I think that author Jane Smiley is right about Charles Dickens' Great Expectations: readers would accept either ending if they didn't know there were two, but since both versions are available to us, the jury's still out.
Author David Nicholls calls the
original ending (the one that Dickens chose to suppress on the advice
of several friends) “incredibly bleak” and the second, the
official ending “unrealistically romantic and sentimental”. Which
is better, asks one reader, the first one where Pip and Estella bid
each other farewell because “the fire no longer burns” or the
second one which offers hope because the fire “hasn't stopped
burning”? Someone makes the comment that if the first version had
been filmed it would have premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and
the second at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.
While debates about the relative merits
of the two endings continue, some readers have chosen an altogether
different response – from George Bernard Shaw to film director
Alfonso Cuaron to secondary school students. Shaw pronounces that
Dickens has “made a mess of both” and supplies his own
unequivocally unhappy ending where Pip tells us, “Since that
parting, I have been able to think of her without the old
unhappiness; but I have never tried to see her again, and I know that
I never shall”. What a hard, hard man.
Cuaron's delightful modern update set
in part in an artist's studio in 1998 New York City ends with Estella
asking Finn (Pip) for forgiveness while holding his hand and looking
out to sea.
And the most original of all is a short
video by Peter, Sydney and Rakela, three students who have Pip pour
out his heart in a suicide letter and ingest pills.
Perhaps at the heart of this debate is
the question of consistency. I agree with Shaw when he writes that
Great Expectations is “too serious a book to be a trivially happy
one”, but at the same time, the characters are not caricatures,
they are capable of psychological and moral growth so that a nuanced
ending, one which at least suggests hope and reconciliation is in
order.
No comments:
Post a Comment