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In Decolonising Fictions, theorists Diana Brydon and Helen Tiffin claim that postcolonial writers create texts that ‘write back’ against imperial fictions and question the values once taken for granted by the once dominant Anglocentric discourse of the imperial epicentre. In Jack Maggs the process of ‘writing back’ is well illustrated. As in Jean Rhy’s Wide Sargasso Sea , the colonial ‘other’ character from a canonised Victorian novel becomes the principal figure in a modern 'decolonising' text, and the peripheral reaches of empire become of central importance.
In Jack Maggs, Australian novelist Peter Carey reconfigures the plot of Dickens’s classic Great Expectations so that it is the maginalised, (colonial) convict figure who now becomes the narrative focus. By filtering the experiences of the exiled convict through a post-colonial lens, Carey creates a text that pays homage too, yet simultaneously questions the values at the heart of the source text’s imperialist discourse.
As Brydon and Tiffin point out, Anglocentrism refuses Post-Colonial territories the right to their own identities, assuming instead that they are merely engulfable parts of the imperial centre. Therefore, in Great Expectations, Australia functioned not as a coherent, cohesive nation, but rather, as an off stage peripheral location were characters awaited their return to the on stage action of the imperial centre, London . Carey tackles this trend head on, by writing a novel that seeks ‘non repressive alternatives to imperialist discourse’ and which refuses to privilege the metropolitan centre over the Colonial margins.
At the heart of the text’s reconfiguration of imperialist discourse lies the complex relationship between returned convict Jack Maggs and up-and-coming writer Tobias Oates. Significantly, Oates bears more than a few biographical similarities with Charles Dickens. For instance, like Dickens, Oates has a feckless, indebted father, an unhappy marriage, a fascination with mesmerism, and the fierce desire to make his name ‘not just as the author of comic adventures, but as a novelist who might one day topple Thackeray himself’ (Carey 43).
By having Oates, a fictionalised Charles Dickens figure, exist in the same imaginative space as Jack Maggs, the modern reworking of one of Dickens’ most memorable characters, Carey is able to explore not only the questions left unanswered by the source text, but also the difficult relationship that exists between character and creator.
The relationship between Oates, soon to become the Empire’s greatest living writer, and Maggs, the marginalised colonial figure, is one that parallels the manner in which the literary potential of the Imperial colonies was mined by Victorian writers. Oates, who fancies himself a ‘cartographer of the criminal mind’ takes an interest in Maggs not because he feels sympathy for the fugitive’s plight, but because he sees great literary potential in his story.
Under pretence of easing Jack’s painful facial tics, Oates employs mesmerism in order to gain access to the darkest corners of the convict’s mind : he even equates his invasion of Magg’s past and mind with his exploration with the seedy streets of London : ‘What a puzzle of life exists in the dark little lane ways of this wretches soul, what stolen gold lies hidden in the vaults between his filthy streets ?’ (Carey 90).
Oates is simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by Maggs: drawn to the convict because of his overriding interest in human nature and because of the literary potential of the man’s life, yet always fearful around him. He wants to use Maggs in the same way that the majority of Victorian writers (including Dickens) used the Colonies : as a blank imaginative space, a territory to be filled with fictional representations emanating from the metropolitan centre. It is a comparison borne out by Maggs himself, who, whilst writing to his feckless ward Henry Phipps, states : ‘I have left a blank map for you and you have doubtless filled it with your worst imaginings' (Carey 238) .
Just as the colonies functioned in the economy of the typical Victorian novel as a convenient starting and ending point, so too is Magg’s brutal and unhappy life used by Oates as a mere fictional device. However, Carey provided Jack with the means to resist imaginative categorisation : when he realises that his trust in Oates has been sorely abused, Maggs explodes in anger at the appropriation of his life story for a sensational novel (‘The Death of Maggs’) about convict life.
Oates is unable to understand Jack’s reaction to the appropriation of his dead fiancee’s character and name in the first draft of the novel : ‘I write that name Jack, like a stonemason makes the name upon a headstone, so that her memory may live for ever. In all the empire, Jack, you could not have employed a better carver’.(Carey 280)
When Oates’ life collapses around him with the discovery of his adulterous affair with Lizzie Warriner, her ‘heaps up all his blame’ on Jack Maggs and creates a brutal fictional counterpart (Carey 326).
Throughout the novel Maggs is identified with the colony of Australia, and often referred to as ‘the Australian’, thereby underscoring the fact that his decade in exile has had a far greater effect on his development than his previous existence in England. As with Magwitch, Australia has served both as his prison, and as a means of creating a prosperous new life (Litvack 8). Following his pardon from the New South Wales prison gangs, Maggs became so successful that he was able to build a brick mansion, have a street named after him, and anonymously raise a poor English boy to gentlemanly status.
Like Magwitch, his Dickensian counterpart, Maggs seeks to renew his aquaintainceship with the 'son' whose ascent in society he has surreptitiously financed.. However, where as Great Expectations is very much the story of Pip's struggle to grasp the true meaning of the concept 'gentleman', the bulk of Carey's reworked narrative is devoted to the convict’s attempt to work out his relationship to both his native and adopted lands.
Jack's compulsion to return to England, and his desire to justify his dark past despite the threat of arrest and imprisonment bring to mind the question asked by Alan Lawson, who whilst discussing the problem of national identity as a structural, problem, defines the ultimate colonial question as 'Who am I when I am transported ?'
Lawson's rhetorical question arises from the situation of the individual transported from the imperial centre to a peripheral outpost 'where the climate, the landscape and the native inhabitants did little to foster any sense of continuity, where the sense of distance, both within and without, was so great that a new definition of self- metaphysical, historical, cultural, linguistic and social - was needed' (Lawson 169).
This is why Jack Maggs returns to London, despite the terrible risk - because he has not yet formulated a stable identity in Australia. Jack rejects his Australian family in order to risk all in the search for an arrogant young man who cares nothing for his benefactor, but who, nevertheless, fulfils his naïve idea of an English Gentleman.
In Great Expectations the convict who returns to metropolitan space from his exile in the Australian Colony is punished with death, despite his rehabilitation, for his transgression of imperial space. Australia therefore functions in that text as a place were great transformations of fortune and character are permitted, but from which the transported individual can never return.
Significantly, in Carey’s decolonising text, Jack Maggs is allowed to return to the distant continent, happily marry the servant girl Mercy Larkin, prosper in business, live to a ripe and peaceful old age, and father 'five further members of 'that race' (the race of Australians) '(327). However, Jack's happy ending only comes about when he finally accepts that there are alternatives to the repressive imperialist discourse of Britain, and ceases to privilege the abusive land of his birth over the adopted land that has given him so much.
Similarly, Peter Carey uses his post colonial reworking of Dickens’s canonised text as an opportunity to explore the complex relationship between the imperial centre, the colonised nation, and the writer who fictionalises that relationship, and as a chance to privilege the colony and the colonised individual over the seat of Empire and it’s citizens.
Brydon, Diana and Tiffin, Helen. Decolonising Fictions. Aarhus : Dangaroo, 1992.
Carey, Peter. Jack Maggs. London, Boston : Faber and Faber, 1997.
Lawson, Alan. ‘Who Am I When I Am Transported ? ‘. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London and New York : Routledge, 1995.
Litvack, Leon. ‘Dickens, Australia and Magwitch, Part 1: the Colonial Context’ Dickensian 95.1 (1999): 7-32.
The Fiction of Peter Carey -- A Bibliographic Project
This page was written by Bernice M. Murphy.
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