Week 35: There’s No Place Like Joe

We begin this penultimate installment with Pip in a rather desperate state of affairs. As Joanne commented last week, the previous few single-chapter parts have been characterised by relentless dramatic action, interspersed with last week’s brief moments of levity (Wemmick’s delightful “Halloa…let’s have a wedding!” being my particular highlight). This week we’re back to the single-chapter-action format, although the mood is somewhat gentler and more contemplative, with a rich emotional arc for Pip and, at the installment’s close, a sense of what is to come in next week’s final part.

Pip’s description of his illness and delirium provides a dramatically tense and rather uncanny route in to this chapter. No one does ‘vaporous visions’ quite like Dickens, and Pip’s creative struggles to represent how he is feeling here reminded me of Esther Summerson’s similar accounts of fevered dreams in Bleak House. There she remarks:

Dare I hint at that worse time when, strung together somewhere in great black space, there was a flaming necklace, or ring, or starry circle of some kind, of which I was one of the beads! And when my only prayer was to be taken off from the rest and when it was such inexplicable agony and misery to be a part of the dreadful thing?

Pip’s fractured awareness of his experiences – is he outside on the stairs, or seeking out a boat, or trapped in a lime-kiln, or simply in his bed all along – and his sense, like Esther’s, of being an unwilling portion of a larger, terrifying operation are deeply unsettling, and capture that sense of confusion and desperate bargaining that seems to take hold in the midst of an illness. The appearance of the bailiffs as eerie spectres who advance and retreat also reminded me of Pip’s earlier uncanny sense of constantly being watched by Orlick or Compeyson.

Emerging through the midst of all this spookiness, though, just as we’ve been hoping he would for several weeks now – joy of joys, it’s JOE! I must admit I almost felt, as Pip does, like crying out with relief. Pip’s account of Joe’s tender nursing over the course of his illness here seemed to me very similar to his previous restorative experiences at the delicate hands of Herbert. As Ben commented in his post at the time, Dickens seems to be positioning gentle touch once again as a means with which individuals can heal and grow and, crucially, reconnect with others around them. Biddy is mentioned as a soothing presence here too, reiterated gently by Joe in his repetition of her words, ‘go to him, without loss of time’. I was reminded of the discussions we’ve had in previous weeks about Clara and her similar presence/absence, mediated via Herbert. Both women are still at something of a distance to Pip – he is assured of their care and kind words, but it is Joe and Herbert who perform the physical and emotional work of restoring him to health.

We also rely on Joe here for some wonderfully-narrated gossip regarding a number of Pip’s previous acquaintances, touching on the fate of Miss Havisham’s obsequious relations and that of the dreadful ‘blusterous’ Pumblechook, who we learn has had his cashbox stolen and his ‘wittles’ partaken of and his nose pulled and various other indignities inflicted at the hands of the dastardly Orlick. Joe’s references here to ‘coddleshells’ and ‘Mrs Camels’; to ‘peranniums’ and ‘cool four thousands’ – not to mention his marvellously elaborate writing operations – bring a sense of the old joy of Joe and Pip’s relationship that has been absent for so many weeks. I was reminded once more of John’s writing on the novel ‘in a nutshell’, and of Dickens’s original plan to explore the amusing relations between these two individuals through their cheerful experiments with language, writing, and communication.

For these relations between Joe and Pip are the same in some ways, and yet crucially different – Pip’s agonised awareness of this and his determination to make amends provide this week’s moments of real poignancy. As Pip strengthens, Joe retreats, and we are left with Pip’s desperate determination to go to Joe and make his ‘penitent remonstrance’, repairing the relationship once and for all.

And yet, and yet…Pip is chastened, and made wiser and ‘worthier’ by this period of illness and reflection – that much he is keen to stress throughout this week’s installment. But that final resolution of his to go and marry Biddy, and his sense that she will have been waiting for him all this time, ready and willing to build a life with him wherever they might choose to go – it really struck me here that, despite everything, Pip still clings to that old confidence that he knows the story that he is in. I wonder if we are all prone to this kind of narrativizing of our own lives, and of rewriting our personal histories once our circumstances have changed to show that things were always meant to work out this way. In Pip’s case, he clearly thinks that he is in David Copperfield, and that Biddy is his Agnes. We await next week’s final installment to see if that’s the ending that Dickens has planned for Pip…