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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 East-hope and McGowan, 202-05.

Easthope, Anthony, and Kate McGowan, eds. A Critical and Cul-tural Theory Reader. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism or, The Cultural Lo._qic of Late Capi-talism. 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

JAY CLAYTON 607 --end of the platform to the other without endangering human life. But this evening the depot was astir: the powerful locomotive-a reno-vated 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 at-tention, 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 Expec-tations Services for Singles, the nationwide video dating company, of-fered its members tree tickets on the two-and-a-half hour dinner ex-cursion on the rails, a $42.95 value. An Elvis Menu of his personal favorite foods-hamburger steak, mashed potatoes, and corn bread-was available f(Jr dinner. Alas, this attractive package no longer exists. Shortly after the Elvis Love Train began running, the company re-ceived notice from Graceland that their use of Elvis's name repre-sented 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 emo-tional appeal, the sentimentality, the promotional genius, the commer-cial crassness, and the legal maneuvering that surrounded both Dick-ens 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 differ-ent figures but to register one instance of Dickens's continuing pres-ence in contemporary popular culture. Like it or not, this sort of phe-nomenon 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

6o8 Cl'LTURAL C:RITICISM

creations: Miss Havisham in her decaying bridal dress, or Pip fantasiz-ing 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 encom-passes, in ways that I will outline, a whole range of contemporary phe-nomena, 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 af-tcrlife.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

1 fur a more extended account of the various ways in which this term is used in cui· rural studies, sec Clavton.

2As 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 re-sponse to my query about references to Dickens in popular culture, I received wonder-ful, 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 Donald-son, 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 ful to J anicc Carlisle for encouraging me to undertake this project; to Louise Graham 0

Tulane University tor her intelligent questions and assistance; to Jamie Adams ofVan-derbilt's Learning Resource Center for help with preparing slides; and to my Julie Fesmire, Greg Hecimovich, and Mark Schoentield for their comments on a dr

0

this essay.

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The Simpsons that presented takeoffs of Dickens novels. The Paper Chase and Happy Days each have segments titled "Great Expecta-tions," and The Twilight Zone called one show "In Praise of Pip." On Saturday morning cartoons, Disney's Scrooge McDuck remains a peren-nial 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 expecta-tions," 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 reserva-tions 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

6ro CULTURAL CRITICISM --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 them-selves.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 net-work of critical journals, academic book publishers, scholarly societies, conferences, foundation grants, graduate fellowships, and salaried po-sitions 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 Expecta-tions. In the Richmond area, there is a candle shop called Great Wax-pectations; in Winnipeg, a dessert restaurant called Baked Expecta-tions; 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, how-ever, 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 com-mercialism in the Dickens Christmas, or the combination in academia of idealism and love of literature with an institutional apparatus requir-ing professional credentialing, publication tor tenure, and the ranking of universities. This kind of irony, I am arguing, characterizes Dick-ens's presence in contemporary culture. Incongruity, contradiction, the juxtaposition of mismatched signifiers and ill-assorted values-these are the tokens by which Dickens travels today. And tor this rea-son, if for no other, Dickens is perhaps the most postmodern nine-teenth -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 inven-tion of a new genre, the Christmas tales, which were increasingly suc-cessful as specially printed seasonal books and which later were care-fully 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 con-sumer economy, with its investment in advertising, marketing strate-gies, and household goods. As historians and cultural critics such as Martin J. Wiener, Jennifer Wicke, and Thomas Richards have demon-strated, in the decades after the Great Exhibition of 1851 a "new com-modity culture dominated by advertising drew on and ultimately sup-planted any alternatives to it" (Richards 1 ). This change helped foster a booming secondary market tor Dickens's creations. In his own life-time, Dickens saw the Little Nell Cigar, Pickwick Gamp Um-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 li-censing such spin-offs, he understood the publicity value that came &om their wide diffusion. From Pickwick onward, the green monthly

6!2 CULTURAL CRITICISM --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 read-ings 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 life-time. Today, one sees the full effects of this one-hundred-year-long transformation.

The most successful contemporary venture to capitalize on Dick-ens'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 hun-dred 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 deriv-ing 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 per-son 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.

]AYCLAYTO:--: 6!3

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 mark-ers 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, dur-ing 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 consolida-tion, 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 collec-tor's item-today, a copy in mint condition sells for over $800. Al-though 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 pic-tures 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 Ex-pectations? ( 311)

A glance at the cover reveals that Dr. Wertham described the scene

4I 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.

Figure l. Classics Illustrated, 194 7.

614

JAY CLAYT0;\1 615

fairly well, as tar as he went (Figure 1 ). His description of the succeed-ing 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 em-bedded 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 gal-lantly 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 impress-ible 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 vio-lence, 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. More-over, 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 fe-male heroine and a historical setting for these quirky mysteries indicate

G R 1 \IHHIII

RirK GMRY

figure 2. Classics Illustrated, 1990.

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6q

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.) Fi-nally, 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 do-mestic scene of stasis, of the heightened self-reflexivity about the dy-namics 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; Tha-raud). 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 pre-decessor 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 chil-dren, 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

6!8 Cl'LTliRAL C:RITIC:ISI\1 --perhaps to a postmodern sensibility such a title would have seemed re-dundant.

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 di-rector, who was to become the preeminent cinematic poet of colonial-ism 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 con-nection 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 reconcilia-tion 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, edu-cation, and age. In the presence of this emotional bond, one is re-minded 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 na-tional character that might still secure the hegemony of British civiliza-tion, even if the nation's place in the new world order was perma-nently 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

jAY CJ.AYTOC\1 619

417). To a postmodern novelist, however, born in one of Britain's for-mer colonies, the message seems little less than appalling. Salman Rushdie, writing in 1984 about both Onvell and the Lean of A Pas-sage 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 Dicken-sian (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 musi-cal 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 pe-riod costumes. One of the extras, a buxom maid with a map of Lon-don drawn in red magic marker on her right breast, tries to seduce Sal-adin Chamcha in a mock Curiosity Shop. This drunken encounter combines t:uniliar postmodern playfi.Jlness about the indistinguishabil-ity of imitations and originals with more disturbing motifs: national-ism, 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 "Rex-Harrisonian" 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 en-tirely 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 life-time and that continues to draw them by the busload today. Such per-plexities 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

620 Cl 1LTURAL CRITICISM --characteristic of contemporary existence. The madness of the street stems ffom the fact that, in a postcolonial world, "There is no consen-sus 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 Dicken-sian 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 de-pends upon a single-minded focus on novelty. At the same time, shop-pers 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 inappro-priate, that one scarcely notices them. for most people, they have cer-tainly 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 ex-cessive 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, textual-ized, eclectic, and discontinuous. One can see this sensibility on dis-play 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 cen-tury. It was, in fact, one of the principal vvays in which Dickens en-countered the cultural (as opposed to his personal) past, and that is

5My thanks to Timothy Watson, who drew attention to this passage from Satanic Verses in his thoughtfi.d posting on VICTORIA.

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why the Dickensian city seems so appropriate a svmbol for the "in-compatible realities" of contemporary society. One should not be sur-prised 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 contem-poraries 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 black-smith, 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--in-tegrity, unswerving loyalty, pride in one's craft-accrue to thi-; resid-ual 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 con-gruity 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 "Victo-rian" moment in the book. His only consolation, the thing that en-ables him to hold up his head when he thinks of how badly he h,ls be-haved, 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 sup-posed 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\' capi-talism and Pip matures into a thoroughlv up-to-date middle class Vic-torian, then is there anyone in the novel who might be said to f()re-shadow 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

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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 en-tirely different man at home, where he indulges his Aged P, shyly courts Miss Skiffins, and lovingly tends to his house and garden. The split be-tween 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 fa-mously 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 cot-tage, 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 accom-plishment 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) collec-tions of curiosities, I sometimes wonder if they did. In short, Wem-mick's home is a postmodern pastiche, a simulacrum, as misshapen-and comical- as "Great Hair-Spectations" at the local mall.

With Wemmick as a guide, one begins to notice that Great Expec-

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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 Wem-mick'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 con-tributes 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 Dick-ens'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 Clas-sics 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 dis-continuity itself, seeing in Dickens a foreshadowing of the "incompa-tible realities" of postmodernism. When Elvis comes calling tor Estella, can any marriage be too far-fetched?

WORKS CITED

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Desai, Anita. "The Rage for the Raj." The New Republic (25 Nov. 1985 ): 46-50.

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Eisenstein, Sergei. "Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today." Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. Ed. Jan Leyda. New York: Harcourt, 1949.

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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 suc-cinctly and a page reference to the longer discussion is provided.

AFFECTIVE FALLACY First used bv William K. Wimsatt and Mon-roe C. Beardsley to refer to what they regarded as the erroneous practice of in-terpreting texts according to the psychological responses of readers. "The Af-fective 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 commu-nities" 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, de-signs, and purposes, some of which may have remained unconscious.

The debate over whether critics should try to discern an author's inten-

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