Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs exemplifies Linda Hutcheon’s concept of “historiographic metafiction: self-reflexive fiction that also incorporate[s] historical figures and events, and that both rel[ies] on and reconfigure[s] familiar representations of the past.” In writing and rewriting the complicated background of convict-turned-benefactor Maggs, returned from Australian exile to reclaim his English fatherland (where he has no father and is father to none), Carey’s novel consistently raises questions common to a postcolonial, historically-driven literary inquiry: issues of “inheritance and genealogy; investment and return; creativity, originality, and authorship; and the representation of time and history.” Each one of these priorities of self-reflexive postcolonial fiction has thematic roots in either material wealth or the family, and as such, each issue can be explored through Carey’s reconfiguration of Dickens as the money-hungry family man Tobias Oates.
Some of Dickens’ more controversial characteristics emerge in Tobias to shape him as a somewhat irritating character with a problematically appropriative relationship to those around him. Philip V. Allingham praises two relatively recent bibliographies for bringing Dickens to life as adventurous and willing to risk people’s lives (Kaplan), as deeply enmeshed in dramatic love affairs, and as meticulously interested in his finances (Ackroyd). These qualities are echoed in Toby Oates, who shares a chronological history with Dickens but whose driving concerns are shaped by an important revision of his childhood. Dickens’ haunting reflections on the hugely formative time he spent working, forcedly, in a blacking factory become Toby’s bitter recollections of a generally dissatisfactory childhood, a low upbringing with unloving parents. A five-month experience for Dickens, necessitated by his father’s incarceration in debtor’s prison and demonstrative of his mother’s lack of love, becomes for Toby an uncontained, unlocalizable sense of loss and lack that manifests itself, in his adulthood, in constant financial worry and an exaggerated, un-satisfiable quest for fame and love.
Having come from no proper family himself, or none that he could remember without great bitterness, he had for all his short, determined life carried with him a mighty passion to create that safe warm world he had been denied.
So it was that he was now the husband of a rosy-cheeked and broad-hipped wife who in no way resembled that pinched and worried woman who had brought him so resentfully into the world. He was the father of a babe just three months old, a boy, whom he doted on as his father had never doted on him. And if he had no more than a florin in his pocketÉhe would not let his son grow up in dreariness or darkness . . .
No one who knew Tobias, not even the old actor who thought he saw the “thunder,” had any understanding of his unholy thirst for love. He had not known it himself. He did not know the curse or gift his ma and pa had given him: he would not be loved enough, not ever. (Ch 10, 37)
He walked the echoing streets thinking of money like that famous miser he would one day create in French Street . . . adding and subtracting, subtracting and adding, just like another man might say his prayers.
Yet no matter how he did his sums Tobias could not get a total above eight pounds and sixpence. It was not enough. Not nearly enough. (Ch 55, 185)
How do Tobias’ driving concerns, his quests for love and for money, shape his approach to writing? Does the presentation of his loveless and poverty-stricken childhood excuse his choices in adulthood? To what extent does the shift from a relatively short- to a long-term trauma bring up the issues of fatherhood, abandonment, control, exploitation and loss that resonate with a postcolonial perspective?
What is the relationship, in Jack Maggs, between writing and domination? Oates pulls stories magnetically out of Maggs without his knowledge or permission, and he writes names and images of the people around him directly into his stories (Ch 63) — to what extent is this literary appropriation a form of colonization? What are the ironies involved in an English author — a representative voice of English culture — stealing the tale of an Englishman who has been exiled to Australia, and telling that tale to extract sympathy from his audience for what “Mother England would do to one of our own” (Ch 24)?
David Cody’s biography of Dickens outlines facts from Dickens’ life that mirror Toby’s — his father haunted by debt, his adoration and idolization of his wife’s younger sister, who dies — but based on Dickens’ biography, the events of Jack Maggs take place when the author is writing lighthearted novels and sketches. The novel’s given date of publication for the Maggs/Magwitch story, 1860, is the same as the real life publication of Great Expectations, but the fictional tale places over two decades between the events and their literary representations. Why does Carey let his author’s story steep for so long, and how is this time lapse connected with issues of trauma?
Questions
In this novel of overlapping stories and intermingling voices, who has the control? The author and his subject struggle with one another for physical authority and control over events; how does Carey’s position as a postcolonial author writing from a former colony inflect his representation of his characters?
To what extent do the low origins of every character in Jack Maggs reflect a postcolonial resentment toward the exploitations of empire?
Should we read Mercy’s “civilizing” of Maggs’ Australian-English hybrid boys as a positive or negative ending of this novel?
References: Works Cited and Consulted
Carey, Peter. Jack Maggs. New York: Vintage, 1999.
Krist, Gary. "Classics Revisited." Hudson Review 51.3 (1998): 623-630.
Landon, Philip. "Book reviews: Jack Maggs." Review of Contemporary Fiction 18.2 (1998): 239-40.
Pfeil, Fred. "Ghost of Dickens Past." Nation (1998): 27-8.
Renk, Kathleen J. “Rewriting the Empire of the Imagination: The Post-Imperial Gothic Fiction of Peter Carey and A.S. Byatt” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature
Savu, Laura E. “The ‘Crooked Business’ of Storytelling: Authorship and Cultural
Revisionism in Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs” Ariel, Jul-Oct2005, Vol. 36 Issue p.127-163
Last modified 1 March 2004