H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e1 5 6ourselves to be, we are not in fact self- authoring. What puts us in
place is a history over which we have little control, and of which we
may know almost nothing. This heritage is woven into our flesh,
veins, bones and organs as much as into our social conditions. We
are dependent for our existence, and thus for our very freedom and
autonomy, on a lineage of other individuals and events, one too
tangled ever to be fully unravelled. There is a plot afoot, but it is
not easy to know how we fit into it. At the root of the self is
that which is not ourselves. This is a kind of conundrum we have
to learn to live with.
The child might also dream that his actual family is not his real
one. Perhaps he really belongs to a more glamorous set of kinsfolk
altogether, and has ended up among his present relatives as a kind
of changeling. Freud called this the family romance syndrome, and
it is one with which Pip is clearly afflicted. Satis House represents
the family he wants to be part of. This is savagely ironic, since
Satis House is a rotting, poisonous, fantasy- ridden shell. Its only
occupants are two solitary women, one of them probably mad
and the other emotionally disabled, who have no blood- relation
with each other. It is a sign of Pip’s false consciousness that he
should prefer this arena of sick dreams to life at the forge.
What Pip does is misread the plot of the novel. He thinks he is a
character in one plot, that of Miss Havisham, but he actually
belongs to another, that of Magwitch. It is never easy to say which
narrative we are part of. The hero makes a disastrous mistake about
the sources of his identity – about who it is that actually ‘created’
him. He assumes that he is the creature of Miss Havisham, but he
is actually the handiwork of a convict. There is an enigma about
origins, rather as Magwitch appears as a ‘dreadful mystery’ to Pip.
Yet it is a mystery which involves more than just the individual.