Watts makes room for both kinds of knowledge in his classroom. It seems that the only knowledge that is denied a place in his school is a narrow, literalist reading of the Bible, which Dolores sees as eminently practical, determining where one will spend eternity.
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