Great Expectations of Human Rights: The Postcolonial Bildungsroman in Mr. Pip

New Zealand author Lloyd Jones’ novel Mr. Pip, winner of the 2006 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Overall Best Book, is set on the island province of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, amidst the violence of the island’s attempted secession in 1990. The book takes its title from the facts that students at one village school are reading Dickens’s Great Expectations during the island’s blockade and that the protagonist, Matilda, in particular begins to identify with Dickens’s main character, Pip. My argument draws on Joseph Slaughter’s analysis in Human Rights, Inc., particularly his contention that “[i]n many postcolonial Bildungsromanae . . . the genre’s traditional conclusive event of social, civil, and self-integration is perpetually postponed, so that the sovereign, undivided human personality remains a vanishing (plot) point beyond the frame of the text” (215). In Mr. Pip, Matilda’s integration as a rights-bearing citizen of a modern nation is disrupted precisely because her society itself has been fragmented by war. Although the novel seems to portray the children’s imaginative identification with Pip as positive and even somehow redemptive, I argue that, given the atrocities that the book’s characters witness, Matilda’s observation that “the white world had forgotten us” is closer to the truth (49). The metropolitan plot of incorporation and inheritance into society available to Pip ultimately fails to have meaning for Bougainvilleans, despite the well-meant attempts of schoolmasters and novelists. The insurgents in Bougainville, as a people in rebellion against one state and seemingly left alone by “the white world,” share interesting correlations with Giorgio Agamben’s definition of homo sacer, the ambiguous figure of the refugee or denationalized citizen as someone “abandoned” before the law and outside the domain of citizens’ rights while ironically also fulfilling Hannah Arendt’s definition as “the man of rights.” Lloyd Jones’ 2006 novel Mr. Pip, which was shortlisted for the Booker prize, is set in a place that few readers outside the South Pacific or even Papua New Guinea are likely to know. Jones, a New Zealander, fictionalizes the civil war and blockade on New Guinea’s island province of Bougainville in late 1991 and early 1992. In Mr. Pip, protagonist Matilda Laimo’s integration as a rights-bearing citizen of her nation is disrupted precisely because her society has been fragmented by war. Thirteen-year old Matlida and her classmates develop a positive (and even in some ways redemptive) imaginative identification with Dickens’s character Pip as their teacher reads Great Expectations to them. However, the traditional Bildungsroman’s plot of incorporation and inheritance into society, available to Pip, ultimately fails to have meaning for Bougainvilleans such as Matilda. The insurgents in Bougainville are a people rebelling against their state and left alone by “the outside world” (Jones 166). In this way the entire island of Bougainville (or any besieged population) becomes part of Giorgio Agamben’s definition of homo sacer, the ambiguous figure “abandoned” before the law and standing outside the domain of citizens’ rights while, paradoxically, as Hannah Arendt argues, also becoming the quintessential “man [or woman] of rights” because bare rights are the only things left to them. Hailing from a place that has been literally cut off from the Western world, and unlike Pip, who is destined by the Bildungsroman’s plot as well as his race, gender, and class to become a Pacific Asia Inquiry, Volume 2, Number 1, Fall 2011