>> It gives me great pleasure
to introduce my friend and colleague Melissa Kort. Melissa has her BA from UCLA,
and while she was doing that, she took a semester abroad -- or a year abroad --
was it a semester? >> Year. >> Year? A year at
the University of Kent in Canterbury. She then had -- got her MA at
the University of Virginia, and recently -- or fairly
recently it seems to me anyway, but it probably is
ten years ago -- she got her PhD from
the university of spoiled children
also known as UCSC. And it was -- the topic
was "Facing the Camera: Dickens Photography and the
Anxiety of Representation." So Melissa's background has a
very, very strong background in not only British
literature generally but specifically in Dickens. She's been at SRJC
off and on since 1979, but that also includes
time as an NEH Scholar in North Carolina, a
Fulbright Exchange Teacher in, York England, and
semester's teaching for SRJC's London
program abroad. She has published on subjects
ranging from faculty development to children's tooth care. So who knew? So today I welcome
Melissa, and I know that -- that all of us have
-- we might say -- "great expectations" for
this wonderful lecture coming your way. Melissa. >> Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Bob and I are celebrating
30 years of being here at SRJC together, so we've
known each other a long time. I want to make an
apology to start with because I thought there
would be a screen in front of me for me to see this, so
every so often I'll have to turn and read this. I'm not trying to be rude. Also, those of you who came
early enough and were listening to the music, I hope
you made the connection between that music and
Great Expectations. That is the music of Handel's
Harmonious Blacksmith, which, if you remember, that's how
Herbert Pocket gives Pip the nickname "Handel" because
the only blacksmith that Herbert has ever known
about was from this piece of music, the Harmonious
Blacksmith. So there's a Dickens'
connection to everything. Also, I -- the picture
here of the -- the Norton Critical Edition
of Great Expectations, that's the one that the page
numbers are for the whole -- for all of the slides. And that's the man himself,
called himself the "inimitable." And we'll talk about Dickens
in Photographs as I go along. But one thing I want to do before the lights
totally blind me is, how many people have
finished reading the novel? Okay. So I won't be giving
away anything for you. How many people, if you haven't
finished the reading novel -- reading the novel have at least
read the first section of it? Good. And how many people
have never read Dickens ever in their lives? All right. Hi up there. >> Melissa? >> Yes. >> Gooseneck. >> Oh sorry. Gooseneck. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome. So I'm going to start -- my
theme today is really how to read Dickens on
the lecturer who -- even though Dickens is my
special field, I really want to make sure everybody's on
target to read Dickens well. I think we assume we
know how to read Dickens because it's English after
all, but it's difficult -- challenging to get used to
read Dickens differently. And I'm also trying to talk
to those of you who want to read other novels
beyond Dickens to think about strategies for successful
novel reading in general. So I'm going to give
you four simple rules for better novel reading. First one is, watch
out for aliens -- I'm going to go into detail
about this as I go along -- assume every word
counts; go to the movies in your head; and
connect the dots. So the first world -- word -- the first rule is
watch out for aliens. And I get this metaphor
of the aliens actually from Karen Joy Fowler
who came to talk here at SRJC a few years
ago about Jane Austen. She wrote -- she's the author
of "The Jane Austen Book Club," and she said -- I
asked her a question. She had originally been
a science fiction writer, and I asked her how she moved
from writing science fiction to writing this novel about
people who read Jane Austen, and she said she felt science
fiction readers were the best readers around because
when they opened a book, they always knew they
were on an alien planet. And they would spend their time when they were initially getting
accustomed to the book trying to figure out the rules and
regulations of that alien place. So the first rule, watch out for
aliens, is based on this idea that every novel creates
a world of its own. And the concurrent
idea that every novel, if it's worth reading, should
be providing a map of how to negotiate that world. So if you think about the
opening of "Great Expectations," and I have here illustration
from the 1946 David Lean film of Great Expectations
of Pip in the graveyard, you think of that opening
scene of Pip in the graveyard, much of what it is doing is
trying to set out the map for how you're supposed
to read the book. That is, you're supposed
to read into the book. Rather than take it
merely literally, you're supposed figure
out, use your imagination, engage in the book in the
same way that Pip engages with the shape of the letters on
his parent's tombstone to figure out what they look like. And I'm going to go
into detail about that. If you look very carefully
at the opening chapter, you actually get all
the rules for how to negotiate the
rest of the novel. The second part of
this comes from a line, "the past is a foreign country." I think a lot of
students, particularly, get I think the kind word
would be to say "flummoxed" by reading Dickens because
they don't recognize the place. I once had a student many
years ago who said to me that he hadn't done
the assigned reading, which at the time Dickens'
novel "David Copperfield," because he said, "It happened
a long time ago, and besides, I never plan to go to London." I want you to think about going
to a novel as an opportunity to -- a novel like this -- as an
opportunity to visit the past. This is your entranceway,
this is your tourist's visa. And it gives you opportunity
to enjoy being in the middle of the past, reading this
like somebody in the past at the same time that you can
be somebody in the present. It's kind of when in Rome, do as the Romans do except
you're never really Italian. [ Chuckling ] This is a student of mine -- I'm
going to focus on the beginning of the novel though I'll be
talking about some things that happen later as well. This is a line from a student
of mine I don't see in the room but so I don't have
to give you her name. She wrote an online discussion
that we're having in that class, it's English 46, she wrote, "While I have enjoyed reading
more of "Great Expectations," I keep thing about
the first chapter. In the first few pages
the reader gets a slew of information. I learned so much about Pip
and his awful upbringing, the poverty and the hunger of
the time, and the class system. The chapter was also
somewhat gothic. It builds tension and
fear, and most importantly, it builds sympathy
and investment within the reader for Pip." I could spend an hour
lecture just trying to get you through the first chapter. Actually, I could spend an
hour lecture trying to get you through the first page
because it's so complexly done, it's so heavily ladened with
meanings, that it helps to set up that roadmap, take that first
step into the foreign country by very slowly going
through the opening chapter. But I'm going to try to be a
little bit broader than that. I'm going to dip into a lot of
the opening chapter and then try to get broader than that. So the first one -- rule,
watch out for aliens. The second rule, assume
every word counts. And this is an image
of Dickens' manuscript of "Great Expectations," so
for those of you who are still under the false assumption
that you can write brilliantly without ever having to go
back and correct yourself, even in the first few lines
there's Dickens writing and revising and
revising and revising. I think that really shows
all of us as writers to be humble before the page. Dickens very carefully
chose his words. It's a myth to say that
there's a lot of words in Dickens' novels because he
was getting paid by the word. That's simply not true. There's a lot of words
in Dickens' novels because he has very
complex characterizations and very complex plots
and he was try -- yes, he was trying to
sell his magazines, but he wasn't being
paid by the word. Every word that's in there is
going to pay off in some way. And so the more we can pay
attention specific words, the more we can get
out of the novel. And this is true about any
work of literary merit. I want to reinforce that. The novels that you read -- my mother used to read
doctors' novels, you know, it's like a story -- same
exact story all the time: The doctor fell in love, and the
doctor almost lost the person's life, and the doctor saved
the person's life, and have -- same story every single time. I would not ask her to pay
attention to every word. But when you're in
the presence of a work of great literary merit such
as "Great Expectations," paying attention to every word
actually pays off in a big way. So the sentence I
want to concentrate -- my favorite sentence in the
whole novel -- is this one. This is at the very
beginning of the novel. This is when Pip is
looking at the tombstone. He says, "As I never saw
my father or my mother and never saw any
likeness of either of them for their days were long
before the days of photographs, my first fancies
regarding what they were like were unreasonably
derived from their tombstones." So the trick about paying
attention to every word, every word counts,
is that you have to know what those words mean. All right? So the keywords for me in
this passage are the terms "likeness," "the
days of photographs," "fancies," and "derived." So when I look them up, I find out that likeness
means resemblance, similarity, image, outward appearance. The days of photographs I'm
going to get into in a minute, just hold that thought. Fancies are the product
of imagination. It's kind of old-fashioned
word to talk about imagination. It's the feelings of desire or
liking, conceptions, fantasies. And derived means
obtained something from; to induce or deduce from facts. And I find this paragraph -- this sentence gives a set
of contradictor ideas. First of all, Pip is
making sure -- Pip -- Dickens is making sure
that we know that the world of Pip is before the world
of photographs; certainly, the world of Pip's childhood is
before the days of photographs. Why is that important? Because photography posits
a certain way of seeing, where you get exact
reproduction in a photograph. And the fear at the time was that if we can photograph the
world, why should we paint it? Why should we write
novels about it? How can we accomplish
anything more realistic than the photograph? So there was -- this is what
in my dissertation I called the "anxiety of representation." There was a fear that with
this mechanical ability to reproduce the world that all
of the imaginative reproductions of the world in art were
going to become useless. And Dickens sets this
novel purposely before that can happen. In a preindustrial world we
start off at the forge -- we don't start off in the
city or at a factory -- we're at a preindustrial world
where things were simpler and clearer and emotionally
richer in Dickens' estimation, where the problems are
not quite so complex. You can see as Pip gets older, the problems become
increasing complex as the world becomes
increasingly widespread. So "likeness," which at the time
in which Dickens is writing -- 1861 the book comes up -- likeness is something which
can be reproduced mechanically, but in the world Pip
is talking about, likeness is reproduced
imaginatively. It's the product of fancy. And it is unreasonably derived. It's not logical that
we look at reality and come up with this story. It's unreasonable
that it's derived from Dickens's experience,
Pip's experience of the world. And as you read through
the novel, you know, you start to realize that this
is the much older Pip writing about his childhood and writing
for the purpose of trying to explain himself, to
justify himself, to figure out, how the hell did I get here? Why did I act that way? So he's looked back on
the facts of his life and he's retold the story in a
way that fits his imagination, that fits his needs -- his needs to present himself
in a certain way. It's the same thing
as when you're sitting that dinner table next to your
sibling or you're reporting to a group of friends -- two
of you have gone somewhere and you're reporting
to a group of friends, and you each tell the story of what happened
totally differently. You're telling the story in
some way to feature the thing which shines best on you. Look at how strong
I was in that event. Look at how smart I was
in making that decision. Look at how funny I was
in cracking that joke. And the person next to you
tells the story in the way that most benefits him or her. This is a story told in the
way that most benefits Pip. It's his imaginative recasting. It's a likeness not
an exact reproduction. So just to give you a
sense of what is meant by "the days before
photography," I give you this very
complicated list of dates. Don't worry. You don't have to
memorize all of them. The key that I want you to
think about here is this date on the bottom -- let me find
my mobility ability here -- so 1861, right here, this
is when the novel comes out. So by the time "Great
Expectations" appears, photography is extremely well
establish in Great Britain. The early date to look at is
1834, 1837, Henry Fox Talbot -- William Henry Fox Talbot
develops the photograph in Great Britain, the negative
process that we now know. Louis Daguerre develops
the photograph in France which was not a paper
process but a process which etched the image
onto a metal plate. And I've actually
brought with me -- they're too fragile for me
to pass around in this big of a group -- but I've brought with me some examples
of Daguerreotypes. They were metal plates
so that -- that were etched by chemicals. So you don't want them
to be etched again by accidently scratching them
so they were always produced in these kinds of
beautiful cases. This one a leather one. This one is a -- this
is embossed leather. This is actually very early
nineteenth century plastic and it has the photograph
inside. So if you want to come
and look at it afterwards, you're welcome to come. And I've also brought
with me a couple of -- to me very precious so I will
hunt you down and shoot you if you walk out with these. That's on record now. These are two examples of
photographs of Dickens. These were actually taken
in Dickens' own time with the process that
was invented in 1851. These are collodion
prints, much cheaper. They would have been
photographed in a special camera that prints eight images
on a page on one negative, so they were much cheaper because you were paying
basically an eighth of the price of a regular photograph. And these would have been sold
in all sorts of different shops in London and in other cities. Dickens' image was so
prolific, so well known, that he felt he could not
walk the streets of London without being recognized. It's kind of like, there weren't
things like "People Magazine" yet but he became a celebrity through the production
of photographs. So even though he says -- sets the novel in "theirs were
the days before photographs," Dickens' own days were not. He was very much a product
of a photographic culture. So these are up here as well. Again, I know who you are. I will chase you down. Matthew Brady, do you
recognize that name? He's the Civil War photographer. If you've ever seen a
photograph of the Civil War, it was probably taken
by Matthew Brady. And he also was the primary
photographer of Abraham Lincoln. So what does the
reference to photography, even though what Dickens does
is he never mentions photographs again in the book, he says, "theirs were the days
before photographs" and that's the last
we hear about it? But it has a benefit to
the novel as a whole. It's part of that initial setup: How do I read the
rest of this novel? What does the reference
do for Dickens? It helps establish a
timeline for the novel. And if you do have the
Norton Critical Edition, that edition I showed at the
beginning, there is an article at the back of that which shows
how a literary scholar would try to establish a timeline for
the novel: When was Pip born; how old is Pip at any given
moment; what are the years between which this
novel takes place. I want to warn you against
going online to establish that because Wikipedia
and the other sources that are reading Wikipedia
have the dates wrong. But the one that's in your
book is very scholarly and I think very useful for you. It basically says
the novel starts -- Pip is about age seven, and
he reaches age seven somewhere within the first decade
of the nineteenth century. So definitely the decades
before photography was invented. Let me say because I forgot
to mention this: If you looked at the beginning of the book and
you see the handwritten version from his manuscript
that puts the title page and then he has his dedication, it says partly recognizing
Dickens' relationship to photography. He dedicates it to his friend
Chauncey Hare Townshend who was first private collector
of photography in Great Britain. First person to recognize that
this is a form that's going to be important enough that having a collection
would be worthwhile. He had a weird reason for it. He was into mesmerism,
which was like seances. That's how Dickens met him because Dickens was
really interested in it. And Townshend thought that
photography was going to be able to show creatures
from other worlds, the dead would come back, we could paragraph
auras, that sort of thing. He was little weird but he
was a good friend of Dickens. So the mention of
photography helps us to establish a timeline
for the novel. It also helps to establish
the novel functioning in a real world. Much of the novel
seems like it exists in some other world
where, you know, women stay in their wedding
dresses for years and years and years, and, you know,
miraculous things happen, miraculous accidents and
stuff like that happens. But because it mentions
real things like photog -- like the photograph, we know
it's a part of the world that we the readers
live in as well. This is for me the
big important part. It contradicts the
prevailing idealizing of mechanical reproduction. It's basically Dickens
thumbing his nose at photography and all mechanic
reproduction and saying that the imaginative mind
as opposed to any kind of mechanical storytelling,
mechanical art -- the mind, the imagination, is
far more important than any of these machines of progress
that we're involved in. And finally, it places
fancy above fact. We know that Pip isn't
telling us the absolute truth. He's a kind of unreliable
narrator because he's trying to show himself off
to be better, not to be blamed,
not to be so guilty. He's trying to expiate that
guilt as he tells the story. His imagination, his imaginative
memory, is more important than the facts of the event, even though as he reports those
facts, we're able to judge who Pip is by contrasting
what he says about the facts and what the facts say to us. But he's -- Dickens
and Pip are going to privilege fancy above fact. One of the elements in which that becomes really important
is the theme that runs through the novel, that
appearances can be deceiving. So a good example of this is
the fact that Pip can dress like a gentleman even before -- and look like a gentleman even
before he's really acquired any of the skills of a gentleman. His appearance makes him seem
like a gentleman already. And in contrast Drummle and
Compeyson, if you've met both of these characters, Drummle
and Compeyson both look like gentlemen but they
behave not like gentlemen. Drummle is cruel and vicious, and Compeyson is
simply a con-artist, a kind of evil con-artist
but dressed well, and because he's dressed well,
he gets a lighter sentence than Magwitch does -- the convict does because the
convict isn't dressed well at all. So appearances can be deceiving. Jaggers tells us -- -
Jaggers is the lawyer. For those of you who haven't
gotten there, he's the lawyer who will help -- who helps Miss
Havisham but also helps Pip in the administration of
his great expectations. Jaggers says quite famously,
"Take nothing on its looks. Take everything on evidence. There is no better rule." Of course what we find out
when we first meet Jaggers, when Pip first gets to London,
is that Jaggers is trying to find witnesses
who look believable. Jaggers -- when Pip first meets
Jaggers, Jaggers is trying to find a witness, and I
think it's Mike or somebody who brings the witness in, and
Jaggers looks at him and says, "He doesn't look like
he's trustworthy. Why are you bringing
this guy to me?" So appearances are
actually important to Jaggers even though Jaggers
says appearances don't count. So we're just going to open
this whole thing up again. Okay. The other quotes
that I have here -- and maybe you can
recognize this without Joe -- without having it
in front of you. But do you remember, some of
you who have gotten farther through the novel, when Joe
goes to visit Pip in London and Pip is so rude to him, and
when Joe is leaving, he says, "I'm just not right
in these clothes. I may be appearing like
I'm in the right place, but I'm not actually right
in these clothes at all." Joe knows that he's
not really right in London even if
he dresses well. Magwitch also -- when
Magwitch comes back -- and for those of you who haven't
gotten that far, I don't want to completely ruin that for you
-- but when Magwitch comes back, he also cannot be disguised. He tries -- Pip tries to
dress him in nicer clothes so he won't look like a convict,
but he can't be disguised. Those two characters,
Joe and Magwitch, are both very true
to who they are. So appearances can be
deceiving in bad people. In good people, they will
always be the good people that they are, okay. So my thing is not here at all. >> [Inaudible] >> No. No. No. That's not it. >> Auto play. >> Auto play? >> Yeah. Click on it. >> Click on auto play. Okay. Thank you, so much. What would I do without
students knowing how to work these things? Okay. So we're --
thank you, very much. So we're down -- appearances can be deceiving. So these are the two quotes
that I was talking about: When Joe comes to London and he
can't be anything but himself; and when Magwitch comes and also
can't be anything but himself. That is, goodness shines through
no matter what you're wearing, you are yourself, but evil can
be hidden behind appearances. Okay, so let me go -- this
is just not my system. How do I get my slideshow
to start? From current slide. Okay, so Rule No. 3 we're on now. Rule No. 3 is go to the
movies in your head, and this is the poster
for that 1946 version. I'm going to keep
pushing the 1946 version. You can watch it
completely online if you go to the WOLM page at the
library, she's mount -- Molly has mounted it there. Just click on the
link for the film. Wonderful, wonderful film. Not the same as the novel so
don't watch the film instead of reading the book,
but a wonderful film that really captures
Dickens' novel. What I mean by going
to the movies in your head is utilizing
Dickens' visual sense. Virginia Wolfe said
that he had the "visualizing power
to the extreme." And when you read these novels
you can read them very much as if they are scripts
for movies. In fact, my first idea for
my dissertation was going to be writing about
Dickens in film, and then I found these little
weird references to photographs which led me to write about
Dickens and photography. I love her line, "His people are
branded upon our eyeballs before we hear them speak." It's interesting because
it seems as if she's going for the picture,
this still picture, but she's actually going for
the movie picture; that is, they speak and they act. So here's an example -- John
Jordan used this example on Monday as well -- an example of Dickens being
extremely visual. The argument I want to make
is that when Dickens is at his most visual, he actually
can go so far over the top that it stops being visual and
becomes purely imaginative. So in this -- this passage is
a really good example of that. This is the description, the
first appearance of the convict at the opening of the novel. "A fearful man all
in the coarse gray with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat
and with broken shoes with an old rag tied
around his head. A man who had been soaked in
water and smothered in mud and lamed by stones and cut
by flints and stung by nettles and torn by briars, who
limped and shivered and glared and growled and whose
teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin." Now the first couple of sentences you think
this is a real description. This seems very accurate, very much just get the
picture in your mind. But once we get into catalog
-- he'd been soaked in water and smothered and mud
and lamed by stone -- this long catalog,
it stops being real. It starts to get fuzzy. You almost see too much of it
to the point that it looks fake. And the fakeness here
is to make the convict into something more
than a real person. The convict starts to take on fairytale qualities;
fictional qualities. That word "briar"
stuck in my craw -- now, what am I supposed
to do here? -- [inaudible] No. Okay. It stuck in my craw
because briar rose is one of the early -- one
of the other names -- alternative names for the
story of Sleeping Beauty. Remember, she pricks her finger. So early versions of that
had her prick her finger on a briar bush, a thorn bush. This is from a nineteen-century
illustrated version of Sleeping Beauty,
a briar rose. But you can see that in the
novel we get a lot of things that become fairytales;
that start off with accurate descriptions,
we get pictures in our mind, but then the pictures
become so over the top that they read like fairytales. The convict ultimately
gets referred to as looking like a pirate. Miss Havisham gets referred
to as looking like -- this is an illustration of
Miss Havisham from the end of the century --
she gets referred to as being like a witch. Where you see Dickens' physical
descriptions best I think is in the scenery, and this
is a beautiful description from the end of the first
chapter of the marshlands. "The marshes were just a long
black horizontal line then. As I stopped to look
after him" -- this is the convict
moving away -- "and the river was just another
horizontal line not nearly so broad nor yet so black,
and the sky was just a row of long angry red
lines and dents, black lines intermitted
-- intermixed." The image I have here is a
still from that David Lean film which I think it just took the
book -- open the book, he -- said the director, just
film what's in here. Because it exactly replicates
what Dickens' words are saying. But, again, Dickens goes
overboard, and he starts to analyze what he's looking
at until we get to the end -- the middle, about -- just below
the center, he sees the gibbets and he says, "When
you're near them, the gibbets have some
chains hanging to it which once held a pirate. The man was limping
on towards this ladder as if he were the
pirate come to life." So now we've left
reality and gone into the fairytale,
the fiction here. And that's what happens
with Dickens's visual sense. The movie starts running
in your mind and it starts to become less and
less about reality. This is the truth we know
about movies, because unless that movie is stamped
"Documentary," we know that as real as
that image may look to us -- Gee, they're wearing clothes
I might be to buy at the Gap or something -- we know
that it's fictionalized. And this is where Dickens
is actually experimenting with that idea, you depict
reality with such intensity, you move it into unreality. Rule 4 -- see we're
moving through this. The is my longest rule
so let's make sure we get through it -- connect the dots. What do I mean by that? It's quite simple. When you are reading, especially
a long work like this, but any time you're reading,
you should always be looking for patterns and repetitions. Patterns and repetitions
always yield meaning. There's a reason why we
go back to the same story or the same image
or the same word. So the pattern that I want to
look at, the repetition I want to look at today,
is the idea of food. And I do this in honor of my
English 1A students who are -- for whom the primary reading
this semester before we got to "Great Expectations"
was essays about food; lots of topics relevant
to food today. Food gets introduced to us
on basically the second page of the novel when the
convict says to Pip, "Do you know what whittles is?" Whittles means victuals
which means food. He's hungry. He's starving. But food appears in the
novel in multitudinous ways, and these are just two images
again from the David Lean. Film on the left,
Pip's meal with Herbert when he first arrives in the --
their housing; and on the right, Pip pushing Miss
Havisham around the table that holds Miss Havisham's
bridal -- bridal feast. But I want to start
with the idea in the dialogue with
the convict. The convict actually
turns Pip into food. He says, "You young dog, said
the man licking his lips at me, what fat cheeks you got. Darn me if I couldn't
eat him, said the man with a threatening
shake of his head, and if I hadn't half
a mind to it." And then a page later,
"You fail" -- "so you fail no matter how
small it is and your heart and liver shall be tore
out and roasted and ate." So the first food that we
encounter in this novel is Pip. And those who have read
the rest of the novel know that in some ways Pip is
consumed by the convict. I won't tell you how if you
haven't gotten that far. Here's tea with Mrs. Joe. That sounds like it's
going to be a good event, but look at what Mrs. Joe does. "With her left hand she
jammed the loaf hard and fast against her bib where it
sometimes got a pin it and sometimes a needle which we
afterwards got in our mouth." This meal reads like Miss -- Mrs. Joe's relationship
to Pip, right. She says she's taking care of
him, but she's actually kind of abusing him even
in feeding him. She's rough and tumble. Food carries the meanings
of character in it, tells us something about
the person cooking, the person serving,
the person eating. Pip brings the convict food
-- and this is a key moment. "Pitying his desolation
and watching him as he gradually settled
down upon the pie" -- this is the pork pie that he's
stolen -- "I made bold to say, I'm glad you enjoy it. Did you speak? I said, I was glad
you enjoyed it. Thank ye, my boy. I do." One wonders
how long it's been since this convict has had
somebody express that to him about a meal; who's offered
in generosity this pork pie, which if you were here at John
Jordan's lecture on Monday, John showed how that pie -- Pip had to go out of
his way to find the pie. All the other food
that he gathers for the convict is obviously
on the shelf, but Pip has to go to the back of the shelf
and inside a container to be able to find the pork pie. It's a very special
treat he's brought. But after this moment of -- of
what I would call an exchange of humanity, an exchange
of gracious behavior, Pip then describes
the convict as a dog. "I had often watched a large
dog of ours eating his food, and now I noticed a decided
similarity between the dog's way of eating and the man's." So now -- and he repeats the dog
all the way through the passage to the very end, "in all of which particulars he
was very like the dog." So he's already snobby enough, or at least the older
Pip looking back at the younger Pip meeting
the convict, has the snobbery to say not that this
man is human like me but this man is like a dog. Maybe he's motivated to do
that because he's described -- he's treated like a dog as well. This is when Estella
brings Pip something to eat on his visit to Miss Havisham's. "She 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. The tears started to my eyes." And then she -- he goes on to say he's trying
to control the tears. But here is Pip who has turned
on the convict to describe him as being like a dog; himself
being treated like a dog and experiencing so intently that he can't quite get the
right word for it, experiencing that same humiliation expressed
through a moment of eating. Are you starting to
see the patterns? The morning of Christmas
dinner -- this relates very much
to how Mrs. Joe is in that earlier scene
about the bread. [Coughing] Excuse me. Pip starts, "We were to have
a superb dinner consisting of a leg of pickled pork
and greens and a pair of roasted, stuffed fowls. A handsomest mince pie had been
made yesterday which accounted for the mincemeat
not being missed, and the pudding was
already on the boil." Look how elevated
these words are. "These extensive
arrangements occasioned us to be cut off unceremoniously
in respect of breakfast, for I ain't, said Mrs. Joe, I ain't gonna have no formal
cramming and busting and washing up now with what I've got
before me, I promise you. So we had our slices" --
this is Joe and Pip -- "we had our slices served out as
if we were two thousand troops on a forced march instead
of a man and boy at home, and we took gulps
of milk and water with apologetic continences
from a jug on the dresser." So again we're reinforcing
Mrs. Joe's character, the nature of the
situation of Pip's childhood by virtue of describing a meal. Christmas dinner itself, I'm sure if you've read it
you, you can't forget it. This is when everybody around
him is just berating Pip and attacking him on whatever
they possibly can so that the -- he was not allowed to speak. The food for him doesn't -- he
feels like he's being devoured by the people around him. He is the meal because they
all get a chance to eat up on him, to put him down. And Joe is there but Joe
can't quite save him. The only thing Joe can do -- and this is what the second
passage here is about -- is that when there's -- when
there's a moment like this, he comforts him by
giving him more gravy, and he ends up giving
him about a half of pint of gravy on his plate. This is Joe being nice. So food becomes the
vehicle for character. Probably very famous scene, I'm
not going to read it all to you. This is the description at Miss
Havisham's of the bridal table with the cake rotting
and there's spiders. I clipped out the part that
there's rats running around, mice running around as
well; pretty disgusting. But this table sums
up Miss Havisham. She is not eating anything. She won't let anybody see her
eat now, but she has the -- that terrible relic of
her broken marriage, of her disappointment in
love, always on the table as a meal that goes uneaten. There is nothing more unnatural
than a meal that goes uneaten. You might remember the
first dinner with Herbert if you've gotten to the
second part of the book. The second part of the book
when Pip gets to London, he visits with -- he meets
Herbert who's supposed to help him become
more gentleman-like, and he gets excited by the meal. It's the lap of luxury except
the place is so small that all of the different dishes
which have been brought in from the coffee house
-- so it's takeout -- all of the different dishes
are being kept on top of all of the furniture so that
when we goes to bed at night, he finds much of the parsley and
butter on his sheets on his bed. But it's also the
scene where Pip -- Herbert shows us how kind
he is, how considerate he is in the way he instructs Pip
in how to be a gentleman which starts with how to
eat properly at the table. It's the revenge of all
your mothers who told you to hold the fork
and knife properly; this is that moment
in literature. There's more food
scenes as well. I can't go through all of them. When Pip goes to have
dinner at the Pockets and the Pockets are
neglecting their children -- or Mrs. Pocket is neglecting her
children and Mr. Pocket says, "Babies are to be
nutcrackered dead for people's poor
grandpapa's positions." He eats dinner at
Walworth with Wemmick. That's the warmest, most
comforting, most positive scene in all of the food
scenes in the novel. He has dinner with Mr. Jaggers which is a pretty
horrific scene. Joe comes for tea in
London, and unlike Herbert who treated the newly arrived
Pip with such kindness, Pip treats Joe, again,
from the position of being very patronizing
and very critical of him. So there's a lot more
food in the novel. The theory about connect
the dots really is, you have to answer the question: What do I do once I
see these patterns? What happens when I
see these repetitions? And for me the basic thing
-- and I tell this -- I teach this to all
my students -- is that you have to
ask yourself: So what? So what -- I see all
these references to food, so what is that going
to mean for me? How is that going to better
explain the novel for me? So the simple question is:
Why all the food references? Food is part of the
representation of life. If Dickens is writing a
novel about this young man and how he grows and matures, it
would be natural to find scenes in which people are eating. It's a part of life. Eating is a common activity. We can easily relate to it. Even if we eat different
food than they do, we can still relate
to it easily. And each food scene carries
with it more meaning than what's on the menu as I said. Food was and still is an
indicator of status and class, and we can see that by people
eating different things in different places
in different ways. There's a great essay
if you're interested. It's 1963 so I'm sorry,
it's not available online, but Barbara's Hardy's
essay on "Food in Ceremony in Great Expectations." She argues that in part
it's a sign of love; those who get food,
those who don't get food, it's an indicator of
love in the novel. Very interesting argument,
but in the interest of time, I won't go into it. I really want to
get to the question which I think has been
haunting me more than anything in both the selection of "Great
Expectations" for the WOLM and in encouraging my colleagues
and their students to be reading and enjoying the book, it keeps
coming up: Why read Dickens? And particularly why
choose "Great Expectations" as a Work of Literary Merit? John Jordan said there were
five reasons that we continue to read Dickens 200 years
after his birth: The comedy, the characters, the
storytelling, the social justice
issues, and the language. I want to add to that that Dickens' novels explore
the human psyche and continue to teach us about ourselves. I think much -- I mean the
food examples I think are great for saying maybe I should think
about the meals that I sit at and the way I behave there, or
the way people behave toward me, or what is being
said when my mother or my roommate puts this
dish in front of me; that all eating has some
sort of greater meaning. I learned that by
reading this novel. Dickens' novels also
teach us to think. That is, we watch Pip
thinking rightly and unrightly. We learn how to think
because of it. And, then, finally -- and this
has been my goal when I talk about those four different keys
to reading novels effectively -- finally, ultimately, I would say that Dickens' novels
teach us how to read. All of the rules of good
reading can be exemplified, can be practiced in
reading a Dickens's novel, making this novel
as well as the body of his work quite worth
reading 200 years, and I hope 2000 years
in the future. Thank you very much. [ Applause ] I can take some questions
if anybody has questions. I was so thorough, I knocked
all the questions out of you. [ Chuckling ] Okay. If you want to see the
photographs, you're welcome to come down and look at them. I'm going to watch
you like a hawk.
