Ding Dong!
11th grade English was memorable for many reasons, not the least of which was our excentric English teacher, Mr. Keane. The books we read, such as Animal Farm by Orwell (or was that 10th grade?), Moby Dick by Melville, The Great Gatsby (still one of my favorites) by F. Scott Fitzgerald, among many others were pretty fantastic and though some of them were quite simple (e.g. The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway), they were almost all mind blowingly good. I think it was Mr. Keane’s English class at Harford High School that really started to make me think more deeply about literature in some sort of meaningful, more-important-than-getting-an-A sort of way.
Whether it was his vocal gender-bending as the sexy woman in red in Death of a Salesman or his heart-stopping outbursts during particularly important passages whose meaning seemed to elude us, Mr. Keane had a way of really making you stop and think about what you were reading and examine it in microscopic detail. One of the most important moments in any book, he taught us, is the mention of the title in the work, which is clearly true, but to make sure we never missed it, he would always shout, “DING DONG!” whenever one was mentioned. While watching a video snippet of Moby Dick, as the whale breaches, Captain Ahab’s ranting would be drowned out by Mr Keane’s deafening exclamation, “DING DONG!” And so it went throughout the rest of my junior year and through AP English the next year.
Mr. Keane’s technique was so effective and so memorable, in fact, that it has become some sort of autonomic response during my further studies in literature. Reading Notre-Dame de Paris in my apartment in France, Victor Hugo’s rendition of Quasimodo’s handiwork wasn’t the only chorus of bells I heard: “A whole chapter named ‘Notre-Dame de Paris?!’ DING DONG! DING DONG!” Reading Upton Sinclair’s (isn’t that a great name?) The Jungle in a double-wide in Hutto, Texas (piqued your curiosity, have I?), the hammers smashing in the cow’s heads before turning them into sawdust filled steaks wasn’t the only clattering I heard. In short, like it or not, Mr. Keane is always with me when I’m reading.
So today while reading Great Expectations by Dickens, imagine the cacophony in my head when I got to the chapter when the lawyer comes and tells Pip about his new enriched life as a gentleman at the expense of a mysterious benefactor (you’re not fooling anyone Dickens, we all know Miss Havisham is behind it); the silly solicitor must have said “great expectations” ten times in two pages! All the ding dongs risked giving me a headache, but not before working precisely as designed and making me realize how fundamentally important the passage was to the book. Pip not only has tangible “great expectations” coming to him in the form of a substantial fortune, he has them of his new life as a gentleman including the possible wooing of Estella. Joe, Biddy, and to a much lesser extent, Pip’s now feeble sister have “great expectations” of what Pip will accomplish and how far he’ll go in life. His mysterious benefactor certainly has “great expectations” of what he’ll do as a gentleman, and probably expects him to do some pretty “great” favors in return. The weight of what’s happening is palpable and nearly crushing, like the first day at a college that is costing a fortune or the first day on the job that you got based on a stellar recommendation from your previous employer. There are moments in life when you have a lot to live up to or when fate has to be exceptionally kind to fulfill a vision you’ve dreamt up for your life, and from this theme has Dickens so deftly chosen the title of his work. Ding dong! He’s a genius.
This chapter also got me thinking about the Miss Havishams in life. How many wealthy benefactors are out there making dreams come true while remaining in the shadows like this aged despondent bride? The federal government and scholarship foundations are allowing underprivileged youth to get a higher education every day and yet these unseen and generous entities go largely unthanked and unknown. It’s very encouraging to think that people with real amounts of money (far exceeding the meager $25/month I send to my little Andrés in Mexico) get something more than a tax deduction out of giving a chance to the less fortunate. Enriching the general populous is a truly altruistic gesture, and both restores my faith in humanity and helps strip away the villainous and miserly reputation the empoverished have of the more affluent. Money might not be able to buy happiness directly, but giving it away can. I’ll find out if Miss Havisham’s gift allows any happiness to creep into her dank shadow-filled existence in a few hundred pages, but in the meantime, I’ll just relish in the happiness the imaginary sounding of a bell can inspire.
