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a now global culture" ( 197). The global reach of the material covered in
Clayton's essay certainly fits that definition, but, more important,
50
does the form of its first paragraph. There Clayton adopts the "dead Ian.
guage" characteristic of Dickens's journalistic essays in his magazines
Household Words and All the Year Round-elaborate evocations of con.
temporary social scenes from the London slums to the central post of.
fice, all embellished with the statistics and details that Victorians sore].
ished. Central to Dickens's journalistic writings was the stance of the
observer, the individual who, in seeing such scenes, gives them signifi.
cance and coherence. Although the fiction of such an observer may no
longer be tenable-was Clayton's "observer" really at that train station
in Nashville?-his essay delineates the ways in which Dickens's fiction,
in its multitudinous afterlives, continues to do its cultural work now as
effectively as it has in the past.
Janice Carlisle
Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Trans. Paul foss, Paul Patton, and
Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e). 1983. Rpt. in Easthope and McGowan, 202-05.
Easthope, Anthony, and Kate McGowan, eds. A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism or, The Cultural Lo._qic of Late Capitalism. 1984. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. Rpt. in Easthope and
McGowan, 196-201.
Lyotard,
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge. Trans. Geoff' Bennington and Brian Massumi. 1979.
Manchester: Manchester UP; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,
1984.

JAY CLAYTON

Is Pip Postmodern? Or, Dickens


at the End of the Twentieth Century
One overcast day in February, under the tailing light of a
afternoon sun, several curiously dressed couples were seen hurrytng
down the platform of the Riverfront Depot in Nashville, Tennessee.
Most days of the week a gang of teenagers might rollerblade from one

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end of the platform to the other without endangering human life. But

this evening the depot was astir: the powerful locomotive-a renovated 1952 model E8A, weighing 318,000 pounds and developing
2,250 horsepower- hissed and vibrated, pulsing with anticipation;
porters beckoned anxiously to late-arriving passengers, while men in
white sequined suits, with bushy sideburns and hair swept forward
over their brows, escorted ladies in tight-skirted red dresses toward the
elegant dining cars. One couple in particular drew the observer's attention, as they paused before a poster of the Roy Acuff movie Night
Train to Memphis. This couple, although dressed as creatively as the
other passengers, appeared more shy than most, as though this were
their first date, and perhaps a blind one at that. Hoping to discover
what had occasioned the unwonted bustle at the depot, the observer
moved closer; and, happily, the gentleman's first words dispelled the
entire mystery. Tonight, the Elvis Love Train was offering another of
its "Great Expectations Specials."
Every Thursday during the month ofFebruary 1994, Great Expectations Services for Singles, the nationwide video dating company, offered its members tree tickets on the two-and-a-half hour dinner excursion on the rails, a $42.95 value. An Elvis Menu of his personal
favorite foods-hamburger steak, mashed potatoes, and corn breadwas available f(Jr dinner. Alas, this attractive package no longer exists.
Shortly after the Elvis Love Train began running, the company received notice from Graceland that their use of Elvis's name represented an unauthorized infringement of trademark. But, tor a few brief
weeks, inquisitive observers had the chance to view firsthand what few
perhaps had ever imagined: the marriage of Elvis and Estella.
This union brings together some of the most marketable cultural
commodities from two different centuries. It nicely evokes the emotional appeal, the sentimentality, the promotional genius, the commercial crassness, and the legal maneuvering that surrounded both Dickens and Elvis in their respective eras. That it should all take place at
trainside, a principal symbol of nineteenth-century technological
progress, adds the finishing touch. My purpose in recording this
ephemeral conjunction, however, is not to compare these very different figures but to register one instance of Dickens's continuing presence in contemporary popular culture. Like it or not, this sort of phenomenon is a way in which Dickens lives on at the end of the
twentieth century. A grotesque, misshapen afterlife, one might say, as
llnsettling as the manias that animate some of Dickens's own

Cl'LTURAL C:RITICISM

JAY CLAYTON

creations: Miss Havisham in her decaying bridal dress, or Pip fantasizing about his great expectations.
There is a logic in this afterlife, however, a logic not entirely alien
to the patterns in Dickens's own stories, as my last comparison is
meant to suggest. Another way of putting this point is to say that
Dickens anticipates some of the characteristic features of postmodern
life. The term postmodern means different things to different people,
but in the current context, it is as good a word as any to name the
dominant cultural practices of today's consumer society. It encompasses, in ways that I will outline, a whole range of contemporary phenomena, including "high" cultural forms such as art, literature, music,
and architecture; popular forms such as film, television, comics, and
advertising; social developments such as consumer practices and
lifestyle choices; and even belief patterns, such as the subcultural belief
that Elvis is alive. 1 If Dickens did anticipate some of these phenomena,
then tracing the misshapen forms of his survival in today's world will
tell readers something about themselves-and about Dickens too.
Let me begin by mentioning a few other examples of Dickens's aftcrlife.2 Once one starts to look f(x him, this author pops up at every
turn. Through 1992, at least sixty-three movies have been made from
his works, five from Great Expectations alone (DeBona 78). In the
course of my inquiries, I have been told of or have seen television
episodes of The Donna Reed Show, Cheers, Wings, Quantum Leap, and

The Simpsons that presented takeoffs of Dickens novels. The Paper


Chase and Happy Days each have segments titled "Great Expectations," and The Twilight Zone called one show "In Praise of Pip." On
Saturday morning cartoons, Disney's Scrooge McDuck remains a perennial favorite. And the very week in which I began writing this piece,
L.A. Law featured a case involving a stereotypical "Victorian" librarian
and a young man who dropped his lawsuit against her because of a
conversion experience brought on by reading Bleak House.
An equal number of examples can be drawn from other spheres of
contemporary culture. Many readers will remember a singer named
Tiny Tim, who made a name for himself with "Tiptoe through the
Tulips." In the 1970s there was a rock band called Uriah Hcep (and,
by the by, a Macintosh programming tool with the same name). The
Eagles' 1976 hit "New Kid in Town" tells of a boy's "great expectations," which lead even his old friends to treat him like he's something
new. More recently, Tasmin Archer called her 1993 debut album
Great Expectations. Journalism provides even better hunting grounds.
A search of a magazine database turned up fifty-nine articles published
in 1993 that used the phrase "great expectations" in their titles, and
although some of these pieces do not explicitly allude to Dickens,
many do-such as the article on President Clinton's first one hundred
days titled "Great Expectations Meet Bleak House."
The nostalgic character of Dickens's presence in today's world is
especially visible around Christmas time, when productions of A
Christmas Carol vic with It)s a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th
Street tor airtime on television. Such nostalgia tor a simpler lite is by
no means incompatible with commercial exploitation, as the novelist
himself well knew. Scrooge is a familiar figure in magazine and televi
sion commercials, such as the Canadian Tire jingle that runs "Spend
like Santa, Save like Scrooge." In gift shops around the country, the
beloved Dickens Christmas Village is a best-seller; this "collectible"
shows how Dickens's creations can literally be transformed into what
Wemmick calls "portable property," as Christina Rieger remarked on
the electronic bulletin board VICTORIA. At the Mt. Hope Victorian
Estate and Winery, near Hershey, Pennsylvania, the great novelist
?imself annually hosts a party of nineteenth-century notables in what
Is billed as a "Charles Dickens Victorian Christmas"; advance reservations may be purchased over the phone with a major credit card. But
Christmas is not the only holiday season when Dickens may turn up.
The Rex parade of the 1993 Mardi Gras carnival in New Orleans

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1 fur a more extended account of the various ways in which this term is used in cui
rural studies, sec Clavton.
2 As is only
in a paper about postmodernism, I have made usc in my research
of the electronic bulletin board VICTORIA (listserv@iubvm.ucs.indiana.edu). In response to my query about references to Dickens in popular culture, I received wonderful, quirky, occasionally inspired suggestions. Some items I had already thought of my
self, of course, but others were completely new to me. In the next five paragraphs, I
incorporate many of the references that turned up in that forum. In addition to the
postings cited individually in the text, let me acknowledge the suggestions made by
Steve Bernstein, Andrea Broomfield, james Bucanek, Dennis Denisoff, Sandy Donaldson, Brad Gadberry, Sheldon Goldfarb, Libby Gruner, Kathy Holliday, Emily
Devoney Looser, james McKeown, Deborah McMillion, Theresa Muir, Chnsona
Rieger, Meri- jane Rochelson, Linda Schulze, Dave Smith, Herbert Tucker, TimothY
Watson, and Alan Winston. Alison McKee and Andrea Kalas responded individually to
my request for assistance in locating archives of television serials. In addition, I am gratef
0
ful to Janicc Carlisle for encouraging me to undertake this project; to Louise Graham
Tulane University tor her intelligent questions and assistance; to Jamie Adams ofVanderbilt's Learning Resource Center for help with preparing slides; and to my
0
Julie Fesmire, Greg Hecimovich, and Mark Schoentield for their comments on a dr
this essay.

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featured Great Expectations prominently. The theme that year was


"Royal British Scribes," and the lead float depicted Miss Havisham
enthroned between two bridal cakes and surrounded by members of
an all-male secret society, wearing masks and bridal costumes themselves.3
The economic impact of Dickens is even greater in education
circles, where the dissemination of his works is a matter not only of
devotion but also of professional obligation. This sector is a
multimillion-dollar industry, which encompasses secondary school
teachers, college professors, editors, publishers, book distributors
bookstore owners, librarians, and more. To speak only of the
end of the spectrum, one observes that the professional interest in
nineteenth-century British literature has spawned an international network of critical journals, academic book publishers, scholarly societies,
conferences, foundation grants, graduate fellowships, and salaried positions in colleges and universities.
More visible traces of the economic potential of the Dickens icon
can be found on street corners and in malls all across the continent.
Who has not run across antique stores called The Olde Curiosity
Shoppe? Philadelphia ofters a pub called the Dickens Inn, and right
around the corner is another one called The Artful Dodger (this latter
name turns up in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, too). Dallas is home to
one of a nationwide chain of maternity stores called Great Expectations. In the Richmond area, there is a candle shop called Great Waxpectations; in Winnipeg, a dessert restaurant called Baked Expectations; in Brooklyn, a beauty salon called Great Hair-Spectations; in
Manhattan, a wine tasting called Grape Expectations. To complete the
roll call of bad puns, I once saw a Saturday Night Live skit called
"Great Expectorations," and more recently, a sports feature about the
hockey star Wayne Gretzky called "Gretz Expectations."
Now, if you are like me, you are about to shriek at the incongruity
of naming maternity shops, hair salons, and dessert restaurants after a
phrase that denominates the inevitability of disappointment, of broken
hearts, of false hopes and punctured dreams. This incongruity, however, is echoed and redoubled by other ironies, equally apparent but
3For a reading of the political dynamics behind the 199 3 New Orleans Carnival,
Vennman. Barbara Vennman generously sent me photographs she had taken oft e
"Charles Dickens" float. Her article also notes that one of the "oldest, private, whtte
men's clubs" in New Orleans is the Pickwick Club (13 ).

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worth underscoring, such as the mixture of sentimentality and commercialism in the Dickens Christmas, or the combination in academia
of idealism and love of literature with an institutional apparatus requiring professional credentialing, publication tor tenure, and the ranking
of universities. This kind of irony, I am arguing, characterizes Dickens's presence in contemporary culture. Incongruity, contradiction,
the juxtaposition of mismatched signifiers and ill-assorted valuesthese are the tokens by which Dickens travels today. And tor this reason, if for no other, Dickens is perhaps the most postmodern nineteenth -century writer.
Dickens was aware that his vision went well with the commercial
spirit. Many VIctorian writers worked hard to make money from their
fiction, but Dickens was extraordinarily fertile in devising new ways to
capitalize on his imagination. Perhaps his greatest coup was his invention of a new genre, the Christmas tales, which were increasingly successful as specially printed seasonal books and which later were carefully orchestrated to prop up circulation of the magazines he ran.
These works did so much to transform the nature of the holiday that
the novelist's most recent biographer has remarked that "Dickens can
be said to have almost single-handedly created the modern idea of
Christmas" (Ackroyd 34 ). Many aspects of contemporary society
might surprise Dickens, but the commercialization of Christmas-and
his part in it-would not be one of them.
Dickens was prescient in recognizing the economic shift that was
occurring in his lifetime. In the middle 0f the nineteenth century,
England underwent a transition from an industrial economy, driven by
the production of coal, iron, heavy machinery, and railroads, to a consumer economy, with its investment in advertising, marketing strategies, and household goods. As historians and cultural critics such as
Martin J. Wiener, Jennifer Wicke, and Thomas Richards have demonstrated, in the decades after the Great Exhibition of 1851 a "new commodity culture dominated by advertising drew on and ultimately supplanted any alternatives to it" (Richards 1 ). This change helped foster
a booming secondary market tor Dickens's creations. In his own lifeGamp Umtime, Dickens saw the Little Nell Cigar, Pickwick
brellas, and a host of other products bearing his characters' names; he
Went out of his wav to visit a tavern named after his novel Our Mutual
Friend (Dickens, Speeches 349). Although there was no provision for licensing such spin-offs, he understood the publicity value that came
&om their wide diffusion. From Pickwick onward, the green monthly

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numbers that serialized his novels carried advertisements for consumer


goods ranging from foundation garments to washing machines and
self-rising flour; the novelist eventually came to exercise control over
what ads
how they were arranged, an.d even
their copy
should be (WICke 50). He also led the way 111 advertlSlng his own
works. His later novels were announced by placards on the sides of
buses, billboards in steamboats and railway stations, and posters
wrapped around lampposts (Ackroyd 947). Moreover, his public readings had dramatic effects on the sales of his work, which were available
in the lobby after each performance. The fit was perfect: Dickens both
exploited and was exploited by a burgeoning consumer economy. But
consumer capitalism was only in its infancy during the novelist's lifetime. Today, one sees the full effects of this one-hundred-year-long
transformation.
The most successful contemporary venture to capitalize on Dickens's Great Expectations is the one with which this essay began, the
video dating service, Great Expectations Services for Singles. With
some forty offices in cities across the country and more than one hundred and twenty-five thousand members, it claims to produce "almost
two weddings a day" (Winokur 239). The enterprise is a nice model of
the kind of cultural pastiche that characterizes the postmodern era. It
fuses information technology with that nostalgically Dickensian name,
and it charges hefty tees (often approaching $2,000) for performing a
richly ambiguous personal service: supplying partners tor marriage
and/or casual sex. Its founder and president, Jeftrey Ullman, who
conceived the idea tor this multimillion -dollar corporation while living
in a Berkeley commune during the counterculture years (Kravitz 277),
conflates venerable political rhetoric about self-determination with
contemporary jargon about lifestyles and the single person. Similarly,
the company's brochure jumbles together incompatible values deriving from several different cultural epochs. Note the clash between the
claims to technocratic efficiency, leisured dignity, workaholic time
pressures, and a hip ability to size up strangers in this passage from a
promotional letter addressed to "Dear Single": Great Expectations "is
a wonderfully efficient-and dignified -way to find the kind of person you prefer to socialize with, before you agree to meet with them.
So you don't waste your precious time on blind dates or with losers."
In a telephone interview on 29 June 1994, Ullman confirmed that th.e
inspiration for his company's name came from Dickens, although It
was the brainchild of his father, a pediatrician born in an earlier age.

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After suggesting the name, Ullman's father remarked that the title
came into his head because he was old enough "to have gone to
school with Boz"; his son, having never heard of Dickens's pen name,
thought his father must be referring to Boz Scaggs. The cultural markers that adorn this dating service are scarcely less disparate than these:
fledgling Victorian novelist meets blues guitarist.
Dickens's presence in the popular culture of this century has not
always been characterized by incongruity. At an earlier moment, during and just after World War II, when the great "modern" values of
democratic nations had been under severe challenge, Dickens's image
was more serious and coherent, an instrument of cultural consolidation, not consumerist expansion. I can bring out the difference by
contrasting two carefully marketed images of the author, the Classics
Illustrated comic book versions of Great Expectations. The first version
of this story was published in 1947, whereas the second, entirely new
version came out in 1990. 4 The first version rapidly became a collector's item-today, a copy in mint condition sells for over $800. Although this issue is number 43 in the series, it is the most valuable
Classics Illustrated ever published because it was never reissued once it
became the target of an attack in a best-selling book about comics by
Dr. Fredric Wertham, Seduction ofthe Innocent(1954). Here are a few
lines from Dr. Wenham's attack:
There is a comic book which has on its cover two struggling men,
one manacled with chains locked around hands and feet, the other
with upraised fist and a reddened, bloody bandage around his
head; onlookers: a man with a heavy iron mallet on one side and a
man with a rifle and a bayonet on the other. The first eight pictures of this comic book show an evil-looking man with a big knife
held like a dagger threatening a child who says: "Oh, don't cut my
throat, sir!" Am I correct in classifYing this as a crime comic? Or
should I accept it as what it pretends to be- Dickens's Great Expectations? ( 311)
A glance at the cover reveals that Dr. Wertham described the scene
4
I want to thank Joseph Witek for guidance and insight into the world of Classics
Illustrated comic books and to the work of Rick Geary. His excellent Comic Books as
History provided me with my first orientation to the criticism of this genre. Assistance
With locating copies of the 194 7 Classics Illustrated Great Expectations was provided by
Dan Malan, editor of Classics Collector Magazine; Hollis Lawrence O'Neal of Nashville,
Tennessee; and Rich Rostel of Louisville, Kentucky.

JAY CLAYT0;\1

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fairly well, as tar as he went (Figure 1 ). His description of the succeeding pictures \vas equally accurate. My point, however, has nothing to
do with violence in comic books, a topic that today seems almost
quaint. Rather, I want to draw attention to the cultural markers embedded in this scene, markers of masculinity, power, legal authority,
and ultimately, national identity. An honest, square-jawed blacksmith,
a well-equipped soldier, and a boy dressed in his best Christmas suit
witness a struggle between determined adversaries, the free and gallantly bandaged Magwitch beginning to rise above the treacherous,
deservedly manacled Compeyson-a struggle between good and evil,
clearly enough, with the values of a nation's men at stake.
When one turns to the 1990 version of the same story, the first
thing one notices is the very different scene the artist has chosen as the
centerpiece of his interpretation (Figure 2). The cover of a comic book
is meant to grab the attention of the potential buyer, and these covers
employ very ditlerent strategies tor that end. Both covers dramatize
formative moments in a child's life, and both emphasize the impressible young boy's status as an observer. In each, he is outside the scene,
watching with rapt attention. But one is an action scene, full of violence, and involving only males; the other is a scene of stasis-indeed,
it symbolizes the deathly stasis of Miss Havisham-and features two
female characters. The visual dynamics of watching are present in both
covers, but the later version introduces a self-reflexive dimension that
is missing fi-om the earlier. The picture is an optical illusion, in which
Pip appears to be looking at a painting or a tapestry, framed by the
border of the carpet and by what may be a doorjamb to his left. Moreover, the spectatorial act is even more prominent, since the reader,
who is positioned behind Pip's head, sees what Pip is seeing and thus
shares what film theorists call his "gaze."
Lest one think I am reading notions of gender and self-reflexivity
into a work entirely innocent of such pretensions, let me provide a bit
of background on Rick Geary, the creator of the 1990 comic. Geary
first gained notice as a cartoonist for the National Lampoon, where his
strips were praised for their droll, deadpan humor and their interest in
the oddity of everyday life. Prior to working on Great Expectations, he
had published several collections of cartoons, two of which were A
Treasury of Victorian Murder and Rick Geary)s Oddities. After finishing
the Dickens story, he produced two original comic books titled
Blanche Goes to New York (1992) and Blanche Goes to Hollywood
(1993), both set in the early years of this century. The choice of a female heroine and a historical setting for these quirky mysteries indicate

Figure l. Classics Illustrated, 194 7.

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something of his interest in the topics of gender and history. Although
both comics display his fascination with what film theorists call "the
gaze," the second Blanche story makes this concern explicit by having
the heroine come under the patronage of the movie director D. W.
Griffith. (This director, it is \Vorth mentioning, was said by Eisenstein
to have learned the technique of montage from reading Dickens.) Finally, Geary's story also highlights the artist's political concerns, tor it
sympathetically recounts the struggle of the Wobblies to unionize the
film industry.
What should one make of the differences between the two comics,
of the shift from a male scene of power and authority to a female domestic scene of stasis, of the heightened self-reflexivity about the dynamics of spectators and the gaze? Clearly, the masculine scenario
owes much to the prevailing conventions of World War II army
comics. The two muscular figures struggling on the cover evoke
Sergeant Rock or Sergeant Fury more than half-starved escapees from
a nineteenth-century prison ship. An even more direct int1uence may
have been David Lean's movie of Great Expectations, which came out
the preceding year. The comic's plot f{>llows the movie in several
places more closely than the book-particularly in the decision to
leave out the character of Orlick entirely, a choice generally regarded
as a major flaw in the movie (see Moynahan; MacKay; Giddings; Tharaud). Geary had no such immediate visual precursor. Perhaps, too,
Geary was aware of the controversy over violence that engulfed the
earlier version. Still, the 1990 comic, with its camp awareness of its
own cultural positioning, is mocking at the very points where its predecessor was earnest. The original Classics Illustrated were marketed as
being "better" than ordinary comics, more serious, more educational.
That was why Dr. Wenham's critique could have such a devastating
effect. Although the publisher of the contemporary Classics Illustrated
gestures toward this same educational mission in his prefatory note, he
spends more time touting the "distinctive, fresh and innovative" styles
of his contemporary adapters. The publisher is well aware that the
largest market for these $3.75 books consists not of thrill-seeking children, nor even of students looking tor a crib, but of adolescent and
adult comic collectors, who value this art fc>rm f()f its own sake. In the
best postmodern fashion, Geary dispels any sense that Dickens should
be treated as an object of veneration and focuses instead on the quirky
and bizarre. This comic might just as well have been called, in homage
to Geary's other works, A Treasury of Dickensian Oddities. But

GR 1
\IHHIII

RirK GMRY

figure 2. Classics Illustrated, 1990.

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perhaps to a postmodern sensibility such a title would have seemed redundant.


To conclude this contrast, let me return to David Lean's 1946
movie. This classic film has received ample attention, but one question
relevant to this discussion has never been addressed: Why was this director, who was to become the preeminent cinematic poet of colonialism in works such as 1he Brir{qe on the Riper Kwai (1957), Lawrence
of Arabia ( 1962 ), and A Passage to India ( 1984 ), attracted to Charles
Dickens? Is there a link between Lean's vision of Great Expectations
and his later fascination with the fate of the British empire? The connection is to be found in his depiction of Magwitch after the convict's
return to England from his transportation to the colonies. The
deathbed scene between Magwitch and Pip is the true climax of the
movie, tar more important, in Lean's rendering, than Pip's reconciliation with Joe, or even the extravagant happy ending with Estella that
so many viewers have deplored. The bond between these two men
generates the most intensely felt emotion in the picture, an emotion
that enables the two figures to overcome all the divisions of class, education, and age. In the presence of this emotional bond, one is reminded of the other intense relationships in Lean's oeuvre between
males from remote cultures: I .awrence with the Arab boys, Faraj and
Daml; Colonel Nicholson with his Japanese counterpart, Colonel
Saito; Fitzgerald with the Indian, Aziz. This last pairing is responsible
for Lean's greatest liberty with E. M. Forster's novel, the Indian and
the Englishman clasping hands in friendship at the film's end. Anita
Desai, Rustom Bharucha, and Millicent Bell have rightly denounced
this bit of colonial nostalgia, but the motif is clearly crucial to Lean's
vision, and it was there, in embryo, in the love between Magwitch and
Pip. The fantasy is that a certain kind of bond between men of honor
can overcome the violence, the horrors, the injustices of this world.
The genesis of Lean's fantasy came just after World War II, when
Britain's hold over its colonial others had been lost. Dickens served the
ends of this fantasy, providing a symbol of those qualities in the national character that might still secure the hegemony of British civilization, even if the nation's place in the new world order was permanently diminished.
In the aftermath of the war, Lean's vision was not as outrageous as
it may seem today. George Onvell, writing a few years earlier in 1940,
identified the same fantasy as the core of Dickens's appeal: "His whole
'message' is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If
men would behave decently the world would be decent" (Orwell

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417). To a postmodern novelist, however, born in one of Britain's former colonies, the message seems little less than appalling. Salman
Rushdie, writing in 1984 about both Onvell and the Lean of A Passage to India, finds this fantasy to be at the core of the "zombie-like
revival of the defi.mct Empire" (101 ). Rushdie calls his essay "Outside
the Whale," signaling his rejection of the stance Onvell took in the
title piece of his collection, Imide the Whale ( 1940). As it happens, this
slender volume is vvhere Onvell's essay on Dickens appears, a Dickensian (or postmodern?) coincidence that helps locate each judgment in
its respective historical moment.
Rushdie is pertinent to this discussion f(x another reason. He is
one of several postmodern novelists who have responded to Dickens in
their fiction (others include Kathy Acker and Graham Swift). In The
Satanic Verses ( 1989 ), Rushdie invokes a different Dickens text, his
last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend. A climactic moment in the
narrative takes place at a party on the set of a movie version of a musical based on Dickens's work, now retitled Friend! The set is a "huge
re-creation of Dickensian London" (421 ), which condenses the
nineteenth-century city so that the landmarks of Dickens's imagination
lie shoulder to shoulder in hallucinatory proximity. "Real" celebrities
mingle with "counterfeit" guests, hired f()r the occasion to wear period costumes. One of the extras, a buxom maid with a map of London drawn in red magic marker on her right breast, tries to seduce Saladin Chamcha in a mock Curiosity Shop. This drunken encounter
combines t:uniliar postmodern playfi.Jlness about the indistinguishability of imitations and originals with more disturbing motifs: nationalism, xenophobia, misogyny, and racism. As she unfastens her blouse,
this "cartographically bosomed stranger" (425) sings a parody of one
of the musical's solos, mocking the accents of foreigners in a "RexHarrisonian" patter and praising London as the "World's Metropolis."
Chamcha stands horrified, transfixed by the sight of her breast. "The
metropolis summons him"-but which one?-until, "giving an entirely Dickensian cry, [he] pushes his way out of the Curiosity Shop
into the madness of the street" (424).
In postmodern terms, Rushdie's movie set is a simulacrum; but,
then, Dickens's London has always been a simulacrum, an image more
real than reality, one that attracted its first tourists during his own lifetime and that continues to draw them by the busload today. Such perplexities are a far cry from the "message" of Dickens in the 1940s.
Rather than serving to consolidate a coherent national identity, this
author has come to symbolize, ti:Jr Rushdie, a form of madness

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characteristic of contemporary existence. The madness of the street


stems ffom the fact that, in a postcolonial world, "There is no consensus about reality," to quote again ffom Rushdie's essay on Orwell and
Lean ( 100). One character in Satanic Verses remarks, "The modern
city is the locus classicus of incompatible realities, " 5 and this comment
applies as much to the London outside the movie set as to the Dickensian simulacrum within. But if Chamcha now experiences the streets of
London as a form of madness, it is only, Rush die seems to say, because
of a logic already visible in the "roaring streets" Dickens wrote about
in the last line of Little Dorrit.
Let me draw some conclusions about contemporary culture ffom
what I have said so far. It has become commonplace to assert that a
consumer society has no historical sense, that advanced capitalism depends upon a single-minded focus on novelty. At the same time, shoppers cruise through a landscape saturated by
references to the
past, hair salons and candle stores labeled with bad historical puns.
These allusions are so bizarrely out of context, so laughably inappropriate, that one scarcely notices them. for most people, they have certainly lost any literal reference to the past. They exist only as a kind of
cultural malapropism, good f{x a brief smile, if that. Consequently, the
experience of cultural dissonance has become a routine part of daily
life. But one can learn many things from it. I will mention three: First,
the experience of cultural dissonance one encounters on television and
at the mall represents a distinctive form of historical sensibility, as
common in "high" as in "popular" cultural expressions. Postmodern
literature, art, and architecture refer to history through devices so excessive that they have become signs of the time. These devices include
allusion, parody, and hyperbole, all of which are used to place isolated
cultural details in incongruous juxtapositions. By taking features of
past cultures out of their contexts, the postmodern work promotes a
particular form of historical sensibility: ironic, selfreflexive, textualized, eclectic, and discontinuous. One can see this sensibility on display not only in Salman Rushdie's fiction but also in the promotional
brochures of Great Expectations Services for Singles. Second, this
mode of historical experience, which critics often regard as a defining
feature of postrnodernisrn, was not unknown to the nineteenth century. It was, in fact, one of the principal vvays in which Dickens encountered the cultural (as opposed to his personal) past, and that is
5
My thanks to Timothy Watson, who drew attention to this passage from Satanic
Verses in his thoughtfi.d posting on VICTORIA.

JAYCLAYTO:--J

62T

why the Dickensian city seems so appropriate a svmbol for the "incompatible realities" of contemporary society. One should not be surprised at the grotesque afterlife of Dickens in today's world. It reflects
a logic at work in his own texts. Third, this logic means something dif..
ferent in 1994 from what it meant to David Lean and
makers of
Classics Illustrated in 1946 and 1947 -or to Dickens and his contemporaries in 1861. A genuinely historical inquiry requires one to
these differences, even if one insists on the lines of continuitv well.
Great Expectations-and at last I refer to the nmel b\ ( :harles
Dickens-mixes cultural signs from different periods as
and as incongruously as any postmodern text. Joe, the simple blacksmith, for example, represents a nostalgic portrait of .1 tlgure from .111
earlier era, a phase of capitalism fast disappearing in 1861 , \\hen the
novel was published, although not as uncommon in rural areas in the
1820s, when the novel was set. The values associated with Joe--integrity, unswerving loyalty, pride in one's craft-accrue to thi-; residual economic order, thus serving as an implicit critique of the more
highly developed dominant economy of London. Staging the contrast
as one between country and city helps to reduce the sense of in congruity f(x readers. Still, the incompatibility of this ideal with modern
existence is dramatized at the end of the novel. The onh- wa\" Pip un
find to be true to the lessons he has learned from Joe is to spend
eleven years away from the f()rge in his companv's colonial branch in
Cairo. Pip's summary of those eleven years represents the mmt "Victorian" moment in the book. His only consolation, the thing that enables him to hold up his head when he thinks of how badly he h,ls behaved, is that now he "lived frugally, and paid mv debts." If the reader
had any doubts about the middle-class positioning of this Victorian
ethic, Pip clears them up without delay: "I must not le.n-e it to be supposed that we were ever a great House, or that we made mints of
money. We were not in a grand way of business, but \\T had a good
name, and worked for our profits" (436 ).
If Joe is a holdover from a rural, pre-Victorian mode of e,1rl\' capitalism and Pip matures into a thoroughlv up-to-date middle class Victorian, then is there anyone in the novel who might be said to f()reshadow postmodernism? I am happy to say that there is. That person is
not Pip, so the answer to the question in my title must be:
Pip is
not postmodern. The character who has the best claim to that role is a
minor figure, although a favorite with readers down through the vears:
Wemmick.
Mr. Jaggers's clerk conflates enough incongruous cultur.ll signs in

622

CULTUR/\L CRITICISM

his humble person to become a veritable icon of the Dickens icon. A


model of businesslike decorum at the office, with his post-oftlce mouth
and his invariable advice to look after "portable property," he is an entirely different man at home, where he indulges his Aged P, shyly courts
Miss Skiffins, and lovingly tends to his house and garden. The split between these two incarnations is so profound that Pip speculates that
there must be "twin Wemmicks" ( 356 ). A division of this kind, between
the self in its "private and personal capacity," to use Wemmick's words
(273), and the public, professional self is seen often enough today but is
hardly restricted to postmodernism. This kind of alienation was, in fact,
one of the hallmarks of the "modern"
a condition that Marx famously identified as a consequence of urban capitalism.
If a divided self were Wemmick's only distinctive characteristic,
then he would be an unusually pure representative of a single historical
type, "modern man." But Wemmick's interest hardly stops there. His
home at Walworth is his other claim to fame. It is a little wooden cottage, which Wemmick has transformed into a miniature Gothic castle,
perfect in every detail, including mock fortifications, a moat with its
own drawbridge, a flag, and a cannon, which is discharged punctually
at nine o'clock every evening. He lives in a simulacrum of another era,
a theme park version of feudal England. And like today's theme parks,
he takes pride in bringing to life a cliche. Wemmick has turned his
house into a literal incarnation of the saying "A man's home is his
castle." His mode of existence-inside this simulacrum -reproduces
the economic conditions of a "freehold" (200), as far as is possible in a
suburb of nineteenth-century London. As Wemmick proudly explains,
"I am my own engineer, and my own carpenter, and my own plumber,
and my own gardener, and my own Jack of all Trades" (200).
Inside the castle is Wemmick's prized "collection of curiosities."
His treasures "were mostly of a felonious character," including a
forger's pen and "a distinguished razor or two" (201 ). The collection
is a treasury of Victorian murder, as odd as Rick Geary's postmodern
comic book of that name. The Aged Pis so proud of his son's accomplishment that he thinks "it ought to be kept together by the Nation,
after my son's time, for the people's enjoyment" (200). After visiting
some of the houses preserved by the British National Trust, with their
mismatched architectural styles and their (tar more expensive) collections of curiosities, I sometimes wonder if they did. In short, Wemmick's home is a postmodern pastiche, a simulacrum, as misshapenand comical- as "Great Hair-Spectations" at the local mall.
With Wemmick as a guide, one begins to notice that Great Expec-

JAY CLAYTO!'."

623

tations itself is a palimpsest of different cultural periods. Raymond


Williams has pointed out that no era is ever characterized by a single
ideology, and he has proposed dividing cultural beliefs along temporal
lines into the "residual, dominant, and emergent." In Dickens's novel,
one can identifY traces of at least five different epochs, each competing
with the others for cultural space: ( 1) the "feudal" freehold of Wemmick's castle; (2) the preindustrial capitalism of Joe's forge; (3) the
"Victorian" middle-class values of Pip's mature years, with their clear
connections to the fortunes of empire; (4) the "modern" alienation
that splits Wemmick into twin selves; and ( 5) the "postmodern" world
of simulacra and pastiche. The discontinuity among these layers contributes to many of the novel's most enduring effects: the comedy of
Wemmick, the tenderness toward Joe, the ethical growth of Pip, and
the social commentary on modern urban alienation. Yet few readers
before today have ever read them as signs that there is "no consensus
about reality." The more usual procedure has been to single out one
strand and elevate it as the master discourse of the text. Where Dickens's contemporaries saw the novel as a return to the comic types and
affectionate portraits of his youthfi.1l fiction, modernist critics perceived
a new, "dark" phase of social criticism, and David Lean and the Classics Illustrated of the 1940s discerned images of masculinity and na.tiona! identity that could symbolically replace the loss of empire. Only
at the end of the twentieth century have people begun to focus on discontinuity itself, seeing in Dickens a foreshadowing of the "incompatible realities" of postmodernism. When Elvis comes calling tor Estella,
can any marriage be too far-fetched?

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CULTURAL CRITICISM

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Glossary of Critical
and Theoretical Terms

Most terms have been glossed parenthetically where they first appear in
the text. Mainly, the glossary lists terms that arc too complex to define in a
phrase or a sentence or two. A few of the terms listed arc discussed at greater
length elsewhere (teminist criticism, for instance); these terms are defined succinctly and a page reference to the longer discussion is provided.
AFFECTIVE FALLACY First used bv William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley to refer to what they regarded as the erroneous practice of interpreting texts according to the psychological responses of readers. "The Affective Fallacy," they wrote in a 1946 essay later republished in The Verbal
Icon ( 1954 ), "is a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and
what it does) . ... It begins by trying to derive the standards of criticism from
the psychological effects of a poem and ends in impressionism and relativism."
The affective fallacy, like the intentional fallacy (confusing the meaning of a
work with the author's expressly intended meaning), was one of the main
tenets of the New Criticism, or formalism. The affective fallacy has recently
been contested by reader-response critics, who have deliberately dedicated
their efforts to describing the way individual readers and "interpretive communities" go about "making sense" of texts.
See also: Authorial Intention, Formalism, Reader-Response Criticism.
AUTHORIAL INTENTION Defined narrowly, an author's intention
in writing a work, as expressed in letters, diaries, interviews, and conversations.
Defined more broadly, "intentionality" involves unexpressed motivations, designs, and purposes, some of which may have remained unconscious.
The debate over whether critics should try to discern an author's inten625

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