The Great Expectation of the Event
In perhaps the key chapter of the Cinema 2 book (the Power of the False) Deleuze argues for the virtue of the false over the ‘true’. Things that are true exist within time and are understood through the movement image alone (Deleuze 1989 p.133): In contrast the event, Deleuze suggests, demands quite a different form of reasoning. He argues that to understand events as they are in time and not merely as movement, we need to unhook events from action, and understand them as what puts truth in question (ibid p.130). Each event exists therefore, not in itself but as a way of affecting other events - of pulling them this way or that – and will, in so affecting them, re-fashion its own nature (ibid p.139). From this perspective one never simply narrates the event – rather one is always caught in the middle of its re-negotiation - the same event will constantly shift its meaning as it is given. The universe of events is therefore the world of co-present and yet incompossible worlds; With any one set of combinations of events - being merely a single case – therefore always in the act of shifting into another case in the very moment in which it is given (ibid 131). In this paper I will examine this power of the false - and its complex relationship with time – through a fairly detailed series of readings of Dicken’s penultimate finished book Great Expectations. My aim will not to be to present either a straight Deleuzian reading of Dickens or even a Dickensian take on Deleuze, but rather by analysing in detail the complex affects that Dickens creates in Great Expectations to open up a zone of communication between these two radically different writers.
How does one then read Dickens? Dickens, ironically is let down by the very strength of his plots. I mean we all think we know Dickens, once we know the plot (and/or have watched the television adaptations). From such a perspective Dickens could not of course be further from Deleuze; he appears simply to be the great novelist of the movement image. And yet anything more than a cursory reading of Dickens will reveal something far more complex going on, both on the level of the narrative itself, and in the events which he recounts. Great Expectations is not just a ‘great story’ told by a dispassionate and objective author – but a memoir written many years after the event by the main character in the book - whose eventual redemption through memory, forms the climax of the book itself. The event that creates the narrative is itself therefore part of the story – a fact which one needs to consider as one is reading it. On a slightly more general level, I would argue that Dickens does always need to be read in terms of the particular tense in which he wrote any one book – Great Expectations is firmly a book of the past, while Barnaby Rudge is a book written in the future – and Bleak House is a book written in two different tenses, one author (who is also a character in the novel) writes in the past, and the other author (who may or may not be Dickens) writes in the present historic.
How then should one read Great Expectations if it is not just a very good narrative? Following Deleuze, I will argue here that it needs to be understood as a work of diagnosing affects – where the affects it uncovers will in each and every case involve a different complex and mobile synthesis of the same three basic events. These events being; Magwitch’s meeting with Compeyson, Miss Havisham being jilted at the altar by Compeyson, and the birth of Estella (of whom Magwitch is the father). All these events happened many years before the novel commences, and two of which are only revealed in the final book. Different characters are then caught up in the criss-crossing of these three events which endlessly interact with one another, each new interaction spawning new events, - and with them new possibilities. Each character in the novel will exist on a dual axis – on the one hand they are defined by the number of events which they have directly (or indirectly) participated in (of whom only Magwitch directly experiences all three); On the other by their attitude towards events, and what it means to be caught up by them. In the course of Great Expectations, Dickens will identify two very different syntheses of events, which I will characterize as ‘Being Witness’ and ‘Becoming Criminal’. The question here is never about truth or falsehood – the witness is just as bigger liar as the criminal, nor is it in the contrast between time image and movement image, as both syntheses involve events, and remain in differing ways, virtual. But rather it revolves around two totally different takes on what an event is – and in exactly what, its creativity consists of. On the one hand is the witness who is constituted within the past of a particular event; on the other, the criminal who is content to wander across widely different events. However it is also clear that for Dickens, things are not quite that simple, and that he presents in Great Expectations not only two great (and contrasting) syntheses, but also a variety of different possible hybrid syntheses – between these two apparently incompatible affects. In the rest of this paper I will attempt to outline each of these moves. My method, for reasons of space, will be not to represent a complete survey of all the different witness or criminals in Great Expectations – (a task which certainly would take more than a medium sized book to achieve), but rather I will outline each synthesis from the perspective of a single character who embodies it. The result will no doubt be an over simplification – which will be particularly problematic in my outlining of the two basic types – and yet it represents the only possible way to give an overview.
What then is a Witness? The great witness of Great Expectations is undoubtedly Miss Havisham, but what is she witnessing? The Event itself is obvious - her life bears perpetual witness to her broken heart and to the fact that she was jilted at the altar. And yet such a fact does not tell you to what she is witness of, as it is clear that she is not witnessing a past present. Although she has literally stopped all the clocks – and never removed her wedding dress, she is painfully aware that the event which she is witnessing, is not or never has been, present as she never did marry, but rather her marriage passed directly from immediate future – into absolute past without ever being present. The event that Miss Havisham is caught up in witnessing, is therefore an event whose sole reality lies in its occupying a past which was never present, and which only ever gave itself in the past. Such an event (in her case her aborted marriage) will then be witnessed across the present in which it manages to forge its sense of being an overarching and never present past. The past event will operate as a vampire (the becoming-vampire of Miss Havisham) which battens onto others and the actuality of others – which it will then claim for itself.
Where then does this vampire past originate? In what sense can an event jolt one into an act of witnessing rather than becoming? Deleuze in Cinema 2, suggests that there exists within a single crystal of time, a point where the actual and virtual world enter into direct communication with one another as each pass into the other’s reality. In this moment the virtual becomes actual and is visible as a limpid reflection in a mirror or crystal of time; while the actual will then become virtual and opaque, and refer to elsewhere. The Crystal is therefore the point of exchange – or of indiscernibility, where that which had been virtual becomes actual – and that which was actual, virtual; with which exactly is which at any one moment of exchange depending on the local conditions, and point of view. However in the case of Miss Havisham, it is as if a certain event has cracked the crystal of time at this moment of exchange (as Miss Havisham was dressing) and the clocks were quite literally stopped. This shattering has two quite catastrophic effects. On the one hand, as the crystal splits, the virtual remains caught within the actual – and vanishes (Miss Havisham’s heart is permanently broken), while the actual world remains virtualized and unable either to ever actualize itself again or to ever pass away. On the other hand all further exchanges between the virtual and actual world across which events normally and perpetually re-negotiate their nature are suspended and Miss Havisham is frozen in one virtual- actual exchange, which is preset for all time. This is a complex move, as it clearly involves all aspects of the crystal exchange being fixed. It is not just that Miss Havisham is trapped in a virtual without an actual, but that she is trapped in the very moment an actual has past into a virtual. What is more, the virtual she is trapped within, does not relate to her own memory – or her own virtuality, but rather to the virtualizing of the actual – a virtualizing, that will then be expressed in taking up actual relations of her environment, and rendering them virtual. However this process will involve no exchange in itself, and will demand the environment which she virtualizes (her large and ruined house) is in itself forever actual in relation to this virtuality. There exists between Miss Havisham and her world a chasm; on one side is the actual world of spiders and rot, an actual world which as it actualizes, is dragged elsewhere and caught within a virtual that does not reflect it; on the other there is Miss Havisham, who inhabits a purely virtual world, a world whose actual is lost in time and cannot be retrieved. It is no wonder therefore that neither Pip or Joe Gargery can visit Miss Havisham without subsequently lying about the experience – how else does one express a virtuality that has eluded all actuality – and yet at the same moment gathered the actual to itself, - than as a lie? It is not then just that an event shattered the crystal of time, but that the same event trapped Miss Havisham in one of those shards, in a virtual, which can neither actualize itself nor be actualized in an environment – but rather must perpetually force everything to refer to a vanished past.
The consequence of this shattering of crystal time will be that Miss Havisham is caught in a purely virtual shard which cannot of itself make anything actual, and so ironically enough, by itself cannot be the witness of anything at all; To be a witness she needs another’s actuality across which she may manifest herself, that is, she can only ‘become witness’ by also ‘becoming vampire’. It is then this craving for another’s actuality that explains Miss Havisham’s demands to see the young Pip and to witness his play. This play will operate as the crystal seed to Miss Havisham’s environment and is the means through which Miss Havisham can give herself some form of actuality. And yet this is no normal relation of crystal and environment, as there can be no point of indeterminancy between Miss Havisham and Pip. The absolute schism which Miss Havisham has opened up between the virtual and the actual is maintained – with Pip on one side, and Miss Havisham on the other. Miss Havisham’s sole interest in Pip lies in his ability to reflect in the actual world, what exists for her only in the virtual. Pip is of course totally unaware of the way that Miss Havisham is using him. All that he is aware of, is the demand to be actual – it is no wonder therefore that Miss Havisham leaves Pip with a contempt for his own becomings, and the desire to be a gentleman (that is to be fully actualised).
The Vampire-witness therefore is a strange witness. They never witness a present or even strictly a past - but rather an event, which has cracked crystal time, and trapped them within a single crystal shard. Their vampirism then lies in the fact that to witness this event, they require another’s actuality be taken over – and forced to bear witness to a virtuality which is very distinct from its own, so that in this very disjunction of time, there is seen again what it means for a crystal to be shattered by an event. From all this it will of course follow that every vampire-witness is quite unaware that it is undead. The vampire, of its essence must remain a fully virtual shard of crystal-time, with no knowledge of its actual being, nor care about its effect on others. Miss Havisham has little or no interest in what Pip is, or is becoming, and only knows how he satisfies (or not) her own ravening intensities. This of course is then what changes at the end of the novel, as in witnessing Pip’s own heartbreak, Miss Havisham’s own crystal is at least momentarily mended when Pip’s own actuality accurately reflects (and so completes) Miss Havisham’s virtuality. At this moment, a normal crystal is restored to her, and the virtualized actuality that she has so long embodied, is free to pass away. The result is that Miss Havisham is translated from a fully virtual world into a fully actual one, and then dies. Her last acts will then all revolve around the actual rather than the virtual world (they concern money inheritance – and a plea that Pip should fully understand and forgive her), while her death (by burning) simultaneously destroys the artefacts (the dress and rotten feast) with which she has so long lived.
The contrast with the Witness in Great Expectations is the Criminal, the individual of excess and passion, whose criminality in fact corresponds closer to the reality than the witness ever achieves. Again, rather that running across the full range of examples, and all the different types of criminals in Great Expectations, I will concentrate on one – the most obvious and best defined – namely Abel Magwitch, Pip’s erstwhile benefactor. Magwitch is unique in Great Expectations in two ways: On the one hand he is the only character who is caught up in all the three events across which the novel is arranged; on the other hand, and more importantly it is Magwitch who embodies three key aspects of events and becoming.
Firstly he understands that each event demands a becoming. One does not witness an event, but rather one becomes through it. Magwitch responds to each of the three basic events of the book by producing a novel becoming: becoming first lover (in the event of Estella’s birth), then becoming hound (in his blind service on Compeyson, a hound which then turns upon its master), and finally becoming woman (as with Compeyson’s wife he witnesses the final act in Miss Havisham’s aborted marriage – the death of her brother). What is more, Magwitch knows that it is not enough to become in each event – but that also that one must produce new becomings each time any two events converge. For example, Magwitch’s meeting with the child Pip, is an event in itself which exists as the meeting of two different events (meeting Compeyson, and the birth of Estella), which it makes resonate in one another, a resonance that Magwitch then responds to by producing a new becoming, that of becoming uncle. Or again on Magwitch’s return home, he does not meet up with Pip without creating in this new event a new becoming (becoming friend) nor does he get caught up in the death of Compeyson without producing a final new becoming – that of becoming saint. Or to put this as Deleuze did in A Thousand Plateaux, Magwitch is aware that he is not a thing, but a pack of symbiotic becomings, – which cannot add a new dimension, without creating new becomings.
Secondly Magwitch knows that all becomings are excessive. Part of Magwitch’s problem is that he is not human – his feelings always overflow the human and defy humanity: Be they feelings of hunger, which make him a ‘heavy grubber’; or a lover whose love is not restricted to his wife; or an uncle, whose excessive gratitude crosses 6000 miles of stormy ocean makes Pip a gentleman. Magwitch has feelings that cannot be contained to one soul, but rather flow outwards to others, and demands that they respond - either by becoming themselves or by attempting to take him up within the act of witnessing and so capture him. It is no wonder therefore that Magwitch summarises his life as in jail and out of jail - wandering or imprisoned. That is, (as Deleuze might say) becoming criminal is to create a pack and Magwitch is the great creator of packs be they packs of lovers (as in the birth of Estella), or friendship, (as with Pip and ‘Pip’s friends’) or enemies (as with Compeyson, who can write in ‘a hundred hands’, and creates a pack to hunt him down). Finally Magwitch understands that events involve stories - that one does not relive an event by attempting to endlessly witness it – but rather by telling a story – a story which is an event in itself, and will bind up the listener to a new and quite different becoming (a becoming that Magwitch will confirm by forcing the listener to swear an oath on his black bible.) In the terminology of A Thousand Plateaux, one might say that Magwitch’s stories place him in the role of the anomaly - the sorcerer who comes from outside (from the Marsh or the sea) and changes everything - creating new problems (singularities), and packs that are caught up by them.
Dickens therefore, in Great Expectations, creates two very complex syntheses through which an event can re-forge its world. The Criminal is one who is content to inhabit falsity directly – and creatively, reaching out to others in a ceaseless re-forging of the world. The Witness in contrast, can create only once they have induced actualizations in another – which they then take up and make bear witness to quite a different (and fully virtual) event. However for Dickens it is clearly not enough to merely identify contrasting affects, - he also wants to suggest contrasting possible syntheses between these apparently mutually exclusive approaches. For reasons of time I am going to be very brief here ignoring one synthesis entirely (that of Orlick), and presenting three others in quite schematic form – but I hope at least to show some of what is involved in all these highly complex moves.
The first disjunctive synthesis of Witness and Criminal revolves around the lawyer Jaggers. Jaggers is a man of great contrasts. On the one hand he is the man who makes everyone else into his witness and so traps them into being actual. One the other, there is Jaggers himself who never himself is a witness to an event, and who ensures that in his own use of language, there is always ambiguity and further possibilities. He therefore makes everyone else his witness not in the service of truth, but rather so that he can ensure that the present is never fully actualized, and always remains pregnant with further possibilities (and that his clients remain alive).
Jaggers will therefore force witnessing into the service of becoming, that is criminality. And yet things are not that simple. In the past there is an event, namely his instigation of Estella’s adoption by Miss Havisham, where apparently he reversed this relationship – and made becoming serve witnessing. What is more, this is the very event that will then elude any one witness – and which in bringing together (unknown to Jaggers) all three events of the novel in one single event – creates near endless new possibilities and combinations. Jaggers could be said therefore, to exist on the cusp of two disjunctive syntheses: He perpetually converts the witnesses into criminals; whilst once - and only once, has he reversed the procedure, and thereby sparked off a series of events, that defied any act of witnessing.
The second disjunctive synthesis is that of Jagger’s clerk – Wemmick, whom Dickens describes as having two quite different personalities (a good twin and a bad twin). In the office he is a pure witness. But a witness who does not witness events as such – but rather the very process of dismemberment that creates witnessing in the first place; that is the very jolt by which crystal time is cracked, and the actual torn asunder from the virtual. Or to put it another way Wemmick is literally the witness of Death itself (which he witnesses ‘virtually’ in a before – the final handshake for the condemned criminal, and in an after - wearing mourning jewellery in memory of hung clients).
At home however, there is a very different Wemmick. Wemmick’s home life centres around a wonderful machanic assemblage – a false castle at Walworth. This house with its battlements, drawbridge, cannon and aged father, express a revelling in the very falsity of past. A revelling that creates endless new becomings and possibilities. Walworth therefore operates as a space where the past is liberated from any act of witnessing, and revealed as endlessly creative. As with the two Jaggers, the two Wemmicks will operate as a disjunctive synthesis of good and bad twin. The Bad twin will operate as a filter of events that he has witnessed (as he keeps his ears open without appearing to) - and tells the good twin what he needs to know. It is then the good twin, in the retreat of Walworth, that puts on ‘his considering cap’, and enters into a space of incompossible presents – of combinations, and creativity: it is here then that Wemmick masterminds firstly Herbert’s being given a job through Pip’s money – (the only enduring deed which Pip does with his wealth), and secondly Pip and Magwitch’s possible line of flight. If Jaggers’ disjunctive synthesis creates new ambiguities far beyond his control, Wemmick will directly create options and possibilities within the world.
The point is clear – as witness and criminal talk to one another, new possibilities are opened up and developed. But Dickens has one last synthesis – a synthesis that is less disjunctive and more redemptive. The climax of the book is not Compeyson’s drowning or Miss Havisham’s burning or even Joe’s happiness in marriage, but its rather strange and very ambiguous end – an end which appears to re-unite Estella and Pip, and yet in friendship not love - and friendship that is described as being a ‘friendship apart’ and whose consolation is that it ‘fears no presentment of any future parting’. The point here then, is not whether or not the two remain together, so much as what they have reconciled - namely the past. It is not in the present that they are to know one another - but the past, and it is in their past, that they can become friends.
The starting point for this redemptive synthesis is Estella. Estella is a very different kind of witness to Miss Havisham. If Miss Havisham was the witness of an event, Estella is the witness of becoming itself. This act of witnessing has two distinct layers. On the one hand Estella is well aware of the nature of becomings – and endlessly acts to incite becoming in others. On the other hand, not only does she never become herself (as she has no heart), but also she immediately and completely actualizes all virtuality – and thereby robs it of the very creativity she has inspired. Or to put it in terms of my above argument – Estella is a mirror which forever gives a limpid reflection of the virtual – but a reflection that can imply nothing more than itself, and which creates no further opaque zone and so robs the virtual of all further possible creativity. Estella of course understands this and with it knows that this particular combination of inciting becoming and fully actualizing all becomings, can only destroy anyone who gets too close to her. She therefore very appropriately selects as a husband Bentley Drummle – the man whom Jaggers describes as the Spider – in the fore-knowledge that being destroyed by one’s wife is the Spider’s normal fate.
Estella is caught therefore, in the opposite side of the mirror or crystal of time to Miss Havisham. On Miss Havisham’s side there is only one event which has ruptured crystal time, and caught her within a single splinter of virtualized actuality. For Estella in contrast, there is only the actualized virtual, which simultaneously provokes new futures, as it erases their creativity. She does not inhabit therefore a world of events at all – and so can no more be caught in a single event than she can lose her heart. It is no wonder that Miss Havisham and Estella’s single dispute concerns the nature of time and memory. It is then this mirror that Pip shatters in the Event of breaking his heart over Estella. Both Estella and Miss Havisham witness this event – but then react to it very differently and in very different times. Miss Havisham’s reaction is more or less immediate – she loses the possibility for any further virtuality – and so dies. But the effect on Estella takes many ‘weary years’. The key point for Estella being, that Pip had in his final agony, still blessed her – and wished her well. This final act of unlimited and selfless blessing, forces Estella herself to come up against an Event which can never be fully actualized, and which operates through time, and across other events. This event will then catch up Estella, and transform her nature in two key ways. Firstly, she cannot witness this event without straightening out time – and making it into a positive and redemptive force. It is this event that will free her, and allow her to forget Miss Havisham’s lessons, so that across time itself, she can create for herself a heart (and give Pip a place in it). Secondly, as she is redeemed through time, her memories are transformed into becomings, across which she is free to befriend Pip anew – and learn to value ‘what she through away before she could value it’. What Pip and Estella reconcile in the last lines of the novel, is their pasts: In the present they might be divided – and remain friends apart. However this separation can cause no further fear – as what they have together - what they can create, is a friendship which is able to transform their shared past and through which they will become not only reconciled with passing years – but that very passage becomes endlessly recreative and redemptive.
I asked at the start of this paper, how one should read Dickens – how one should liberate one’s reading from the very strength of his narrative – and understand how that narrative is moved forward by other hidden currents. My answer in this paper is that if one reads Great Expectations with Deleuzian eyes, it immediately becomes resolvable into a conflict between two totally different attitudes towards the event - and possible syntheses which run between these attitudes. From such a perspective – the famously ambivalent end becomes clear: Pip, in his last vision, as he stands in the ruins of Satis House with Estella and sees in the mist of the marshes no fear of a future parting from her – understands what she has given him, the ability to be not only reconciled, but creative with one’s memory and with time – a project then that Dickens on a very deep level, shares with Deleuze.