Rewriting History : Peter Carey's Fictional Biography of Australia [1 ed.] 9789042030718, 9789042030701

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Rewriting History

Peter Carey’s Fictional Biography of Australia

Costerus New Series 184 Series Editors: C.C. Barfoot, Theo D’haen and Erik Kooper



Rewriting History

Peter Carey’s Fictional Biography of Australia

Andreas Gaile

Amsterdam-New York, NY 2010

Die vorliegende Arbeit wurde vom Fachbereich 05 (Philosophie und Philologie) der Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz im Jahr 2006 als Dissertation zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades eines Doktors der Philosophie (Dr. phil.) angenommen.

Cover photo: Peter Brock, Sydney, Australia Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3070-1 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3071-8 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010 Printed in the Netherlands

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS INTRODUCTION

1

PART ONE – THEORETICAL PREMISES Chapter One Rewriting History: Theoretical Premises

17

PART TWO – THEORIZING CAREY’S FICTIONAL BIOGRAPHY Chapter Two After the Grand Narratives: From History to Mythistory Chapter Three Strategies of an Illywhacker (I): Replacing the Truth-Paradigm with a “Weaseling Kind of ‘Truth’” Chapter Four Strategies of an Illywhacker (II): Transcending Historical Reality Chapter Five Strategies of an Illywhacker (III): Telling History as Story

31 45 59 83

PART THREE - CAREY’S BIOGRAPHY OF AUSTRALIA: KEY EVENTS IN THE LIFE OF A NATION Chapter Six 107 Dissecting the Lies of Terra Nullius: The Nightmare of Aboriginal History Chapter Seven 141 Deconstructing Leichhardt: Peter Carey and the Explorer Myth

Chapter Eight “Decolonizing the Mind” (I): Colonial Australia Chapter Nine “Decolonizing the Mind” (II): Postcolonial Australia

151 193

PART FOUR – CAREY’S BIOGRAPHY OF AUSTRALIA: AUSTRALIAN IDENTITY Chapter Ten “Trying to Make Out the Southern Cross”, Or, The Dilemma of Australian Identity Chapter Eleven The Real Matilda: Re-Inscribing the “Pygmies” of Australian Culture Chapter Twelve Intruders in the Bush: Women in Male Domains

219

POSTSCRIPT Wrong About Carey? Reading Carey in Post-Postmodern Times

285

BIBLIOGRAPHY

299

INDEX

341

235 253

“An Stelle des Historischen – die mythenbildende Kraft” Friedrich Nietzsche

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book is the result of a long-standing fascination with and passion for Australia. It started some twenty-five years ago with the discovery of late eighteenth-century editions of James Cook’s diaries of his voyages of discovery in my grandparents’ attic. The voyage of discovery through the world of Australian literature and culture, which I undertook in the years to follow, was piloted by Professor Stein from Johannes Gutenberg-Universität in Mainz. He lifted my exoticist fascination with Australia onto a scholarly level and initiated the project whose outcome is the present book. My thanks go out to him for all his support and intellectual stimulation throughout my years at Mainz university. The second leg of my voyage of discovery, which took me from the manuscript of the PhD to the present state of the book, was guided by the editor of Costerus New Series, Cedric Barfoot, who has been very patient with me over the last four years and who has taught me a great deal about writing books. My thanks also go out to Peter Carey for the time he has taken to discuss his writings with me; to the Brun family in Sydney for their hospitality and their friendship; to Cyrus Patel, who was always there for me when there were issues with my computer; to Peter Brock from Sydney for letting me use his photograph of the Vivid Sydney festival as a cover image; to the Gesellschaft für Australienstudien for their appreciation of this project; and naturally, to my family who has had to dispense with me during those endless hours that I spent grappling with format issues and rewriting considerations. Andreas Gaile Friesenheim, March 2010

INTRODUCTION

But this our native or adopted land has no past, no story. No poet speaks to us.1 I’m sure Peter has a project of sorts to write the story/stories of Australia.2

Setting the context: historians at war In 2003 the Australian Aboriginal Dawn Casey was dismissed as director of the nation’s National Museum. In a feature article in the Sydney Morning Herald, the journalist Christopher Kremmer, trying to make sense of the merited director’s deposition, ventured that the institution led by Casey was … just too popular. Less than three years since it opened, the museum has attracted more than 2 million visitors. Conservative members of the governing council had warned of just such a disaster even before the doors had opened.3

Although Kremmer is being sarcastic in his assessment of Casey’s case, there is no denying that the dismissal of a director who managed to attract the crowds and who was widely praised for her leadership is a highly controversial act of cultural management. It only starts to make sense if one sees the fiery debate about the direction of the museum in the context of the “Australian history wars” that have been raging amongst the academics and politicians of the country for more

1

Marcus Clarke, Preface, Poems by Adam Lindsay Gordon, Sydney: University of Sydney Library: http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/ozlit/pdf/v00010.pdf. (Etext prepared from the print edition published by Robert A. Thompson and A.H. Massina, London 1920; accessed on 7 January 2005.) 2 Anthony J. Hassall, email to the author of this volume, 20 June 2004. 3 Christopher Kremmer, “The Myths, and the Misconception”, Sydney Morning Herald, 8 December 2003, np.

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than a decade now.4 In the course of these wars, the National Museum, which as a federal government agency can claim to be an officially sanctioned custodian of the country’s past experience, turned out to be one of its principal battlefields, for, what was at stake in the direction of the museum was nothing less than the interpretative hegemony over who the Australians are and what they want to remember of their past. The decidedly multicultural and reconciliation-based5 interpretation of the national story the indigenous Australian Casey propagated through her exhibitions and programmes stood in stark contrast to the views held by the government of the day. It must be remembered that the Prime Minister John Howard famously refused to join the “People’s Walk” across Sydney Harbour Bridge on 28 May 2000, that powerful gesture towards reconciliation with the country’s Aborigines. Until Casey was dismissed and until the exhibits and public programmes of the museum were subjected to review, the version of Australian history on display there was clearly indebted to the postmodern and postcolonial museology laid out by Graeme Davison, one of the country’s most high-profile historians, and one of the principal intellectual architects of the museum, as it is. The objectives

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The history wars started when Paul Keating and John Howard, in the mid-Nineties, triggered a public controversy over their interpretations of the Australian past. There are several informative accounts of the course the history wars have taken so far: see, for instance, Andrew G. Bonnell and Martin Crotty’s “An Australian ‘Historikerstreit?’”, Australian Journal of Politics and History, L/3 (2004), 425-33, and the definitive history of the debate by Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, The History Wars, Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne UP, 2003. Some of the most important academic interventions in the debate are those by the ultra-conservative historian Keith Windschuttle, for example, his polemic against Casey’s museology: “How not to Run a Museum: People’s History at the Postmodern Museum”, Quadrant, XLV/9 (2001), 11-19, and his self-explanatorily titled two-volume study, The Fabrication of Australian History, Sydney: Macleay, 2002; Robert Manne’s response to Windschuttle’s book: Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Melbourne: Black, 2003; and Bain Attwood and S.G. Foster’s collection Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience, Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2003. 5 The term “reconciliation” is widely used in Australia. It is a much contested term, though. Many Australians feel that it is a misnomer because reconciliation implies that there must have been a time of conciliation with the Aborigines in the first place, which is not the case.

Introduction

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that Davison drafted for the museum’s statement of aims6 were closely followed by the director and the curatorial staff, and are worth looking at in the context of Peter Carey’s rewriting of history. A national museum like that in Canberra, Davison asserted, should, first of all, challenge the standard narrative of national history, especially its imperialist and racist components; secondly, it should reflect (through its collections) the new priorities of post-imperial days, and especially acknowledge the importance of popular culture; thirdly, it should cater for a clientele beyond the educated middle class (especially immigrants, indigenous people and all else who were traditionally excluded from the political nation); and last but not least, the display techniques should not only make use of high cultural forms, but should also pay tribute to low cultural forms such as popular entertainments of the past.7 Since the museum under Casey was strikingly leftist, the displays emphasizing the fracture lines within Australian society and thereby undermining the one-national-story approach of traditionalist historians and politicians, a conservative reaction was inevitable, not least because the “cheeky nation” image constructed by Casey proved incompatible with the principles advocated by those running the country. The mechanisms of her deposition expose the political nature of this historiographic battle, confirming Anthony Mason’s assessment (former Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia) that there is a “direct conjunction between Australian history and politics”:8 those who most actively sought to prevent an extension of Casey’s tenure in Canberra were the Howard government’s appointees to the governing council of the museum, people like Tony Staley, the former federal president of Howard’s Liberal Party, David Barnett,

6 Davison further elaborated his ideas in a paper given at the National Museums: Negotiating Histories conference held at the Australian National University from 12 to 14 July 1999 (see Davison’s “National Museums in a Global Age: Observations Abroad and Reflections at Home”, in the poceedings edited by Darryl McIntyre and Kirsten Wehner: National Museums: Negotiating Histories – Conference Proceedings, Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2001, 12-28). 7 Davison, “National Museums in a Global Age: Observations Abroad and Reflections at Home”, 18-19. 8 Anthony Mason, Foreword, in Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, The History Wars, Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne UP, 2003, viii.

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co-author of a Howard biography, and Christopher Pearson, a former speechwriter for Howard. Yet, how does all this relate to my reading of Peter Carey’s fictions? First and primarily, the battle for the sovereignty over the National Museum and the interpretative hegemony over the past that comes with it already gives the non-Australian reader of this book an idea as to how important the custodianship of the national story actually is for Australia, which in its incarnation as a modern nationstate seems to have so little history compared to Europe. Above all, the tug-of-war for the national story as told by the Canberra institution can serve as a foil that makes the reader sensitive to some of the issues I will be analysing in the course of this book. There are, after all, two striking parallels between the history exhibited in the National Museum under Casey’s aegis and the history written by the writer Peter Carey. First, both rewrite Australian history from the same ideological side of the country’s history wars, which have divided academics and political interest groups into a progressive and a conservative camp. The progressives, following the lead taken by Manning Clark to revise Australian history,9 challenge the great narrative of achievement told by historians such as Geoffrey Blainey, which in the multicultural present is often seen as simplifying and forgetful of marginalized groups and communities. As Kremmer laconically observes, traditional accounts of the Australian experience à la Blainey feature “miners and farmers, the campaigns for universal suffrage, and success in sports, business and science. Throw in a few convicts, bushrangers, fires, floods and droughts, and there you have it: instant Australia!” Since the progressive historians tend not to mince matters when it comes to the imperfections and defects of their nation’s story,10 conservatives have accused them of having a “black armband”

9

Clark was the primer in the tradition of Australian revisionist history. In his 1954 essay “Rewriting Australian History” (reprinted in The Oxford Book of Australian Essays, ed. Imre Salusinszky, Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1997, 129-38), he maintained that “the first move to be made in the rewriting of Australian history is to drop the ideas of the past which have comforted and instructed earlier generations” (138). 10 Their narratives typically feature prominently such issues as the destruction of Aboriginal tribes and the class-ridden make-up of a society that had always taken pride in its egalitarianism.

Introduction

5

view of history.11 This, they hold, causes the progressives and their adherents to paint an overly negative portrait of Australia’s history. The conservatives, on the other hand, believe, like John Howard, “that the balance sheet of Australian history is overwhelmingly a positive one”.12 Their historians have therefore “emphasised the successful European settlement, the Anglo-Saxon legacy, the monarchy, and the sense of national unity and pride in our achievements”.13 Second, both the writer Carey and the National Museum tell the national story, or rather, a version of it. The National Museum, abiding by its statutes,14 renders the story of the Australian people through the material it exhibits and through the pieces of information it disseminates relating to Australian history; and Peter Carey’s fictions, in their entirety, also tell the story of the Australian people. In fact, the author returns to the country’s past obsessively; the vision of the Australian experience that emerges from Carey’s fiction is so comprehensive his œuvre makes up nothing less than a fictional biography of the country.15 His eight novels span more than 150 years 11

Phrase coined by one of their most prominent opponents, Geoffrey Blainey, in his Sir John Latham Memorial Lecture (April 1993): Quadrant, XXXVII/7-8 (July/August 1993), 10-15. 12 Howard’s speech before the House of Representatives (29 October 1996): House of Representatives: Official Hansard, 29 October 1996: www.aph.gov.au/hansard/reps/ dailys/dr291096.pdf (accessed 20 March 2010). 13 Mason, Foreword, The History Wars, vii. 14 The National Museum of Australia Act from 1980 is available at www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/nmoaa1980297 (accessed 20 March 2010). 15 In framing Peter Carey’s fiction as a fictional biography of Australia, I find myself in the tradition of two prose genres that have of late proved very productive. First, there are the mostly fact-based biographies of geographical regions. These are national narratives that give a more or less comprehensive outline of the lives of nations or other communities. Some of the best known of these anthropomorphizing histories of countries and metropoles are Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography (2000), John Reader’s Africa: A Biography of the Continent (1999), and the Australian examples – John Birmingham’s Leviathan: The Unauthorised Biography of Sydney (1999), Lucy Hughes Turnbull’s Sydney: Biography of a City (1999) and Phillip Knightley’s Australia: A Biography of a Nation (2000). Second, there are the fictional biographies of real or imagined persons. The parallels between Carey’s fictional biography of Australia and novels like Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg (1994), Joyce Carol Oates’ Blonde (2000), Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), Peter Ackroyd’s The Lambs of London (2004), or even Peter Carey’s own True History of

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of Australian history, ranging from the 1830s (Jack Maggs16) to the putatively post-contemporary setting of the finale of Illywhacker.17 They cover many of the key episodes of the Australian heritage: the convict experience (Jack Maggs), the age of exploration (Oscar and Lucinda18), the unfairness of Aboriginal dispossession (Illywhacker, 30 Days in Sydney19), the Kelly Outbreak (True History of the Kelly Gang20), the importance of aviation in the national development, the Great Depression, the anti-Chinese riots at Lambing Flat (all in Illywhacker), the Ern Malley hoax and the prudery and antiintellectualism of the 1940s (My Life as a Fake21), and the country’s economic and cultural colonization in neocolonial times (Illywhacker and The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith22). As befits a biography, Carey’s fiction, next to the key events in the life under review, also presents an assessment of the personality of the biography’s subject, its character, its identity. Some of the recurrent issues in his inventory of the Australian consciousness are the nation’s notorious misogyny (Oscar and Lucinda), the feeling of guilt over Aboriginal dispossession and victimization and, related to this, the attempts at reassessing the doctrine of terra nullius (Illywhacker); the latent racism (Oscar and Lucinda, 30 Days in Sydney); the psychological traumas of the convict era (Jack Maggs); the precarious and misleading self-confidence and its reverse, the cultural cringe (Illywhacker); and, last but not least, the country’s corruption and

the Kelly Gang (2000) are striking. Like the other writers mentioned, Carey, in his capacity as author of a life of Australia, is free to pick those episodes that carry the greatest poetic effect; and since he is not bound by the strict conventions of historiography, he can, like the writers of fictional biographies, take liberties with the chronology, facts and events in the life of the subject of his biography. 16 Peter Carey, Jack Maggs, London: Faber and Faber, 1997. 17 Peter Carey, Illywhacker, London: Faber and Faber, 1985. 18 Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, London: Faber and Faber, 1988. 19 Peter Carey, 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account, The Writer and the City, London: Bloomsbury, 2001. 20 Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), London: Faber and Faber, 2001. 21 Peter Carey, My Life as a Fake, London: Faber and Faber, 2003. 22 Peter Carey, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, London: Faber and Faber, 1994.

Introduction

7

barely-contained criminality (The Tax Inspector,23 30 Days in Sydney24). Review of the literature With the publication of Fabulating Beauty (2005), the critical reception of Peter Carey’s writings has reached a point where, as Paul Kane asserts in his preface to this collection of essays, one can safely say “that the academy is in fact serious about a writer”. Carey is now fully implicated in the system of literary criticism and critics “are well along in the process of establishing what the work means and how it functions within that system”.25 Carey has been a darling of literary criticism for some time.26 One of the icons of the New Literatures in English – which themselves have become increasingly visible over the last few decades, to the point of now being firmly established in the canon – Carey is one of the most highly-decorated writers in English. A multi-award winning “literary lion”27 in the eyes of the popular press, Carey has won almost all of the major fiction awards in Australia, and he was awarded both the Booker Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize even twice.28 23

Peter Carey, The Tax Inspector, London: Faber and Faber, 1991. Although 30 Days in Sydney is a hybrid book in terms of genre, I include it here among the author’s fictions. For a closer analysis of the genre of 30 Days in Sydney, see Chapter Six. 25 “Preface: Framing Peter Carey”, in Fabulating Beauty: Perspectives on the Fiction of Peter Carey, ed. Andreas Gaile, Cross/Cultures 78, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005, xi. 26 A search in the AustLit database (a bibliographical project of eight Australian universities and the National Library of Australia that provides tens of thousands of authoritative references to Australian writers and their critics) best illustrates this. Of contemporary Australian writers, Carey rates by far the most entries in the criticism section (more than three hundred items by 2006). Only Patrick White, the father of modern Australian literature, has been the subject of more critical readings (exceeding eight-hundred items). 27 Peter Huck, “Making of a Literary Lion”, Sydney Morning Herald, 29 October 1988, 82. 28 Carey won the prestigious Miles Franklin Award in 1979 for War Crimes, in 1981 for Bliss, and in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda; the Age Book of the Year Award in 1985 for Illywhacker, and in 1994 for The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith; the National Book Council of Australia Award in 1982 for Bliss, in 1985 for Illywhacker and in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda; the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award in 1980 for War Crimes and in 1982 for Bliss; the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award in 1986 for Illywhacker; the Australian Film Institute’s Award for the best screenplay in 1985 24

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The fact that Carey is booked for literary prizes is so conspicuous that it was even taken up by Australia’s satirical online magazine The Blue News,29 which published a faked interview with Carey having the author express delight at his fellow writer Frank Moorhouse’s tragic failure to win a literary award which Carey himself had just won. Another indication of the high esteem in which he is held is the amount of academic literature on his writings: Carey is the subject of four monographs, seven dissertations, an essay collection, more than a hundred articles in scholarly journals, essay collections and monographs, as well as several hundred reviews in major world dailies and weeklies.30 Regardless of the disciplinary affiliations of Carey’s academic commentators (next to literary critics there are political scientists,31 film and media critics,32 and fellow creative writers33), the vast majority of Carey scholars have approached his writings with the tools provided by late twentieth-century critical theory. This is, perhaps, not too surprising, for Carey’s period of literary eminence (beginning with the publication of his first collection of short stories by the University of Queensland Press in 1974) approximately coincides with the ascendancy of “postist” theories (like postmodernism, postcolonialism and post-structuralism) in the critical appreciation of literature. His writings respond to the same cultural currents that Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, or Edward Said, for instance, have analysed in their theoretical work. This is why Carey’s fiction has proved to be particularly approachable through postmodern and postcolonial critical concepts, and why, as for Bliss; internationally, he won the Booker Prize in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda and in 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1998 for Jack Maggs and in 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang. 29 “Peter Carey ‘Still Delighted’”, in Blue News, I (2001). The piece caused quite an uproar in the Australian book trade (cf. the anonymous news item “Satirical Newsletter Has the Book Trade Laughing – Nervously”, Age, 20 May 2002). 30 See Fabulating Beauty, 349-408. Although most scholarly contributions come from Australia and the United States, where Carey lives today, there is also significant criticism from Canada, South Africa, India, Britain, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland, France, Spain, and Sweden. 31 Most notably M.D. Fletcher, who has published no less than five critical essays on Carey. 32 Theodore Sheckels, Graeme Turner, Patrick Fuery. 33 The most prominent are John Updike, John Banville, Matthew Kneale, Peter Porter, Nicholas Jose, John Kinsella, and Barry Oakley.

Introduction

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Theodore Sheckels aptly observes, a writer like Carey does not need to say to himself “‘be postmodern’ and proceed accordingly”34 in order to be postmodern (and the same holds true for the other theoretical schools he is associated with). Carey critics come, roughly speaking, in two denominations. There are those who, like Helen Daniel, Wenche Ommundsen, and Teresa Dovey, mainly focus on the aesthetic dimension of Carey’s fiction, on his story-telling techniques, his narrative trickery, his metafictional strategies, or his use of parody and intertextuality. The second group of critics, led by the likes of Bill Ashcroft and Graham Huggan, also recognize these writerly strategies and methods, but do so expressly for the purpose of shedding light on the cultural and political implications of the author’s writings. The present reading clearly follows the second tradition. It will be my objective to show how the postmodernist, postcolonialist and poststructuralist writerly strategies and techniques in evidence in Carey’s fiction deflate the master narrative of Australian history and help the author install a new version in its stead. This new fictional history is not necessarily closer to the truth; it does, however, constantly alert the reader to its constructedness and, by implication, to that of history in general. Because of the deeply political nature of this revision of history, allegory in Carey’s fiction will be of prime importance to my argument. Widely recognized as a form of counterdiscourse that enables the postcolonial writer to open up history to the “transformative power of imaginative revision”,35 the allegorical mode allows us to see for example the Pet Shop in Illywhacker as a metaphor for Australia at large, the inland exploration in Oscar and Lucinda as a classic example of the civilizing mission of white man and, more specifically, white man’s intrusion into the Aboriginal’s dreaming, the fictional countries of Efica and Voorstand in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith as imaginatively transfigured versions of Australia and the United States, and Bob McCorkle in My Life as a Fake as a personification of the concept of Australia as an orphan. Because of their direct relation to the extra-textual world, allegories 34

Theodore Sheckels, “The Difficulties of Translating Peter Carey’s Postmodern Fiction into Popular Film”, in Fabulating Beauty, 83. 35 Stephen Slemon, “Post-Colonial Allegory and the Transformation of History”, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, XXIII/1 (1988), 159.

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thus often transport the most hard-hitting and acerbic cultural criticism invested in Carey’s (or any other writer’s) fictions. Having stated that I see myself as following the path signposted by critics from the second group, it is on the basis of their readings of the revisionary strategies employed by Carey (mainly in the novels Illywhacker and Oscar and Lucinda) that I devise my own critical project, whose aim is to give a systematic analysis of the revisionary thrust of Carey’s oeuvre as a whole. As the following analysis of the primary texts will show,36 practically all of Carey’s novels can be seen as carrying a revisionary argument, as contributing to a revised biography of Australia, one that asks the readers to jettison canonical views of the Australian experience. The new image that emerges from Carey’s fiction is, as will be seen, underlined by the new approach Carey chooses to his literary subject matter in terms of form, style and genre.37 Conception and design Rewriting History starts out with a theoretical chapter in which I will locate Carey’s rewriting of history in the larger philosophical context of postmodern, postcolonial and poststructuralist theorizing in the field of history. I shall demonstrate how Carey, by debunking the pretensions of traditional history to present a unified, objectified and truthful account of events, joins forces with the postmodernists; how, with a virtual bow to poststructuralist theorists, he alerts the readers’ attention to the constructedness of his fictions (and by implication, of all books dealing with history); and how, in line with postcolonial 36

In the course of this book virtually all of Carey’s novels, travelogues and a few short stories will be considered. The focus will be on the novels Bliss (1981), Illywhacker (1985), Oscar and Lucinda (1988), The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994), Jack Maggs (1997), True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), and on the semifictional travelogue, 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account (2001). 37 The deviation from then predominant forms of prose fiction in Australia is reiterated by Carey, who is noted for his formal, stylistic and linguistic innovations, every time he writes a new book – this at least was the critical consensus until the publication of My Life as a Fake in 2003. It was only then that critics started to accuse Carey of being repetitive (as Robert Macfarlane did in his TLS review of My Life as a Fake, or as Karen Lamb did in her ABR review of Theft: A Love Story), of engaging in a field of literary exploration that had “exhausted” itself in the sense of John Barth’s controversial essay from 1967 (see my discussion of Carey as a writer between replenishment and exhaustion in the Postscript to this book).

Introduction

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thinkers, he stresses the distortions of the imperial tradition of colonial history and the degrading effects these have had on colonial subjects. Part Two of this book seeks to theorize Carey’s specific outlook on history. His stress on the mythical properties of history, which in Carey’s historical narratives replace the truth-and realism paradigms of traditional orthodoxies of historical method, turn his novels into what I shall be calling “mythistory”.38 Mythistory is a type of discourse that eschews the essentials of traditional Western epistemology and necessitates a recalibration of the bearings of those readers who still think in categories such as true and false, right and wrong, fact and fiction. Mythistory as an aestheticized type of history also clearly signals a return to the story-telling origins of the discipline, filling the intersection between history and fiction. My analysis of Carey’s transformation of history into mythistory is central not only to a critical estimation of his rewriting of history, but also to an appraisal of Carey’s works in general. After all, as Carolyn Bliss holds, the story telling and yarning that is so characteristic of the author’s writings has kept no less than three schools of Carey critics occupied.39 Part Three is dedicated to the actual content of Peter Carey’s fictional biography. I shall here analyse Carey’s depiction of such key issues in Australian history as Aboriginal dispossession, the psychological and social effects of the convict system, and the mechanisms of colonization (both in colonial and postcolonial times). I will show how Carey, an astute critic of “denial and memory loss”,40 unrelentingly fictionalizes the blemishes on the historical record to make an end of the “selective memory” that according to fellow 38

For a critical introduction to the concept of mythistory, see Chapter Two. See her essay “‘Lies and Silences’: Cultural Masterplots and Existential Authenticity in Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang”, in Fabulating Beauty, 276. According to Bliss, the first school comprises critics who view Carey’s “yarning and patent conning as instances of postmodern play, one of the many signs of the author’s artistic prestidigitation and contemporaneity”; the second one, led by Anthony Hassall and Christer Larsson, “concentrates on the implications of this technique [focus on narrative] for character, theme, and ethical vision”; and lastly, an approach taken by critics who mesh the two previous ones and, like Paul Kane, find “Carey’s storytelling to be both postmodern in form and ethically inflected toward the postcolonial in theme” (Bliss, 275-76). 40 Andreas Gaile, “The ‘Contrarian Streak’: An Interview with Peter Carey”, in Fabulating Beauty, 3. 39

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novelist David Malouf has been so characteristic of Australian attitudes to the past: We remember the bits that speak well of us … the dark bits we suppress .… What each of us takes on, at whatever point we enter it [history], is the whole of what happened here.41

As historian of such an inclusivist account of the past, Carey sounds out the moral implications of these “dark bits” for present-day Australia. From the vantage point of academia one might think that Carey, by showing how the Aboriginal dreamtime was turned into a nightmare and by emphasizing the unprepossessing convict origins of the country, preaches to the choir. This is not the case. These issues, as Robert Manne asserts, have proved to be “extraordinarily difficult” for Australians to come to terms with, because like all other nations, Australians “wish to think of their origins at least as without taint”.42 With his emphasis on the impossibility of glossing over the “dark bits” such as Australia having its origins in genocide and penal confinement, Carey illustrates Alexis de Tocqueville’s assertion that nations, like human beings, will always bear the “marks of their origin”, and that “the circumstances which accompanied their birth and contributed to their rise, affect the whole term of their being”.43 To Carey, these marks are ingrained in the very texture of Australianness. History, to him, appears “like a bloodstain that keeps on showing on the wall no matter how many new owners take possession, no matter how many times we paint over it”.44 Part Four concentrates on the way in which Carey rewrites the personality of the subject of his biography, the Australian national identity. The orthodoxy he writes against here is easy to identify: the exclusivist and misogynist yet extremely powerful concept of the 41

David Malouf, A Spirit of Play: The Making of Australian Consciousness, Sydney: ABC, 1998, 101. 42 Robert Manne, “History to Suit Carries Its Own Peril”, Sydney Morning Herald, 8 September 2003. 43 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vols, trans. Henry Reeve, rev. Francis Bowen, introd. Phillips Bradley and Daniel J. Boorstin, New York: Vintage, 1990, I, 26-27. First published as De la Démocratie en Amérique, 2 vols, Brussels: Hauman, 1835. 44 Carey, 30 Days in Sydney, 220.

Introduction

13

typical Australian, derived from the country’s nationalist tradition. I shall here be concentrating on Carey’s depiction of the deeply hierarchized relationship between the sexes in Australia. Recovering the female side of the national character, as he does in many of his fictions, indeed, is one of the most pressing concerns in identity politics in present-day Australia, for women are traditionally absent from the country’s identity constructions. Female identities still need to be written into existence. Although the project of “rewriting Australian history from a feminist perspective” has, according to a 1998 survey of the Australian humanities,45 received significant scholarly input ever since the 1970s, women’s achievements still fail to be seen as historical. A list of the one hundred most influential Australians (published in 2001 by the Sydney Morning Herald to mark the centenary of Federation) features eighty-five men, and fifteen women.46 The fact that women are so conspicuously underrepresented in this admittedly subjective inventory is not necessarily a sign of the paper’s misogynist journalists, but rather attests to the fact that Australian society in the past has systematically prevented women from having influence, from making history. The Postscript, then, takes the opportunity for a reckoning with both the critical inventory employed in this analysis of Carey’s fiction as well as with the author’s achievements as a fictional rewriter of Australian history. The time for doing so seems just right: the predominant paradigms of the literary criticism of the last three decades have increasingly come under pressure, and so have a number of those writerly strategies that have been seen as typical of Carey and that have proved to be particularly powerful when it comes to revising notions of Australian history.

45

Bruce Bennett, “Identity and Heritage”, in Knowing Ourselves and Others: The Humanities in Australia into the 21st Century, 3 vols, Australian Research Council, Canberra: Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs, III, 89. 46 To have influence, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, “is to be capable of changing, moving, affecting or modifying people and events. The test is whether a person has changed the course of history in some way, whether we see things differently because of what he or she has done” (Tony Stephens, “The Most Influential Australians”, Sydney Morning Herald, 22 January 2001).

PART ONE THEORETICAL PREMISES

CHAPTER ONE REWRITING HISTORY: THEORETICAL PREMISES If white Australia had a ‘culture’ it was predominantly a Christian one – it had destroyed 40,000 years of aboriginal culture to establish itself. Now, it seemed the Christian culture was dying. This seemed an interesting site for an exploration ... not so much saving history as inventing it, re-shaping it, creating ways of looking at it.1

What Peter Carey once said in an interview with regard to his method in Oscar and Lucinda holds true for all of the author’s novels under scrutiny in this study. From Bliss to My Life as a Fake – the reader finds in Carey’s writings a version of the Australian experience that is decidedly different from the reconstructionist account that traditional history books used to offer. Carey’s fictional biography of his country bears two diametrically opposed signature traits. It conforms with Mark Twain’s oft-quoted assessment of the Australian experience, used by Carey as an epigraph to Illywhacker: “Australian history is almost always picturesque .... It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies.”2 At the same time, there is a distinct feeling of authenticity, of dealing with empirically analysable data, evidence from the past that is presented to the reader through a seemingly objective narrating agency. Out of this ambivalence speaks the postmodern constitution of the Zeitgeist of the late twentieth century. The postmodernist predilection for aesthetic processes has turned history into one of the major fields of exploration for contemporary artists. More than a hundred years ago, it was none other than Oscar Wilde who, in one of his now classic aphorisms, alerted his audience to the exigency of rethinking the past: “The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.”3 It seems as 1

Eleanor Wachtel, “‘We Really Can Make Ourselves Up’: An Interview with Peter Carey”, Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada, IX (1993), 103-105. 2 Carey, Illywhacker, 7. 3 Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist” (1890), in The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann, London: W.H. Allen, 1970, 359.

18

Rewriting History

if intellectuals from a wide range of disciplines had taken Wilde’s call to heart: the revision of history and its implications for the theory and practice of a number of neighbouring disciplines have been major concerns in the humanities over the last three decades. Since the days when Oscar Wilde prowled the literary scene the conditions for revising history have fundamentally changed, though. Proud Clio is in an ailing condition. The muse’s countenance bears the marks of conceptual and ideological changes that have effected a full-scale revolution in the discipline of history. A centenary ago, in fin de siècle nineteenth-century Europe, the Western mind had just historicized itself and begun to grasp the historical relativity of its present situation. As the “Leitwissenschaft”4 of the nineteenth century, academic history not only brought the light of knowledge to the dark ages of the past, but also afforded a whole new outlook on the human situation of the nineteenth-century observer. To a newly historicized consciousness, the present suddenly appeared as just one significant episode in the inexorable plot of history, the great story of human development and advancement. Devoted to standards appropriated from the natural sciences,5 European historicists of the likes of Ranke, Droysen and Burckhardt in the German context, Carlyle and Macaulay in Britain, and Michelet in France, displayed an unshakable belief in the incorruptibility of the historical facts they used for the construction of their national pasts. Traditional, historicist conceptualizations had seen history as an evolutionary narrative of ceaseless progress, the teleological narrative closure being “universal freedom, the fulfilment of all humanity”.6 Ideologically, history, once it had taken on “the mantle of a 4 Annette Wittkau, Historismus: Zur Geschichte des Begriffs und des Problems, 2nd rev. edn, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck, 1994, 13. 5 See ibid., 31. Droysen, for example, was convinced of the scientific character of his historical knowledge: “Überhaupt verstehen die Historischen ihren Vorteil besser: die schreiben nicht so windige und windschiefe Spekulationen, sondern Zitate, die man wieder zitieren kann, und reelle Wissenschaft” (letter to Albert Heydemann, 19 November 1829, in Johann Gustav Droysen: Briefwechsel, ed. Rudolf Hübner, 2 vols, 1929, I, 1829-1851, reprinted, Deutsche Geschichtsquellen des 19. Jahrhunderts, Osnabrück: Biblio, 1967, 15). 6 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982-1985, Afterword Wlad Godzich, trans. Don Barry et al., Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993, 25.

Theoretical Premises

19

discipline”,7 was deeply rooted in European Enlightenment philosophy with its belief in progress and improvement, which goes back at least to the times of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his oft-quoted belief in the “faculty of self-improvement”.8 Postmodernism’s scepticism towards and even negation of the premises of historicism has rendered such progressivist concepts unsustainable. Ever since Nietzsche’s assault on the teleological alignment of Western civilization, the evolutionary tale of history has lost its clear direction and today presents itself as a field of chaos and anarchy rather than as one of linear progression. A hundred years after Nietzsche, the deconstruction of history has been taken to its logical conclusion by the school of the “posthistoire”, scholars who have proclaimed the end or even death of history.9 In reaction, the postmodern school of historiography revises traditional histories attaching greatest importance to “the rewriting of some features modernity had tried or pretended to gain, particularly its legitimation upon the purpose of the general emancipation of mankind”.10 The crisis of legitimation observed by postmodernists like Lyotard has transformed the traditional linear sequence of events into a multitude of narratives that are characterized by a “dispersion of events and multiplicity of lines of ‘explanation’”.11 The grands récits have, in the process, been irreversibly replaced by petits récits whose objective it is “to avoid totalization and preserve heterogeneity”.12

7

Bill Ashcroft, “Against the Tide of Time: Peter Carey’s Interpolation into History”, in Writing the Nation: Self and Country in the Post-Colonial Imagination, ed. John C. Hawley, Critical Studies 7, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996, 194. 8 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. and introd. G.D.H. Cole, London: J.M. Dent, 1973, 54. 9 For scholars who, like Francis Fukuyama (in The End of History and the Last Man, 1992), propound an end-of-history theory, the death of Marxism has signalled the dawning of a new world order in which the historic struggle between the forces of liberalism and capitalism and those of totalitarianism has been resolved by the triumph of democracy and global capitalism. In this sense, history has come to a halt. 10 Jean-François Lyotard, “Rewriting Modernity”, SubStance, LIV (1987), 8-9. 11 Thomas Flynn, “Foucault’s Mapping of History”, in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994, 43. 12 Victor E. Taylor, “General Commentary”, in Postmodernism: Critical Concepts, eds Victor E. Taylor and Charles E. Winquist, 4 vols, I, Foundational Essays, London: Routledge, 1998, xv.

20

Rewriting History

With regard to Australian history, postcolonial concepts of history are particularly important when it comes to exchanging the imperial grand récit for a postcolonial petit récit, written from the former margin. In the reconceptualization of history that has taken place over the last three decades postcolonial scholars have identified history as “a prominent, if not the prominent instrument for the control of subject peoples”.13 Postcolonial interrogations of history have generally laid great emphasis on the way in which history was used and/or abused in its function as one of the legitimizing narratives on which the imperialist invasion and the subsequent perpetuation of Western hegemony rested. They have shown how the institution of history helped the Empire to erect its centre/margin dichotomy, which has been a determining factor in constructions of colonial and imperial subjectivities ever since the colonial age. The exposure of history as a totalizing narrative with a potentially harmful teleology has relied to a considerable degree on poststructuralist insights and the linguistic turn in the social sciences they have effected. The poststructuralist awareness of the constructedness of all language and especially of the trope-ridden nature of historical discourse effectually debunked history and exposed its ideological contamination. In his famous study of nineteenth-century historicist thought, Metahistory, Hayden White explains in this context that the historical consciousness on which Western man has prided himself since the beginning of the nineteenth century may be little more than a theoretical basis for the ideological position from which Western civilization views its relationship not only to cultures and civilizations preceding it but also to those contemporary with it in time and contiguous with it in space. In short, it is possible to view historical consciousness as a specifically Western prejudice by which the presumed superiority of modern, industrial society can be retroactively substantiated.14

In both the theoretical reconceptualization of historical discourse and the actual revision of, say, the history of nations, persons, or 13

Ashcroft, “Against the Tide of Time: Peter Carey’s Interpolation into History”, 194. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1973, 2. 14

Theoretical Premises

21

social groups that have been misrepresented in traditional accounts of past human experience, the ‘postist’ discourses of the last three decades stand out as the most consequential influence. Postmodernism with its anti-authorizing agenda and its “incredulity towards metanarratives”,15 poststructuralism with its debunking of history’s linguistic constructedness, and postcolonialism with its emphasis on the centre-margin dichotomy in the relation between the colonies and the imperial centre have, together, prepared the intellectual ground for feminist historians to rewrite history into herstory,16 for authors in the former colonies of the British Empire to rewrite their histories and thus write back to the imperial centre,17 for all other marginalized players in the historical concert to write their historic selves into being,18 and finally, for Carey to rewrite the history of Australia. Carey and the postist discourses The critical discourses mentioned are the theoretical underpinning to Carey’s fictional revision of history. They are all clearly present in his œuvre – so much so that there is hardly a scholarly essay that fails to either mention Carey’s intellectual vicinity to one or several of them or to present a reading of the novels along the lines of postmodern or postcolonial critical concepts. Carey himself is extremely wary of 15

Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), Foreword Fredric Jameson, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984, xxiv. 16 Cf. Sheila R. Johansson’s essay “Herstory as History: A New Field or Another Fad?” (in Liberating Women’s History: Theoretical and Critical Essays, ed. Berenice A. Carroll, Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1976, 400-30). Some revisionist gender histories are Sheila Rowbotham’s Hidden from History: Rediscovering Women in History; From the 17th Century to the Present (1974), or Joan W. Scott’s Gender and the Politics of History (1988). 17 In India, historians associated with the Subaltern Studies Group (e.g. Gyan Prakash or Dipesh Chakrabarty) have famously rewritten the history of South Asia from a postcolonial perspective. Rewritings of Australian history have been produced by, for instance, Mudrooroo (Us Mob: History, Culture, Struggle: An Introduction to Indigenous Australia, 1995) or Deborah B. Rose (Hidden Histories: Black Stories from Victoria River Downs, Humbert River and Wave Hill Stations, 1991). 18 One might here think of the narratives of historic emancipation that have been written by minorities such as lesbians and gays (e.g. Jonathan Katz’s Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the USA – A Documentary, 1976; Alison Oram’s and Annmarie Turnbull’s The Lesbian History Sourcebook: Love and Sex Between Women in Britain from 1780-1970, 2001).

22

Rewriting History

being associated with the critical theory that has brought about the reconceptualization of history, though. He has, for instance, never (to my knowledge) referred to his novels as being postmodern. At the same time, however, he openly avows the influence of the American postmodernists of the metafictional and fabulatory school of writing: Donald Barthelme, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, John Barth, Kurt Vonnegut. While most of his writing is clearly informed by, for instance, the postmodernist distrust in meta-narratives and in authority in general, Carey’s postmodernism still needs to be qualified, for the writer conspicuously lacks the anti-Enlightenment thrust and the corresponding denial (if not rejection) of humanist ideals, which according to Fuery and Mansfield have “become near orthodoxies”19 in the posthumanist climate of postmodernism. In fact, by writing historical novels of the kind of Illywhacker, Oscar and Lucinda, Jack Maggs and True History of the Kelly Gang – doubtlessly postmodern in several of their stylistic and formal features – Carey openly defies the posthumanist, anti-Enlightenment ingredient of postmodernism. When critics categorize Carey as a postmodern author they therefore usually refer to his literary postmodernism. It is in phenomena like the loss of narratorial authority, unreliable narration, episodic plot structures, metafictional elements, and the pleasure of the fabulist to tell stories, spin yarns and create myths, that Carey’s postmodernism must be located rather than in postmodern ambivalence or even nihilism. The anti-modernist potentiality of postmodernism, incompatible as it is with the humanist ethos that shines through Carey’s œuvre, might also account for Carey’s reluctance to be pigeonholed as a postmodernist writer. His taking sides with historic losers (Australian Aborigines; the convicts silenced in the history books; Australian women), his warmhearted sympathy with those sinned against, in any case clearly bespeak his obligation to the moral imperatives inherent in the programme of the Enlightenment. These moral ideals are traditionally espoused by antipostmodernists like Jürgen Habermas, but negated by postmodernists who resign to the failure of the modernist programme and make a 19

Patrick Fuery and Nick Mansfield, Cultural Studies and Critical Theory, Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2000, 2.

Theoretical Premises

23

virtue of that failure.20 Carey’s novels in any case do not foster a climate where “anything goes”21 in moral terms; they rather display a sensitivity to traditional humanist values like emancipation, liberty, and human rights. Postcolonialism is another illustrative example for the way in which Carey’s work is permeated by current literary and cultural theory. As with the postmodern badge, the writer himself is disinclined to be positioned in the postcolonial corner of the literary spectrum. His reluctance, as in the case of postmodernism, does not necessarily signal his reservations against the programme of loss of authority (as in the case of postmodernism) or the revision of imperial superiority (as in the case of postcolonialism), but rather stems from a strategic wariness about being hijacked by any one school of thought (and thereby restricted in theme or political motivation) as well as from a certain uneasiness with academia in general that dates back to Carey’s early days as a writer. In a recent interview, he explained: There’s no doubt that when I was first published I felt rather threatened by literary critics. And also, I’ve had some very bad personal experiences with academia. One of the more traumatic was being shortlisted for the Stanford writing scholarship in Melbourne in the early 1960s. I knew the prize would change my life, send me out of Australia, put me in a testing environment, and even now I know I wasn’t wrong to see how high the stakes were. Finally the day came. I opened a door in the English Department at Melbourne University and there, gathered around a huge table, were my judges: the professor of history, the professor of English and so on. And they were patronizing and dismissive from the very start, and of course they gave the prize to

20 It is one of the most common allegations against postmodernism that it tends towards a radical relativism and thus towards nihilism. See Walter Truett Anderson, who argues that there never has been such a radical relativism in postmodern thought (see The Fontana Postmodernism Reader, ed. Walter Truett Anderson, London: Fontana, 1996, 7), and Daniel Cordle, who holds that “There are, undoubtedly, those who both advocate postmodernism and preach relativism, but these voices distort the postmodern culture they claim to portray” (Postmodern Postures: Literature, Science and the Two Cultures Debate, Aldershot, VT: Ashgate, 1999, 168). 21 Paul Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge, London: New Left Books, 1975, 296.

24

Rewriting History someone who talked their language – a nice man, by the way, a BA Honours student. But I was really hurt and humiliated.22

As a matter of fact, Carey has for a long time been interested in questions that have been integral to postcolonial interrogations of history since their inception in the 1980s. His intimate knowledge of three Anglo-Celtic cultures – the predominantly British one of his childhood and of his days at Geelong Grammar (Australia’s Eton); the Australian one of his early adulthood; and the North American one since 1989 (when he moved to New York) – even makes him an ideal observer of questions to do with colonialism and postcolonialism. His position affords him a privileged perspective on British-Australian relations, but also, and importantly so, makes him an astute critic of neocolonial mechanisms of cultural imperialism emanating from time to time from the United States. There are, however, also a number of reservations against treating Carey as a postcolonial writer. These are to do with Carey being a white Australian of European origin, which suggests a certain complicity with both the former colonizers from Britain and those Australians who have acted as colonizers within the country. And secondly, the designation of Australia itself as postcolonial is not uncontested. It goes without saying that it is problematic to subsume Australia under the same heading as a country like Nigeria, India or some of the Caribbean islands, and to try and approach its culture with the same conceptual tools. For India, for example, postcolonial history writing is a vastly different project from revisionist historiography in Australia. As Helen Tiffin points out, while writers and thinkers in the classical invader colonies can bring to bear the full weight of their indigenous metaphysical logos on the remnants of the European grand narratives, non-indigenous inhabitants in the settler colonies must do without such an alternative system.23 Additionally, postcolonial studies are often assumed to be too oppositional, too subversive and too anti-colonial to allow for a complicity like Carey’s with the dominant forces within society.

22

Gaile, “The ‘Contrarian Streak’: An Interview with Peter Carey”, 9-10. Helen Tiffin, “Post-Colonialism, Post-Modernism and the Rehabilitation of PostColonial History”, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, XXIII/1 (1988), 173. 23

Theoretical Premises

25

It would be critically blind, though, to exclude Australians from postcolonial investigations for reasons of their membership of the First World and their involvement in the colonization of the country’s Aborigines. First, postcolonial studies are, after all, an elitist form of discourse whose theorists are at home on Western campuses and whose practitioners (writers, artists) have often enough enjoyed an education in institutions of the West. And second, if we understand postcolonial discourse as an inquisitive reading and writing activity that sets out to disrupt the Western master narrative rather than as a discourse reserved for the Third or the Fourth World, postcolonial studies can also be usefully applied to Australian history and culture. After all, as Stephen Slemon argues in his essay “Unsettling the Empire” (1990), it is of no avail to limit the idea of anti-colonial resistance to the Third and Fourth World only as this would bring about “two forms of displacement”: “First, all literary writing which emerges from these cultural locations will be understood as carrying a radical and contestatory content” and secondly, “the idea will be discarded that important anti-colonialist literary writing can take place outside the ambit of Third- and Fourth-World literary writing.”24 Slemon consequently lists Peter Carey among those writers from a postcolonial background whose work exemplifies the “necessary entanglement of anti-colonial resistances within the colonialist machineries they seek to displace”25 – a critical practice that will be adopted for the present analysis. The usefulness of postcolonial critical concepts will be demonstrated again and again in the following analyses of Carey’s novels. Virtually all of them invite the reader to take a postcolonial approach. In Bliss (1981), published at a time when postcolonial criticism was still in its infancy, Carey first drew attention to the harmful influence of American cultural expansionism.26 He continued 24

Stephen Slemon, “Unsettling the Empire: Resistance Theory for the Second World”, in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, eds Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, London: Routledge, 1995, 106. 25 Ibid., 110. 26 Of the short stories, “American Dreams” (1974) most outspokenly carries an antiimperial argument. Invoking Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacrum, the short story chronicles the decline of an Australian small-town that is haunted by American cultural imperialism and the overseas tourists that come to see the city’s replica rather than the original.

26

Rewriting History

this tack in Illywhacker (1985), which investigates Australia’s entrapment in its colonial past as well as its post- respectively neocolonial present. Oscar and Lucinda (1988) confirmed the postcolonial designation of Carey’s writings. Carey here followed the devastating tracks laid by the European explorers on their expeditions through unmapped areas of the land. The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994), a voluminous allegory of the relationship between an entirely fictional ex-settler colony and an expansive super power, is imbued with questions of postcolonial relevance. And so is Jack Maggs (1997), a by now classic example of the Empire “writing back”.27 True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) with its doublycolonized protagonist also provides critics with material for postcolonialist interrogation by raising such issues as the (post)colonial national identity or by staging significant episodes of anti-colonial resistance. In My Life as a Fake (2003), the author offers some bait for readers with an awareness of postcolonial concerns (such as the possibility of reading Bob McCorkle, born at the age of twenty-four, as an allegory on Australia’s unnatural birth as a prison colony and on its denied childhood), but the book is not as conspicuously postcolonial in theme and style as the novels preceding it. What all these books share (with the exception of Bliss) is the writer’s attempt at retrieving the historic losers, those oppressed by the authorities (whether in colonial or postcolonial times), from their collective oblivion in the imperial tradition of preserving cultural memory. Carey is also clearly indebted to poststructuralist theory (which, of course, is intricately related to the other ‘postist’ discourses). The poststructuralist lineage of his writing is most obvious when the author takes his readers to the Jamesonian “prison-house of language”,

27 For a reading of the novel along these lines, see, for example, John Thieme, Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon, New York: Continuum, 2001, 102-26; Annegret Maack, “Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs: An Aussie Story?”, in Fabulating Beauty, 229-43; see also Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp, who reads the novel as an inversion of the “writing back” pattern: “The Writing-Back Paradigm Revisited: Peter Carey, Jack Maggs, and Charles Dickens, Great Expectations”, in Fabulating Beauty, 245-62.

Theoretical Premises

27

to places where he parades the deceptiveness of linguistic signs.28 It shines through whenever he plays with historical authenticity (most ostensibly in True History of the Kelly Gang, Illywhacker, and Oscar and Lucinda) and tricks his readers into believing his narrators’ lies and pretensions, if only for a short while. It is apparent whenever Carey writes historical losers into his fictional biography of Australia, or when he employs deconstructed hierarchies between males and females, natives and colonials, historical and un-historical characters. It is visible in his episodical plot-structures that convey a sense of the fragmented experience of his characters, and in the loss of narratorial authority. It is more than likely that Michel Foucault’s concept of history also seeped into Carey’s writings,29 manifesting itself for instance in the choice of historical themes and characters.30 As with postmodernism and postcolonialism, the author’s relationship with poststructuralism is of an indirect nature. Theodore Sheckels’ observation on Carey’s use of postmodern thought can also be usefully applied to his relationship with the other post-al discourses: “The term ‘postmodern’ ... is not necessarily a concept writers have in mind when they compose a poem or write a novel. Writers do not say to themselves ‘be postmodern’ and proceed accordingly.”31 Carey, to be sure, does not approach his literary subjects from the side of theory. Rather, he is a writer of his age, transforming into fiction the same problematic that theorists like the poststructuralists have formulated in theoretical-critical terms.32 The 28

For a reading of Carey’s self-conscious attention to language, see, for example, Brian Edwards, “Deceptive Constructions: The Art of Building in Peter Carey’s Illywhacker”, in Fabulating Beauty, 149-70. 29 Foucault is often cited as a major influence on postmodernist historical fiction in general: see, for example, Europäische Mentalitätsgeschichte: Hauptthemen in Einzeldarstellungen, ed. Peter Dinzelbacher, Stuttgart: Kröner, 1993, xii. 30 For Carey’s indebtedness to the history of mentalities and everyday life, see Ansgar Nünning, “‘The Empire had not been built by choirboys’: The Revisionist Representation of Australian Colonial History in Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda”, in Fabulating Beauty, 179-97. 31 Theodore Sheckels, “The Difficulties of Translating Peter Carey’s Postmodern Fiction into Popular Film”, in Fabulating Beauty, 83. 32 Nicholas Birns in his analysis of the short story “Kristu-Du” diagnoses the same reciprocal relationship with regard to postmodernism: “Kristu-Du” for example, is quint-essentially postmodernist, to the point that Birns claims that “postmodern theory could have learned a lot from him [Carey]. All these concepts are latent in this short

28

Rewriting History

genre of historiographic metafiction illustrates this perfectly. He writes novels that qualify as historiographic metafictions, but claims (in an unpublished interview I conducted with him in 1999) not to have read anything by, or even heard of, people like Linda Hutcheon or Hayden White. And the same might well hold true for most of the other theorists in the field of revisionist historiography. Carey, who in his interviews likes to flirt with his lack of theoretical grounding, may or may not have read them. Since his writings suggest a close relationship with critical theory in the field of history, I propose to see Carey’s relationship with the postist discourses as a conspicuous family resemblance, one that helps to explain theoretically why and how Carey destabilizes history in order to rewrite it.

Australian story of the early 1970s” (“‘A Dazzled Eye’: ‘Kristu-Du’ and the Architecture of Tyranny”, in Fabulating Beauty, 110).

PART TWO THEORIZING CAREY’S FICTIONAL BIOGRAPHY

CHAPTER TWO AFTER THE GRAND NARRATIVES: FROM HISTORY MYTHISTORY

TO

And what is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men’s existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?1 Contemporary man has rationalized the myths, but he has not been able to destroy them.2

While the discipline of history has been suffering from an existential crisis in the post-Hayden White era, historical fiction, by virtue of its ability to reconstruct human experience in history without having to abide by any scholarly restrictions, has evolved as a popular and much respected alternative to history proper.3 Taken to its logical conclusion, the poststructuralist assault on history, after all, leaves 1

Joseph Conrad, “A Personal Record”, in Collected Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad, 21 vols, London: Dent, 1960, V, 15. 2 Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude: The Other Mexico, and Other Essays, trans. Lysander Kemp, Yara Milos, and Rachel Phillips Belash, New York: Grove, 1985, 211. 3 Ansgar Nünning speaks of a “Renaissance der Historie in der zeitgenössischen Literatur” (Von Historischer Fiktion zu Historiographischer Metafiktion, 2 vols, Trier: WVT, 1995, I, 1) and points to the amount of fiction by contemporary authors that has a historical subject. The term “renaissance” is a little misleading, perhaps, because the genre of historical fiction has had a strong tradition in English literature since Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It is true, however, that compared to the huge output of historical fictions in postmodern times writers and critics in the first half of the twentieth century showed relatively little interest in historical subjects (cf. Jerome de Groot, The Historical Novel, The New Critical Idiom, London: Routledge, 2010, 45).

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historiography as part of fiction, but as one that because of its many restrictions lacks the appeal of historical fictions. Although this, of course, is not being put into practice for institutional, political and educational reasons, historical fictions can claim to have broken the monopoly of history books written by professional historians. For novelists, by taking their readers by their hands and guiding them through the past, that “foreign country [where] they do things differently”,4 can familiarize their readers with history as well as academic historians can do. At a time when the feasibility of representing reality as such has become a questionable undertaking even for a traditionally superior non-fictional discourse, fiction can well claim to have been rehabilitated: the reservations against fiction, which had been passed on from the Platonian criticism of art to the Christian orthodox disapproval of literature (and especially of fiction) on grounds of its deceiving nature, have finally been overcome. “Once literature”, as Susana Onega points out in an essay on the postmodernist narrativization of history, “refuses to hide its fictionality, it is then possible to reverse the traditional Platonic prejudice, and argue that the literary text ‘lies’ less than history – or philosophy or any other kind of human discourse – precisely in that it explicitly lays bare its own rhetorical status”.5 Friedrich Nietzsche stands out in the counter-movement against the absolutism of truth ingrained in history and Christianity. He is one of the most-often referred to sources of postmodernist and poststructuralist negotiations of the polar oppositions related to truth and untruth. In his Untimely Meditations (Part Two: On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, 1874), he drew attention to the potentially harmful consequences of the truth-claims of history, especially those of the kind he saw his contemporaries indulge in: 4 L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953), introd. Colm Tóibín, New York: New York Review of Books, 2002, 17. 5 Susana Onega, “‘A Knack for Yarns’: The Narrativization of History and the End of History”, in Telling Histories: Narrativizing History, Historicizing Literature, ed. Susana Onega, Costerus New Series 96, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995, 16. It is for this reason that Peter Pierce, for example, assumes that Carey perhaps feels “as Australian writers such as Eleanor Dark, ‘Barnard Eldershaw’, and Brian Penton dutifully did in the interwar years, that the national history was better entrusted to such saga novels as theirs than to professional historians” (“Kinds of Captivity in Peter Carey’s Fictions”, in Fabulating Beauty, 81).

From History to Mythistory

33

As long as the soul of historiography lies in the great stimuli that a man of power derives from it, as long as the past has to be described as worthy of imitation, as imitable and possible for a second time, it of course incurs the danger of becoming somewhat distorted, beautified and coming close to free poetic invention; there have been ages, indeed, which were quite incapable of distinguishing between a monumentalized past and a mythical fiction, because precisely the same stimuli can be derived from the one world as from the other.6

At a time when the Rankean ideal of representing the past “as it actually happened” governed the history profession, Nietzsche issued a warning to historians who had failed to see the destructive potential of their representations of historical truth. Nietzsche rebelled against the foundations of then current categories of thinking, arguing against Socrates’ moral absolutism as well as against the moral righteousness of Christianity. To him, claims to tell the truth signified a decline rather than an advance for human beings. The Christian condemnation of art, Nietzsche wrote in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), was detrimental to humankind as such: “Behind this way of thinking and evaluating, which is bound to be hostile to art if it is at all genuine, I had always felt its hostility to life, a furious, vengeful enmity towards life itself; for all life rests on semblance, art, deception, prismatic effects, the necessity of perspectivism and error.”7 Nietzsche therefore sought to overcome the moral rigidity of Christianity, its primacy of truthfulness, and its emphasis on the afterlife. His legacy can be located in many of postmodernity’s concepts of art and reality.8 After the experiences of the first half of the twentieth century, Nietzsche’s warnings regarding concepts of absolute truth reappear in the distrust cultivated today against totalitarian notions of truth, and in the widespread notion that history and fiction are, on grounds of their linguistic nature, epistemologically on level ground. 6

Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche: Untimely Meditations (Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen, 1873-76), ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997, 70. 7 Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings (Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, 1872), eds Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, trans. Ronald Speirs, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999, 9. 8 See, for example, Alan D. Schrift’s Nietzsche’s French Legacy: A Genealogy of Poststructuralism, New York: Routledge, 1995.

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According to Linda Hutcheon, the literary genre of historiographic metafiction demonstrates this generic blending by “refus[ing] the view that only history has a truth claim, both by questioning the ground of that claim in historiography and by asserting that both history and fiction are discourses, human constructs, signifying systems, and both derive their major claim to truth from that identity”.9 This is not to say that for postmodernist history questions of historical truth, because of its unattainability, have ceased to be relevant. Quite to the contrary, they are more relevant than ever. The dichotomy between truth and untruth is even constantly foregrounded.10 There is, however, a significant loss of authority to judge the truth-telling capacity of any given text, or to assess the “art of verisimilitude”11 of a given piece of art. Instead of measuring degrees of realism, critics, Hans Blumenberg contends, ought to accept that art generates its own truth(s).12 The notion that both fiction and history thus have their own truthtelling capacities has today become one of the postulates of critical theory. Robert Scholes pertinently concludes: All writing, all composition, is construction. We do not imitate the world, we construct versions of it. There is no mimesis, only poiesis. No recording. Only constructing.13

According to this conviction, there is, epistemologically, no difference between a truthful imitation of the world and an untruthful illusion summoned up by the forces of the imagination. For writers of historical fictions, this has had a hugely liberating effect: the

9

Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, London: Routledge, 1988, 93. 10 The reading public, to be sure, still thirsts for true stories and histories, as the popularity of this time-honoured genre proves (Amazon lists several thousands of books that flaunt “true story” or “true history” in their title). 11 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1957, 136. 12 See his essay “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans”, in Nachahmung und Illusion, ed. Hans Robert Jauß, Poetik und Hermeneutik 1, Munich: W. Fink, 1964, 10. 13 Robert Scholes, Structural Fabulation: An Essay on Fiction of the Future, University of Notre Dame Ward-Phillips Lectures in English Language and Literature 7, Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 1975, 7.

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popularity of the genre, and the number of prize-winning historical novels in postmodern literature speak for themselves. Myth with its ambiguous truth-telling capacity paradigmatically embodies this new order of historical reality. It reflects the shift from mimesis to poiesis, from an imitation of past reality to fictional or nonfictional constructions of it, from recreation to creation. One of the standard definitions of myth illustrates my understanding of myth as a type of discourse that eo ipso exemplifies the unmaking of the once antithetical categories of “true” and “untrue”: “A myth ... is a narrative that suggests two inconsistent responses: first, ‘this is what is said to have happened’, and second, ‘this almost certainly is not what happened, at least in precisely the way described’.”14 Although the grands récits have lost much of their authority in post-Lyotardean times, the contemporary world still is ripe with stories and myths. We are thus faced with the paradox that while in the philosophical climate of postmodernism last rites have been administered to a number of our most enduring ideologies, new myths have started to proliferate in their place. Late capitalist society, to be sure, thrives on myth, on great or small stories installed in the name of marketing and consumption to give meaning to man’s existence. In the 1950s the structuralists around Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes were the pioneers in what is now the established field of myth-criticism in the humanities. Their interest in the composition and linguistic structure of myth correlated with a renewed interest of creative writers in ancient myths, most of all in Greek mythology. According to George Steiner, “No period ever since the Florentine Renaissance has exemplified more vividly Shelley’s dictum: we are all Greeks”.15 Writing in the early 1980s, Annegret Maack even spoke of a “renaissance”16 of myth in what was then contemporary British fiction. The current proliferation of myth is, by no means, limited to classical pretexts. In fact, 14 Northrop Frye, “The Koine of Myth: Myth as a Universally Intelligible Language”, in Northrop Frye: Myth and Metaphor. Selected Essays 1974-1988, ed. Robert D. Denham, Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1990, 4. 15 George Steiner, “Modernity, Mythology and Magic”, The Guardian, 6 August 1994, 27. 16 Annegret Maack, Der Experimentelle Englische Roman der Gegenwart, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984, 67.

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according to Barthes, “everything can be a myth provided it is conveyed by a discourse. Myth is not defined by the object of its message, but by the way in which it utters this message: there are formal limits to myth, there are no ‘substantial’ ones.” Barthes goes on to explain that any discourse may turn into a myth “when social usage is added to pure matter”.17 Given its malleable nature, myth can potentially be constructed by every interest or pressure group.18 It is cultural currency that decides whether a story attains mythic status in contemporary popular consciousness or whether it remains inconsequential, ephemeral. At a time when the internet and global marketing strategies ensure worldwide circulation, stories are very prone to becoming myths. What is certain, however, is that given the transient nature of knowledge today, narratives may assume the function of myth temporarily, but at the same time are unlikely to become transhistorical master narratives. The religious and ritual origins of myth are therefore increasingly secularized, its trajectory having gone from the sacred to the profane. Hence, rather than explaining some fundamental ingredient of human existence crucial to an understanding of the world, myth more often than not turns out to be a targeted tool in marketing, image-making, or more generally, a constituent of an ideology. As part of the latter, it typically either endorses some grand, or rather, grandiose idea (such as the myth of the racial superiority of the white man or the invincibility of empires such as the Third Reich), or helps to obscure inconsistencies in the specific worldview upheld by that ideology. It is crucial to our understanding of myth that whatever the circumstances of its employment, it is often thought to be vital for human beings. Historians, myth scholars and, more generally, philosophers of culture have made it clear that myth has accompanied 17

Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957), trans. Annette Lavers, London: Vintage, 1993, 109. First published as Mythologies, Paris: Seuil, 1957. 18 The simplifying and naturalizing effect of myth also makes it so dangerous. As Barthes explains: “The world enters language as a dialectical relation between activities, between human actions; it comes out of myth as a harmonious display of essences …. [myth] abolishes the complexity of human acts …. it organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, [myth] establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves” (ibid., 142-43).

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man throughout the history of civilization. The need for myth-making and storytelling even appears as one of the differentia specifica of the human race. Tom Crick, the narrator-protagonist of Graham Swift’s 1983 novel Waterland, finds solace from the angst gnawing at his soul by telling stories. In a much-quoted passage, he describes this effect of mythos: But man ... is the story-telling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there’s a story, it’s all right.19

Liberated from the excessive history of Europe, new world societies are particularly interesting breeding grounds for myth. In the settler colonies especially, the encounter between the patchwork of the imported settler mythologies and the local mythologies of the natives has afforded some of the most interesting creations of myth in the contemporary world.20 While many of the fundamental myths of Europe go back into the darker recesses of human history, nonAboriginal mythogenesis in Australia only has a history of two centuries, and is consequently still in the making. The lack of a substantial white mythology (the settlers understandably brought with them only fragments of their mythologies) was particularly pressing when European settlers were first transplanted to the Antipodes. In the material-dominated world of the frontier, they were likely to face the same predicament as Nietzsche’s “mythless man” who, on the brink of a demythologized world of facts, is eternally hungry for a mythical home: Now mythless man stands there, surrounded by every past there has ever been, eternally hungry, scraping and digging in a search for roots, even if he has to dig for them in the most distant antiquities. The enormous historical need of dissatisfied modern culture, the 19

Graham Swift, Waterland (1983), London: Picador, 1984, 53. See Marc Colavincenzo,“Trading Magic for Fact”, Fact for Magic: Myth and Mythologizing in Postmodern Canadian Historical Fiction, Cross/Cultures 67, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003; and Marie Vautier, New World Myth: Postmodernism and Postcolonialism in Canadian Fiction, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1998. 20

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Rewriting History accumulation of countless other cultures, the consuming desire for knowledge – what does all this point to, if not to the loss of myth, the loss of a mythical home, a mythical, maternal womb?21

It is in the tradition of Nietzsche that Vance Palmer, one of the principal makers of the legend of the Australian 1890s, maintains that “men cannot feel really at home in any environment until they have transformed the natural shapes around them by infusing them with myth”.22 When the European settlers arrived, Australian Aborigines lived in their Dreamtime world, a world mythically charged, internalized and familiarized through ancestral tradition. In contrast, the new arrivals, bereft of their familiar environment, their tradition, and their stories, oftentimes felt uprooted and alienated. While the divine nature of their mission must have facilitated the removal for the European founding fathers of the United States, the first transplanted Europeans on Australian shores not only lacked a sense of mission, but also encountered surroundings “so unusual in kind as to be likely to exert a strong individual influence upon the stocks that inhabit it”.23 Since Australians were not destined, by divine providence, to settle a “howling wilderness” or to christianize the “heathen Indians” (as standard Puritan rhetoric had it) and, along the way, erect a “new Jerusalem”, their early settlement history was rather more material than that of the Pilgrim Fathers. It was therefore all the more urgent for them to comprehend the place where birds (namely the Kookaburra) laughed instead of sang, where the trees (the eucalypts) shed their bark and not their leaves, and where endemic animals like the kangaroo or the platypus presented a real challenge to the settlers’ imagination, as Murray Bail explains in his oft-quoted article “Imagining Australia”.24 21

Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, 109. Vance Palmer, The Legend of the Nineties (1954), Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1963, 52. 23 Henry Mackenzie Green, A History of Australian Literature Pure and Applied: A Critical Review of all Forms of Literature Produced in Australia from the First Books Published After the Arrival of the First Fleet Until 1950, with Short Accounts of Later Publications up to 1960, 2 vols, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1961, I, 355. 24 Murray Bail, “Imagining Australia”, Times Literary Supplement, 27 November 1987, 1330. 22

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It is at this point in the cultural history of any given society that myth comes in. According to Blumenberg, it sets to work where the unfamiliar and the inexplicable inflict an existential angst upon humans. In such a situation myth helps to familiarize the unfamiliar: “This occurs primarily, not through experience and knowledge, but rather through devices like that of the substitution of the familiar for the unfamiliar, of explanations for the inexplicable, of names for the unnameable.”25 In the history of European colonialism, this urge to familiarize played an important role in various practices of cultural inscription in the new world. With cities such as Paris, London and York having been metaphorically transported all over the world, the toponymy of the colonies constitutes a well-known example, and followed this urge as much as the introduction of European folk traditions wherever the settlers tried to make a new home. The transportation of such movable cultural accoutrements brought with it complications, though. First, it more or less nonchalantly wiped out the culture that was already there, and second, by disregarding the peculiarities of the new surroundings, the settlers soon found that many of their myths, which had endowed their lives with meaning in the Northern hemisphere, could not be sustained in the new world.26 In what follows, I shall argue that, taken together, Peter Carey’s novels form a narrative ensemble that significantly enriches the former colony’s nascent mythology and adds to what Steiner calls the “alphabet of … culture”.27 Peter Carey’s mythistory Peter Carey’s engagement with myth is complex. It applies to his writings in several of its meanings and is, unsurprisingly, one of the most oft-mentioned critical concepts in Carey criticism. There is, in fact, hardly an essay or review article that fails to mention the word “myth” or one of its lexical derivatives.28 Where myth is mentioned in 25

Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth (1979), trans. Robert M. Wallace, Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1985, 5. 26 Carey exemplifies this problem in True History of the Kelly Gang, where the Kellys’ “beloved saint” (88), St Brigit, loses her mythical powers and simply withers away in the new colonial surroundings. 27 Steiner, “Modernity, Mythology and Magic”, 27. 28 In the essay collection Fabulating Beauty, “myth” significantly appears in fourteen out of twenty essays – although it was not given out as a topic to the contributors.

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criticism, it is used in a considerable semantic variety. The mechanisms of its use are as nebulous as the matter it designates. In reviews especially, “myth” is dropped rather casually, most often as what myth scholar Elizabeth Baeten regards as the most common use of the term in ordinary public discourse: “a near synonym for ‘mistaken belief’, or perhaps, ‘widely or deeply held beliefs with no solid foundation in the facts of the matter’.”29 Myth in its sense of something whose truth is not verifiable, in the sense of a semi-truth or even of a lie, is integral to Carey’s writings. It sums up his preoccupation with lies and deceptiveness and thus applies to the historical demythologizing programme that he and a number of recent Australian intellectual and cultural historians like Richard White, Miriam Dixson, John Carroll, Graeme Turner and Paul Carter have engaged in. Myth is also relevant in this context in the meaning underlying many of Northrop Frye’s writings on the topic: “to me myth always means, first and primarily, mythos, story, plot, narrative.”30 Therefore it also offers itself as a concept with which to approach Carey’s investigations into the nature of narrative. It helps to make sense of the way in which many of his novels explore the function of narrative in society, explore how narrative is traded on from one generation to another, and how, through its constant usage, a story is turned into a myth. Carey’s novels not only investigate the function of such stories on a metalevel, but they also offer themselves as material for the incipient Australian mythology. The author, whose passion for storytelling has been so frequently commented on,31 has, for a long time, been painfully aware of the conspicuous lack of an authentic Australian folk tradition. This first dawned on him, as he explained in a speech in 1986, when he came across a busload of singing pensioners at a motel in the Bellinger Valley and witnessed how they 29

Elizabeth Baeten, The Magic Mirror: Myth’s Abiding Power, Albany: State U of New York P, 1996, 5. 30 Frye, “The Koine of Myth: Myth as a Universally Intelligible Language”, 3. 31 See, for instance, Bliss, “‘Lies and Silences’: Cultural Masterplots and Existential Authenticity in Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang”, 275-300; Christer Larsson, “The Relative Merits of Goodness and Originality”: The Ethics of Storytelling in Peter Carey’s Novels, PhD, Uppsala University, 2001; Anthony Hassall, “Telling Lies and Stories: Peter Carey’s Bliss”, Modern Fiction Studies, XXXV/4 (1989), 637-53.

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quickly ran out of songs to celebrate themselves. Prompted by the group’s thwarted attempts at merrymaking, Carey felt it clearer than ever that non-Aboriginal Australian “culture (our popular culture, our high culture, our culture as a whole) was still terribly thin”. He explained: A culture is something that is built up over time – a layering, an accretion of songs, stories, myths, memories that give meaning to the present. And when we want to celebrate being Australian, we do not have a great many of these reference points .... We still do not have enough songs to sustain us in the difficult times ahead.32

The stories Carey tells no doubt enrich the Australian tradition. A church drifting up the Bellinger River, members of the Kelly Gang riding across the colonial paddocks in women’s clothes, a 139-yearold illywhacking narrator who spins yarn after yarn, Ern Malley eventually coming to life at the age of twenty-four, Harry Joy’s three deaths, the archetypal convict wrenching himself free from Dickens’ grasp and installing himself as founding father of many members of the Australian race – these all constitute narrative ingredients that have the potential of becoming part of the national heritage, of being referred to and indulged in when cultural nourishment is needed. It is therefore certainly not too farfetched to concur with Karen Lamb who sees Illywhacker as the “song of Australia”,33 or with Anthony Hassall, who sees Carey as mythopoet of Australia: “Peter Carey has spent his days abroad identifying with and writing obsessively about his native land, seeking to contribute positively to a nascent Australian mythopoesis.”34 But myth is also pertinent for an analysis of Carey’s writings because of its intricate relationship with history, because of the way that history is refashioned as myth and myth as history. On the one hand, Carey continuously destabilizes history, has his narrators castigate it as a lie or a fiction, and thus reduces it to the 32

Carey, “Peter Carey Accepts the NBC Award for 1985”, NBC [National Book Council] Newsletter, XIII/2 (1986), 2-3. 33 Karen Lamb, Peter Carey: The Genesis of Fame, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1992, 33. 34 Anthony Hassall, “A Wildly Distorted Account? Peter Carey’s 30 Days in Sydney”, in Fabulating Beauty, 332.

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epistemological level of a myth, a discourse whose veracity is at best doubtworthy. On the other hand, the writer elevates myth (in the sense of mythos) to the status of history by authenticating the myths that he tells in a way that suggests historical veracity. The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, for example, is fashioned with footnotes and a glossary to ironically parade the adherence to scholarly requirements; in a like manner, True History of the Kelly Gang leaves the inexperienced reader wondering whether the fictional archivist who comments on paper stock and other peculiarities of Ned’s manuscripts and the call numbers from Melbourne Public Library might not, after all, mean that True History of the Kelly Gang is indeed a true history.35 Similar strategies of authentication permeate all of Peter Carey’s novels and make the fiction-into-fact and myth-into-history stratagems some of the most prominent of the author’s themes. The approximation of mythos and history is one of the founding missions of postmodernist narrative, the marriage of both forms of discourse having been honoured by literary theorists with the creation of the hybrid genre of historiographic metafiction. The history profession has also sought to critically apprehend the merging of the two genres and came up with “mythistory”, a concept in which myth and history are seen as complementary ingredients of historical discourse.36 In its attempt at a rehabilitation of myth vis-à-vis the quasi-scientific claims of traditional historiography, mythistory has significantly implemented for the history profession one of the basic 35

One of the most extensive Ned Kelly websites features a large section on Carey’s True History entitled “Fact or Fiction?”. The author of the website explains: “Those readers already familiar with the genuine history of the Kelly gang would recognize those aspects of this book that were invented by the author. However (perhaps as testament to the skill of the writer), numerous novices to the Kelly story have accepted that it [the Carey novel] is actually a ‘true history’” (www.bailup.com/ booksTrueHistoryKellyGang.htm; accessed 20 March 2010). 36 The genre of mythistory has a continued tradition in historiography from Herodotus to Machiavelli and on to Walter Scott, Jacob Burckhardt, Jules Michelet and Ernst Kantorowicz, as Joseph Mali explains in Mythistory: The Making of a Modern Historiography (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003, 3). As a critical concept in the philosophy of history it is less prominent. Its two main proponents are William McNeill, who introduced the concept into modern historiography in his presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1985 (see his essay “Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History, and Historians”, American Historical Review, XCI/1 [1986], 110), and Joseph Mali, who in 2003 presented his substantial monograph on the topic.

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tenets of poststructuralist thought: rather than trying to fossick the archives for historical truth, mythistorians lay emphasis on meaning and signification. In Mythistory, the historian Joseph Mali demands of the history profession a “mythic turn”. Historical studies, once they have implemented this latest in a whole series of academic turns, “must deal not only with what actually happened (that is, in common terms, history), nor with what people merely imagine to have actually happened (myth), but rather with the process in which both affect the production and reproduction of historical meaning (mythistory)”. Hence Mali sees history as just another signifying system, the historic agents as suspended in webs of significance, and their witnesses’ consciousnesses as meaning-making agencies. Also, and more importantly in the present context, mythistorians put great emphasis on the saturatedness of the historic agents’ minds with myth. Hence, they “consider the narratives and other symbolic interpretations of historical reality in which the people believe to be as real as the conditions and events in which they actually live”.37 Likewise, as Mali argues, the myths that are imagined, revived or traded on, also explain the motives and stimuli that have animated people’s actions in the past. Therefore mythistory sees myth as a very real and powerful force in the lives of historic men and women. For the mythistorian trying to “explain historical events, it is [therefore] imperative to grasp those ultimate narratives of the agents performing them, their myths”.38 For the following analysis of Carey’s strategies of deligitimating and rewriting history I have borrowed the historiographic concept of mythistory and applied it to the field of literature. From all the critical concepts at hand, it best describes the nature of Carey’s writings, which are framed on one side of the generic scale by mythos and on the other by history, thus oscillating between poiesis and mimesis, invention and representation, and ultimately, truth and lie.

37 38

Mali, Mythistory: The Making of a Modern Historiography, 27. Ibid., 23.

CHAPTER THREE STRATEGIES OF AN ILLYWHACKER (I): REPLACING THE TRUTH-PARADIGM WITH A “WEASELING KIND OF ‘TRUTH’” Unlike history proper which – in order not to lose its credibility, must legitimate itself by striving for truthfulness – fictional histories are not bound to such reconstructionist rules. Where the latter replace official history with a reconceived and an almost always unofficial form of history, they do not claim greater truthfulness. In the name of emancipation, they open alternative vistas on past human experience and seek to alert the reader to contradictions and inconsistencies in officially sanctioned accounts. By permanently drawing the readers’ attention to their status as fictions, and by stressing the discursive nature of the historical facts they are constructed from, postmodern historical novels avoid the danger of essentialism, the danger of claiming to be more than a fiction. Metafictional self-reflexivity is therefore a constant companion in such fictions; and so are the narrators who castigate themselves for the truths (or rather the lies) they tell. In Peter Carey’s novels, these postmodern resistances against essentialism culminate in the figure of the confidence trickster. Such deceitful narrator figures are ideally suited for the task of unmaking history and for testing the boundaries between fact and fiction, reality and illusion, history and story. The role of lies and the creative potential of unreliable narration has intrigued Carey from the late 1970s on, when he first came across a quote from Mark Twain’s travelogue More Tramps Abroad (1897). The epigraph, inserted as a motto into his 1985 novel Illywhacker, reads as follows: Australian history is almost always picturesque; indeed, it is so curious and strange, that it is itself the chiefest novelty the country has to offer and so it pushes the other novelties into second and third place. It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies; and all of a fresh new sort, no mouldy old stale ones. It is full of surprises

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Rewriting History and adventures, the incongruities, and contradictions, incredibilities; but they are all true, they all happened.1

and

Thinking he could never use Twain’s by now classic assessment of Australian history, Carey suggested the title The Most Beautiful Lies for a collection of stories published by Brian Kiernan in 1977. When his ideas about Illywhacker started to gestate, this quote was one of Carey’s starting-points. The author explained in an interview that in the early stages of Illywhacker he had the strong feeling that he wanted to write like Mark Twain had suggested. In the process of gathering material for his novel, the creation of a liar-narrator conform with Twain’s assessment was “a gradual process of discovery” for him: he “more or less stumbled upon [Badgery]” while sitting in a doctor’s office in Sydney one morning.2 Carey knew that he wanted to write a book about three generations of an Australian family. Normally this would have meant that he would have lost his first generation narrator half way through the book. With the liar-device Carey could easily bypass his generational problem and have a first-person narrator all the way through. Lying thus became a structural necessity to the whole artefact of Australian history as told by his illywhacker. What is more, the liarnarrator Badgery serves as a powerful illustration of the ideas about Australian history Twain had implanted in Carey’s writerly consciousness. As one of the major fictional stratagems of the book, lying determines the representation of episodes of Australian history as well as such choices as narrative technique, plot and chronology of events in the novel. Herbert Badgery, the self-declared “King of Liars”, is “a spider at [his narrative’s] centre”,3 weaving a web of lies, some “beautiful and noble, some subsistence lies, some mean and ignoble, snivelling things, noisome, some simply bullshit”.4 He alone is

1

Carey, Illywhacker, 7. From an unpublished interview the author conducted with Peter Carey in New York in 1999. 3 Carey, Illywhacker, 304 and 545. 4 Helen Daniel, “Lies for Sale: Peter Carey”, in Liars: Australian New Novelists, Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1988, 168. 2

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content-manager of his history, and it is through his consciousness that Australian history is filtered. As narrative agency in this historiographic metafiction, Badgery is highly self-conscious about his narration. From the very beginning, he leaves no doubt about the epistemologically dubious nature of the facts that he presents. On the first page he declares outright: I am a terrible liar and I have always been a liar. I say that early to set things straight. Caveat emptor. My age is the one fact you can rely on, and not because I say so, but because it has been publicly authenticated .... Apart from this (and it is all there, neatly printed on a chart not three feet from where I lie) I have also been written up in the papers. Don’t imagine this is any novelty to me – being written up has been one of my weaknesses and I don’t mention it now so that I may impress you, but rather to make the point that I am not lying about my age. But for the rest of it, you may as well know, lying is my main subject, my specialty, my skill.5

The ground is thus prepared for the following 589 pages of Badgery’s performance of Australian history. The reader is well advised to heed these warnings and be cautious about the information the liar-narrator presents. After all, he is even lying about the one thing he says we can rely on: his age. If we were to believe that he is 139 years old, the narrative present of the book would be 2025, which is unlikely, since there are no indications in the novel that would confirm the setting of the narrative frame in the future. One thing, however, is certain: Badgery has not been lying about the fact that he has been lying. His narrative situation leaves no doubt about his notorious unreliabilty: as we learn along the way, the narrator has been entertaining his audience all the while from a cage in the pet emporium (the human zoo constructed by the youngest member of the Badgery clan, Hissao), where old Badgery, in a homonymic pun, “lie[s]”.6 At the time of the narrating act, half of his brain has collapsed, he has suffered a stroke,7 and his transmutating body has started to play tricks on him. Carey portrays Badgery as being aware of the disbelief 5

Carey, Illywhacker, 11. Ibid., 11. 7 Ibid., 548 and 571. 6

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which the readers have to suspend in order to believe his story and has his narrator castigate his creator with oblique accusations on the first and the last page of the novel: “It is hard to believe you can feel so bad and still not die.”8 As a clever salesman of history, Badgery disclaims all responsibility for dissatisfied customers and declares: “But now I feel no more ashamed of my lies than my farts (I rip forth a beauty to underline the point).”9 Since his lying is transparent to the reader, it is, in a way, self-correcting.10 After all, Herbert openly confesses that what he tells is not necessarily what has experientially happened. He delivers a story or gives a fact, and, in one breath, delights in telling his readership that they have just been duped: It is not true, of course, that business about the goanna bleeding – no one in Jeparit ever said such a thing. Not even the town that produced the Warden of the Cinque Ports could stretch to such a grotesque idea. It was I, Herbert Badgery, who said it.11

When he talks about Charles Ulm, a historical figure and – along with Charles Edward Kingsford-Smith – one of the pioneers of Australian air-travel, Badgery expresses a very revealing uncertainty: As it happened, I had known Charles Ulm. Possibly I had known Charles Ulm. To tell you the truth I can’t remember whether I really did know him or if I claimed it so often I came to believe it myself.12 8

Ibid., 11, 600. Ibid., 11. 10 A passionate debate has been led about this sort of double-dealing with the reader in Carey’s fictions. In an essay published in 1991, the French-Australian critic Sue Ryan accused Carey of manipulating the reader in a way as to “subver[t] the symbiotic type of author/reader relationship we are used to” (“One-Upmanship in Peter Carey’s Short Stories”, Journal of the Short Story in English, XVI [1991], 51). When Carey read the essay, he was rather annoyed (according to Ryan), holding that she had misread him and that it would take a very blunt reader to see the representational pact between writer and reader in danger. The German critic Cornelia Schulze supports Carey’s claims and suggests to read his fictions as “Lehrstücke” for the reader to sharpen his senses and become aware of the danger of linguistic deceptions (see her essay “Peter Carey’s Short Stories: Trapped in a Narrative Labyrinth”, in Fabulating Beauty, 11736). 11 Carey, Illywhacker, 436. 12 Ibid., 36. 9

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Being the inveterate liar that he is, Carey’s main character is no more or less trustworthy than a narrator who dons the mantle of reliability. History, his readership is made to infer, may all too often be based on the same shaky foundations as the illywhacker’s version of 139 years in the history of Australia. Badgery’s notorious unreliability is more than a general warning against the blind belief in history and the lofty certainties that at times make it up, though. It is a direct engagement with the history profession. Carey’s narrator, after all, is an academically approved historian who has, as he claims, graduated with a “Bachelor of Arts” in a correspondence course from the University of Sydney.13 During that time, he has become, as he proudly declares, a specialist on the “role of lies in popular perceptions of the Australian political fabric” (488). His teacher is the Australian historian M.V. Anderson (a fictitious character), who is the author of a “famous work” about the great Australian lie of terra nullius. The imaginary historian and Badgery are not only both devoted to the study of history, they are also common-spirited in their obsession with lies: “There was nothing to excite him [Anderson] as much as a lie.”14 Unlike generations of Australian historians before him, Badgery, Carey seems to insinuate here, is at least outspoken about the shortcomings of his narrative. He spends as much time telling lies as he does trying to correct what he sees as the lies Australians have told themselves about their history and their identity. This is not to say that Badgery is a better historian than his real-life colleagues. According to Peter Pierce he is even an “anti-historian”: Yet in the light of Twain’s comment, he might equally be seen as an appropriate historian of Australia. Carey plays at length with this ambiguity, teasing out the possibilities of an unreliable narrator who may therefore be the most reliable recorder of the national history.15

In Illywhacker, lying proves to be an adequate mode for Badgery’s narration. It is his obsession; he thrives on lies. To him, lies are a 13

Ibid., 12, 488. Ibid., 456. 15 Peter Pierce, “Preying on the Past: Contexts of Some Recent Neo-Historical Fiction”, Australian Literary Studies, XV/4 (October 1992), 306-307. 14

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“gift”,16 they provide him with the material for his writing and liberate his imagination from the restraints of the truth-doctrine. The paradox inherent in the nature of lies, their truth-telling capacity in the face of their untruth, makes them so suitable to the task they serve in the environment of a critical rethinking of Australian history. It is this capacity in particular that has animated many Australian writers and critics. Malouf’s narrator in Johnno, for example, closes his narration with the observation that “Maybe, in the end, even the lies we tell define us. And better, some of them, than our most earnest attempts at the truth.”17 Helen Daniel takes this thought as inspiration for her monograph on what she calls the “Liars” amongst contemporary Australian novelists. Through their lies (that is, ostensibly deceitful fictions), writers like Carey, Murray Bail, David Ireland, David Foster, and Peter Mathers, Daniel argues, all create “New ways of looking at reality”. Engaging in the paradox of the lie, she explains: “Liars [may be] more truthful, because they tell things the way they really are, the way they are in reality.”18 In its form of a literary trompe l’œuil, similar to Maurits Escher’s graphic art, the lie à la Daniel is capable of mirroring “truth and illusion and reality and the Lie of fiction”.19 Therefore a lying discourse can serve its creators to steep in ambiguity issues they want to address. Essentialist categories such as true and untrue, historical and fictional, which usually apply to the discourse of history, are thus foregrounded and problematized. The narrative mode of lying dispenses with these categories (because it evades categorization as true or untrue) and can still claim to be meaningful to its readers. What counts is what people make of the ambiguous matter at hand – as long as the reader decides in the name of emancipation, one would have to add with regard to the decolonizing agenda of Carey’s fiction. The lie as a writerly sleight-of-hand is also present in other Carey novels. In Oscar and Lucinda, Carey – if we follow Daniel’s flamboyant rhetoric – even orchestrates “magical fireworks of the

16

Carey, Illywhacker, 34. David Malouf, Johnno (1975), New York: George Braziller, 1997, 170. 18 Daniel, “Lies for Sale: Peter Carey”, 5. 19 Ibid., 4. 17

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Lie”.20 The novel, “a dazzling lie about the manufacture of glass – and the manufacture of the Lie”,21 in any case manages to dupe those readers who expect a classic love plot and find that the genre conventions are blatantly contravened by Carey. With its insubstantiality and fragility, the main metaphor of the book, glass, supports the deceptiveness brought into the fiction by the title as much as do the eponymous lovers who are, almost needless to say, both passionate and masterful liars. Oscar already is at war with the truth as an adolescent. His attempts at divining the true faith depend solely on chance, on the throw of a dice: “It could not be true. But it must be true. If it was true, he could not 22 live in his father’s house. He must live in an Anglican house.”

From that point on, Oscar sets out to subvert the absolutism of truth and untruth. He turns out to be “cunning with excuses, with substitutes”. To him, it is enough to be “true, quite true”. His truth, in the narrator’s opinion, is of a “weaseling kind ... which was not a truth at all”.23 Lucinda enters the stage of the novel’s discourse on lies as a liar congenial to Oscar. But unlike Oscar, she lies compulsively, to satisfy her craving: All she could think was that she must play cards. She was a despicable person. Then she was despicable, and that was that. But she must go. She told a number of lies, one after the other, teetering above each other, a house of cards, all constructed in order that she might abandon the vicarage and fly – as fast as she could down the Glenmore Hill – to the house in Rushcutters Bay where they would lay a hand of shining cribbage across a grey wool-covered table.24

Once again, as in Illywhacker, lying not only makes Carey’s characters more colourful and excentric, it is also of structural importance. In tandem with the element of chance, it is a precondition for the narrator and thus the whole narration and the history that is 20

Ibid., 178. Ibid., 177. 22 Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 33. 23 Ibid., 224. 24 Ibid., 177. 21

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told through it to exist. After all, it is a lie that helps to bring Oscar and Lucinda together.25 Jack Maggs is another pertinent example of the creative potential of the truth/lie dichotomy and the debates it is capable of prompting. Here, lies and untruths are being negotiated on a more theoretical, metafictional level than in Illywhacker or in Oscar and Lucinda. Maggs, on his mission of setting the record of his past straight, takes his history into his own hands and saves it from the “lies”26 of Tobias Oates’ fiction. The returned convict subsequently supplants his own truth in the place of the distortions that he sees as making up Carey’s Victorian novelist’s version of Maggs’ life (entitled “The Death of Maggs”27). Carey here uses the lie in order to interrogate the process by which life is turned into fiction. Dickens’ melodramatic rendering of the Australian convict who returns to his home was avowedly his starting-point. He had felt that Dickens had given Magwitch “such a bad rap”, painting him as this “sort of dark other”.28 By foregrounding the process by which Oates alias Dickens narrativizes life, and by lending an ear to Maggs, whose life is emplotted as a fiction against his will, Carey sets out to deconstruct Magwitch, whom Dickens had securely established as the archetypal Australian convict in British literature. Fiction is here pitted against fiction, one lie against another. The truth that Jack Maggs after more than 130 years of Dickensian distortion is allowed to tell significantly comes in the form of another nineteenth-century-style fiction and thus presents us with a perfectly postmodern paradox where one lie is more truthful than another lie, but still remains a lie. Deviations from the truth also play a significant role in Bliss. Here Carey presents the lie in several contexts and meanings. He loses no time to introduce the lie as narrative device into his fiction and has the novel start with a particularly bold one (if the laws of nature are to apply): “Harry Joy was to die three times.”29 As in Illywhacker, the 25

Ibid., 225. Carey, Jack Maggs, 232. 27 Ibid., 231. 28 Powells.com, “Interview with Peter Carey”, nd: www.powells.com/authors/carey. html (accessed 20 March 2010). 29 Carey, Bliss, 11. 26

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reader is thus prepared at the earliest possible stage for the narrative manœuvres and double-dealings that demand the willing suspension of disbelief and the readiness to redefine notions of truth and lie. One such manœuvre that forces Carey’s readers to consider the implications of lies is the narrative situation of the novel itself. A narratological analysis leaves no doubt: what the narrator presents to the reader is not only a conventional “lie of fiction”, it is a lie even if measured against the ethics of storytelling in fictions. The narrators, who are identified as the children of Harry Joy and Honey Barbara no earlier than in the very last line of the novel,30 tell stories that they could not possibly have witnessed. Since there are no additional sources of information in the novel (such as diaries, embedded narratives by friends of the protagonists and the like), a good deal of what we are reading must therefore have been made up by the protagonist’s children rather than reconstructed from their own experience. The narrative situation not only stretches the readers’ minds, it has also kept critics puzzled. Various readings have been offered to account for the shift from the traditional and overtly controlling authorial narrator (who dominates most of the narrative) to the limited first-person point of view of a first-person plural narrator (on the last two pages).31 In my reading I would like to follow the direction into which Teresa Dovey has pointed by commenting on Carey’s use of metalepses (as on pages 37 and 80 of the novel), transgressions of narrative levels which according to Gérard Genette manifest themselves in “any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse”.32 These tropes allow Carey to puncture the truth-related illusion of the realistic assumption that the narrator is simply set the task by the author of telling a story over which the author has complete power. By 30

Ibid., 296. See, for example, Anthony Hassall, Dancing on Hot Macadam: Peter Carey’s Fiction, St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1994, 69-70; Bruce Woodock, Peter Carey, Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996, 52; Teresa Dovey, “An Infinite Onion: Narrative Structure in Peter Carey’s Fiction”, Australian Literary Studies, XI/2 (October 1983), 200. 32 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (1972), trans. Jane E. Lewin, Oxford: Blackwell, 1980, 234-35. 31

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breaking this convention, they enable him to transgress the boundary between the intra- and the extratextual world. Genette’s elaboration on the concept of metalepsis makes this clear: All these games [metalapses and the like] demonstrate the importance of the boundary they tax their ingenuity to overstep, in defiance of verisimilitude – a boundary that is precisely the narrating ... itself: a shifting but sacred frontier between two worlds, the world in which one tells [and] the world of which one tells .... Such inversions suggest that if the characters in a story can be readers or spectators, then we, their readers or spectators, can be fictitious. The most troubling thing about metalepsis indeed lies in this unacceptable and insistent hypothesis, that the extradiegetic is perhaps always diegetic, and that the narrator and his narratees – you and I – perhaps belong to some narrative.33

If the novel’s last paragraph indeed presents such a Genettean metalepsis, the readers, by being included in the first-person plural pronoun, are turned into the metaphorical children of Harry Joy and constitute the last link in the Joy family’s tradition of passing on stories from generation to generation. As the virtual and perhaps spiritual offspring of the Joy family, we, the readers, the consumers of Carey’s stories, are nolens volens emplotted in a fiction and are consequently all the more attentive to the process by which the characters in Carey’s novels so frequently get caught up in fictions and untruths. Carey demonstrates this process in practically all of the major characters in the novel. Harry Joy, for instance, is “suckled on stories” of his father’s making, stories which accompany him throughout his life. 34 Bettina Joy is enamoured with and blinded by the “glittering visions of capitalism which she merely called by the pet name of New York”35 and, in a tragic epiphany,36 finds out that her “whole life had 33

Ibid., 236. Carey, Bliss, 18. 35 Ibid., 188. 36 An epiphany is incidentally also experienced by one of the characters in what may have been an intertext to Carey’s novel: Katherine Mansfield’s short story “Bliss” (1920). There, the female protagonist Bertha finds out in an epiphany that the “fire of bliss” aroused by her friend Pearl Fulton does not burn for her (Bertha herself), but 34

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been built on bullshit”,37 on the deceptions by “Those in Charge” (for example, page 89). Another case in point is David Joy who perpetuates the storytelling tradition of his father and is known for telling “lies” and “stories”38 at school. He significantly ends up living his own dream of escaping the Australian small-town ennui. Once again, the reader finds himself implicitly addressed, for the characters only reflect their gullible extratextual compatriots’ tendency to get entangled in a web of fictions, many of which are of a deceptive nature (an issue Carey gives greater attention to in Illywhacker). Just as in the other novels already considered in this chapter, Carey in Bliss pits lies against truths to sound out their implications and to test their relevance as epistemological standards. In the novel, several types of discourse are exchanged between the characters. Whether they deal with a “fact” (for example, page 151), a “lie” (for example, pages 31 and 171), a “dream” (for example, pages 31, 200, 201, 242), a “myth” and a “legend” (both page 291), mere “bullshit” (for example, pages 70, 196, 252), an “apocryphal” (page 70), “original” (for example, pages 69, 76), “funny” and “old” (both page 75) or “romantic” story (page 240) – truthfulness is not a quality by which they are judged. What counts is whether the discourse is meaningful to its sender and its addressee. The “aprocryphal story” of the elephant taking a seat on Harry Joy’s Fiat 500 illustrates this.39 A modern myth,40 the story of the elephant sitting on a car, as it happened in the reality of Harry Joy’s world, is unacceptable to the official trustees of the truth, the police, who demand to be told not the true story. They prefer a lie, a fiction, and are satisfied as long as it is original.41 Originality combined with meaningfulness thus supersedes truth as gold standard for the assessment of a story. Abandoning the truth-paradigm not only complies with the demands of a habitual storyteller, the narrative suggests that the totalitarian repressiveness of the concept leaves no alternative but to rather for her husband (The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981, 99). 37 Carey, Bliss, 252. 38 Ibid., 31. 39 Ibid., 69-75. 40 It is, for instance, mentioned in Jan Harold Brunvand’s Too Good to be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends, New York: W.W. Norton, 1999, 107-108. 41 Carey, Bliss, 73.

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abandon it. The case of Alex Duval, Harry Joy’s business partner and stronghold of the truth in the novel, is telling. Duval rewrites his company’s conference reports every Saturday morning42 and thereby exposes the lies of his company’s clients, the tellingly named Krappe Chemicals, trader of carcinogenic goods. As a result, he is institutionalized in a mental hospital. Reminiscent of Dürrenmatt’s mad but tragically sane physicists, the truth in Bliss seems safe only in a mental institution. With a gesture towards Foucault, Carey locates in the phenomenon of madness the site of a power struggle between two regimes of truth. The admittance to an insane-asylum appears as an act of repression designed to contain unpleasant truths that might harm the flow of money in the business world. Inside the asylum, the pressure of senior consultant Alice Dalton, officially sanctioned custodian of the truth, is no less stifling. To her, truth is a matter of business policy. The absurdity of her medical practices and the truths she holds up is highlighted by the grotesqueries in the dialogue ensuing between Harry Joy and Alex Duval when they meet in Dalton’s institution: “I’m Harry Joy,” he [Harry Joy] said. His name was his name. His name was more than his name. In short, it was him. It could not be stolen from him. …. “It’s a therapy,” he [Alex Duval] said at last, “to find the right name. But first you have to give up your old name. You see, when I came here I was really stuck on being Alex .... but, finally, I just stopped fighting. And it worked, you see, the damn thing worked. I’d always hated being Alex.” “That’s not therapy. That’s a fuck-up. They called you Harry Joy because they got you by mistake. You’re not meant to be here. They meant to get me. They thought you were me.”43

Truth here is generated in the name of medicine, respectively in the name of money. As Dalton, who was once inmate of a mental institution herself, explains:

42 43

Ibid., 83. Ibid., 154.

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“If you knew your own name, Mr Joy, you probably would not be here. I am here because I do know my own name. Not only my own name, but also the names of all of my patients. You see, Mr Joy, this is my speciality. It is my business.”44

Allegiances to the wrong regime of truth in this Carey novel have the most dire consequences extending into the deeper recesses of the personality, and they even have, as the author shows, the power to deprive humans of their identity. In fictions like the above, where the truth is sooner deconstructed than constructed, Carey says good riddance to the “troublesome criterion of the ‘truth’ as barometer”, as Carolyn Bliss aptly remarks in an essay from 1991.45 Whenever truth appears, it is interrogated and often weighed against the lie. What is important to note, however, is that the dissolution of these most fundamental of all Western categories does not mean that the novels are thus reduced to absurdity and utter meaninglessness. When the lie is shown to be capable of being as truthful as the truth, and when one man’s truth turns out to be another man’s lie, this still does not mean that Carey wishes to steep his narratives in relativism and moral ambiguity. Quite to the contrary, as Ian Adam observes with regard to Illywhacker: Issues are raised that make it essential to distinguish between truth and falsehood, right and wrong, and freedom and oppression .... it really does matter that people are hungry or unemployed and that superpowers or multinationals control the lives of citizens.46

Therefore the lie forms an integral part of Carey’s revisionist programme. As a constant companion throughout his version of the Australian experience, it serves to destabilize the traditional account of Australian history by breaking the monopoly “Those in Charge” formerly held on representations of past Australian experience.

44

Ibid., 152. Carolyn Bliss, “The Revisionary Lover: Misprision of the Past in Peter Carey”, Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada, VI (1991), 48. 46 Ian Adam, “Illywhacker and The Prowler: Settler Society Response to Ideas of History”, Australia and New Zealand Studies in Canada, XII (1994), 5. 45

CHAPTER FOUR STRATEGIES OF AN ILLYWHACKER (II): TRANSCENDING HISTORICAL REALITY Over the past twenty years Peter Carey has made it sufficiently clear that for lack of a fail-safe way of determining the one true history attempts at representing past reality must necessarily falter or end in a philosophical impasse. Realism as a literary device has been a constant in Carey’s writings, though. As a mode of narration, it simulates the truth, or at least creates a semblance of truth and probability and suggests to the reader that the narrated events could actually have happened this way in the extratextual world. The degree of just how real or truthful the narrated worlds feel varies significantly from novel to novel. Whether they are set in the present, the past, the future, or some unidentifiable period, the novels all have a basis in literary realism and boast a number of realism-enhancing narrative techniques. Those of his works with a historical subject usually have a high mimetic quotient and are steeped in reference material that creates a strong sense of authenticity: historical personages interacting with Carey’s fictional ones, painstakingly reconstructed settings and even newspaper articles (as in True History of the Kelly Gang) and proceedings from a trial (My Life as a Fake) that are pasted into the fiction. To support the illusion of authenticity, Carey uses period-style language (as in the case of Oscar and Lucinda and Jack Maggs), an outlaw’s idiolect (True History of the Kelly Gang), or the AustralianMalaysian patois of an Australian poet stranded in a bicycle repair shop in Kuala Lumpur (My Life as a Fake). Those of his novels set in contemporary Australia equally aim at verisimilitude. Bliss and The Tax Inspector portray life in suburban Australia – the latter even decidedly smacks of journalistic realism. And yet, Carey very frequently takes a departure from realism. In an interview with Ray Willbanks he explained:

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What Carey at the time described as “something extraordinary” are episodes in which the author tries to liberate his writings from the mimetic constraints of doctrinal realism. While the novels from Bliss to My Life as a Fake (perhaps with the exception of Tristan Smith, which is not grounded in the world of known and familiar space) can all be said to adhere to the paradigm of realist narration, not one of them is not interspersed with realism-undermining elements such as the bizarre, the grotesque or the fantastic. In Oscar and Lucinda, Carey tampers with the laws of probability and confounds dream and reality in the laudanum-induced sequences on the inland expedition. In The Tax Inspector, where a disturbed juvenile mind experiments with New Age spiritualism, grotesqueries smoulder directly under the surface of suburban normality. Deviations from realism are also strikingly obvious in Tristan Smith with its otherworldly setting and the different calendar used by the Eficans. While experientiality is never abandoned in Jack Maggs, the animal magnetism practised by Tobias Oates at least introduces the occult into the novel and hints at the possibility of spiritual healing beyond the orthodoxies of traditional medicine. Full-scale violations of experientiality feature in Bliss, Illywhacker and True History of the Kelly Gang, which later in this chapter will serve to illustrate Carey’s strategy of transgressing the boundaries of reality, thus disputing its ascendancy in the Western world and specifically in its literary tradition. In order to account for the elements of fantasy and the supernatural which the self-declared “hard nosed realist”2 Carey weaves into his fictions, critics have suggested a literary kinship with a whole range of genres and modes of writing including science fiction,3 fabulation,4 1

Ray Willbanks, “Interview with Peter Carey”, in Speaking Volumes: Australian Writers and Their Work (1991), Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1992, 57. 2 Carey in Kate Ahearne, “An Interview with Peter Carey”, Going Down Swinging, I/ 1 (1980), 48. 3 See, for instance, Van Ikin’s “Peter Carey: The Stories”, Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative Literature, I/1 (1977), 19-29; George Turner’s “Science Fiction,

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and from the literary fantastic5 to magic realism.6 All of these categories are to some extent congruent: they defamiliarize reality by introducing unreality into it. Given the terminological vaguery, it will prove helpful to determine the nature of Carey’s departures from realism before subjecting the novels to a closer reading with regard to their transcendence of reality. Theorizing Carey’s departures from reality All the genres mentioned above are relevant in a critical appraisal of Carey’s novels, but not all of them are pertinent for the way in which Carey transcends the traditional prescriptions of historical discourse – the question that is of central interest here. Fabulation, to begin with, is a critical concept that describes Carey’s writing style rather well. It concurs with much of what has already been said regarding the author’s explorations of the paradoxes of reality and fiction. According to Robert Scholes, the one major theoretical proponent of this chronically underdefined genre, fabulators display an “extraordinary delight in design”, devising

Parafiction and Peter Carey”, Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative Literature, X/1 (1988), 14-21; or Marie Maclean’s “Carey Goes Cybersurfing: Peter Carey Returns to SF”, Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative Literature, XIV/1 (1997), 18-20. 4 Karen Lamb, Peter Carey: The Genesis of Fame, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1992, 22, 28; Bruce Woodcock, Peter Carey, Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996, 11920; Graeme Turner, “American Dreaming: The Fictions of Peter Carey”, Australian Literary Studies, XII/4 (October 1986), 431, 438. 5 Graham Huggan even goes as far as to say that Carey’s continuous “interest in the supernatural and its relation to everyday life”, his “concern for transformation at both individual and societal levels” and his “attempt to uncover, beneath the veil of appearances, a hidden world of dreams and secrets” link his writings “most closely with the genre of the literary fantastic” (Peter Carey, Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1996, 11). 6 For instance, Phil McCluskey, “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the Outback: Contextualising a Structural Magic Realism”, Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, 36 (1993), 88-94; Richard Todd, “Narrative Trickery and Performative Historiography: Fictional Representation of National Identity in Graham Swift, Peter Carey and Mordecai Richler”, in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995, 307-28.

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“wheels within wheels, rhythms and counterpoints” for their narratives.7 For Scholes, fabulation: [is the] attempt to find more subtle correspondences between the reality which is fiction and the fiction which is reality. Modern fabulation accepts, even emphasizes, its fallibilism, its inability to reach all the way to the real, but it continues to look toward reality. It aims at telling such truths as fiction may legitimately tell in ways which are appropriately fictional.8

As a mode of writing, fabulation in Scholes’ sense of “ethically controlled fantasy”9 aptly describes the peculiar mix of fact and fantasy we find in Carey’s novels, the manner in which their author constructs and then deconstructs reality, and the “delight in design” expressed in the intricate form and structure of his narrations. More importantly in the present context, fabulatory writings, according to Scholes, … bristle with facts and smell of research of the most painstaking kind. Yet they deliberately challenge the notion that history may be retrieved by objective investigations of fact. These are fabulative histories that mix fact with fantasy ….10

As a critical concept, fabulation also allows us to trace a family resemblance between Carey, whom Bruce Bennett once called “a true fabulator according to Scholes’ criteria, one whose inventive, witty fictions both delight and instruct”,11 and the exponents of fabulatory fiction12 – many of whom Carey habitually lists as having had a major influence on his writings.13 Since fabulation has received no sound 7

Robert Scholes, Fabulation and Metafiction, Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1979, 2. Ibid., 8. 9 Robert Scholes, The Fabulators, New York: Oxford UP, 1967, 11. 10 Scholes, Fabulation and Metafiction, 206. 11 Bruce Bennett, “Australian Experiments in Short Fiction”, World Literature Written in English, XV/2 (November 1976), 360. 12 One would, for instance, think of John Barth, Donald Barthelme, E.L. Doctorow, Robert Coover and Thomas Pynchon from the United States; Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez from South America; and Julian Barnes, John Fowles and Graham Swift from Britain. 13 See Robert Ross, “‘It Cannot Not be There’: Borges and Australia’s Peter Carey”, 8

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theoretical underpinning since Scholes, it is too insubstantial to lend itself to the attempt of locating Carey’s use of fantasy in theory, though. The genre of science fiction can, from the point of view of literary theory, help us to account for the profoundly altered sense of normality, the concern for scientific experiment, technological and biological engineering, social, geological and ecological change, the absurdities of science and the consequences of technology gone wrong, which are all present in the short stories. It does, however, not offer itself for a sustained reading of the novels, of which only Tristan Smith with its dystopian setting bears clear traits of a science fiction. Illywhacker contains elements of science fiction, but the world depicted therein lacks the “‘point of difference’, the thing or things that differentiate the world portrayed in science fiction from the world we recognise around us”14 – a conditio sine qua non in many standard definitions of science fiction.15 As for the rest of his longer prose, Carey recurrently uses elements of fantasy and displays a “voyeuristic fascination for the freakish”,16 which suggests an ongoing relationship with science fiction. The characters, as a rule, have become more reconciled with the worlds they inhabit, though. The settings themselves are accordingly not outlandish, abstract and allusive enough to qualify as science fiction. The literary fantastic is intricately linked to science fiction and the other genres mentioned above, but since it need not come with any of the additional markers of, say, a science fiction or magic realism, it also has a tradition as a separate genre.17 As an analytical category in my reading of Carey’s fictional biography of Australia it helps to explain how in the novels under scrutiny the pre-eminence of realism in representations of past human experience is undermined. Carey in Borges and His Successors: The Borgesian Impact on Literature and the Arts, ed. Edna Aizenberg, Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1990, 45; and Willbanks, “Interview with Peter Carey”, 44-45. 14 Adam Roberts, Science Fiction, The New Critical Idiom, London: Routledge, 2000, 6. 15 This did not prevent the novel from winning the Ditmar Award for Best Australian Science Fiction Novel in 1986. 16 Huggan, Peter Carey, 8. 17 See Neil Cornwell, The Literary Fantastic: From Gothic to Postmodernism, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990, 34.

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typically introduces elements of fantasy into fictional milieus that are otherwise safely anchored in the world of realism. When he has his narrators conjure up ghosts (as in Illywhacker, True History of the Kelly Gang, My Life as a Fake), or when his characters perform disappearing tricks, or interbreed with a goanna (as in Illywhacker), the author openly defies the laws of physics and biology that constitute his otherwise verisimilar fictional worlds. Although such events are irreconcilable with classical realism, they are plausible and undoubtedly real in the terms of the fiction they are embedded in. It lies in the nature of the fantastic that while the fictions do feel real, it still prompts uncertainty in the reader who approaches the text with a powerful set of indelible preconceptions about what can be real and what not. Realism has been so powerful a paradigm for all forms of textual renderings of human experience in the West that the perusal of a fantastic text inevitably brings to the fore the tensions at work between what may feel real and what can legitimately be real. According to Tzvetan Todorov, it is ingrained in the genre of the fantastic that it causes the reader to subject his narrative to a critical assessment: The viewer of a Fantastic image hesitates, wonders whether what he is seeing is real, if what he is confronted with is indeed reality, or whether it is no more than an illusion. The ambiguity is sustained to the end of the encounter: reality or magic? Truth or illusion? Which brings us to the very heart of the Fantastic. In a world which is indeed our world, the one we know and recognise, we perceive an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world. The person who sees the event must opt for one of two possible solutions: either he is a victim of an illusion of the senses – or else the event has indeed taken place, in which case reality is controlled by laws unknown to us.18

The standards against which the fantastic is measured are accordingly the real on the one side and the imaginary on the other. In a postcolonial and postmodern novel, this moment of uncertainty is of the utmost importance. It causes friction between the traditional 18

Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard, Foreword Robert Scholes, Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1975, 25.

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cornerstones of the representational contract of realism, and prompts the reader to rethink. In the postcolonial context of Carey’s novels, fantasy can also be “an expression of freedom”, as Teresa Dovey holds.19 Often ingrained in magic realist fictions, it serves the conceptual purpose of confusing, refusing and consequently undermining the distinction between reality and fantasy imposed by the imperial thought system. It shows that the perceptive instruments of realism may, at times, and especially in (post)colonial contexts, fail to represent human experience adequately. Therefore, the monopoly on representing history, which realism had, is rendered debatable. In the case of Australia, we can gather from Carey’s novels, history in all its Twainean picaresqueness cannot be accommodated into texts that adhere exclusively to traditional realist and rationalist conventions. Where scholarly histories aim to narrate an objectified past reality, Carey strives to represent his characters’ experiences as close to their perceived realities as possible. A history so “strange and curious” as Australia’s may, after all, require to be fantasized. In the face of fantasy, the order and teleology that historians have sought for in the past appear as categories arising from the political and ideological moorings of the historian rather than as something simply “already there” in history. As a consequence realism loses its authority to speak about the past in terms more reliable and more appropriate than other narrative modes. Carey and magic realism Magic realism is very closely related to fantasy and fabulation, and many of the arguments presented in the previous sections of this chapter could also be attributed to magic realism. Given the confusing and often contradictory theorization of magic realism, there are a number of reservations against applying this particular style of writing to Carey. Alejo Carpentier, who popularized the concept when he introduced it to the Americas in 1949, had, after all, used it in a very specific context. The magically real to him described the “‘marvelous American reality’”, the “improbable juxtapositions and marvelous mixtures” found exclusively in Latin American texts, which he saw as 19

Dovey, “An Infinite Onion: Narrative Structure in Peter Carey’s Fiction”, 199.

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bearing the hallmarks of “Latin America’s varied history, geography, demography, and politics”.20 Over the past few decades, the concept has been significantly widened in geographical terms to include fiction from places as different as India, Canada, Britain, Australia and even Japan.21 In this process, magic realism has acquired a quasi passe-partout quality, summed up here by Gerald Martin: “the same term is used, consciously or unconsciously, as an ideological stratagem to collapse many different kinds of writing, and many different political perspectives, into one single, usually escapist concept.”22 It is for this reason probably that Carey himself has become weary about being subjected to this particular “ism”. As he explained in an interview: I liked the term magic realism when I first heard it and I always thought that this was a lovely way to describe the sort of writing one finds in Illywhacker, even Bliss, but particularly Illywhacker. Then later it became a tag that was thrown around so much that it started to get soiled. In my mind it became a sort of cheap cliché. I became wary of being labeled a magic realist. In a funny way I no longer feel I am writing in this way.23

While Carey may not be a full-blown magic realist, he does share a good many of the literary strategies, objectives, and themes of other fictions that have frequently been discussed in terms of magic realism, for instance the experience of “living on the margins”;24 the processing of colonial as well as postcolonial history; the use of magic as an antidote against doctrinal realism and the general insufficiency of metropolitan forms of discourse; and the employment of narrative trickery and self-reflexivity to disrupt the reading process.

20 Alejo Carpentier, “On the Marvelous Real in America”, in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, 75. 21 Susan J. Napier, “The Magic of Identity: Magic Realism in Modern Japanese Fiction”, in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, 451-75. 22 Gerald Martin, “On ‘Magical’ and Social Realism in Gárcia Márquez”, in Gabriel Gárcia Márquez: New Readings, eds Bernard McGuirk and Richard Cardwell, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987, 102. 23 Carey in Willbanks, “Interview with Peter Carey”, 55-56. 24 Linda Kenyon, “A Conversation with Robert Kroetsch”, New Quarterly, V/1 (Spring 1985), 15.

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Magic realism, of course, does not have a monopoly on any of these; and although it is closely linked with the experience of excentricity, a life on the margins, it does not mean that magic realism necessarily … worms its way into all, or even most, literary texts written from marginal cultures, [nor is it] somehow absent from the literary archives of the imperial center .... It does mean, however, that a structure of perception – if only in literary critical registers – dogs the practice of magical realist writing, that is, the perception that magic realism, as a socially symbolic contract [referring to Jameson], carries a residuum of resistance toward the imperial center and to its totalizing systems of generic classification.25

This inbuilt opposition marks practically all of Carey’s fictions and can help us to locate their anti-imperial and generally anti-authorizing thrust in a specific literary environment or tradition. For, as Slemon suggests,26 the genre designation draws our attention to fictions that work according to a similar software or are animated by the same spirit, even though they might differ widely in genre or provenance. Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie and Günter Grass offer themselves as examples here. As different as their writings may be, they are all frequently discussed in the context of magic realism (for instance in Zamora and Faris’ oft-cited essay collection Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (1995) and Carey tellingly never fails to mention One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) when asked for his favourite novels in interviews.27 His indebtedness to these writers is evidenced in his fictions through an abundance of intertextual references. There is even an intertextual triangle between Grass’ The Tin Drum, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Carey’s lllywhacker. All three novels are marked by a peculiar acknowledgement of the fantastic as part of everyday reality. They all are of a picaresque type, told in an episodic three-deck structure by highly idiosyncratic first-person narrators. All three, Oskar Matzerath, Saleem Sinai and Herbert Badgery have grotesque physical 25

Stephen Slemon, “Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse”, in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, 408. 26 Ibid., 421. 27 For example, in Willbanks, “Interview with Peter Carey”, 45.

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deformities, and all three very importantly share an interest in their respective countries’ histories. Their private lives are significantly linked with the history of their nations, and each of the narrators is keen to point out parallels between their own and their nation’s history.28 Their attempts at coming to terms with their respective nation’s history, and with their origins, coalesce in these novels in the topos of disputed parenthood. Allegorical readings, which the historical contexts of Carey’s and Rushdie’s novels and these authors’ dedication to postcolonial concerns strongly invite, allow the reader to see these intergenerational troubles as comments on the relationship between the colonial parent Britain and its wards in India and Australia. In all three novels, the parentage of the protagonists is problematic, that is, multiple or unresolved: in Grass’ The Tin Drum, Oskar Matzerath can choose between Alfred Matzerath and Jan Bronski; Rushdie’s Saleem Sinai is in an extraordinary multiparent state and presents a whole range of fathers (Wee Willie Winkie, Ahmed Sinai, William Methwold) and mothers (Amina, Mary, and all the nannies) throughout his narrative; Carey’s Herbert Badgery disposes of his biological father and adopts a Chinese foster father; his grandson Hissao’s parentage is even entirely inscrutable. While The Tin Drum is an undeniable presence in Carey’s Illywhacker and Oscar and Lucinda,29 Midnight’s Children permeates Illywhacker to an even greater degree. Both novels sustain an analogy between the microhistory of the main character’s lives and the macro-history of their respective cultures. Even little details and incidents reappear in Illywhacker: the disappearing trick,30 the “slap-deafened ear”,31 and the protagonist’s bowed legs.32

28

Günter Grass, The Tin Drum (1959), trans. Ralph Manheim, New York: Fawcett, 1966, for example, page 306; Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (1981), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991, for example pages 3 and 25; Carey, Illywhacker, pages 40 and 460. 29 See Graham Huggan, “Is the (Günter) Grass Greener on the Other Side? ‘Oskar and Lucinde’ in the New World”, World Literature Written in English, XXX/1 (Spring 1990), 1-10. 30 Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 45, 308; Carey, Illywhacker, 220. 31 Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 194, 201, 290; Carey, Illywhacker, 362. 32 Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 67, 288; Carey, Illywhacker, 49, 52.

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As varied as their subjects and the approaches taken to these subjects may be, what magic realist authors all share is a mode of writing that expresses a particular approach to reality. In the postcolonial context, this often manifests itself in the writers’ attempts at incorporating the alternative interpretations of reality found in the original philosophies of the colonized cultures into the dominant tradition imported from the colonizers’ cultures. So while realism remains the core of these narratives, any departure from realism and Western-type rationality by way of the supernatural, the fantastic, or the surreal, allows magic realists to explore reality with tools distinct from those of the colonizers. When Rushdie’s narrator in Shame, for example, explains that he and the country of Pakistan exist “at a slight angle to reality”,33 the author interweaves Indian concepts of reality (which are barred from conventional hegemonial discourse because of their deviance) into an otherwise predominantly realistic Westernstyle narrative fabric. The intrusion of the fantastic does not make the text less convincing. It quite simply allows Rushdie to take some liberties with reality and make it suit his narrative purposes. As he explains in an interview with John Haffenden: “I now think of it [fantasy] as a method of producing intensified images of reality ... one thing that is valuable in fiction is to find techniques for making actuality more intense, so that you experience it more intensely in the writing than you do outside the writing.”34 Like Rushdie, Carey is a realist who approaches reality from an angle that defies convention: “[I like to] turn the world around to odd angles, to transform reality or make it clearer, like looking at the world from between your legs (everything becomes dislocated and the relations of things to each other become more apparent).”35 His writings are saturated with referents to the extra-textual level. After all, Carey declaredly writes about “things that exist”: he only “push[es] them to their ludicrous or logical extension. When you push

33

Salman Rushdie, Shame, London: Jonathan Cape, 1983, 29. John Haffenden, “Salman Rushdie”, in Novelists in Interview, ed. John Haffenden, London: Methuen, 1985, 246. 35 Carey in the video documentary Beautiful Lies (Australia Council, 1987), produced and directed by Dan Featherstone. 34

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far enough”, he says, “you can find yourself in some strange and original places”.36 Like the metafictional references in Carey’s novels, fantastic and bizarre occurrences puncture the illusion of the novel’s fictional reality. They disrupt the reading experience, introduce an air of alienation in a literary context that seemingly respects the conventions of a mimetic narration. This highlights one of the writer’s most longstanding interests: that of challenging conceptions of absolute truth. Reality, in its fictional or non-fictional form, never can be absolute, as the intermingling of the two modes in Carey’s writings indicates. Rather, the introduction of supernatural beings and of other elements of science fiction with a deadpan sense of realism suggests that there must be co-existent layers of reality. Jean-Pierre Durix in his study of magic realism in postcolonial fictions suggests that the magic realist mode as employed by excentric writers is a particularly apt instrument for countering the cultural hegemony of Western philosophy, which grounds itself in positivism, reason, and realism: Primarily images of reality have been offered by the colonizer and it is against these images that the new intellectuals are rebelling. Rather than reject reality in favour of the powers of the imagination, many post-colonial writers offer alternative interpretations of reality. They are often torn between two contradictory desires: one is to go back to the native sources; the other is to use the tradition offered by European realism to reinterpret their reality in their own terms. The ‘colonialist’ logos is often useful, provided it can be made to accommodate different forms of experience.37

When in the fictional worlds of Bliss, Illywhacker, or True History of the Kelly Gang, Carey amalgamates “realism and fantasy” so that “the unreal happens as part of reality”,38 as one of the standard definitions of magic realism reads, he breaks the representational pact between the reader and the writer of a realist narration and uncouples 36

Carey in Janet Hawley, “How an Ad Man Found Bliss”, Age, 26 September 1981, 26. 37 Jean-Pierre Durix, Mimesis, Genres and Post-Colonial Discourse: Deconstructing Magic Realism, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, 80. 38 Angel Flores, “Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction”, in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, 112, 115.

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the narrative matter from the doctrine of strict truthfulness. Magically real episodes in his fictions are true in the terms of the texts and enhance the organicism of the whole composition. At the same time, they also introduce a moment of disbelief, which draws attention to the concoctedness of the narration, to the artificiality of the apparently realist fictional world. The reader is once more reminded of the fact that any recreation of episodes from history, whether personal or official, is not a mere representation of past reality. As with many of the other magic realist novels from postcolonial contexts, there is in Carey’s novels also a clear decolonizing appeal of the sort described by Durix: What many “magic realistic” works have in common is this mixture of “fantasy” and a clear concern with reference, historical allegory and social protest. Such novels often evoke the process of liberation of oppressed communities. The scope of these books largely transcends the individual fate of a few characters in order to constitute an imaginary re-telling of a whole nation through several decades.39

Since many of the afore-mentioned marker traits of magic realism are also in evidence in Carey’s fictions, it is an appropriate label for those of his works which subvert hegemonial conventions through magic and in which, as the following analyses of Bliss, Illywhacker and True History of the Kelly Gang will demonstrate, the characters try to liberate themselves from the realist constraints imposed by imperial culture. Bliss Set alternately in the normality of suburban Australia and the countercultural environment of a hippie commune, Bliss allegorically retells the Dantean story of its protagonist’s life in hell and his turn to a state of heavenly bliss in the novel’s last section, where Harry, along with other dropouts from the “broken culture”,40 some Horse People, the group of the Ananda Marga, the Krishnas and the Buddhists,41 seeks esoteric refuge in a commune. The rainforest ecotopia promises to 39

Durix, Mimesis, Genres and Post-Colonial Discourse, 116. Carey, Bliss, 291. 41 Ibid., 270. 40

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alleviate the sufferings of a culture at a time of severe spiritual crisis; it functions as a refuge from the bleak reality of life in a derivative American culture, a culture of second hand. To Harry Joy in particular it promises salvation from the indignities he suffered in his real life as businessman whose company advertised carcinogenic goods, as cuckolded husband, and as father of two incestuous children. Pervaded with an air of the supernatural from the very first line on – “Harry Joy was to die three times”42 – Bliss negotiates possibilities of spiritual transformation through an escape from reality. When Harry, for instance, escapes from suburbia to the parallel universe in the Bog Onion Road commune, he leaves behind reality and opts for utopia. His rite of passage at the beginning of the last chapter, where he arrives at Bog Onion Road in a dreamlike state, seemingly out of nowhere, marks the progress from one state of consciousness to another, from his life in a colony “on the outposts of the American Empire”43 to that of absolute liberty, but also significantly from the real to the magically real. Reality as conceived of by “Those in Charge”44 has significantly been abandoned. The aptly-named character Daze, who discovers the delirious Harry, and the other hippies are good indicators for this, because they … believed many different things about the nature of reality. Christopher Rocks believed in Wood Spirits, and Edith Valdora understood how flying saucers propelled themselves .... John Lane had been a fish in another life, and people believed in Jesus Christ, the Buddha, reincarnation, levitation, and feared the three 6’s on the Bankcard as a sign of the Beast of the Apocalypse. Bart Pavlovich had been Astral travelling for years and would think nothing of opening a conversation by saying, “I was on the Moon last night”. Which, as everybody said, was his reality.45

The eclecticism of these world views, each with its specific concept of reality, is irreconcilable with the reason-based view of reality allowed for by the outside world, dominated as it is by the American lifestyle. When Carey’s characters trade in their traditional views for 42

Ibid., 11. Ibid., 13. 44 Frequently mentioned throughout the novel, for instance on page 89. 45 Ibid., 131. 43

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alternatives (many of which have been appropriated from nonEuropean thought systems), they act not unlike characters in other magic realist fictions. As a mode of writing which characteristically breaks up the limitations of Western concepts of reality, magic realism, according to Zamora and Faris, … facilitates the fusion, or coexistence, of possible worlds, spaces, systems that would be irreconcilable in other modes of writing. The propensity of magical realist texts to admit a plurality of worlds means that they often situate themselves on liminal territory between or among those worlds – in phenomenal and spiritual regions where transformation, metamorphosis, dissolution are common, where magic is a branch of naturalism.46

Although Harry finds his peace in the unreality of Bog Onion Road, Bliss does not suggest that such an escape from reality is a viable option for the country at large. Life at Bog Onion Road is not idealized. Carey himself said that he does not see his protagonist’s transformation as a “blue print of salvation for the rest of society”.47 As a former dweller of the Yandina rainforest community, Carey knows what he is talking about. Bog Onion Road clearly fails to be Arcadia. The reader senses the author’s critical distance in the text. Honey Barbara, high priestess of spiritual renewal through countercultural anti-consumerism, is far from uncritical of life in the commune herself. While she does espouse health food and colour therapy, she refers to some of the other beliefs as “Hippy mumbojumbo”.48 This rather disillusioning verdict implies a reading of the novel along dystopian rather than utopian lines and is entirely in keeping with the fact that virtually all of Carey’s “New Age mutants”49 – next to the hippies in Bliss characters such as Barto in “The Chance”, Alex Finch in “The Fat Man in History”, Benny Catchprice in The Tax Inspector, and Hissao Badgery in Illywhacker – are ill-fated. Their escapes more often than not end in nightmarish delusions, sometimes 46 Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, “Introduction: Daiquiri Birds and Flaubertian Parrot(ie)s”, in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, 6. 47 Jan Garrett, “Interview with Peter Carey”, 14 October 1981, ABC Tape 82/10/619-2. 48 Carey, Bliss, 288. 49 Huggan, Peter Carey, 10.

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of Kafkaesque grotesquery. For the “refugees of a broken culture”,50 whose self-fabricated realities provide them with a nourishment that post-Enlightenment rationalism with its primacy on the logos cannot cater for, spiritual liberation through transformation and escape to other levels of reality is disarmingly illusive. There are, for instance, telling leaks in the commune’s purported self-sufficiency. While Harry lives through thirty unperturbed years in the commune, he cannot quite shut out the world beyond: it is his money that buys the community new dope when theirs has run out, and the Commer van Honey Barbara and her father use to deliver their honey is fuelled by multinational oil corporations.51 Spiritual and physical isolation from what the commune-dwellers see as a “fucked up” society52 is wishful thinking. Even the precautions that the commune takes against interventions by the authorities are futile: It was all unnecessary, this ridiculous complicated entry into the property, but it amused Clive and the other paranoids. If the cops wanted anything important, they’d do a helicopter bust. They didn’t need roads.53

As Woodcock points out, the failure to insulate themselves against intrusion from the outside shows that even the people at Bog Onion Road are part of the system that they defy.54 Their esoteric rituals, their bee- and tree-keeping as well as their storytelling, do not liberate them from their lives outside the commune, from their burdensome history and identity. Remnants of that inescapable past are everywhere. Harry’s Cadillac illustrates this. “That car”, “That American thing”, appears to him “like a great dull beast, a stinking stranded whale he could not forget no matter how much he might like to ignore this painful reminder of his disgraceful past”.55 The commune’s utter dependence takes on special significance before the situation of Australia at large. As with the commune, so with the whole country: the purported independence is punctured by 50

Carey, Bliss, 291. Ibid., 277 and 278. 52 Ibid., 135, 227, 270. 53 Ibid., 281. 54 Woodcock, Peter Carey, 49. 55 Carey, Bliss, 285. 51

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the evidence of the country’s cultural, economic and political dependence, an issue that Carey investigates extensively in the novel following Bliss, Illywhacker. Illywhacker Published four years after Bliss, Illywhacker reiterates some of the concerns of the preceding novel, especially its feats of defamiliarizing reality. Illywhacker is a sprawling 600-page-invention featuring ghosts, dragons, disappearing tricks, a mysterious hybrid kept in a bottle of shining liquid, all of which is narrated in an entirely matterof-fact manner. As in Bliss, these deviations from strict realism carry subversive potential and allow the author to explore the effects of colonialism on Australians. While in Bliss Australians appear as spiritual captives of Americanization, Illywhacker concerns itself with the mental consequences of three subsequent generations of colonization. On an epic scale, the narrator Herbert Badgery retells his family’s fortunes and misfortunes from the late nineteenth century well into the twentyfirst (if we believe his chronology). But Illywhacker investigates more than the family history of the Badgerys. Beyond the tall tales told by the illywhacker the novel is clearly concerned with the wider canvas of Australian history. The encyclopedic dimensions as well as the numerous parallels that are established between personal and national history clearly invite a reading of the novel as a comment on the various states of Australia’s coloniality, as has been suggested by Heinz Antor.56 The use of fantasy in the novel is intricately related to the figure of the trickster-narrator and his idiosyncratic outlook on reality. It is through Herbert Badgery’s dragon-infested consciousness that the narration is charged with an atmosphere of the magically real. Badgery for once even literally assumes the role of magician conjuring up his story. One can well imagine him sitting in front of a crystal ball like a sorcerer waiting for things to take shape:

56 Heinz Antor, “Australian Lies and the Mapping of a New World: Peter Carey’s Illywhacker (1985) as a Postmodern Postcolonial Novel”, Anglistik: Mitteilungen des Verbandes Deutscher Anglisten, IX/1 (1998), 155.

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There they are now. Their conversation is as clear as crystal. I simply 57 have to reach out and take it.

Herbert twists, distorts and subverts the natural order of things. He starts with the seemingly familiar, only to confront us with the surreal or the absurd a moment later. All the while, he labours hard to make his narrative convincing. Badgery explains that a … man who wishes his tale believed does himself no service by speaking of the supernatural; I would rather have slipped in some neatly tailored lie to fill the gap, but the gap is so odd, so uniquely shaped, that the only thing that will fill it is the event that made it.58

This event, to be sure, is the appearance of his late friend Jack’s ghost. Once again, realism cannot be stretched far enough to accommodate the events in this picaresque history and the supernatural proves to be a more appropriate mode for presenting an account of events that is as plausible for the composition of the whole narrative as is possible. Although Badgery’s magic is put to use to disrupt norms and established notions of Australianness, there is evidence in the text to suggest that such departures from rationality are not in any way commendable, for Badgery’s magic is disillusioningly false. It is the result of the untranslatability of Chinese culture to the mind of an Anglo-Celtic child who has a penchant for storytelling and the imagination of a “sorcerer”: “You were a small child”, [Goon Tse Ying] said, stirring three sugars into his dark tea. “You misunderstood the things I tried to teach you .... I wanted you to know practical things, so you wouldn’t be tempted to be what Hing said you were already. He was superstitious, a poor man from a village, and I did not believe him. I told you, I suppose, that you should not make a dragon. My English was not as good as I thought it was and you misunderstood me. A dragon ... was my mother’s name for a frightening story. Also it is a name they give to liars in my mother’s village. In Hokein, they say ‘to sew dragon seeds’ when they mean gossip”.59 57

Carey, Illywhacker, 15. Ibid., 194. 59 Ibid., 369, 370. 58

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Even as a middle-aged man, Badgery fails to see his misunderstanding. Having great hopes for prying into Goon’s magician’s skills, he purloins what appears to him to be The Book of Dragons, a “splendid volume, black, red, gold, the colours of dragons”.60 Hoping for the sacred, Badgery – in total ignorance of Chinese cultural forms – discovers that the book contains its former owner’s most profane business secrets. Finding himself “confronted with a code [he] could not decipher”, Badgery at first cannot make sense of either the Chinese or the English characters. When he eventually grasps the gravity of his misunderstanding, it is too late. The dragons have already infested his mind and he is not willing to give up the magic he practiced: “So it was, at a time when it seemed too late, that I began to have some understanding of the power of lies.”61 From then on, the “dragons” woven into the narrative in their various manifestations as ghosts, grotesque creatures, or disappearing feats, are brandished as mere figments of Herbert’s storyteller’s mind. Reality finally catches up on Herbert, and on the magically enchanted reader. True History of the Kelly Gang True History of the Kelly Gang can also serve as an illustration of Carey’s use of magic realism. The nature of its unreality is different from the two cases analysed earlier, though. There are no grotesqueries, no absurdities and no instances of freakishness. Imbued with the historical verisimilitude of Oscar and Lucinda and Jack Maggs and their tastes of authentically recreated history, True History of the Kelly Gang is an emulation of the historic Ned Kelly’s “Jerilderie Letter”62 which Carey studied in detail before he set out to write the novel. But although, as Peter Porter observes, the novel “gather[s] about itself a veritable ectoplasm of nineteenth-century colonial life”,63 it still exudes a decidedly magic tone which it largely

60

Ibid., 370. Ibid., 374 and 375. 62 Ned Kelly, The Jerilderie Letter (1879), ed. and introd. Alex McDermott, London: Faber and Faber, 2001. 63 Peter Porter, “Made Noble in the Fire”, Review of True History of the Kelly Gang, Times Literary Supplement, 5 January 2001, 19. 61

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owes to the Irish folk heritage that permeates the fictional Ned’s version of events. The episodes of magic that Ned weaves into his narrative expose a rift in the fabric of the dominant white Anglo-Celtic society itself. It is a rift between two diametrically opposed interpretive communities and the way they relate to the world and its history as it really is, or was: there are the British with their rationalism, which has a stronghold in the colonial administration; and then, there are the Irish, whose epistemology and ontology can easily allow for the existence of the irrational and the supernatural. For the Irish, one feels, the supernatural is vital. Therefore, when Ned employs magic, he does so because without it the Irish experience in the colonies would not be represented appropriately. To the Irish settlers, their imported mythology functions as a safeguard against emotional and spiritual starvation. It insulates them against the hardships they encounter in the hostile climate of colonial Victoria. Yet, not only the British with their rationality are a hindrance to Irish myths. The country itself seems adverse to the transported stories. The rich Irish folk tradition, like Christianity, simply does not thrive in the new environment. It loses its grounding. The Irish patroness of the cow, for instance, does not survive the removal into the southern hemisphere: In the colony of Victoria my parents witnessed the slow wasting of St Brigit though my mother made the straw crosses for the lambing and followed all Grandma Quinn’s instructions it were clear St Brigit had lost her power to bring the milk down from the cows’ horn. The beloved saint withered in Victoria she could no longer help the calving and thus slowly passed from our reckoning.64

In this passage Carey exemplifies one of the mythistorical premises, which is to accord as much weight to the narratives and myths that historic people believed in as to their res gestae. The myths and the magic that turn out to be an integral appurtenance to the Irish are not only important for the spiritual wellbeing of their users, but they also carry a political undertone. When Ned uses his folk heritage, he can be sure that the supernatural will 64

Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang, 88.

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function as a barrier beyond which the British oppressors, because of their different concept of reality, will not follow. Throughout the narrative, attitudes towards the supernatural accordingly enable Ned and his author to draw a demarcation-line between the Irish and the British, or rather those who fight for the English and those who fight against them. Harry Power’s case demonstrates this: an ex-convict, he rejects the cause of his English compatriots and is now open to adopt the world view of the archetypal underdogs, the Irish. It is on either side of that imaginary line that Carey has Ned align the characters he is dealing with in the “drama”65 that the outlaw declaredly stages of his life. The following passage illustrates how Ned uses the supernatural to shore up this dividing line evident in almost every aspect of colonial life Ned touches upon: When our brave parents was ripped from Ireland like teeth from the mouth of their own history and every dear familiar thing had been abandoned on the docks of Cork or Galway or Dublin then the Banshee come on board the cursed convict ships ... and there were not an English eye could see her no more than an English eye can picture the fire that will descend upon that race in time to come. The Banshee sat herself at the bow and combed her hair all the way from Cork to Botany Bay she took passage amongst our parents beneath that foreign flag 3 crosses nailed one atop the other.66

There are more than a dozen references to supernatural occurrences in Ned’s narrative. When the fictional outlaw interweaves figures from Irish folklore into his narrative, he does so without begging for his addressee’s suspension of disbelief. He simply assumes that his reader shares his and his friends’ beliefs, or hopes that possible doubts be dispelled. The following dialogue between Ned and his mentor Harry Power illustrates this: You listen young’un said he and we’ll see who is laughing at the end. When Mr James Whitty arrived in Beveridge he were as poor as your da and ma he had not a pot to piss in but one dark rainy night the Devil appeared as he were riding home along the adjectival Melbourne road. 65 66

Ibid., 334. Ibid., 87-88.

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To the narrator, the adult Kelly, the supernatural is part of reality. Besides, he has learned to see his supernatural Irish heritage as a tool against oppression by the British. The fact that he here includes the doubts of his adolescent self is meant to show to the readers that Kelly can appreciate their disbelief, but that it might be advisable to follow his own example and accept the devil as real because he, like the other spirits in the book, is such a powerful presence in Kelly’s and the other characters’ lives. This explains why the unreal is woven into the text with such an absolute deadpan sense of presentation, exactly of the sort that is so characteristic of magic realist fictions, where, as has been ascertained before, “the unreal happens as part of reality”.68 Two other incidents from the text illustrate this. Ned does not have the slightest doubt about the mysterious change of George Kelly’s eye colour. To prove his reliability, he produces a witness (his sister Kate) who, according to Ned, “will attest to that”.69 Although such rapid physical changes have their models in the literary world,70 biologically, they are not possible in so short a time. Within the logic and the aesthetics of Ned’s narrative, however, such an incident still feels real because it is embedded in the mythically-charged narrative environment of an Irish mind in the colony. Another remarkable supernatural presence in the text is the Banshee, the Celtic “supernatural death-messenger”.71 For Carey’s narrator, this mythic figure is as real as any of the other characters. Ellen Quinn, we are informed, has a tête-à-tête with the female spirit 67

Ibid., 75. Flores, “Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction”, 115. 69 Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang, 254. 70 In “A Descent into the Maelström”, Edgar Allan Poe, one of the masters of the fantastic and the grotesque, has a middle-aged man change into a “very old man” in the course of a day: “It took less than a single day to change these hairs from a jetty black to white, to weaken my limbs, and to unstring my nerves, so that I tremble at the least exertion” (The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings, ed. and introd. David Galloway, Penguin Classics, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986, 225). 71 Patricia Lysaght, The Banshee: The Irish Supernatural Death-Messenger, Dublin: Glendale, 1986, 15. 68

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in the shape of an “old white woman wearing a red dress”. Ned reports the ensuing dialogue: Who do you want? The Banshee made no answer my mother had been told from her youngest years that you must not interfere with the Death Messenger ... and she knew an hour’s luck never shone on anyone who molested a Banshee but she were in another country far from where the Banshee should of been .... She were an ugly old crone but now she revealed her long and golden hair which she set about combing as if to soothe herself. My mother knew all the stories of the comb she knew the bone comb & steel comb & comb of gold.

When Ned hears the Banshee wail – “It were not what they say it were not like a vixen fox but a dreadful shriek that would turn a strong man’s bowels to water it filled the whole vault of the heavens”72 – he “never doubted what it were [but] galloped home all the time praying no one in my family had been took”.73 For the overall effect of the narrative it is irrelevant whether the devil actually really materializes or whether the blood-curdling shriek really emanates from the Banshee. If we were to take these occurrences at face value, the novel would not be grounded in experientiality, which we are called to believe, given the historic pretext and all the other devices that feign authenticity. The supernatural episodes that intersperse Ned’s fictional autobiography are more likely meant by the author Carey to be mental projections of characters who thirst after the mythical, superstitious countryfolk who try to come to grips with the strangeness of their new home. But magic, through the carrier medium of myth, also has a communitybuilding value for the colonial underdogs and may well serve as ingredient to the founding of a tradition of Australian narrative beyond journalistic realism. Besides, the use of magic realism in True History of the Kelly Gang allows Carey to attack historical discourse conceptually. In a narrative that generically comes along as a “true history”,74 the 72

Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang, 86-87. Ibid., 88. 74 As part of a narrative’s title, the word “true” has a long tradition in deluding the reader. Lucian of Samosota (in his Vera Historia, c. AD 150) primed the genre of the 73

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interpolation of magic into the narrative fabric constitutes an act of rebellion against the repressiveness of the label “true”. At the same time as it exposes the rational basis of history as a pretension, it shows that the realist sensorium of conventional historians might not be tuned in such a manner as to capture in a holistic way the experience of a transplanted Anglo-Celtic people. As the analyses of Bliss, Illywhacker and True History of the Kelly Gang have illustrated, Carey amalgamates the supernatural in its various narrative manifestations to arrive at a form that displays a conspicuous family resemblance with novels written in the magic realist style. The paradoxical co-existence of ostentatious fiction and the real, captured so well in the oxymoron of magic realism itself, provides a key to Carey’s subversion of reality by way of fantasy in the present context. For this undertaking, Slemon’s theorization of magic realism as a form of postcolonial discourse that highlights the continuous dialectic between the two disparate worlds with their incompatible ground rules, thus “creat[ing] disjunction within each of the separate discursive systems, rending them with gaps, absences, and silences”,75 seems particularly suitable. In the Carey fictions under scrutiny in this chapter, the pervasive realism creates exactly this sort of disjunction when the reader enters the realm of fantasy, while, at the same time, the naturalness of fantasy creates a similarly disrupting effect with regard to the fictional realism. Whether Carey uses realism or fantasy, the one is automatically implied in the other through signs that debunk the seeming unpretentiousness of both.

true histories with what turned out to be the first science fiction novel, a glaringly untrue narrative of his protagonist’s trip to the moon and the sun and his participation in interplanetary warfare. Many early novels (Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko [1688], Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe [1719], and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels [1726]) were also presented as “true histories”, with the narrators posing as chroniclers or editors of an original document. 75 Slemon, “Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse”, 409.

CHAPTER FIVE STRATEGIES OF AN ILLYWHACKER (III): TELLING HISTORY AS STORY And while we fret and writhe in bandaged uncertainty ... we fabulate. We make up a story to cover the facts we don’t know or can’t accept; we keep a few true facts and spin a new story round them. Our panic and our pain are only eased by soothing fabulation; we call it history.1

Storytelling is as old as human civilization. Stories have always accompanied man, from the pre-classical ages of antiquity to postmodernity. Stories give meaning and make human existence less absurd. It is because he “fear[s] absurdity”2 that Salman Rushdie’s Scheherazadean storyteller Saleem Sinai, for example, literary kin to several of Carey’s narrators, embarks on his narrative tour de force through the history of post-independence India. Despite recurrent death-of-literature pronouncements,3 despite the conceptual doubt that poststructuralist thought has raised concerning narrative configurations of all kinds (literary and non-literary), ostentatious, unashamed and pleasure-seeking storytelling is an important feature in a large number of contemporary novels: John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot and A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, William Golding’s Rites of Passage, Close Quarters and Fire Down Below, Peter Ackroyd’s The Great Fire of London, Hawksmoor, Chatterton, or A.S. Byatt’s Possession come to mind. Literary criticism has been much enamoured of 1

Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, London: Picador, 1990, 242. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 4. 3 See, for instance, Alvin Kernan, The Death of Literature, New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1990; Leslie Fiedler, What Was Literature? Class Culture and Mass Society, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982; and Carl Woodring, Literature: An Embattled Profession, New York: Columbia UP, 1999. 2

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contemporary storytellers – and in the body of Carey criticism it is one of the most long-standing critical concerns.4 The profusion of stories highlights the narrativity of linguistic records of human experience and ties in conveniently with the self-reflexivity that postmodern narrative theory describes and stipulates as that form of writing that best conforms with the exigencies of the postmodern world. At a time when six-thousand novels are published every year5 and multi-medial fictions are readily available in everybody’s living-room, on computers and on bookshelves, storytellers of our technological society are called upon to counteract the dreariness of mass-produced narratives, to try and stop people abandoning reading for TV and other electronic media. As British playwright David Hare explains in an essay in The Guardian: Why fabulate? Because if we do not, everyone else will. We must fabulate because we all, as spectators, need to be brought up short and reminded that the lowest levels of fabulation, the formulaic levels which prevail everywhere, as much in half-baked novels as on halfbaked television, do not, in fact, tell us very much about reality, or about ourselves. Bad story-telling, conventional story-telling, storytelling propelled by the doctrinal rules of UCLA screenwriting classes – Reel 10: hero confronts apparently insuperable problem; Reel 11: hero overcomes apparently insuperable problem – serve only to dull us. Such story-telling reduces the world and makes it less than it is. How much more desperately, then, we need our sense of wonder restored, given that so much in modern fabulation conspires to steal it away. Science, which effortlessly opens minds and exposes them to new ideas, will rob the arts of their audience if we are content to leave fiction clattering mindlessly along tracks it has traversed a thousand times before.6

Original storytelling is one of the marker traits of Peter Carey’s fictions: it is this characteristic that explains why there is no such thing as a typical Carey novel, only certain features and concerns which recur throughout his fictions. 4

See Bliss, “‘Lies and Silences’: Cultural Masterplots and Existential Authenticity in Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang”, 275-76. 5 Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel: 1878-2001, rev. edn, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001, 541. 6 David Hare, “Fabulation”, The Guardian, 2 February 2002, Saturday Review, np.

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The author’s arrival on the literary scene in Australia in any case clearly marked a breach with the formula bush tales and the “dreary, dun-coloured offspring of journalistic realism”,7 which the then literary avant-garde (next to Carey writers like Murray Bail, Michael Wilding, Frank Moorhouse) rebelled against with their formal and thematic innovations. These writers also seemed to find it increasingly difficult in the late Sixties and early Seventies to accommodate within the narrative tradition of Lawson the experiences of their changing world: Australians at the time made their first tentative attempts at extending citizenship to immigrants of non-European background on a considerable scale, and the Vietnam War once again showed the country the dire consequences of getting involved in someone else’s war. In order to overcome the creative and ideological impasse the emerging writers started to look abroad, to South America, for example, and that continent’s magic realists and fabulists (Màrquez and Borges in particular), to North America’s postmodernists (Barth, Barthelme, Pynchon, Kerouac), or to Europe and some of its chief formal innovators (Kafka, Proust, Robbe-Grillet). The new literary peers, subjects and forms of writing also entailed a significant shift in literary treatments of the Australian experience. Carey’s writings exemplify this newness in Australian fiction. When he started to publish, he set out to re-imagine a country he felt had not been sufficiently imagined within the then predominant parameters of social realism. Commenting on Illywhacker in a 1989 interview, Carey explained how he approached the problem of the local literary tradition: This [Australia as described in Illywhacker] was not the same Australia as the dull and dreary gum-tree-dotted place depicted in naturalistic Australian literature. The Australia I wished to write about was the one described by Mark Twain.

He went on to explain that in Illywhacker he “tried to look at Australia as if I had never seen it before. I tried to arrive (like Twain) as a

7

As Patrick White famously had it in his essay “The Prodigal Son” from 1958 (reprinted in The Oxford Book of Australian Letters, ed. Imre Salusinszky, Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1997, 127).

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traveler, with little baggage, no preconceptions, and a fresh eye.”8 This imaginative departure from established patterns of Australian narrative correlated with the writer’s urge to represent portions of the Australian experience which he felt were either misrepresented and distorted, or quite simply absent from the nation’s literature. His declared aim of approaching the country with “little baggage” even seems to express itself in his formal inventiveness. In terms of literary genres, his prose fictions range from fantasy and science fiction (in his shorter prose particularly and The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith), to a Bildungsroman (Bliss), a love-story (Oscar and Lucinda), a picaresque three-decker novel (Illywhacker), a social realist fiction (The Tax Inspector), a children’s book (The Big Bazoohley), a postcolonial convict fiction (Jack Maggs), a fictional autobiography (True History of the Kelly Gang), and a melange of a thriller and a mystery-novel (My Life as a Fake). Therefore Carey has been hailed by critics as a writer of “indefatigable inventiveness”,9 as being … almost alone among contemporary novelists in never writing the same book twice. Each of his novels is quite different from any of the others; each carves out its own world, its own interests .... The more one looks at them, however, the less they follow the curves of one’s expectations. [And even] the apparently familiar genres don’t erase the sense that Carey starts each novel with an absolutely blank sheet, and takes nothing for granted.10

In other words, Carey is a very eclectic storyteller. Admittedly, every novelist renders a story of one sort or another. In the case of a writer like Carey, however, the “yarning and patent conning”11 that critics so often comment on is not only a technical necessity for 8

Jean W. Ross, “Contemporary Authors Interview”, in Contemporary Authors: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide to Current Writers in Fiction, General Nonfiction, Poetry, Journalism, Drama, Motion Pictures, Television and Other Fields, ed. Susan M. Trosky, Detroit: Gale, 1989, CXXVII, 75. 9 Woodcock, Peter Carey, 130. 10 Philip Hensher, “Heaven and Disneyland”, The Guardian, 11 October 1994, Features Page T8. 11 Bliss, “‘Lies and Silences’: Cultural Masterplots and Existential Authenticity in Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang”, 276.

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transmitting a story to the readership, but it is actually paraded and, as those critics writing in Helen Daniel’s tradition would have it, “celebrated”. The storyteller Carey’s fictional worlds teem with stories, so many stories, in fact, that only a fraction of them can get told. A number of his novels therefore leave us with the distinct sense that despite the abundance of tales that do get told, there still are many more waiting at the edge of the narrative that simply have not been included for dramaturgic or strategical reasons. Herbert Badgery is an illustrative case. He only tells those stories that serve his narrative purposes; others, possibly as significant ones, he leaves out (such as those about his first wife and their child, who he only mentions fleetingly).12 Another instance is Oscar and Lucinda, from which the more significant part of the female protagonist’s life is excluded.13 Similarly, the really unusual part of Tristan Smith’s life is not told in the book that misleadingly bears the title The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, for, as Tristan says on the last page of his narrative, “my unusual life was really just beginning”.14 In Bliss, the story of their father Harry’s life is only one of the many stories his children can tell. They, for instance, fail to tell their own story.15 In Jack Maggs, a novel about the eponymous main character, the narrator only renders a few episodes from Jack Maggs’ biography. The reader is left to guess at the abundance of stories that are not told: “and it is only natural that they [the Maggs family] left many stories scattered in their wake.”16 Ned Kelly in True History of the Kelly Gang also intersperses his autobiography with narrative sidetracks that lead beyond the limits of his own text. “At the time I assumed Mr Whitty must of passed into the next world ... but that as they say is another story”,17 and therefore is not accorded room in the narrator’s account. In a metaphorical way, therefore, the shadow-maker from Carey’s early short story “Report on the Shadow Industry”, whose last shadow is “elusive, unsatisfactory, hinting at greater beauties and more profound 12

Carey, Illywhacker, 83. Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 152, 506-507. 14 Carey, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, 414. 15 Carey, Bliss, 295-96. 16 Carey, Jack Maggs, 327. 17 Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang, 78. 13

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mysteries that exist somewhere before the beginning and somewhere after the end”,18 already foreshadows this particular quality of Carey’s novels.19 The variety of narrators that crop up in Carey’s fictions are another indicator of the profuse, celebratory, quality of his storytelling. Carey’s narrator-figures only rarely have purely functional value. With the exception of the authorial narrator in The Tax Inspector, there is no other self-effacing narrator in Carey’s novels. They come in various forms: Bliss features a semi-omniscient first-person plural narrator; Illywhacker flaunts a notorious teller of tall tales; Oscar and Lucinda has a selectively-omniscient figural narrator who tells a seemingly classic love-story but secretly indulges in narratorial gamesmanship; The Tax Inspector is presented by a matter-of-fact omniscient narrator; Tristan Smith features a Shandyan first-person narrator who starts his autobiography well before his birth; Jack Maggs is related by an omniscient emulation of a Dickens narrator; True History of the Kelly Gang has a self-interested first-person narrator verging on megalomania; the semi-fictional travelogue 30 Days in Sydney is told by Peter Carey, a narrator posturing as the real Peter Carey; and finally, My Life as a Fake is filtered through the eyes of a first-person narrator who embeds several lengthy stories into her own narrative. With the exception of the narrator of the The Tax Inspector, none of Carey’s narrators tell their stories casually, en passant. Storytelling is part of their very nature and a number of Carey’s narratorprotagonists are significantly even brought up on stories: Ned Kelly, for instance, is raised on stories of Irish heroism;20 Herbert Badgery’s children are “Spawned by lies, suckled on dreams, infested with dragons”,21 and Harry Joy, offspring of a storytelling family, is equally “suckled on stories”.22 In such a milieu, the act of storytelling is highlighted and the metafictional references in the novels stress the 18

Peter Carey, Collected Stories, London: Faber and Faber, 1995, 139. Van Ikin, in one of the first essays published on Carey, prophetically stated that this passage might turn out to be Carey’s “artistic manifesto” (see “Peter Carey: The Stories”, Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative Literature, I/1 [1977], 23). 20 Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang, 98. 21 Carey, Illywhacker, 359. 22 Carey, Bliss, 18. 19

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role of the narrator as mediator between the narrated matter and the reader. Where stories proliferate and metafictional reflections draw the readers’ attention to the nature of storytelling, the act of mediation between the narrated matter and the consumer becomes all-important. In the case of historical fictions that critically revise episodes of Australian history and pass metahistorical judgements on the nature of that history, special emphasis is laid on the production of history, on its making, its construction. And when history is in the hands of notoriously unreliable narrators who spin yarn after yarn the storytelling becomes a conceptual attack against the monolithic renderings of past human experience that traditional historiography offers. Bliss Bliss serves as a good example of the importance narrativity and storytelling hold in Carey’s writing. Abounding with stories, Bliss is a novel that investigates the functions of storytelling in society and the emancipatory use to which authentic stories can be put in the Australian settler society. In short, it is a story about the telling and the reception of stories. The very structure of Bliss is entrenched in narrative, or, to be more precise, narrative archetypes. It is in this sense that Teresa Dovey, having recourse to Robert Kellogg’s and Robert Scholes’ understanding of myth as “‘traditional narrative’”,23 speaks of Bliss as … mythic, in a way which recalls the sacred origins of myth in the rituals enacting the cyclical processes of nature. The plot pattern follows the seasonal pattern of mortification, purgation, invigoration, and jubilation ... which corresponds to Harry Joy’s first death, period of purgatory in his imagined hell, restoration to self and to the society of Bog Onion Road, and the final joyful reunion with Honey Barbara.24

For the protagonist Harry Joy, storytelling accordingly is not just entertainment, it is ceremony. The stories which he hears in church 23

Robert Kellogg and Robert Scholes, The Nature of Narrative, New York: Oxford UP, 1966, 219. 24 Dovey, “An Infinite Onion: Narrative Structure in Peter Carey’s Fiction”, 195-96.

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and which are all imported from Europe teach him about “Heaven and Hell and the tortures of Jesus”,25 but they fail to touch him. More to his liking are his father’s stories and the ritual they are accompanied by: “You must always give something for a story,” his father said. “Either blue bread made from cedar ash, or a sapphire. That is something I learned from the Hopi. All stories come from the Holy People and you must give something for them.”26

It is significantly only when he escapes from his life in “hell” that he comes to a real understanding of his family heritage in the form of stories. In the beginning, a yarn spun by Harry is “a poor directionless thing, left to bump around by itself and mean what you wanted it to”.27 When he enters the commune as storytelling shaman, he slowly comes to a better understanding of the stories he tells. His listeners then are … astonished ... not so much by the content of the story, but rather the way it was approached .... There was, in Harry’s stories, something of the skill of a cabinet-maker, the craftsman more than the artist. They were not usually stories at all, but incidents to which he applied himself with such dedication that, finally, the thing was like a folly or a carefully carpentered house for pigeons, a rotunda, a series of small pavillions with elegant roofs and perfect dovetail joinery.

His stories are neither original (except for one, see page 76), nor are they meaningful by themselves: The words of the story could be of no use to anyone else. The words, by themselves, were useless. The words were an instrument only he could play and they became, in the hands of others, dull and lifeless, like picked flowers or bright stones removed from underwater.28

It is only when Harry endows them with a mythic quality that they start to be meaningful for the “refugees of a broken culture who had 25

Carey, Bliss, 19. Ibid., 20. 27 Ibid., 32. 28 Ibid., 221. 26

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only the flotsam of belief and ceremony to cling to or, sometimes, the looted relics from other people’s temples”. His special skill then is to give “value to a story so that it [is] something of worth, as important, in its way, as a strong house or a good dam”. Harry’s listeners in Bog Onion Road, “hungry for ceremony and story”, come to appreciate his stories as something to live by, as narrative constructions without “embarrassment”.29 Harry, in the end, becomes a vital institution: He was not only liked, he was also necessary. He could dig a decentsized hole for a tree; he could tell a story for a funeral and a story for a birth. When they sat around the fire at night he could tell a long story just for fun, in the same way Richard might play his old accordion and Dani her Jew’s harp. He never thought of what he did as original. It wasn’t either. He told Vance’s old stories, but told them better because he now understood them. He retold the stories of Bog Onion Road. And when he told stories about the trees and the spirits of the forest he was only dramatizing things that people already knew, shaping them just as you pick up rocks scattered on the ground to make a cairn. He was merely sewing together the bright patchworks of lives, legends, myths, beliefs, hearsay into a splendid cloak that gave a richer glow to all their lives. He knew when it was right to tell one story and not another. He knew how a story could give strength or hope. He knew stories, important stories, so sad he could hardly tell them for weeping.30

Although the Bog Onion Road model exudes a certain parochialism, it still is highly significant from the postcolonial vantage point. Having rejected the grand narratives of Christianity, Americanstyle globalization and the stock of British hegemonial traditions, in which Australia only features as a country of second-rate importance, the hippies liberate themselves from those narratives that presented a hindrance to their and their country’s spiritual well-being. Within such parameters it is easy to see Harry, as Ralph Pordzik suggests, as a … founding figure of a genuinely postcolonial culture emancipating itself from the imported tales and legends of the imperial (capitalist) past. Accordingly, Bog Onion is not a timeless utopia of static 29 30

Ibid., 291. Ibid., 290-91.

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Even if Carey does not intend to suggest Bog Onion Road as a model for all of Australia, the novel still sounds an autonomist tone which “argu[es] the necessity of constructing stories to live by, stories which emerge from and are given value by the community itself, rather than from the importation of American dreams”. According to Graeme Turner, it even posits Harry Joy as a “kind of model for the writer within the Australian culture, providing fictions, Australian dreams, for a culture ‘hungry for ceremony and story’”,32 an assessment that ties in with what I described earlier as the mythopoetical agenda of Carey’s fictions. In Carey’s œuvre storytelling functions as a form of cultural resistance and can be read as an attempt to assert cultural difference and independence from nations that threaten to monopolize Australia. The yearning for cultural self-sufficiency crops up again in Illywhacker: there, storytelling and the calls for independence are amalgamated into a radicalized, nationalist form, though. Considering the decolonizing political agenda of Illywhacker, Badgery’s narration is a means of liberation. Where Harry Joy’s storytelling investigates the mythic function of stories, Badgery’s stories are conceived by his creator as an investigation into historiographic problems on the agenda in the 1980s. Against the theoretical background outlined above, the narrative act itself becomes as important as the narrated matter, for it highlights mechanisms of narrativization such as construction, selection, personal taste and vested interests of the narrating mind, all of which not only influence, but heavily determine what is told.

31 Ralph Pordzik, The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia: A Comparative Introduction to the Utopian Novel in the New English Literatures, Studies of World Literature in English 10, Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2001, 77. 32 Graeme Turner, “American Dreaming: The Fictions of Peter Carey”, Australian Literary Studies, XII/4 (October 1986), 441.

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Illywhacker Of all of Carey’s novels, Illywhacker with its illywhacking narrator most outspokenly problematizes these aspects of telling stories and histories. Since Badgery is portrayed as a spider at the centre of his own narrative construct,33 everything revolves around him. The literary gamesman Carey uses Badgery to tease out the intricacies of his narrative trickery and to expose the way the narrator can manipulate the reader. Although Badgery is a confidence trickster and a liar duping many of his fictional compatriots, the metafictional selfreflexivity running through the novel perpetually alerts the reader to the dubious reputation of their entertainer, the would-be historiographer Badgery. His initials already leave no doubt, for HB incidentally also stands for a quintessential writer’s tool, a pencil just like the one that Leah uses: Leah “revealed her liar’s lump, the callus where her HB pencil fitted against her finger”.34 What one can already infer from his name is confirmed by Herbert’s fashioning himself as an author (above his position as a storyteller). Badgery, co-author (with Leah) of a number of books such as Gaol Bird,35 handles the plot of his narrative like a fictionwriter; he lays it out in such a way as to best suit his narrative purposes. We must also bear in mind that the whole narrative is one enormous flashback, allowing Herbert to arrange and, if necessary, manipulate his material with the privileges of hindsight. He makes extensive use of his unique perspective on the narrative, grants himself the freedom to misconstrue and misinterpret, and he sometimes blatantly excludes and distorts certain elements: “Now, as I drag these old items out, I am surprised at the number I chose to forget (a wife and child in Dubbo come to mind) and how effectively I did it.”36 The frequent references to his method of ordering, selecting and omitting are a clear hint at the all-important function of the mediator regarding the selection of material and the point of view in the presentation, both in the writing of fiction and, decisively so, in historiography. As Hayden White never tires of emphasizing: “when it comes to apprehending the historical record, there are no grounds to 33

Carey, Illywhacker, 545. Ibid., 552. 35 Ibid., 550. 36 Ibid., 83. 34

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be found in the historical record itself for preferring one way of construing its meaning over another.”37 When Badgery takes his liberties with history and places his fabrications in lieu of what he sees as flagrant misconceptions and distortions, his method is that of a “bricoleur”,38 that is, a craftsman, someone who makes constructions of one sort or another.39 Herbert indeed can be said to construct his narrative in the manner of a postmodernist architect, a bricoleur, who composes his buildings by borrowing styles and materials from here and there. Leah Goldstein gives the reader a taste of this style when she describes her spouse’s methods of acquiring material for his narrative: … you have not done me the honour of thieving things whole but have taken a bit here, a bit there, snipped, altered, and so on. You have stolen like a barbarian, slashing a bunch of grapes from the middle of a canvas.40

37

Hayden White, “The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and DeSublimation”, in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Interpretation, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987, 75. 38 Brian Edwards, “Deceptive Constructions: The Art of Building in Peter Carey’s Illywhacker”, in Fabulating Beauty, 154. 39 With respect to this building metaphor it is interesting to observe that Herbert also has a relish for architectural activities. He builds a whole variety of dwellings, ranging from ramshackle huts to real mansions. When he redesigns the Pet Shop in Book Three, his seemingly haphazard destruction work turns out to be a purposeful act of historical deconstruction: “I picked up a brick and started to scratch a plan on to it with a nail. It was then I noticed the thumb print in the corner. This is common enough with bricks of this age, produced by convicts down at Brickfields …. This one, and this one. They’ve all got it. So there you are. All around you, in your walls, you’ve got the thumb prints of convicts. How do you reckon that affects you?” (542) These manœuvres allow him to expose the penal origins of the country which had been shamefully concealed under “a hundred per cent pure Australiana” (545). 40 Carey, Illywhacker, 549. The real-life author behind Herbert Badgery seems to belong to the same school of writers as his fictional character. Reflecting upon the time when he constructed the image of the pet shop, Carey described his method as follows: “it [the pet shop] did not really exist anywhere, or was a conglomeration of all sorts of different pet shops .... But my pet shop, the best shop in the world, was made out of scrap, bits and pieces from here and there, from the head keepers of birds at the zoo, for instance, who spent a lot of time with me” (see Candida Baker, “Peter Carey”, in Yacker: Australian Writers Talk About Their Work, eds Candida Baker, Robert Drewe, and Robert Duncan, Sydney: Picador, 1986, 61-62).

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The makeshift nature of Badgery’s narrative is further underscored by the conscious denial of a number of conventions of the writer’s trade. He breaks up the chronology of the story and reshuffles events to arrive at a plot in which, according to Christer Larsson, … each event is deliberately placed where it will carry the greatest explanatory power. Badgery arranges his narrative so that each revelatory point helps the understanding of his version of the events.41

It is little surprising that in a novel preoccupied with lies this does not go unchallenged. In a metafictional coup, Leah exposes Badgery’s narration as plagiarism and even distortion. In the letter she enters into the narrative she seizes the possibility to emend and rectify some of the most outrageous lies Badgery has been telling about his own life and the lives of other characters: I do not mind that you have stolen so much of what I have written. Is that what you were doing crawling around on the floor pretending to kill cockroaches or kissing my feet when I already told you they were dirty? A hundred things come to me, things that amused me at the time, touched me – and now I see they were only excuses to thieve things from me.42

Badgery deals frankly with the reader, mostly. He does not try to hide the fact that he has mutilated his own as well as his lover’s biographies. The reader is meant to know that the story is the result of a process of construction similar to that of building a house: “I had work to do, making certain unstable parts of my story become strong and clear.”43 The excessive use of architectural imagery in the novel underscores the constructivist approach Carey takes to Australian history. To him, there are no natural givens, no fixities. “When the page is still blank”, he says, “you can do anything .... We really can make ourselves up.”44 Illywhacker drives home this point very 41 Christer Larsson, “‘Years Later’: Temporality and Closure in Peter Carey’s Novels”, Australian Literary Studies, XIX/2 (October 1999), 181. 42 Carey, Illywhacker, 548-49. 43 Ibid., 42. 44 See Eleanor Wachtel, “‘We really can make ourselves up’: An Interview with Peter

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emphatically. There is no representation, only construction. The whole narrative depends on a narrator who is a figment, pure fabulation in the original sense of the word: “You have invented yourself, Mr Badgery, and that is why I like you. You are what they call a confidence man. You can be anything you want” .... “We will invent ourselves.”45

It is in keeping with this that Sydney as the “city of illusions” appears as “something imagined by men and women, and if it could be imagined into one form, it could be imagined into another”,46 and that Leah proclaims “there was no such thing as Australia or if there was it was like an improperly fixed photograph that was already fading”.47 With its emphasis on insubstantiality and constructedness, Illywhacker as a historical narrative is not only one of Carey’s clearest repudiations of traditional conceptualizations of history, but it can also be read as a contribution to the identity debate of the 1980s, which was headed by Richard White and was hinged on his stipulation that there is “no ‘real’ Australia waiting to be uncovered. A national identity is an invention”48 – an understanding resounding loud and clear in Leah’s statement quoted above. True History of the Kelly Gang True History of the Kelly Gang relates to the preoccupation with story in two ways. First, it is a novel that within its covers exemplifies the importance of narrative for human beings. The subject matter, the Kelly myth, offers itself like only few other narratives in Australia for an investigation of storytelling. George Turnbull Dick’s Bushranging Bibliography (1992) lists more than twelve-hundred items which in one way or another comment on or retell the Kelly story and the phenomenon of bushranging which Kelly immortalized. And second, as a novel that recreates one of the most often-told stories of the whole modern Australian narrative tradition it functions, in the extraCarey”, Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada, IX (June 1993), 104. 45 Carey, Illywhacker, 91-92. 46 Ibid., 597 and 561. 47 Ibid., 586. 48 Richard White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688-1980, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1981, viii.

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fictional world, as a comment on the importance and implications of this story for present-day Australia. Above these considerations, it is a novel which demonstrates that, as John Kinsella puts it in his review of the novel, There’s no doubt that Carey is, above and beyond all else, a storyteller .... The novel is full of wonderful vignettes ... and it’s the stories within the stories that Carey does so well .... the asides make for wonderful digressions that richly inform the main narrative.

With its premium on storytelling, True History of the Kelly Gang not only repackages history as story, but it also quite explicitly warns of the potential abuse of stories of the potency of Kelly’s, since the Kelly story has, over the years, been exploited by historians and identitymakers, often for a nationalist cause. It is for this reason that John Kinsella feels uncomfortable even with Carey’s novel which, he admits, is written with “critical awareness” and its “own textual procedures ... under review”. But, as he argues, this latest fictionalization of the life of Kelly participates “in the creation and continuation of so many national myths that I begin to comprehend why it is that right-wing groups in Australia connect with Australian literary identities like Henry Lawson and Banjo Patterson [sic]”. This way, Kinsella adds, Carey’s indulging of the myth “might be seen as perpetuating some of the deepest problems of Australian nationalism”.49 A careful reading of the Carey novel, however, reveals how pronounced the “critical awareness” noted by Kinsella actually is. True History of the Kelly Gang constantly alerts its readers to the potency of stories and myths in its characters’ lives and in this way calls to mind the use of the Kelly story in extratextual Australia. The outlawed hero of the novel, Ned Kelly, is suspended in a web of stories into which his life is inscribed. Through his intertextual engagement with these texts, Carey sets Kelly’s fate into a specific context which at times endows the story of the outlaw’s life with grandeur, at other times gives it a ridiculous air. The bushranger, animated by his puppeteer Carey, tries desperately to justify his 49

John Kinsella, “On Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang”, nd: www.john kinsella.org/reviews/carey.html (accessed 20 March 2010).

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misdeeds before his daughter. Throughout this process, he conjures up literary classics by William Shakespeare and Richard Blackmore as well as a wide range of English and Irish folktales and episodes from both countries’ histories, creating for himself the context of historic and legendary heroism. Animated by Carey, Kelly instrumentalizes these pretexts and, with the hubris of a megalomaniac, completely misjudges the power relations in the colony (not unlike the real Kelly in his “Jerilderie Letter”). It is at this point that Carey ironically distances himself from Kelly. He has the outlaw pour forth all the flattery that is to be had from his admirers.50 It is in this feeling of elation and anxiousness before the final battle that Kelly devises his body armour modelled on the Monitor, the “ironclad monster”,51 a famous battleship from the American Civil War. When he finally confronts the colonial army in the famous shootout at Glenrowan, an episode already hinted at on the very first page of the novel, the martial context has long been prepared: “I am the b----y Monitor, my boys.”52 The origin of his plan is prosaic rather than heroic. The walls of the shepherd’s hut he dwells in are plastered with news items from the time of the American Civil War, which the previous incumbent had used for want of wallpaper. Kelly studies the news stories about the war, or what is left of them: “I were often disappointed to find the outcome of a battle eaten by a mouse.”53 Carey ironizes Kelly in a similar way when the outlaw engages with Shakespeare. When he comes across the schoolteacher Curnow, who is carrying a volume of the plays of Shakespeare (later he is significantly described as holding the book “across his heart”54), Kelly records: In his left hand he were carrying a thick book I took it from him and seen it were the plays of Shakespeare. Do you object to a man reading he asked.

50

Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang, for instance, 304, 324. Ibid., 324. 52 Ibid., 3. 53 Ibid., 324. 54 Ibid., 337. 51

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O I sometimes read a book myself said I then asked him were this one any good.55

When Kelly later pastes King Henry’s Crispin’s Day Speech into his narrative, he invokes (unwittingly, as is suggested) the context of one of the most glorious victories of the English, whom he otherwise despises. The outlaw takes the epic heroism of the soldiers preparing to fight at Agincourt, a bravery and death-defiance that has caused much debate amongst Shakespeare scholars, at face value. Kelly’s narrative even suggests that he identifies with the English king. Just like King Henry’s soldiers are all gathered around him on the eve of the battle, Kelly’s army, “boys ... noble of true Australian coin”,56 assemble around him as well. He does not seem to notice the inadequacy of a comparison between the shootout at Glenrowan and the battle of Agincourt, where King Henry V won one of the most brilliant (and bloody) battles of the Middle Ages for the English. As the narrative progresses and draws to its climax in Glenrowan, Carey has Kelly invoke more and more outspokenly the context of heroism and exposes the outlaw’s grandiosity through the tales he has him refer to. Next to Shakespeare’s history play stands – rather disparately – Blackmore’s nineteenth-century classic Lorna Doone (1869), a middle-brow romance with a huge readership at the time of its first publication. Featuring the story of John Ridd’s battle against the violent but powerful Doone family, Blackmore’s novel as an intertext serves as a model for Ned Kelly’s plight. Just like Kelly, Ridd sees himself wronged by the circumstances of his low social status and the advantages those in power harvest from their elevated societal position. Kelly derives a certain satisfaction from the comparison with the hero of Blackmore’s tale; Ridd, like him, is an “ignoramus but pretty well for a yeoman”.57 Kelly uses the tale of Ridd’s melodramatic struggle as a backcloth to the enactment of his own life and narrative. The engagement with 55

Ibid., 336. Ibid., 340. 57 Ibid., 337. The dialogue between Kelly and Curnow is another instance where Carey ironizes the outlaw. The way in which Curnow makes fun of him, calling him a “scholar” (337) and playing on his inability to distinguish between the author and the narrator of Lorna Doone, seems to escape Kelly entirely. 56

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Blackmore’s famous tale58 strengthens his sense of righteousness and his illusion of belonging to a tradition of glorious fighters. It is by no means an accident that Carey’s Kelly is fascinated by Lorna Doone: the historic Kelly is known to have enjoyed an occasional reading in his copy of Blackmore’s tale of bravery.59 The parallels Carey’s Kelly establishes between himself and Ridd endow his struggle with dimensions larger than life. Ned Kelly sees himself in line with historical and fictional personages who, like him, have fought a desperate and officially unsanctioned battle against injustice and unfairness. The references to two archetypal ennobled outlaws or “social bandits” (in Eric Hobsbawm’s terminology), Robin Hood and Rob Roy,60 are telling in this respect. Like these heroes from English and Scottish folklore, whose deeds represent “a rather primitive form of organized social protest ... against oppression and poverty”, a “cry for vengeance on the rich and oppressors, a vague dream of some curb on them, a righting of individual wrongs”,61 Carey’s Kelly in the end believes he is not only fighting for his and his family’s honour, but also for the rest of the colony’s underprivileged rural population. Another way in which Carey emplots the outlaw’s life as a heroic tale are the references he makes to stories from Irish mythology and its tales of heroism and resistance against injustice. The allusions to the Irish warrior hero Cuchulainn,62 leader of the Red Branch, a semichivalrous order of Ulster warriors (who make up a whole cycle in Irish mythology), are significant in this context, and so is the identification of the Kelly Gang with the fictional Sons of Sieve,63 a secret group of Irish rebels who are described as opposing British tyranny in their homeland with acts of terrorism. The implication of Ned Kelly’s life in an intricately contrived system of interlinkages with other well-known narratives also relates to what has been said about the importance of myth for Australian society. True History of the Kelly Gang, like the other Carey novels 58

See, for instance, ibid., 181, 246, 324, 336-37. Ian Jones, Ned Kelly: A Short Life, Melbourne: Lothian, 1995, 211. 60 Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang, 285-86. 61 Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (1959), Manchester: Manchester UP, 1963, 13, 5. 62 Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang, 324. 63 Ibid., 266-67, 272-78. 59

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already analysed, illustrates the genesis of myth. It exemplifies the way narratives strike roots in society and perpetuate themselves by making their consumers’ lives more meaningful. In this sense, the novel, as Kinsella writes in his review of True History of the Kelly Gang, is also a “paean to the value of literature” as carrier medium of myth: National identity comes through its arts. The pen is mightier than the sword, but it also goes hand in hand with it. Carey’s Kelly knows that to be heard, to be read in print is to enter the bodies of the reader. The song, the written word, stories told around fires – these are what gives power. These are where identity is located.64

In this sense, the novel – through the impact it has had on Australians – has already proved the value of literature. Despite Kelly’s racist attitudes, despite the fact that he commits several murders, he has an enormous identification potential, and, because he “touches an Australian nerve”,65 Kelly in a curious way relates even to present-day Australians. Granted that the readers of the novel register the metafictional strategies which keep the narrative process under review and make sure that a critical distance to the outlaw is kept, True History of the Kelly Gang is a very instructive book for its readers from the fifth continent: it is a quintessentially Australian narrative, a myth that explains to Australians their origins in outlawdom and institutionalized injustice. The propositions the novel makes regarding its readers’ cultural orientation tie in with the emphasis laid on independence from Britain in postcolonial discourse. The palimpsest-like texture of the novel makes this clear. The many references to the Irish myths and legends, to Shakespeare and Blackmore, acknowledge the layering effect of history and culture. They specifically pay tribute to the value of the Anglo-Celtic tradition, but the novel denounces Kelly when he metaphorically becomes a liege to the English king. Once Kelly turns 64

Kinsella, “On Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang”. Although Carey does not try to conceal Kelly’s racism against the British, he excludes the fact that his historic model was imprisoned once (at the age of fourteen) for a racially-motivated assault on a Chinaman (see Bill Gammage, “Kelly, Edward ‘Ned’”, in The Oxford Companion to Australian History, eds Graeme Davison, John Hirst, and Stuart Macintyre, Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1998, 362). 65

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into an “Imaginary Englishman”, he is described as falling victim to the process of cultural cringing so frequently described in postcolonial texts, such as in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997): “… our minds have been invaded by a war. A war that we have won and lost. The very worst sort of war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.” “Marry our conquerors, is more like it.”

As a story that gives its readers access to the “History House” that Chacko in The God of Small Things complains being excluded from,66 True History of the Kelly Gang was envisaged by its author not only for white-male Anglo-Australians, that group of Australians that has traditionally identified with the hero-villain. On the contrary, in an interview Carey explained that This [the Kelly story] isn’t going to go away, and it doesn’t matter if you come from Thailand or the Lebanon, this story is going to have an effect. If you look at the US, or even newer countries, you can see their foundations built on similar stories of immigration. So it’s an address to the new multicultural Australia to say that this story really matters. We are this people.67

Carey’s assessment of the function of his novel for Australians also ties in well with my reading of his novels as a fictional biography of the country. True History of the Kelly Gang, like many of the other Carey novels under scrutiny here, is a narrative that makes the past accessible and lends a helping hand to its readers in their endeavour of making sense of and coming to terms with their communal history. The fact that Carey’s history comes in the form of stories does not, in post-Hayden Whitean days, make it any more or less helpful in learning about or from the past than history books written by historians. However, what does set Carey’s biography apart from the many fact-based histories on the subject is the profusion of stories that 66

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things: A Novel (1997), New York: HarperPerennial, 1998, 51-52. 67 Amazon.co.uk, “The Convict Stain: An Interview with Peter Carey”, nd: http://tinyurl.com/convictstain-interview (accessed 20 March 2010).

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True History of the Kelly Gang comprises and the emphasis on the act of storytelling itself, which is highlighted through the postmodern self-referentiality pervading the author’s narratives. The storytelling aspect of the novels analysed above is further underscored through the importance of narrative in the lives of the characters that inhabit the author’s fictional worlds. Stories that are well told are so potent that they can weld a community together (as in Bliss): Ralph Pordzik even sees Bog Onion Road “gradually gro[w] into existence with each new story invented and memorized”.68 Stories lodging in the characters’ minds can project ghosts into their realities (as in True History of the Kelly Gang and Illywhacker) and stories can even bring to life fictionally real persons: in My Life as a Fake, Chubb’s narrative contrivance gives birth to Bob McCorkle; in True History of the Kelly Gang, the protagonist writes his autobiography to for no lesser purpose than to “get [his daughter] born”.69 Stories are the exclusive carrier medium of history in Carey’s writings – his narrators’ tales and those embedded in them constitute the author’s version of Australian history. It is therefore only to be expected that Carey should warn of the dangers of an abuse of narrative, even if the narrative follows a seemingly harmless, aesthetic purpose. To drive home this point, Carey installs many of his characters as objects in someone else’s stories, often against their will: Bob McCorkle is a pertinent example, as is Jack Maggs, caught up in Tobias Oates’ novel. Herbert Badgery and the cast of typical Australians featuring in Illywhacker are also trapped, caught in their own deceptive stories of male independence. This admonition is in keeping with the postmodern poetics of Carey’s fiction. The examples of Badgery, McCorkle and Maggs make it clear that not only master narratives (such as history) can subdue those who are implicated in them: all linguistic constructions can work an insidious kind of magic – the pen, indeed, can be mightier than the sword. The fact that truth and realism fail as criteria to assess the value of what is told leaves the readers in an impasse, even an aporia. They must look for alternative, I would argue, ethical, criteria to judge the many stories that make up this fictional history. Since Carey’s novels are far from autotelic, the ethical side is, indeed, 68 69

Pordzik, The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia, 77. Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang, 321.

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very important in the critical appreciation of Carey’s writings. It really does seem to matter to the author that the falsehoods ingrained in canonical views of history be exposed; and the way in which the author’s novels in their entirety present a full-scale alternative history that (as Part Four of this book will demonstrate) consists of rewritten key events in the life of Australia suggests that Carey’s fictions – even if they are not true – still are meant to replace an older, even more untruthful version of the past. And though Carey, by having his narrators flaunt their mistakes and their utter unreliability, clearly admits to the precarious nature of the history presented in his novels, he clearly does not want them to be irrelevant in a serious discourse on Australian history. On the contrary, there is an unmistakable didactic purpose ingrained in his fiction, namely that of exposing historical falsehoods. These falsehoods may not be replaced by the truth, but their fictional rendering does draw attention to the issue under review and call for a rethinking of certain aspects of Australian history.70

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For a more thorough investigation of this issue, see the Postscript to the present book.

PART THREE CAREY’S BIOGRAPHY OF AUSTRALIA: KEY EVENTS IN THE LIFE OF A NATION

CHAPTER SIX DISSECTING THE LIES OF TERRA NULLIUS: THE NIGHTMARE OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY In Australia, where the past has been the subject of denial and memory loss, it’s essential, it seems to me, to go back to the past and try and untangle all the lies we’ve told and been told.1

Most of Peter Carey’s fiction is highly political. His writings are explorations of key issues in Australian politics, ranging from cultural issues to the intricacies of foreign affairs. It is not least because of their strong political appeal that all of his novels can be read as postcolonial fictions. In interviews and in his actual political engagement, the author has made it very clear that he wants to use his position as one of the spokespersons of the liberal left to encourage a redefinition of accepted notions of Australianness, past and present.2 Within Australian history, a history Carey sees as “filled with denial and false consciousness”,3 the writer time and again returns to the nightmare of Australian history, the Aboriginal genocide and dispossession, which, according to Graham Huggan, “now constitut[e] the most significant form of memory work being undertaken in postcolonial Australia”.4 1

Carey, “The ‘Contrarian Streak’: An Interview with Peter Carey”, 3. This, of course, is not unproblematic for a creative writer, who must always beware of not confusing his calling with that of a propagandist: “Talking about politics and writing can be dangerous”, Carey once said in an interview, “because it can make you sound like an essayist. I’m not trying to write essays or propaganda. What I am trying to do is to create an imaginative work and it just happens that politics plays an important, but hopefully subtle, part in the creation of that work” (Carey in Mark Roberts, “Profile of Peter Carey”, Australian Left Review, CVIII [December/January 1988/89], 6). 3 Carey, “The ‘Contrarian Streak’: An Interview with Peter Carey”, 7. 4 Graham Huggan, “Cultural Memory in Postcolonial Fiction: The Uses and Abuses 2

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In several of his fictions, Carey engages with this most contested site in Australian historical discourse and critically interrogates the “narrative of how the nation was born, how we gained our land”. What he finds most aggravating, he explained in a recent interview, are the lies Australians have told themselves about this chapter in their history: We told ourselves [the land] was not farmed, not being used. We told ourselves that unlike the Maoris in New Zealand – who famously resisted – the Aboriginals didn’t fight at all. But of course they did; there were these fierce wars fought all over the country. People of my age grew up in total ignorance of this.5

It is in keeping with this political position that when Carey engages with the issue of Aboriginal-white relations he presents an experience decidedly different from the traditional views still held by many of his contemporaries. Terra nullius: the historiographic debate In the debate about this dark chapter in Aboriginal history, terra nullius, the legal doctrine on which the dispossession of Aboriginal land rested, is one of the key issues. Like no other issue in recent Australian historiography, it has aroused the passions of the public and of historians – most evidently those involved in the country’s “history wars”. In actual fact, its weight in the country’s cultural discourse is not unlike that of the holocaust in Germany. The reason for the spirited nature of the debate is evident, for the issue at hand not only affects the historiography of Australia, but it actually shakes the very foundations Australia rests on. To a descendant of the previous occupants of the land like Mudrooroo, it foremostly continues to be “a painful reminder that from the first we had been denied existence, that in 1788 we had been rendered a no-people and our land a vacant land without us. We were an anomaly, a living and breathing nothing with no past and no future.”6 Recent histories of the settlement of the continent therefore of Ned Kelly”, Australian Literary Studies, XX/3 (May 2002), 149. 5 Carey, “The ‘Contrarian Streak’: An Interview with Peter Carey”, 7. 6 Mudrooroo, Us Mob: History, Culture, Struggle: An Introduction to Indigenous

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make a point of acknowledging the illegal (if not criminal) nature of the acquisition of the land. The enormity of this historiographic revolution manifests itself not only in the spirited debate amongst historians like Keith Windschuttle and Henry Reynolds, but also in the passionate involvement of politicians and the public alike. Politicians and public were drawn into the debate by what historians already see as “one of the most important [decisions of the High Court] in Australia’s short history”: the Mabo decision of 3 June 1992. In the Mabo case, Australia’s High Court admitted for the first time that “white Australians had stolen the country from Aboriginals and that the time had come to hand it back to them”.7 The implications of this decision for present-day Australians are not only ethical and ideological – Bill Ashcroft and John Salter go so far as to say that “what we know as ‘Australia’ may never be the same again. Indeed we might even tend to think that this judgement signifies the era of a ‘postmodern Australia’”8 – but also quite practical, and menacingly so for white Australians. For, Mabo “allowed Aboriginals, if they so wished, to claim back nearly 80 per cent of the whole of Australia. It was as if the Supreme Court of the United States had ruled that North America had been stolen from the original Indians and that they could now legally claim large chunks of it back.”9 In other words, what is at stake in the question of traditional landownership is nothing less than the sovereignty of the Australian nation. Terra nullius having been declared a legal fiction, James Cook’s acquisition of the land for the crown suddenly lacks legitimacy, even if judged by the conventions of his time.10 For the Australia (1995), Sydney: HarperCollins, 1996, 221. 7 Phillip Knightley, Australia: A Biography of a Nation, London: Jonathan Cape, 2000, 314. 8 Bill Ashcroft and John Salter, “‘Australia’: A Rhizomic Text”, in Identifying Australia in Postmodern Times, ed. Livio Dobrez, Canberra: Australian National UP, 1994, 15. 9 Knightley, Australia: A Biography of a Nation, 314. 10 The denial of Aboriginal ownership goes back to a flagrant “misreading of Australian circumstances” on the side of James Cook, who had taken possession of the land on the legal basis of terra nullius, a doctrine derived from what was then international law. He had received orders from the Lord High Admiral “with the Consent of the Natives to take Possession of Convenient Situations in the Country [the great southern continent] in the Name of the King of Great Britain” (“Secret Instructions for Lieutenant James Cook Appointed to Command His Majesty’s Bark

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history profession, these new legal parameters have meant that much of early white Australian history has had to be rewritten: the narrative of a peaceful settlement of the land was in this process rewritten into that of a conquest, an invasion.11 In the Australian public imagination, terra nullius functions as a “trope, lurking in once unquestioned usages, such as ‘Captain Cook discovered’ Australia or describing as ‘wilderness’ parts of the continent little used by those who have arrived since 1788”.12 In history books, Aborigines consequently played little or no role until the late 1960s and beginning 1970s, when a reassessment of Aboriginal Australia, past and present, set in. According to Reynolds, Australia at the time was … influenced by the world-wide reassessment of European imperialism which followed in the wake of decolonization and thirdworld assertiveness. Indigenous minorities embedded in European settler societies – American Indians, Maoris, Aborigines – have linked arms, assessments and aspirations. Aboriginal political activism has challenged assumptions about the past as surely as it has questioned contemporary attitudes and current policies.

Historical scholarship supported the changes in attitude wrought by the general political and ideological climate, contributing to what has been dubbed the Aboriginal Renaissance, in the course of which key assumptions about Australian history have been reconceived. Anthropologists played a crucial role in this “radical reinterpretation the Endeavour 30 July 1768”, Documenting a Democracy, National Archives of Australia: www.foundingdocs.gov.au/scan.asp?sID=253). Since Cook and his crew had chanced upon few natives only, he judged “that the Aborigines were few in number, mere nomadic inhabitants rather than proprietors” (Stuart Macintyre, A Concise History of Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999, 34). Recent research has proved that this view is a misconception, first, because Aborigines did have a sense of ownership and a very strong sense of belonging to their traditional lands, and second, because they also cultivated their land (see Henry Reynolds, “Killing Off the Case for Terra Nullius”, Age, 23 August 2003, np; see also my analysis of 30 Days in Sydney, Chapter Six of this book). 11 Aborigines and parts of the country’s left have consequently adopted a new nomenclature for “Australia Day” (the country’s most important national holiday on 26 January): “Invasion Day.” 12 Tim Rowse, “Terra Nullius”, in The Oxford Companion to Australian History, 638.

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of the past”.13 They gathered evidence that the continent had been settled by Aborigines for some 50,000 years before the first whites came to stay. Before an indigenous history of some 1600 generations, the achievements of only eight generations of white settlers started to look diminishingly small. Accepted notions of Aboriginal population density were also challenged. Prominent pre-historians (that is, historians dealing with Australia before white contact) now asserted that the number of 300,000 Aborigines before the arrival of the First Fleet needed to be multiplied by four or five. Next, a wide-ranging reassessment of Aboriginal land use set in, as a consequence of which historians started to paint an increasingly differentiated picture of the natives’ sense of land ownership. Aborigines ceased to be seen as “the aimless wanderers of traditional accounts but as people who systematically exploited their environment by means of a profound knowledge of its resources”.14 Aboriginal use and cultivation of the land (mainly by controlled and systematic use of fire) was now acknowledged to have opened up the landscape for white settlement. And lastly, anthropologists became increasingly aware of the “processes of change and the dynamics of history in Aboriginal society”,15 an important step in the recognition of Aborigines in the teleological framework of Western historiography. The “Great Australian Silence”,16 which had effectually dispersed Aborigines from histories of the continent, is a phenomenon of the first half of the twentieth century. At the time, racial violence, according to Reynolds, “was an embarrassment, best forgotten, especially as the heroes of the pioneer legend ... had helped to bloody the billabongs”.17 In histories that sought to trace “material progress, the creation of free institutions, and the evolution of a happy,

13 Henry Reynolds, “The Breaking of the Great Australian Silence: Aborigines in Australian Historiography” (1984), in Studying Australian Culture: An Introductory Reader, ed. Franz Kuna, Hamburg: Kovač, 1994, 106. 14 Ibid., 108. 15 Tony Swain, A Place For Strangers: Towards a History of Australian Aboriginal Being, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993, 3. 16 Trope coined by W.E.H. Stanner in his famous 1968 Boyer lectures, the second chapter of which bore that title. 17 Reynolds, “The Breaking of the Great Australian Silence: Aborigines in Australian Historiography”, 105.

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hedonistic life-style”,18 there quite simply was no place for episodes that questioned the morality and legitimacy of white achievements. Additionally, histories written in the first half of the twentieth century were ideologically underpinned by the notion of the “doomed race” theory, the assumption that Australian Aborigines were doomed to extinction by the natural laws of evolution,19 and hence would be a quantité négligeable in future Australia. It is for these reasons that Aborigines, generally, were only accorded “fleeting mention ... while a few individuals, like Bennelong, were given walk-on parts ...”.20 A random choice of histories from that period confirms the existence of what Stanner called the “cult of forgetfulness”21 around Aboriginal history. Stephen H. Roberts’ 1924 History of Australian Land Settlement 1788-1920 illustrates Rob Riley’s (leader of the Nyungar tribe) sad avowal of the widespread “notion that Aboriginal people didn’t exist before 1788”22: natives simply do not rate a mention in Roberts’ account of the settlement of the land. Another case in point is The Making of Australia (1915) by Walter Murdoch, who is one of the most distinguished Australian academics of the twentieth century, name-giver to Western Australian Murdoch University, a man praised for his “intelligence, wit and humanity”:23 “When people talk about ‘the history of Australia’”, he asserted in a textbook for schools, … they mean the history of the white people who have lived in Australia. There is good reason why we should not stretch the term to make it include the story of the dark skinned wandering tribes who hurled boomerangs and ate snakes in their native land for long ages before the arrival of the first intruders from Europe. [The historian] is concerned with Australia only as the dwelling place of white men and 18

Ibid., 106. A comprehensive history of this idea is presented by Russell McGregor in his Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 18801939, Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1997. 20 Reynolds, “The Breaking of the Great Australian Silence: Aborigines in Australian Historiography”, 104. 21 W.E.H. Stanner, After the Dreaming: Black and White Australians – An Anthropologist’s View, Boyer Lectures, Sydney: ABC, 1969, 21. 22 Rowse, “Terra Nullius”, 638. 23 See the university’s website at www.murdoch.edu.au/index/visitors/walter (accessed 20 March 2010). 19

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women, settlers from overseas. It is his business to tell us how these white folk found the land, how they settled in it, how they explored it and how they gradually made it the Australia we know today.24

Far from radical, Murdoch only expressed the prevalent opinion at the time, which was suffused with a barely disguised racism, and therefore not dissimilar from then current European sensibilities on the subject. The silencing of Aborigines continued far into the second half of the twentieth century: Australia’s indigenous peoples are completely absent from Gordon Greenwood’s Australia: A Social and Political History (1955), published to commemorate fifty years of Federation. Cleansed of the earlier racism, Douglas Pike’s Australia: The Quiet Continent (1970) mentions Aborigines at regular intervals. But the first page already reveals the mechanisms of exclusion at work in written history: “When colonization began in 1788 at Sydney, much of the continent’s coast was still unknown”25 – “unknown to whom?”, one feels tempted to ask. Assertions such as Pike’s are in flagrant disregard of the fact that – as research in the continent’s pre-history already established in the late 1960s – the “discoverers, explorers and colonists of the three million square miles which are Australia ... were its Aborigines”.26 These histories all exemplify the mechanisms of historic silencing. In the process of this silencing white Australia’s Others were systematically written out of the historical record by either simply not mentioning them or by playing down their importance. This was only possible because Aborigines did not have access to the historical record (typically either because of their illiteracy or because of the incompatibility of their view of history and their idea of being in the world, their ontology, with that of Western-style history). The case of the Aborigines illustrates well what is meant by one of the catchphrases of contemporary critical theory, epistemic violence, as used by Spivak or Foucault to describe subjugated knowledges that were “disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently 24

Walter Murdoch, The Making of Australia: An Introductory History, Melbourne: Whitcomb and Tombs, 1915, 9. 25 Douglas Pike, Australia: The Quiet Continent (1962), 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1970, 1. 26 Derek John Mulvaney, The Pre-History of Australia, London: Thames and Hudson, 1969, 12.

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elaborated: naïve knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity”.27 In keeping with this reconceptualization of the study of Australian history, fictional explorations of Carey’s kind constantly alert their readers to these methods of exclusion, especially to the silences produced by purportedly true historical discourse. Peter Carey has interpolated himself into the debate about terra nullius and the reconciliation movement as a spokesperson on behalf of the counter-movement against the Great Australian Silence. The way terra nullius and the injustice it has caused inform his fiction suggest that to Carey his forefathers’ crimes against humanity, their bending of what was then international law, and the subsequent denial of these crimes, are historic bones of contention. They have proven to be of so indigestible a kind that Carey has been revisiting the same themes ever since the early 1980s. Re-evaluations of episodes of Aboriginal history since the impact of white settlers are of central importance in Illywhacker, Oscar and Lucinda and 30 Days in Sydney.28 Illywhacker deals with terra nullius as part of the discourse it stages on lies and myths of Australianness; Oscar and Lucinda, written under the impression of the nearing bicentennial celebrations, an event which itself acted as a “catalyst for historical review”,29 addresses the question of the Aboriginal 27

Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 19721977, trans. Colin Gordon et al., New York: Pantheon, 1980, 82. 28 Novels encouraging a revision of the past are a major genre in contemporary Australian fiction. Among the more well-known examples are Kate Grenville’s Joan Makes History (1988), David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon (1993) and The Conversations at Curlow Creek (1996), Robert Drewe’s The Savage Crows (1978), Our Sunshine (1991) and The Drowner (1996), Nicholas Jose’s The Custodians (1997), Mudrooroo’s Long Live Sandawara (1979), Kim Scott’s Benang: From the Heart (1999), and Sam Watson’s The Kadaitcha Sung (1990). Although there are noticeably many such fictions in present-day Australian fiction, there were writers whose outlook on Australian history was very critical or even revisionist well before the 1980s. One need only think of Patrick White and novels like Voss (1957) or A Fringe of Leaves (1976), which already called for a reappraisal of the history of white Australia and especially white Australia’s relationship towards the Aborigines. 29 Kateryna Olijnk Arthur, “Recasting History: Australian Bicentennial Writing”, Journal of Narrative Technique, XXI/1 (Winter 1991), 53. The many fictions this event has prompted (amongst them Rodney Hall’s Captivity Captive, Mudrooroo’s

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genocide; and 30 Days in Sydney (2001), the brainchild of an author writing at the time when the reconciliation movement had reached its peak and a quarter of a million people were marching across the Harbour Bridge to demonstrate their support for reconciliation and their willingness to actually say “sorry”, debunks the lies of terra nullius. Illywhacker: “The whole country is stolen” In Carey’s œuvre, Illywhacker is the first comment on Aboriginalwhite race relations. It confers great importance to the issue of terra nullius. The trope of lying, which determines the narrative make-up and structure of the novel, culminates in the tellingly fictional historian M.V. Anderson’s comments on terra nullius. Fed up with the “dreary Australian history books that were available pre-war”, the narrator Herbert Badgery is greatly excited by Anderson’s revisionist interpretation of Australian history. He therefore quotes at length from his “famous work which opens with that luminous paragraph ...”: ‘Our forefathers were all great liars. They lied about the lands they selected and the cattle they owned. They lied about their backgrounds and the parentage of their wives. However it is their first lie that is the most impressive for being so monumental, i.e., that the continent, at the time of first settlement, was said to be occupied but not cultivated and by that simple device they were able to give the legal owners short shrift and, when they objected, to use the musket or poison flour, and to do so with a clear conscience. It is in the context of this great 30 foundation stone that we must begin our study of Australian history.’

Doin Wildcat: A Koori Script, Tim Winton’s In the Winter Dark, Kate Grenville’s Joan Makes History, Thea Astley’s It’s Raining in Mango, Marion Campbell’s Not Being Miriam, and Sally Morgan’s My Place – all published in and around 1988) were understandably “more than usually concerned with history, specifically with history as open to question” (Arthur, 53). For a survey of what the bicentenary has catalysed in historians and cultural critics, see George Bernard Shaw’s 1988 and All That: New Views of Australia’s Past, St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1988, especially his Introduction, “Bicentennial Writing: Revealing the Ash in the Australian Soul”, and The Penguin New Literary History of Australia, eds Bruce Bennett et al., Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1988. 30 Carey, Illywhacker, 456.

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Besides summarizing his own views on the subject, Carey here has his narrator face the history profession directly. He dispatches Badgery into the debate about Aboriginal history and, by creating striking parallels between the life and opinions of his protagonist and Australian historians, invites his readers to see Illywhacker as a comment on the development of Australian historiography in the twentieth century. The nationalist tone of Australian historians in the first half of the twentieth-century is clearly reflected in the bravado nationalism of Badgery in his younger years. Like the professional commentators on history, who wasted no time with doubts about the legitimacy of the white Australian nation, Badgery at the time brushes away Leah Goldstein’s warnings: ‘The land is stolen. The whole country is stolen. The whole nation is based on a lie which is that it was not already occupied when the British came here.’

To this he stubbornly retorts: “‘This is my country ... even if it’s not yours.’”31 The revisionist turn of the Australian history profession in the second half of the twentieth century resounds very clearly in these lines. In the context of this divisive issue in Australian historiography, Badgery – by fashioning himself on Anderson’s model – not only embodies real-life historians, but even performs the contentious act of land acquisition with his own body: “I found my land, and took it, although its legal owners (the Church of England) were not aware of it at the time.” Ironically, Badgery here does not realize that the “legal owners” themselves most likely would have taken the land illegally at some point in history. The act of taking possession is even more telling when its analogies with James Cook’s acquisition of land are considered: Badgery “took possession of [his] land by circling above it. ‘There’s my land,’ I shouted. Not once. Three times”;32 and Cook on 22 August

31 32

Ibid., 307. Ibid., 157.

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1770 “took posession [sic] of the whole Eastern Coast [and] fired three Volleys of small Arms”.33 Like Herbert, Leah Goldstein is also assigned a key role in this fictional comment on the debate going on in Australian historiography. As Gloria Gebhardt points out in her essay “Ahasverus on the Walkabout”, Carey uses Leah to cast light on terra nullius from a diasporic angle, because Leah as a Jew has an understanding of the plight of Australia’s dispossessed natives that grows out of the parellels in both peoples’ histories.34 Carey’s composition strongly intimates these parallels: Herbert and Leah negotiate both peoples’ fates almost in one breath. When Leah reads Herbert her stern lecture on terra nullius, the latter draws attention from the Aborigines’ to the Jews’ lack of land: “‘You’re a Jew. You don’t have a country’”, to which Leah rejoins: “‘Of course we have a country. It was stolen from us.’”35 Leah’s insight as “‘Melbourne Jew’”36 and as politically thinking woman anticipates the postcolonialist concern with diasporic peoples and, to judge by Carey’s non-fictional statements, ventriloquizes the author’s position on cultural and political issues. Leah is by far the most perceptive of the characters. Equipped with an acute sense of righteousness, she identifies problems to do with the white man’s settlement that lie beyond the material side of things. She says with regard to the land: ‘If it is anybody’s place it is the blacks’. Does it look like your place? Does it feel like your place? Can’t you see, even the trees have nothing to do with you.’

Claiming the land, Leah holds, takes more than the merely physical act of conquest: ‘There you go, land-house, house-land, you can’t help yourself, can you, Mr Badgery? You’re true blue. Dinky-di. You think you can put 33

John Cawte Beaglehole, The Life of Captain James Cook, Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1974, 249. 34 Gloria Gebhardt, “Ahasverus on the Walkabout: The Motif of the Wandering Jew in Contemporary Australian Fiction”, Antipodes, XVI/1 (June 2002), 13-14. 35 Carey, Illywhacker, 307. 36 Ibid., 599.

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Before he refashions himself at Rankin Downs, Herbert Badgery is the prototype of the practical-thinking settler, a true battler, an itinerant, a bushman. Leah’s study of her lover’s character revolves around his lack of metaphysical awareness that, according to the Australian legend, is typical of the country’s menfolk, but may well be a hindrance in the attempt at appropriating the land for European usage: ‘Nothing ... sustains you, Mr Badgery. You are walking on hot macadam ... You are sustained by a gadget. The gadget does not believe in anything. It does not have an idea. It is just a product.’

While struggling no less than Badgery, Leah at least tries to come to terms with the ancient continent her European forefathers have taken possession of. She acutely feels the lack of bondage, of rootedness, of being at home in the new territory. Movement alone sustains her: I am really the one dancing on hot macadam …. I cannot stay still anywhere. It is not a country where you can rest. It is a black man’s country: sharp stones, rocks, sticks, bull ants, flies. We can only move around it like tourists. The blackfeller can rest but we must keep moving.38

The books erudite Leah has written by the end of the novel qualify her as a sharp observer of the nature of European settlement on the fifth continent. She is painfully aware of the fact that the settlers pouring into the country after 1788 did so in utter disrespect of the people and 37

Ibid., 307. Ibid., 323. This is an interesting reversal of conventional ideas about Aborigines. Although the point made by Leah, that unlike the white immigrants the Aborigines connect to the land, is pertinent, Aborigines are generally known as nomads. As the Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey explains in his influential book Triumph of the Nomads: A History of Ancient Australia (1975), rev. edn, South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1982, the Aborigines for thousands of years wandered around their country in conjunction with seasons of plenty and thus wrested from it a standard of living that Blainey sees as a triumph (see especially Part Three, “Reign of the Wanderers”, 123-254). 38

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the land they found there. In Leah’s analyses of Australia, Carey therefore has her put special emphasis on the “landscape and its roads, ... the raw optimistic tracks that cut the arteries of an ancient culture before a new one had been born”.39 The process of cultural layering that in other corners of the world has – given the time – often enough resulted in transculturation or at least some sort of cultural interweaving, seems to have miscarried in Australia. White settlement harms the land, literally cuts it, as a result of which white Australia has trouble getting born. That Carey believes something went terribly wrong after the impact of Europeans is also signified by the striking image of the pet emporium which closes the novel. What is left of Aborigines (and the settlers) in the narrative present of the novel are exhibits in showcases, performing or rather simulating their Aboriginality in the Baudrillardean sense through “their sand paintings, their circumcision ceremonies”.40 Oscar and Lucinda: “Glass Cuts” Oscar and Lucinda is as much concerned with the nightmare of Aboriginal history as is Illywhacker. Its revisionist agenda is centred on Aboriginal dispossession and the genocide resulting from inland exploration. While in Illywhacker Carey has his characters deal with terra nullius retrospectively, in a purely discursive and sometimes ostentatiously scholarly manner, in Oscar and Lucinda the author actually re-enacts the murderous encounter between Aborigines and whites in nineteenth-century Australia.41 As in Illywhacker, where the lie was used as an all-encompassing motif, in Oscar and Lucinda the novel’s main ideas are all hinged on one central metaphor, that of glass. Heralding white civilization, glass accompanies Oscar and his 39

Carey, Illywhacker, 553. Ibid., 599. For a more extensive analysis of Carey’s use of Baudrillardean thought, see below, Chapter Nine. 41 It is noteworthy that the transition from Bliss to Illywhacker already presented a qualitative leap in terms of Carey’s treatment of Aboriginal matters. Commenting on Carey’s failure to acknowledge Aboriginal landownership in his first novel with its concern for a spiritual link to the land and its fauna and flora, Nicholas Jose observes: “In its paean to indigenous nature, for example, there is no pause for the indigenous people who might have a stronger, more political claim to a place in this romantic idyll. That awareness must wait for Illywhacker” (“Bliss and Damnation: Peter Carey in Australia”, in Fabulating Beauty, 146). 40

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party on their mission inland, and glass, like the lies in Illywhacker, also has an enormous potential to do harm. The harmful consequences of white settlement, captured in Oscar’s exploration into unmapped territory, figure prominently in the novel. Aboriginal dispossession does not only appear as an act of unfairness, as an expansion of the Empire based on legal lies, but rather as a fatal intrusion into an ancient culture rudely awoken from its dreamtime. Oscar and Lucinda is a neo-Victorian novel. Carey here charts the lives and opinions of a cross-section of colonial Victorian society. The characters are more or less representative Victorians, expressing attitudes and values of their time that for today’s readers conspicuously lack awareness of the injustice done to Aborigines. There is only one character in the novel who keenly feels the guilt. Significantly, as in Illywhacker, it is a woman: misunderstood Lucinda.42 She says: ‘My fortune is unearned. It is the fruit of your clever subdivision, and it was bought by the labour of my mother and my father and the blood of the blacks of the Dharuk. I have no right to it.’43

Her sense of injustice is all the more pressing because her own father had entangled his family in a web of guilt by “kill[ing] a black man with his rifle”.44 As a “square peg” in a world of “round holes”,45 42

It is very late in the novel that the main male character Oscar starts to see the truth behind the white acquisition of land: “‘If it was my country, sir, I would be feared to see you coming’ …. ‘And I would pray to God to forgive you …’” (473). The fact that Lucinda as a woman of the 1850s should be on the cutting edge of late twentiethcentury cultural theory has been seen as a problem by some commentators. Luke Strongman says that the juxtaposition of contemporary values with those of the past is unfair, even creating a certain vacuousness in the novel (see his article “Colonial Folly: Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda (1988)”, in The Booker Prize and the Legacy of Empire, Cross/Cultures 54, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002, 94). The New Zealand critic and novelist C.K. Stead argues similarly that those up-to-date opinions are “not reasonable to have” in a fiction set in the 1850s. They “begin to invade and undermine both the history and the myth [that Carey presents] – not because they are ‘wrong’ but because they are out of place. They destroy the credence on which the fiction depends” (“Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda (1988)”, in Answering to the Language: Essays on Modern Writers, Auckland: Auckland UP, 1989, 185). 43 Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 427. 44 Ibid., 92. 45 Ibid., 91.

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Lucinda with her unconventional ideas is used by her author to demonstrate methods of exclusion and oppression (brought to bear mainly on women and on Aborigines) at work in colonial Australia. By having her rebel against the orthodoxies of Victorian mores Carey can draw attention to their absurdity and small-mindedness. And since Carey makes sure the reader is on Lucinda’s side throughout the narrative, the contrast established between Lucinda and her misogynist contemporaries casts a particularly sobering light on colonial Australian society, a society that above all tolerated the natives being dispossessed and dispatched by explorer heroes and land-hungry squatters. Carey begins his investigation into colonial Australian society and its strategies of dealing with the Aborigines programmatically, by pointing out that what readers might have taken for established facts are in fact instances of historic denial, attempts to gloss over atrocities of the past. It is in this vein that Bob, the narrator, explains: I learned long ago to distrust local history. Darkwood, for instance, they will tell you at the Historical Society, is called Darkwood because of the darkness of the foliage, but it was not so long ago you could hear people call it Darkies’ Point, and not so long before that when Horace Clarke’s grandfather went up there with his mates – all the old families should record this when they are arguing about who controls this shire – and pushed an entire tribe of aboriginal men and women and children off the edge.46

The atmosphere created at this early stage of the book sets the tone for the unfolding narration and inspires the reader with a healthy distrust in established facts, or rather facts established by institutions like the “Historical Society”.47 Carey focuses his investigation into this nightmare of Australian history on the clergyman Oscar’s journey into the bush, the hinterland that had hitherto not been transformed by European civilization. The 46

Ibid., 2. It little surprises that in the anti-authorizing climate of Illywhacker Herbert Badgery should also attack the authority of a Historical Society: “The Point’s Point Historical Society has a cast that was taken of the nugget at the time. It is named, in that dusty little-visited room, ‘The Swallow.’ The real name for the nugget was not ‘The Swallow’ at all. It was ‘Gelly’s Luck’” (Carey, Illwhacker, 89). 47

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glass church Carey makes Oscar transport to the remote community of Bellingen carries special weight, for it is here that the novel’s main motif (gambling), its main image (glass), as well as its main point of cultural criticism (the impact of Christianity on Australia), converge. The structural significance thus accorded to the building directs the readers’ attention to it and helps the author to drive home his points. His most important concern in the context of this chapter is the contentious topic of frontier warfare. The confrontation between Oscar’s exploration party and the natives compellingly asks the reader to acknowledge the violent nature of the acquisition of land by whites. It renders untenable the image perpetuated through canonical renderings of Australian history, that is, through history books and the journals of the explorers, as well as through the fine arts.48 Preoccupied with feats of human endurance and the historic project of mapping the country,49 their authors’ naturalist achievements as surveyors and propagandists for future settlement glossed over the fact that they were the cause of much bloodshed. As the only available textual sources of the explorations, the journals largely determined official views until the oral tradition of the Aborigines was granted recognition in the general rethinking of Australian history. In the Carey novel, the exploration begins as a harmless extravaganza undertaken by a priest mad in love and eager to spread the word of God, and slowly turns into a nightmare. As the journal of the expedition leader Jeffris records, his party kills half a dozen

48 A classic example of the way in which literature helped to disseminate this view of history is Henry Lawson’s poem “How the Land Was Won” (1899; first published in Verses Popular and Humorous, 1900). It celebrates the achievements of European immigrants and only registers the lives they lost: “With God, or a dog, to watch, they slept / By the camp-fires’ ghastly glow, / Where the scrubs were dark as the blacks that crept / With ‘nulla’ and spear held low; / Death was hidden amongst the trees, / And bare on the glaring sand / They fought and perished by twos and threes – / And that’s how they won the land!” (Henry Lawson, Verses Popular and Humorous, Sydney: University of Sydney Library, 1997: http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/ozlit/ pdf/v00027.pdf; accessed 18 January 2008). 49 It is not by accident that the act of surveying and mapping is accorded such prominence in Carey’s fictional critique of colonialism. The appropriation of newlyacquired colonies through maps is an important field of interest in postcolonial studies and has been thematized in a number of postcolonial fictions. See also below, page 131.

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natives who defend their tribal territories.50 Before falling victim to his own church (ironically a building that by definition is a safe haven to mankind) by drowning in it, Oscar himself recognizes the destructive potential of his construction and calls it “devil’s work, ... the agent of murder and fornication”.51 Representing European civilization and expansionism like nothing else, the church, “as fine and elegant as civilization itself”,52 is thus made to exemplify the destructive potential of the colonial enterprise. Mr Jeffris’ musings on the subject are particularly interesting in light of this connection of “teleology and theology” which, according to Bill Ashcroft, is “particularly evident in Carey’s work”:53 Mr Jeffris did not like the church but he was certainly not without a sense of history. Each pane of glass, he thought, would travel through country where glass had never existed before, not once, in all time. These sheets would cut a new path in history. They would slice the white dust-covers of geography and reveal a map beneath, with rivers, mountains, and names, the streets of his birthplace, Bromley, married to the rivers of savage Australia.54

Glass as building material of Oscar’s church highlights the ambiguous nature of Christianity. Removed into the bush, glass, the material “most nearly like the soul, or spirit ... free of imperfection, of dust, rust, ... an avenue for glory”,55 quickly reveals its destructive potential. Its harmful nature is the first thing the Aborigines of the Narcoo tribe notice about it: “They saw the glass was sharp ... that it cuts. Cuts trees. Cuts the skin of the tribes.”56 As an utterly incomprehensible harbinger from the white man’s world, a piece of glass picked up by one of the Kumbaingiri tribe is stowed away by the tribe’s elders, “where it would not be found”.57 50

Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 472. Ibid., 500-501. 52 Ibid., 490. 53 Bill Ashcroft, “A Prophetic Vision of the Past: History and Allegory in Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda”, in On Post-Colonial Futures: Transformations of Colonial Culture, New York: Continuum, 2001, 132. 54 Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 441. 55 Ibid., 376. 56 Ibid., 469. 57 Ibid., 470. 51

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Like glass, the Janus-faced church also reveals its downsides once it is moved into territory where it does not rightfully belong. In light of the novel’s cultural and ideological criticism, the removal of the glass church to Boat Harbour incurs questions that call into doubt the legitimacy of the presence of the Christian church, and even of English culture in general in Australia.58 The church in the novel not only costs the lives of several natives intent on defending their sacred sites, but it also proves to be utterly inappropriate in its Antipodean location: There were bush-flies inside the church. They did not understand [what] glass was .... For one hundred thousand years their progenitors had inhabited that valley without once encountering glass. Suddenly the air was hard where it should be soft .... They bashed against ‘nothing’ as if they were created only to demonstrate to Oscar ... the limitations of his own understanding, his ignorance of God, and that the walls of hell itself might be made of something like this, unimaginable, contradictory, impossible.59

Oscar’s trip to Boat Harbour, next to being part of Oscar and Lucinda’s last bet a Christian mission into the “territory of the Kumbaingiri Tribe”,60 undertaken in the name of “Lord Jesus Christ ... Whose glory it celebrates”,61 turns out to be entirely nonsensical. The church is “a lead-heavy folly”,62 utterly unsuitable for its purpose. In fact, it is:

58

Several critics have commented on the relevance of the church for postcolonial readings of the novel. See for example Graham Huggan, “Is the (Günter) Grass Greener on the Other Side? ‘Oskar and Lucinde’ in the New World”, World Literature Written in English, XXX/1 (Spring 1990), 6; Kirsten Holst Petersen, “Gambling on Reality: A Reading of Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda”, Australian Literary Studies, XV/2 (October 1991), 107-16; Bill Ashcroft, “A Prophetic Vision of the Past: History and Allegory in Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda”, in On PostColonial Futures: Transformations of Colonial Culture, 131-32); and Ruth Brown, “English Heritage and Australian Culture: The Church and Literature of England in Oscar and Lucinda”, Australian Literary Studies, XVII/2 (October 1995), 135. 59 Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 494. 60 Ibid., 279. 61 Ibid., 426. 62 Ibid., 444.

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… ‘not practical’ .... ‘It will be hot’ ... ‘as hot as hell. The congregation will fry inside’ …. ‘They will curse you. They will curse God’s name.’63

Carey heightens his readers’ awareness of the problematic position of the Christian church by connecting it with the element of chance and gambling. Oscar’s journey inland, and therefore the coming of the church to Australia, are based on nothing but the whims of fortune. The English clergyman’s decision “to bring the word of Christ to New South Wales”64 is taken by his friend, Wardley-Fish, who flips a coin for Oscar,65 his journey to Bellingen the result of a bet, and his whole coming to Australia ultimately the effect of the consumption of a piece of confectionery: There would have been no church at Gleniffer if it had not been for a Christmas pudding. There would have been no daguerreotype of Oscar Hopkins on the banks of the Bellinger. I would not have been born. There would be no story to tell.66

To Carey, therefore, the mission is not simply the work of an idiosyncratic character, making for an even more entertaining story; rather, he uses Oscar to interrogate the legitimacy of a “church on [whose] account so much blood has been split [sic]”,67 and of Christianity in general, alien as it turns out to be to the land and the natives in its new Antipodean location. Carey builds on this precariousness. The novel is pervaded by a strong sense of the Christian church being a failure in Australia. This failure, having materialized in the mid-1980s before the eyes of the writer in the form of a “small simple weatherboard church” that was about to be taken away from its location in the Bellinger Valley, was one of the starting points for this novel in the writer’s imagination.68 63

Ibid., 426-27. Ibid., 182. 65 Ibid., 189. 66 Ibid., 7. The haphazard nature of Oscar’s history is already indicated in the very first sentence of the novel, which starts hypothetically: “If there was a bishop …” (1). 67 Ibid., 484. 68 See Carey in Willbanks, “Interview with Peter Carey”, 53. As part of a community’s heritage, small historic weatherboard churches of the kind of Carey’s 64

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The novel significantly begins with a chapter called “The Church” in which the narrator expounds on the impermanence of the church, which “After only one hundred and twenty years …. was not of any use” anymore.69 Given this structural prominence, it is not surprising that Carey should spend so much of his attention as a writer trying to find reasons for this failure. Most obviously, the land itself appears averse to the church, burning the potential congregation, defending itself against the invasion of a foreign spirituality. The country, already “thick with sacred stories more ancient than the ones [Oscar] carried in his sweatslippery Bible”,70 does not permit Christianity to strike roots: the “stories of the gospel lay across the harsh landscape like sheets of newspaper on a polished floor. They slid, slipped, did not connect to anything beneath them.”71 It is in keeping with this that the land eventually shakes off the alien construction: “Where [St John’s, the church] stood last Christmas there is now a bare patch of earth, which is joined to the kikuyu grass by two great wheel ruts where the lowloader was temporarily bogged.”72 Although St John’s is declaredly important in the narrator’s family mythology,73 it leaves no traces, barely scratches the alien surface. All that remains are material, but no spiritual traces:

Gleniffer example appear as sacred sites in rural Australia. According to Graeme Davison, who has dedicated a whole chapter to these sorts of churches, they are “among the most distinctive and visible symbols of local community” (The Use and Abuse of Australian History, St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2000, 154). As a “tangible link with [people’s] ancestors” (147), they serve as a kind of local shrine to which church-goers – even after “they have ceased to believe in the formal tenets of Christianity or to observe its rituals” – feel a particularly “strong attachment” (155). 69 Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 508. 70 Ibid., 492. 71 Ibid., 307. Carey revisits this theme in Tristan Smith: “Every Burastin house carries an obvious sub-text – that it would be better for everyone if the house were not really there. Burastin’s houses barely penetrate the soil. They tiptoe on their sites. They are as light as thoughts, prayers, wishes that history had been otherwise, that clovenfooted animals had never been brought across the sea in ships, and that those who live there now should disturb the place as little – to quote – ‘as those early colonizers who inhabited the dry cool granite caves’” (The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, London: Faber and Faber, 1994, 125 n.; italics in the original). 72 Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 508. 73 Ibid., 2-3.

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There are sixteen banks of old cinema chairs which had lately served as pews for the small congregation. But there is no sign here of anything that the church meant to us: Palm Sundays, resurrections, water into wine, loaves and fishes, all those cruel and lofty ideas that Oscar, gaunt, sunburnt, his eyes rimmed with white, brought up the river in 1866.74

If the land and its animals are disinclined to accept Christianity, the human flock appears to be even more so: the Christian doctrines do not catch with the people they are intended for. The final destination of the glass church, the frontier settlement of Boat Harbour – that “little hell on earth” where Hasset fears to be “set upon by drunken bullock drivers or be pelted with potatoes by the snotty-nosed children of the Magneys or the Walls”75 – is no less hostile a home for the teachings of Christianity. Intended as a “gift to the Christians of Boat Harbour”, the church, grotesquely, is welcomed by “All the godless of Boat Harbour [who] pressed their thick necks and cauliflower ears forward”,76 people who had thrown Dennis Hasset’s predecessor into the river,77 and most of whom were As usual ... drunk. They smelt loathsome: unwashed clothing, rum, vomit. Hell itself could smell no worse than this.78

At the bottom of the church’s failure lies the Christians’ fundamental inability to appreciate and respect their new environment in its otherness. Oscar illustrates this: loaded with his Christian baggage, his sensorium is incapacitated to appreciate the culture he as Christian missionary treads upon. Therefore, according to the narrator, Bob, he “drifted up the Bellinger River like a blind man up the central aisle of Notre Dame. He saw nothing.”79 It is with the same ignorance that the expedition (wittingly or unwittingly) violates the sacred sites of the Narcoo.80 The inability to respect indigenous spirituality 74

Ibid., 508. Ibid., 276, 495. 76 Ibid., 497. 77 Ibid., 383. 78 Ibid., 496. 79 Ibid., 492. 80 Ibid., 469-70. 75

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indicates the general incompatibility of Christians and natives. The imported Christian tradition is entirely unsuitable for natives, as illustrated in Oscar’s naming-practice: ‘He told her: “You will live in paradise.” He christened her Mary, for Magdalene. It was a damn silly name for a Kumbaingiri and if you want my opinion, Bob, it was ignorant to talk to us Kooris in that way.’81

For this reason the Christian mission miscarries. Bishop Dancer gives evidence of this: … mission work was a waste of time. The blacks were dying off like flies, and if he doubted this he should look at the streets of Sydney ... and note the condition of the specimens he saw there. The field was over-supplied with missionaries and Methodists fighting Baptists to see who could give the ‘poor wretches’ the greater number of blankets.82

The failure to understand the other is not restricted to the representatives of the Church of England with their cultural arrogance. The natives also prove incapable of comprehending the fair-skinned invaders from within their dreamtime reality: “Our people had not seen white men before. We thought they were spirits.”83 Oscar’s red hair, for instance, is more than they can digest: “Even in the shadow, so Kumbaingiri Billy told my father, fire danced around this man’s head.”84 While the Aborigines do grasp the nature of Oscar’s mission (“they got the idea these boxes were related to the stories [from the Bible]. They thought they were sacred. They thought they were the white man’s dreaming”85), they fail to see what in the history of

81

Ibid., 488. Ibid., 305. 83 Ibid., 468. A common reaction of Aborigines upon first sight of white man (see Reynolds, “The Breaking of the Great Australian Silence: Aborigines in Australian Historiography”, 111-12). 84 Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 493. 85 Ibid., 469. 82

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colonialism has been “central to the project of defining and controlling the world”, 86 the surveying and the mapping: ‘They [the white men] cut these trees so they could make a map. They were surveying with chains and theodolites, but we did not understand what they were doing. We saw the dead trees.’87

Carey thus complements one of the main motifs of the novel, that of misunderstanding.88 At the core of the Western civilizing mission, the church is one of the main outlets for Carey’s postcolonial criticism in this novel. Another one is the British belief in its culture’s utter superiority, epitomized in the novel by the Crystal Palace, that icon of British achievement, which along with the Great Exhibition was to become a “defining event for mapping not just the Progress of the Nation [title of a well-known treatise from 1836-43 by George R. Porter], but the whole progress of mankind into a modern age”. The Royal Consort 86

Ashcroft, “A Prophetic Vision of the Past: History and Allegory in Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda”, 135. Maps are the textual product of surveying. They have wielded an enormous cultural and political power and therefore lastingly influenced the power relationship between European nations and their colonies. In Australia, as spatial historian Paul Carter demonstrates, the mapping and the naming of newlydiscovered territories provided “the spatial and conceptual co-ordinates within which history could occur”, turned the presumable emptiness of the Aboriginal land into a historical place and thus “brought history into being” (The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History [1987], London: Faber and Faber, 1988, 46). As one of a number of symbolic gestures with which colonizers ascribed “intention and dimensionality to unknown space”, maps – as Elleke Boehmer points out in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995, 17 – helped colonizers and settlers to carry meanings from the old world to the new. Maps and the act of mapping therefore feature prominently in postcolonial literature. Critiques of the colonizers’ practice of surveying and mapping can be found in many postcolonial fictions, so many, in fact, that Graham Huggan speaks of a “prevalence of the map topos in contemporary post-colonial literary texts” (“Decolonizing the Map”, in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 407). Among the best-known fictional critiques of the act of mapping are Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992) and Brian Friel’s Translations (1981). 87 Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 468. 88 It is a misunderstanding of Lucinda’s feelings that triggers Oscar’s fateful journey (384-85); for the surprise ending of his novel (when it turns out that Lucinda is not the narrator’s grandmother), the author also relies on the readers’ misunderstanding of the title of the novel, which suggests a classic love-story of the Romeo and Juliet kind.

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Prince Albert (in the Mansion House Banquet Speech of 1850) saw it as “a true test and a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived ..., and a new starting point from which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions”.89 As a barometer of human advancement, the Great Exhibition and its glass symbol are used in the novel to express the Victorian belief in progress and change. Carey refers to the Crystal Palace several times and provides numerous other links to the famous building in London’s Hyde Park through Oscar’s glass church. Fabricated in Lucinda’s glassworks, Oscar’s sacral building bears a strong resemblance to Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace. In the eyes of a German visitor at the time, it appeared as a … glass structure supported by barely perceptible slender iron beams ... light almost to the point of weightlessness .... Its color alternates between the color of the sky through the transparent glass, which covers most of the building’s volume, and the sky-blue of its narrow iron beams ....90

Oscar’s glass church mirrors the architectural aesthetic of the Crystal Palace, the lightness of its construction and the play of light through glass: “its walls like ice emanating light, ... fine and elegant .…”91 And when Oscar first conceives of his church, he envisions … light, ice, spectra .... He saw a tiny church ... clean and pure and free from vanity .... The light shone through its transparent, unadorned skin and cast colours on the distempered office walls as glorious as the stained glass windows of a cathedral.92

Little wonder that Oscar’s vision, once materialized, bears a resemblance to the Crystal Palace. Lucinda is associated with the Crystal Palace throughout the novel: for her ninth birthday, she receives a present from Marian Evans, 89

Chris Hopkins, “Victorian Modernity? Writing the Great Exhibition”, in Varieties of Victorianism, ed. Gary Day, London: Macmillan, 1998, 40. 90 In Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988, 237. 91 Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 490. 92 Ibid., 376.

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bought at the Great Exhibition, which, as it later occurs to her, “must have come from the building she was to so admire in her adult life – the Crystal Palace”.93 Related with crystal several times,94 the fictitious Lucinda above all is described as being a personal friend to the historical Joseph Paxton.95 On her voyage “‘Home’”, Lucinda even visits the Nottingham glassworks where the sheet glasses for Paxton were produced.96 The state-of-the-art machinery she transports back to her Sydney glassworks allows her to use the same modular construction system for Oscar’s church that was used for the Crystal Palace (which, famously, was one of the first prefabricated buildings in the world): the glass church “is what they call prefabricated. It comes in pieces. It has nuts and bolts and so on.” It is the availability of these new means of industrial production, transportation, construction and building materials, that in the first place inspires Oscar’s bold plan to “transport an entire cathedral and assemble it across the mountains”.97 The vitreous evidence Carey leaves for his readers to make the connection between the church and the Victorian belief in science and progress allows the author to interrogate one of the most notorious attempts to legitimize the Western civilizing mission: imperialism and exploration in the name of God and science. The devastation wreaked by these Victorian beliefs transforms Oscar into a “killer angel”, a representative of a “civilization whose ethical and philosophical framework is not adequate to cope with its technological changes”.98 Unwitting as he may be, Oscar nonetheless “composes a small part ... 93

Ibid., 78. Ibid., 78, 423, 444. 95 Ibid., 201-202, 407. 96 Ibid., 203, 202. 97 Ibid., 386. The motif of prefabrication can also be fruitfully applied to other items in the novel that like the method of production of the glass church (Lucinda travels to Britain especially to learn about new methods of production) are imported from Britain: the concept of white superiority, Christianity, Western-style reality, etc. They are all prefabricated in the sense that they were made elsewhere, transported to their final destination and assembled at the construction site. The method of prefabrication entails that the prefabricated objects (concepts) are conceived in conditions potentially entirely different from the circumstances of their final destination (in terms of geography, but also in culture as well as diverse aspects of the metaphysical world). 98 Petersen, “Gambling on Reality: A Reading of Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda”, 115. 94

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of the colonial mission”, as Elleke Boehmer argues.99 Featuring two of the most notorious pretexts for colonization, Christianity and science, as well as such quintessential ingredients of the process of territorial annexation as dispossession and subsequent murder of the previous owners of the land, Oscar and Lucinda strongly suggests that it should be read as a parable of European colonialism, a postcolonialist reminder that, as the appalling Jeffris has it, “‘Churches [were] not carried by choirboys’ .... ‘Neither has the Empire been built by angels.’”100 30 Days in Sydney: an “occupation of the land not only cruel but illegal” 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account is an exceptional book. Disregarding the odd personality piece or political statement, 30 Days in Sydney is Carey’s first departure from the genre of fiction, or so the book’s paratextual features, which are essential for the reader’s first response to a book,101 make us believe. Published in Bloomsbury’s “occasional series” The Writer and the City,102 this “beautifully produced, pocket-sized book”, as the publisher has it on their website, promises to be the New York-based author Peter Carey’s “private glimpse behind the glittering façades and the venetian blinds”.103 The cover photograph of the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge and the bold-type inscription “Peter Carey on Sydney” on the back of the dust jacket underline this – they steer the reader towards expecting the genre of a more or less factual travelogue written by a celebrity.104 However, upon closer inspection, the author’s admission (directly following the Dedication) that “‘I had to rearrange their [his friends

99

Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors, 16. Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 473. 101 See Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1987), Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997, 5 and 8, for instance. 102 Carey, 30 Days in Sydney, back cover. 103 Ibid., inside front of dust jacket. 104 Celebrity travel writing has a long tradition. Two famous examples are very close at hand: Mark Twain’s Following the Equator (1897; the famous epigraph to Illywhacker is taken from this travelogue), and Anthony Trollope’s Australia and New Zealand (1873). 100

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who feature in the book] faces and give them all another name’”105 and the nature of the cover image suggest that 30 Days in Sydney might be closer to Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days, whose title Carey’s book calls to mind, than to Anthony Trollope’s travelogue Australia and New Zealand (1873), which he invokes in the first line of his narrative, or to the other travelogues in the Bloomsbury series, which can be situated far more clearly on the factual side.106 Anthony Hassall positions the book with its “dialogue between truth and lies, histories and fictions, which runs as a theme throughout his writing ...”,107 in the proximity of Carey’s novels: “What appears to begin as factual celebrity writing thus turns into a collection of stories, of fictions, of beautiful lies, which capture more searchingly than a merely factual travelogue the look, the feel, the history and the spirit of Sydney, that metonym for Australia.”108 The tension created between the factual make-up of the paratext and the fictional strategies used for the narrative proper – Hassall describes the embedded narratives in the book as “premeditated by their tellers, and judiciously arranged by the author”109 – leaves the reader constantly on the alert. It is with a special awareness of the binaries of truth and untruth, fact and fiction, that the reader will therefore have to approach this semi-fictional take on the issue of terra nullius. Although there is a conspicuous proximity between the narrative mediator, the narrator called Peter Carey, and the extrafictional writer 105

As I outline in my review of the book in Antipodes (2002), there are some other errors of fact that will not escape the reader. Carey, for instance, gives conflicting dates regarding his own age (he says he was almost forty in 1974 when, in fact, he would have been only thirty-one), and he has the “White Lie 2”, which only ever set sail in the harbour of Carey’s imagination, take part in the real Sydney – Hobart yacht race (see Gaile, Review of 30 Days in Sydney, Antipodes, XVI/1 [June 2002], 83). 106 30 Days in Sydney has been described by its author as “an honest book about my experience in Sydney”, but Carey admits at the same time that “It’s all made up …. I mean, my whole business is treating the world like a piece of plasticine, shaping it in some way that, I hope, reflects what it is” (Carey in Stephen Romei’s review of 30 Days in Sydney: “Carey Casts a Long-Harboured Pall”, Weekend Australian, 28 July 2001, Nation 5). 107 Hassall, “A Wildly Distorted Account? Peter Carey’s 30 Days in Sydney”, in Fabulating Beauty, 320. 108 Ibid., 331-32. 109 Ibid., 326.

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of the same name, the narrative still is “wildly distorted”, which is why it cannot – in a critical context – be read as a one-to-one representation of the author Peter Carey’s experiences and thoughts.110 30 Days in Sydney as a semi-fictional text is not only a new textual form in Carey’s œuvre, but it also has the author approach the burden of Australia’s past in a new way. The book’s revisionist case is based on new findings in the fields of geology, biology and Aboriginal prehistory (that is, before white contact). It places special emphasis on such factors as the climate and the flora and fauna of the “sandstone city”111 that the narrator Peter Carey calls his “home”.112 In his arguments, Carey is especially indebted to the scholarship of Tim Flannery, one of Australia’s most popular scientists.113 It is Flannery’s achievement, for example, to have brought to the eye of a large audience his findings about the natural history of Australia (especially the Sydney area) and particularly about Aboriginal firestick farming, an issue which has proved socially and intellectually highly divisive since it has supplied weighty arguments for revaluating the terms of Aboriginal tenure of the land and subsequent white settlement on it. According to the narrator in Carey’s book, the issue of firestick farming had become “particularly intense” at the time of his visit in Sydney in 2000: “Fire was defining not simply the landscape but the political climate and I would later have the slightly odd experience of sitting in an expensive Sydney restaurant, looking out across the harbour and the opera house, and hearing two of my friends almost come to blows on the subject.”114 Flannery’s scientific evidence and insights are interwoven into the very structure of Carey’s narrative. The book is interspersed with quotes from and references to Flannery. The author has even made the 110

Asked by Anthony Hassall which genre he and his publishers would assign to the book, Carey said: “I don’t see it as any genre in particular. It is fiction. It is a sort of memoir. It is about travel, but then so is all fiction in one way or another …. This question of genre is one the booksellers have to make …. If it was my choice, I’d place it right next to the novels” (in ibid., 321, n.8). 111 Carey, 30 Days in Sydney, 3. 112 For example, ibid., 2, 9, 50. 113 The Future Eaters (1994), for example, won a shelf-load of prizes including the “Age Book of the Year” in 1995 and the inaugural “South Australian Premier’s Literary Award” in 1996. 114 Carey, 30 Days in Sydney, 41.

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latter’s assertion of the importance of the natural environment (“the timeless interplay between earth, water, air and fire that helps shape all cities was felt in Sydney from the very first day”115) a structural principle in his own tale about Sydney: Sydney, to the narrator Carey, is an “elemental”116 city which is “defined not only by its painful and peculiar human history but also by the elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water”.117 It is in keeping with Flannery’s element-based views of the natural history of the Sydney area that the stories of Carey’s friends, which are embedded in the narrative frame of the narrator’s visit to Sydney, are all related to either earth, air, fire or water.118 30 Days in Sydney is a provocative book. It is a sweeping attack upon historical denial and false consciousness, and in this respect it is not dissimilar to Illywhacker. It constitutes Carey’s attempt to unveil the “traumas” that Sydney, “This modern good-time city of beaches and restaurants, of sailing boats and boozy Friday nights ... cloaks so casually you might easily miss them”. The historic markers which he visits throughout his thirty days in Sydney and which show him that “the past continues to insist itself upon the present in ways that are dazzlingly and almost unbelievably clear”,119 help the author to put into perspective the prevailing image of Sydney as the feelgood city. 30 Days in Sydney is an inversion of a tourist guide, with whose conventions it plays. It does feature icons of Australianness on its cover (the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House), but they are reproduced with a difference. As Hassall argues: the cover is dominated by a … night-time photograph in which the sky and the water are dark, and the muted lighting and the limited colouring so grim as to verge on the 115

The Birth of Sydney, ed. and introd. Tim Flannery, Melbourne: Text, 1999, 6. Carey, 30 Days in Sydney, 48. 117 Ibid., 10. 118 Ibid., 11, 23. The fact that Carey employs his friends’ lives according to a pre-set typology that has a long tradition in Western literature (William Shakespeare, for instance, famously used the theory of the four humours, which correspond to the four elements, to draw flawed characters like Hamlet) corroborates Hassall’s view that the embedded stories are premeditated and cleverly arranged in a literary way rather than merely reported by the author. This further attests to the literary (that is, fictional) nature of 30 Days in Sydney. 119 Carey, 30 Days in Sydney, 5. 116

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With its uncomfortable truths, the picture of Sydney that emerges from Carey’s writings is diametrically opposed to the city’s predominant image, perpetuated for example throughout the Sydney Olympics. Carey’s Sydney is not only intensely corrupt, but it is also provisional, impermanent, unstable, in a way, unreal: I wonder what they [the Grevilleae robustae] were really called. ... What do you mean, ‘really’? Previously, I said, before 1788. The country was more real before 1788? ... I meant, what did the Eora people name these plants?121

Although this dialogue and the misunderstanding between the narrator and his friend are based on the casual usage of language and a personal temper quickly aroused in the heated political landscape of the beginning of the third millennium, there is a serious argument lurking behind this dialogue. It is more than just accidental that the narrator uses “real” in this context. The Sydney built by the convicts was, according to Carey, merely “summoned up ... willed ... into being”122 by Governor Arthur Phillip. It lacks history and tradition and therefore fails to connect to the reality of the geography, climate, flora and fauna of the fifth continent. Carey here reiterates an assessment of the nature of white Australia already presented in a number of his previous fictions. In Illywhacker, for example, Sydney, the “city of illusions”,123 appears as a mere figment of its white inventors’ minds, its present form being the result of incidents and accidents. Ultimately, “the city itself was something imagined by men and women, and if it could be imagined into one

120

Hassall, “A Wildly Distorted Account? Peter Carey’s 30 Days in Sydney”, in Fabulating Beauty, 321. 121 Carey, 30 Days in Sydney, 18. 122 Ibid., 106. 123 Carey, Illywhacker, 597.

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form, it could be imagined into another”.124 Like the rest of the country it is mirage-like, frail and insubstantial: .

I showed him ... the sort of city it was – full of trickery and deception. If you push against it too hard you will find yourself leaning against empty air. It is never, for all its brick and concrete, quite substantial and I would not be surprised to wake one morning and find the whole thing gone, with only the grinning façade of Luna Park rising from the blue shimmer of eucalyptus bush.125

In 30 Days in Sydney, Carey provides an answer as to why white Australia actually tends to be so unreal, insubstantial and why it at times even seems to dematerialize, as in the short story “Do You Love Me?”.126 The Australian nation was built on the ruins of the “most ancient civilisation on earth”,127 based on an unfair and illegitimate appropriation of land tended by Aborigines. In Illywhacker, Carey’s arguments against terra nullius hinge on the trope of lying (terra nullius being the most monumental lie in Australian history); in 30 Days in Sydney they revolve around the anthropological evidence borrowed from Flannery’s books, mainly that of firestick farming. In the latter book, the cultural criticism is more immediate because it is not couched in the ostentiatiously fictional environments of earlier

124

Ibid., 561. Ibid., 547. 126 This emphasis on the lack of materiality is an interesting inversion of the canonical view of Australia as a very practical-minded society whose ideals in the nineteenth century at least “were almost wholly material” (Henry Mackenzie Green, A History of Australian Literature Pure and Applied: A Critical Review of all Forms of Literature Produced in Australia from the First Books Published After the Arrival of the First Fleet Until 1950, with Short Accounts of Later Publications up to 1960, 2 vols, 5th edn, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1961, 2). Recent assessments of the spiritual or immaterial side of Australia have corrected this view. Marion Spies’ analysis of the country’s large body of religious poetry (Religiöse Lyrik in Australien, 2001) proved wrong the assumption that Australian literature from its beginnings denied the religious and metaphysical side of life. In Australia, Lyn McCredden (for instance in “Popular Culture/Sacredness”, Interface: A Forum for Theology in the World, V/1 [March 2002], 114-26) has tried to prove wrong the assumption that Australia is an entirely secular nation that does not allow for notions of sacredness in its literature and other popular art forms. 127 Carey, 30 Days in Sydney, 49. 125

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fictions such as Illywhacker or Oscar and Lucinda.128 The scientific legitimation of the author’s arguments endows 30 Days in Sydney with a considerable penetrating power: If they [the Aborigines] farmed with fire, they farmed. They tended the land. This is what the British would never allow … and if it is true then it makes the occupation of the land not only cruel but illegal.129

Hence 30 Days in Sydney is Carey’s most direct indictment of dispossession and the country’s unjust occupation. It sums up the author’s earlier investigations into the field and helps to explain why Carey’s characters often fail to strike roots, why they tend to feel displaced, why Burastin’s houses can only tiptoe on their sites, why Leah Goldstein dances on hot macadam and has to keep on moving, why Oscar Hopkins fails to connect to the land and why reviewers like Joy Press see the fake McCorkle as an allegory for the whole country, “both [being] bastard offspring that took on exuberantly renegade, independent lives of their own”.130 Because of the weight this issue in Australian history evidently has for Carey, he makes sure that his renewed engagement with the injustice perpetrated against the previous owners (if not proprietors) of the land prevents historic forgetfulness. The concept of history informing the small book is revealing in this respect. Australian history, we read, is “like a bloodstain that keeps on showing on the wall no matter how many new owners take possession, no matter how many times we paint over it”.131 Just like it appears impossible to gloss over individual chapters of Australian history, history as such 128

This is not to suggest that the criticism advanced through Carey’s novels is less hard-hitting; it only means that the author Carey in 30 Days in Sydney speaks to the reader through a relatively thin veil of fiction. The likeness between the narrator “Peter Carey” and the author is, after all, considerable. 129 Carey, 30 Days in Sydney, 197. 130 Joy Press, “My Little Phony”, Review of My Life as a Fake, Village Voice [New York], 5 November 2003, C84. 131 Carey, 30 Days in Sydney, 220. Tell-tale remnants of the past are literally on the walls of two other Carey books as well: Herbert Badgery has the walls of his cage in the Pet Emporium plastered with “write-ups” from the past (Illywhacker, 598), and Ned Kelly gets the idea for his iron armour from the newspapers from the time of the American Civil War which feature ironclad battleships and which function as wallpaper in his hut (True History of the Kelly Gang, 324).

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seems inescapable. The past in Sydney, Carey explains, is “buried yet everywhere in evidence”.132 He supports this assumption, contentious as it is in a place that in traditional historiography has for a long time appeared almost without a history, by bringing to the fore the signposts of history. There is, for instance, Bennelong Point, the site of the Sydney Opera House today, which in 1788 was covered with “great piles of shells abandoned after meals, and these middens were twelve METRES HIGH on that site, evidence of ancient occupation. This was the first city of Sydney”,133 to Carey a historic marker of “hundreds of thousands of wonderful [Aboriginal] feasts”.134 Fossicking in the history of a city that has “No respect for history”,135 Carey retrieves historic markers which help to counter the forgetfulness which has not only befallen Aboriginal history, but also Australia’s convict past: “So the ancient city is still there, sandwiched between the bricks – baked earth – which contain, in turn, the thumbprints of the men who made them.”136 The historic evidence Carey retrieves from these signposts all serve the purpose of urging his readers to reconsider the most shameful episodes of their country’s past. This is unavoidably a highly political undertaking and includes attacks on Australia’s then Prime Minister who had been sanctioning what Carey would call historic denial for years. Carey captures the divisiveness of Howard’s position in the dialogue between his fictional self and his friend Kelvin, who wishes that “this little turd of a prime minister could be big enough to apologise to the Aborigines for all the dreadful shit they’ve suffered, but this is my country too”, to which the narrator, representing white liberal guilt, replies: There was a war .... Our side won. All through history there have been wars for territory. I think that’s been our big mistake, to never admit that there was a war, to pretend that we found this nice empty bit of

132

Carey, 30 Days in Sydney, 9. Ibid., 122. 134 Ibid., 49. 135 Ibid., 137. 136 Ibid., 49. Carey already used bricks bearing imprints of their convict makers as signposts to history in Illywhacker (542; cf. above, page 96, n.39). 133

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Throughout the book, the reader can sense that the author behind the narrative is driven by an anger over this injustice, one that has been fermenting in the writer for years, ever since he first occupied himself with this issue. It for example surfaces in 30 Days in Sydney when Carey has his namesake express irritation over the white settlers’ stubbornness and hubris, which prevented them from implementing more native knowledge and which made them blind to the fact that the process of imposing “order and useful arrangement” on “tumult and confusion”, on what they saw as the primeval anarchy of a “savage coast”,138 was entirely a matter of view-point. As Flannery explains, the Eora tribe, that settled in Sydney at the time, “did not view themselves as inferior to the Europeans in any way, and thus saw no reason to adopt their ways”, such as “the wearing of clothes and adoption of a settled life”, which the Europeans “wished to force on them”. “It is not hard to imagine why”, says Flannery, “for early Sydney was a degenerate settlement, full of violent, starving and often immoral people”.139 To enhance the sense of the first settlers’ ignorance Carey’s narrator in 30 Days in Sydney adds that while the Aborigines “knew how to live off this land, ... we did not, and still do not”. In 30 Days in Sydney, Carey addresses such issues as will help his fellow Australians, a nation “forgetful of the facts”,140 to actually face the facts of their history. It is a passionate advocacy for an active engagement with this history. We must remind ourselves that, after all, it is not Carey’s aim to surrender before history. Rather than resigning before the towering shame of the past, the readers of 30 Days in Sydney are asked to acknowledge the wrongs of terra nullius and, by following the example of Carey’s alter ego (who by the end of the thirty days is “ready to make peace with [Australia’s] past”141), pave the way for a true reconciliation. 137

Carey, 30 Days in Sydney, 19. Ibid., 104. 139 Flannery, The Birth of Sydney, 22. 140 Carey, 30 Days in Sydney, 52. 141 Ibid., 222. 138

CHAPTER SEVEN DECONSTRUCTING LEICHHARDT: PETER CAREY EXPLORER MYTH

AND THE

Exploration is a very fruitful field for postcolonialist demythologizing. Colonialism and conquest are condensed, the human cast is reduced to few actors only, but apart from that all the mechanisms that traditionally accompanied the expansion of European civilization around the world are present. As Bill Ashcroft explains: “The importance of naming, the alienation from place, the significance of the journal, indeed of writing itself in the control of history, the demonization of the indigenous inhabitants, the power over representation; all these features of imperial history are located in the journal of discovery.”1 In the Carey novel exploration and especially the journal function as metonyms for the author’s cultural criticism. The procedures of Carey’s exploration party and the attitudes and opinions of its members are very revealing and allow the reader to draw conclusions as to the consciousness of colonial society in general.2 Carey’s investigations into exploration are of particular interest here in as far as they relate to the Aboriginal experience after what has been called the “fatal impact”,3 the coming of the Europeans. The 1

Ashcroft, “A Prophetic Vision of the Past: History and Allegory in Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda”, 135. 2 Its microcosmic nature in the middle of the vastness of the bush is reminiscent of the function of ships and their crews, that – by literary convention – symbolize the larger world. Famous examples where boats reproduce in miniature the lineaments of human society are Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” (1898), Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897) and Lord Jim (1900), William Golding’s To the Ends of the Earth: A Sea Trilogy (1980-89), or Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) and Billy Budd (1891). As a reader of Oscar and Lucinda, one need not stray so far to look for examples for this literary device, though. The steamer Leviathan in that novel also features a cross-section of Australians who represent the various views of their colonial society. 3 Cf. the title of Alan Moorehead’s famous monograph: The Fatal Impact: An Account of the Invasion of the South Pacific 1767-1840, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.

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intricate relation between exploration and the bloody conquest of the land has long been eclipsed by the celebration of the explorers’ achievements. In the course of the general rethinking of EuropeanAboriginal relations, the merits of the explorers have come to be questioned, though. Historians have since focused on the way in which the explorers established contact with the natives and on the way in which they legitimated European conquest of the land.4 The exploration journal is of central importance to Carey’s imaginative transfiguration of this part of Australian history. As records of some of the most monumental heroisms and failures the country has witnessed, the journals loom large in Australian consciousness. Fictionalizations of the explorers’ exploits have a tradition in Australian writing.5 Patrick White’s Voss, which bears a “significant intertextual relation”6 to Leichhardt’s journals, foremostly comes to mind. Like anyone else writing about Australian explorers after White, Carey, when writing Oscar and Lucinda, would also have been “painfully aware of Voss’s long shadow still stretched out on the desert sand”, as Alan Attwood put it.7 Carey indeed shares with White more than the mere choice of intertexts (Leichhardt’s journals) and subject (exploration). Like White, Carey … explor[es] the meaning of journeys of exploration like those of Eyre and Leichhardt for … Australians, who are ‘troubled’ by the legends – the legends of suburban Australians, who sense the interior of the continent as a reservoir of meaning about the essential Australian experience, and so to make the myths available, and to facilitate … the development of an indigenous mythology.8

4

See Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra, Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Post-Colonial Mind, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1990, 157. 5 The explorer myth has also been used in the visual arts, for instance by Sidney Nolan in his series of Burke and Wills paintings (see, for instance, Burke and Wills Expedition [1948], In Menindee [1950], Burke and Wills [1964]). 6 Hodge and Mishra, Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the PostColonial Mind, 159. 7 Alan Attwood, “Trapped in the Present Tense”, Age, 9 August 2003, np. 8 Anthony Hassall, “Quests”, in The Penguin New Literary History of Australia, 405.

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But while White is mainly interested in the main character’s introspection in “the country of the mind”,9 Carey is more concerned with the political and ethical ramifications of exploration. He begins his revision of the exploration experience in a truly Careyesque manner: “Arrangement”, he quotes in Oscar and Lucinda from the non-existent “Memoirs” of the real and historic explorer-hero Major Thomas Mitchell, “is a material point in voyage writing as well as in history”.10 This quote gives the reader some idea of the theoretical underpinnings informing the novel: factual records of what actually happened on the explorations, we are made to infer from the passage from Mitchell (which might as well have been borrowed from any of Hayden White’s writings), are as constructed and as selective as other histories. It is in this spirit that Carey in Oscar and Lucinda investigates the making of Mr Jeffris’ journal. The latter’s “great obsession” to be “an explorer of unmapped territories”11 is closely linked to his keeping a journal. Once in charge of an expedition, he … would write such journals as the colony had never seen: every peak and saddle surveyed to its precise altitude; each saw-tooth range exquisitely rendered. His prose would have a spine of steel and 12 descriptions as delicate as violet petals.

Carey has Jeffris systematically gut the journals of those that went before him: the historic Major Mitchell and the fictional Captain Burrows. This underlines the character Jeffris’ ambitiousness. As Paul Carter points out, the keeping of a journal enabled the explorer to make history twice: “first by his journey and then by his journal.”13 In his emulation of Major Mitchell, Jeffris uses his role model’s journal as manual for his own: He … had copied from Mitchell’s Memoirs his self-deprecating advice to those who would follow him. Mr Jeffris had executed the Major’s 9

Patrick White, Voss (1957), London: Vintage, 1994, 446. Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 404. 11 Ibid., 169. 12 Ibid., 412. 13 Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History (1987), London: Faber and Faber, 1988, 117. 10

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Jeffris, who would have heard about Mitchell’s exploits through the newspapers, which celebrated explorers upon their return, or through personal experience (explorers were welcomed by large crowds when they returned from their journeys), even has a frock made that “bore a striking similarity”14 to Mitchell. In his portrayal of Jeffris, Carey draws an obsessive personality: “All of his adult life had been spent in preparation for the day when he should survey unmapped country, have a journal, publish a map.”15 The would-be explorer even teaches himself Latin, studies watercolour technique and spends five years of his life as a “brown-nose, arse-licking apprentice, assistant, dogsbody to the incompetent, asthmatic Mr Cruikshank in order that he might master that science which Mitchell placed above all others: surveying”. The setting of the novel (Oscar sets out on his trip to Bellingen in 1865) suggests that the priest’s extravaganza is Jeffris’ one-off chance to make history, the great explorations under Burke, Wills, Stuart, Leichhardt, Mitchell, Sturt and Eyre already having taken place at the time. Jeffris, who “could not tolerate incompetence”,16 seizes the opportunity and, fashioning himself after “his hero”17 Mitchell, strives to do a better job than his predecessors. “Hume, Hovell, Burke, Eyre”, we read, had all drawn their maps badly. They were useless for both settlement and exploration, but their authors were heroes and Mr Jeffris was a clerk in an office in Sydney.

Carey uses Jeffris’ ambition as cartographer and claimant to literary fame to mount a critique against the traditional belief in the map as a seemingly value-free representation of a geographical reality that simply is out there, to be captured with the help of scientific positivism. The fact that Jeffris sees himself as a surveyor of 14

Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 404. Ibid., 403. 16 Ibid., 404. 17 Ibid., 403. 15

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“unmapped territory”,18 which he is about to make himself the master of by dint of his trigonometrical knowledge, illustrates the extent of his cultural arrogance. Like the many map-makers in the history of Western cartography who created a standard representation of geographical space and then built “a wall around their citadel of the ‘true’ map”, ruling out maps produced by non-Western cultures as “inaccurate, heretical, subjective, valuative and ideologically distorted images”,19 Carey’s Jeffris condemns the cartographic achievements of the explorers who came before him,20 and implicitly those of traditional Aboriginal cartographers who charted their country with rock paintings and engravings as well as with mud-maps and sanddrawings.21 Aimed to facilitate further exploration and subsequent European settlement,22 Jeffris’ cartographic accomplishments (the naming of creeks and heights of mountains23) and especially his methods and attitudes, illustrate the postcolonial and post-imperial awareness that maps only add strength to those who already have strength in the world. Given the dubitable nature of the expedition leader’s scientific mission, it little surprises that Carey’s rendering of the inland exploration itself is rather devastating. The character Jeffris could not be more flagrantly unsuitable for the task of being the first European to bridge the gap between European and Aboriginal culture. His scheme for coping with “the butchering habits of the northern blacks”24 is unsound, the knowledge he claims to possess of tribal boundaries of “the niggers’ kingdoms”25 a mere show put on in order to be installed as commander of the expedition, the ulterior motives of 18

Ibid. John B. Harley, “Deconstructing the Map”, in Postmodernism: Critical Concepts, eds Victor E. Taylor and Charles E. Winquist, 4 vols, III, Disciplinary Texts: Humanities and Social Sciences, London: Routledge, 1998, 7. 20 Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 403-404, 472. 21 Cf. Peter Sutton’s articles “Icons of Country: Topographic Representations in Classical Aboriginal Traditions” and “Aboriginal Maps and Plans”, in The History of Cartography, 2 vols, II, Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific Societies, eds David Woodward and G. Malcolm Lewis, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998, 374-84 and 405-408. 22 Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 404. 23 Ibid., 472. 24 Ibid., 411. 25 Ibid., 412. 19

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which (romantic love, Christian mission) he misappropriates and reverts into a nightmare of personal ambition. To complement the picture and to show that Jeffris is in no way an exception, Carey comes up with the figure of Captain Burrows, whose journey significantly ends as violently as Jeffris’, by an axe. Carey exposes Burrows’ glaring moral and ethical deficiencies through his journals. The “sixteen leatherbound diaries containing maps, descriptions of journeys, raids against the blacks”26 are amongst the few personal effects that the widow, Mrs Burrows, gets handed after her husband’s murder, together with … an envelope containing sixteen picture cards, numbered one to sixteen, like the cigarette cards little boys collected. Each card bore the title ‘Rape by Cossacks.’ She [Mrs Burrows] was not shocked by the coupling there depicted (or less shocked than she might have imagined), nor by the exaggerated male genitalia, but rather the combination of this with sword and scimitar, with hacked breasts, with women’s mouths screaming wide with pain, eyes bulging with terror, and not even this, horrible as it was, but the question as to why Captain Burrows, who had liked to nestle his head sleepily at her breast, should carry cards like this upon his person.27

Like the explorer Jeffris, Burrows is sketched as a pervert with revolting fantasies of violence which Victorian hypocrisy prevented him from expressing in his civilian life until he had the good fortune of becoming an explorer for the imperial power. Sanctioned by the greater cause of the progress of British civilization, Burrows – like Jeffris, the novel implies – seems to have felt the right to massacre, rape and pillage, and then to dress his experiences up in a series of lies, high-sounding heroic rhetoric, packaged for greater public appeal in the form of diaries. Carey does not limit his exposure of Australia’s racist and brutal past to the two fictional explorers, one a pervert and one a megalomaniac. He uses the reception of Burrows’ exploits as a barometer of public opinion at the time. The late explorer hero’s wife allows him to draw the larger picture: her opinions, we read, were 26 27

Ibid., 170. Ibid., 171.

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“only different from much opinion in New South Wales in that they were unambiguously put”. Burrows’ wife, who calls for a “final allout war against the blacks” and thinks “the blacks should straight away be poisoned”,28 is ignorant of the true nature of the colonial undertaking. Like most of her contemporaries, the novel suggests, she fails to grasp the truth because she only has access to the official, imperialist discourse she finds in her husband’s diaries. She fails to see the parallel between the unspeakable horrors inflicted by the ferocious Cossacks in other parts of the world on the one hand and the spoliation of the land and the massacre of indigenous peoples in Australia on the other, but the reader of Carey’s novel does not: there is one picture card for each of Burrows’ sixteen diaries,29 one violent picture as motto for each leg of the Empire’s progress into the wilderness. The moral standards of Carey’s text make us infer that exploration as a key concern in Australian colonial history has, for a long time, been glaringly misrepresented. Carey can be located in a tradition of cultural commentators who, according to Paul Genoni, have scoured exploration texts not in order to “legitimate the colonial experience” and to “reconstruct the incidents and discoveries made in the course of their expeditions”, but for “what they reveal of the processes by which the land was travelled, signified and brought within the purview of the empire”.30 By featuring explorers with personalities disposed like those of Jeffris or Burrows, Carey raises the awareness of explorer texts being … so much more than objective accounts of the land travelled and ‘discovered.’ For while the journals were intended to be an impartial record of the explorations written in order to allow an orderly expansion of the empire, they invariably carried a personal, interpretive overlay that was formed by the explorer’s own expectations, imagination and experience.31

28

Ibid., 172. Ibid., 171. 30 Paul Genoni, “Subverting the Empire: Exploration in the Fiction of Thea Astley and Peter Carey”, Journal of Australian Studies, XXV/70 (2001), 13. 31 Ibid., 13-14. 29

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In order to counter the objectified imperial version of history Carey includes the view-point of the Aborigines, the historic losers, and gives voice to those who have been silenced by the writerly power exerted by the official custodians of the institution of history. In a much-noted narratorial manœuvre, he passes on the narrative voice from the narrator Bob to the Aboriginal Kumbaingiri Billy, a descendant of the Kumbaingiri tribesmen who witnessed Oscar’s journey to Bellingen. In Chapter 98 (“An Old Blackfellow”), Carey has him tell the story of “‘How Jesus come to Bellingen long timeago’”.32 Kumbaingiri Billy’s version stands in stark contrast to the passages the narrator quotes from Jeffris’ puportedly factual journal. To illustrate this: we are told that Jeffris records “sound work” and selfsatisfiedly states that … he had ‘given better than we took’ from the ‘Spitting Tribe.’ Also: ‘6 treacherous knaves’ from the Yarra-Happini had been ‘dispatched’ by their guns. He had also successfully defended the party from the 33 ‘murderous Kumbaingiri.’

Kumbaingiri Billy, possibly informed about the event by his tribe’s elders, on the other hand says: When the white men wanted to cross Mount Dawson, the Narcoo men did not wish them to. Mount Dawson was sacred. The young men were forbidden to go there. It was against their law. Then the leader of 34 the white men shot one of the Narcoo men with his pistol.

Carey does not simply say that one version is truer than another, but he very clearly warns of the distortions that might arise from onesided accounts of the past. The novel leaves no doubt that the Aborigines’ oral tradition is as problematic in terms of its truth-telling value as Jeffris’ written record. Bob assumes that Kumbaingiri’s story of “‘How Jesus come to Bellingen’” may “not [be] one story anyway”. 32

Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 467: the Aborigine gets to present his oral evidence again a little later (487-88). 33 Ibid., 472. 34 Ibid., 469-70.

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The nature of the story even suggests to the narrator a “more complex parentage than I am able to trace”.35 It is as a reminder of precisely this complex parentage of historical narrative that Carey presents a whole variety of view-points on the expedition: Jeffris’ as recorded in his journals; Kumbaingiri Billy’s as traded on through the oral history tradition of his people; and Bob’s which, because of the latter’s privileged position as narrator, dominates the narrative. All three deviate from one another and thus can be read as a comment on the end of the traditional grand narrative of history and its fragmentation into a multiplicity of view-points. Against the background of the bicentennial celebrations, Oscar’s exploration and its contested narrative evidence is not simply a picturesque diorama that serves to highlight the priest’s idiosyncrasies and accommodate the most memorable incidents and accidents of the fiction. Rather, Carey’s engagement with the legend of exploration is a political statement in the face of the “embarrassment of official bicentennial self-congratulation”36 and the historic denial that went with it. Howard Jacobson even goes as far as to say that because of its ostentatious revisionist appeal the novel is “Peter Carey’s antiBicentenary present to his country”.37 In the context of the bicentenary, reclaiming and remapping the past is even “unavoidably a political act”, as Arthur explains.38 This political appeal has invited utilitarian readings of the novel which locate it in the greater discourse of reconciliation and see it as an expression of “white, liberal guilt”.39 As a contribution to the project of coming to terms with Australia’s burdensome past, Oscar and Lucinda therefore may be said to have the same soothing effect on the guilt-ridden portion of its readers as Lucinda’s gambling, which serves 35

Ibid., 467. Arthur, “Recasting History: Australian Bicentennial Writing”, 53; cf. C.K. Stead, “Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda (1988)”, 185. 37 Howard Jacobson, “A Wobbly Odyssey”, Review of Oscar and Lucinda, by Peter Carey, Weekend Australian Magazine, 20 February 1988, 13. 38 Arthur, “Recasting History: Australian Bicentennial Writing”, 53. 39 Lyn McCredden, “Discourses of Vocation in Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda”, in Australian Literature and the Public Sphere: Refereed Proceedings of the 1998 [ASAL] Conference, eds Alison Bartlett, Robert Dixon, and Christopher Lee, Toowoomba, Queensland: Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 1999, 150. 36

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Carey’s female protagonist to “slough off the great guilty weight of her inheritance …”.40

40

Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 446.

CHAPTER EIGHT “DECOLONIZING THE MIND” (I): COLONIAL AUSTRALIA All of Peter Carey’s novels as well as many of the short stories, I shall argue, engage in a decolonizing programme. If one were to read all of Carey’s books in one sitting, one of the mandates of postcolonialism, namely to “decolonize the mind” (phrase coined by Ngugi wa Thiong’o), would emerge as one of the writer’s primary concerns. Colonialism is thematized in all of the novels, regardless whether they are set in the nineteenth century, the twentieth century, the near future, or some parallel universe. The stories Carey tells provide evidence of three successive generations of colonial overlords in Australia: the British Empire in colonial times; the United States, which took over cultural and economic overlordship after the British Empire collapsed; and multinational trusts (with moneyed interests from Japan and the United States) in what is technically speaking a postcolonial, but in reality a neocolonial country. Spanning roughly one and a half centuries of Australian history, Carey’s œuvre thus gives a diachronical overview of the experience of a colonized culture. Carey does not approach colonialism by way of the earthshattering events of political history. His main interest lies in the psychologies of living in a colonized culture. His characters exemplify all sorts of reactions to being colonized. There are acquiescence and complicity (for example, the Imaginary Englishmen in Illywhacker), overt (Ned Kelly) and covert (Harry Joy and Honey Barbara) resistance, subversion (Tristan Smith as Bruder Mouse), and spin-offs like the postcolonial nationalism of Herbert Badgery. With its rich inventory of colonized characters, Carey’s novels feature all sorts of patterns and topoi discernible in texts from other former settler cultures: the centre/margin dichotomy, the cultural cringe as that state of the colonial mind that results from processes of marginalization and cultural devaluation, as well as the “double bind”, the double

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colonization of women and ethnic minorities as colonial subjects and as minorities in an already colonized country.1 The weight accorded to questions of coloniality in the fictions is considerable. The awareness of living in an eternally colonized culture is ever-present during the perusal of a Carey book. Where the feeling of being colonized is subliminal it still proves highly irritable to the characters who suffer from it. Where it surfaces it materializes in issues as diverse as that of Australia’s cultural insecurity (addressed in fictions such as Illywhacker, My Life as a Fake, The Tax Inspector, Tristan Smith); the way in which women are written back into the history of a deeply misogynous colonial culture; the ever-recurrent “pom-bashing”, the ranting against British hypocrisy, the colonial administration and the legal system of the Empire; the moral indignation vis-à-vis the horrors of transportation and the convict system; and the problematic father-son relationships which allegorically address the relationship between colonial child and metropolitan parent and which are present in Illywhacker, Oscar and Lucinda, Jack Maggs, Tristan Smith, True History of the Kelly Gang and Bliss. It is significant that these issues, all of which function as indicators as to the state of Australia’s coloniality, are not limited in terms of time. They crop up in the fictions regardless whether the setting is colonial, postcolonial or neocolonial Australia, and regardless whether the colonizers come from within (men colonizing women; Europeans colonizing the country’s Aborigines) or from without (Britain, the United States, or Japan). Colonial Australia Although political independence came to Australia more than a hundred years ago, the country remained exclusivist (that is, white Anglo-Celtic) until very late in the twentieth century. Even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Australia continues to be predominantly Anglo-Celtic: Britishness and Irishness remain the single most visible racial and cultural ingredients; the language has remained English, and so has the education system; and the 1

Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies, London: Routledge, 1998, 103; see also Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia 1787-1868 (1987), London: Pan, 1988, 244-45.

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Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia still provides that the “executive power of the Commonwealth is vested in the Queen and is exercisable by the Governor-General as the Queen’s representative ….”2 The dichotomy between the country’s outward signs of Britishness and its multicultural present has stimulated cultural discourse to a considerable degree. At a time when almost thirty per cent of the population were born outside of Australia and more than twenty per cent speak a language other than English at home,3 the monocultural signifier “Australia” is in the process of being adapted to its increasingly multicultural signified. This redefinition of Australian identity for future purposes also necessitates a reappraisal of the country’s past in order to make it more meaningful for the multicultural present. Carey’s novels do both: they seek to redefine Australianness in light of the requirements of the twenty-first century; along the way, they reposition the country in history, settling accounts with the British colonial parent. The past in Carey’s writings is everpresent, and, to tell from his epigraph to True History of the Kelly Gang (“The past is not dead. It is not even past. William Faulkner”, np), not even past. Therefore, it cannot be escaped and needs to be put on the agenda, no matter how painful or inconvenient this may be. Carey’s treatment of Australia’s Englishness illustrates this. Although Englishness is subject to much criticism in the novels, it still is acknowledged as valuable and vital to Australia. Instead of denying this part of their ancestors’ legacy, Australians are asked to critically review the role the British have played in the past. Touching on this topic, Carey explained in a recent interview: Think about Jack Maggs. What’s Jack Maggs? What does it grow out of? What is it entwined around? What is it arguing? It is arguing with one of the great works of English literature. One of the great riches that we Australians inherit is English literature. So it’s fine to quarrel with it, but it is also ours. I think Jack Maggs is absolute evidence of 2

See The Parliament of Australia’s homepage at www.aph.gov.au/senate/general/ constitution (accessed 20 March 2010). 3 Data from the most recent census (from 2006): www.multiculturalaustralia.edu.au/ doc/2006census-quickstats-australia.pdf (accessed 20 March 2010).

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Settling accounts takes many forms in Carey’s novels: from the vitriolic campaigns against England to the far more subtle evidence presented by characters who cringe before British institutions and British culture. As will have alighted from the analysis of Carey’s fictionalization of terra nullius, the British are clearly and explicitly held responsible for this nightmare of Australian history. It is not least because of this historical guilt that the former colonizers find themselves accused, disparaged and derided by several of Carey’s characters. There are instances of this in practically all of the fictions, most notably in Illywhacker, Jack Maggs and True History of the Kelly Gang, all of which will be analysed in the following sections. Illywhacker: “the English are as big a pest as the rabbit” In Illywhacker the British are held accountable for Aboriginal dispossession and genocide as well as for a deep-seated defect in the Australian psyche, a fatal flaw that effectually prevents Australia from truly coming of age. The impact of British colonization, the logic of the novel suggests, has made the country vulnerable to subsequent colonizational manoeuvres from aggressive nations in postcolonial and neocolonial times. British rule, it seems, has eroded the country’s defences by destabilizing the ground on which colonial culture was founded: ‘Anyone can see that the English are as big a pest as the rabbit. No offence, but they’re identical. They come here, eat everything, burrow under, tunnel out ... and when the country is rooted’ ... ‘it’ll be rooted.’5

4 5

Gaile, “The ‘Contrarian Streak’: An Interview with Peter Carey”, 14-15. Peter Carey, Illywhacker, 137.

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It is for this reason that Australia here appears so susceptible to colonizers like the Americans, who seek to monopolize Australian culture, or the Japanese, whose companies threaten to take over Australian industry and pocket its profits. Australians, however, are not blameless when it comes to their economic and cultural subservience. Herbert Badgery puts it in a nutshell: “‘If you start out crawling, you end up crawling.’”6 As masters of self-deception, Australians, these “proud people” who “do not act like caged people”,7 do not, to Herbert Badgery’s great dismay, seem to mind their ongoing cultural, economic and political enslavement. Badgery is Carey’s agent provocateur, dispatched into Australian history on a mission to come to terms with the British. As liberator, he chooses an ill-fated bravado-type of nationalism, and in the end fails. Badgery’s opinions regarding the British are worth our attention here, though. A closer analysis within the parameters framed by postcolonial criticism shows that Badgery’s ranting against the members of what he derisively calls the “master race”8 is a form of postcolonial retaliation, an example of the Empire striking back – if unsuccessfully. Badgery’s strategies indeed have much in common with postcolonial cultural politics. The self-declared “nationalist”9 passionately tries to assert Australian independence – culturally, politically and economically. He is much enraged by the “‘privileging norm’” which according to Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin was “enthroned at the heart of the formation of English Studies as a template for the denial of the value of the ‘peripheral’, the ‘marginal’, the ‘uncanonized’”,10 and which causes Badgery’s fellow Australians to feel second rate. Revolting against the centre/margin binarism, which he finds stifling to Australian progress, is central to his project of infusing his fellow countrymen with self-confidence. Language is one of the primary outlets for Badgery’s nationalist pride. He is “happy enough to use the natural nasal Australian accent

6

Ibid., 141. Ibid., 599. 8 Ibid., 119. 9 Ibid., 223. 10 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, London: Routledge, 1989, 3. 7

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which had so enraged that imaginary Englishman who sired me”.11 The first memory he has of his father, though, “is being chastised for the way I spoke. ‘Cahstle,’ he roared at me, ‘not kehstle.’ He did not like my accent.”12 The absurdity of doing such splits between the physical reality of their life in the antipodes and the spiritual longing for their roots in the other hemisphere is a common enough feature in first-generation immigrants in all geographical and historical contexts, but, as the example of Herbert’s father shows, starts to look absurd in the second or third generation. Carey’s own grandfather, a person who also called England “home”,13 might well have been the model for old Badgery, whom Herbert “always imagined to be an Englishman, who made such a thing … of his Englishness, who never missed a chance to say, ‘I am an Englishman’ or, ‘as an Englishman’ that I [Herbert] was surprised to find out he was born in York Street, Warrnambool, the son of a shopkeeper”.14 He significantly works for “the English firm of Newby whose prime product was the Newby Patented 18 lb. Cannon”.15 In selling British products instead of colonial products, Herbert’s father, as Antor argues, “... takes over the value structure of British colonialism, which is of course Anglocentric, and therefore sets England above Australia”: He looks at himself from the position of an other and unquestioningly accepts that other’s colonizing attitude without acknowledging that he himself becomes a colonized subject. That is why he imitates the English.

Above all, the cannons he sells are symbols of the colonizers’ militarily enforced domination and illustrate how subjects of colonial rule tended to willingly disseminate the instruments of colonial 11

Carey, Illywhacker, 48. Ibid., 38. 13 Gaile, “The ‘Contrarian Streak’: An Interview with Peter Carey”, 7. 14 Carey, Illywhacker, 38. That something is wrong with Old Badgery’s Englishness is already indicated through the jarring juxtaposition of the English (“York Street”) and the Aboriginal (“Warrnambool”) toponym of Badgery’s place of birth. In a context where Englishness is interrogated, it will not escape the reader of the novel that Carey has left an ironic hint as to the famous perception of Britain as a “nation of shopkeepers” (popularized by Napoleon I, who had borrowed it from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations [1776]) in this passage. 15 Carey, Illywhacker, 38. 12

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control. Antor sees Carey’s description of Old Badgery as a common trope in postcolonial literatures “which shows the consequences colonialism has with regard to the self-constitution and the identity of the colonized, who, more often than not, cannot develop a subject status of their own, but rather define themselves through the very power that exploits them”.16 It is one of the many ironic twists in the novel that Herbert Badgery learns to speak his king’s English not from his father but from the Chinese Goon Tse Ying who “taught [Badgery] the different accents of this King’s language and how to use each one”.17 Doubly marginalized in the Anglo-Celtic settler society, Goon practices a form of resistance which in postcolonial discourse is known as mimicry. According to Homi Bhabha, the copying of the colonizing culture, behaviour, manners and values by the colonized contains both mockery and a certain “‘menace’, so that mimicry is at once resemblance and menace’”.18 Goon for that purpose envelops himself with English culture and even has “the alien visage of the king of England”19 hanging in his corridor. He is driven, Herbert explains, “by a desire to prove himself civilized to the English he despised”: He adopted their dress when it suited him and spoke their language without a trace of accent. He was a giant of a man … tower[ing] over every man I ever met in the size of his spirit, his indignation ….20

He takes in Herbert solely for the purpose of showing to the English that he is “not a barbarian like them”.21 Goon mimics Englishness as a retaliation for the crimes committed by the English on the gold-fields of Lambing Flat, by “bands of men with my [Herbert’s] father’s merciless eyes”. Addressing himself to little Herbert Goon explains:

16 Antor, “Australian Lies and the Mapping of a New World: Peter Carey’s Illywhacker (1985) as a Postmodern Postcolonial Novel”, 157. 17 Carey, Illywhacker, 214. 18 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994, 86. 19 Carey, Illywhacker, 214. 20 Ibid., 210. 21 Ibid., 212.

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‘May you die never having heard the English come in their horses and carts. They carried the English flag, an ugly thing. They had a band. They had pipes and drums and they came in their thousands. They did not like the Chinese … because we were clever .… But the Englishmen thought it was all their country and all their gold and they played their band and came out to get us. They drove the Chinese down the river bank. They had axe handles and picks. They ran over my uncle Han in a cart and broke his leg and they broke my father’s head open with a water pipe.’22

Goon uses Herbert, the “‘little Englishman’” whom he “‘love[s] and hate[s]’”, to subvert and manipulate Englishness. To Goon, the disappearing-trick, which he passes on to Herbert, is even an explicit form of “‘revenge’”23 against the English, whose weapons turn ineffective when the enemy dematerializes. The Chinese man’s mimicry of Englishness highlights the artificiality of those characters in the novel who aspire to Englishness by, for example, speaking the language of a distant monarch or by perpetuating English customs which in the Antipodean context tend to appear ridiculous. Coming into Goon’s spiritual inheritance, Herbert takes it on himself to decolonize those amongst his compatriots whom he sees as eternally enslaved to their British origins. It is in this light that he asks the reader to judge his efforts of building up an Australian industry: “When I had envisaged an Australian-made aeroplane it was as a weapon against people like this [the Abbots].” The Abbots, a family of “Imaginary Englishmen”, embody those patterns of cultural emulation that Herbert Badgery is so scornful about. They flaunt their Englishness. It does not suit them, nor does it come to them naturally; they adopt it by choice, construct their Englishness according to their purpose, as a statement of colonial cultural politics: You would think Cocky Abbot a reasonable fellow until you met the son, and then you saw what was wrong with him. It was what happened in this country. The minute they began to make a quid they started to turn into Englishmen. Cocky Abbot was probably descended from some old cockney lag, who had arrived here talking flash language, a pickpocket, a bread-stealer, and now, a hundred years later 22 23

Ibid., 215. Ibid., 216.

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his descendants were dressing like his gaolers and torturers, disowning the language, softening their vowels, greasing their way into the plummy speech of the men who had ordered their ancestors lashed until the flesh had been dragged in bleeding strips from their naked backs.24

The Abbots do not even copy their Englishness faithfully. Cocky Abbot’s son, the Imaginary Englishman, chooses a sanitized version of Englishness, not necessarily that of his ancestor. The British airs he puts on by wearing a “camel-hair coat, the military moustache, the way in which cane and gloves were held”25 are a mask, a mere simulation. His performed Englishness cannot conceal his essentially colonial nature, the dimpled chin, the fact that he has, in the words of a perceptive observer, essentially “remained a barbarian and not even the cloaked vowels could hide it”.26 The Abbots even conjure up Ward’s typical Australian: they attack their “big unappetizing plates of goose and roast vegetables”27 in the unrefined style of a stockman or a squatter rather than that of an English gentleman. Cocky Abbot, “as rough as bags but … proud because he had sired an Englishman”,28 paradigmatically personifies uncouth Australianness. It is interesting that Englishness as utilized by the Abbots and other Imaginary Englishmen in the novel is not primarily a way of saving history by indulging in nostalgia for one’s family’s roots. Rather, it is a choice of class. The accumulation of wealth, for example, makes Cocky Abbot’s ambitious son turn his back on his family’s common Australianness. Phoebe McGrath’s case is similar. As aspiring poetess, she is frustrated by what she perceives as the provincialism of Australian culture. She loathes the small-town attitudes of the people in Geelong and grows “into the most formidable snob”.29 She frowns upon her father’s value system, and opts for English models: “She read Ruskin and learned to scorn Henry Lawson (whom her father loved with a passion) and learned to mock his bush poetry .…”30 24

Ibid., 126. Ibid., 125. 26 Ibid., 133. 27 Ibid., 132. 28 Ibid., 126. 29 Ibid., 36. 30 Ibid., 14. 25

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When she elopes to turn into one of the great characters of Sydney’s high society, leaving Herbert “with two children and a savage poem”,31 Phoebe cultivates her snobbishness, “enunciat[ing] her vowels in a manner that her son could only describe as posh”.32 The Australian way of speaking to her appears “‘pig ignorant’ … ‘and if I were an American I wouldn’t trust them [the Australians] either. They talk like pickpockets’.”33 Phoebe, like the Imaginary Englishmen, renounces Australian English on grounds of her obsessive classconsciousness. It is for this reason that in her diatribe against Australian English she brings up the Australian Labour Party whose members, she criticizes, all have “pegs on their noses”.34 Swopping identities by adopting a false history is entirely unacceptable to Herbert Badgery, and the novel suggests that this is also the case for the author himself. In interviews Carey confirms this reading of the authorial intention. Disowning one’s past he sees as an act of historical “denial and false consciousness”: I grew up thinking that we were English, my grandfather called England home. And somehow when we imagined the convicts and soldiers we always placed ourselves on the soldier’s side of the experience. We thought the convicts were nothing to do with us. Later I came to believe that the convict experience was central in the formation of Australia. And you know the convict experience makes itself felt in so many things, not least the very particular nature of our lovely idiosyncratic Australian English.35

His way of directing readers’ sympathies gives further clues, and so does the whole morale of the novel. Characters like Miss Kentwell, a paragon of Englishness, are absurdities. The way she parades her Englishness is utterly out of place. She rules her house in Western Avenue (next to the McGraths’ mansion) “with an ivory-handled paper knife on which was engraved the image of an elephant-headed god from India”.36 With this imperial insignium, symbol of her 31

Ibid., 204. Ibid., 401. 33 Ibid., 518. 34 Ibid., 517. 35 In Gaile, “The ‘Contrarian Streak’: An Interview with Peter Carey”, 7. 36 Carey, Illywhacker, 112. 32

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interests in the money-making machinery of the Empire, she opens the morning’s letters, placing those “from her friends in England … on the top, those from Assam … underneath.37 The two local letters were for her brother but she would, as usual, read them before he did (which would not be until she had dealt with matters in Assam and England).” She thus “concentrated on parish problems in a village in Kent” as well as a province in India before finally turning to matters Australian. When Herbert and Phoebe perform their act on the McGraths’ roof, Kentwell mourns the “lost standards of English civilization which wilted and died in this society of Irish peasants and jumped-up cockneys”.38 She here expresses a particular kind of classconsciousness which hinges on one of the fundamental patterns of Australian thought and social history, namely the distinction within Anglo-Celtic Australian society between the Irish and the English, a topic Carey explores in detail in True History. True History of the Kelly Gang: “the historic memory of UNFAIRNESS”

The Kelly Outbreak is one of the best-known episodes of Australia’s colonial history. Though the story has been told hundreds of times, Carey can claim to have created one of its most powerful versions.39 37

Given the general anti-imperial atmosphere pervading the novel and the way that Mrs Kentwell is ridiculed, the choice of Assam as sender address of the letters she receives is not accidental: next to Ceylon, Assam because of its tea plantations was one of the engines of trade in the British Empire. As a province famous for its tea production, it underlines the quintessential Englishness of the already tellingly named icon of Englishness, Kentwell, who is introduced to the reader when she is “taking tea [in her] drawing room (112). Tom Stoppard in Indian Ink (1995) uses tea to focus the postcolonial discourse in the play whose protagonists sit around a cup of tea in London offering a critical retrospect on the Raj. 38 Ibid., 112. 39 The impact of his novel was considerable. In the aftermath of the success of True History, the “Jerilderie Letter” was republished, several monographs on Kelly were published (Angeline Baron’s Blood in the Dust, 2004; Lyn Innes’ Ned Kelly: Icon of Modern Culture, 2008) or reissued (Jones’ 1995 monograph Ned Kelly: A Short Life was reissued in 2003; McMenomy’s 1984 monograph Ned Kelly: The Authentic Illustrated Story in 2001 and 2004; and Molony’s 1980 study Ned Kelly in 2001), at least two exhibitions were put on (at the Old Melbourne Gaol in 2002: “Ned: The Exhibition”; and at the State Library of Victoria: “Kelly Culture: Reconstructing Ned Kelly,” 2003), a Hollywood movie was made (Ned Kelly, 2003; this was based on Robert Drewe’s Our Sunshine, though) and a whole city was encouraged to read the

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As the huge success of the novel in Australia has shown, Kelly’s fate continues to agitate and intrigue Australians because it raises issues to do with the very essence of Australianness. His bushranging exploits have proved to be a particularly divisive issue, polarizing Carey’s readers. Some have taken offence at Carey’s barely disguised sympathy for the outlaw,40 others have praised the novel for its siding with historic losers and its success as a reinvention of a true Australian legend. The rift through the audience, in any case, goes along the same lines that already divided colonial Victorian society on the issue of the Kelly Outbreak, opinions being determined through class and social standing, but also through ethnic background (that is, Irish or English). Although Kelly today is seen as a quintessentially Australian icon, he, as champion of the underdog, is a hero of Irish Australians rather than those of British extraction. He accordingly is claimed by those Australians to whom bushranging “evokes bushcraft, daring, defiance, and freedom from convention, rather than crime or evil”.41 Patrick O’Farrell, major historian of Irish Australia, explains that “the assumed qualities of national character”, as personified by Kelly, “draw heavily on the Irish”: … independence, lawlessness; stereotypes that were easy-going, antihierarchy and authority, generous, fun-loving, boozy, and as game as Ned Kelly. The Irish might not look the epitome of a large and selfconfident colonial independence, but they acted it: the frame and flesh of the typical Australian were not Irish but his disposition was.42

Kelly’s Irishness is a major issue in the novel. Carey has his outlaw deploy it as an ideological backing in his fight against injustice and, as it is, against the British. The historic Kelly enjoyed “widespread history of the bushranger as re-imagined by Carey (“One Book, One Brisbane” campaign in 2002). 40 Given the nature of the narrative (as an autobiography, it demands the sympathy of the reader, that is, Kelly’s daughter), it is not too surprising that, as John Kinsella writes, “we are always on his [Kelly’s] side” (“On Peter Carey’s True History of The Kelly Gang”: www.johnkinsella.org/reviews/carey.html, nd; accessed 20 March 2010). 41 Bill Gammage, “Kelly, Edward ‘Ned’”, in The Oxford Companion to Australian History, 362. 42 Patrick O’Farrell, The Irish in Australia, Kensington, NSW: New South Wales UP, 1987, 19.

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sympathy”43 in ‘Kelly Country’ and was hailed by a considerable portion of the rural poor as a rebel hero pitted in a fight against oppression and unfairness. Carey’s Kelly is described as being aware of the bushranger tradition that impelled his real-life model to “liv[e] up to the Robin Hood expectations of his sympathizers with the liberal distribution of money stolen from the banks”.44 It is probably for this reason that Kelly is seen by many as the avenger of the losers, and, because of his determination to fight the British, that he was adopted, as Susan Martin explains in her 2005 essay “Dead White Male Heroes”, as an “anti-authoritarian resistance fighter … by a broader segment of Australian society”.45 In his depiction of Kelly, Carey – who in interviews often said that he sees Kelly as a “victim”,46 as a “decent” enough man,47 but also as “no angel”48 – allows room for readers from both traditions in the cultural iconography of the Kelly Outbreak. A contradictory character, his Kelly can mean all sorts of things to different people, and therefore perfectly illustrates, as Peter Gordon points out in his review of the novel, the “oft-repeated statement that ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’ ... and vice-versa”.49 Although Carey sketches his Kelly as a megalomaniac with a pathological commitment to his mother, there is undoubtedly also a celebratory aspect about him. As Anthony Quinn observes in The New York Times Book Review, Kelly emerges from Carey’s fictionalization as “nothing less than a folk hero and freedom fighter, a defiant exemplar of Irish-Australian cussedness in the face of colonial oppression”.50

43

John McQuilton, The Kelly Outbreak: 1878-80, Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1979, 144. 44 Ibid., 147; cf. Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang, 329. 45 Susan K. Martin, “Dead White Male Heroes: True History of the Kelly Gang, and Ned Kelly in Australian Fictions”, in Fabulating Beauty, 309. 46 Mark Chipperfield, “Kelly’s Hero Movie Reopens Old Wounds in Australia”, Scotsman, 9 March 2003, np. 47 Carey in Gaile, “The ‘Contrarian Streak’: An Interview with Peter Carey”, 5. 48 Chipperfield, ibid. 49 Peter Gordon, “A Literary Cloning”, Review of True History of the Kelly Gang, Asian Review of Books, 22 October 2001: www.asianreviewofbooks.com/arb/article. php?ref=pdy&article=52 (accessed 20 March 2010). 50 Anthony Quinn, “Robin Hood of the Outback”, New York Times Book Review, 7 January 2001, np.

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As part of Carey’s decolonizing fictions, True History of the Kelly Gang features a bushranger who, tallying with Hobsbawm’s description of a social bandit, increasingly sees himself as the head of a social liberation movement. His agitation against the British thus sometimes appears pre-political. Carey achieves this by positioning Kelly in the larger context of the struggle between British and Irish Australians. The Anglo-Irish controversy in its transported form is introduced by Carey’s narrator in the second sentence that Carey has him put to paper: “God willing I shall live to see you read these words to witness your astonishment and see your dark eyes widen and your jaw drop when you finally comprehend the injustice we poor Irish suffered in this present age.”51 The reader knows from this early stage on (and should be warned for it) that Kelly’s rationale for writing is the attempt to justify his life of crime before his daughter. What follows should therefore not surprise the attentive reader: it is a tale of victimization, written by a fictional outlaw with a near-instinctive Anglophobe disposition, arising from a history of nine hundred years of colonization and oppression by the English respectively the British. Like the real Kelly in his “Jerilderie Letter”, Carey’s reincarnation of the outlaw exploits the “parallels between the beleaguered, oppressed, and betrayed Ireland of his family lore and the wellsprings of frustration, bitterness and hate that poised the narrow Victoria he knew”.52 Although Carey grants his protagonist many opportunities to dwell on his Irishness, he at the same time also shows that Kelly capitalizes on his membership with an ethnic minority in order to compurgate his past. In Kelly’s tale, it is an important factor which, Carey shows, helps his protagonist to construct the persona of a forced outlaw. With the historic struggle of his Irish compatriots up his sleeve, Kelly in the novel uses Irishness in order to endow his criminal career with a higher cause than that of personal revenge. He loses no time in making clear to his daughter that his non-English background put him at a disadvantage from his early childhood on. As he explains to her, his Irishness causes his teacher, a man to whom “all micks was a notch beneath the cattle”,53 to dislike him. It is for the same ethnic 51

Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang, 7. O’Farrell, The Irish in Australia, 138. 53 Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang, 27. 52

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reason, Kelly makes us believe, that the representatives of the colonial government harass his family, thinking them “less than dog manure beneath [their] boots”.54 Carey makes clear that the reason for Kelly writing his autobiography is the criminal’s attempt at whitewashing his past. The outlaw is busy throughout Carey’s novel to create the image of himself as a person “[m]ore sinned against than sinning”, as someone who only reacts against the offences he and his family are suffering at the hands of their adversaries.55 When Kelly kills a policeman at Stringybark Creek, he makes us believe that he does so only to defend his own life: “I squeezed the fateful trigger what choice did I have?”56 In his confrontations with members of the police force, Kelly is always in the defensive, and notably, once again, not in control of events. His weapons have taken over: The 2nd policeman were Scanlon he spurred his horse forwards firing at me as he done so. My gun responded ….57

A little later he writes: “[Sgt Kennedy’s] pistol flashed my Enfield answered.”58 Defender rather than aggressor, Kelly stresses that his upbringing not only put him at a disadvantage, but that it actually left him no choice: apprenticed by his mother to the notorious bushranger Harry Power, he was doomed to lead a life of crime. Looking back, Kelly therefore pitifully describes his younger self as a “rabbit in his [Power’s] snare”, “so young and gullible that Harry Power could play

54

Ibid., 230. Carey’s Kelly thus evokes such famous literary predecessors as Thomas Hardy’s Tess (in his Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 1891), who has a “coarse pattern” laid over her “beautiful feminine tissue” (Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman, introd. James Wood, annotated by Daniel S. Burke, New York: Modern Library, 2001, 88) and, in the end, turns out to be “more sinned against than sinning” (Hardy, ibid., 266), or, of course, Lear, who in Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of King Lear (1605 [?]) famously conceives of himself as “More sinned against than sinning” (William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Lear, ed. Jay L. Halio, The New Cambridge Shakespeare, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992, 3.2.58). 56 Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang, 239. 57 Ibid., 242. 58 Ibid., 243. 55

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with me almost any way he wished”.59 He even switches to third person narration for a short time to indicate that he, “the boy”, was a hapless object in the hands of his abductor.60 @@@ The vindicatory quality of the outlaw’s autobiography is clearest when Carey inscribes an element of predestination into Kelly’s life. In the outlaw’s narrative, fate itself appears as instrumental in his downfall. When he was still an innocent boy, Kelly explains, his “future [was] already pretty much written”.61 Likewise, when he serves his first term in jail, he claims: “I were finally in that place ordained from the moment of my birth.”62 And in the “fateful night”63 when he kills Bill Frost, fate, it seems, has taken possession of Ned who, sporting his narratorial skills, once again switches to third person narration to indicate that “[f]oul fortune”64 and not he himself ought to be held responsible for his offences against justice. Not only the occasional switches in narrative perspective should warn the reader that Kelly’s narrative is a literary creation and not a factual recreation. Carey stresses the dangerously seductive charm that necessarily inhabits the tale of a “widows son outlawed”65 again and again by hiding caveats in the novel which it would he hard to overlook. First, Kelly verges on megalomania; he completely misjudges his own capabilities and “the forces brung against us [him and his gang]”.66 He deems himself in total control of the situation, thinking the police “actors in a drama writ by me”.67 The way that Carey ironizes Kelly’s delusion of grandeur reminds the reader all the more that “the stage-manager is Peter Carey, and Ned is nothing but an actor in a drama writ by the real-life author”.68 Second, Ned writes 59

Ibid., 119; 120. Ibid., 64-67. 61 Ibid., 93. 62 Ibid., 97. 63 Ibid., 114. 64 Ibid., 115. 65 Ned Kelly, The Jerilderie Letter, ed. and introd. Alex McDermott, London: Faber and Faber, 2001, 83, echoed by Carey’s fictional outlaw (Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang, 329). 66 Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang, 325. Cf. my analysis of his grandiosity in Chapter Five. 67 Ibid., 304. 68 Andreas Gaile, “The True History of the Kelly Gang, at Last”, Review of True History of the Kelly Gang, Meanjin, LX/3 (September 2001), 219. 60

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purely out of self-interest, rather obviously fishing for his daughter’s sympathies, continually justifying his misdeeds by inscribing his life into one of Australia’s cultural masterplots, “the story of oppressed Irish convicts, emancipists, and currency lads cheated, harassed, robbed, and generally abused by the Anglo power-structure”.69 Third, his protestation, “this history is for you and will contain no single lie …”,70 will not only make Carey experts cautious. The author Carey exposes his creation’s unreliability again and again. He, for instance, occupies Ned as an “author”,71 making him report (or, should one say, fabulate?) a lengthy passage of the text without having been personal witness to the events narrated: “I were not there when the trouble come bearing down on them out of the scrub but will tell the story just the same.”72 Beside the outlaw’s unreliability, at least two people have interfered with Kelly’s supposedly authentic manuscript: Joe Byrne, who “much revised”73 the pages describing the shooting of Constable Fitzpatrick, and Thomas Curnow, who stole Kelly’s manuscripts and “continued to labour obsessively over the construction of the dead man’s sentences …”.74 While these facts doubtlessly bring distance between Carey and his brainchild – disarming those of the author’s critics who feel he has glorified Kelly – there is, on the other hand, also an endless amount of textual evidence that suggests that Carey actually really means his readers to grant Ned a fair trial by his peers,75 perhaps even to send him “to a higher tribunal to answer for his faults and crimes”,76 and to reconsider the controversial criminal with an eye to the odds he was facing. Colonial Victoria in Carey’s fiction is ridden with the “elemental simplicity” of the convict settlement at Botany Bay. It is as if Carey set out to illustrate recent assessments of cultural historians like Hodge and Mishra, who describe Kelly Country in the 1880s as 69 Bliss, “‘Lies and Silences’: Cultural Masterplots and Existential Authenticity in Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang”, in Fabulating Beauty, 290. 70 Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang, 7. 71 Ibid., 265. 72 Ibid., 265; 265-78. For other instances where Carey exposes Kelly as an unreliable narrator see, for instance, 108, 111, 321, 330, 334. 73 Ibid., 183. 74 Ibid., 350. 75 Ibid., 298. 76 Ibid., 352.

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“virtually a society of prisoners and warders, with a palpable opposition between the two”.77 It is in keeping with this assessment that Carey has Kelly tell his daughter that “we was being ruled by warders there were no more justice than in the days of yore”;78 Kelly’s comment that Victoria is an extended prison which is “ruled like Beechworth Gaol” sounds the same tone.79 The bushranger dwells on these issues excessively, even obsessively. Unfairness and injustice, key words in his narrative,80 are the root of all evil to him. If only there was justice – Kelly (who stresses that he has all that he requires “except justice”81) makes his daughter believe – he would not have been forced to lead a life of crime. Carey here takes sides with the outlaw and describes the evils Kelly is so concerned about in his autobiography as systemic, as deeply ingrained in the colony’s psyche: “And here is the thing about them men they was Australians they knew full well the terror of the unyielding law the historic memory of UNFAIRNESS were in their blood and a man might be a bank clerk or an overseer he might never have been lagged for nothing but still he knew in his heart what it were to be forced to wear the white hood in prison he knew what it were to be lashed for looking a warder in the eye and even a posh fellow like the Moth had breathed that air so the knowledge of unfairness were deep in his bone and marrow.”82 According to Carey, the unfairness instituted by the convict system and kept safely in place by the British colonial administration effectually prevents Victoria’s poor selectors from ever escaping their crippling poverty. It is for this reason that the author – in the eyes of novelist-cumcritic Hermione Lee a “genuinely socialist novelist [who] is always writing about the … people who have been done over by forces of authority”83 – fashions Ned with a keen awareness of this injustice. He 77 Hodge and Mishra, Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the PostColonial Mind, 117. 78 Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang, 303. 79 Ibid., 306. 80 To show how important these concepts are for Kelly, Carey has the outlaw capitalize “UNFAIR” (284) and “UNFAIRNESS” (299) in his autobiography. 81 Ibid., 306. 82 Ibid., 299. 83 Hermione Lee quoted in Nicholas Wroe, “Fiction’s Great Outlaw”, The Guardian, 6 January 2001, Saturday Pages, 6.

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has the outlaw spend much time identifying those responsible for the evils in the colonial system: the British colonial administration and their cronies. As beneficiaries of the structural inequality, the British and those who collaborate with them strategically withhold justice so as to protect their own vital interests. In Ned’s inventory of oppressors the squattocracy are an ever-recurring item. To him, the squatters, wealthy landowners, are a “curse”84 on his family and the rest of the colony’s selectors. In the realm of his imagination, the squatters are clearly on the receiving end of governmental nepotism and systematically prevent the material well-being of the poor selectors: “Through his connections in government”, Ned explains, the squatter Whitty for instance “had been permitted to rent the common ground and as a result a poor man could no longer find a place to feed his stock in all the drought stricken plains.”85 So deeply ingrained is the injustice that all attempts at reforming the system are doomed to fail. Not even the historic reformer Charles Gavan Duffy, champion of the labourers and poor farmers and regarded by many as one of the ablest public men in the colony, can alleviate the suffering. To Ned, he is nothing but “a well intentioned idiot … leading poor men into debt and lifelong labour”.86 Despite the thick layers of fiction in this recreation of the Kelly story, the reader can sense how the real-life author Carey is trying to do away with several of the most enduring popular misconceptions about this part of Australian history. The version of the Kelly story which he presents asks the reader to acknowledge the human and even poetic side to the outlaw who has been so much maligned by the country’s “establishment”,87 or to face the fact that a good many of the first settlers lived under desperate economic conditions. A colony that according to Carey seems specifically made “to have poor men bow down to their gaolers”88 can no longer sustain perceptions of nineteenth-century Australia as a “workingman’s paradise” or as “Australia Felix”. Notions of Australia as the classless society, the 84

Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang, 219. Ibid., 188. 86 Ibid., 19. 87 Cf. the reference in True History of the Kelly Gang to Kelly being described by the press as the “Devil the Horror of the Ages” (260). 88 Ibid., 151. 85

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egalitarian society, the fair go society, are debunked as myths, no longer creditable in the demythologizing context of Carey’s fictions. Against this background, Kelly – as novelist John Banville writes in his review of the book – appears as “a tragic figure, driven by love and outrage and the desire for justice”,89 an underdog whose attempts at honest toil is doomed to come to nothing. His family’s selection in the novel is accordingly described as a “grave of honest hope”, the “dead and ringbarked trees”90 thereon being a symbol of his family’s destitution. Carey further backs the outlaw by stressing the socialrevolutionary dimension of his fight. Kelly appears to the reader as a freedom-fighter, a defender of the downtrodden, an avenger of the poor, a redistributor of wealth.91 The references to Rob Roy and Robin Hood as well as to Lorna Doone, which Carey weaves into Kelly’s narrative, are telling in this respect. In these passages Kelly becomes more than a petty “horse-thief and … murderer”;92 he is a social bandit who elevates himself to the position of spokesperson for historic losers. Carey shows how Kelly (if rather unashamedly) exploits the higher cause of being a champion of the poor. He makes their plight his motto – “As the poor pay fealty to the bushranger thus the bushranger pays fealty to the poor”93 – and thus secures himself a “great army of friends”.94 As events draw to a close before the final shootout at Glenrowan, Kelly more and more clearly fashions himself into a liberator for the rural poor. His anti-imperial cause, he is certain, guarantees him a large following: “The British Empire had supplied me with no shortage of candidates these was men who had had their leases denied for no other crime than being our friends ... men mangled upon the triangle of Van Diemen’s Land men with sons in gaol men who witnessed their hard won land taken up by squatters men perjured against and falsely gaoled men weary of constant 89

John Banville, Review of True History of the Kelly Gang, New York Review of Books, 29 March 2001, 15. 90 Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang, 191. 91 Ibid., 329. 92 Ibid., 350. 93 Ibid., 112. 94 Ibid., 303.

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impounding on & on each day without relent.”95 As a figure meaningful for thousands of followers, Kelly by far outgrows his beginnings as avenger for his unruly Irish settler clan. He becomes a figure of national import, pompously apostrophized by his gang members as “the greatest adjectival man alive”,96 a born leader who should really “be the ruler of the colony”.97 Carey spends a great deal of his creative energy to investigate the huge popularity of the “horse-thief and … murderer”.98 Kelly’s fate, he is well aware, is a national issue. The outlaw strikes a chord deep down in the Australian psyche; his story sums up the quintessentially Australian experience of suffering and oppression. This is why at the time when the historic Kelly was at large he found a ready and eager public to support him. A report in the local press at the time (23 August 1879 in the Ovens and Murray Advertiser) even maintained that the “majority of a certain powerful class in Victoria are really to a certain extent Kelly sympathisers”.99 And although Ned’s prestige was considerably lower in urban communities than in “Kelly Country”, more than ten per cent of Melbourne’s population (around 300,000 in 1880) signed a petition for clemency when Ned was about to be hanged.100 The novel gives several reasons for the huge identification potential of this Australian icon. Those who followed Kelly, the novel suggests, may have been infatuated with the outlaw because he and his gang, as Carey has the fictional version explain, “showed the world what convict blood could do. We proved there were no taint we was of true bone blood and beauty born.”101 Second, Kelly allowed his fellow sufferers, displaced persons who were “ripped from Ireland like teeth from the mouth of their own history”,102 to close ranks behind him. He inspired them with a sense of unity and orientation by telling them who they are and who they are 95

Ibid., 328. Ibid., 304. 97 Ibid., 324. 98 Ibid., 350. 99 Reprinted in John McQuilton, The Kelly Outbreak: 1878-80, Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1979, 145. 100 Ibid., 146, 173. 101 Ibid., 323. 102 Ibid., 87. 96

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not. A close reading of the novel reveals how programmatic and even overly and obsessively clear-cut his universe is. It also shows that Kelly, while ranting against his adversaries and glorifying his mates and fellow sufferers, is engaged by his author in nothing less than the sketching of what may be seen as the essence of the Australian character. A reader familiar with the stereotype of the “Australian legend” will no doubt note the likeness between the legend and Kelly’s values. This peculiarity, the ability to touch the Australian nerve, the novel suggests, may be the secret of the outlaw’s popularity, for he, by demarcating the British from the rest of Australia’s Anglo-Celtic stock, paved the way for the birth of a new “‘race’”, as the narrator in Jack Maggs puts it,103 one distinct from the British who at the time were still colonial overlords. This point made, True History of the Kelly Gang, however, leaves no doubt that the fictional outlaw has a fatefully deluded personality. He glorifies those on his side (the Irish and the poor) and accepts them as true Australians, and vilifies all others. As the following inventory of Kelly’s limited worldview will illustrate, no attempt is made by the outlaw to reconcile the several Anglo-Celtic ethnicities, or to understand the view-point of the others. By forging together those who have been “made noble in the fire”104 kindled by the British, Carey’s Kelly is clearly in line with his author’s anti-imperial agenda. His world may be overly clear-cut, but he emerges from the narration as an important figure in his nation’s struggle for independence from Britain. In the finale of the novel, Carey suggests that Kelly, although he lost his fight and ended on the gallows, is nothing less than an Australian Jefferson,105 an assessment he has also repeatedly made in interviews like the one with Sunder Katwala: This [the Kelly story] is, as I continue to tell my American friends, not like Jesse James. If it is like anything, it is like Thomas Jefferson. That is the sort of space Kelly occupies in the national imagination.106 103

Carey, Jack Maggs, 327. Ibid., 254. 105 Ibid., 350. 106 Sunder Katwala, “Peter Carey’s Double Booker Triumph”, The Observer, 18 October 2001, np. 104

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Bearing in mind that Jefferson masterminded the American Declaration of Independence, Kelly’s identification with Jefferson might not be too farfetched. After all, the letters which make up Carey’s novel can be read as the outlaw’s declaration of Australian distinctness from Britain. Upon publication of the Carey novel it became clear that not all Australians were ready to welcome Kelly into their country’s pantheon. There were, for instance, some angry letters to the papers by readers who condemned what they saw as a glorification of a murderer. Carey’s writer friend Patrick McGrath explains in this context that Carey may well be right in his assessment of Kelly and of his importance for the country, but that this is “also very troubling for Australians. That, in fact, a strand of their character could be traced back to a murderer and a thief who wound up on the gallows.”107 While this admission may be embarrassing or uncomfortable for many, it nevertheless is an essential step on Australia’s road to postcoloniality. To Carey, the Australians’ acknowledgement of Kelly as part of their heritage is a key to coming to terms with the convict past. As he has it in an interview conducted by amazon.co.uk: Kelly represents the idea in Australia history of the ‘convict stain.’ He is the convict seed and stain. He’s facing all these mediocre, corrupt officials and forces of empire. He proves himself to be more decent, more brave, wittier and generally more able than these forces. Kelly is us; we are the convict seed.108

Jack Maggs: “you cannot imagine what it was, to live in such darkness” Published three years before True History of the Kelly Gang, Jack Maggs already presented an extensive interrogation of Australia’s convict past. Like the Booker Prize-winning novel of 2000, Jack Maggs has established itself as an important novel in the Carey canon. One of Carey’s most popular books (in terms of sales figures it closely follows True History), Jack Maggs is widely read and taught at universities and subjected to much literary analysis by academia. It is a Victorian-style page-turner, which accounts for its popularity with 107 108

Wroe, “Fiction’s Great Outlaw”, 6. Unfortunately, the interview is no longer available on amazon’s websites.

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Carey’s audience, but above all it is one of the author’s most unrelenting indictments of British colonialism and a general comment on the inadequacies of the Victorian Age.109 The idea for this book was evidently born when Carey came to realize that the archetypal convict of English literature, Abel Magwitch, had been given such a “bad rap”110 by his maker, Charles Dickens. In Jack Maggs, whose very nucleus is formed by the writer’s contrarianism against British representations of Australia, Carey sets out to correct the notion of the tragic convict who despite his moral righteousness is defeated in the end by the unforgiving machinery of British law. It is not easy for Jack Maggs to replace his fictional ancestor, for Magwitch is deeply rooted in the literary subconscious of the English-speaking world. After all, he is the brainchild of an author whose importance in the canon of English literature it would be hard to overestimate. Carey’s strategy in rewriting the experience of the returned convict is to stage an intertextual dialogue with the British novel he rewrites. Jack Maggs’ relationship with Dickens’ Great Expectations is a complicated one: it is neither a sequel, nor a prequel, nor an interpolation. It has been variously referred to as a “rewrite” in the sense of a counter-statement, a kontrafaktur,111 “a twentieth-century,

109

This reading is suggested by the date of Maggs’ arrival in London (April 15, 1837), the significance of which cannot escape the alert reader (1837 is the year of Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne). 110 Powells.Com, “Interview with Peter Carey”. 111 Maack, “Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs: An Aussie Story?”, 231. Next to Great Expectations, Dombey and Son (1846-48) may have inspired the choice of the protagonist’s name in Jack Maggs: the novel features one Mr Staggs who lent his name to Staggs’ Gardens, a neighbourhoud in Dickens’ London; and Carey’s descriptions of the “Mudlarks” and the muddy banks of the River Thames (Jack Maggs, 75) come to mind when we read the opening sequence of Our Mutual Friend (1864-65): “Allied to the bottom of the river rather than the surface, by reason of the slime and ooze with which it was covered, and its sodden state, this boat and the two figures in it obviously were doing something that they often did …. Half savage as the man showed, with no covering on his matted head, with his brown arms bare to between the elbow and the shoulder … with such dress as he wore seeming to be made out of the mud that begrimed his boat …” (Our Mutual Friend, ed. Michael Cotsell, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989, 1-2).

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post-colonial Dickens novel”112 or a postcolonial “‘con-text’ … that engage[s] in direct, if ambivalent, dialogue with the canon”.113 The character constellation and the protagonists’ names make it easily recognizable as a variation on the Dickens text: Abel Magwitch, the returned convict, and Pip, the protagonist and beneficiary of the convict, are featured in Carey’s novel, disguised as charcaters by the name of Jack Maggs and Henry Phipps. Apart from renaming, Carey also shifts the focus to the convict, away from the figure of the poor English orphan. Although Phipps (alias Pip) plays an important part in Carey’s narrative (it is for his sake that Maggs returns to London) he is reduced to a walk-on part in the action of the novel and features prominently only as an ideé fixe in Maggs’ mind. Commenting on his adoption of the two main characters from the Dickens novel, Carey recalls wanting to “reinvent him [Magwitch], to possess him, to act as his advocate”: I did not want to diminish his “darkness” or his danger, but I wanted to give him all the love and tender sympathy that Dickens’ first person narrative provides his English hero Pip .… My Henry Phipps is not in any sense the same person as Dickens’ Pip. They have both inherited money from a transported convict, but their actions and their characters are very different.114

This shift in focus and readers’ sympathies provides a key to an understanding of the novel. As the focus is reallocated from the English boy to the returned convict, the narrative is turned from an English into an “Aussie story”.115 Carey empowers the convict to emancipate himself, to wrench control over his existence out of the hands of those who had predestined his life to become a tragedy: the British legal system by sentencing him to death, and the author Tobias

112

Hermione Lee, “Great Extrapolations”, Review of Jack Maggs, The Observer, 28 September 1997, 15. 113 John Thieme, Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon, New York: Continuum, 2001, 4. 114 Anonymous, “Interview with Peter Carey”, Boldtype: An Online Literary Magazine, II/12 (1999), http://tinyurl.com/Boldtype-Careyinterview (accessed 20 March 2010). 115 Maack, “Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs: An Aussie Story?”, 241.

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Oates by emplotting his life into a tragic novel entitled The Death of Maggs. Maggs’ rebellion against Oates is particularly telling in the context of the reading that I suggest. By taking over the reins from Oates, the convict metaphorically also takes over the narrative authority over the archetypal story so far held undisputedly by the Victorian novelist Dickens; for Oates is Dickens, only in disguise. There are dozens of clues which invite the reader to identify Oates as Dickens and which display Carey’s familiarity with both Dickens’ œuvre and his vita. There are, for example, striking parallels in Dickens’ and Oates’ literary careers. The real and the fictional author rise to fame in their early twenties: Oates is no more than twenty-five when he meets Maggs and already famous for his novels116 – Dickens was twenty-one when he started to write fiction and twenty-four when his Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers were published (both 1836) and earned their author instant public acclaim. Oates is the creator of a famous miserly character,117 and so is Dickens (Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol). Oates’ novel about the convict was published in serial form in the years 1860-61, as was Dickens’ Great Expectations. There are many further striking parallels in the biographies of the real and the fictional Victorian: The latter has a portrait painted of him in 1838 by the famous Samuel Laurence,118 as had Dickens; both men reside at Furnival’s Inn for a period of their lives;119 in his later life, Oates turns into a Dickens lookalike, becoming a “bearded eminence”;120 both writers have a “famously dim-witted [wife] who was commonly thought not to understand half of what her famous husband said”;121 Oates and Dickens dance a hornpipe (in disguise) 116

Carey, Jack Maggs, 25, 18. Ibid., 198. 118 Ibid., 44. 119 Ibid., 191; Fred Kaplan, Dickens: A Biography, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1988, 77-80. 120 Carey, Jack Maggs, 325. 121 Ibid., 315. The image of Catherine Dickens as “clumsy, torpid and domestically incompetent” has long prevailed, mainly as the result of the “bad press” she was given by biographers like Edgar Johnson (see Michael Slater, “Catherine Hogarth Dickens”, in Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens, ed. Paul Schlicke, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999, 157). As a result of the publicaton of the Pilgrim Edition of Dickens’ letters (1965-2002), scholars have started to see her in a much more positive light, though. 117

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when they court their future wives;122 and both are engaged in extramarital relations: Oates impregnates his sister-in-law and Dickens was rumoured to have entertained an immoral relationship with his sister-in-law and he certainly had affections for the young actress Ellen Ternan, who may even have been his lover.123 Carey’s embodiment of Dickens also “fear[s] poverty” and “would rather drown himself than take his family down into such purgatory”.124 The author thus alludes to the life-long fears of the actual Dickens, who was no stranger to poverty.125 Oates’ expertise in the art of animal magnetism and his acquaintance with the teachings of John Elliottson, one of the pioneers of mesmerism and only vaguely disguised as Dr Eliottson in the Carey novel, have also been adopted from Dickens.126 Furthermore, Carey also uses Dickensianisms to establish the intertextual link between the novels. He, for instance, has his narrator explain that “[Maggs] stood before what Tobias Oates might have called ‘a cheerful fire’”.127 The phrase “a cheerful fire” is, of course, classic Dickens, used by the Victorian again and again in his writings.128 By creating a postcolonial alter ego for Dickens, Carey prepares the ground for his attack on one of the Empire’s central institutions, namely that of English literature. Aimed at the sovereignty of British 122

Carey, Jack Maggs, 307; Mamie Dickens, My Father as I Recall Him, Westminster: Roxburghe, 1897, 30. 123 Cf. Kaplan, Dickens: A Biography, 370-72, 389-94. 124 Carey, Jack Maggs, 197, 198. 125 Charles Dickens’ father, John, spent a humiliating term in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison and young Charles had to work in Warren’s Blacking warehouse for some time to help support his family. According to several of Dickens’ biographers, these experiences had “profound” long-term effects on Charles Dickens (Michael Allen, “John Dickens”, in Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens, 171). 126 See Maack, “Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs: An Aussie Story?”, 231-32, for a detailed analysis of mesmerism in both Oates’ and Dickens’ lives. 127 Carey, Jack Maggs, 322. 128 For instance, in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41; London, Dent, 1907, 15, 105), in Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of ’80 (1841; London: Heritage, 1969, 51, 275), in The Pickwick Papers (1836-37; Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998, 403), in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44; Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998, 244), in Pictures from Italy (1846; London: Chapman, 1880, 153), and in Oliver Twist (1837-38; Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999, 203).

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culture and its representatives’ oppressive claims to universal validity, Jack Maggs clearly illustrates the postcolonialist agenda the writer is working on. In fact, in no other novel does Carey examine the difficult relationship between Britain and its unwanted children on the other side of the earth as explicitly as in Jack Maggs. No other novel is directed against British institutions as sharply as is Jack Maggs. On the one hand this may simply have to do with the fact that the setting of the novel is the heart of the former Empire itself (only few episodes are set outside of London, namely in Australia and in Gloucester), whereto the convict returns in order to haunt his tormentors and regain authority over his history. The postcolonial tone may, on the other hand, also be attributed to the fact that Carey read Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism and found in it intellectual nourishment just before he wrote Jack Maggs.129 Said’s influence is clearly visible in the book. The following excerpt, for instance, reads like a guideline for a postcolonial reimagination of the convict’s fate: We must therefore read the great canonical texts, and perhaps also the entire archive of modern and pre-modern European and American culture, with an effort to draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented … in such works .... The point is that contrapuntal reading must take account of both processes, that of imperialism and that of resistance to it, which can be done by extending our reading of the texts to include what was once forcibly excluded.130

Carey’s novel illustrates just that. He takes one of the best-known and most safely canonized novels of Dickens and of English literature in general and brings to paper his own contrapuntal reading of the pretext by allowing his version of the convict to speak up, to write down his own history.131 Although the figure of the convict was not “forcibly excluded” from the pretext to the Carey novel, his history was written and directed by someone else, namely by the Victorian novelist and the British law enforcement 129

Carey made much of the fact that he read this book by Said and said so in every other interview he gave on the occasion of the publication of Jack Maggs. 130 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993), London: Vintage, 1994, 78-79. 131 Carey, Jack Maggs, for instance, 150, 299.

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agencies that he let loose upon Magwitch. Carey helps the convict to emancipate himself, to prevent his life from being appropriated by imperial writers. He contrasts the story of Maggs’ “secret” or “hidden history”132 with the version publicized by the writer Oates. In doing this, he highlights the subjectivity of the authorial viewpoint by showing how Oates’ personal tragedy of losing his wife, his lover and his baby seeps into his famous fiction and determines its plot: It was Jack Maggs who had done this, and in his grief Tobias began to heap up all his blame upon him. It was now, on the seventh of May, in the darkest night of his life, that Jack Maggs began to take the form the world would later know. This Jack Maggs was, of course, a fiction ….

Yet Carey, by including what was excluded from Oates’ version, hints at the selectiveness and one-sidedness of the imperial viewpoint: Tobias never witnessed the final act of the real convict’s search: never observed Henry Phipps raise that pistol with his trembling hand, never heard the deafening explosion, nor smelled the dark and murderous scent of gunpowder. It would not have been lost on him that Mercy Larkin’s wedding finger was blown away, and that when Jack Maggs came to her side, the pair were finally matched in their deformity. But the forces that made that famously ‘abhorrent’ face inside the fire were different from those that drove the real Jack Maggs, who escaped London with Mercy Larkin that very night on the Portsmouth Mail. There is no character like Mercy in The Death of Maggs, no young woman to help the convict recognize the claims of Richard and John to have a father kiss them good night.133

Carey further discredits Oates’ authority by showing that his methods of acquisition and selection of narrative material are morally doubtworthy. Oates uses the “hidden history” he extracts from what he sees as a “Criminal Mind”134 not to establish a fair biography that 132

Ibid., 150, 91. Ibid., 326-27. 134 Ibid., 43. 133

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does justice to the convict’s fate, but rather emplots the life of Maggs, to him a mere “criminal”,135 in that form of fiction that will sell best: the sensational novel. To make things worse, he does so for purely material reasons: financial worries force him to sell the rights to The Death of Maggs to Cheerie Enthwistle before he has even begun to write down the novel.136 From the point of view of the postcolonial critic, it is clear that in challenging the narrative authority of Oates, Carey, by implication, also challenges the authority of the nineteenthcentury novelist Dickens whose novel, as Jack Maggs implies, eclipsed the secret, the “real” history of the convict. In order to rehabilitate the archetypal convict, Carey uses all narrative means that characterization, layout of the plot, and direction of readers’ sympathies make available to him to show that Jack Maggs’ conviction and subsequent transportation are not the result of a “criminal craniu[m]” or a “poisonous line of blood [running] through [his] vermin veins”.137 Maggs’ criminality turns out to be the direct result of the harsh social injustice making up Victorian society. The story of Jack Maggs’ life, especially his childhood, is rendered with a heightened awareness of this. The heartwrenching episode of the foundling Maggs being picked up from “the mud flats ‘neath London Bridge”138 by Mudlarks and later being taken to Mary Britten by Silas Smith, his “Benefactor”,139 who at first refuses the “rubbish”140 Britten presents to her, could just as well have taken place in a Dickens novel.141 The life of Maggs as told by Carey strongly

135

Ibid., 182. Ibid., 220. 137 Ibid., 213. 138 Ibid., 75. 139 Ibid., 83. 140 Ibid., 84. 141 The appalling situation of children at the bottom of Victorian Britain was frequently commented on in the nineteenth-century social novel, but it also crops up regularly in contemporary Australian historical fiction. In David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon, London: Chatto and Windus, 1993, for instance, the protagonist Gemmy Fairley refers to his early childhood back in England, when he worked in a timber mill, as “his life as a maggot” (147), “one of an army of little shitty creatures, mere bundles of rag and breath but with hands that could clasp a broom and strength enough to push it” (ibid., 146), and thus highlights the dehumanizing treatment of working-class children or orphans in nineteenth-century 136

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suggests that like Ned Kelly Maggs was forced to a life of crime by the bad start Ma Britten gives her foster child. That Ma Britten in the novel is a professional abortionist is particularly telling in this postcolonial rewriting of the convict’s life, for she metaphorically gets rid of Britain’s unwanted children by making them end up as convicts in Australia. As foster mother to Maggs, she not only withholds the love and affection Maggs so much craves for, but also preordains her protégé to a life of crime by sending him out with notorious burglars to earn her money. Overall, the novel leaves no doubt that Maggs is a decent fellow, that his life is a tragedy inflicted on him by his cruel Mother Britain as personified in the character of Ma Britten. Like many of Carey’s other novels, Jack Maggs is infused with a pronounced sympathy for the downtrodden in history, in this case those who did not benefit from the Empire’s thriving economy. The novel provides a fictional forum for one of London’s thousands of paupers residing at the bottom of imperial economy and, in those passages where Maggs gives an account of his childhood, adopts the mantle of the social novel (one of whose major exponents was, we must remind ourselves, Dickens himself, in novels such as Oliver Twist or The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby). It is entirely in keeping with the tradition of the social novel that Carey brings up socialist discourses, as for example when he proffers the well-known argument from Marxist history that the upper class could only afford its lifestyle through the exploitation of the working class: In actual history it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly force, play the great part. In the tender annals of Political Economy, the idyllic reigns from time immemorial.142

The mechanism of exploitation is clearly exposed in the novel, as when Maggs says: “Silas’ comfortable way of life was paid for by my labours,”143 mirroring the structure of the labour market at the heyday of industrialization. As chronicler of the lives of many historical Britain. Like Maggs, Gemmy Fairley insists on his British nationality, ironically rendered by Malouf in his outcry “‘I am a B-b-british object!’” (ibid., 3). 142 Karl Marx, Capital, 3 vols, introd. Ernest Mandel, trans. Ben Fowkes, Penguin Classics, Harmondsworth, 1990, I, A Critique of Political Economy, 874. 143 Carey, Jack Maggs, 214.

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losers, Carey elaborately works out the mechanisms of exploitation at work in nineteenth-century England. The author’s uncompromising exposé of the conditions at the bottom of imperial economy hence does not simply add a portion of heartwrenching melodrama to his story; intensely critical of nineteenth-century capitalism, the novel, as Bruce Woodcock, even suggests that it should be read with Karl Marx’s social criticism in mind. In Jack Maggs, Carey – says Woodcock – goes to the “heart of the contradictions of industrial capitalism in nineteenth-century England … and he does so in terms that are analogous to the vivid imagery of Karl Marx’s classic, Capital”.144 In exposing the failure of public authorities and politicians to alleviate these social ills, Carey’s novel directly opposes the tradition of thought that sees the English in an inevitable telos of progress, as the “greatest and most highly civilized people that ever the world saw”.145 The novel is generally imbued with a sense of indignation over the fact “that Mother England would do such a thing to one of her own”.146 Carey (like Dickens) condemns the country’s social injustice and unfairness as well as its inhumane law which appears to be executed singularly for the purpose of punishing the country’s unwanted children. Its focalizer being a person who has been horrendously wronged by the British, the novel abounds with passages in which Britain is denounced, in which its citizens are shown to be capable of the utmost cruelties. In this respect, Ma Britten as the cause of much of the novel’s evil is of central importance. As the allegorical Mother Britain, she not only gets rid of some of London’s surplus population, but she also inflicts lasting damage upon her protégé’s psyche by killing off his and Sophina’s unborn baby son.147 When she aborts 144

Bruce Woodcock, “Unsettling Illusions: Carey and Capital in Jack Maggs”, in Fabulating Beauty, 264. 145 Thomas Babington Macaulay, quoted in Ashcroft, “Against the Tide of Time: Peter Carey’s Interpolation into History”, 202. 146 Carey, Jack Maggs, 89. 147 There is more to the depiction of Jack’s tragedy than Carey’s general feeling for losers. When Jack is forced to look at the cess pit where his dead son has been cast (“See, … it looks like a toad. There lay our son – the poor dead mite was such a tiny thing. I could have held him in my hand. And on his queerly familiar little face, a cruel and dreadful cut”, 241), the personal trauma of being the father of three stillborn

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Sophina’s child, she is shown to be driven purely by practical, even monetary reasons.148 Britten thus brings tragedy and despair into Sophina’s and Jack’s “fresh young lives”149 and perverts what goodness and talent there is in Jack. Hardened by his fate, he realizes this later in his life and it is for this reason that he tries to provide for poor Henry Phipps, an orphan like himself: ‘Then I see this little boy just starting out on the journey of his life, a very kind boy, with all his God-given goodness still undamaged. And I thought, so must you have been, Jack, before you were trained to be a varmint.’150

The novel’s pervasive animal imagery suggests that Britten/Britain even denies her children their very humanity. Ma Britten and Silas Smith keep their charges Sophina and Jack as “ferrets”, for the sole purpose of doing clever burglaries for them so that they themselves “never [have to lay] fingers on the goods”.151 As Britten’s pets, the children are confined to their keeper’s lodgings and are forbidden “the little lane that ran down beside our home”: Even hopscotch was denied us. It is not so queer then that we looked forward to our burglary more than we feared its consequences.152

Maggs’ association with all sorts of animals continues throughout the novel and underlines the dehumanizing treatment convicts received by the imperial authorities. In a number of metaphors and similes, he is described as a “wild animal”,153 an “old dog”,154 a “monkey in a sailor’s cage”,155 a “lion”,156 a “fli[e]”,157 a “rat”,158 a “rascal”,159 – babies may well have been at the back of Carey’s mind (see Carey’s biographical piece “A Small Memorial”, New Yorker, 25 September 1995, 54, 59-63). 148 Carey, Jack Maggs, 239. 149 Ibid., 240. 150 Ibid., 264. 151 Ibid., 153. 152 Ibid., 213. 153 Ibid., 84. 154 Ibid., 72. 155 Ibid., 81. 156 Ibid., 89. 157 Ibid., 227.

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underlining his ferocity, his confinement, but also his cleverness. His bodily features tie in with the animal metaphor deployed by Carey: Maggs has a “great hawk’s nose”,160 issues sounds of “an injured animal: a hedgehog or a mole”,161 has the “hair of an animal”.162 In those passages where Maggs’ convict experience is on the agenda, the animals with whom Maggs is associated tellingly get more and more lowly: he variously refers to himself as a “vermin”,163 a “varmint”,164 or a “cockroach”.165 Jack’s identification with insects ties in with the degrading treatment the Empire had reserved for those who broke its law: “‘You don’t know nothing about what it was to be in that place,’” says Maggs to Mercy Larkin. He goes on: ‘You would not be judging me. You would shoot a man you saw treat a dog as we were treated. You might blow his brains out and not think yourself a bad‘un for having done the business .… A girl like you cannot imagine what it was, to live in such darkness’.166

Britten/Britain not only proves to be a hostile, unforgiving and unloving mother, the country also emerges as haunted by systemic evils. As in True History of the Kelly Gang, British law and economy are based on utter unfairness and are shown to be constitutive of a society that keeps those at its bottom safely and irrevocably in check.167 The British legal system as depicted in Jack Maggs 158

Ibid., 308. Ibid., 86. 160 Ibid., 3, 279. 161 Ibid., 279. 162 Ibid., 317. 163 Ibid., e.g., 127, 213, 280. 164 Ibid., e.g., 5, 217, 233, 264. 165 Ibid., 128. 166 Ibid., 317. 167 There is an abundance of other parallels between Jack Maggs and True History of the Kelly Gang, to the point that one feels Carey had not quite exhausted the narrative material of the man who has done wrong but turns out to be the victim of a more serious wrong. Both novels are told by narrators who try to exculpate a life of crime. Both Jack Maggs and Ned Kelly are criminals who emerge from their narratives as more or less decent human beings, not hardened criminals. Both novels seek to correct earlier misconceptions about their protagonists’ lives. There are formal analogies as well: both Maggs and Kelly write letters to their children which then make up the 159

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characteristically promotes injustice rather than justice. It is very revealing, for example, that Jack Maggs gets convicted for a crime he did not commit. He only takes the blame upon himself in order to save his lover Sophina from the gallows. Characteristic of the law’s unfairness, Justice Denman does not reward Jack’s courage: while he gets transported to Australia “‘for the term of his natural life’”,168 his partner in crime and suffering, Sophina, awaits capital punishment. It is as telling that while he gets transported, his employers, the beneficiaries of his thefts, are left unpunished. British law seems pitted against those most in need of it. One of the representatives of law, the ironically named lawyer Mr Makepeace, instigates the attempt at Jack Maggs’ life and by providing Phipps with legal subtleties and a gun to seal Maggs’ fate169 perverts the main maxim of law: justice. The novel leaves no doubt that the legal system is unfair to the core, its representatives forming an unholy alliance perpetuating the bondage of the poor. To Mercy Larkin, herself a victim of social injustice that led her into prostitution as a young girl, “a lawyer was of the same species as a judge, and the judge the same genus as a policeman, and a policeman the same thing exactly as Harold Hoban, the hangman at Newgate Prison”.170 Characterization supports Carey’s assessment that law and justice in nineteenth-century Britain are truly perverted. The author has all those punished by British law who – to judge by the moral standards of the novel – are decent and righteous (Sophina, Jack), and lets go unpunished all those who are guilty morally and ethically (Tom

whole or at least a significant part of the novel. In both cases the manuscripts are said to be held by public libraries. Another significant parallel is the way in which both novels expose the mechanisms of historic silencing. In both cases, the protagonists’ attempts at explaining their crimes are prevented. Maggs’ adopted son never goes through the trouble of reading his foster father’s letters; in the case of Ned Kelly, the reader is left in doubt whether or not the addressee of Kelly’s letters ever gets to read them. The letters he writes to the colonial government, to be sure, are either not read, not printed, or intercepted by the schoolteacher Curnow. 168 Carey, Jack Maggs, 324. This, of course, was the technical term for a person sentenced for life; in a novel that thrives on intertextuality, the phrase also conjures up Marcus Clarke’s monumental convict fiction, For the Term of His Natural Life (as his 1870 classic His Natural Life today is usually referred to). 169 Carey, Jack Maggs, 295-97. 170 Ibid., 126.

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Britten, Ma Britten, Silas Smith, Henry Phipps, Percy Buckle, Tobias Oates). The perversion of justice is most clearly illustrated in the figure of the author Oates and his subject Maggs. Oates is a respected writer, trying to keep up the appearances the insecure Victorian middle class insisted upon. At the end of the day, however, he is a “murderer”,171 responsible for Spinks’ and Lizzie’s death, for the collapse of his marriage and for having “shamed his own family”.172 He is also responsible for child abuse,173 for the infection of his “son’s innocent body”,174 for exploiting the traumatized convict’s mind rather ruthlessly and for planting a phantom in his psyche. Yet, in the end, he grows to be a respected writer like his model Dickens. Maggs, who is referred to as the “criminal”175 throughout the novel, ironically turns out to be one of the most righteous characters. While far from innocent (he is guilty of murder in at least one case176), it is to his credit that he is driven by ulterior motifs when he makes himself the benefactor of Henry Phipps, the poor orphan he adopts. Taking into consideration his denied childhood and education, he presents himself to the reader as a decent enough character who deserves compassion because his life (until Mercy saves him) is a long history of suffering and of getting betrayed by those whose station in life enables them to keep up the decorum of Victorian earnestness: most notably Tobias Oates, who “burgle[s]” and “plunder[s]”177 him with his mesmeric passes and who later takes him on a trip to Gloucester to get some money from him;178 Tom who betrays him to the police;179 and Buckle who, in “a matter of the heart”, entices Phipps to murder Maggs.180 It is perhaps not too surprising that in this postcolonialist comment on Victorian society one’s station in life does not depend upon one’s 171

Ibid., 180. Ibid., 231. 173 Ibid., 197. 174 Ibid., 189. 175 For instance, ibid., 181, 182. 176 Ibid., 253. 177 Ibid., 32. 178 Ibid., 222. 179 Ibid., 263. 180 Ibid., 271-72. 172

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merits or the quality of one’s character. Henry Phipps, who is assigned the role of Pip, a character whose gentlemanliness was already exposed as a mere pretence in the Dickens novel, is a case in point. He is a regular at the “gentleman’s club”181 and constantly referred to as a “gentleman”,182 but turns out to be very ungentlemanly and cowardly, evading and eventually trying to kill his benefactor Maggs. To underline the point that success in Victorian society was not related to one’s personal integrity and ability, Carey introduces an element of chance into his narrative. Phipps can only live a leisurely gentleman’s life because he chances upon Maggs who, after several years as a convict in the prison colony of Australia, is lucky enough to receive a conditional pardon and then to make his fortune. Percy Buckle, likewise, can only afford to live at Great Queen Street because of an unexpected inheritance, after he “had ‘[his] little visit from the solicitor,’ as a result of which good fortune he became, in two short months, the master of a household in Great Queen Street and the owner of the Lyceum Theatre on Holborn Hill”.183 His position as gentleman is accordingly precarious, his household unsurprisingly “chaotic”:184 Mr Percy Buckle was the owner of a gentleman’s residence at 29 Great Queen Street, but he was no more a gentleman than the man who was presently entering his household in disguise. A year before he had been a humble grocer in Clerkenwell, and for years before that time he had been well known … as a seller of fried fish.185

The fact that the characters’ fates are determined by factors such as corruption and good or bad fortune is all the more tragic when one realizes that Victorian society, as rendered in Jack Maggs, traps its citizens in their unwanted lives. Carey again and again stresses the point that humans are generally capable of all sorts of goodness and badness, and potentially suitable for all walks of life. It is owing to this policy that his characters are as dynamic as they are. Like Maggs, 181

Ibid., 256. Ibid., 8, 256. 183 Ibid., 9; see also 125. 184 Ibid., 7. 185 Ibid., 9. 182

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who has the appearance of a “‘murderer’”,186 but also that of “a bookmaker, … a gentleman farmer … an upper servant wearing his master’s cast-off clothing”,187 they are capable of huge changes and are fashioned with a considerable social mobility (upward and downward) that indicates the wide range of possible human destinies. Mercy Larkin is another illustrative case: sold to prostitution as a child and employed as a lower housemaid in Buckle’s household, she becomes a “disciplinarian”188 who “meticulously supervise[s]”189 her own servants once she moves to Australia. Buckle, who betrays Jack, is described by Mercy as “the kindest, most decent man in all the world”.190 The famous author Oates, while “solicitous and kindly” in his manner, appears “about as trustworthy as a Newgate Bird”.191 Jack Maggs hence illustrates a view of history which lays emphasis on the material rather than the intellectual or spiritual conditions of human existence. What good there is in the characters, and in Maggs above all, is perverted by the injustice inherent in the country’s classridden society. Instead of providing a fair start to all of its citizens, Britain, by force of its unwielding law, prescribes barbarous punishments to its offenders, literally mutilating their body and soul. The novel emphatically illustrates this: Jack misses the two middle fingers of his left hand and the top of his left ear (injuries from the double-cat), suffers from a tic douloureux in the face, and is haunted by what his mesmerist calls a “Phantom”, the personification of the horrors he was subjected to as a convict. Adopting the tradition of convict fiction, a major genre in Australian literature, Carey in Jack Maggs records his protagonist’s sufferings in much the same drastic detail as novels like Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of his Natural Life (1870), Patrick White’s A Fringe of Leaves (1976), or Thomas Keneally’s The Playmaker (1987) do. As a convict, Maggs experiences excesses of inhumanity. Ever since, he wears the “hallmarks of New South Wales”,192 a “sea of pain 186

Ibid., 15. Ibid., 1. 188 Ibid., 327. 189 Ibid., 328. 190 Ibid., 71. 191 Ibid., 30. 192 Ibid., 87. 187

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etched upon [his] footman’s back, a brooding sea of scars, of ripped and tortured skin”.193 The effects these floggings have on him are devastating: He limped … to Lincoln’s Inn Fields with his shoes torturing him at every step. It was only pain, or so he told himself. He had suffered 194 worse [in Australia].

Maggs’ pain is so intense that he sometimes begs for death when flogged.195 Even in the narrative present, years after his conditional pardon when he has become a respectable person with a street named after him back in Australia, and a full twenty-four years after his sentence was pronounced, Maggs still loses his countenance at the mere mention of his conviction: It was heart-wrenching to witness the effect this announcement had upon this manly man. His shoulders slumped. He shook his great head 196 slowly. ‘I’m a vermin, ain’t I?’

Carey’s outrage over these acts of inhumanity is tangible in passages like the ones cited above. The utter unfairness of a society that sentenced its needy citizens to transportation for “morally speaking … no crime at all”197 seems a real concern for him, and so is the legal system that “ripped” people from their homes, as Kelly has it in True History of the Kelly Gang,198 leaving them spiritually and psychologically uprooted. Given this history of suffering, the reader by the end of the novel certainly is ready to forgive Jack Maggs his wrongdoings. It is one of Carey’s most important points that Maggs, as soon as he liberates himself from the fate of the archetypal convict, also emancipates 193

Ibid., 86. Ibid., 38. 195 Ibid., 322. 196 Ibid., 127. 197 Norbert Schaffeld, “The Making of a Myth: Irish Convicts, Diggers and Bushrangers in Australian Literature”, in Writing in Australia: Perceptions of Australian Literature in its Historical and Cultural Context, eds Gerd Dose and Bettina Keil, Anglophone Literaturen 1, Hamburg: LIT, 2000, 67. 198 Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang, 7, 87. 194

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himself from his cruel Mother England. His time in London (15 April to 7 May) lastingly cures the man who always liked to think of himself as an “Englishman”199 of his persistent Anglophile disposition. He realizes that the home he returns to is essentially unwelcoming. His foster mother claims not to know him; his allegorical mother threatens him with death by hanging; and his son turns out to be the very nightmare that kept haunting him: “long straight nose, fair hair, brutal dreadful uniform of the 57th Foot Regiment. The Phantom had broken the locks and entered his life.”200 The tellingly named Mercy Larkin – holding the locks of Maggs’ children in her hand – thwarts the plans of “the malevolent being who now threatened to snuff out Jack Maggs’ life [that is, Henry Phipps]”201 and reinstalls Maggs, who is now ready to accept membership to “That Race”, in his true home, Australia. Published just one year ahead of the Australian Republican Referendum (1999), Jack Maggs and its protagonist’s final renunciation of the imperial parent is a first-rate cultural-political statement. Maggs’ farewell to Britain and the generally conciliatory tone of the last panoramic chapter of the novel, which sees Maggs reconciled with his past and looking into the future as progenitor of “five further members of ‘That Race’”,202 is a sign to those Australians who continue to live in the virtual reality of an imaginary Britain in the Antipodes. As it turned out in the 1999 Referendum, a large percentage of real Australians were not yet prepared to give up being Imaginary Englishmen, though: more than fifty per cent voted against cutting the constitutional ties with Britain. All three novels discussed in this section are clear examples of the Empire writing back to its former centre. Illywhacker illustrates how Australians on their way to coming of age feel manacled by their British past and even by Britishness as such. Jack Maggs and True History are explicit accusations against the British legal system and the attendant British ideas of justice, righteousness and decency.

199

Carey, Jack Maggs, for instance, 128, 322. Ibid., 323. 201 Ibid., 325. 202 Ibid., 327. 200

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All three novels share certain strategies typical of novels with such a clear postcolonial agenda, for example the attempt at delicensing the British authority over history or the diatribes against representatives of the British Empire. One of the most prominent of these strategies in Carey’s fiction is the use of the family metaphor, which according to John Thieme is also “a major trope in post-colonial con-texts …. Orphans and bastards abound in postcolonial texts and the engagement with issues of parentage is often as intense as in, say, a Fielding novel ….”203 The protagonists of these three novels are all notably orphans of one sort or another: Herbert Badgery, Ned Kelly and Jack Maggs all lose their father before they reach maturity, and only Ned Kelly has a mother to see him grow up. Rejected, abandoned and generally unloved, Carey’s protagonists allegorically illustrate the problems a colony like Australia faces when it tries to come to terms with its ancestral legacies.

203

Thieme, Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon, 8.

CHAPTER NINE “DECOLONIZING THE MIND” (II): POSTCOLONIAL AUSTRALIA It is one of the most characteristic traits of those of Peter Carey’s fictions that are set in a postcolonial context that Australia remains essentially colonial. It is as if the British, by burrowing under and tunnelling out (as featured in Illywhacker), had, metaphorically speaking, destabilized the country and thus made it vulnerable to future generations of colonizers. While the British continue to be a force to reckon with in Carey’s fictional version of postcolonial Australia, the United States have notably taken over political and cultural stewardship over the country. The detrimental effects the American influence has on the consciousness of the characters in Carey’s novels suggest that this new form of cultural and political patronage is not dissimilar to that of the British in former times. In fact, nothing much seems to have changed when the job of protector in chief was reallocated from the British to the Americans in the middle of the twentieth century. Australians in Peter Carey’s postcolonial Australia continue to be inhibited by an acute sense of cultural backwardness and political and military dependence. Although postcolonial Australia is not formally bound or subjected to any nation, the attempts that Carey’s characters make at coming of age, at asserting an authentic selfhood, continue to be thwarted because of the debilitating effects of foreign influence. Collective mental disorders such as the cultural cringe or cultural schizophrenia, induced by the British, continue to work their insidious ways on the Australian psyche and account for the characteristic ambivalence with which many of Carey’s characters view their colonizers’ culture: Charles Badgery, for instance, who displays a flagrant “inconsistency about the King of England” and enlists in his army despite the fact that he “considered England and the English the scourge of all humanity”;1 Jack Maggs, who considers himself an Englishman despite the ill-treatment he receives from his compatriots; Ned Kelly, 1

Carey, Illywhacker, 460.

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who identifies with King Henry V, although he has an innate hatred of the English; and, of course, Tristan Smith and his fellow Eficans, who are agonised by their mixed feelings about Voorstand’s aggressive culture.2 By dwelling at length on the more objectionable aspects of American cultural imperialism, Carey leaves no doubt that the influence the United States have asserted over Australia in postcolonial times is nothing less than an act of colonization, “cocacolonization” in the words of Kristin Williamson.3 It is therefore not surprising that narrative patterns (for instance, colonial subject engaged in retaliation against the colonizer) and motifs (problematic parent-child relationships, sense of confinement, feeling of cultural insecurity) prevalent in the Carey novels set in colonial times crop up again in what is technically speaking a decolonized Australia. Carey is particularly suited for sounding out the effects of this new phase in the history of Australia’s coloniality. As an Australian expatriate living in New York, he can claim to have intimate knowledge of both the neocolonial power and the colonized. The idea for his 1994 novel The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith even seems to have sprung directly from the experience of settling down in the heart of the American empire (he moved to New York in 1989).4 But the United States were targeted by Carey well before his move to New York. Anti-American sentiments already figure quite prominently in a 2 The condition of cultural schizophrenia is characteristic of many postcolonial countries (see Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors, 106, and Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of the World Order, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996, 154). It arises from the heterogeneity prevalent in former colonies that are at the crossroads between loyalty to and admiration for the hegemonial culture and the assertion of an independent (post)colonial culture often accompanied by a complete rejection of the former colonizers’ culture. 3 Kristin Williamson, “The Cocacolonization of Australia”, Antipodes, III/2 (December 1989), 121-24. 4 In other words, Carey is very close to his narrative matter. He therefore unsurprisingly shares a number of biographical details with his protagonist: like Tristan Smith, he comes in from the margin, right into the heart of the super power; and both Carey and Tristan write down their experiences in Voorstand respectively the United States in their early fifties (Carey was fifty-one when The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith was published, Tristan fifty-five – see The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, 5, 7, 414).

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number of his short stories, most noticeably in “American Dreams” and “The Chance”. The display of anti-Americanism in the short fiction is directly attributable to the Zeitgeist of the 1970s: at the time his country’s left was united in an almost programmatic opposition to the United States, which included protests against the Vietnam War and a rejection of American-style capitalism and its cultural imperialism. Carey’s activities as leading member of Australia’s Vietnam Moratorium Committee as well as the fact that most of his friends at the time were “communists, Maoists, Trotskyists”5 clearly filtered into his early writings, never to really leave him in his mature years.6 In fact, as part of his postcolonial rejection of imperialism and colonialism, a latent anti-Americanism is one of the most conspicuous items on the author’s political agenda. It plays an important role in Bliss (1981), Illywhacker (1985), and, to some extent, also in The Tax Inspector (1991). The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, though, is Carey’s most thorough exploration of the imbalanced relationship between postcolonial Australia and the United States. The author here scrutinizes the reality of Australia’s postcoloniality by investigating the terms and the nature of its liaison with one of the country’s “great and powerful friends”, in Sir Robert Menzies’ famous phrase.7 In The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, Carey sums up many of the issues raised first in the fictions mentioned above, bringing together a scathing critique of the American strategy of manipulating its allies politically so as to make them more compliant, of the American entertainment industry and, on a more general level, of the country’s cultural imperialism, as well as of its specific religiosity and the shallowness of its idol-worship. The novel was received with almost unanimous praise. A number of its reviewers and critics even suggested that this novel might well turn out to be Carey’s masterpiece.8 It can be and has been read in 5

Carey in Wroe, “Fiction’s Great Outlaw”, 6. According to Gelder and Salzman the whole “‘new wave’ of short story writers” in the 1970s were inspired in their writings by the “resurgent radicalism of anti-Vietnam protest” (Ken Gelder and Paul Salzman, The New Diversity: Australian Fiction 19701988, Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1989, 11). 7 Robert Menzies, The Measure of the Years, London: Cassell, 1970, 44. 8 See Nicholas Birns, “‘A Dazzled Eye’: ‘Kristu-Du’ and the Architecture of Tyranny”, in Fabulating Beauty, 110. 6

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various ways. Bruce Woodcock, for example, sees it as a “mythmaking fantasy” and as an investigation into “the issue of severe disability”.9 In the present context, a critical analysis of the novel is most fruitful if it is read as an allegory of Australian-American relations, for, the two countries Efica and Voorstand are only barely disguised versions of Australia and the United States.10 The parallels Carey establishes between Efica and Australia and between Voorstand and the United States are so striking that an identification with the real countries is inevitable:11 Efica is described as an “unimportant country”,12 an archipelagian nation, situated in the Southern hemisphere (the tropic of Capricorn runs through it). Because Eficans have been “abandoned”13 by their former colonial masters from Europe as an “unsuccessful idea”,14 they are notoriously “selfdoubting”15 and, as a consequence, tend to be “provincial, parochial”.16 Eficans have their roots in France and Britain, its population having descended from convicts and potato-blight Irish. Its indigenous peoples are described as “‘lost’”,17 murdered when Britain and France colonized the islands.

9

Woodcock, Peter Carey, 113, 116. The phonological proximity between the pseudo-Dutch name “Voorstand” and the English “stand for” (Voorstand standing for the USA) corroborates an allegorical reading of the imperial country in the novel. In such a reading, the Dutch element of Voorstand’s culture can be seen as an allusion to the role the Dutch played in the early history of New York (then called New Amsterdam). There is more to Voorstand, however, than parallels to American history and culture, for, Voorstand also bears strong resemblances to South Africa. This gives Carey’s imperial power an almost universal quality, allowing the reader to look for mechanisms at work in former European colonies anywhere on the globe. 11 In an interview with Ray Willbanks, Carey himself suggested that Voorstand may be seen as a “reinvention of the U.S. and Ifica [sic] an improvisation on the idea of Australia”: see Ray Willbanks, “Peter Carey on The Tax Inspector and The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith: A Conversation with Ray Willbanks”, Antipodes, XI/1 (June 1997), 14. 12 Carey, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, 8. 13 Ibid., for instance, 5, 9, 32. 14 Ibid., 32; see also 149. 15 Ibid., for instance, 5, 9. 16 Ibid., 5. 17 Ibid., 9 (italics in the original). 10

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Voorstand is as clearly and recognizably a version of the United States as Efica is of Australia. It is a “settler culture”,18 “‘a great people’” whose country was “founded on a principle”.19 Voorstanders valorize individualism and liberty,20 have a penchant for light entertainment and are obsessed with the icons of their identity and their past, which they passionately worship.21 Despite the selfdestructive deterioration of their morals and their righteousness, they still are confident enough to export their entertainment all over the world, to wage war against “some poor country”,22 and to keep a number of client states such as Efica under firm control. One still must bear in mind that The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith is science fiction. Eficans and Voorstanders live at a considerable remove from the readers’ and the author’s reality, in an other world. The way in which Carey has disguised the countries involved in this neocolonial relationship suggests analogies with the wider postcolonial experience (by raising issues of an almost universal validity in imperial-colonial relations), but it also asks the reader to consider the very specific conditions of the unequal partnership between the United States and Australia. Read in this way, the novel is a very informative source for finding out about Australia in postcolonial and neocolonial times. What, then, is the state of affairs in Efica? How does Carey comment on the country’s coloniality? Efica, to begin with, is formally decolonized, but has paradoxically remained colonial through and through. Founded as a prison colony, the country is so notoriously insecure that successive generations of colonizers meet with little resistance: when its colonial parents abandon their former colony, Voorstand moves in. Their origin as a failure is so conspicuous that it oozes from the Eficans’ very pores. Their language for example, the “prison slang”,23 the “self-doubting Efican patois”,24 exudes an acute 18

Ibid., 165. Ibid., 168. 20 Ibid., 50. 21 Ibid., for instance, 317. 22 Ibid., 168. Voorstand’s role as colonial superpower is also suggested by the telling name: “Vorstand” in German means “directorate” or “management”. 23 Ibid., 40. 24 Ibid., 51. 19

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lack of self-confidence – as does their general subservience to Voorstandish culture. Downtrodden throughout their history, they unsurprisingly “identif[y] with the lost, the fallen, the abandoned”25 – quite unlike their antagonists from Voorstand who celebrate the individual26 and crave for the catastrophic and the sensational in their entertainment: the possibility of death, we read, was “always on the menu”27 of their Sirkus performances. Because of their short history, Eficans have not even had time yet to determine who they are: ‘Did we even begin to define a national identity?’ Felicity said. ‘No one can even tell me what an Efican national identity might be .… All we know is what we’re not. We’re not like those snobbish French or those barbaric English. We don’t think rats have souls like the Voorstanders. But what are we? We’re just sort of “here”. We’re a flea circus.’28

Efica is a culture mired in a state of indeterminacy. The reader is invited to see this dilemma as at least in part a consequence of the fact that Efica’s British and French colonial parents withdrew from the experiment they had begun in this essentially hostile country, “dotted [as it is] with failed attempts at European enterprise – bauxite claims, farmhouses, abandoned rusting windmills”.29 Interestingly, the freedom fighter Tristan sees the British and French withdrawal as a betrayal rather than as a liberation. Eficans, he never tires of saying, were “abandoned”. Left to their own devices, they were doomed to become a client state of Voorstand. Against the historical background of the British strategic realignment of its forces during World War II – the British sacrificed Singapore30 and refused to send relief troops 25

Ibid., 136. Ibid., 50. 27 Ibid., 341. 28 Ibid., 117. 29 Ibid., 66. 30 The fall of Singapore has gone down in history as “Australia’s Dunkirk”. As a consequence of this traumatic event, Australia ratified the Statute of Westminster (1942) and, by doing so, recognized its constitutional independence from the mother country. The widely held view of Australia as an orphan has at least in part been inspired by the British refusal to help its former colony. Carey explores the implications of Australia’s orphanhood at some length in Oscar and Lucinda, where a whole chapter is entitled “Orphans” (390-94). It starts programmatically: “Our history 26

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against the Japanese invasion when the “Battle for Australia” was proclaimed and Japanese air raids on Darwin and the attacks on Sydney harbour traumatized Australians31 – this is a thinly veiled indictment of Australia’s disloyal British parent. The events of the World Wars and especially the British military reorientation proved so traumatic for Australians that it determined the post-war years and made the 1950s “a watershed in the life of modern Australia”.32 David Malouf, referring to the Great War, recalls the experience as follows: We began to think of ourselves as having been betrayed. Of our willingness, our good nature, as having been taken advantage of. At Gallipoli. In the last days of the war in France, when we had made so large a sacrifice but received so little acknowledgment of it. At the Peace Conference afterwards, where the British had thwarted our attempts to acquire the German possessions in the Pacific, and granted those that lay north of the equator to the Japanese, thus bringing one step closer what most Australians saw as a potential aggressor.33

These developments explain why the issue of parenthood plays such an important role in the novel. Carey expands on the motif in the figure of Tristan Smith himself and invites the reader to see his contested parenthood as a trope for the mixed British, French and Voorstandish parentage of Efica, or by way of inference, Australia’s own parentage, for Tristan “really had three fathers – Bill and is a history of orphans ….” (390) In his inventory of Australian consciousness, A Spirit of Play, David Malouf also dedicates a chapter called “The Orphan in the Pacific” to this phenomenon (A Spirit of Play: The Making of Australian Consciousness, 81-99). 31 The Japanese invasion has intrigued Carey for a long time. It already features prominently in Illywhacker and serves as one of the historic backgrounds against which Badgery stages his family’s history. The Australasian hybrid Hissao, who leads the Badgery family into the post- or rather neocolonial stage of Australian history, is mysteriously begot during these world-historical events: “Why ... is Hissao himself not only named Hissao, but also snub-nosed and almond-eyed? Why? Because the Japanese were bombing Darwin and Emma was not a stupid woman” (Illywhacker, 432). For Hissao’s nationalist grandfather Herbert, the devastation of Darwin is one more reason for Australians to grow up and stand on their own feet (186-87). The topic crops up again in Carey’s recent novel, My Life as a Fake (191-92). 32 Malouf, A Spirit of Play: The Making of Australian Consciousness, 80. 33 Ibid., 84.

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Vincent, sometimes, and Wally every day”.34 Carey’s protagonist is obsessed with coming to terms with his parentage. At the end of the novel he says he travelled to Voorstand expressly to see “‘My Father’”35 – father here referring to Bill and, given the fact that he is an Efican concerned with the identity of his country, metaphorically also to Efica’s parent Voorstand. The analogies between Tristan’s and Australia’s experience indeed are striking: like Australia, Tristan is abandoned by his father at a crucial moment in his life,36 and like Australia, Tristan and his fellow Eficans, a “northern hemisphere people who have been abandoned in the south”,37 for want of a proper parentage, are obsessed with trying to determine who they are. The cultural and political ramifications of Efica’s contested parenthood and its state of orphanhood are consequently a major issue for the characters in the novel. Carey concentrates the discussion of cultural politics on the Feu Follet theatre company, a polemic group of actors with a counter-cultural, anti-imperial “agitprop”38 repertoire. On the artistic and moral avant-garde of Efica,39 their express purpose seems to be to bring home to audiences the reality of the abandoned archipelago’s dependence on Voorstand. Their “little plays”, we read, … were crude and funny. There was juggling and feats of strength and acrobatics, but everywhere with both a story and a purpose. We mocked our snivelling ‘alliance’ with Voorstand, publicly libelled the silk-shirted facheurs who ran the Red Party. We dressed one actor as an obese Bruder Rat, another as randy Oncle Duck. We had our audience write down the phone numbers of top DoS [Efica’s secret service] agents and sometimes had a little fun telephoning them from the stage. We broke the obscenity laws, the alliance laws, the secrecy laws, all in one act with two posturers.

34

Carey, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, 63. Tristan may have been named after Gottfried von Strassburg’s protagonist of the same name (who himself is tellingly named the “sad one”) who also grows up ignorant of his true parentage. So Tristan’s name contrasts with that of his mother, Felicity, which means “happiness”. 35 Ibid., 414. 36 Ibid., 311. 37 Ibid., 117. 38 Ibid., 77. 39 Ibid., 66.

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The theatricals are driven by an exceptional idealism. Not a single Efican playwright, according to Tristan, quite shares the subversive “passions [and] politics”40 of the Feu Follet’s performances. They painfully feel the power and the allure of “Voorstand influence – its spies, its cables”, and of the Sirkus which was then threatening to “wash across [them] like a tidal wave”. As spearhead of the Efican cultural resistance, the actors “wan[t] Efica to be free of Sirkus”.41 Their performances, to be sure, are intended to help Eficans to … forget the franchised Sirkus Domes and the video satellites circling above the ozone layer, and you could imagine that theatre could still change the destiny of a country. In Efica you could have the illusion of being a warrior in a great battle, and when you toured … you performed as if art mattered.42

Acutely aware of the cultural vacuum left by Efica’s European founders, the Feu Follet engage in the ambitious project of “inventing the culture of its people”,43 even the country itself.44 Carey here explicitly invokes the famous book by the cultural historian Richard White (Inventing Australia, 1981) and thus comments on the efforts of his country’s intellectuals at coming to terms with their identity. Just like this debate seems to have led nowhere in Australia,45 the Feu Follet’s attempts at inventing their country in the end prove futile. Their importance for Efica is wishful thinking. They cannot fend off Voorstand’s cultural imperialism. 40

Ibid., 55. Ibid., 56. 42 Ibid., 77. 43 Ibid., 50. 44 Ibid., 53, 77. 45 After almost three decades of spirited debate, Australians seem to have come no closer to determining who they are. The historian Stuart Macintyre calls the debate about national identity “the Lasseter’s Reef of Australian intellectuals [that] has lured many into fruitless expeditions” (back cover of Miriam Dixson’s The Imaginary Australian: Anglo-Celts and Identity, 1788 to the Present, Sydney, U of New South Wales P, 1999). Ann Curthoys supports Macintyre’s sobering assessment: “I cannot find words for myself, stumbling around with phrases like Anglo-Australian … or Anglo-Celtic Australian, feeling ever more clumsily named and ever less clear about how to describe and situate myself and those like me in current debate” (“History and Identity”, in Creating Australia: Changing Australian History, eds Wayne Hudson and Geoffrey Bolton, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1997, 24). 41

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It is crucial for an understanding of this novel that Efica’s cultural predicament is not solely the result of the imperialist policies of a super power capitalizing on the relative weakness of its ally. Rather, Eficans are agents of their own political and cultural unmaking. Wavering between admiration and disdain, their response to Voorstand is marked by a characteristic duality, as is Tristan’s, who embodies the Hairy Man (personified evil) just as well as Bruder Mouse (personified goodness).46 The complexity of the Efican’s relationship with Voorstand keeps readers from understanding this novel as yet another accusation of American cultural imperialism. The reason is that Eficans are shown to be instrumental in their own downfall – their saturation with Voorstandish culture self-inflicted. Efican characters, as a rule, are animated by the same self-destructive impulse as the inmates of the petshop in Illywhacker, who willingly relinquish their freedom for a life of captivity. Even the most ardent critics of Voorstand’s imperialism, the members of the Feu Follet, are shown to have a far more complex relationship with Voorstand than would allow the reader to blindly condemn Voorstand for its imperialism. Tristan’s parents are a case in point: his mother, Felicity Smith, was born in Voorstand, but raised and naturalized in Efica. She embodies the ambivalence that marks a good many of the characters’ feelings for the imperial culture. When she equips Tristan with the mask of one of Voorstand’s best-known mythical characters, Bruder Mouse, it is “against her own heartfelt principles”.47 At the same time that she infuses Tristan with animosities against Voorstand, planting the seeds which later drive him to destroy the Sirkus, she disseminates hegemonial culture. Tragically, she turns her son into a Voorstand mascot only to alleviate his psychological anguish. Therefore she perfectly illustrates the ambivalent feelings of attraction and repulsion Eficans cherish for Voorstand, and as a matter of fact, Australians do for the United States: … no matter what her critique of Voorstandish hegemony, my maman obviously held more complex feelings for Bruder Mouse than she had

46 47

Carey, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, 414. Ibid., 185.

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ever admitted to the collective .… No matter that she denounced your country’s intrusion into Efican soil, she was a Voorstander.48

Bill is another case in point. Tristan describes him as a “colonist, an islander, an Efican”.49 When he as a member of the Feu Follet is offered a job in the Saarlim Sirkus, his actor colleagues “weigh up the public benefit and the moral damage”,50 but, as they often do, surrender to the lure of money and fame and let him go to make his way in Voorstand’s entertainment industry. Bill’s dilemma is that this is against his nature: “When he spoke his lines in Saarlim, he would need to abandon his soft, self-doubting Efican patois [and] learn to speak with a clip to his consonants, give up his Feu Follet habits of irony and self-mockery.”51 By relinquishing what is quintessentially Efican about him, he acts out, … with his own body, the surrender of our frail culture to your more powerful one. He would be singing your songs, telling your stories, and this went strongly against the grain, undercut the whole notion of who he thought he was.52

When he rises to fame in Voorstand and returns to Efica for the first time, Tristan is shattered to find that Bill, “tall, tanned, gravurehandsome, with huge padded shoulders and pointed snakeskin shoes with silver tips on the laces … looked like the embodiment of everything the Feu Follet had fought – your culture, your Sirkus”.53 Hence Bill is a typical example of the American predicament Australians are in. Their prolonged experiences as a colony as much as their heartfelt principles (the taking sides with losers, the suspiciousness of “dogma” and “high-sounding rhetoric”54) tell them to refrain from American culture, and so does their purported image as a self-confident postcolonial nation – which is captured in Wally’s

48

Ibid., 185. Ibid., 51. 50 Ibid., 50. 51 Ibid., 51. 52 Ibid., 52. 53 Ibid., 305. 54 Ibid., 202. 49

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protestations that “this [Efica] is the best country on earth, and we’re about to have the best life imaginable”.55 The reality is that Eficans are fascinated by the imperial; a certain subservience to that hegemony even seems to be present in their very blood. It is in Tristan’s blood, no doubt, given the biography of his parents. When Tristan travels through Voorstand to reclaim his father Bill, the landscape provides a clue to his love-hate relationship – it was “the landscape of the stories Irma had recited, the landscape my ancestors … had travelled through”: It was alien. It was in my blood, in my dreams. It appeared and reappeared at every bend and cutting – real, not real, familiar, foreign.56

No matter how much Eficans struggle “to get their [Voorstand’s] hands out of our [Efica’s] guts”,57 Voorstand has inextricably implanted itself into their culture and mythology. The following speech by Tristan sums up the complexity of his and his fellow Eficans’ feelings about Voorstand – and casts light on Australian sensibilities regarding the United States: … you are part of our hearts in a way you could not dream. It is as if you, at your mother’s breast, had imbibed the Koran, the Kabuki, and made them both your own. We grow up with your foreignness deep inside our souls, knowing the Bruder clowns, the Bruder tales, the stories of the Saints, the history (defeating the Dutch, tricking the British, humiliating the French, all this gets you big marks in the islands of Efica). We recite your epic poets for the same reason we study Molière or Shakespeare, listen to your Pow-pow music as we fall in love, fly your fragrant peaches halfway across the earth and sit at table with their perfect juices running down our foreign chins. We have danced to you, cried with you, even when we write our manifestos against you, even when we beg you please to leave our lives alone, we admire you, not just because we have woven your music into our love affairs and wedding feasts, not just for what we 55 Ibid., 149. Wally here echoes one of the standard perceptions of Australia as the “best country in the world”, a phrase that often crops up in the pompous rhetoric of the country’s tourism industry. 56 Ibid., 283-84. 57 Ibid., 168.

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imagine you are, but for what you once were – for the impossible idealism of your Settlers Free who would not eat God’s Creatures, who wanted to include even mice and sparrows in their Christianity.58

Tristan’s position as cultural critic of Voorstand is very problematic, though. He is the puppeteer in charge of the whole narration, driven by two emotional vectors facing in opposite directions. Torn between revulsion and fascination, Tristan embodies the complexities of feelings his postcolonial nation has for Voorstand like no other character. Although Carey stresses his character’s hatred of Voorstand, he at the same time has him succumb to Voorstand’s glittering culture. As “mythic beast”,59 Tristan, for example, indulges in the ego-boosting effects Voorstand’s cultural icons have on him. By wearing the mask of Bruder Mouse, he tries to cover up his ugliness and to make himself more suitable for his career as an actor. It is only later in his life, after he has become associated with Efican resistance groups like January 20, a “Radical nationalist group named in commemoration of Felicity Smith’s death”,60 and after he has been familiarized with the secret agent Jacqui and her Saidian doctoral thesis entitled “‘Orientalist Discourses and the Construction of the Arab Nation State’”61 that the orphan realizes how big a role Voorstand – synechdochically represented through the Mouse – has played in his life. From hindsight, Tristan sees how much he allowed his adolescent self to be blinded by the deceptive charms of imperial culture: ‘I hated that Mouse. I hated its face. I hated what it stood for in my life, my history, that I was ever fool enough to hide behind its face.’62

The evidence Tristan presents to us of his attitude towards Voorstand is misleading and contradictory, but the reader is meant to understand that Tristan is a fierce critic of Voorstand, a political pamphleteer who seeks revenge for the death of his mother, who alone could uphold the very un-Efican fiction of her son’s greatness: “One 58

Ibid., 292. Ibid., 388. 60 Ibid., 233 (italics in the original). 61 Ibid., 268. 62 Ibid., 288. 59

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day I was Napoleon. Next day I was a coward.” Dubbed a “‘poison gland’” and a “‘vile octopus’” by his enemies, Tristan protests his innocence again and again, saying he did not wish Voorstand any “harm”.63 In fact, his travels to Voorstand, if we believe him, are conceived as a harmless “Sirkus Tour of Saarlim”, intended to brighten the grim reality of his and Wally’s “wasted lives” in Efica.64 Tristan’s real feelings, though, are far more complicated, even for himself – especially if we remember that it is the Sirkus, not the people of Efica, whom he hates.65 Carey’s protagonist is a creature who has lived most of his life “‘in the Penumbra of your [Voorstand’s] Lives’”, who is drunk on “‘the light of your [Voorstand’s] Dreams’”.66 At the same time that he carries the aggression over Voorstand’s navigation cable and the poison waters it leaves in Efican seas, he dons the Bruder Mouse mask yet again. Thus Tristan, nolens volens, reverts to his old admiration for Voorstand’s glittering icons and bathes in Bruder Mouse’s comfort, relishing the popularity and the admiration it attracts in public and the feelings it stirs in Peggy Kram, who makes love to him because of his mythic costume. Tristan’s impersonation of Bruder Mouse thus paradigmatically expresses his family’s and his country’s ambivalence towards Voorstand. The individual characters’ mixed feelings about Voorstand reflect in the whole country. Voorstand can only export its culture to Efica because the latter has a penchant for it. Also, Efican culture has not even been invented yet, and for want of a father who could protect them and give them sufficient cultural nourishment Eficans actually depend on cultural imports from overseas. The grim reality, as formulated by Tristan, is this: “Our greatest defence is our culture, and the brutal truth is – we have none.”67 Eficans’ ambivalence about Voorstand is not restricted to its cultural life. It extends right into politics and even questions of defence. Voorstand’s military presence in Efica (they have a “ten-

63

Ibid., 231. Ibid., 243. 65 Ibid., 50. 66 Ibid., 414 (italics in the original). 67 Ibid., 231. 64

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battalion army” based in Efica68), especially their subterranean “navigation cable”, writes Tristan, is an issue that “divide[s] Eficans”. While the liberal Blue Party (Tristan’s mother runs as presidential candidate for them) feels “those unexplained cables to be a humiliating invasion, a reminder of our craven servility to another power”,69 the Reds with their “servility” and their “cynicism”70 figure as agents of their own destruction, as door-openers for foreign intrusion. Even Efica’s secret service turns out to be instrumental in the country’s self-inflicted servility, working closely together with Voorstand’s agents in Efica, “it sometimes being said that the DoS’s loyalty lay with the VIA [Voorstand’s secret service], not with the elected government of Efica”.71 By showing that Efica’s enslavement to the imported hegemonial culture is largely self-inflicted, Carey puts Voorstand’s “cultural imperialism”72 into perspective. He asks his readers to handle the antiimperial evidence found in the novel with care: after all, the narrative is commissioned, typically for Carey, to an ostentatiously unreliable narrator. Everything we know about Voorstand’s moral decrepitude, its hypocrisy, its ruthlessness and its perverted values, comes from Tristan who, as anti-imperial freedom fighter, has large personal stakes in his activities in Voorstand and his account thereof.73 This granted, Tristan Smith still is an unremitting portrayal of an oppressive imperial power. Voorstand pursues a ruthless strategy of keeping its client states on track and, in order to prevent them from getting lost to the “Alliance”,74 destabilizes and sabotages antiVoorstand opposition.75 To judge by the moral standards Tristan imparts to his narration, Voorstand is the opposite of everything Efica is, or at least thinks it is. Voorstand is powerful and mercilessly makes use of its political and military weight in dealing with its allies (as in

68

Ibid., 135. Ibid., 168 (italics in the original). 70 Ibid., 56. 71 Ibid., 35 (italics in the original). 72 Ibid., 170 (italics in the original). 73 Ibid., 231. 74 Ibid., 210. 75 Ibid., for instance, 194, 201-203, 214, 310, 337. 69

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the case of Efica) or, as it is, with its enemies.76 Efica is a strategic component in the defence policy of its big brother: Efica’s southern granite islands were now host to fifteen vital subterranean defence projects. Eficans would not be permitted to reject their twenty-five-year-old alliance with Voorstand.77

Tristan several times states that the “snivelling ‘alliance’”78 between both countries is utterly imbalanced, its conditions having been imposed by Voorstand rather than negotiated between the two partners. It is also symptomatic of this inequality that the cultural transfer between them works only in one direction. While Eficans, through their excessive exposure to Sirkus culture, know “the names of the steegs, the kanals, the parks, the bars, the Domes [of Voorstand]”,79 they themselves are “beneath [Voorstand’s] notice unless they want to use us for something”. It is a painful realization for Tristan that although Efica is Voorstand’s “little brother”, a kin that has “the same colour skin”, “speak[s] more or less the same language”, “know[s] the words of all their songs”, and “love[s] their heroes like they were our own” – Voorstanders actually “don’t notice us”.80 While Carey tries to give a very balanced account of the neocolonial relationship between Efica and Voorstand, his critique of Voorstand’s cultural and moral qualities is harsh. There are hardly any redeeming moments in his analysis of the fictionally transfigured American culture and its depraved morality and shallowness. The author concentrates his critique on Voorstand’s world of entertainment, which plays a crucial, ritualized role in their culture. In actual fact, Voorstand’s culture is so intricately connected with the country’s entertainment industry that it only seems to come to life by way of performance. It is, in short, a culture of appearance rather than essence; and worse still, the whole country turns out to be a sham, its righteous façade resting on Hollywood-like performances of its former 76

Ibid., 168. Ibid., 203; see also 202. 78 Ibid., 55. 79 Ibid., 356. 80 Ibid., 169; see also 299. 77

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greatness. The Bruders and their righteousness, in any case, have ceased to represent Voorstand. Voorstanders have “‘lost [their] values’”81 and only traces of their former goodness are left: ‘They’re a great people’ …. ‘That’s what a show like this teaches you. Theirs was a country that was founded on a principle. What you can still see in this Sirkus is their decency. I’d forgotten it. I spend all my time thinking about their hypocrisy. You don’t see decency when their dirigibles are bombing some poor country who tried to renegotiate their Treaty.’82

The moral guidance the Bruders once sought and found in the Sirkus as a form of religious revelling in their society’s goodness has been perverted by the entertainment industry and its profane (because moneyed) interests. The feeling of moral perversion is overpowering in the Voorstand Tristan visits. The contrast with their former selves has become unbearable even to Voorstanders. Peggy Kram, for instance, laments: ‘When the Saints walked Voorstand, that is how it was, just like it is in the Ghostdorps. We were decent people then. The Sirkus was not just an entertainment. Bruder Mouse was not a clown. We knew him when we saw him .… We did not rape and murder. We did not thieve. We were better then.’83

The contrast between the reality outside and the simulation of a better past brings to the fore the moral decline all the more clearly. That something has gone terribly awry with Voorstand’s mythic past and its famed goodness is demonstrated by Carey’s deployment of the Bruder Mouse Simulacrum. In the hyperreality of Voorstand’s present, the sacred Bruders have been replaced by the “computerdriven likeness of the mythic animals of the Franciscan Free Church”.84 Bruder Mouse hence “ha[s] become nothing more than a logo-type, the symbol for an imperialist mercantile culture”85 and as 81

Ibid., 407. Ibid., 168. 83 Ibid., 406. 84 Ibid., 422. 85 Ibid., 167. 82

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such is used by the author to ridicule Voorstand’s (and, as a matter of fact, America’s) excessive hero-worship, a habit alien to an author from a culture notorious for its “tall-poppy-syndrome”. The worshippers of the Mouse, people who adore Bruder Mouse so much that they “wan[t] to eat Bruder Mouse, to fuck him, smother him”,86 are fatally deluded. Peggy Kram for example, fails to see that the Bruder Mouse likeness Tristan uses for his impersonation is a simulacrum, ‘… a klootsac, a balls-up. The original Sirkus Mouse was like six foot tall. You see these early Bruders in the paintings. Dogs, Ducks, Mice, all as big as football players. In the beginning, of course, it was very religious. All God’s creatures, all that sort of thing. Maybe they was priests at one time but as long as I remember they were krakers, swartzers, thieves of one sort or another. Those Bruders did some awful stuff – murder, rape, terrible things. So now we have Creature Control Act – no Bruder in a public place can be over three foot six inches.’87

When Peggy discovers the true nature of the Mouse (which is inhabited by the monstrous appearance of Tristan), she learns how perverted her adoration of Voorstand’s icons has been and ends up deeply traumatized. Carey conceived Bruder Mouse as a simulacrum in the sense in which Jean Baudrillard has popularized the word: “a false assumption or display, a surface resemblance or imitation, of something.”88 In fact, in its exposure of the insubstantiality of Voorstand’s culture and the hypocritical nature of its highly cherished values, the novel calls for a reading along the lines of Baudrillard’s concept of simulation and the simulacrum with its inherent negation of the sign as value. Simulation, to Baudrillard, “is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal”.89 The Saarlim Sirkus does just that. In its performance of its culture’s greatness and goodness, it uses 86

Ibid., 317. Ibid., 321; cf. 287. 88 Oxford English Dictionary Online, www.oed.com (accessed 20 March 2010). 89 Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations”, in Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, trans. Jacques Mourrain et al., ed. and introd. Mark Poster, 1988, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Polity, 2001, 169. 87

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symbols that have long lost their referentiality; their value as signs is being negated: the righteousness the Bruder Mouse simulacra point to is long lost. They generate their own essentially hollow goodness. Therefore, their simulation is, in the words of Baudrillard, … no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes.90

Baudrillard illustrates this hyperreality by the example of Disneyland: Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.91

This breakdown of the difference between the real and its representation governs Carey’s entire novel, and so does the image of the idea of the theme park, which highlights Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality and simulation.92 Just as in Julian Barnes’ 1998 novel England, England, where the megalomaniac entrepreneur Jack Pitman 90

Ibid., 170. Ibid., 175 (italics in the original). 92 The theme park was already on Carey’s mind when he first conceived of his novel. Evidently, Carey’s attendance of the AAALS (American Association of Australian Literary Studies) conference in Winter Park, Florida (in 1990) and his subsequent visit to Disneyland supplied this conceit (see Robert Dessaix, “An Interview with Peter Carey”, Australian Book Review 167 [December/January 1994-95], 18-20). Tristan Smith is not the first novel in which Carey explores the motif of culture-as-theme park. He had already turned Australia into a gigantic theme park that parades national icons and deceives its visitors in Illywhacker (see below, Chapter Eleven). 91

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builds “an essence-of-England theme park on the Isle of Wight”,93 the Saarlim Sirkus in the Carey novel performs a culture that has been lost for a long time, preserved only in the Ghostdorps, the theme parks owned by Peggy Kram, in which actors perform their country’s “Great Historical Past”.94 Carey memorably illustrates the end of the “reality principle” in his novel by showing how Saarlim alias New York is about to be turned into one extended Ghostdorp, demonstrating Baudrillard’s contention that the “real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models – and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times”.95 Kram’s plans for an extended Ghostdorp are accordingly not modelled on the reality of Saarlim as it is or once was, but rather on her commercialized preserve of the past: ‘I tell you, this is what the Great Historical Past was like. It doesn’t really behove you to doubt me. History is my business .… Who else but me preserves the Great Historical Past? No one would know what happened yesterday if it wasn’t for the Ghostdorps.’96

In her and perhaps Voorstand’s collective memory, the heritage parks have replaced historical reality and, as nuclei for Kram’s plans, exemplify what is meant by the Baudrillardean precession of simulacra:

93 Vera Nünning, “The Invention of Cultural Traditions: The Construction and Deconstruction of Englishness in Julian Barnes’ England, England”, Anglia, CIXX/1 (October 2001), 60. 94 In the 1960s, the father of media criticism, Marshall McLuhan (1911-80), anticipated Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality, especially that of theme parks which, as simulacra of the real that no longer exists, in the end would become more desirable to the visitor than the real cities or countries they are modelled on. He thus foresaw the possibility of megalomaniac characters such as Carey’s Peggy Kram or Julian Barnes’ Jack Pitman in England, England. The essay collection by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983, is also noteworthy in this context, its point being that a national tradition and the cultural practices it comprises are often inventions constructed to serve a particular ideological or economic purpose. 95 Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations”, 170. 96 Carey, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, 406 (italics in the original).

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‘God damn, I am sick of being afraid … tired of being afraid of sicko men with knives and poisons …. I can buy the roads and parks back from the foreigners .… Everyone will be happy. It’s a very patriotic thing to do …. I’m going to give the citizens of Saarlim exactly what they need. Clean streets. Well-dressed people .… I’ll let all the decent folk go about their business .… Because I can run a clean Ghostdorp and I can run this city. I can have the parks safe all night long. I can have the streets tidy and neat. The grass in the park will be cut. It is so very simple. People will come from all over the world once again. We will be a great nation once again.’97

When the United States under George W. Bush accentuated the country’s “righteous might”98 increasingly noisily, insisting on the role of the world’s policeman, and when cultural and political commentators from all corners of the world united in their criticism of the imperialist policies that led to the Pax Americana of the younger Bush’s administration, the relevance of the political implications of Carey’s novel became clearer and clearer. An approach to Carey’s tale of a “re-imagined America”99 as “political fable” ceased to be “unsatisfactory” (as Woodcock had still maintained in 1996).100 As Carey confirms, the highly political act of the “dismissal of the Whitlam government in 1975 and the role I believe the C.I.A. played in that” was, after all, the “emotional engine” behind his narrative.101 Whether The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith is really convincing as a fictional biography of the eponymous protagonist is debatable – but I would argue, intentionally so. The novel is foremost a quest into postcolonial politics: the life of its protagonist merely provides the narrative scaffolding for this. It may well be that this is the reason why Woodcock witnessed a “lack of narrative conviction”102 in the novel. The assumption that Carey is preoccupied with something other than the life of his protagonist is corroborated when the reader finds out that the novel’s title is actually a misnomer, for, as we are informed, 97

Ibid., 408 (italics in the original). Phrase famously used by Franklin D. Roosevelt in his “Pearl Harbor Speech” (1941), s. http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/oddec7.html (accessed 20 March 2010). 99 Carey in Woodcock, Peter Carey, 112. 100 Woodcock, Peter Carey, 113. 101 Carey in Willbanks, “Peter Carey on The Tax Inspector and The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith: A Conversation with Ray Willbanks”, 16. 102 Woodcock, Peter Carey, 115. 98

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Tristan’s “unusual life [is] really just beginning” at the point where the novel ends.103 The issues Carey discusses here are of immediate relevance for Australians. The Sirkus that washes its foreign culture across the Efican islands has its counterpart in the American film and music industry that many Australians feel has unduly infiltrated and lastingly colonized them, threatening to turn the country into Hollywood South.104 There is undoubtedly also a conspicuous imbalance in the political and military power structure between the United States and Australia.105 Australia paid for American support by having foreign soldiers stationed in the country during World War II, and later, by going “all the way with LBJ”,106 or very recently, by following its ally into its War on Iraq. In The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith Carey exemplifies (and magnifies) instances of Australia’s dependence and thus sharpens his compatriots’ senses to the political and cultural reality of their country. One might, of course, argue that just like Tristan has made peace with his father Bill, Australians have come to terms with the American presence in their lives and that Carey’s The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith has therefore lost its relevance. But as Australia (bound militarily and politically through the ANZUS treaty of 1951) in 2003 was drawn into yet another war which it had originally nothing to do with, and as John Howard’s aspirations as America’s regional deputy

103

Carey, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, 414 (cf. above, p. 87 of this book). See Richard Waterhouse, “Popular Culture”, in Americanization and Australia, eds Philip Bell and Roger Bell, Sydney: U of New South Wales P, 1998, 56; and Philip and Roger Bell, “Introduction: The Dilemmas of ‘Americanisation’”, in Americanization and Australia, 10. 105 Although Australian complaints about Americanization have shifted to the cultural sphere since the rise of a global economy in the 1980s, economic indicators illustrate the imbalance in the countries’ relationship most strikingly. According to Bell and Bell, the United States in the 1980s and early 1990s enjoyed a trade surplus with Australia greater than that with any other nation (Philip and Roger Bell, Implicated: The United States in Australia, Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1993, 7). 106 Prime Minister Harold Holt had adopted Johnson’s slogan to confirm his government’s full support of its ally in Indochina (see MacIntyre, A Concise History of Australia, 225). 104

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recalled Harold Holt’s submissiveness,107 the country’s obligations as junior partner once again became frighteningly clear. The price of freedom that Australia paid in 2003 was so huge that it caused the biggest wave of protest in that summer the country had ever witnessed. Yet, as the novel demonstrates, the close relationship between Australia and the United States and a critical awareness of it might, in the end, prove beneficial to both. Both countries have seen themselves mirrored in each other, which is hardly surprising, given their shared experiences as former settler colonies with a strong British component and given their close relationship over the years. The novel makes this quite clear. It is one of Tristan’s motives for travelling to Voorstand to find out who he is by coming to terms with his metaphorical and actual father across the Pacific in Voorstand. Bill Clinton spelled out the positive potential this partnership has for both when he addressed the Australian parliament in 1996: “in one another … we have seen a distant mirror of our better selves, reflections of liberty and decency, of openness and vitality.”108 Looking to America might therefore sensitize Australian readers to the least excusable aspect of their history – their role as colonizers within the country.

107

In 1999, Prime Minister John Howard characterized Australia’s position in the Asia-Pacific region as the United States’ peacekeeping deputy. This “Howard Doctrine” incurred much criticism during his administration. 108 Bill Clinton, “Remarks to the Australian Parliament”, 20 November 1996, http://ipmall.info/hosted_resources/ippresdocs/ippd_102.pdf.

PART FOUR CAREY’S BIOGRAPHY OF AUSTRALIA: AUSTRALIAN IDENTITY

CHAPTER TEN “TRYING TO MAKE OUT THE SOUTHERN CROSS”, DILEMMA OF AUSTRALIAN IDENTITY

OR,

THE

Almost everything I have ever written has been concerned with questions of ‘national identity’, a seemingly oldfashioned project that seems, to me, an alarmingly modern concern.1 One of the great lies Australians tell themselves is how proud, free, independent and anti-authoritarian they are.2

Herbert Badgery, self-declared “nationalist”3 and advocate of Australianness, is witness to three successive generations of colonial masters in Australia: the British, who, in Leah’s diction, steal the land in the first place; the Americans, whose exports such as the Ford are a “tumour”4 in Badgery’s life; and lastly, the Japanese, whose Mitsubishi company takes over Australia’s-Own Best Pet Shop in the World. These successive eras of colonization have made a deep imprint in the national psyche, leaving Australian identity in a state of disorientation. Postcolonial Australians (not only those in Carey’s Illywhacker) are therefore desperately trying to determine who they are. Herbert Badgery is a case in point. In Book Three of Illywhacker, Carey has his protagonist explain:

1

See BBC, “Peter Carey: Australian Heavyweight”, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ entertainment/1550985.stm (accessed 13/05/2008). 2 David Sexton, “Interview with Peter Carey”, Literary Review [London], LXXXIV (June 1985), 54. 3 Carey, Illywhacker, 223. 4 Ibid., 75.

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Badgery, Carey seems to insinuate here, cannot find the Southern Cross, one of the most well-known symbols of Australia, because it is an elusive invention by the country’s identity and image-makers. In contemporary cultural discourse, identity is a key issue. It has even been seen as integral to the postcolonial project worldwide. Simon During explains: “The post-colonial desire is the desire of the decolonized communities for an identity ….”6 To assert a distinct sense of being in the world proved a particularly difficult venture in former British settler colonies because of the intricate relationship between identity-formation and language, for, to put it bluntly, the “choice of language is the choice of identity”.7 As David Malouf outlines in his most recent inventory of Australian consciousness, an essay called “Made in England” (2003), the Australian language is a “way of laying out experience, of seeing, that comes with the syntax, a body of half-forgotten customs, and events, fables, insights, jokes, that makes up its idioms, a literature that belongs, since there is nothing that ties it mystically to one patch of soil, as much to the Englishspeaking reader in Perth, Australia as in Perth, Scotland”.8 In postcolonial studies, language is therefore a central field of interest. As Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin explain, “control over language” was, after all, one of the “main features of imperial oppression”.9 The language spoken by the colonizers, by force of its alleged authority, served the Empire as a kind of “software” for maintaining control over the subject peoples (whereas the physical oppression in the form of military presence constituted the “hardware” of the system). Installed under the guise of a liberal education, language helped the British to maintain their hegemony in fields such as historiography, politics, and all other spheres of culture. In the 5

Ibid., 486. Simon During, “Postmodernism or Post-Colonialism Today”, in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 125. 7 Ibid., 126. 8 David Malouf, “Made in England: Australia’s British Inheritance” (2003), in 4 Classic Quarterly Essays on the Australian Story, Melbourne, Black, 2006, 69-70. 9 Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, 7. 6

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course of the imperial appropriation of new colonies, the language of the metropolitan centre was concomitantly defined as the standard and that spoken on the fringes of Empire as a variety, an impure variant of the King’s and Queen’s English. The same process of marginalization and downgrading of the peripheral was operative in other spheres of culture as well. The psychological damage done to the self-confidence of Australian colonials, for example, has proved to be profound. In his seminal study The Australian Tradition (1958), A.A. Phillips famously diagnosed his compatriots – whom he saw haunted by “a minatory Englishman”10 – with having a serious form of the “cultural cringe”. This “disease of the Australian mind”,11 according to Phillips, had caused Australians to feel culturally worthless, thinking of their Antipodean home as a place “Where second-hand Europeans pullulate / Timidly on the edge of alien shores”, in the words of A.D. Hope.12 The cringe has long delayed processes of cultural maturation and setting apart from the metropolis. Instead of centring their peripheral cultural and linguistic variant, cringing Australians tended to feel utter disrespect for what they could call their own in terms of culture. Rosa Campbell Praed memorably summed up her fellow Australians’ disdain for their language in her 1881 novel Policy and Passion: “To be colonial is to talk Australian slang; to be ... everything that is abominable”.13 Identity-production was further complicated by the lack of an “alternative pre-colonial metaphysic [which made] the assertion of ‘Otherness’ more difficult”.14 Unlike the indigenous populations in India or Africa, who could resort to their precolonial culture (or what was left of it) and especially the language of their ancestors,15 settlers in Australia had no indigenous culture to retreat to 10

A.A. Phillips, The Australian Tradition: Studies in a Colonial Culture (1958), 2nd edn, Melbourne: Cheshire, 1966, 94. 11 Ibid., 89. 12 A.D. Hope, “Australia” (1939), in The Penguin Book of Australian Verse, ed. Harry Heseltine, Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1972, 190. 13 Rosa Campbell Praed, Policy and Passion, London: Bentley, 1881, 154. 14 Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, 137. 15 It is for this reason that Ngugi wa Thiong’o, as outlined in his book Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, London: James Currey, 1986, resorted to writing in Gikuyu language at a certain stage in his career.

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in order to escape the towering culture of the metropolis. For them, only great “feat[s] of metaphysical disentanglement” could bring about a certain distancing from the colonial father figure.16 The road to Antipodean distinctness, to Australianness, was therefore fraught with many obstacles, which might explain why at some point in the history of the last 200 years, the process of identity fabrication went wrong down under. In their attempt to assert difference, Australians opted for exclusiveness rather than inclusiveness, leaving “most Australians … with the problem that they are not ‘typical Australians’ at all”.17 From a German point of view, the problem is not easy to understand; after all, most Germans would consider it a blessing not to be regarded as typical Germans with their supposed lack of affection, their latent xenophonia, their efficiency, inflexibility, tidiness and punctuality. In Australia, however, being excluded from the national stereotype actually entailed sanctions. Women are a case in point, and so are ethnic minorities such as the country’s natives (who were not even granted citizenship until 1967). The glaring inadequacy of such identity-fabrications has made the quest for a more inclusive, more representative idea of themselves a “national obsession”18 for Australians. Many of the country’s most respected cultural commentators view this national navel gazing as useless, possibly even detrimental to the country’s mental health. The distinguished journalist John Douglas Pringle (former editor of the Sydney Morning Herald), for instance, referred to the identity debate as Australia’s “aching tooth”; David Malouf, impatiently, once described Australians as “endlessly fussing and fretting over identity”; to the poet Les Murray the debate seemed “crippl[ing to] the spiritual energies”; and Donald Horne, author of The Lucky Country (1964), said Australians might as well settle with the fact that this kind of debate would lead nowhere, for, as he asserted, there never had been and never would be “something called the Australian national identity”.19 Even if the quest for Australianness has, indeed, not 16

Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, 137. 17 Hodge and Mishra, Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the PostColonial Mind, xv. 18 John Carroll, Intruders in the Bush, Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1982, viii. 19 All quoted in Tony Stephens, “Mate, You’re a Legend”, Sydney Morning Herald,

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unearthed the true national character, the spokespersons of the debate can at least claim to have raised public awareness of the old stereotypes and encouraged Australians to come up with a more inclusive idea of themselves. How, then, did Australians arrive at their multicultural idea of themselves? How did they make the transition from Russel Ward’s legendary Australian, the “‘hard case’”, the “practical man, rough and ready in his manners and quick to decry any appearance of affectation in others”20 to recent (if ironic) sketches of the typical Australian as “educated, suburban, from a migrant background and working in a service industry”.21 Identity-construction in multicultural Australia Over the last two decades, Australia has noticeably come in from the margin. As the country celebrated its bicentennial (1988), the Sydney Olympics (2000) and its centenary as a Federation (2001), the fifth continent has leapt into the eyes of the world. All these events have acted as catalysts, causing Australians to polish up their prevailing image as an exile for transplanted Anglo-Celts, a place where misogynism and racism are rife. The renovations of their image Australians have undertaken in preparation for these national and international events were programmatic and have proved effective. During the Sydney Olympics Australians presented themselves as an easy-going, tolerant or at least as a perfectly politically-correct multicultural nation willing to come to terms with the nightmares of its past – a perfect simulation of the image the country’s tourism industry propagates of Australia, namely that of the “best country in the world”. Through his fictions, Peter Carey has taken an active part in the country’s discourse on identity. The paradox that Australia “has continued to be portrayed as an Anglo-Celtic country long after it stopped being one” informs his writings to a considerable degree. The racial and ethnic minorities, the non-Anglo-Celtic Australians, which

17 May 2003, np (italics in original). 20 Russel Ward, The Australian Legend (1958), 2nd edn, Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1978, 16-17. 21 Donald Horne, “We Should Be so Lucky”, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 August 2004, np.

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Carey feels have “not been represented enough”,22 have consequently found their way into several of his books. In The Tax Inspector, for example, the Takises, Katalanises and Katakises, the Mazonis, Papandreous, and Pavlovics, the Hos and the Alaverdians, all disrupt the predominance of the Catchprices and the Tubbs, the Dawsons, the Petersons and the Wrights, and turn the novel into a multicultural panorama. In Illywhacker, likewise, the Vogelnests, Jenszes, Joungebloeds, Alkemades and Dellioses, Goldsteins and Kaletskys, the Los, Goons, and Carlobenes, add cultural and ethnic colour and bear clear witness to Carey’s contribution to the identity debate and to his rewriting of notions of an exclusively Anglo-Celtic Australia. Those of Carey’s novels that have a multicultural inventory of characters pay tribute to the fact that present-day Australia is one of the most successful experiments in multiculturalism worldwide.23 Australian social scientists boastfully declare that Australia has “developed some of the most advanced policies and practices in the world for managing cultural and linguistic diversity”. Indeed, since the demise of the White Australia Policy in the late sixties and early seventies, the fifth continent has effectually ceased to be a mere extension of British society. While in 1945 Australia was an “unusually homogenous society” with some 90 per cent of its citizens born in the country, speaking English and professing either to the Anglican, Protestant or Catholic faith, today, only three generations later, Australia comprises citizens from roughly 120 different national backgrounds speaking more than 50 major languages and practising more than 40 major religions.24 Since 1945, more than six million migrants (increasingly non-British) from overseas have arrived so that today more than 40 per cent of the Australian population were born

22 Thomas E. Tausky, “Getting the Corner Right: An Interview with Peter Carey”, Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada, IV (Fall 1990), 32. 23 Of course, the Howard government’s stance on immigration, especially their tough line towards the detention of asylum seekers and illegal entrants has incurred much criticism. The present government under Kevin Rudd (since 2007) has adopted a more liberal and active policy on immigration and multicultural affairs. In 2008 the Multicultural Advisory Council was installed to advise government on how to increase social cohesion and how to stem the problems of racism. 24 Stephen Castles et al., Mistaken Identity: Multiculturalism and the Decline of Nationalism in Australia, Sydney: Pluto, 1988, 244, 1.

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overseas or have at least one parent born overseas. Hence, Horne’s above-quoted ironic observation appears not too far-fetched. Recent literary assessments of the multicultural reality confirm the optimistic voices reported above. In their appraisals of contemporary Australian consciousness, Peter Carey and David Malouf celebrate a nation that is in the process of being reborn within multicultural and multiethnic parameters.25 The new Australia emerging from these analyses of the national psyche appears as an open-minded place, more or less at ease with the government’s immigration policies (more in Malouf, less in Carey). The Smiths, McGraths and Bennetts, all dwellers of earlier concepts that saw Australia as a “new Britannia in another world” – as William Charles Wentworth wrote in his 1823 poem “Australasia” – are joined by new Australians. One such representative of the new Australia in Carey’s 30 Days in Sydney is a fifteen-year-old Sydney girl named Yianna Souleles, who was to be the second runner to carry the Olympic torch. Carey writes: She was an Australian of Greek descent. She was not only a gifted athlete but also very pretty. She was perfect. She was us, the new Australia.

A scandal broke out when “Souleles was bumped” by the IOC and replaced by the daughter of Kevan Gosper (then Vice President of the IOC). For Carey, this is more than a case of IOC corruption, and more than just another example of the general corruption he sees in Australia’s business life. For him, the Souleles case is meaningful because when “suddenly the old Australia showed its face, rearing up from deep in the CBD”,26 the antagonizing forces of the old and the new clashed. This sort of cultural resistance, coupled with corruption, however, does not change the overall impression that present-day Australians are making an effort to jettison some of the anachronisms of the past – a process in the course of which the representatives of the

25

Carey, 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account; David Malouf, A Spirit of Play: The Making of Australian Consciousness, and “Made in England: Australia’s British Inheritance” (2003), in 4 Classic Quarterly Essays on the Australian Story, 170. 26 Carey, 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account, 101.

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corrupt past, the “[k]issers of royal arses”,27 are slowly neutralized by the new multicultural Australia. David Malouf’s analysis of the Australian state of mind towards the end of the twentieth century, A Spirit of Play (1998), is written on a similar note. Malouf emphasizes that over the last 30 years, ever since the “Australian dream ... of a single superior race on the continent”28 was abandoned, there has been a change not only of the mind but also of the psyche of Australians. A walk down Lygon Street in Melbourne, writes Malouf, suffices to indicate this “change of a peculiar kind” and its manifestations in the open-minded way people accept foreign styles in fashion and in dining out. Like Carey, Malouf observes a sharp contrast between old and new. The attitude marking Australian savoir vivre of the late twentieth-century, says Malouf, “make[s] the sharpest imaginable contrast with the way we were even two decades ago, the way, in that far-off time, that we saw life and the possibilities of living”.29 Both Malouf and Carey agree on the extraordinary quality of multiculturalism down under. Like Malouf, who describes changes of attitude that transformed Anglo-Celtic Australians into a “warmclimate people”30 of a “loosely Mediterranean” coinage,31 Carey observes a “particular relationship between the races”.32 As a tool in demographic engineering, multiculturalism in Australia was long inhibited by the reluctance of the white settler culture to accept nonBritish influences. According to Malouf, Australian tolerance … was hammered out painfully and over nearly a 150 years in the long process by which Catholics and Protestants, the Irish and the rest, turned away from ‘history’ and learned to live with one another in a way that, for all its bitterness of distrust and resentment, was never murderous as it had been elsewhere, even in times of the greatest stress ….33

27

Ibid., 223. Malouf, A Spirit of Play: The Making of Australian Consciousness, 106. 29 Ibid., 103. 30 Ibid., 102. 31 Ibid., 103. 32 Carey, 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account, 229. 33 Malouf, A Spirit of Play: The Making of Australian Consciousness, 109. 28

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Indeed, multiculturalism in Australia is distinctly different from multicultural concepts in other Anglo-Saxon cultures, different, for instance, from the British way of managing racial and ethnic diversity34 or from the classic (but by now outmoded) American ideal of the melting-pot.35 At a time when America already famously embraced multicultural (but, of course, famously assimilationist) policies, Australia was just about to be born as an outpost of British civilization. Founded on the principle of racial exclusivity, the racist definition of the country (based on the infamous White Australia Policy from 1901) effectually prevented the American principle of unity in diversity to take roots. It was only after the World Wars that a first change of paradigms in Australian immigration set in. In 1945 a department of immigration was established and with it the principle of “populate or perish”. To satisfy the great demand for labour in the growing and expanding Australian economy, the state-sponsored immigration programme primarily called upon workers from Britain, but also tolerated “‘racially acceptable’ Eastern and Northern Europeans” who could be fully assimilated to the Anglo-Celtic norm as “‘New Australians’”.36 When almost three decades later, Britain realigned its economy to the exigencies of its post-imperial present (signified by its entry into the EEC in 1973), the sheer will to survive in demographic and economic terms left Australia no choice but to abandon its legal insurance against large-scale immigration from non-European countries. As Australia gradually abrogated the White Australia Policy,37 the country also had to reconceive its management of racial diversity. Over the last 30 years, Australia has consequently replaced the doctrine of assimilation to the contested core culture to that of unity in 34

British multiculturalism has received much criticism in recent years. Writers like Salman Rushdie (in The Satanic Verses) and Hanif Kureishi (in The Buddha of Suburbia and in the short story/screenplay “My Son the Fanatic”) have portrayed it as being based on the principle of exclusiveness rather than on inclusiveness and therefore as being conducive to racism and racial discord. 35 See Roland Hagenbüchle, “From Common Ground to Common Project”, in Negotiations of America’s National Identity, eds Roland Hagenbüchle and Josef Raab, Transatlantic Perspectives 9, 2 vols, Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2000, I, 7. 36 Castles et al., Mistaken Identity: Multiculturalism and the Decline of Nationalism in Australia, 23-24. 37 It was finally abandoned under the Whitlam government in 1972.

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diversity. In view of the demographic development,38 the everincreasing interlocking with the growing South-East Asian economies and the military and strategic stakes Australia has in the Asia Pacific region, the country only has two options in the long run: either to “run or walk”39 to Asia. Recent multicultural definitions of Australian selfhood and consciousness therefore cannot but recognize the Asian reality of their country. All these developments have given present-day Australians “a considerable choice on the menu of national identity”40 and have indeed come a long way from Ward’s characterization of the typical Australian. The core culture has not only been enlarged by Asians, though. The last two decades especially have also seen an increased visibility of Aborigines in the national self-awareness. The recognition of Australianness as being at least in part Aboriginal is the result of a fundamental rethinking. It is as part of the reconciliation with the country’s Aborigines that politicians and others involved in the identity industry have started to acknowledge the Aboriginal as a defining element in the character of the Australian nation.41 Considering the fact that it took less than half a century to completely overhaul conceptions of the national self, any attempt at trying to determine who Australians are must be predicated on the notion that the Australian identity is one “forever in-the-making”.42 With terra nullius looming large on the minds of a considerable part of the country’s intelligentsia, identity-constructions at times of major demographic changes are bound to be particularly ephemeral. When multiculturalized European nation-states can still refer back to a common past (even if it is only imagined, as Benedict Anderson tells 38 According to the 2006 census almost 50 per cent of all immigrants to Australia come from an Asian country today (www.tinyurl.com/censusaustralia2006; accessed 20 March 2010). 39 Rawdon Dalrymple, “Perspectives on Australian Foreign Policy 1996”, Australian Journal of International Affairs, LI/2 (July 1997), 173. 40 Jeff Archer, “Situating Australian National Identity in Theory and Practice”, in The Politics of Identity in Australia, ed. Geoffrey Stokes, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997, 23. 41 See Barbara Nicholson Roberta Sykes, “True Black – True Blue: Aboriginal Influence on Australian Identity”, in Identifying Australia in Postmodern Times, ed. Livio Dobrez, Canberra: Australian National UP, 1994, 165-74. 42 Identifying Australia in Postmodern Times, vii.

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us) which once unified the nation in cultural, ethnic or religious terms, white Australia is hard pressed for such a self-vindication when, in the face of terra nullius, it lacks the territorial legitimacy as a nation. Deconstructing myths of identity Revisions of traditional notions of Australian identity have proceeded on the assumption that identity is a socio-cultural fabrication, a fiction constructed for specific purposes either by specific groups within a society or by society at large. The stereotypes used by identity-makers have turned out to serve a similar function, as social identity theory tells us: For the individual, stereotypes served the cognitive function of systematizing and simplifying the environment, and the motivational function of representing and preserving important social values. At the group level, stereotypes contributed to the creation and maintenance of group beliefs which were then used to explain large-scale social events and justify various forms of collective action.43 [Italics in original]

Identity and the stereotypes it comprises therefore are not a natural given, not in any way “already there” in a culture. From the writings of Australian identity-critics such as Richard White, John Carroll, Geoffrey Stokes or Miriam Dixson, identity emerges as antiessentialist and therefore provisional. The coherent and essentialist master narrative of nationalist concepts such as Ward’s typical Australian has been substituted by notions of hybridity and transculturality. In the course of the transition from Anglo-Celtic to multicultural Australia, the unified subject of monocultural Australia was replaced by free-floating subjects in a multicultural, post-British national context. Commentators on the identity debate have stressed again and again the constructed nature of Australian identity. To expose the methods of identity-construction and the mechanisms by which the national type was instituted in Australia was one of the main objectives of academics from all sorts of social sciences and the humanities in 43

Penelope J. Oakes, S. Alexander Haslam, and John C. Turner, Stereotyping and Social Reality, Oxford: Blackwell, 1994, 85.

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general. They considered Australia an “imagined political community” of the kind Benedict Anderson described in his book of that title within which several groups were involved in the construction and reconstruction of identities as well as in the interpretation of their pasts, presents and futures. The notion of identity as a field of cultural contestation wherein several societal groups try to assert their interests has, according to Richard White, opened up the discussion about the ideological and political motivations of those engaged in the construction of images of their nation. White writes: There is no ‘real’ Australia waiting to be uncovered. A national identity is an invention. There is no point asking whether one version of this essential Australia is truer than another because they are all intellectual constructs, neat, tidy, comprehensible – and necessarily false .... When we look at ideas about national identity, we need to ask, not whether they are true or false, but what their function is, whose creation they are, and whose interest they serve.44

For an analysis of Peter Carey’s fictional biography of Australia and the literary revision of established notions of the Australian character that he presents in it, poststructuralist modes of inquiry are very fruitful. The stress poststructuralism lays on the linguistic constructedness of reality in general and notions of personal and national selfhood in particular is highly instructive for understanding the author’s methods of rewriting the personality and identity of his biographee, Australia. As will alight from the following chapter, Carey systematically attacks traditional notions of Australianness, and, in doing this, deconstructs the binarism underpinning earlier constructions of national identity. Such a revision of identity owes much to Derridean deconstruction which, since its inception, has exposed how the Western world is mapped in terms of binary oppositions which were traditionally used to establish hierarchies in the social order. Deconstructive readings of culture have revealed how through the construction of a societal norm epistemic violence was exerted against signs or meanings that were not privileged by the predominant forces in society. While hierarchies 44

White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688-1980, viii.

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of meaning and truth in praxi are hard to avoid, deconstruction has, at least, helped us to gain an understanding of their effects. It has shown how woman, for instance, was instituted as “the opposite, the ‘other’ of man”: … she is non-man, defective man, assigned a chiefly negative value in relation to the male first principle. But equally man is what he is only by virtue of ceaselessly shutting out this other or opposite, defining himself in antithesis to it .... Woman is not just an other in the sense of something beyond his ken, but an other intimately related to him as the image of what he is not, and therefore as an essential reminder of what he is. Man therefore needs this other even as he spurns it, is constrained to give a positive identity to what he regards as no-thing. Not only is his own being parasitically dependent upon the woman, and upon the act of excluding and subordinating her, but one reason why such exclusion is necessary is because she may not be quite so other after all. Perhaps she stands as a sign of something in man himself which he needs to repress, expel beyond his own being, relegate to a securely alien region beyond his own definitive limits. Perhaps what is outside is also somehow inside, what is alien also intimate ….45

Deconstruction has provided the critical tools necessary to detect the mechanisms by which a cultural norm – which effectually excluded the other, the abnormal, from the communal image – was installed. In Australia it has revealed how typical Australians defined themselves in relation and opposition to atypical (“un-Australian”) Australians, how an “order of sameness” was created which, according to gender historian Kay Schaffer, included all Australianborn men (as long as they were heterosexual); Anglo-Irish Australianborn men and women; Australian bush dwellers (but never the Chinese); “mates” involved together at important moments of national life (diggers, Anzacs, union comrades); naturalized English-speaking migrants (without foreign accents); other naturalized citizens (as long as they were white); and rarely, naturalized citizens from Southern European or South-East Asian backgrounds and Aborigines.46 45 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), 2nd edn, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996, 115. 46 Kay Schaffer, Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural

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Based on such rigid self/other dichotomies, the Anglo-Celtic, masculine and heterosexual norm has for most of Australia’s history excluded large parts of the Australian public from Australianness. Women are a case in point. According to gender historian Miriam Dixson, they were relegated to the role of cultural and historical “pygmies” in a society that elevated its males to the role of the dominant cultural norm and established the female as the male’s reverse side. Femininity, as the purportedly negative adjunct of masculinity, was thus exiled to the status of being essentially unAustralian. While the ideal Australian man in such conceptions had to be a practical improviser with rough and ready manners, laid back, fiercely independent and freedom-loving, given to drinking, swearing and gambling, the ideal female counterpart, according to Dixson, was conceived of as “so colourless that she seem[ed] mentally backwards”.47 The deconstruction of such misleading images is an integral part of Peter Carey’s fictions. The picture he conveys of Australia and Australians differs considerably from the one the country’s leading image-makers have perpetuated. Through the self-reflexivity of his novels, stereotypes of identity are foregrounded and exposed as being highly deceptive. The author reminds us that just like histories are human-made compositions, identities are, too. They serve the special needs and desires of their creators, be they individuals or certain groups within society. Under the writer’s scrutiny the frail construction of the Australian legend quickly disintegrates; the shiny façade Australians put on gets exposed as show and ostentation. From Carey’s novels, a new Australia emerges that allows enough room for multiple identities. Carey’s rethinking of Australian identity is an integral part of what I take to be his project of rewriting his country’s biography. As has been outlined, it bears striking similarities with deconstructivist procedures. His choice of characters in particular illustrates the emancipatory and recuperative use to which Derridean thought can be put. His creative writings are peopled by fictional Australians who can be read as comments on the contradictions and ruptures produced in Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988, 12. 47 Miriam Dixson, The Real Matilda: Women and Identity in Australia 1788 to the Present (1976), rev. edn, Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1984, 12.

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the text of Australian history by the afore-mentioned mechanisms of exclusion. Carey’s portrayal of gender roles (as the next chapter will show) reveals how the author rewrites the characteristics traditionally assigned to Australian men and women. As will be seen, Carey’s nonconformist male and female characters, oppositional as they are in the historic environment of a society based on exclusion rather than inclusion, often even bear the hallmark of Derridean thought: they flaunt the traces of their excluded others. By rescuing the other from his/her/its Antipodean oblivion, Carey rewrites the dramatis personae of Australian history. Notions of identity that were based on the undisputed predominance of a specific group within Australian society in the past are thus rendered untenable. Such revision is most evident when Carey reconceives the role women have played in the national development. Carey’s female characters, amongst them many “real Matildas” (name given to strong and charismatic women by Miriam Dixson), as a rule resist the men’s attempts to expulse them from the communal image. The reassessment of the relative importance of men and women in Australian history is so pertinent in the novels that it even appears programmatic. Whether Carey himself would want his fiction to be seen as a piece of revisionist gender history is not clear, but it is not really relevant for the following analysis, which clearly shows that the author’s texts constantly overhaul the traditional behavioural patterns attributed to men and women and recast their experience in a number of the most significant fields of human experience down under.

CHAPTER ELEVEN THE REAL MATILDA: RE-INSCRIBING THE “PYGMIES” OF AUSTRALIAN CULTURE My daughter lives in a fairy world I have made for her, and they would not tolerate her in open society in New South Wales where they hate women like us with a passion .…1

It was one of the most memorable moments of the Sydney Olympics in the year 2000 when “Waltzing Matilda”, the unofficial national anthem and battle hymn of the obstinate republic, resounded from the 110.000 capacity crowd in the Stadium Australia. What captured the souls of folk legend Slim Dusty and his record audience was, surprising to non-Australians, not an incantation of some legendary female Australian. To feminist historian Miriam Dixson, “Waltzing Matilda” even represents one of the negative highlights of the antifemale tradition in Australian thought. A.B. Paterson’s folk song, set by a billabong (a waterhole in the bush), excludes women and celebrates men, represented in the song by a squatter, a swagman, and troopers. The anti-female tendency of the hymn only becomes apparent once the Australian idiom is decoded: to “waltz one’s Matilda” means to “carry a swag.” This, Dixson argues, effectually degrades women to the position of objects possessed by men; a swag, after all, is the bundle of personal belongings of the iconic Australian swagman.2 Such more or less obvious abasement of women is, by no means, a singular phenomenon in Australian cultural history. Gender historians such as Dixson have observed “a curiously low standing of women”3 throughout Australian history. Dixson proceeds on sociologist Louis 1

Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 74. Dixson, The Real Matilda, 11. 3 Ibid., 60. 2

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Hartz’s assumption that for want of an aristocracy and a proper middle class, the “lower orders” in Australia had “a unique influence on our national mores”.4 Those socially inferior strata of colonial society, according to Dixson, projected their frustrations on their women as “a largely unconscious device to make up for the anguish they experienced as a result of their own demeaned position on the social ladder”.5 It is this kind of psychological cringing that Carey describes in Oscar and Lucinda when he writes about Irishmen who “had been beaten and humiliated by the English soldiers for so many centuries that they must, like farmyard poultry, turn around and find a weaker creature to strike at themselves”.6 Today’s intersexual relations in Australia have been largely determined in a past that, from the point of view of gender history, has been “unusually steeped in misogyny”.7 The fact that this history has for a long time been almost exclusively retrieved and reconstructed by male historians, who tended focused on “the lives and achievements of males” in order to affirm “their present identity through a celebration of their past selves”,8 has incurred much criticism from gender historians over the last two to three decades. The nationalist tradition in particular has been under constant attack ever since the rise of female voices in Australian cultural and historical discourse. Australian nationalist historiography, which feminist historian Patricia Grimshaw sees per se as a masculine myth,9 systematically faded out female voices relying instead solely on the ingredients at hand from the 1890s, most of which had been provided by the creators of the bush myth: Lawson, Furphy, and Paterson. The same holds true for constructions of the Australian national character – they are “by males about males”. As a result of this, Dixson argues, “women figure as pygmies in the culture of the present and are almost obliterated from the annals of the past”.10 4

Louis Hartz, The Founding of New Societies, New York: Harcourt, 1964, 3. Dixson, The Real Matilda, 60. 6 Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 88. 7 Dixson, The Real Matilda, 13. 8 Ibid., 12. 9 Patricia Grimshaw, “Women in History: Reconstructing the Past”, in Women, Social Science and Public Policy, eds Jacqueline Goodnow and Carole Pateman, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1985, 33. 10 Dixson, The Real Matilda, 13, 12. 5

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In a conversation I had with Peter Carey in New York in 2000, the author avowed that he is very fond of many of Dixson’s ideas. This clearly shows in his writings. They follow the iconoclasm of feminist historians whose attacks against the historical silencing of women had the “combined effect of assailing the masculinist assumptions upon which almost all previous Australian history had been grounded”.11 In his novels, Carey entitles women, the doubly colonized sex in Australian cultural history, to a voice in history and re-inscribes them into the Australian tradition. His novels feature all sorts of strongwilled and charismatic women: Lucinda and Elizabeth Leplastrier in Oscar and Lucinda, the snake-dancer Leah Goldstein and Phoebe McGrath in Illywhacker, Ellen Kelly in True History of the Kelly Gang, Mercy Larkin in Jack Maggs, and Felicity Smith in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith. They all stand their ground in an essentially hostile patriarchal society. With these female characters the author not only reallocates those of his biographee’s character traits traditionally associated with a particular sex, but he also actually rewrites the roles men and especially women have played in Australian history.12 “A fire and slippers”: male and female attitudes towards freedom and independence “Oh, how pleasant it is for a man to be looked after ….”,13 says Herbert Badgery in Illywhacker when he manages yet again to get himself “put up” at a friend’s place. Badgery acts in complete denial of the assumption that Australian men are fiercely independent and freedom-loving. He rather fulfills the stereotype of Australian women who are traditionally believed to have a preference for containment and the safety of home and hearth.14 If we adopt Graeme Turner’s view that “narratives are ultimately produced by the culture ... and assume forms that are articulations of the values, beliefs – the

11

Rob Pascoe, The Manufacture of Australian History, Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1979, 109. 12 Kate Grenville’s Joan Makes History, St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1988, is therefore an interesting intertext to Carey’s fictions. 13 Carey, Illywhacker, 333. 14 See Schaffer, Women and the Bush, 20.

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ideology – of the culture”,15 then the masculinist tradition in Australian writing, which in their narrative of past Australian experience has cemented gender characteristics over the decades, is a significant barometer of how powerful these views actually were. Carey, reflecting late twentieth-century thought on gender history, undermines stereotype assumptions by featuring characters whose personalities are disposed in a way that renders untenable traditional views and sometimes even reverses them. The motif of captivity, one of the major metonyms of Australian literature16 and a frequently used trope in Carey’s fictions, again and again provides the occasion for assessing the characters’ attitudes towards confinement. The actions they take or do not take against being confined are telling and indicative of the revision of assumptions about gender roles. Oscar, Lucinda and Miriam Chadwick as well as Herbert Badgery and his lovers Phoebe Badgery and Leah Goldstein are all pertinent cases and will be part of the following analysis. Oscar and Lucinda Lucinda, to begin with, is female self-determination incarnate. “[C]harged with static electricity”17 and always carrying “a great reservoir of energy”18 with her, she is the very paragon of a strong and colourful woman. In the fashion of a true “Aussie battler” (someone who does not lose hope in the face of adverse conditions) she rises again after her misfortunes have cast her down; the fact that the whims of fortune deprive her of all her worldly possessions is “but a sharp jab” to her. Her “real life”, we are informed, only starts after “the long and fruitful journey of [that part of] her life” portrayed by Carey:

15

Graeme Turner, National Fictions: Literature, Film and the Construction of Australian Narrative (1986), 2nd edn, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1993, vi. Following Barthes’ broad definition of narrative, Turner does not restrict his analysis of Australian narrative to literature, but also includes film and other cultural productions. 16 M.D. Fletcher, “The Theme of Entrapment in Peter Carey’s Fiction”, in Australian Literature Today, eds R.K. Dhawan and David Kerr, New Delhi: Mehra, 1993, 74. 17 Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 83. 18 Ibid., 176.

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Lucinda was known for more important things than her passion for a nervous clergyman. She was famous, or famous at least amongst students of the Australian labour movement.”19

Her actual achievements far outreach the dimensions of just one novel.20 The fact that Lucinda chooses the labour movement out of all the avenues for glory is certainly no accident. Her creator Carey thus emphasizes her merits, for the Australian union movement is a notoriously “embattled male citadel”,21 an “organization of men by men, with the clearly voiced intention of driving out women”.22 For long, women have here only been mentioned in terms of what feminist historian Gerda Lerner has called “‘contribution history’”, without really challenging the masculinist make-up of the historical narrative. They are an “outgroup” amongst workingmen and are “described as ‘also there’ or as problems”.23 To have made it in labour in misogynist Australia therefore is a particularly powerful statement. Lucinda’s glory certainly does not come easily to her, though. Carey makes it clear that there are many obstacles in her way as soon as she decides to leave the confinement of the role colonial society had reserved for her. Lucinda’s desire to break free from what to her seem stifling conventions is boundless. One of the metaphorical battlefields on which she stages her rebellion is the dress code. Daughter of Elizabeth Leplastrier, an advocate of “rational dress” for

19

Ibid., 506. Margaret Harris argues that the “full story of Lucinda is one for which the nineteenth-century novel, and even twentieth-century fictions, provide no form or precedent”. She concludes that by extending Lucinda’s story beyond the confines of his text, Carey “rewrites the conventions of the female fate as inscribed in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss” (see Margaret Harris, “Eminent Victorians?”, Southerly, IL/1 [1989], 111). However, by only hinting at the “de hors-texte”, Carey does not actually rewrite these particular fictional conventions; he parodies them, implying there is more to the female fate than writing conventions in Victorian novels permitted to say. 21 Dixson, The Real Matilda, 38. 22 Coral Lansbury, “The Feminine Frontier: Women’s Suffrage and Economic Reality”, Meanjin, XXXI/3 (September 1972), 291. 23 Gerda Lerner, “The Majority Finds its Past: Placing Women in History”, in Feminism: A Reader, ed. Maggie Humm, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992, 326. 20

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women24 as well as personal friend to a character named Marian Evans,25 Lucinda due to her family heritage feels … everywhere leashed in …. It was the condition of her adult life to feel it. She refused the conventions of whalebone and elastic, but still she was squeezed and blistered, pinched and hobbled.26

Her mother, who herself causes offence by, for instance, not wearing black after her husband dies,27 administers bloomers to her as an “antidote” against the “‘crippling crinoline’”28 and thus makes her daughter an outcast, like herself.29 Carey makes it clear that Elizabeth Leplastrier ventures too far. Colonial society will not tolerate a woman like Lucinda rushing ahead towards equal rights. In the words of Carey’s female protagonist, her fellow colonials “would have her tie a silk rope between her ankles so she would move in a fettered way”.30 It is not too surprising in this context that Lucinda, whose steps towards emancipation turn out to be simply too daring, is asked to shorten her unwomanly stride.31 Another field which serves to illustrate how Lucinda’s freedomseeking character and colonial conventions are at war is her hair. One of the key images of the novel, it connects on a metaphorical level the eponymous couple before they meet for the first time (after no less than 231 pages32) and, importantly, hair helps Carey to sum up 24

Ibid., 99. The reference to the pioneer feminist from England leaves no doubt that Carey wishes the reader to make a connection with feminist discourse. Evans is, indeed, an interesting point of reference in the novel. Grappling with her femininity throughout her life (she hid behind the pseudoandronym George Eliot to gain respect and access to the male domain of writing, see Oxford Reader’s Companion to George Eliot, ed. John Rignall, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000, 317-18), she serves as a reflector figure for Lucinda and Oscar who are both not at ease with their gender. 26 Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 251. 27 Ibid., 87. 28 Ibid., 99. 29 Ibid., 87. 30 Ibid., 251. 31 Ibid., 251, 289. 32 For almost half the novel, Carey writes classic vitae parallelae. A careful reading shows that although Carey keeps his couple (designated to be lovers through the title) safely apart throughout the first 231 pages, a number of links are already established between both characters. Both have suffered the death of one or even both of their 25

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Lucinda’s extraordinary character. Her great shock of hair, which is described as being “wilful”33 at times, like Lucinda will not tolerate to be leashed in: … Mrs Ahearn had pulled it up tight on her head and secured it with pins and clips. But pins and clips would not work. They had never worked. Her hair was a sea of little snakes, each one struggling to insist on its freedom. She patted her prickling neck feeling as the first wisps of hair escaped.34

The Ahearns, who share the Victorian obsession with hair,35 find it almost impossible to accept that Lucinda’s hair simply was “‘like that’”.36 Carey charges Lucinda’s hair with significance from the first time it is mentioned, when Lucinda is still a little girl and, in an important scene, ventures out into “Blackfellow territory”.37 Beyond the reach of her parents, and by implication, colonial conventions, she here tries to come to terms with the unruly side of her personality, as represented by her hair. As soon as she leaves her well-protected environment, the conditioner of colonial society starts to lose grip on her hair and allows the red and unruly element in her hair to break free: “Her hair parents as a child, both are outcasts in their respective societies, both are forced to leave their homes because they do not fit, both have remarkable features of the opposite sex (see further down), both scandalize their contemporaries (324, 327), both have angelic features (18, 80, 259, 262), and both have exceptional, reddish hair (18, 80, 470). 33 Ibid., 143. 34 Ibid., 128; see also 243. 35 Victorians, for instance, collected hair lockets and were generally very much concerned with hair (Joanna Pitman, On Blondes, New York: Bloomsbury, 2003, 141). Hair-obsessed Dante Gabriel Rossetti perfectly embodies this Victorian fad. So fascinated was he by hair that he is known to have stalked women with blonde manes in the street (ibid., 143). Rossetti is an important point of reference in the novel. He is explicitly referred to on several occasions in the novel. His series of paintings of his model and later wife, Elizabeth Siddal, whose hair is described as “being dazzling copper [shimmering] with lustre” (Max Beerbohm, Rossetti and His Circle, introd. N. John Hall, New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1987, 12), seems to have inspired Carey’s portrayal of Oscar and could also account for his conspicuous femininity (Oscar and Lucinda, e.g., 405). 36 Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 143. 37 Ibid., 79.

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was reddish brown, more brown than red except here, by the creek, where a mote of light caught her and showed the red lights in a slightly frizzy halo.” Her attempt at taming her hair by way of a substitute, the doll, whose “hair was like her own – curly and frizzy to touch”38 and which functions as an alter ego to her, miscarries. The straight black hair she had planned to implant on the doll’s head after plucking all the old one off fails to stick. Deprived of her hair, the doll becomes “a different person, a native of a land where maps were not yet drawn”.39 The parallel between the doll and Lucinda is, indeed, striking. Like her doll, Lucinda in later years will not suffer to be transformed against her nature.40 Lucinda’s rebellion against colonial conventions goes back to her mother Elizabeth. Her liberationist methods of raising Lucinda fail completely to liberate her, though. In fact, patricentric Australia resists so effectively that Lucinda, rather than feeling free, ends up “inhabiting a cage constructed by her mother’s opinions and habits”.41 Raised to be a “square peg” in a world of “round holes”, Lucinda, as soon as she leaves the “fairy world”42 of her mother’s contriving, causes offence simply because of her unconventionality. The novel thus draws a very disillusioning picture of gender relations and explains why women (even if they stood up against their adversaries) have largely featured as marginal notes in the history of Australia. As 38

Ibid., 80. Ibid., 81. 40 Next to the obvious sexual connotations of hair as “one of woman’s main weapons” (Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, trans. John Buchanan-Brown, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996, 462), hair is also significant through the connection that is established in the novel with the Aborigines. Lucinda, who likes the natives “better than the Mayor of Parramatta” (Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 80), significantly goes into “blackfellow territory” to come to terms with her hair problem. If we take into consideration the orthodox Christian belief that cutting one’s hair is a sign of penitence (The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, 463), Lucinda’s ritual coiffure of the doll’s hair can be read as a gesture of reverence towards ancient Australia. This reading would be entirely in keeping with Lucinda’s awareness of the injustice of Aboriginal dispossession later in her life when she is pained by a feeling of guilt and starts to believe that all her “money did not belong to them [Lucinda’s parents] or to her either. The money was stolen from the land. The land was stolen from the blacks. She could not have it .... She would give it to the church” (Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 104). 41 Ibid., 83. 42 Ibid., 91. 39

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Carey makes clear, colonial Australia had reserved a particularly harsh punishment for women like Lucinda who committed blunders against colonial sensibilities. Both Lucinda and her mother are ostracized. Elizabeth has “no friend to talk to”,43 and her sociable daughter Lucinda, who “liked to be with people”44 and was consequently craving for “comradeship”,45 “alienate[s] all the people she might now wish to cultivate”: It was not merely that her stride was wrong or her hair inadequately coiffured, her fashions, generally, inconsiderate of other feelings. She had held herself aloof. … Even her house, the house she chose herself, placed her apart from people.46

Her female extravagance locks her in a prison far worse than any of the conventions might have done. She ends up isolated, alone in a “prison her foolishness had made for her”.47 To underline the point, Carey refers to Lucinda’s isolation on no less than thirteen occasions throughout the novel.48 Oscar is in many ways Lucinda’s correlative. He nominally is her sexual counter-part, bound to her by the title of the narrative and thus by the generic conventions of the love tale. From the beginning, Carey establishes a number of significant parallels between them which invite comparisons of their characters. Oscar, like Lucinda, is subject to various sorts of entrapment, which is not too surprising in a novel one of whose overarching concerns is that of entrapment.49 Oscar, however, lacks Lucinda’s unconditional will to freedom and selfdetermination, qualities that are not encouraged by his father. Even if Oscar originally was equipped with a male love of freedom, he is effectually deprived of it by Theophilus who imposes a rigid beliefsystem on him and thus leaves the adolescent Oscar very little room for spiritual and physical development. Sometimes, we are told, 43

Ibid., 87. Ibid., 154. 45 Ibid., 228. 46 Ibid., 289. 47 Ibid., 410. 48 See ibid., 87, 127, 153, 154, 160, 167, 205, 228, 250, 279-80, 287, 289, 312. 49 Cf. Fletcher, “The Theme of Entrapment in Peter Carey’s Fiction”, in Australian Literature Today, 74-79. 44

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Theophilus even wishes “to make a human cage around him”.50 All of Oscar’s attempts at breaking free only leave him in yet another kind of entrapment. When he absconds from his father, he ironically ends up “caught between bank and wall”51 in the vegetable garden of the impoverished Anglican minister Hugh Stratton. Rather than taking control of his life, he surrenders himself to Fortuna’s rule, ultimately leaving the process of active decision-making to chance, or in his own terms, to God. His states of captivity are mostly self-chosen, as when he “jail[s] himself in a room with only a birdless sky for company and only the prospect of a terrifying voyage to look forward to”.52 Whenever Oscar does act and manage to liberate himself, his freedom is only short-lived; he effectually exchanges one prison for another. When he leaves his self-imposed “jail” in Oxford, it is only to step into a “large cage” in which he is heaved on board the Leviathan.53 Once inside the ship, Oscar finds himself “caught in the web of his phobia”.54 In the colonies, Oscar’s extravagance propels him from one predicament to the next, his last and fatal one being significantly a situation where he is trapped inside a glass church of his own devising.55 Oscar and Lucinda thus both diverge considerably from the typicality condition laid down in traditional identity constructions. When Lucinda gives herself up to confinements, it is only to find human closeness and warmth and thus to leave her agonizing isolation: [Lucinda] had pretended to herself that she was one of them, but she was not. ... It was not just curiosity ... but something stronger, more physical, a need to push herself in amongst her kind, like a ... rabbit in a cage.56 50

Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 26. Ibid., 43. 52 Ibid., 198. 53 Ibid., 206. 54 Ibid., 219. 55 It is indicative of the cyclical nature of the novel that the final scene is already prefigured at the beginning of the novel. While still at home with his father, Oscar is already caught in a church (if only metaphorically, namely in the stifling beliefsystem of his father’s church). There is also mention of a “glass cage” (14) in the kitchen of Oscar’s parental home at a very early stage of the novel. 56 Ibid., 208. 51

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While Oscar never quite has the determination to shake off his shackles – he after all dies in a situation of confinement – Lucinda in the end is free, both from the tyranny of her inheritance and from the constraints of male domination, which she has successfully managed to overcome. Another female character who rebels successfully (if morally questionably) against the stifling conventions is Miriam Chadwick, the narrator’s grandmother. Weary of being treated like an “Irish servant”,57 Chadwick resolves to get married in order to escape her situation as governess with the Trevis family who set her menial tasks like milking the cows and setting fires instead of having her teach the family’s children their Shakespeare and Milton. Desperate to improve her situation, Chadwick, who displays a keen eye for “practical concerns”,58 “nabs” the clergyman on the barge and thus secures herself a husband (she seduces the dazed and traumatized Oscar and forces him to marry her in consequence), her ticket to freedom. Chadwick is certainly not a popular character in the novel: she strives rather remorselessly for her personal advancement and robs Lucinda of her fortune, degrading her from her privileged role of an industrialist to that of an “impoverished”59 employee of “Mr Edward Jason’s Druitt Street pickle factory”.60 She still evolves from the narrative as one of Carey’s remarkable female characters. The daughter of a “strong-willed” and “practical”61 mother, Chadwick resolutely organizes her liberation and finally manages to put herself in a position of independence and financial security. Her grandchild, the narrator Bob, admits that she may well be seen as “harsh and scheming” because she walked off with Lucinda’s fortune, but Bob asks the reader to consider the “options” of the young woman who, having to comply with Victorian etiquette, is caught in a “cage of deep mourning”62 for “half her life”63 and is therefore in danger of ending 57

Ibid., 506. Ibid., 491. 59 Ibid., 505. 60 Ibid., 507. 61 Ibid., 392, 391. 62 Ibid., 394. 63 Ibid., 506. 58

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up as an “old maid”.64 The clergyman Oscar is her deus ex machina, a means of liberating herself from her “depress[ing] and unstimulat[ing]” life as governess to a family who have “no education themselves and no great respect for it” either and who are “inclined to view a governess as a labourer and, should she be found with anything as useless as a book, would request her to do something more practical around the place”.65 Even in old age, the former Mrs Chadwick continues to rebel against Victorian conventions. As a widow, she subverts the Victorian mourning habit and wears “long black dresses” with “violent-coloured petticoats (crimson, royal purple, blazing yellow)” underneath.66 Illywhacker The motif of captivity also features prominently in Illywhacker and highlights the characters’ attitudes towards freedom and independence. Herbert Badgery is a particularly illustrative case. His attitudes towards confinement are complex and reflect those of his whole country in a metaphorical way. Badgery is so intriguing because he constantly vacillates between the principles of independence and autonomy on the one hand and that of domestic comfort on the other. He propagates independence at the same time that he gets himself put up or abandons his freedom in some other way. Badgery tellingly starts the account of his life with an episode involving an aeroplane,67 a striking symbol of freedom. The fact that only a few pages later he tries to get himself put up for the first time in the narrative sums up his ambivalence about freedom and gives the reader a taste of what will follow. His inconsistency undermines gender-determined behavioural patterns, as does the behaviour of his female companions. Much of what Carey writes in terms of freedom and independence in this text is couched in a richly evocative animal imagery. In a novel that ends with the striking image of Australia as a pet shop, animals and the qualities they represent are a powerful device of sounding out attitudes towards freedom. Herbert Badgery, advocate of economic 64

Ibid., 391. Ibid., 394. 66 Ibid., 502. 67 Carey, Illywhacker, 23. 65

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and cultural independence for his country, tellingly chooses a highly venomous king brown snake as companion and fellow combatant for freedom. The snake, to him a “true Australian”,68 combines a whole set of virtues which Badgery would also like to see adopted by his compatriots. First, it never gives up striving for freedom: There would be no peace with the snake, no treaty. It would not become tame or even accept its captivity. All day long it pushed its head against the sack, as persistent as a blowfly against glass. It was a cunning thing and not capable of being bought off.69

Second, the snake, unlike human Australians, will never be made compliant by being bribed: ‘You cannot make this a good little bunny.’ ‘… no matter what you say to it, no matter what you feed it. You cannot buy it or tame it or make it nice.’ … ‘It is a mean bastard of an animal and it cannot be bought.’70

No matter how much he admires his reptilian partner, which he dubs “Mr Joe Blake” (rhyming slang for “snake”),71 the union with the reptile is a misalliance. After all, it must be borne in mind that Badgery tells his complete narrative from his cage in the pet shop and that the snake came to him as the result of a lie, designed for the sole purpose of showing off.72 Not only is the snake not his pet, but the whole story of the snake might well be a tall tale told for the reader: according to a website of the University of Melbourne, the king brown snake has been recorded throughout all of Australia except in Victoria (which is exactly where Geelong is), Tasmania and the most southern parts of Western Australia!73 Beside the fact that the veracity of the snake episode cannot be ascertained, the freedom the reptile embodies cannot come to any good because of Herbert’s subliminal urge to live in confinement. 68

Ibid., 140. Ibid., 47. 70 Ibid., 139-40. 71 Ibid., 25. 72 Ibid., 26-28. 73 See www.avru.org/general/general_mulga.html (accessed 20 March 2010). 69

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Most of these confinements are, as with Oscar, self-inflicted, or, as in the case of the many houses that Herbert builds, literally selfconstructed. We learn, for instance, that in jail he cunningly turns himself “into a nice old man”74 and, after his release, plans right away to get himself put up with his son Charles.75 He not only gives himself up to living in a pet shop, he even has his son Charles organize his life for him.76 Old Badgery actually seems happy with his life in captivity, for, as he frankly declares, all he “ever wanted was a fire and slippers”,77 belying his former longing for autonomy and selfsufficiency for himself and his country. Even as a young man, while he campaigns for the Australian-made aircraft and while he parades his autonomy, he is animated by the scheme of getting himself put up. It is one of the major strategems in his life: I was an expert ... at getting “put up.” I was not just an expert. I was an ace. I never had to be formally invited and I always left them before my welcome was worn out.78

This longing for the peace of the home also motivates him to build houses, one after the other.79 He says of himself that he is “obsessed with houses”80 and builds a “place [for] the girl in Bacchus Marsh” and a “slab hut for the barmaid up at Blackwood”.81 When he marries 74

Carey, Illywhacker, 409. Ibid., 508. 76 Ibid., 512. 77 Ibid., 538. 78 Ibid., 33. 79 The prevalence of the building metaphor in Illywhacker and especially the parallels Carey draws between the construction of houses and that of fictions allows us to locate the author in a tradition of writers who have constructed their fictions in architectural terms. There is Nathaniel Hawthorne, for instance, who in his Preface to The House of the Seven Gables (1851) explains that he “buil[t]” his eponymous house from “materials long in use for constructing castles in the air” (The House of the Seven Gables, ed. Seymour L. Gross, New York: Norton, 1967, 3). Henry James is another and very influential case in point. He famously referred to his 1881 novel, The Portrait of a Lady, as a “house of fiction” (8). Howards End (1910), by E.M. Forster, is another “house of fiction”, as Alistair Duckworth demonstrates in his 1992 reading of the novel (as the title of his monograph Howards End: E.M. Forster’s House of Fiction indicates). 80 Carey, Illywhacker, 33. 81 Ibid., 158. 75

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Phoebe, he starts building a mansion for her as well. Houses, however, are a divisive issue for the men and women in the novel. None of Herbert’s houses actually ever serves as a family home. His women refuse to take the place that Herbert respectively patriarchal society have reserved for them. What Herbert devises as “my gift, my surprise, my work, my love, my tribute to her”82 accordingly fails to gratify Phoebe. The “home” that Herbert envisages is a “gaol” to her, and Herbert the “warder”.83 It is typical of the lack of understanding between the sexes that Herbert “never guessed how differently she saw the place”, while he “Saw no harm in it! I saw great benefit”.84 Family homes and the geographical immobility and captivity in smalltown life they represent are unbearable to Phoebe. Having once tasted the fruit of freedom by flying Herbert’s plane, she will not relinquish it. Freedom and the instrument to achieve it even become a question of life and death for her: the prospect of owning Herbert’s plane is what keeps her alive in the abortion scene.85 At the end of Book One Phoebe, Titaness and daughter to Heaven and Earth in Greek mythology, strikes back. She elopes with the plane and leaves Herbert with a “savage poem”,86 a metaphorical cage that sends Herbert into his own “private depression”.87 It is interesting to note that the poem is masterminded by the would-be artist Phoebe but constructed by Herbert himself: ‘She … had me, her labourer, saw and hammer and make it for her. She had me rhyme a cage with a room, a bird with a person, feathers with skin, my home with a gaol, myself with a warder .…’88

Yet, it is also important to note that Carey’s characterization does not permit absolute or essential categorization. Phoebe, owner of an aeroplane and variously referred to as “gypsy”89 and “humming-

82

Ibid., 161. Ibid., 205. 84 Ibid., 161. 85 Ibid., 180-81. 86 Ibid., 204. 87 Ibid., 222-23. 88 Ibid., 205. 89 Ibid., 401. 83

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bird”90, convincingly represents the principle of freedom. As soon as she has broken free from Herbert, she reverts to captivity, though. She ironically “spen[ds] the rest of her life putting all her wiles and energies into being kept, cared for, eventually ending up “like a budgie in a cage”.91 Although their attitudes towards liberty respectively captivity are more complex than would allow the reader to draw final conclusions, Herbert and Phoebe still illustrate well the way in which Carey inverts or disrupts notions of male and female behaviour. Other characters in the novel corroborate the author’s manipulation of gender roles.92 In fact, the pet shop, this intricate symbol of entrapment and selfsurrender, mainly harbours men. The “lifesavers, inventors, manufacturers, bushmen”, figures who in Australian iconography are male rather than female, are “proud people” who “do not act like caged people”,93 but Carey leaves no doubt that, of course, they are in a deplorable state. The leader of the opposition against the selfinflicted captivity is significantly a woman, Leah Goldstein: … it was not permissible [to Leah] to live her life so uselessly. It was not permissible to be in this undignified position, to be kept by a keeper of pets.94

A “touchstone of political insight, integrity and clear-sightedness”,95 Goldstein is the only one who takes action against the large-scale menagerie she inhabits. She, for example, “spends a lot of time explaining that she is not a Jew, that the sign is a lie, that the 90

Ibid., 36. Ibid., 205. 92 This is not to say, however, that among the huge cast of characters in that novel there are none who conform with conventional assumptions about the behaviour of men and women. Emma Badgery is a radical example. For fear of losing her husband, who in 1939 “enlist[s] on behalf of the King of England” (ibid., 463), she seeks a drastic form of domesticity and “crawl[s] quietly into the big cage that rightfully belonged to the goanna” (ibid., 464). While the other characters in the novel who are subject to one sort of confinement or another are usually only metaphorical captives, Emma stands out in the range of caged characters as the one who lives in a literal cage. 93 Ibid., 599. 94 Ibid., 536. 95 Woodcock, Peter Carey, 69. 91

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exhibition is based on lies; but visitors prefer to believe the printed information”.96 Goldstein even tries to assassinate Hissao, the mastermind behind the human zoo, but fails, because she by that time is an “old lady in paisley with weak wrists and arthritic hands”.97 She still goes down in Carey’s history as the one character who tries to organize the resistance against the smugness of her compatriots. As former snake-dancer, Goldstein lives up to the ideals embodied by the venomous paragons of freedom and never resigns to a life in captivity; she thus contrasts sharply with her male foil Badgery who to her is an “idiot, [a] fool, making a home for himself, jumping from one prison to another”.98 That Illywhacker can be read as an allegory on the various sorts of captivity Australia as a nation has been in is apparent and has been frequently pointed out in reviews and critical articles.99 What seems to me important to stress after this gender-oriented reading of the novel is that there are also obvious parallels between the main character Herbert flaunting the male principle of independence and Australia as a whole with its ostentatious masculinity and its proclamations of “how proud, free, independent and anti-authoritarian”100 it is. The novel, therefore, suggests to the reader that like Herbert Australia might be parading a false masculinity to cover up its innate femininity.

96

Carey, Illwhacker, 599. Ibid., 597. 98 Ibid., 536-37. 99 See e.g., the essays by Heinz Antor, “Australian Lies and the Mapping of a New World: Peter Carey’s Illywhacker (1985) as a Postmodern Postcolonial Novel”, and M.D. Fletcher, “The Theme of Entrapment in Peter Carey’s Fiction”. 100 Carey in Sexton, “Interview with Peter Carey”, 54. 97

CHAPTER TWELVE INTRUDERS IN THE BUSH: WOMEN IN MALE DOMAINS Intruders in the Bush is the title of John Carroll’s study about transplanted cultures attempting to find “a psychological, even a spiritual, home in Australia”.1 It is a history of a people intruding into an alien land. The title of Carroll’s book will serve as a motto for the following analysis of the way in which a number of Carey’s female characters intrude into those areas of Australian public and private life traditionally reserved for males. Phoebe Badgery and Leah Goldstein in Illywhacker, Felicity Smith in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, and Ellen Kelly in True History of the Kelly Gang, like the Leplastrier women in Oscar and Lucinda, decline the role of “prisoners of war”2 in the battle of the sexes raging in these Carey fictions. By entering male-governed domains such as the bush, they refuse to resign themselves to their marginality and, as has been demonstrated in the previous chapter, jettison the principle of confinement that traditional conceptualizations of Australian identity had imposed on them. In their studies of Australian society, Australian feminist intellectuals have sought to raise the awareness of “gender as a social structure that has its origins in the development of human culture, not in biology or procreation”.3 The tenor of their contribution to the international project of gender studies is that Australian men have held

1

John Carroll, Intruders in the Bush, Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1982, vii. Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 88. 3 Judith Lorber, Paradoxes of Gender, New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1994, 1. Apart from Anne Summers’ Damned Whores and God’s Police, Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1975, and the works by Miriam Dixson and Kay Schaffer mentioned earlier, the feminist histories written by Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch, London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1970), Kay Daniels and Mary Murnane (Uphill All the Way: A Documentary History of Women in Australia, St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1980) as well as by Susan Magarey, Sue Rowley and Susan Sheridan (Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the 1890s, St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1993) are illustrative examples of how female intellectuals have tried to write against the predominantly male perspective on the Australian past. 2

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women down in a “stranglehold”,4 preventing them from enjoying equal rights in the country that famously prides itself on giving its citizens a “fair go”. An Australian woman, Dixson explains, “soon develops an awareness that her country values most highly, and rewards accordingly, those qualities which it decrees she must not have if she is to be a ‘real’ woman: that is, achievement-drive, initiative, autonomy, true dignity, confidence and courage”.5 These virtues are valued in men and deemed unnatural in a woman. A confident and courageous woman who steps out of “an essentially domestic role”, the gender historians Sol Encel, Norman MacKenzie and Margaret Tebbutt argue, is therefore often prima facie faced with “suspicion, hostility and fear”.6 In a traditionally misogynous country like Australia, this has important consequences for women: they are granted full sovereignty only over home and hearth. As soon as they encroach on male-governed territory in order to find an outlet for their energies, women encounter the opposition and enmity of the “pacesetting and boundary creating men”.7 Peter Carey places issues of women and, more generally, of gender centrally in his narrative of Australia’s past. Many of his female characters attest to the writer’s membership with the countermovement against the misogynist tradition in Australian social history. Women emerge from the writer’s fictional biography of Australia as courageous, ambitious, and full of achievement-drive. Not only do their achievements turn out to be as historical and therefore worthy of inclusion in a fictional history as those of their male counter-parts. What is notable is that women are written into exactly those fields of the Australian tradition that were reserved exclusively for men. They rebel against the separate spheres philosophy upheld, for example, by Victorian writers like Sarah Stickney Ellis, John Ruskin, and Coventry Patmore, and captured in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s dichotomous presentation of man and woman in Canto 5 of “The Princess” (1847):

4

Schaffer, Women and the Bush, 7. Dixson, The Real Matilda, 22. 6 Sol Encel, Norman MacKenzie, and Margaret Tebbutt, Women and Society: An Australian Study, Melbourne: Cheshire, 1974, 146. 7 Dixson, The Real Matilda, 22. 5

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… but this is fixt As are the roots of earth and base of all; Man for the field and woman for the hearth: Man for the sword and for the needle she: Man with the head and woman with the heart: Man to command and woman to obey; All else confusion.8

And generally one feels that the vicar Dennis Hassett’s assessment of women in Oscar and Lucinda is also Carey’s guiding principle in arranging the tableau of characters in his novels: It had not taken him [Dennis Hassett] long to discover that women were by far the most interesting of the sexes in the colony, although you would never imagine it the case if you met them with their menfolk present. For then they affected the most remarkable vapidity. But alone, or with their own sex, they revealed themselves as scientists when it came to the vectors of the human heart.9

The bush In the Australian cultural tradition, men are the undisputed hegemons of the outback. Since the bush is central to celebrations of masculinity in the Australian tradition, a revisionist outlook on the construction of the bushman as hero and the woman as intruder is a temptation for any writer with a keen eye to the validity of gender stereotypes. Peter Carey approaches the issue of women’s relationship to the bush in Illywhacker and True History of the Kelly Gang. When the hybrid gender of characters like Oscar, Lucinda, Herbert Badgery and even Ned Kelly10 already deals several deconstructive blows to traditional conceptualizations of gender-related identity as such, a number of female characters who know how to tackle the Australian backcountry

8

Alfred Lord Tennyson, “The Princess” (1847), V, 435-41, in Alfred Tennyson: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Adam Roberts, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000, 178. 9 Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 140. 10 See, for instance, Martin, “Dead White Male Heroes: True History of the Kelly Gang, and Ned Kelly in Australian Fictions”, in Fabulating Beauty, 303.

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specifically render untenable the concept of the bush as “Manzone Country”,11 as simply no place for a woman. Leah Goldstein as Carey’s female version of Crocodile Dundee is a pertinent example. She has a natural affinity with the Australian outback and “dream[s] of landscapes cut with raw red roads, hills sliced by deep crimson cuttings, yellow ochre rocks striated with the long straight stabs of jack-hammers”. She even finds a “shrill, ragged, unaesthetic optimism” in “these landscapes, by these roads”.12 All the more, Leah Goldstein possesses a number of qualities usually monopolized by the opposite sex and often produced in selfdefinitions of Australian masculinity: she is “very partial”13 to alcohol, promiscuous,14 prefers a vagabond life in the bush to her studies at university, and sits around the camp-fire with her mate and sexual partner Herbert,15 eating Bungaree Trout, a dish of “bush-tucker” prepared, for want of fish, from potatoes. Although Ellen Kelly from True History of the Kelly Gang is mostly confined to her family home, she is another of Carey’s characters capable of bringing down the lease that Australian man holds on the bush. She is depicted as a matriarch of the type described by Manning Clark: Yet, paradoxically, those [women] who possessed the pluck and the will to endure acquired a prestige and a power in a society whose composition seemed designed to confer a power on the man even in excess of that on which Moses and the apostle Paul had conferred a divine sanction. Out of such squalor and hardship, which drove the menfolk into erratic, unsteady ways in the primitive huts of the gentry, a matriarch quietly took over the central position in the family, and in the huts of the servants a ‘Mum’ came into her own.16

Ellen Kelly as bush mum takes over the role of pater familias from her late husband and pulls all the strings in her ever-growing family. 11

Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police, 103-14. Carey, Illywhacker, 526. 13 Ibid., 303. 14 Ibid., 227, 303, 308. 15 Ibid., 301-303. 16 Manning Clark, A History of Australia, 6 vols, III, The Beginning of an Australian Civilization, 1824-1851, Carlton: Melbourne UP, 1973, 272. 12

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A widow and mother of seven children, she more than simply replaces her ineffective husband; she is a classic “coper” whose skills as improviser lead her family through the poverty and squalor of life in a place where “nothing flourished … but misery”.17 She even displays some of the virtues of a genuine pioneer spirit: she has endurance and a vision for her family’s future: … she talked of … the mighty farm we would all soon select together she said we would find a great mountain river and flats so rich no plough were needed we would plunge our hands into it and breathe the fertile loamy smell … and all the land beneath our feet would be our own to walk on from dawn to dusk ours and ours alone.18

Ellen Kelly is rough and ready, her mind being set entirely on practical concerns. Into the bargain, she is described as having an “Irish temper” and sometimes displays a virago-like behaviour. When a policeman makes advances to her she slaps him and shouts abuse at him.19 In addition, she is given to drinking20 and continuous and very unladylike swearing: She cried I would kill the b-----ds if I were a man God help me. She used many rough expressions I will not write them here. It were eff this and ess that and she would blow their adjectival brains out.21

It is not unimportant to note that Ellen Kelly, who often gets the better of the males in her environment, can cope only by virtue of traditionally male qualities. This masculinity appears as irreconcilable with her femininity, though; she is conspicuously deficient in what are considered quintessentially female qualities such as motherly love and tenderness. In terms of her motherly love, it is striking that she values honour higher than her eldest son, Ned: when he at one stage returns from a police interrogation, she rejects him on the mere suspicion of his having sold a companion to the police. Her quality as a mother is

17

Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang, 21. Ibid., 37. 19 Ibid., 10. 20 Ibid., 57. 21 Ibid., 9 18

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also under review when she apprentices Ned to a notorious bushranger, predetermining his career as a criminal. Whether she is forced by the exigencies of life on the maledominated frontier to forego her feminine side, or whether she has a natural propensity to adopt male traits of character, Carey’s bush mum is, in terms of gender, a jarring character. Her femininity and her masculinity do not go very well together. No doubt, she is a commanding figure in the novel, but her adoption of male behaviour at times threatens to obliterate her womanness. If that is the price to pay, Carey seems willing to sacrifice parts of Ellen Kelly’s femininity if the reward is female autonomy and self-determination. These two qualities distinguish Kelly from the best known bush mum in Australian literature, Henry Lawson’s “Drover’s Wife” (1892). Although Lawson’s female “coper” is as resolute as Ellen Kelly, she cannot wrench herself free from the genitive construction of the title that dooms her to be her husband’s appendage.22 The workplace In the reassessment of the role that women have played in Australian history, feminist historians have argued that women have been systematically pushed out of the world of work. In the misogynist environment of Australia, the exclusion of women from the workplace, according to Encel, Tebbutt and MacKenzie, has allowed “nineteenth-century attitudes” towards “working women in Australia” to survive until as late as the 1970s. A woman who steps out of an “essentially domestic role”, Encel, Tebbutt and MacKenzie observe, traditionally encounters “suspicion, hostility and fear”.23 In Carey’s novels, a number of major as well as minor female characters are professionals in responsible positions. Maria Takis in the Tax Inspector is the titular tax inspector, Barbara Joy in Bliss is an 22

“The Drover’s Wife” is a central text in the Australian literary canon. It has been much used by writers of the nationalist tradition to reinforce their male-dominated world order and by feminists to expose the sexist ideology with which this world order was constituted. An indicator of the importance of the story is the literary rewritings and intertextual engagements it has prompted. So far, Barbara Baynton (“The Chosen Vessel”, 1902), Murray Bail (“The Drover’s Wife”, 1975), Frank Moorhouse (“The Drover’s ‘Wife’”, 1980), and Barbara Jefferis (“The Drover’s Wife”, 1980) have presented their own versions of Lawson’s classic tale. 23 Encel, MacKenzie, and Tebbutt, Women and Society: An Australian Study, 146.

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advertising genius, Lucinda Leplastrier is an ambitious entrepreneuse, Felicity Smith, Tristan’s mother in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, runs in Voorstand’s presidential elections, Peggy Kram is about to take over the metropolis of Saarlim (or rather, its simulacrum), Ma Britten in Jack Maggs is a clever but unscrupulous businesswoman. Although Carey has a pronounced interest in female characters – he has his alter ego in 30 Days in Sydney, the narrator by the name of Peter Carey, explain that his “novels are filled with women”24 – female professionals still are considerably outnumbered (as well as outpowered) by male professionals, who, generally, are in charge in the world of business; when they are not, they try to find ways of stopping the women from being in charge. Against the background of the misogynist atmosphere pervading the Australian workplace, this seems a fairly appropriate representation of the historical reality of women in the workforce. Carey does not leave it at that, though; he interrogates the under-representation of women and shows that their relative scarcity in elevated positions is not due to a lack of achievement-drive, discipline or professional ethos on their side, but rather the result of the fact that they were systematically pushed back into essentially domestic roles by the menfolk, who had reserved lives for their women that to many of them seemed intolerably pointless. Virtually all of the professional women we encounter in the fictions under scrutiny experience some sort of antagonism by male colleagues. Most of them even fail as a direct result of male intervention. Maria Takis in The Tax Inspector, for instance, is imprisoned by a male representative of the car-dealership she examines for suspected tax evasion; Barbara Joy in Bliss is not credited with the creative work she has been doing for her husband’s company; Lucinda Leplastrier in Oscar and Lucinda is not accepted as boss by her male employees; Felicity Smith in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith is shot on her way to the Efican presidency; and Peggy Kram is stopped in her tracks by Tristan. Of all of Carey’s novels, Oscar and Lucinda demonstrates the adversities women encounter at the workplace most clearly. It features a number of women who are desperately trying to venture into work but, as interlopers on a terrain well guarded by colonial men, are put 24

Carey, 30 Days in Sydney, 75.

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in their place by the men. They are not even allowed to qualify for a job. As the narrator Bob explains: Mrs Stratton was not a don. She could not have been, for while the constitution of the university [Oxford] would permit entry to a fourteen-year-old boy (with his pocket full of string and dried-out worms) it could on no account matriculate a woman.25

In Oscar and Lucinda Carey rewrites history by demonstrating that women – like the Aborigines whom the author claims were long thought to have simply surrendered to their oppressors26 – did struggle for their independence and for their right to actuate their achievement drive as professionals. By writing the history of women’s struggles for work and equal rights, he follows the lead Australian feminists have taken since the 1970s and looks for the women who were lost in history. By writing the Leplastrier women into the fictional history of Australia’s workforce, Carey does not preach to the converted. Writing in the 1970s, Anne Summers recalls having “completed a high school education without even hearing about these women warriors [the members of the Women’s Liberation Movement]”. Therefore Summers at the time demanded that “women’s history be taught in schools and universities so that the circumstances and accomplishments of our gender were no longer ‘hidden from history’”. Some twenty years on, Summers still feels that the “group which learned the hard way that history belongs to those who write it has not yet written its story”,27 but a substantial amount of women writers have by now contributed to the telling of the (hi)story of Australian woman28 – and Carey’s story of the Leplastrier women’s struggle can be seen as part of this interdisciplinary project. 25

Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 45. Gaile, “The ‘Contrarian Streak’: An Interview with Peter Carey”, 7. 27 Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police, 511, 510. 28 Writers like Helen Garner (especially in her 1977 classic, Monkey Grip), Elizabeth Jolley (in The Sugar Mother, 1988, My Father’s Moon, 1989), Thea Astley (in her highly-regarded 1987 novel, It’s Raining in Mango), Jessica Anderson (in Tirra Lirra by the River, 1978), the pseudonymous Elizabeth Riley (in All that False Instruction, 1975), Olga Masters (in The Rose Fancier, 1988), Kate Grenville (in Joan Makes History, 1988), Jean Bedford (in Colouring In, 1986), and Janette Turner Hospital (especially in Charades, 1988) come to mind. 26

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Set in the early 1860s, the Leplastrier women’s struggle takes place at a time when British and American women had just started to take action against their legal and social discrimination by men: American feminists had signed the Seneca Falls declaration in 1848 and The Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill was published in 1869. Australian women, according to Summers, took considerably longer to realize “their slave-like status in relation to men”29 – their first concerted actions only being undertaken in the 1880s and 1890s. Predating the rise of colonial feminism by more than half a century, the Leplastrier women’s struggle is rather exceptional, perhaps an anachronism. Carey makes Lucinda and her mother pioneers and locates their fight for equal rights in the context of the international women’s liberation movement by weaving into the narrative one of the most famous of the strong women of the nineteenth century: George Eliot. An “‘avenging angel’ devastating bourgeois Victorian values”30 in the eyes of some of her contemporaries, Eliot’s stance on the woman question was highly ambiguous and requires some elucidation in light of her importance for the novel. The Eliot biographer Frederick Karl describes her as having a “radical personal position” on women’s issues such as the franchise or divorce laws,31 but as being reluctant in getting involved in public with women’s issues.32 As Karl explains, Eliot never denied that women ought to be socially elevated, but she was hesitant to get drawn into action for fear of disrupting her romantic idea of “‘Olde England’” with its social cohesiveness and balance.33 She was worried that through progress and social reform woman might be “‘unsexed’”, that an “emancipated woman might stop being a ‘feminine’ creature”.34 But since she herself felt rather keenly the social constraints imposed upon her despite the privileges she enjoyed as daughter to a very well-to-do father and later as a celebrated writer, she grappled with the popular Victorian perception

29

Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police, 403. Frederick Karl, George Eliot: A Biography, London: HarperCollins, 1995, xix. 31 Ibid., xvii. 32 Ibid., 214. 33 Ibid., 138. 34 George Eliot, quoted in Karl, George Eliot, 428 (italics in the original). 30

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of woman as the “angel in the house”.35 Her 1855 essay on “Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft” can be seen as a direct comment on the relegation of women to the “temple of the hearth”, which John Ruskin, for instance, invoked in his lecture “Of Queen’s Gardens” (1865), and which demanded of woman to create a “place of Peace”, a “temple of the hearth” for her family.36 To Eliot, it was unbearable to see the condescension with which man looked down on woman: she therefore questioned the “established formulae about women” which relegated them to the position of “idols, useless absorbents of precious things”. While the historic Eliot did promote (through her writings, not through activism) “freedom and culture for woman, because subjection and ignorance have debased her …”,37 she was less radical than Elizabeth Leplastrier who is her correspondent in the Carey novel. Lucinda’s mother is described as an “enthusiast” who sees … industrialization as the great hope for women. The very factories which the aesthetes and romantics so abhorred would, one day soon, provide her sex with the economic basis of their freedom.38

The real Eliot had her reservations against women’s liberation through work. She critically commented on Margaret Fuller’s proposal to give women “a great variety of employments, in manufactures or the care of plants and animals”. Women, she wrote, need not take over man’s position at the workplace; an education alone, she hoped, would end the bondage and turn women into “fellow-beings, to be treated, one and all, with justice and sober reverence”. Females “with a taste for

35

Epitomized in Coventry Patmore’s sequence of poems bearing that title (1854-63). John Ruskin, “Of Queen’s Gardens”, in Sesame and Lilies (1865), New York: Chelsea, 1983, 85, 86. Ruskin’s conception of woman is often referred to by gender historians who seek to explain how present-day attitudes towards woman came into being. Ruskin is an interesting example of gender determination in the nineteenth century, because his definition of woman captures both the idealization and the oppression of the female sex in Victorian times. 37 George Eliot, “Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft” (1855), in The Writings of George Eliot, 25 vols, XXII, Essays and Uncollected Papers, Boston: Houghton, 1908, 332, 333. 38 Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 86. 36

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masculine pursuits” consequently never met with her unrestricted approval.39 This explains why in the novel Carey describes the fictional Eliot as having … encouraged Elizabeth’s [Elizabeth Leplastrier’s] essays and pamphlets [but as having] never shared ‘Elizabeth’s fanaticism’ for factories. And while she was interested to learn that the orphan [Lucinda] had actually purchased a factory, she did not wish to discuss the manufacture of glass .… George Eliot was not interested, and she had work to do.40

Before sending Elizabeth Leplastrier to New South Wales, Carey makes sure that the reader will appreciate the pioneering spirit of the Leplastrier women and understand the odds which Elizabeth – who is described as having been notorious even in London, the European centre of the women’s movement at the time – must have faced in the colonies. In London “something of a joke”, her passion about factories is so outstanding that it even attracts the attention of Thomas Carlyle, whom Carey fishes out of his bag of historiographic tricks in order to convey to the reader Elizabeth’s importance and to make the connection with the “condition of England question”, which Carlyle, the Victorians’ “national conscience”, had famously raised. The factories envisioned by Elizabeth, “factories [that] were like hubs of wheels, radiating spokes of care”,41 could have been a remedy to the social ills denounced by commentators like Carlyle42 by providing the female sex with an economic basis for their freedom.43 Significantly, 39

Eliot, “Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft”, 332, 331. Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 202-203. 41 Ibid., 86. 42 For instance, in Past and Present (1843). 43 Although the passage where Carey describes Elizabeth Leplastrier’s attitude towards factories may well have been influenced by the mechanistic rhetoric Carlyle deployed in his essay “Signs of the Times” (1829) – in which he metaphorically described the civil government as a “Machine of Society”, a “grand working wheel from which all private machines must derive, or to which they must adapt, their movements” – the real nineteenth-century reformer had reservations against modern machinery, which in his eyes had made the nineteenth century the “Mechanical Age”, the “Age of Machinery” (“Signs of the Times”, in Centenary Edition: The Works of Thomas Carlyle in Thirty Volumes, XXVII, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, in 40

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Elizabeth’s social experiments in the working world are never actuated, her plans having been thwarted by her husband Abel, whose purchase of land “made them poor [and] prevented the factory, which he had promised they would lease in Parramatta, ever being more than a dream”.44 The case of Abel, the economically incapacitated man, is not unique in the novel. Oscar and Lucinda is interspersed with men who throw obstacles into the paths of enterprising women. After her husband’s death, Elizabeth only decides to stay in New South Wales, where, in her opinion, “they hate women like us with a passion”,45 because she is nettled by the condescension of her “barrel-chested” Irish neighbour, Mr O’Hagen. Though “polite and shy”, he suggests to Elizabeth (who by that time had resolved to go “Home”, that is, to England), to sell the land so that “‘you ladies won’t be having to worry your pretty heads about such things as harvest’”. Elizabeth, who “did not like the way [the Irishmen] treated their own women, or the assumptions they made about women in general”,46 and who avowedly “did not care for farming”,47 decides to stay to spite her male adversary: They were not going Home. This was as a direct result of Mr O’Hagen’s comments about ‘pretty heads.’48

Her aversion to New South Wales, which she finds “‘venal, materialistic, corrupt, and when not corrupt, plain damn stupid’”,49 is hence overcome by her urge not “‘to leave this country to the Irish’” who have “their women walk after them with their heads bowed like prisoners of war”.50 Five Volumes, London: Chapman and Hall, 1904, II, 66, 59). Instead of factories, he advocated strong leadership by great men, heroes, even dictators like Oliver Cromwell (in his famous lectures on the topic, published as On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History in 1840). 44 Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 86. 45 Ibid., 91. 46 Ibid., 88. 47 Ibid., 85. 48 Ibid., 88. 49 Ibid., 90. 50 Ibid., 88.

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Lucinda’s case is similar. She lives her mother’s dream and buys a glass-factory in Sydney, but encounters similar antagonism by colonial society. Carey’s narrator, assuming narratorial intimacy with the reader, brings the conflict between colonial society and enterprising women to a head: She [Lucinda] was a manufacturer. She might not look like one to you, sir, but that only demonstrates your colonial nature. Not all manufacturers have side-whiskers and smoke cigars.51

The narrator’s assumed addressees are easy to identify: they are people of the sort of Mr Borrodaile, a fellow passenger to Oscar and Lucinda onboard the Leviathan. In the novel, Borrodaile, who “did not like a woman at his table”, epitomizes the misogynist attitudes of colonial society. He is a sharply sketched caricature of the chauvinistic part of Australian society. He has a very distinct idea of gender roles, of what behoves a woman, and what a man. When he meditates upon potential topics for the dinner conversation with his female table companion, he comes up with “Flowers”, the “children’s health”, the “maid” and the “footman”; “politics (because they knew nothing of it)”, “Business” and “sporting matters” as well as “God” he rules out per se. In the company of the likes of Borrodaile, Lucinda appears as an intruder, an alien who disrupts the male order of life. Lucinda’s presence, according to Borrodaile, not only “constrained and restricted the natural flow of conversation”; it is because of Lucinda’s mere presence that “the bottle, which might otherwise move back and forth so gaily, stayed in its place upon the sideboard and could not be sent upon its proper business”.52 In a novel that plays a great deal with transgressive gender, such distinct ideas about men and women become untenable. Carey makes clear that it is not only the condescending attitude of colonial society towards women in general that keeps them from succeeding in business. As the novel illustrates in the conversation between Borrodaile and Lucinda, women’s approaches to business are antithetical to and irreconcilable with those of men. In the maledominated world of business, Lucinda with her admittedly unorthodox 51 52

Ibid., 229. Ibid., 239.

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business principles is therefore doomed to fail. We learn that Borrodaile, a “practical man”53 who “had made his great fortune out of buying land and chopping it up”, now owns a tallow works. Guided by purely mercenary considerations, Borrodaile says he “had no time for anyone who wished to raise sheep for mutton .... He was a tallow man, a chop-them-up-and-boil-them-down man.”54 Lucinda’s way of doing business is an affront to him: she is led by her instincts and emotions, even a sense of aestheticism, and disregards the principle of profitability. Disapproving of the “unpleasant odour”55 of Borrodaile’s tallow works, she declares that instead of investing in tallow, she “would put [her] capital into something that [she] loved very much”,56 “something that was not there before”.57 Business being a subject he would not “allow disagreement on, not even if the dissenter were protected by crinoline and stays”, Borrodaile bellows back at her and patronizingly calls her “girlie”,58 denying twenty-five-year-old Lucinda the status of a mature person. Although Borrodaile as a character verges on being overdrawn, the way in which he deals with the entrepreneuse Lucinda appears as in keeping with the standards of colonial society. Even more sensitive and well-meaning men are described by the narrator as being unable to accept Lucinda as a professional woman. The Reverend Dennis Hassett, whom Lucinda consults to discuss “the ‘physical properties and manufacture of glass’”, expecting a certain “L. Leplastrier”,59 is no little “surprised ... to find Monsieur Leplastrier in skirts, but he was not shocked”: He was delighted. He made his petite visitor blush by continuing to call her monsieur and it took a while before he saw his insensitivity ….60 53

Ibid., 240. It is not insignificant that Carey depicts Borrodaile as a “practical” man. Practicality is a key term in constructions of Australian masculinity, cropping up for instance in Ward’s definition of the typical Australian (The Australian Legend, 16). 54 Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 242. 55 Ibid., 244. 56 Ibid., 243. 57 Ibid., 244. 58 Ibid., 242. 59 Ibid., 139. 60 Ibid., 141.

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Another case in point are Lucinda’s employees, who are embarrassed and distracted by her mere presence in the factory.61 Their gender expectations are so rigid that they readily accept Lucinda’s male companion Oscar as their “lord and master”.62 Carey here shows that the misogynist conditioning process in the Australian colonies is so profound that the factory hands prefer Oscar to Lucinda, even though they realize that their “new master [is] an odd bird”.63 The judgement the novel passes over their behaviour is unequivocal. Their decision to opt for a man as boss is absurd, for Oscar, who himself believes he has “nothing worth saying on matters secular” and who delegates all decision-making to fortune, could not be more flagrantly unsuitable as a businessman. With regard to the wider context of how Carey portrays men and women at work, it is interesting to see that Lucinda’s flamboyantly female way of conducting business seems to confirm Borrodaile’s position that business and women do not go together: Lucinda, whose business principles are love and aesthetic pleasure,64 in constructing the glass church, produces a “lead-heavy folly”65 and in the end gambles away her entire fortune. But, importantly, and this leaves it entirely to the reader to judge Lucinda’s achievement, many of the men in Carey’s novels are no better as businessmen: Charles Badgery, for instance, lastingly ruins the orthodoxy of the Australian man as having a purely materialistic, practical approach to conducting business. Like Lucinda, he follows his vision rather than economic considerations. According to his father, Charles “loved to style himself a practical man”: It was bullshit. He was an enthusiast, a fan. He did not even calculate the money he would need to fix the arcade which had been disused since the depression. He signed the lease without getting a quote for building cages or aquariums. He did not even think about the extra cost of feed if he was going to stock the place in accordance with his

61

Ibid., 328-29. Ibid., 365. 63 Ibid., 369. 64 Ibid., 243. 65 Ibid., 444. 62

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Overall, colonial society, as depicted by Carey, is structured by that principle of Western society that feminists have summed up as follows: “the masculine (man, Empire, Civilization) has a God-given right to subdue or cultivate the feminine (woman, Earth, Nature) and appropriate the feminine to masculine domination.”67 Opinions about a person are formed by sex alone; creativity, vision and integrity of character are entirely disregarded when a woman like Lucinda attempts to “play a useful part in manufacture”.68 Above all, Carey in Oscar and Lucinda, as Lyn McCredden points out in her essay on discourses of vocation in that novel, constructs a “dialogue between calling [here both in the sense of being on a divine mission and one’s occupation, one’s profession] and chance”, depicting both Oscar and Lucinda’s vocations as the result of the accidental and the coincidental.69 This allows Carey to disrupt unquestioned habits of thought that, for instance, foreclosed a career as factory-owner and labour activist for a nineteenth-century colonial woman. Intellectual pursuits Australian women, having been programmed in an “intellectually crippling”70 way to be passive, compliant and diffident, are traditionally equated with “domesticity” and “spiritual starvation,” as historian Tim Rowse explains. Men, on the other hand, stand for “wide open spaces, achievement”, and the “heroism of the Australian spirit”.71 With an education system that according to feminists has only reinforced this orthodoxy, making the female feel “incompetent, 66

Carey, Illywhacker, 480-81. Schaffer, Women and the Bush, 82. 68 Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 228. 69 Lyn McCredden, “Discourses of Vocation in Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda”, 145-46. 70 Dixson, The Real Matilda, 40. 71 Tim Rowse, Australian Liberalism and National Character, Melbourne: Kibble, 1978, 208. 67

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dependent and self-denigrating”,72 Australian women, indeed, seem to have faced greater odds than men in training their intellectual faculties. On top of the general misogyny and the discriminatory structure of the education system,73 Australians have traditionally tended to put the premium on more practical, outdoor pursuits rather than on intellectual activities. The image Australians have cultivated of themselves is not that of a nation of thinkers and writers, musicians and painters, but that of a sporting nation that loves the “great outdoors”. The fascination for physical exercise was already in evidence in the nineteenth century, well before the fitness boom set in in the twentieth century. Anthony Trollope, for instance, when visiting his son in Australia in the 1870s, already described “‘sports’” as “a national necessity” to Australians;74 in his travelogue, he dedicated a whole chapter (“Australian Sports”) to the Australians’ commitment to sport. Observers of Australia’s culture in the twentieth century confirm this view: Jonathan King, in his provocative book Waltzing Materialism (1978), holds that “to Australians, sport is not just something we play in our spare time, but is the medium by which [we] have to prove ourselves to the rest of the world”.75 In the 1990s, as the country prepared itself and the world for the Sydney Olympics, Australians cultivated ever more clearly their image as the greatest sporting nation in the world, a nation of fit and healthy people with a dedication to all sorts of sporting activities.76 72

Dixson, The Real Matilda, 39. The sexual power structure at Australian universities illustrates this well. In 1972, only one per cent of all Australian professors were females (Dixson, The Real Matilda, 40). In 2000, the situation has improved. The number of women in the professoriate has increased tenfold, but is still strikingly low with no more than eleven per cent of all full professors in Australia being females (Kate White, “Women in the Professoriate in Australia”, International Journal of Organisational Behaviour, III/2 (January-June 2001), 68. 74 Anthony Trollope, Australia and New Zealand (1873), eds Peter David Edwards and Roger Bilbrough Joyce, St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1967, 73. 75 Jonathan King, Waltzing Materialism, Sydney: Harper and Row, 1978, 104. 76 Interestingly, this image is, to speak in Herbert Badgery’s words, one of the lies Australians tell about themselves. Research by Kieran Hogan and Kevin Norton (published in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport) found that while Australia’s sporting elite – through enormous resource allocation by the federal government – had been turned into one of the best teams at the Sydney Olympics in the period following the disaster of the Montreal Olympics in 1976 (when the 73

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Against the background of misogyny and anti-intellectualism, the female characters in Carey’s fictions, who are often reservoirs of heightened insight and philosophical reflection, are all the more striking. Virtually all of Carey’s women characters reach out beyond their accustomed roles of the angel in the house, this way deconstructing stereotypes such as the one perpetuated by John Ruskin. Bliss, Carey’s first published novel, marks the beginning of what can be read as a wholesale reconceptualization of ideas about Australian women and the female intellect in past and present day Australia.77 As the author said himself in an interview, it is the women in Bliss who have the “drive and the ideas”.78 Honey Barbara, for instance, is a very inspiring character. As one of the “refugees of a broken culture”,79 she is assigned the task of rescuing the protagonist from his life in “hell” with her new age philosophies, that “hotchpotch of religion and belief and superstition”.80 Bettina Joy is another interesting case. As soon as she starts to liberate herself from Harry, “resent[ing] all the years he had squashed her”,81 she develops her creative faculties, rising instantly to the position of copywriter, art director and typographer in Harry’s advertising agency. The company’s “growth and success [being] based solely on Bettina”,82 the creative genius Bettina still stands in her husband’s shadow. The novel identifies not only the husband, but country’s athletes failed to win a single gold medal), the data they present on physical activity patterns of Australians today show that the broader community’s participation in sport and activity has continued to decline steadily over the last decades. While the country bathes in the sporting glory of sixteen respectively seventeen gold medals in Sydney (2000) and Athens (2004), the general population, according to Jane O’Dwyer (President of “Sports Medicine Australia”), is “facing a major health crisis because of inactivity – we are getting fatter and slacker” (“Gold for Australia: A Lesson in Successful Public Policy?”, Online Opinion: Australia’s E-Journal of Social and Political Debate, 15 August 2000: www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=361; accessed 20 March 2010). 77 Cf. Woodcock, who sees Bettina Joy as “the first of a number of powerful women characters in Carey’s work” (Peter Carey, 48). 78 Philip Neilsen, “Waiting for the Barbarians: An Interview with Peter Carey”, Literature in North Queensland, XV/3 (1987), 69. 79 Carey, Bliss, 291. 80 Ibid., 174. 81 Ibid., 217. 82 Ibid., 235.

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Australian society in general, whose system of gender roles cannot accommodate women with creative talents, for the intellectually crippling treatment of women. When Harry, credited with a muchadmired campaign for the State Gallery produced by Bettina, is elected trustee to the institution, Bettina’s resolution to leave Australia for New York is clearer than ever: ‘The arseholes! Jesus, I’ll be pleased to be out of this town. They all think it’s Harry who does the ads. They automatically assume it’s him. Oh, what a clever husband you have,’ she whined in imitation. ‘What a brilliant man. And what do you do, Mrs Joy?’83

Illywhacker continues this tradition of exposing the sexist structures of patriarchal society by parading women who leave the prison of domesticity. Leah Goldstein is a pertinent example. Described as enjoying an “intelligent conversation” and as being regretful about the fact that “there is no tradition of intellectual discussion”84 in Australia, Leah one day resolves to reject her duties in the Badgery family’s house and home: No longer would she be understanding Leah .… She had cooked their bland meals for them, wiped their noses, mended their socks, done all the simple things they all appeared to be incapable of doing. She had accepted the mindless ordinariness of their lives because she did not wish to live alone, perhaps, or because she could never explain to Charles why she might want to leave his custody. But she was not a young girl any more. She was thirty-seven years old and had a crease beneath her bottom and a little role of fat on her middle. She was thirty-seven and had, for the most part, wasted her life as if she hated it.85

She gives up her role as angel in the house in favour of what to her appears as a higher calling, that of a social historian. Carey inscribes her into a tradition of the Australian New Left that emerged in the 1970s and whose major proponents are historians such as Humphrey McQueen (for example, A New Britannia, 1976) and Robert W. 83

Ibid., 233. Carey, Illywhacker, 229, 230. 85 Ibid., 526-27. 84

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Connell (Ruling Class, Ruling Culture, 1977). It is in the vein of these socialist historians with their heightened awareness of Australia’s class structure that Carey has Leah “analyse the history of this country and point out why the working classes have always acted as if they’re going to be bosses tomorrow”.86 Reminiscent of the writings of the country’s best-known dissident historian, McQueen, the Labour activist Leah exposes the country’s famed egalitarianism as a myth of capitalist society: “the country has woken like a baby and had to discover everything for itself and only now are people learning what the ruling class has done to us, that we have been lied to and deceived about some Working Man’s Paradise.”87 Leah’s mother-in-law, Rosa Kaletsky, also sets out to make it in politics. She is a remarkable character, flamboyant, “filled with passions and enthusiasms, sudden squalls of anger and equally sudden exclamations of childlike … delight”, and so full of life that Leah falls in love with her: “When she was with Rosa she felt as if the world was about to burst open, like a delicious tropical fruit, and spill its seeds into her cupped hands.”88 At the same time, Rosa is also a very “moral” and “serious”89 character who, with one son “thrown into the arms of the revolution”90 back in Russia, has great personal stakes invested in the Communist cause, which is her “‘hobby-horse’”,91 her passion. Her comrades in the Communist Party of Australia, however, will not extend one of the guiding principles of Communism, equality, to female party members. Although Rosa, like all the major characters in Illywhacker, is given to telling lies about her personal history,92 it is quite clear to the reader that the reason for Rosa being expelled from the Party is the latent misogynism of her comrades, not the flaws in her character or a lack of conviction on Rosa’s side: “When I was in the Party”, Rosa tells Leah, “they thought I was frivolous. They did not trust me because of my dresses.”93 A little later, Rosa corrects this

86

Ibid., 230. Ibid., 229. 88 Ibid., 256. 89 Ibid., 257. 90 Ibid., 256. 91 Ibid., 251. 92 Ibid., 258. 93 Ibid., 251. 87

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“‘lie’”, telling a different story that involves an equal dose of misogynism, however: ‘The Bastards expelled me’ … ‘Because’ … ‘they are puritans and hypocrites, because I had an affair with a married comrade .… But they did not expel him. He was a man. They expelled me. It’s quite true.’94

That Rosa should be expelled so unfairly from the Australian branch of the Communist Party is particularly noteworthy since Australia has always prided itself on its fairness and equality. It is generally interesting to see that women in Carey’s novels are assigned crucial roles in the construction of the history that is presented to the reader. Leah Goldstein with her revisionist take on Australian history, for instance, has a particularly keen eye for representations of past human experience and calls into question Herbert’s authority as witness of the Badgery family’s history. Carey has her expose Badgery’s narrative as a gross distortion of their shared experience. Badgery’s version of their history is that of a “barbarian”,95 “unpardonable”96 to her for its lies and deliberate falsehoods. Ultimately, the narrator’s viewpoint is unmasked as that of an anti-intellectual, misogynist Australian male who poses as “the great criminal, the cynic”97 and cannot tolerate a woman to be a successful author or an activist of the Labour party, achievements of Leah’s she accuses him of having left out on purpose.98 Annette Davidson is another striking example from Illywhacker. A teacher of history, of “Some history”,99 as Badgery specifies, Davidson is used by her author to problematize notions of history as master narrative as well as of the categories of authenticity and truth in history. She is introduced in a typically illywhacking fashion: blurring the boundaries between fact and lie, the narrator makes an effort to authenticate her, telling us that Davidson is featured in one of Norman Lindsay’s paintings, namely “Perseus & the Beauties”, which, he claims, is held 94

Ibid., 258. Ibid., 549. 96 Ibid., 548. 97 Ibid., 549. 98 Ibid., 550. 99 Ibid., 15. 95

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by the “Art Gallery of Victoria”.100 Lindsay (1879-1969), one of Australia’s most famous visual artists, is an historical reality; the painting Badgery attributes to him is not. And while there is a “National Gallery of Victoria”, the “Art Gallery of Victoria” is a creation of the gamesman Badgery. In True History of the Kelly Gang, Ned Kelly’s girlfriend Mary Hearn is assigned the function of custodian of the past. Ned describes her as passionately dedicated to historical truth, or at least historical truth in Ned’s own terms that, the reader is given to understand, are dubious enough. According to Ned, she “sits watch on these sentences [for example, the newspaper cuttings] like a steel nibbed kookaburra on the fences in the morning sun”,101 and, like Leah, leaves traces of her interference with the narrative material in the text: Carey has her insert comments on the margins of the newspaper cuttings which Ned enters into his narrative to expose what he and Mary see as distortions of the press.102 Besides being a friend of truth, Mary is also equipped by the author as strategic adviser to the Kelly Gang, whose members she reads a stern lecture on the dangers of reverting from being avengers of the poor to terrorists, similar to the Irish rebels (the Sons of Sieve) whose history she tells. When a reader of Peter Carey’s novels begins to reflect upon the overall impact of the fictional history presented by Carey, the author’s “intruders in the bush” are likely to be amongst the most lasting memories. The snake-dancer Leah Goldstein will doubtlessly stay with the reader, and so will the young and frail owner of a Sydney glassworks, and possibly also her mother with her passion for factories; Ellen Kelly, the matriarch of the Kelly family, will also remain an essential memory of Australian history à la Carey. These women stand out in their respective fictional societies because of their exceptional stamina, their ambition, their pursuit of a dream. Carey will surely go down in Australia’s literary history as a writer whose novels are full of colourful women. It is important to point out, however, that he does not elevate woman to a place where she can – in the realm of the fiction – exercise her faculties to her best advantage. The picture he conveys to the reader is far from idealizing – it is 100

Ibid., 13. Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang, 290. 102 Ibid., 290-96. 101

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disillusioning. Carey’s fictional women are never in a position where success comes easy to them, where they can achieve as much as the men can. When one of his female characters succeeds in any of the male domains, it is against the resistance of an essentially hostile environment. Here lies the key to Carey’s view of the history of the female sex in Australia and to his exposition of his country’s misogynist past. Women are historic pygmies because only the most outstanding characters amongst them could hope to defy the crippling conventions and open the lock that kept women out of those areas of public life that were seen as essential for the national development and were therefore historical. Bending gender Bending gender to the point of transgenderism or even transsexuality is the most radical form of reconceptualizing woman (and man, of course) that we find in Carey’s writings. It is indicative of the defamiliarizing and dehierarchizing agenda of postmodernist cultural criticism in general, and especially of the deconstructionists’ strategy of dissolving binaries. While Carey already weakens the orthodoxies of traditional gender roles by featuring women who infringe on male prerogatives, incidents of transgenderism, transsexualism and even hermaphroditism all destabilize the sexual polarities that have underpinned traditional conceptualizations of gender identity. By bending the gender of some of his major characters, Carey joins forces with a group of feminists led by Joan Wallach Scott who reject the fixed and seemingly eternal quality of the generic opposition between man and woman. Scott takes gender to be “a primary way of signifying relationships of power”.103 In order to overcome the repressive faculties of gender identity she calls for a wholesale deconstruction of gender roles. Such a deconstructivist approach to gender to her means “analyzing in context the way any binary opposition operates, reversing and displacing its hierarchical construction, rather than accepting it as real or self-evident or in the nature of things”.104 Drawing on Lacan’s notion that repressed desires for sexual otherness are part of the unconscious, Scott sees the 103

Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (1988), rev. edn, New York: Columbia UP, 1999, 42. 104 Ibid., 41.

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dissolution of gender boundaries facilitated by the “subject’s potential for bisexuality”: The principle of masculinity rests on the necessary repression of feminine aspects … and introduces conflict into the opposition of masculine and feminine. Repressed desires are present in the unconscious and are constantly a threat to the stability of gender identification, denying its unity, subverting its need for security.105

It is in line with such a deconstructivist approach to gender that a number of the characters in Carey’s fictions are drawn, for instance in “The Chance”, where Carey first attacks the fixity of sexual polarity. The narrator in this short story confesses he has a particular liking for … women who, whilst being conventionally feminine enough in their appearance, have exhibited certain behavioural traits more commonly associated with men. A bare-breasted woman working on a tractor is the fastest, crudest approximation I can provide.

The narrator’s new girlfriend, whom he describes at some length to the reader, is of exactly such an ambiguous sexual nature. We meet her rolling “a cigarette with hands which might have been the hands of an apprentice bricklayer, hands which were connected to breasts which were connected to other parts doubtless female in gender ...”. Femininity and masculinity reside side by side in this wo/man, a person who impresses the narrator with her “strength” and charms him with her “vulnerability” all at once.106 Carey continues to look critically at the construction of sexual identity in his longer prose. Illywhacker exemplifies this. Here, the main character Herbert Badgery is not only far less engaged in typically male activities than his hard-drinking, promiscuous and independent-minded girlfriend Leah Goldstein, but actually ends up being perfectly intersexual. His behaviour throughout the novel oscillates between offensive masculinity (when he performs his chauvinistic nationalism) and femininity (whenever he gives in to his desire for home and hearth). It allows Carey to break down notions of 105 106

Ibid., 38-39. Carey, Collected Stories, 267.

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sexual identity; after all, the exponents of Australian nationalism are almost exclusively males,107 and the role of the “angel in the house” was the prevailing image of Australian woman until feminists interrogated the concept in the 1970s. In the figure of Herbert Badgery he brings to light the repressed characteristics of the sexual other. Badgery is an extreme case, for he not only allows his author to disrupt the stability of gender identification, but he even starts to grow into a hermaphrodite with a “dick … as scabby and scaly as a horse’s”108 and “tits”109 from which he metaphorically gives succour to his offspring: “the milk of dragons from my witch’s tit”.110 In the figure of Hissao, Badgery’s grandson, the sexual indeterminacy consuming his grandfather in old age culminates. As Badgery’s “creature, [his] monster”,111 Hissao, whose genderless name already is indicative of the author’s play with blurred sex roles,112 is doomed to “liv[e] out the destiny [Badgery] had mapped for him”,113 a destiny of a transgendered kind. When Badgery discovers that Hissao looks like a “spitting image of Sonia”, his daughter who disappeared in the bush without a trace, he starts the process of switching his grandson’s sex: … I bought him a little blue dress and a pinny and I had him put them on. There was no danger in it. I got him to do it in the privacy of my room .... I looked up, and there she was. What a pretty little girl my Sonia was. She tugged at the long sleeves of her dress and then waved her hand.114

This process is so complete that Rosa Carlobene, a fellow passenger on board the plane that takes Hissao to Rome at the end of the novel, 107

See Michael Roe, “Nationalism”, in The Oxford Companion to Australian History, 459-60. 108 Carey, Illywhacker, 11. 109 Ibid., 154, 587, 600. 110 Ibid., 600. 111 Ibid., 597. 112 Hassall explains his name as follows: “His name, which was supposed to be Michael, also sounds both snake-like and Japanese; but it splits into ‘his sao’ which, perhaps ironically, incorporates that Australian icon the Sao biscuit” (Dancing on Hot Macadam: Peter Carey’s Fiction, 111). 113 Carey, Illywhacker, 597. 114 Ibid., 547-48.

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is described as having “the sense, the very distinct sense, of her companion’s female gender …”.115 Hissao’s transmutation interestingly is as irreversible as the metamorphosis Herbert himself undergoes in Rankin Downs, where he fashions himself into a “frail man”.116 Another character who is transgendered is Horace Dunlop, the poetaster who lures Phoebe away from Herbert. He is described as “cosy and comfortable and domestic”, “a nice man, but far too gentle”.117 Carey emphasizes the awkward nature of his gender identity by contrasting him with his lover Phoebe who, Herbert tells us, “displayed little of the maternal instinct towards her son”.118 Horace with his female gender identity takes over the household chores from Phoebe: “… Horace had found, at last, his true vocation which was neither poetry nor law …, but the care of house and baby which even Molly had to admit that he did with greater skill than any of the women could have managed.”119 Almost a hermaphrodite, Horace, who is not Charles’ biological father, integrates the roles of both parents in one person, and it is “only when the small puckered lips sucked at his chest [that he] could … be judged lacking as both father and mother to it”.120 The dissolution of essentialist sexual identities once again shows the postmodern lineage of Carey’s thought. Proceeding on the assumption that identity is subject to change, postmodernism sees identity as “not immanent in oneself, one’s consciousness or personality”, but as a construct constituted “through language and the social order”.121 Carey explores this issue further in Oscar and Lucinda, where he focuses on gender as a social category, one that imposes societal strictures on the gendered person that literally imprison the characters caught up in them. The setting of the novel in nineteenth-century colonial New South Wales, ridden as it is with Victorian hypocrisy and a particularly harsh form of misogyny, allows 115

Ibid., 591. Ibid., 454. 117 Ibid., 191. 118 Ibid., 196. 119 Ibid., 195. 120 Ibid., 196. 121 Schaffer, Women and the Bush, 9. 116

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the author to show how the colonial gender system was instituted, how male and female identities were traditionally produced, and how oppressive the system was for non-conformists such as Oscar and Lucinda. By fashioning many of the novel’s characters with features and behaviours clearly recognizable as belonging to the other sex, Carey renders fixed gender identities obsolete, destabilizing the social organization of the relationship between the sexes based on a polarity between man and woman. Lucinda is a case in point. Born into a family with unconventional sex roles (her father is described as “gentle”, “passive” and “mild”, while her mother comes across as resolute and full of initiative122), Lucinda, in order to liberate herself from the societal strictures imposed upon her sex, revolts against her “otherness, her womanness”,123 and is consequently perceived by a fellow character as “a woman acting like a man”.124 Oscar, like Lucinda, transgresses the line that demarcates men and women in canonical prescriptions of sexual identity – such as the one by Oscar and Lucinda’s real-life contemporary, John Ruskin: Now their separate characters are briefly these. The man’s power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation, and invention; his energy for adventure, for war, and for conquest .... But the woman’s power is for rule, not for battle – and her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision .... She must be enduringly, incorruptibly good; instinctively, infallibly wise – wise, not for self-development, but for selfrenunciation: wise, not that she may set herself above her husband, but that she may never fail from his side ....125

Oscar is a very effeminate character who, as M.D. Fletcher observes, “has no sense of self in the world as a man”.126 Signs of his lack of 122

Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 86, 78. Ibid., 299. 124 Ibid., 436. 125 Ibid., 84-86. 126 M.D. Fletcher, “Peter Carey’s Post-Colonial Australia II: Oscar and Lucinda: Misunderstanding, Victimisation, and Political History”, in Australian Political Ideas, ed. Geoffrey Stokes, New South Wales: U of New South Wales P, 1994, 145. 123

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maleness are pervasive throughout the text. We encounter Oscar giggling rather than laughing,127 and when he laughs, he does so in a high hooting manner;128 he behaves “like a girl with the manner of a grown man”;129 he is of a light and frail physique, with “thin milkwhite arms”,130 and is seen by others as an “extraordinary child”,131 “an ‘old woman’”,132 “a hooded nun”;133 ultimately, as Lucinda realizes, he “is as near to a sister as I am likely to get …”.134 Just like Lucinda experiences opposition when she refuses to adhere to traditional conceptions of womanness, Oscar is also sanctioned for his effeminacy. Emphasizing the violence and the oppressiveness with which the rigid system of traditional gender identity was kept in place, Carey shows how Oscar is punished on the expedition by the wardens of maleness such as the expedition leader: derided as a “wax-skinned girlie boy”135 by Jeffris, Oscar is relegated to the “‘Ladies’ Compartment’” together with Percy Smith, an aesthete and naturalist, a man who wears clean clothes that “still smelt of his wife’s ironing board”.136 He, the “Odd Bodd”,137 “whose credentials as explorer could not be more unsuitable”, as Paul Genoni argues,138 and who is even “too shy to bathe naked in front of the other men …”,139 is unacceptable to the others. While Jeffris and his men 127

Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 386. Ibid., 360. 129 Ibid., 62. 130 Ibid., 359. 131 Ibid., 440 132 Ibid., 360. 133 Ibid., 494. 134 Ibid., 361. It is quite likely that Oscar’s frailty is based on that of the young Edmund Gosse. In his Acknowledgements to the novel, Carey admits to having “borrowed” (Oscar and Lucinda, np) certain ideas from Gosse’s autobiography, Father and Son (1907). Carey mentions the Plymouth Brethren, the Christmas Pudding and the father who was “proud of never having read Shakespeare”. One would have to add the father-son conflict and the male protagonist’s feebleness (see Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949, 34). 135 Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 441. 136 Ibid., 449. 137 Ibid., 454. 138 Paul Genoni, “Subverting the Empire: Exploration in the Fiction of Thea Astley and Peter Carey”, Journal of Australian Studies, XXV/70 (2001), 20. 139 Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, 449. 128

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actually seem to be enjoying the expedition, “enjo[y] being ‘soldiers’”140 engaged in a test of their manhood, Oscar experiences an ordeal, his own way of the cross in a world where only the strong survive. In Manzone Country, Darwin’s teachings, which had already haunted the elder Hopkins,141 become menacingly clear to the younger Hopkins, who is described by the narrator as a man who … could not imagine … what this countryside was like. He used soft words like brook and lane and copse. He could not imagine its sawtoothed savagery.142

In Australian colonial society, the novel’s point seems to be, Oscar really only is safe in the realm of the house, a place where the reader sees him engaged in helping Lucinda. She, at first, “did not think it manly”143 that Oscar should do her household chores, but still falls in love with him – it seems precisely because he is not a typical man. Hence, both Oscar and Lucinda demonstrate Joan Wallach Scott’s claim that gender is a “social category imposed on a sexed body”144 rather than the expression of qualities inherent in a person. Although, as Susan Martin explains, Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang features one of the most important “white male heroes” of the Australian narrative tradition,145 the gang members’ cross-dressing has paradoxically raised the issue of their gender stability.146 Commentators on the historic Kelly have used the Kellys’ crossdressing along with other instances of behaviour where Ned and his fellow gang members seemingly deviated from the path of heteronormativity to argue for Ned Kelly’s homosexuality. The 140

Ibid., 448. Ibid., 210. 142 Ibid., 387. 143 Ibid., 360. 144 Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, 32. 145 Martin, “Dead White Male Heroes: True History of the Kelly Gang, and Ned Kelly in Australian Fictions”, in Fabulating Beauty, 303. 146 Steve Hart’s cross-dressing has been firmly embedded in the Australian folk tradition ever since Sidney Nolan immortalized Hart wearing a skirt and woman’s shoes, riding a horse (“Steve Hart”, 1945). For the cultural significance of Hart’s transvestism in the wider context of Australian cross-genderism, see Elizabeth McMahon, “Cross-Dressing Cross-Genre: Intersections of Australian Art, Literature and Culture”, Art and Australia, XXXIV/3 (March 1997), 372-79. 141

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linguist Sidney Baker, for instance, claimed that because Kelly and several of his gang members are known to have worn perfume, danced with men, embraced each other, and dressed as women occasionally, they were likely to have been homosexual.147 Norman Lindsay, in his essay “The Question of Ned Kelly’s Perfume”, argued against Baker, explaining that “perfume was a property common to all men of the period”, that it was a matter of fashion and of keeping one’s nose free from the miasma of the city, that there was no stigma attached to men dancing together at the time and that nothing sexual was interpreted by it.148 In True History of the Kelly Gang, the author deploys crossdressing mainly for socio-historical reasons. He links the Kellys’ fight against oppression with the Anglo-Irish controversy and provides the outlaws with another motive for their robbing and stealing, for, as it turns out, Ned’s father, John, his brother Dan and gang member Steve Hart wear women’s dresses as credentials to their political conviction. They seek to emulate an Irish rebel organization, the “Sons of Sieve”, who are said to have brutally raided rich landowners’ properties back in Ireland and who – as was common among social rebels back in Ireland – cross-dressed to indicate that they felt no longer bound by the normal rules of society.149 Besides, Carey uses cross-dressing to play with his readers’ expectations and to introduce an air of uncertainty regarding gender roles. The possibility of transvestism, after all, lingers in the text for more than 250 pages: it is only discarded when Mary reads the crossdressed gang members Steve and Dan a stern lecture about the relationship between cross-dressing and terrorism.150 This allays the readers’ uncertainty about the motivation of John Kelly’s crossdressing, which turns out to be a case not of gender identity disorder, but rather of an excessive kind of masculinity involving male bonding and acts of cruelty against innocents. 147

Sidney Baker, The Australian Language, Milsons Point, NSW: Currawong, 1978,

94. 148

Norman Lindsay, “The Question of Ned Kelly’s Perfume” (1967), in The Oxford Book of Australian Essays, ed. Imre Salusinszky, Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1997, 105. 149 See Carey’s interview with The Compulsive Reader in 2001 (http://tinyurl.com/ Carey-Compulsive-Reader). 150 Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang, 271-78.

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Bending or hybridizing gender is Carey’s most radical form of revaluating the relative importance of men and women in the history of his country. When characters deviate from the sexual or generic normality condition, when the distinction between genders and sexes become blurred, the laws that have kept men and women safely apart, each in their separate spheres of historical relevance or irrelevance, cease to apply. Since traditional ideas of Australian history depend on the validity of this distinction, the deconstruction of the sexual binary destabilizes canonical perceptions of the role men and women have played in the past. As author of a revisionist history of his country, one that reinscribes woman into history and exposes the mechanisms of oppression that had absented her from traditional conceptions of Australian identity, Carey acts as an accoucheur in the rebirth of woman in Australian society. While it may be right that, as Carey claims, virtually everything he writes somehow connects with questions of his country’s identity, women are that group of Australian society which the author most clearly speaks out for. In his recent publications My Life as a Fake (2003) and Wrong about Japan: A Father’s Journey with His Son (2005), Carey has significantly turned from gender-related concerns to another field of identity, that of race and ethnicity under the impact of the “Asianization” of Australia. Although he himself sees “no scheme”151 in the Asian locales of My Life as a Fake and Wrong about Japan, it is a conspicuous enough move for literary critics aware of the increased importance of the Asian axis in Australian life and the tremendous recognition that the country’s writers have paid to Asia over the last two decades.152 By “crossing the gap” between Asia and Australia like Christopher Koch before him,153 Carey acknowledges his country’s

151

Gaile, “The ‘Contrarian Streak’: An Interview with Peter Carey”, 16. For an overview of this development, see Gaile, “Resisting Cultural Resistance: Contemporary Australian Fiction and the ‘Asianisation’ of Australia”, in Zwischen Asien und dem Westen: Zur politischen, ökonomischen und kulturellen Orientierung Australiens, ed. Norbert Platz, Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2004, 165-66. 153 Koch is one of the best-known Australian writers to have discovered Asia for an Australian readership. Two of Koch’s novels are set in Asia (The Year of Living Dangerously, 1978, Highways to a War, 1995) and he wrote a much-noted essay on the importance of Asia for Australian consciousness: “Crossing the Gap: Asia and the 152

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cultural, economical and political stakes in Asia and joins forces with groups such as the Australian Labor Party, whose declared aim is to “‘move Australia from being a European-American-oriented community to being a nation in, and of, the Asia Pacific’”.154 To see Carey in line with a programme redirecting attention to the next-doorneighbours in Asia ties in well with the way in which he has portrayed the orientation to Britain as a historical anachronism, hindering the country from reaching true postcoloniality.

Australian Imagination”, in Crossing the Gap: A Novelist's Essays, London: Chatto and Windus, 1987, 1-25. 154 Richard A. Higgott, and Kim Richard Nossal, “The International Politics of Liminality: Relocating Australia in the Asia Pacific”, Australian Journal of Political Science, XXXII/2 (July 1997), 169.

POSTSCRIPT: WRONG ABOUT CAREY? READING CAREY IN POST-POSTMODERN TIMES The last ten years, the period over which this book has grown into its present form, were an intriguing time for a critical assessment of Carey’s writings. By the year 2000, when I embarked on this project, Carey had been around as a writer for two and a half decades (The Fat Man in History, his first book, appeared in 1974) and had produced a substantial enough amount of fiction to carry the arguments of a sustained critical appreciation. In 2001, his position as Australia’s most garlanded contemporary writer was confirmed when he won his second Booker Prize. Next to the success he has had with critics and the reading public, the Noughties have also marked decisive changes in Carey’s literary career. In 2003, he left the University of Queensland Press, ending a partnership that had lasted for twenty-nine years and eleven books;1 in 2004, he got divorced from his wife, Alison Summers, whose “critical intelligence” and “nonobtrusive” comments he had always considered to be important factors in his writing-process;2 in 2009, Penguin Australia signed up the writer for their distinguished Hamish Hamilton list. In terms of content, Carey has recently increasingly sought locales outside of Australia: large parts of My Life as a Fake (2003) are set in Malaysia, and Wrong about Japan: A Father’s Journey with His Son (2005) chronicles a journey undertaken by Carey and his son Charley to Tokyo; parts of Theft: A Love Story (2006) are set in Tokyo and in New York; His Illegal Self: A Novel (2008) starts out in New York, and Parrot and 1 Carey did not leave UQP for financial reasons only. To him, it was a “once-in-alifetime chance”, as Laurie Muller, his former editor at UQP said, to “mov[e] to a higher international league” (quoted in Jason Steger, “Peter Carey Leaves Long-Time Publisher for Random Exposure”, Age, 6 December 2002, np). Carey apparently followed Carol Davidson, the former publisher of UQP and personal friend of the author, who had left her old press for a management position at Random shortly before. 2 Carey in Willbanks, “Peter Carey on The Tax Inspector and The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith”, 15.

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Olivier in America (2009), a reinvention of Alexis de Tocqueville’s voyage to America, takes the reader to nineteenth-century America. Meanwhile, a momentous change has occurred in literary criticism. The ascendancy of postmodern critical theory has come to an end. More and more scholars urge academia to move beyond postcolonialism,3 postmodernism,4 and poststructuralism.5 As a result, Ihab Hassan, in one of his publications, asked the question what postmodernism “was”,6 and Terry Eagleton, responding to the same general discontent, even proclaimed the present day to be “after theory”.7 The changing academic environment, coupled with the changes in Carey’s career, are a good opportunity for review, for reckoning with the old before the new has fully evolved. This is also the time to evaluate the critical tools and the methods employed in this analysis of Carey’s fiction. If one were to put a name to the single most important issue in Carey’s fictions, one would very likely come up with Australian history. Of the eleven novels (excluding The Big Bazoohley) the author has published so far, six clearly qualify as historical fiction, fulfilling such criteria as the fusion of history and fiction, or the awareness of the time that has passed between the events that are narrated in the novel and the act of representing them: Illywhacker, Oscar and Lucinda, Jack Maggs, True History of the Kelly Gang, My Life as a Fake and Parrot and Olivier in America. Of the remaining five, two (Bliss and The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith) negotiate the effects of the colonial past on the cringing settler societies they feature, and in only three of Carey’s novels do questions of history 3

See, for instance, Epifanio San Juan Jr., Beyond Postcolonial Theory, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. 4 See José López and Garry Potter in their influential essay collection After Postmodernism: An Introduction to Critical Realism, London: Athlone, 2001. 5 See Colin Davis, After Poststructuralism: Reading, Stories and Theory, London: Routledge, 2003, and Michael O’Driscoll and Tilottama Rajan in the essay collection After Poststructuralism: Writing the Intellectual History of Theory, Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002. 6 In his essay “From Postmodernism to Postmodernity: The Local/Global Context” (2001), which he starts with a tellingly entitled section: “What Was Postmodernism?” (www.ihabhassan.com/postmodernism_to_postmodernity.htm). An earlier version of this essay appeared in Philosophy and Literature, XXV/1 (April 2001), 1-13. 7 Terry Eagleton, After Theory, London: Lane, 2003.

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play no or only a marginal role (The Tax Inspector, Theft: A Love Story, and His Illegal Self: A Novel). Apart from history, there are several other issues that crop up again and again in the fictions, but, as I have argued, practically all of Carey’s writings can be seen as reconceptualizing notions of Australianness, past and present. The big issues that have kept Carey critics occupied over the last thirty years – unreliable narration, the play with authenticity, truth and lie, literary showmanship, shifting identities, examinations of troubled and anxious minds (with the exception of the last item in this list, perhaps) – all contribute in one way or another to what I see as the writer’s overarching concern: the critical evaluation of history by means of fiction. Critics have frequently commented on history as a factor in Carey’s fictions, but before the publication of this book, no attempt had been made to synthesize the evaluation of individual novels and – based on all of the historic fictions listed above – to arrive at a systematic understanding of the author’s approach to and concept of history. Carey’s focus on history and the methods deployed to interrogate it tie in with the attempts of postmodernism to come to terms with the past. Postmodernism, as has often been pointed out, does not shrink back from the nightmares of history (as did the modernist Stephen Dedalus), it has decided to face them. “Always historicize!”, says Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious, and many have followed his stipulation that history be the “ultimate horizon” of literary and cultural analysis ever since.8 To Carey, countering the historical apathy of a country where most of its citizens think there is so little history it is not worth investigating is one of the engines that drive him as a writer. In interviews he declares mantra-like that the unresolved issues in his country’s history (especially the convict past and terra nullius) prevent Australia from ever reaching maturity as a nation and that it is therefore of the utmost importance to come to terms with them. The real-life writer’s clear stance has no doubt encouraged my own approach to his fictions, that is, to read them as vehicles for a serious engagement with history and historiography, as an intervention in the country’s history wars. 8

Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981), Routledge Classics, London: Routledge, 2007, 64.

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Holding up one’s approach for a critical assessment is an essential feature of any closing chapter of an academic project. In the given context, this evaluation is all the more important because Carey’s latest fictions have raised questions that not only ask where Peter Carey is heading as a writer, but, what is more important for me as a critic, have at the same time challenged the established critical tools used hitherto in reading Carey’s fictions. It is already telling that My Life as a Fake and Theft: A Love Story, for instance, were not as warmly received by academia and the general readership as the novels that preceded them. Both novels did not win any of the great literary awards that the author was almost certain to win in the past. Robert Macfarlane, Cambridge academic and reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement, while giving the author due praise for his creation of Malaysian local colour in My Life as a Fake, in the end thinks the novel an artistic “failure”. He sums up what might well have been the cause for its unfavourable reception with part of its reviewers and the jurors of literary prizes: The deep problem with the book is not an excess of story, or a failure of technique, but an insufficiency of humanity. For this is a novel which, like many recent novels, is all about itself. Specifically, it is about the issue of authenticity in literature. Like other contemporary writers – Peter Ackroyd, Julian Barnes, A.S. Byatt, Don DeLillo – Carey rolls this gobstopper of a question around in his mouth in the hope that it will dissolve, but of course it doesn’t. Those supply rendered voices are made to exemplify not the rich substance of human fears and aspirations, but the arid antimatter of literary theory.

Macfarlane seems particularly disenchanted with the metafictional “gelignite” that, he says, Carey straps so carefully in place that he “bring[s] the whole book tumbling down”9 – an effect that delighted critics ten, fifteen or twenty years ago, but seems to leave most of the professional literary commentators perfectly cold today. Macfarlane’s dissatisfaction is indicative of the general theoretical and critical climate of the new millennium, which has critics reaching out beyond postmodernism and fictional self-reflexivity. 9

Robert Macfarlane, “Dangerous Inventions”, Times Literary Supplement, 12 September 2003, 23.

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While I think that Macfarlane is perfectly right to point out that the endless regurgitation of the issue of authenticity, which, again, is of central importance in Theft: A Love Story, has Carey going round in circles, always ending up in the same place (authenticity is a construction, an illusion, and as good or bad as fakery), and while it may well be that writers who explore this field are not on the philosophical avant-garde any more, I do believe that there are still plenty of reasons why writers should continue their fictional investigations along these very same lines. It is true, the battles of poststructuralism have long been fought and the question of the truthtelling capacities of language has been answered finally, and in the negative, but the reality of life in the twenty-first century continues to be of a kind that not only justifies but actually demands of authors to go on rolling the “gobstopper” in their mouth in order to alert their readers to the dangers of essentialist thinking. This is especially pertinent if fiction is to be seen as an important contribution to the critical discourses of our society, and what literary critic can afford to adopt a l’art pour l’art stance after the cultural turn of the discipline anyway? In my reading of Carey’s treatment of Australian history and identity, I believe I have adduced sufficient evidence to prove that Carey’s fiction is conceived so as to make an impact on his readers when they form their attitudes towards certain issues of Australianness. For, despite their narrators’ postmodern tricksiness and their liberties with facts, the fictions clearly beg to be taken seriously, beg to be read as a viable alternative to official history in explaining the past. As is typical of postmodern and postcolonial fictions with a historical subject, Carey’s novels – by confounding fact and fiction, myth and history, truth and lie – engage official history in a critical dialogue with the aim of depriving the former metanarrative of its exclusive right to make the past accessible for the present. It goes without saying that no serious reader will consult Carey’s novels as true history. As fictional histories that together make up a biography of Australia, however, Carey’s novels are as enlightening and truth telling about the cultural history and the Australian consciousness as any traditional history that, for methodological and institutional reasons, adheres to the truth criterion.

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There is, indeed, much need for further fictional intervention in the Australian history wars and for raising the critical awareness of the country’s past and the interrelated problems of the present. Australian historical discourse continues to strive after metaphysical essences; the country’s historians continue to believe they hold the right and their opponents the wrong view of history (as do those of other nationalities); they still come to intellectual blows on the subject of how to interpret the sources of the past, as the debate about the frontier conflict fanned by Keith Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History has shown.10 And above all, politicians and other pressure groups continue to mobilize history for their purposes, and in essentialist ways. Although Australians have started to acknowledge some of the wrongs of the past, the conservative view of the past continues to be very powerful, officially promoted, for instance, by the former Prime Minister Howard, whose declared aim it was, as he outlined in the Robert Menzies lecture of 1996, … to ensure that our history as a nation is not written definitively by those who take the view that we should apologise for most of it. This black armband view of our past reflects a belief that most Australian history since 1788 has been little more than a disgraceful story of imperialism, exploitation, racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination. I take a very different view. I believe that the balance sheet of our history is one of heroic achievement and that we have achieved much more as a nation of which we can be proud than of which we should be ashamed.11

The country’s left-liberals have argued against the Howard view of history, exposing rather than covering up the racism, misogynism and the shameful treatment of the country’s Aboriginals. The tools and strategies that postmodernism, postcolonialism and poststructuralism have put into the hands of writers have proved to be highly efficient instruments in questioning official history. With the 10

In this three-volume work on Aboriginal history (The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, 3 vols, Sydney: Macleay, 2003-2009), Windschuttle attempts to rewrite the history of the frontier conflict by exposing what he sees as flagrant misreadings of the sources about Aboriginal casualties by “black armband” historians such as Henry Reynolds. 11 www.menzieslecture.org/1996.html (accessed 20 March 2010).

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help of anti-authorizing and deconstructivist stratagems, histories have been rewritten (as in Ondaatje’s The English Patient or in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children), and even whole countries have been reconceptualized (as in England, England by Julian Barnes). Critical theory, to be sure, is an integral component of Carey’s fiction. Much of what his critics see as the writer’s strengths, or as “typically Carey”, he nolens volens owes to the discourses that dominated literary criticism until recently. There is, accordingly, hardly a critical essay that fails to relate Carey to literary postmodernism or that fails to detect instances of postcolonial or poststructuralist thought in his writings. One could, in fact, well argue that there would be no playful confounding of binaries such as fact and fiction in Carey’s novels without the groundwork done by French poststructuralists; no bold “celebration” of story-telling as a form of history without Nietzsche and the postmodern thinkers that followed him; no interrogation of the teleological trajectory inherent in the Western metanarrative of history without the likes of Lyotard; and no writing back to the Empire without the exponents of postcolonial theory, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak. Many charges have been levelled against postmodern, postcolonial and poststructural theories, both in their application in literary criticism and in their deployment in creative writing. Scholars who work with interpretative concepts provided by critical theory are seen as reinstalling the very totalizing rhetoric their discourses claim to disrupt, as obfuscating through their jargonized rhetoric, even as lacking the coherent-writing gene. Anti-postmodernists also find fault with postmodernist creative writers. The self-conscious fictionality of their texts, so the argument goes (here reported, not propounded, by Dominic Head), is … self-deprecating in the sense that it has the effect of devaluing the role and function of ‘literature.’ No longer capable of high seriousness, the literary object colludes in its own debunking, participating in the cultural logic that blurs the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. The consequence of this is a culture of pastiche, with no vantage point from which value can be assigned with authority.12 12

Dominic Head, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction: 1950-2000,

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Postmodernists such as Donald Barthelme (for instance, in Snow White, 1967), John Barth (especially in his collection of tales, Lost in the Funhouse, 1968), or Thomas Pynchon (in Gravity’s Rainbow, 1973, for example), who according to Steven Best and Hans Kellner “broke with realist theories of mimesis” and typically abandoned “moral, symbolic, or allegorical schemes … in favor of surface meaning, or the depicition of the sheer ‘meaninglessness’ of random events and fractured ‘narration’”, may well keep their readers mooring in a certain moral ambiguity and indeterminacy. Their characters may also be perceived as “empty, depthless, and aimless, embodying the ‘waning of affect’”, eking out their existences in “nonlinear”13 narratives that are “primarily concerned with the form and play of language”, and whose “‘metafictional’ techniques … flaunt artifice and emphasize the act of writing over the written word”.14 Carey’s novels share certain of these ingredients of a postmodern poetics, but he certainly does not adopt the “nihilistic stance” that has been read into the fictions of the practitioners of radical metafiction such as John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, John Hawkes, and Robert Coover. Unlike these postmodernists, Carey does not “eschew being pinned down to positions”; he does not “reve[l] in irony and the indeterminacy of meaning”,15 but employs metafictional strategies such as narratorial self-consciousness to an effect that actually forecloses the “waning of affect” Fredric Jameson sees as one of the dangers of self-reflexive, postmodern fiction of the ludic kind.16 In fact, from my reading Carey emerges as a writer who uses postmodernist techniques in the name of deliverance from onerous powers and influences. When Carey, for instance, rewrites Australian history by delegitimizing established versions of the past, his vision is always emancipatory, directed against political and cultural oppression and dependency. In his fictional biography of Australia, he preserves the Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002, 229. 13 Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, The Postmodern Turn, New York: Guilford, 1997, 131. 14 Ibid., 132. 15 Ibid., 26. 16 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991, 10.

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memory of those who in traditional Australian historiography did not qualify as being historical. In order to make his characters historical, he, like the historians of the Annales School, leaves the heights of political history, opting for gossip, local-interest stories, the extraordinary, the fantastical. It is little surprising, therefore, that there is a clearly discernible moral vision in Carey’s writings. Carolyn Bliss, in her 1991 essay “The Revisionary Lover”, already described Carey’s short stories as having a “sharply delineated … moral territory” and his novels as being full of “moral concern and obligation”.17 Almost twenty years on I would like to argue for the ongoing relevance of Bliss’ assessment. The novels Carey has written since continue to have a moral that the reader can easily identify. Since this moral vision is ever-present in Carey’s fiction, and since the author persistently holds up certain critical issues to his readers in the magic mirror of his fictions, it is certainly not inadequate to say that there is a didactic purpose ingrained in his writings, which calls for a utilitarian reading as I have proposed it in this book. To such a reading, which sees Carey’s fictions as a positive contribution to Australia’s attempt at coming of age, the story-telling aspect of Carey’s fictions, which contributes positively to the nascent Australian mythology, has been of great importance. As Helen Daniel already observed in 1991, Carey’s novels form a “mythopoeic history of Australia”,18 one that explains how Australians came to be who they are by, for instance, emphasizing their origins in convictism and organized oppression. Like the stories the members of the Joy family tell in Bliss, Carey’s stories are Australian-made and therefore relate directly to their readership in Australia. As I have shown, they counter the canon of stories the imported European and American mythologies have imposed on the settler culture, and which are suffocating attempts at creating a settler mythology as powerful as that of the United States or, for that matter, the Voorstanders in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith.

17

Bliss, “The Revisionary Lover”, 46, 47. Helen Daniel, “Peter Carey: The Rivalries of the Fictions”, in International Literature in English: Essays on the Major Writers, ed. Robert Ross, Chicago: St James, 1991, 405. 18

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Carey is not the only contemporary author to mythologize his fictions in that specific way. The genre of historiographic metafiction, which he has used in a number of his fictions, seems to be particularly suitable for dealing with myth, whether constructively, by mythologizing, or deconstructively, by demythologizing. Myth is used by writers of historiographic metafictions from Canada,19 the United States,20 and Great Britain.21 The examples from Canada are particularly pertinent in this context, because the cultural and historical conditions in Canada, another settler colony, allow comparisons to be made with Australia. Canadian authors like Rudy Wiebe, Timothy Findley, and Michael Ondaatje, according to the analyses provided by Marie Vautier and Marc Colavincenzo, mythologize history in a very similar way and to the same effect as Carey. Like Carey, they use the very systems they challenge with their “New World Myth”: New World Myth could be described as in a perpetual state of coming-into-being. European accounts of New World historicopolitical events have long informed the English Canadian and Québécois mythological universe(s), as has the traditionally dominant Christian belief system. These European-based worldviews no longer entirely suffice, however; hence the creation, in narrative, of New World Myth. In its development, though, New World Myth cannot avoid being part of the older belief system it inherited from the European viewpoint: that is to say, biblical myth and religious ritual, on the one hand, and nonindigenous historico-political accounts of New World happenings on the other .… The specificity of New World Myth … lies in its need to assert itself by flaunting its opposition to the European-inspired versions of the past(s) of the New World.22 19 See Monika Fludernik, “History and Metafiction: Experientiality, Causality, and Myth”, in Historiographic Metafiction in Modern American and Canadian Literature, eds Bernd Engler and Kurt Müller, Paderborn: Schöningh, 1994, 81-101; and Marie Vautier, New World Myth: Postmodernism and Postcolonialism in Canadian Fiction, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1998. 20 See Marc Chénetier, Beyond Suspicion: New American Fiction Since 1960, trans. Elizabeth A. Houlding, Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1996, esp. 154-74 (first published as Au-Delà du Soupçon: La Nouvelle Fiction Américaine de 1960 à Nos Jours, Paris: Seuil, 1989). 21 See Susana Onega, “The Mythical Impulse in British Historiographic Metafiction”, European Journal of English Studies, I/2 (August 1997), 184-204. 22 Vautier, New World Myth, x.

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The subversion of cultural hegemony through the New World Myth of Canada, which Vautier here describes, works similarly in Carey’s fiction. Rather than seeking refuge in the alternative belief-systems of the indigenous people, argues Vautier, the Canadian authors Joy Kagawa, Rudy Wiebe, and George Bowering challenge hegemonial discourse from within, by staying within an essentially European mind-set. Colavincenzo’s reading of the New World Myth created by writers like Timothy Findley, Michael Ondaatje, Rudy Wiebe, and Robert Kroetsch, is even more interesting for comparative reasons. The fiction by these writers he describes as “mytho-historical: neither is it straight historical fiction, nor is it straight myth”.23 It processes history in a way that can also be seen in Carey’s fictions. In the writings of the above-named authors, history, according to Colavincenzo, … is given a mythic twist, or is tinged with elements which one would usually ascribe to mythology and myths. This can even reinforce the challenge to historical practice …. The desire for verifiable facts found in positivist history gives way to the possibilities and unbelievable larger-than-life events of legend, hearsay and tall tales.24

Colavincenzo even observes the same pattern of de- and remythologizing that is in evidence in several of Carey’s fictions. The postmodern fiction from Canada, he holds, … demythologize[s] historical practice and accepted views of history itself, laying bare their limitations, contradictions, and biases. At the same time, it remythologizes history – the history depicted is shot through with elements of myth, legend, the supernatural or magical, the incredible, and/or the extraordinary. The mundane world of history is given a resonance beyond that of historical truth and pushed towards myth.25

23 Marc Colavincenzo, “Trading Magic for Fact”, Fact for Magic: Myth and Mythologizing in Postmodern Canadian Historical Fiction, Cross/Cultures 67, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003, 217. 24 Ibid., 86. 25 Ibid., 217.

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This Canadian example confirms my own understanding of myth as a type of discourse that, because of the questions it poses regarding historical truth and because of its magical nature, is particularly suitable for revising canonical renderings of history; and it once again shows the value of comparative readings of the literatures from former settler colonies. For the time being, My Life as a Fake is Carey’s last engagement with questions of myth. In the novel he mythologizes the dry history of his country’s philistine reaction against modernist poetry. The Asian locale fosters the creation of myth: Malaysia and its people come across as inscrutable, evading the grasp of the reader, who witnesses the events through the eyes of a British narrator with an incompatible, essentially metaphysical sensorium. The composition of several layers of narrative whose truth-value is always questionable, and the integration of myths from Malaysia26 and Europe,27 additionally make for an atmosphere appropriate for a mythistory. Unlike so many of his Australian writer colleagues, however, who have explored Asia in order to counter the “dead ends of postmodernism” through “a cultural impetus in the form of injections of new ideas”,28 Carey turns to Asia, it seems, not because he is bogged in a philosophical and stylistic impasse. In fact, the deployment of literary postmodernism in My Life as a Fake is as conspicuous as ever. The topic of fakery, after all, par excellence raises all those issues that have animated postmodern critiques of concepts of truth and authenticity. Wrong about Japan: A Father’s Journey with His Son, like the more recent Theft: A Love Story, confirms the ongoing presence of postmodernism in his writings. The 26

Chubb’s arrival at the Kaya Kaya’s palace is focalized through the eyes of his abducted daughter who, having grown up in Malaysia, is so awash with Malaysian folklore that she sees an old woman entering her room as a “pawang” (a shaman who can communicate with the spirit world; 201) and her real father as a “hantu” (a ghost; 201-204). 27 My Life as a Fake features the Prometheus myth (transported through the intertextual relationship with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, 1818), that of Isis and Osiris (through Milton’s pamphlet “Areopagitica”, 1644), and, as a motif for the narrator Sarah Wode-Douglass’ “quest” (My Life as a Fake, 265) for Chubb’s and her own history, the quest-myth. For an in-depth analysis of these mythical intertexts, see Gaile, “Towards an Alphabet of Australian Culture: Peter Carey’s Mythistorical Novels”, in Fabulating Beauty, 43-45. 28 Brian Castro, Looking for Estrellita, St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1999, 153-54.

Wrong about Carey?

297

title already suggests that Carey uses the same approach to questions of identity that he used when Australian identity was under review, the word “wrong” implying that there is a misconception that needs to be set straight. But in an ironic twist, Carey, while indicating that there are competing versions of Japan, this time bows to his son Charley’s pressure and, avoiding the “Real Japan”29 he had attempted to hunt down in one of his earlier trips to the country, accepts the simulated Japanese realities of the manga and the Sega World that Charley accompanied him for. If this turn to Asia does not effect any change in the theoretical foundations of his writings, nevertheless it is a highly significant artistic move, one that complements his fictional biography of Australia. It acknowledges the demographic realities of the new millennium, which is bound to see Australia transform into a country not merely in, but actually of the Asia Pacific. At the cultural crossroads where Australians have arrived, an approach to Carey’s œuvre that sees the writer as a biographer of his country seems particularly worthwhile. It lays emphasis on the contribution the writer makes to the cultural, historical and political discourses of his home country. What is more, it underlines the integral importance of literature for the cultural memory of a country. A chronicler of the experience of a transplanted people, Carey emerges from my reading as a writer who, at a time of monumental social change – Australia is being transitioned from “a new Britannia in another world” to a post-British, multicultural nation, possibly even a republic – helps to secure cultural continuity by creating, with a fabulator’s tools, a shared past for Australians. Women, Aborigines, and migrants from a non-European background can relate to this fictional biography as much as can Anglo-Celtic males who traditionally eclipsed all others in representations of history and identity. Seen in their entirety, Carey’s fictions can reassure Australians of their collective identity, of what they share in all their ethnic and cultural diversity. My approach stresses this capacity of Carey’s fictions. It accommodates the individual fictions in the big picture of Australian history. Bliss, Illywhacker, Oscar and Lucinda, The Unusual Life of 29

Peter Carey, Wrong about Japan: A Father’s Journey with His Son, London: Faber and Faber, 2004, 11.

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Tristan Smith, Jack Maggs, True History of the Kelly Gang, 30 Days in Sydney as well as My Life as a Fake all fall into place as tokens designed for the memory culture of a country whose citizens, as a rule, have lost large portions of their collective memory in the experience of migration.30 As biographer of Australia, Carey, in the terms of my analysis, counters the condition of amnesia. He acknowledges the fact that Australia, as David Malouf put it in his assessment of Australia’s British inheritance, was indeed “made in England”, but he at the same time advocates an end to the country’s traditionalist British trajectory by embracing its post-British, multicultural(ist) future in Asia.

30 Wrong about Japan: A Father’s Journey with His Son concludes the fictional biography that Carey’s writings amount to. The most recent novels do not carry the argument I have propounded in this book: Theft: A Love Story, while set largely in Australia, is only marginally concerned with questions of Australian history and identity; the same holds true for His Illegal Self: A Novel; and Parrot and Olivier in America, reflecting the author’s biographical reality of having lived in New York for almost two decades now, explores American rather than Australian history.

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Index Aborigines, 1, 2, 6, 9, 11, 12, 17, 22, 25, 37, 38, 41, 107-40, 14142, 145, 148, 152, 154, 228, 233, 260, 290, 297; Aboriginal Renaissance, 110-11; “doomed race” theory, 14; during European exploration, 141-42; ignored in Australian historiography, 111-14; preEuropean history, 110-11; in Illywhacker, 115-19; in Oscar and Lucinda, 142-50; in 30 Days in Sydney, 134-36 Ackroyd, Peter, 83, 288 Adam, Ian, 57 allegorical mode in Carey, 9, 10, 26, 68, 71, 138, 152, 182, 190, 191, 196, 251 Anderson, Benedict, 228, 230 Arthur, Kateryna Olijnk, 149 Ashcroft, Bill, 9, 109, 141, 155, 220 Asia, influences on Australia, 224, 228, 232; presence in Carey, 283-84, 285, 296-298 Attwood, Alan, 142 Australia, Americanization of, 25, 155, 193, 194, 213-14; being postcolonial, 24-25; 219-21; bicentenary, 114, 149, 223; critique of British colonizers, 151-91; European colonization of, 38; history of inland exploration, 122-23, 141-50; as insubstantial, 96, 136-37; lies in cultural fabric, 107-40, 219, 251, 269; as materialist, 38, 264; nascent mythology, 39-41, 100-104,

293; Republican Referendum, 190-91; self image, 135-36, 155, 204, 219, 223-33, 250 Australianness, 12, 76, 107, 114, 135, 153, 159, 162, 170, 171, 173, 219, 222-23, 228, 230, 232, 287, 289 “Australian Legend” (see Ward, Russel) Baeten, Elizabeth, 40 Bail, Murray, 38, 50, 85 Baker, Sidney, 282 Banville, John, 8, 170 Barnes, Julian, 62, 83, 211-12, 288, 291 Barnett, David, 3 Barth, John, 22, 85, 292 Barthelme, Donald, 22, 85, 292 Barthes, Roland, 35-36 Baudrillard, Jean, 119, 210-12 Bellingen, 122, 125, 144, 148 Bennett, Bruce, 62 Best, Steven, 292 Bhabha, Homi, 157, 291 “black armband” view of history, 4-5, 290 Blackmore, Richard, 98-101, 170 Bliss, Carolyn, 11, 57, 293 Blainey, Geoffrey, 4 Bloomsbury (publisher), 132-33 Blumenberg, Hans, 34, 39 Booker Prize, 7, 173, 285 Borges, Jorge Luis, 22 Bowering, George, 295 British Empire, critique of its imperialism, 146, 151-91

342

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Britishness, 152-53, 158-61, 191 building metaphor, 94-95, 123, 130, 131, 248, 249 Burckhardt, Jacob, 18, 42 Burke, Robert O’Hara, 144 bush, as Australian landscape, 118, 121, 123, 124, 141, 160, 231, 236, 250, 253, 255-58, 277; and Australian men and women, 255-58, 274; as landscape in Australian literary tradition, 85, 160, 189 Bush, George W., 213 bushranging, 96-97, 162-66, 170 Byatt, A.S., 83, 288 Byrne, Joe, 167 captivity, motif of, 237-51 Carey, Peter, autobiographical traces in his work, 183, 194; literary awards, 7; and politics, 107; and postist theory, 8-9, 10, 21-28; as revisionary historian, 9-10, 107-108, 13839, 289; 292-93; taking sides with historic losers, 22, 26, 57-58, 103-104, 114-15, 148, 179, 181, 183; uneasy relation with academia, 23; Works: “American Dreams”, 25, 195 “The Chance”, 74, 195, 276 “The Fat Man in History” (short story), 73 “Report on the Shadow Industry”, 87-88 The Big Bazoohley, 86, 286 The Fat Man in History (short story collection), 287 Illywhacker, 6, 9, 10, 17, 22, 26, 27, 41, 45-46, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 57, 60, 63, 64, 66, 6869, 70, 71, 74, 75, 82, 85-86,

88, 92, 93-96, 103, 114, 11519, 120, 135, 136, 137, 138, 151, 152, 154-61, 191, 193, 195, 202, 219-20, 224, 237, 246-51, 253, 255, 271, 27274, 276, 286, 297; building metaphor, 94-95, 248-49; convict experience, 94, 139; critique of British colonizers, 154-61; image of pet shop, 9, 94, 119, 219, 246, 248, 250, 267; and magic realism, 7577; reversal of gender, 27678; and storytelling, 92-96; terra nullius, 115-19; women in Carey, 246-51, 271-74 Jack Maggs, 6, 22, 26, 52, 59, 60, 77, 86, 87, 88, 152, 15354, 172, 174-91, 237, 259, 286, 298; animal imagery, 183-84; and Dickens, 17478; hypocrisy of Victorians, 186-87; indictment of convict system, 188-90; parallels with True History, 185 My Life as a Fake, 6, 9, 17, 26, 59, 60, 64, 86, 88, 103, 152, 154, 283, 285, 286, 288, 296, 298; significance of Asian setting, 283, 288 Oscar and Lucinda, 6, 9, 10, 17, 22, 26, 27, 50, 52, 59, 60, 68, 77, 86, 87, 88, 114, 11932, 138, 142, 143, 149, 152, 154, 236, 237, 238-46, 253, 255, 259-68, 278, 286, 297; critique of Christianity, 12329, Crystal Palace and Great Exhibition, 129-31; glass metaphor, 119-20, 122, 13031; and inland exploration, 141-50; as parable of European colonialism, 132; reversal of gender roles, 276,

Index 278-81; and terra nullius, 119-32; women in, 238-46, 259-68 Parrot and Olivier in America, 285-86 The Tax Inspector, 7, 59, 60, 73, 86, 88, 152, 195, 224, 258, 259, 287 Theft: A Love Story, 285, 287, 288, 289, 296 30 Days in Sydney, 6, 7, 88, 114, 115, 132-40, 225, 259, 298; question of literary genre, 132-34; repudiation of terra nullius, 134 True History of the Kelly Gang, 6, 22, 26, 27, 42, 59, 60, 64, 70, 77-82, 86, 87, 88, 96-103, 152, 153, 154, 16173, 174, 185, 190, 191, 237, 253, 255, 256, 274, 281-82, 286, 298; and Australianness, 162; critique of British colonizers, 161-73; intertextuality in, 98-100, 165; impact of True History on Kelly phenomenon in Australia, 161; and Irishness, 78, 79, 162, 163-64; and “Jerilderie Letter”, 77, 98, 164; Kelly ironized by Carey, 166-67; Kelly as Australian Thomas Jefferson, 173; and magic realism, 75-80; and storytelling, 96-103; reversal of gender roles, 281-82; role of women in, 274 The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, 6, 9, 26, 42, 60, 63, 86, 87, 88, 152, 194-215, 237, 253, 258, 259, 286, 293, 298; as allegory of US-Australian relations, 196-97, 200, 202, 203, 213-15

343 Wrong about Japan, 283, 285, 296-97 Carey criticism, overview, 7-10 Carlyle, Thomas, 18, 263 Carpentier, Alejo, 65 Carroll, John, 40, 229, 253 Carter, Paul, 40, 129, 143 cartography (see maps) Casey, Dawn, 1, 2, 3, 4 Clark, Manning, 4, 256 Clarke, Marcus, 189 Clinton, Bill, 215 Colavincenzo, Marc, 294, 295 Commonwealth Writers Prize, 7 convict experience, 4, 6, 11, 12, 22, 41, 52, 79, 86, 136, 139, 152, 160, 167, 168, 172, 173, 174-91, 196, 287, 293; in True History, 170-71; in Illywhacker, 94, 139; in 30 Days, 139; in Jack Maggs, 172, 174-91 Cook, James, 109-10, 116-17 Coover, Robert, 62, 292 “cultural cringe”, 6, 102, 151, 154-61, 193-94, 221-22 Crystal Palace, 129, 130, 131 Daniel, Helen, 9, 50-51, 87, 293 Davison, Graeme, 2-3 deconstruction of gender roles in Carey, 237-84 Dedalus, Stephen, 287 DeLillo, Don, 288 Dick, George Turnbull, 96 Dickens, Catherine Hogarth, 176 Dickens, Charles, 41, 52, 88, 174-82, 186, 187 Dixson, Miriam, 40, 229, 232, 233, 235-37, 254 Dovey, Teresa, 9, 53, 65, 89 Droysen, Johann Gustav, 18

344

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During, Simon, 220 Durix, Jean-Pierre, 70, 71 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich, 56 Dusty, Slim, 235 Eagleton, Terry, 286 Eliot, George (Marian Evans), 130, 239, 240, 261-62 Elliottson, John, 177 Encel, Sol, 254, 258 Englishness (see Britishness) Escher, Maurits, 50 Evans, Marian (see Eliot, George) exploration, inland, 6, 9, 119, 120, 122, 141-50; journals, 143, 144, 146-49 Eyre, Edward John, 142, 144 fabulation, 22, 60, 61-63, 65, 83, 85, 96, 167, 297 fantasy (literary genre), 60-65, 67, 69, 70, 71, 75, 82-83, 86, 196, 293 Faris, Wendy B., 67, 73 Faulkner, William, 153 feminism, rethinking of history, 13, 21, 235-40, 260; exposing Australian misogynism, 235, 236, 237, 253, 258, 268, 275, 276-77 fictional biography, as literary genre, 5, 213; Carey’s œuvre as fictional biography, 5-7, 10, 12-13, 17, 102, 103; 232, 293, 297 Findley, Timothy, 294, 295 Flannery, Tim, 134, 135, 137, 140 Fletcher, M.D., 279, 280 Foster, David, 50 Foucault, Michel, 8, 27, 56, 113

Fowles, John, 83 Friel, Brian, 129 Frye, Northrop, 40 Fuery, Patrick, 22 Fukuyama, Francis, 19 Fuller, Margaret, 262, 263 Furphy, Joseph, 236 Gaile, Andreas, Fabulating Beauty 7; interviews with Carey, 23-24, 28, 46, 108, 160 Gebhardt, Gloria, 117 Genette, Gérard, 53-54 Genoni, Paul, 147, 280 Golding, William, 83, 141 Gosper, Kevan, 225 Grass, Günter, 67, 68 Greenwood, Gordon, 113 Griffiths, Gareth, 155, 220 Grimshaw, Patricia, 236 Habermas, Jürgen, 22 Hare, David, 84 Hartz, Louis, 236 Hassall, Anthony, 11, 41, 133, 135 Hassan, Ihab, 286 Hawkes, John, 292 Head, Dominic, 291 historians, Australian, different schools of, 3, 4; fighting “history wars”, 2, 108-109, 287, 290; ignoring Aborigines, 111-13 historical fiction, in postmodern times, 32, 34-35 historicism, 18, 19, 20 historiographic metafiction, 28, 34, 42, 47, 294 history, reconceptualization as a discipline, 17-19, 31-35; vs

Index historical fiction, 32, 102-103; and myth, 35, 39-43; rewriting of, 17-28 Hobsbawm, Eric, 100, 164, 212 Hodge, Bob, 168 Holt, Harold, 215 Hood, Robin, 100, 163, 170 Hope, A.D., 221 Horne, Donald, 222 Howard, John, 2, 3-4, 5, 139, 214, 290 Huggan, Graham, 9, 61, 107 Hutcheon, Linda, 28, 34 identity, Australian, 12-13, 97, 201, 219-33; being multicultural, 223-29; deconstruction of, 229-33; redefinition of, 223-29; and women, 231-33 imperialism, criticism of British imperialism, 178, 180, 199; criticism of American imperialism, 195, 213 intellectual life, and Australian men and women, 268-75 intertextuality, references to Richard Blackmore, 98-101, 170; to Marcus Clarke, 185; Charles Dickens, 41, 52, 88, 174-82, 186, 187; to George Eliot, 130, 239, 240, 261-62; to William Faulkner, 153; to Günter Grass, 67-68; to Katherine Mansfield, 55; to Salman Rushdie, 67-69; to William Shakespeare, 98-99, 101, 129, 135, 165, 204; to Laurence Sterne, 88; to Mark Twain, 17, 45-46, 49, 65, 85; to Patrick White, 142-43, 189 Ireland, David, 50

345 Jacobson, Howard, 149 Jameson, Fredric, 26, 287, 292 “Jerilderie Letter”, 77, 98, 164 Kagawa, Joy, 295 Kane, Paul, 7 Karl, Frederick, 261 Katwala, Sunder, 173 Kellner, Hans, 292 Kelly, Edward (“Ned”), in Australian cultural tradition, 96-97; author of “Jerilderie Letter”, 77, 98, 164; public controvery over, 167; as social bandit, 100, 164, 170 Keneally, Thomas, 189 Kiernan, Brian, 46 King, Jonathan, 269 Kingsford-Smith, Charles Edward, 48 Kinsella, John, 97 Kremmer, Christopher, 1 Kroetsch, Robert, 295 Lacan, Jacques, 275 Laurence, Samuel, 176 Lawson, Henry, 85, 97, 159-60, 236, 258 Lee, Hermione, 169 Leichhardt, Ludwig, 142, 144 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 35 lies (see Australia, lies in cultural fabric) lying, as literary device, in Bliss, 52-57; in Illywhacker, 45-50; in Jack Maggs, 52; in Oscar and Lucinda, 50-52 Lyotard, Jean-François, 19, 35, 291 Mabo decision, 109-110

346

Rewriting History

Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 18 McCredden, Lyn, 268 Macfarlane, Robert, 288, 289 McGrath, Patrick, 173 MacKenzie, Norman, 254, 258 magic realism, 61, 63, 64, 65-83, 85 Mali, Joseph, 43 Malouf, David, 12, 50, 199, 220, 222, 225, 226, 298 Mansfield, Katherine, 55 maps, as signs of cultural control, 122, 129, 144-45 Márquez, Gabriel García, 22, 62, 67, 68 Martin, Gerald, 66 Martin, Susan, 163, 281 Marxist thought, in Jack Maggs, 181-82 Mason, Anthony, 3 Mathers, Peter, 50 Menzies, Robert, 195, 290 metafiction, 9, 22, 28, 34, 42, 45, 47, 70, 95, 101, 288-89, 291-92 Michelet, Jules, 18 Mill, John Stuart, 260 Mishra, Vijay, 168 misogynism in Australia (see Australia, role of women in) Mitchell, Major Thomas, 143, 144 Moorhouse, Frank, 8, 85 Mudrooroo, 108 multiculturalism, Australian, 2, 4, 102, 153, 223-29, 297-98 Murdoch, Walter, 112-13 Murray, Les, 222 myth, Barthesian criticism of, 3; in contemporary fiction, 29496; in contemporary world, 35-36; and history, 35, 39-43;

in new world, 37-39; myth criticism as academic discipline, 35-36; as vital for human beings, 37-39 mythistory, 42-43, 42, 39-43; in Carey, 11, 43, 296 narrators, in Bliss, 53; different types in Carey, 88-90; in Illywhacker, 46-50, 92-96; in Oscar and Lucinda, 121; in The Tax Inspector, 88; in 30 Days in Sydney, 134; in Tristan Smith, 207; in True History, 166-67 National Museum of Australia, 15 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 19, 32-34, 37-38, 291 O’Farrell, Patrick, 162 Olympics, Sydney, 136, 223, 225, 235, 269 Ommundsen, Wenche, 9 Ondaatje, Michael, 291 Onega, Susana, 32 Palmer, Vance, 38 Paterson, Banjo, 99, 235 Patmore, Coventry, 254, 261 “People’s Walk” (see reconciliation) Pearson, Christopher, 4 Penguin (Australia), as Carey’s publisher, 285 Phillip, Arthur, 136 Phillips, A.A., 221 Pierce, Peter, 49 Pike, Douglas, 113 Pordzik, Ralph, 91-92 Porter, Peter, 8, 78 postcolonialism, and Australian identity, 219-33; decolonizing

Index agenda in Carey, 151-215; relevance for Australia, 20, 24-25, 219-21; validity for reading Carey, 8-9, 21-26, 286 postmodern history, and Carey, 21-23, 286, 287, 288, 290, 29192, 295-96; and myth, 42 poststructuralism, and Carey, 2627, 286; and identity, 230-33 Praed, Rosa Campbell, 221 Pringle, John Douglas, 222 Pynchon, Thomas, 292 Quinn, Anthony, 163 Ranke, Leopold von, 33 reconciliation, 2, 114, 115, 140, 149, 228 Reynolds, Henry, 109-11 Riley, Rob, 112 Roberts, Stephen H., 112 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 19 Rowse, Tim, 266 Roy, Arundhati, 102 Roy, Rob, 100, 170 Rushdie, Salman, 67, 68, 69, 83, 291 Ruskin, John, 159, 254, 261, 270, 279 Said, Edward, 8, 178, 205, 291 Salter, John, 109 Schaffer, Kay, 231 Scholes, Robert, 34, 61-63, 89 science fiction, in Carey, 60, 63, 70, 86, 197 Scott, Joan Wallach, 275 Seneca Falls Declaration, 261 Shakespeare, William, presence in Carey, 98-99, 101, 129, 135, 165, 204

347 Sheckels, Theodore, 9, 27 Slemon, Stephen, 25, 67, 82 Souleles, Yianna, 225 Spivak, Gayatri, 113, 291 Staley, Tony, 3 Stickney Ellis, Sarah, 254 Stokes, Geoffrey, 229 storytelling, abundance of stories in Carey, 87; in Bliss, 89-93; in contemporary fiction, 8384; as device in Carey, 83104; in Illywhacker, 92-96; importance of storytelling for Australia, 89, 91-92; in True History, 96-103; Stuart, John McDouall, 144 Sturt, Charles, 144 subaltern studies, 21 Summers, Alison, 285 Summers, Anne, 260 Sydney, character of, 135-37; and history, 94, 134-35, 137-40 Tebbutt, Margaret, 254, 258 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 254 Ternan, Ellen, 177 terra nullius, 11, 49, 107-40, 154, 228; debate in Australian society, 108-15; in Illywhacker, 115-19; in Oscar and Lucinda, 119-32; in 30 Days in Sydney, 134 Tiffin, Helen, 24, 155, 220 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 12, 286 Trollope, Anthony, 133, 269 true history, as literary genre, 82 truth/untruth, dichotomy in historiography, 34; Carey playing with, 45-58

348

Rewriting History

Turner, Graeme, 40, 237-38 Twain, Mark, 17, 45-46, 49, 65, 85 University of Queensland Press, as Carey’s publisher, 8, 285 unreliable narration, 22, 45-52, 89, 167, 207, 287 Vautier, Marie, 294 Verne, Jules, 133 Victorian novel, intertextual relation to, 120, 174, 176, 239 Victorianism, critique of, 121, 130-31, 146, 174, 180, 186-88, 245-46, 254, 261-63, 278 Victorians, obsession with hair, 241 Vonnegut, Kurt, 22 Ward, Russel, 118, 159, 172, 223, 228, 229, 232

Wentworth, William Charles, 225 White Australia Policy, 224, 227 White, Hayden, 20, 28, 31, 94, 102, 143 White, Patrick, 114, 142-43, 189 White, Richard, 40, 96, 201, 224, 229, 230 Wiebe, Rudy, 294 Wilde, Oscar, 17, 18 Williamson, Kristin, 194 Wills, William John, 144 Windschuttle, Keith, 2, 109, 290 women, in Carey’s fictions, 13, 232-84 Woodcock, Bruce, 74, 182, 195, 213 workplace, relation of Australian men and women to, 258-68 Zamora, Lois Parkinson, 67, 73