Great Expectations

There is a peculiar cruelty in the title Great Expectations. Expectations, after all, are not possessions, but arrangements with the future. A life presently withheld will eventually become available. Dickens understood how much human existence can be organised around this.

Pip knows things throughout the novel. He learns manners, acquires money. He learns who Estella is, who Miss Havisham is and, eventually, who his secret benefactor is. Yet facts accumulate without producing understanding.

Experience has to catch up.

That is perhaps why Pip remains recognisable long after Victoria died. He is not simply a provincial boy corrupted by ambition, he is somebody who mistakes expectation for evidence.

London helps him. Pip can enter it believing that somewhere within it lies the explanation of who he is becoming.

The city does not need to deceive him. He does most of the work himself: soon, perhaps, when the missing piece arrives. It is also one of desire’s favourite tenses.

Estella matters because she is not simply unattainable. If she were entirely absent, the problem would eventually become easier. Absence, however painful, can acquire a shape.

Estella is available enough. She appears, speaks, permits proximity while withholding what proximity appears to promise. She is neither completely present nor completely gone, an efficient machine for producing desire. There is enough presence to maintain hope and enough absence to prevent reality from replacing fantasy.

The absent object may eventually be mourned. The fully available person eventually becomes ordinary. Partial availability occupies the more dangerous middle ground.

Pip therefore does not simply love Estella. He interprets her.

Every gesture can become evidence because the conclusion has already begun organising the evidence.

Miss Havisham intensifies this by supplying a plot. Pip sees Estella, Satis House, wealth and his mysterious advancement and draws an entirely coherent conclusion.

He has been selected.

Dickens’s brilliance lies partly in showing that a coherent interpretation can be completely wrong without being irrational.

Pip is not stupid. Quite the opposite. He is observant enough to construct a persuasive explanation from incomplete information.

The problem is intelligence placed in the service of expectation.

And the wrong explanation becomes particularly difficult to abandon precisely because it explains so much. Give the pattern a name and perhaps repetition will cease. Attachment. Projection. Trauma. Compulsion. Fantasy.

But naming does not necessarily alter anything.

A person may know that another’s attention has acquired disproportionate importance and still wait for the next sign.

He may understand that uncertainty intensifies desire and still experience a small gesture as revelation.

He may explain repetition perfectly and then repeat himself.

Pip’s education suggests something more difficult, that knowledge may have to be lived before it becomes knowledge.

This is why experience is so expensive.

Books can tell a young man that social ambition is hollow. Philosophy can tell him that possession does not end desire.

Neither has quite the authority of humiliation.

Experience teaches.

Unfortunately, experience hurts.

Biddy occupies the opposite position from Estella, although it would be too crude to make one woman false and the other true.

Biddy belongs to another register.

She is legible, ordinary in the most important sense of the word. She belongs to work, care, intelligence and continuity. She does not require the elaborate machinery of expectation that Estella generates.

And this is partly why Pip cannot initially see her.

The available person is forced to compete not with another person but with possibility.

Possibility has several advantages. It has no bad mornings, among them. It remains beautifully protected from evidence.

Ordinary love is more vulnerable because it exists in time. People become tired. They disappoint one another.

Nothing has necessarily gone wrong.

Reality has happened.

Fantasy enjoys an enormous advantage because it never has to survive reality.

Estella therefore carries more than herself. She carries another life.

This is unfair to Estella, and Dickens knows it. She too has been produced by an arrangement she did not choose. Miss Havisham has educated her as an instrument of revenge, making her carry the unfinished injury of another generation.

Pip sees Estella through his fantasy and Miss Havisham sees her through hers.

The woman herself begins to disappear.

That may be one of the crueller aspects of romantic idealisation. The idealised person appears to receive enormous attention while being seen less and less.

She becomes a function.

The person who will confirm that the waiting was worthwhile.

At that point love acquires an impossible burden.

The revelation initially feels catastrophic because Pip loses more than an explanation, he also loses a version of himself. He has to confront the fact that his life has been organised around a story whose central premise was false.

The interpretation was mistaken, but its consequences were real.

Fantasy is not unreal merely because it is fantasy. Fantasy helps organise reality and this may be why understanding so often arrives retrospectively.

A pattern can remain almost invisible while it is being lived and become embarrassingly obvious only later.

But this may also be where freedom begins. Not in discovering that love was unreal, but in seeing the additional work the object was being asked to perform.

When another person’s desire becomes the floor on which the self attempts to stand, every movement of that person shakes the building.

Pip’s education consists partly in losing that floor.

But that may be what finally makes love possible.