The Postmodern Rewritings of Great Expectations to Reinvent Antipodean identities; A Study on Jack Maggs by Peter Carey and Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones

Abstract

The present study pivots on the individual analysis of the antipodean writers` novels Jack Maggs by Peter Carey and Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones the retellings of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. The paper concentrates on the approaches based on its perception towards ideological, historical, authorial, cultural, narrative and geographical representations of Australia in literature.  The select novels are under analysis for their employment of postmodern narrative strategies such as intertextuality and carnivalesque. By applying these theories, the writers are successful in generating new ideologies, varying perspectives and reframing the status of canon. The fictionist takes cues from the fictional world which is a rhetorical construct, by having the possibility of adding and filling gaps to complete it by using intertextuality. In a postmodern scenario, the literary mode of carnivalesque is utilized to reverse the conviction of realism.  The novelists give liberty to their protagonists Maggs and Matilda to vindicate their rights by unearthing the voices as well as to vocalize their stories in a way of deconstructing artificial stereotypes. One of the ideologies of postmodernism is “incredulity towards metanarratives” (p. xxiv) propound by Lyotard, it replaces by mini or local narratives. Thus, oral narratives/ storytelling take dominion and unfold a space for a new authentic narrative rendering from the indigenous other, by a subaltern voice and a cast-out victim.   Objective: The paper strives to analyze its antipodean characters and their continuum with historical equivalents in Australia. The novelists try to imply and recontextualize rewritings from a broader spectrum of cultural reproductions. The article also endeavors to readdress nineteenth-century texts into their contemporary postmodern relevance.   Theoretical Framework: The theoretical framework of the study is to look through the lens of postmodernism. Postmodernism believes that every text carries the fragment or traces of other texts and every work can be read against the relation or background to each other texts. In Jack Maggs the story gives the background to why and how the eponymous character becomes a convict and thus offering him a voice and re-centering him in the center like an Englishman Pip. Mister Pip is about the journey of an indigenous girl named Matilda who dives into the fictional world of Dickens amidst war and personal losses. The select novels have the ability of genre-blurring intersecting with historical novel, fictional biography, and metafiction. The point of departure from the existing research about the novels Jack Maggs and Mister Pip is that there is an alteration of focus from political resistance towards foregrounding postmodern literary struggle in rewriting.   Method: The paper discusses with a postmodern study of the novel Jack Maggs and Mister Pip as a retelling of Dickens` Great Expectations. The methodology of the study is qualitative textual analysis with a postmodern approach. The theories that are applied to the select texts are, Julia Kristeva`s Intertextuality and Mikhail Bakhtin's Carnivalesque. The select novels are written to subvert Eurocentric metanarratives, which is further explained by Jean-Françoise Lyotard that, ‘those totalizing narratives are to be replaced with mini or local narratives.’ The framework of the paper is restricted to study the textual, intertextual, thematic and contextual analysis.   Results and Discussion: This article investigates the way in which Australian identities are remodeled using fictional constructs. Finally, by reading these novels the readers get to know the multiple perceptions of the canon. The novel`s self-reflexivity has subdued any fixed, totalizing or final assertion towards any narrative.  These novels foreground the importance of storytelling, writing, each creating their own story amid falsehood and misrepresentation. Postmodern novels are concerned with the representation of reality. It is cynical towards versions of history and reminds the readers that history itself is an artificial construct. The oral narratives/ storytelling take dominion and unfold a space for a new authentic narrative rendered from the indigenous other, by a subaltern voice and a cast-out victim. The fictional reinvention of the antipodean authors not only questions the ambiguous status of representation, but they are successful in recreating their autonomous versions of their self-supporting narratives. Thus, by reading Careys` and Jones` novels through the lens of postmodernism have attempted to evaluate the validity of western metanarratives and cultural conventions.