Pip Comes Home Like Truth... Dickens and Hypergraphia

A lot has been written about Pip as a likable character. As a matter of fact, all the research I've done in my reading of "Great Expectations" yields very little (actually close to nothing) regarding Pip as an unlikeable character, or a self-centered, selfish, etc. persona. It is so perhaps because he speaks to us, and about us. Who hasn't at one time or another felt that the whole world is looking down on us from a high place, and that the worst of our actions are continuously put to trial by unyielding judges. I think early on Pip is aware of this fact--that his actions are, for better or worst, being judged continuously. Who could possibly live like that? And yet we all seem to have managed to survive that terrible age of indecision and loss. Here's a passage of Pip's torture:

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. The guilty knowledge that I was going to rob Mrs. Joe--I never thought I was going to rob Joe, for I never thought of any of the housekeeping property as his--united to the necessity of always keeping one hand on my bread and butter as I sat, or when I was ordered about the kitchen on any small errand, almost drove me out of my mind. Then, as the marsh winds made the fire glow and flare, I thought I heard the voice outside, of the man with the iron on his leg who had sworn me to secrecy, declaring that he couldn't and wouldn't starve until to-morrow, but must be fed now. At other times, I thought, What if the young man who was with so much difficulty restrained from imbruing his hands in me should yield to a constitutional impatience, or should mistake the time, and should think himself accredited to my heart and liver to-night, instead of to-morrow! If ever anybody's hair stood on end with terror, mine must have done so then. But, perhaps, nobody's ever did?

And it really doesn't end there. Pip moves on to his episode with Ms. Havisham at her estate gives entry to Pip's most challenging interlude (a crast understatement, since this is the entire plot line... delayed a bit, perhaps, but masterfully introduced by Dickens). Meeting Estella is another example of the excruciating part of our own personal growing pains. The things we do for that early crush of love, how seemingly unaccountable we think we are... how it is readily dismissed as "puppy love." I felt that pain written all over Pip's face... reading this story has been an experience, really. Ms. Havisham cross-examines Pip about Estella: "Is she pretty... do you find her proud, nice, etc.? Do you wish to come back, if not then, do you think you can deal without seeing Estella again? I mean, didn't you just say she was pretty? Then why not see her again?" Ms. Havisham strikes me dead, really, because I knew (or may even know presently) people like her. It is Pip's young pride that is hurt in the end, and his reaction to Estella's behavior makes me think of those early days of tormenting emotions:

She [Estella] came back, with some bread and meat and a little mug of beer. She put the mug down on the stones of the yard, and gave me the bread and meat without looking at me, as insolently as if I were a dog in disgrace. I was so humiliated, hurt, spurned, offended, angry, sorry,--I cannot hit upon the right name for the smart--God knows what its name was,--that tears started to my eyes. The moment they sprang there, the girl looked at me with a quick delight in having been the cause of them. This gave me power to keep them back and to look at her: so, she gave a contemptuous toss--but with a sense, I thought, of having made too sure that I was so wounded-- and left me. But when she was gone, I looked about me for a place to hide my face in, and got behind one of the gates in the brewery-lane, and leaned my sleeve against the wall there, and leaned my forehead on it and cried. As I cried, I kicked the wall, and took a hard twist at my hair; so bitter were my feelings, and so sharp was the smart without a name, that needed counteraction.

Pip comes home like truth, like a chain of memories wrapped around one's neck. They just won't go away... run away and hide all you want, Pip... it just won't stop. Which brings me to the other issue: Charles Dickens is a master because of his ability to sustain a story like this one. Critics who presently challenge his inclusion into the Canon say he is "too easy to read," or "not challenging enough." I think that's like something I heard while in Graduate School about how John Steinbeck is not taught at the college level because "he is over-done in high school." I found this to be an insulting reason for keeping an author out of the Cannon or the classroom altogether. At any rate, the other sort of critic claims that Dickens' ability to sustain a story for this long has nothing to do with mastery or genius, but more to the fact that he--Dickens--got paid by the word. I'd admit there might be a certain truth to that, but you still have to write the story and make it real, make it relevant and not repetitive or lacking in focus. Was it hypergraphia (a mental condition that makes people write profusely, a claim leveled at Dostoevsky, among other Classic authors)? I am still trying to determine that. At any rate, off to do some more reading (and writing, and grading, and class prep, and....)

Why Charles Dickens Still Matters...

I confessed to shooting and "killing" my "Reading List for 2008" nearly two months ago. It wasn't going well, I was way, way behind on my book count for the year, and it was actually beginning to feel like a chore of sorts rather than reading for pleasure. So I decided to call it off for 2008. That, of course, doesn't mean that I am not making an effort to complete it (Premise Contradictory to Facts). I picked up Charles Dickens "Great Expectations" and got into a tete-a-tete with young Pip, all of this reminiscing of my own feelings of guilt, insecurity and fear as a young child. The opening chapters display such a vivid universal experience... the young child navigating that narrow pass between rule and choice, ethics and fear of punishment. While many argue that Dickens has fallen out of favor with academia because "it is too easy to read," I still argue that we shouldn't throw out a classic for--and pardon my being specific about this--books like Jodi Picoult's "My Sister's Keeper." Now, mind you, Ms. Picoult's book made me cry this past summer (we had to read it for summer reading), and it was indeed a moral/ethical and critical plot, well organized and exceedingly thought-provoking... but Dickens it was not. Why do we continue to give in to young people's "demands" to make literature "relevant," when it in reality it is the ROLE and OBLIGATION of the teacher/instructor/professor to make the Great Classics relevant and insightful and human... oh, I forgot, that takes a great deal of effort and work (insert sarcasm here). I'll get off my rant here, sorry.

Young Pip is the archetypal child of wonder being beaten into submission (both physically and emotionally) by the adults around him. I wonder why Dickens chose not to give Pip's sister a name (she is referred to by her husband's name in the first few chapters)... could it possibly be because she is too ugly (in an emotionally abusive way) to portray? Uhmm, I wonder. So I read on with a sense of my own frightful childhood, fear based upon thinly disguised religious guilt and repressions, etc. I am happy for young Pip "being in my life." Dickens certainly STILL matters very much.

I picked up a copy of "Writing About Visual Art" by David Carrier and I am enjoy it tremendously. My students had a test today in one of my classes and between monitoring them and pacing around I got through the introduction of this fascinating book. I do need to learn to write about the visual art, and this book seems like the perfect instructional manual. It's more like essays than instruction but the wealth of knowledge is palpable and easily accessible. More on this later.

On "Bushido: The Soul of Japan," and Going Back to "Pip."

Well, after much delay I finished reading "Bushido: The Soul of Japan." Perhaps this is the longest time I have taken to finish a book under 150 pages. Factors vary between the academic term just beginning two weeks ago, to simply too much to do and not enough time. At any rate, "Bushido" was written around the early 1900s, just as Japan was leaving its vestigial feudal system behind, and Bushido as an ethical form was left to wander the countryside without a path or a value system of its own, and Nitobe captured this with a sharp eye and an incredible manner of tying together the old and the new across different fields: culture, religion, economics, industrialism, etc. Modernism hit Japan hard--and with this I must explain that I don't mean the post-World War II type of modernism. To a strictly traditional and highly defined culture in the early 1900s, this was a kiss of death. Generational issues also caught on. Remember that America herself was breaking off from the Victorian age of formalism that led to the rampage of the Roaring Twenties... Japan was influenced, molded and even changed against her own will, plain and simple, by what was happening in the world: social upheaval, generational shifts, and industrialism (read: commercialism).

Nitobe concludes that the one thing that will survive into the future of Japan is stoicism, and he nicely ties it to the fact that it was a Bushido-driven virtue: "Who can say that stoicism is dead? It is dead as a system; but it is alive as a virtue: its energy and vitality are still felt through many channels of life-in the philosophy of Western nations, in the jurisprudence of all the civilized world. Nay, wherever man struggle to raise himself about himself, wherever his spirit masters his flesh by his own exertions, there we see the immortal discipline of Zeno at work."

I learned this early in my life. My father was a stoic of the foremost discipline. I grew up seeing a man not even blink at the fact that someone was pointing a gun at his face. While I always admired it in my father, I never quite understood the origins of such behavior. It wasn't until I lived in Japan in 1994 that I understood how my father--without self-conscious knowledge--was the embodiment of Bushido.

I am going back to Charles Dickens with a furious passion. I am reading "Great Expectations" and enjoying it tremendously. More on this later. I am also reading "The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block and The Creative Brain." More on this later as well.