Notes from the session on Mr Pip by Lloyd Jones

Posted on behalf of Mary -

This post contains lots of interesting stuff but it only relates to one aspect of what were discussing last Monday and I am going to try to explain how i think it might connect. Thanks to Anna for starting the discussion off so well!

Mr Pip is narrated retrospectively by a young woman who is telling about her experiences between the ages of 13 and 15 (‘skinny thirteen year-old’ on the first page). In fiction retrospective narration can work in many ways - sometimes a lot is retrospective assessment set against the past/present experience of the story and therefore moving between different understandings of a situation, sometimes the focus is more on the innocence at the time and although in the past tense reminds us very infrequently of the longer perspective. This latter manner is how Mr Pip is structured - so as you say Greg it is a useful voice in which to tell the events because it can engage readers who are also ignorant of the history and context of this island and because the young perspective is vivid and describes in a detail (the beach, Mr Watts, the stories, etc, etc) that is useful to evoke that world for those unfamiliar with it. Often child perspectives are to bring alive what we no longer see, or judge too much see. (And I agree with what you say about the choice of a girl to tell the story - keeping the narrative out in the open and so on).

However both 'convenient and versatile' imply something else, you seem to be saying that this was a good way for a writer with himself a limited knowledge to tell a story – perhaps, but isn't that worrying: aren't gaps and silences left intentionally in a story to hint at knowledge and understanding that surpasses what is actually included.

That makes me come back to on the one hand the tension between the retrospective narrator and the protagonist - remember Jenny commented on how in Great Expectations Pip comments in complex and often self-critical way on what he is telling. This mix can thicken a fiction - make it more meaningful as we think about the difference between different perspectives.

Another issue is the one raised about Sargeson and the distance between Sargeson's narrators (and often his characters) and the perspective of the implied author. Sargeson's work hinges on this distance - he uses an unreliable narrator ( I don't think Matlida is quite that though we th reader do think beyond her naivete at times) - and the narrator is telling a story (boxes within boxes) of someone he has met or known. It's usually a story which he the narrator is moved by but dosn't quite know why - ie he emotionally feels its significance but can't explain why or what it is. The difference from what greg is suggesting is in Sargeson’s case that this is an extremely conscious strategy for telling a story which is particularly designed to comment on what Sargeson the author thought was a judgmental and impoverished society in which those real experiences of joy, love, revelation, purposefulness were experienced by ordinary working people ( particaularly men)denied and destroyed by a utilitarian and judgmental (puritanical) middle class. Hence he is dignifying a real experience of the world by creating these inarticaulte narrators. He wrote mostly short fiction often - a good genre in which to sustain this tension. You acn of course deconstruct this also -s howing that the desire to show without telling, to hide knowledge and to write plainly is in fact a continuation of the puritanism he was trying to break away from.

So the question comes back to MR Pip - does Lloyd Jones use the naivete of Matilda's to some purpose - other than a useful way to tell a fable or fairystory. Is there a tension between Matilda's new understanding of the world and her first one. I think to give him his due at the end Lloyd Jones is trying to show that story can come via a pathetic example – that is it arises from NZ in the form of a rather lost and undirected actor in an arid community who gets involved with the lonely island girl living next door - Mr Watts.

But somehow I am not convinced both because the narrator's rethink has been delayed without building up a questioning tension as Dickens or Sargeson do in different ways and because the pattern of story- telling in the main part of the book has been so much the pattern of colonial appropiation, misrecognising or leaving out and erasing the culture of the island, and privileging the power of story as it emenates from the Western classic - even if its conduit, Mr Watts, is unlikley.

I hope I have explained this - this last part probably needs better articulation!

The choice to go back to the island is, as Bruce said, also interesting - why? And why escape alone - in the initial plan?

Authorial Voice in 'Mr Pip'

Lloyd Jones, author of Mr Pip (2006), has written 14 books since 1991, including novels and children’s stories. In that time frame, he has either been short-listed for or won a dozen or so national book awards, including at least one children’s book award. The latter implies that Jones is adept at knowing how to ‘speak’ to children, which brings us to the question of the authorial voice in Mr Pip: Jones chose a university graduate named Matilda recalling her life at age 14 onwards in a village in Bougainville cut off from the outside world by an encircling war.

Before discussing Matilda, let us backtrack for a moment to an essay called ‘The Godly Roof', which was written by R. A. Copland and first appeared in the New Zealand periodical Landfall in 1968. In the essay Copland discusses the authorial voice in literature, particularly that of Frank Sargeson. For Copland, authors continually battle with what level of intelligence to give their characters without it seeming forced. If we apply that statement to Emma Neale’s 2006 novel Relative Strangers, it was not a huge jump for Neale – who holds a PhD on expatriate New Zealand women writers – to speak in the voice of the protagonist Chloe, who also has an enquiring mind and is continually taking night courses to keep herself intellectually stimulated. Likewise in the 1987 novel Dirty Work written by Nigel Cox, the protagonist Gina Tully is a middle class girl with a college education, so it is not a huge jump for Cox to emulate Tully’s voice, however, crossing the gender divide to speak as a ‘postmodern Ms’ no doubt was. 

In short, both the above authors and their protagonists are almost like us. In contrast, Copland writes that Sargeson wrote with his left hand (not literally) to achieve the realism of his characters, so distanced were they from his intellect.

So how does Copland’s discussion about what level of intelligence to give a book’s character transfer to Mr Pip? At age 14, Matilda is at a very convenient and versatile age as a protagonist. She is old enough to comprehend what the adults in the village talk about and has access to the world of children through her classmates. Yet she is still exposed to the violence of war, as can be seen in the segment where her mother sacrifices herself to save Matilda from being raped. But why did Jones choose a female voice? One answer is that if the narrator had been a male from the same age group, he would have been preoccupied with whether he should join the rebels, as other boys around his age had done, or whether he would eventually be forced to. In short, the male world and the war would have overridden the narrative. So by having a young woman as narrator, Mr Pip keeps the narrative out in the open, within the village dynamics, not hidden in the jungle with the fighters. Plus, for much of the time during the book, the narrator appears to be either absorbed in a literary world, or in shock after experiencing close at hand the horrors of war, a condition that in the real world creates a sort of tunnel vision. Both devices are handy veils if the author is not quite knowledgeable about a lived reality.

Finally, in keeping with his previous books targeting children, to some extent Jones is using a author's device that has worked for him before. In 2004 he wrote Everything You Need to Know About the World by Simon Eliot. The book was a finalist in the 2005 New Zealand Post Book Awards for Children. In the book a narrator named Simon Eliot creates a worldview for children in the 9-14 years age group. Sound familiar? The upper level of the target age group is the same age as Matilda, the protagonist in Mr Pip. Jones is familiar with the dialogue of that age group.

Jones, Lloyd

[NZ Book Council Writers Pages]


Lloyd Jones (b. 1955)

Author Pages:

NZ Book Council

NZ Literature File

Novels:

Gilmore's Dairy. Auckland : Hodder and Stoughton, 1985.
Splinter. Auckland : Hodder and Stoughton, 1988.
Choo Woo. Wellington : Victoria University Press, 1998.
Book of Fame. Auckland: Penguin, 2000.
Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance. Auckland: Penguin, 2002.
Paint your Wife. Auckland : Penguin, 2004.
Mister Pip. Melbourne : Text Publishing Company, 2006.

Stories:

Swimming to Australia and Other Stories. Wellington : Victoria University Press, 1991.
This House Has Three Walls. Wellington : Victoria University Press, 1997.

Non-Fiction:

Biografi: an Albanian Quest. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1993.
Last Saturday; by Loyd Jones and Bruce Foster. Wellington: Victoria University Press for the National Library of New Zealand, 1994.
Beach. Photographs Jocelin Carlin ; essay Lloyd Jones. Auckland: Bateman, 1999.

Edited:

Into the Field of Play : New Zealand Writers on the Theme of Sport. Edited by Lloyd Jones. Auckland : Tandem Press, 1992.
On Getting Old. By Kevin Ireland. Series Editor Lloyd Jones. Wellington: Four Winds Press, 2005.
On Going to the Movies. By Peter Wells. Series Editor Lloyd Jones. Wellington: Four Winds Press, 2005.
Next to Gods: a Cleaner's Story. By Don Franks. Series Editor Lloyd Jones. Wellington: Four Winds Press, 2005.
etc.