Missed Encounters: Repetition, Rewriting, and Contemporary Returns to Charles Dickens's Great Expectations

I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you—the objet petit a—I mutilate you.

Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis

Julian Barnes's England, England, true to its echolalic title, is about doubleness, more specifically the specular dualism of originality and replication. It questions the notion of authenticity as megalopolitan England atrophies and dies when beamed with the idea of England, and the image of a theme park named England, England. In his eternal quest for the top dollar and long yen, Jack Pitman—Sir Jack, an entrepreneur of the late-capitalist variety—fabricates England, England on the Isle of Wight, with fifty quintessences of Englishness (Royal Family, Big Ben, Man Utd., Class System, and so forth). The French intellectual hired to hone the philosophical angle of this project sums it up to the coordinating committee as a "rivalization of reality." We prefer the replica to the original because it opens up endless possibilities of differential reproduction: "We must demand the replica, since the reality, the truth, the authenticity of the replica is the one we can possess, colonize, reorder, find jouissance in, and, finally, if and when we decide, it is the reality which, since it is our destiny, we may meet, confront and destroy" (35). The nonidentical replica updates and problematizes the original. Representation, according to the Frenchman, is "an ironization and summation" of the thing represented: "A monochrome world has become Technicolor, asingle croaking speaker has become wraparound sound" (55).

Sir Jack rewards such Platonic musings by paying the man in dollars instead of pounds, the dollar being the replica, the pound the prototype. Jack Pitman takes the discussion further. In offering a mediated image of England, he claims, "We are offering the thing itself" (59). A reservoir becomes a lake when it is built and positioned as a lake, and natural and man-made objects adopt it as such—it becomes the thing itself. In the novel, it becomes difficult to say what preexists repetition. Dr. Max, Official Historian of the project, observes, "There is no prime moment," adding indignantly, "It is like saying that . . . a gibbon suddenly wrote Gibbon" (132). Replication in this sense does not follow the law of recurrence or the logic of compulsive returns but is a mode of inventiveness that, through its reiterative structure, mobilizes narrative instead of arresting it.

This article looks at rewritings of a well-made Victorian multiplot novel completed in 1861, Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, to explore the dynamic between precursor and latecomer in terms of narrative operation. I am particularly interested in the remembering and reinterpretation of the literary canon, in acts of generative citation that bring the (Eurocentric) literary past to recurring life. The first section looks briefly at Kathy Acker's and Sue Roe's extrapolations of the classic and at Alfonso Cuarón's 1998 film. The second section is a reading of Peter Carey's brilliant Dickensian pastiche Jack Maggs. What unites the late twentieth-century novels Idiscuss is a project of denaturalizing, defamiliarizing, and problematizing "natural givens" in a master text. The constructedness of the literary artifact is seen, in these second comings, as analogous tothe constructedness of identity categories and cultural formations: the work of rewriting, then, is to look awry at virtual pasts, interrupt collective identities and the habitual coherence of cultural experience, and confront the social discourse informing memorable acts of literature.

Is repetition a mode of recuperating loss, a ritual of control to cope with the reality principle, as Freud suggested? Is it, as Lacan elaborates, a quest for lost pleasure through symbolic substitution, and a necessary condition of being in language? This essay erects an opposition between Freud's and Lacan's differing notions of repetition (mastery versus alienation). The point where their readings come together is on the grounds of death, failure, or breakage. Repetition can only ever produce a certain kind of undoing. It is undeniable that rewriting is to writing what writing is to speech—a supplement to a circumscribed...