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All the Year Round: the Magazine
where Great Expectations was
originally serialized.
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Good question. I have a roundabout answer that will require a brief excursion in more general issues.
Tweaking Reality
I felt this for a while and am only now beginning to articulate it clearly, but, what draws me to science fiction, fantasy, and supernatural horror aren't necessarily their content--the aliens, the zombies, the sorcerers, etc.. Rather, what draws me to them is their unique relationship to reality. These genres--which I call the "weird genres"--tweak reality. What do I mean by tweak?
This is an obscure word usually thought to come from twiccian (to pluck) but has been used since the late sixties to refer to "fine-tuning or adjusting a complex system" (Lord Wikipedia). It's also used more colloquially to refer being "under the influence of methamphetamine" (Urban Dictionary).
I like calling upon all these shades of meaning when using the word tweak in terms of tweaking reality: (1) slightly altering the ontological rules that determine reality; (2) doing so in such a way the experience/effect of it suggests a drug-induced state, a different mode of perception; (3) and doing so in a slightly aggressive, violent way.
By tweaking reality, I mean, making it strange, bending its rules, allowing something to exist or something to happen that shouldn't happen. And the effect of this tweaking reality might be best articulated as a kind of altered perception, a new experience.
For science fiction, fantasy, and horror, quotidian reality is a starting point that is deviated from. It is a kind of base that, through contrast, foregrounds non-reality. Its aesthetic effects depends on a reality principle to deviate from.
Back to Charles Dickens...
In Great Expectations Dickens plays with reality in a significant sort of way. He continuously "tweaks" reality. Consider the following passage. Some background: the main character, Pip, is watching as a convict is being taken to a prison ship:
"By the light of the torches, we saw the black Hulk lying out a little way from the mud of the shore, like a wicked Noah’s ark. Cribbed and barred and moored by massive rusty chains, the prison ship seemed in my young eyes to be ironed like the prisoners.” (39)
I’m struck by the figurative language here, the simile comparing the soldiers to the ship and vice-versa. Also, I’m struck by how Pip metaphorically figures the Hulk as a “wicked Noach’s ark.” Let me try to explain why.
Not only do we have individuals being turned into objects, we have a reversal of this effect here, the turning of the ship (an object) into an individual (a subject). Also, we have the ship being figured through a kind of literary citation, if you will, an allusion to the Biblical story of Noah and the Ark.
We have here an intense example of what narrative theorists would call “focalization.” The surface texture of the world is filtered through the interpretive lens of young Pip. It's focused through him.
Indeed, the world derives from his subjectivity—his identification of visual patterns, his literary corpus knowledge.
Remember: “Seemed in my young eyes” (39, my emphasis). This verb “seemed” gives me pause.
“Seems” implies that the world unfolded through narration is an interpretation. We don’t have here a purely subjective interpretation of the world. Folded into the narrative is an allegorical “material,” a—I’m not sure what to call it—“story substructure” that Pip’s subjectivity is colliding with.
My hunch is that there is an interplay between two worlds here: the subjective world of the narrator and the objective world. It seems that Dickens tends to play with collapsing clear cut distinctions between the subject and the object.
He tweaks reality by breaking down clear cut distinctions between where characters' "interior" consciousnesses end and where the material, "external" world begin.
Subjectivity (consciousness, if you will) spills out onto the the objective world.
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