Words and images

Abstract

My story, like many others, begins with a book. By the time that I reached junior high school, I had become a committed, even an obsessive reader, but the first novel that I read that signaled that I might have found a vocation was Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. I don’t remember precisely when and why I first read it—it certainly was not as an assigned text in school—and I can’t remember why I loved it as much as I did, but it was the first book that I read over and over again, drawn in, I think, by what a twentieth-century critic called its “secret prose.” Rereading Great Expectations now, as I still do, I know what I have come to love about it. The wildly inventive qualities of its figurative language never cease to amaze me. The older Pip looks back on the story of his life and melds his young ability to be the kind of observant child that Dickens himself was with an adult capacity to turn those observations into verbal pyrotechnics. The plants in a ruined garden, for instance, are not simply weeds; rather, they seem to be “a spontaneous growth of weak attempts at pieces of old hats and boots, with now and then a weedy offshoot [taking on] the likeness of an old saucepan.” In this novel Dickens achieves a tone that is almost as often comic as it is deeply sad. Pip as a child during a memorable Christmas dinner is treated to “those obscure corners of pork of which the pig, when living, had had the least reason to be vain”; and, later on, his friend Herbert Pocket is so “desperate” to earn a living that he often talks of “buying a rifle and going to America, with a general purpose of compelling buffaloes to make his fortune.” Endlessly fascinating are also the complex ways in which Pip tries to make peace with his past even as he registers his inability to transcend his earlier meanness or to confront honestly what has driven his ambitions. Yet now when I read Great Expectations again, I can also recognize—though I have only relatively recently recognized—that its plot and its main character must have set up resonances of which I, as a schoolgirl, could have been only barely conscious. When Pip tells the story of himself as a village boy who longs to escape his current