"Transnational Appropriations of Dickens: Fluid Identities in Lloyd Jones' s Mister Pip"

Against the background of the ongoing critical debate on 'transculturality' and 'transnationalism' (Page 2011) which explores emerging modes of relationship between cultures and new networks of reception, adaptation and hybridization of literary texts, this paper investigates Lloyd Jones's Mister Pip (2006), one of the most recent and imaginative rewritings of Great Expectations. Echoing the current fascination with the Victorians (Hadley 2010: 1), Lloyd Jones's novel focuses on the power of storytelling and on those practices of re-writing and re-reading that enact, in a wider perspective, the never-ending dialogue between texts (Genette 1982, Allen 2000), thus calling attention to the "intertextual unconcious" enfolding every literary work (Riffaterre 1987). Set in Papua New Guinea during the brutal civil war of the early 1990s, the novel intermingles the growing horror of the conflict and the fictional universe of Victorian England, as conjured up by Mr. Watts, the only remaining white man on the isle, who reopens the local school and daily reads a chapter of Great Expectations to the village children. For Matilda, the 13-year-old-narrator, the unfamiliar world of Pip's marshes, with its "porkpies", and "rimy mornings" ("We could not imagine air so cold that it made smoke come out of your mouth or caused grass to snap in your hands", Jones 2006: 29 ) becomes as real as her own life. Dickens's fictional universe, with the unusual sonority of its 'foreign' language ("I had never been read to in English before. [...] it was a new sound in the world. He read slowly so we heard the shape of each word". Jones 2006: 18) enflames her imagination and gradually provides an escape from the violence of the rebels and the horror of her own existence: "It was always a relief to return to Great Expectations. It contained a world that was whole and made sense, unlike ours" (Jones 2006: 58). What Mister Pip primarily and most extensively explores, as my paper will argue, is the notion of an increasingly blurred and fluid identity resulting from the processes of appropriation and hybridization that characterize cross-cultural and literary encounters in a globalized context (Hall 2006, Gilsenan-Hansen-Llena 2013). The fictional identity of 'Pip' is thus imaginatively associated both to Matilda, who quickly learns how to "slip into the skin of another" (Jones 2006: 20), and to Mr. Watts, who ultimately becomes a Pacific version of Dickens himself. His simplified readings of Great Expectations, whose recollected fragments are eventually written down by the village children to 'save' the story when the only copy of the book is lost, intriguingly merge with the folklore and oral tradition of the children' parents who are invited to share their knowledge of the world. The final version of Pip's story that Watts delivers in the end to the rebels at the campfire weaves together portions of the Victorian narrative and fragments of the islanders' tales and local culture, thus epitomizing a process of appropriation and 'incorporation' of Dickens's text that "mutates and expands to accommodate old and new elements" (Latham 2011:31).