Inheritance and Expectations

Inheritance and Expectations:

The Ambivalence of the Colonial Orphan Figure in

Post-Colonial Re-Writings of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations.

By Motoko Sugano

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (Research)

University of New South Wales, Sydney Australia

September, 2005

THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES Thesis/Project Report Sheet

Family name: SUGANO

First name: MOTOKO Other names: -

Abbreviation for degree as given in the University Calendar: MA (RESEARCH)

School: ENGLISH Faculty: ARTS and SOCIAL SCIENCES

Title: ‘INHERITANCE AND EXPECTATIONS: THE AMBIVALENCE OF THE COLONIAL ORPHAN FIGURE IN POST-COLONIAL RE-WRITINGS OF CHARLES DICKENS’S GREAT EXPECTATIONS’

ABSTRACT (350 words maximum)

This thesis considers the colonial literary relationship between the ‘centre’ and the ‘margin’ in the field of post-colonial counter-discourse. As such, this thesis investigates the possibility of disrupting the dominance of Empire, which is often rhetorically constructed through the certainty of the parent and child binary relationship. By analysing the orphan’s affiliational associations, which exist beyond the traditional binary of parent and child in the colonial relationship, I argue that the orphan, as both figure and trope, becomes a site of resistance to the dominant colonial discourse. Re-reading Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations with two Australian re-writings of his text in mind – Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs and Gail Jones’s Sixty Lights – this thesis investigates the particular case of post-colonial counter-discursive practice, and explores the way in which the orphan figure in each re-writing inscribes their expectations and thereby refigures the power hierarchy between the canonical European text and the post-colonial re- writing.

In order to do so, I have organised this thesis into four main chapters, each of which develops a specific interrogation of the orphan figure in light of post-colonial theory and criticism. So, chapter one considers the colonial figure and the trope of parent and child, investigating the influence that this trope wields in casting the racialised colonial Other as ‘savage’ and ‘primitive’, but, ultimately, ‘child-like’. Chapter two furthers this observation by highlighting the disruptive affect of such naturalised perspectives of the colonial Other—evidenced in post-colonial theory through the motion of the key concepts of ambivalence and abjection. And, it is in this context that chapters three and four stand as direct examinations of the disruptive affect of the orphan figure. Discussing Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs and Gail Jones’s Sixty Lights (respectively), these last two chapters formalise the subversive agency assumed by the orphan, and locate it in the very practice of ‘writing back to the centre’.

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For Hinako (b. 12.09.01)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

I would like to thank the following people and institutions for the support they have shown me during the period it has taken to write this thesis.

I thank Associate Professor Sue Kossew and Professor Bill Ashcroft at UNSW for their academic input, which has always been invaluable to me. Their belief in my research topic has given me the confidence to pursue my research. My project could not have been completed had I not had two extremely supportive supervisors.

Among all the friendly fellow post-graduates at UNSW School of English, I would particularly like to send my best regards to Timothy Roberts and Dr Grant Hamilton. I thank Tim for his officemateship. His tireless patience in sharing the office with a noisy international student who occasionally bombards questions and enquiries of all sorts imaginable, I admire and respect. I thank Grant for his spirit of volunteer mentorship. His unending generosity of time, to talk about literary theories or to edit my drafts, enabled me to have a glimpse of clarity in the state of hopeless confusion and chaos.

My life in Sydney would have been very different if I had not met the people at the FASS. Amongst all, I would especially like to thank Peter ‘Pierre’ Balint, Jared van Duinen, Sean Hosking, Kate Mason, Agnes Vogler, Nathan Wise for assisting me to write ‘in English’. I would also like to thank Diana Adis for her friendship. She never failed to cheer me up with her ‘can do’ attitude.

I would like to extend my thanks to the library staff of both UNSW and the State Library of New South Wales for helping me out to reach their archival materials.

Professor Yoko Fujimoto and Dr Aiko Watanabe of Waseda University in Tokyo had read an early draft of a part of chapter three and gave me a constructive criticism. Their comments helped me, not only to widen the perspective, but also to develop a fuller thesis argument.

This thesis could not have been written without support from my family. I thank my parents Teiji and Toyoko Sugano and my sister Hiroko Kato for their understanding of my study here, which has always been demonstrated in the manner of ‘no news is good news’. So, I would like to conclude this page of thanks with the word, Arigato. M.S.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgement

Introduction Conceiving the Orphan 1

Chapter ONE: The Child and Empire 25

Chapter TWO: The Orphan in Empire 49

Chapter THREE: Fathering the Orphan, Orphaning the Father— Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs 72

Chapter FOUR: The Family of the Orphan— Gail Jones’ Sixty Lights 97

Conclusion Inheritance and Expectations 123

Bibliography 129 1

Introduction: Conceiving the Orphan

‘Deep,’ said Wemmick, ‘as Australia.’ Pointing with his pen at the office floor, to express that Australia was understood, for the purpose of the figure, to be symmetrically on the opposite spot of the globe.1

Our history is a history of orphans, or so my mother liked to say. She used the word in a sense both literal and sentimental. She did not mean it in the sense that it is true for the nation as a whole, but only as it applied to the three corners of the family history. 2

In the post-colonial world where the experience of dislocation further complicates the subject position of writers, the mapping of literatures in English inevitably exhibits the diversity of transcultural exchanges. It is such cultural exchanges beyond borders, and the consequent transformation of the dominant culture through literary texts, which forms the background to this thesis. For those writers who experience dislocation or marginalisation, language and literature in English are the locations of both resistance and complicity; a hybrid space of both ‘inheritance’ and ‘expectations’. Yet, it is the questions that arise from this situation that inform my thesis: in what way do contemporary writers who have no direct experience of colonial rule, yet undoubtedly still feel the legacy of colonialism, respond to the experience of colonisation? How do they engage with the literary inheritance proffered by the colonial ‘father’ of Europe in order to ‘write back’ to it—to subvert the hegemony of the British literary canon?

In order to address this issue of resistance in contemporary re-readings and re-writings of colonial discourse, this thesis considers the colonial literary relationship between the

‘centre’ and the ‘margin’ in the field of post-colonial counter-discourse. As such, the thesis investigates the possibility of disrupting the dominance of Empire, which is often

1 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 197. 2 Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988, p.390.

rhetorically constructed through the certainty of the parent and child binary relationship.

In order to do so, this thesis turns to the often over-looked figure of the orphan. By analysing the orphan’s affiliational associations, which exist beyond the traditional binary of parent and child in the colonial relationship, I argue that the orphan, as both figure and trope, becomes a site of resistance to dominant colonial discourse. Indeed, the orphan represents a profound ambivalence in colonial discourse due to its

‘parentless’ ontological condition. The post-colonial orphan seeks parentage, that is, a beginning, a point of origin, or a knowable history. In search of its origin or genesis, the post-colonial orphan attempts to situate its genealogy in terms of its affiliated cultural inheritance, onto which the orphan inscribes personal expectations that ultimately insist on the hybridisation of any and all cultural inheritance. Re-reading

Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) with two Australian re-writings of his text in mind – Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997) and Gail Jones’ Sixty Lights (2004) – this thesis investigates the particular case of post-colonial counter-discursive practice, and explores the way in which the orphan figure in each re-writing inscribes their expectations and thereby refigures the power hierarchy between the canonical European text and the post-colonial re-writing. Both Carey and Jones each ‘write back’ to

Dickens’s novel and refigure the site of the orphan as both unsettling and ambivalent.

Paying particular attention to the orphan figures of the texts and criticising them in terms of Homi K. Bhabha’s conceptualisation of ambivalence, I will elucidate the position of the orphan figure as paradoxically both ‘powerless’ and ‘powerful’ in the economy of encounter operating between European and colonial ‘settler’ societies.

Thus, this thesis focuses on the power and powerlessness of the illegitimacy of the orphan figure. The very illegitimacy, and therefore the powerlessness, of the orphan figure can be read as a power to destabilise the legitimacy of family and Empire. In

Victorian novels there are an abundance of orphans, such as in Dickens’s Great

Expectations, represented in terms of a position of insecurity. Being constructed outside the structured authority of the Victorian patriarchal family, the social position of the orphan is most often constructed through ‘lack’, particularly, the lack of an authoritative parentage in which the orphan can locate his or her genealogical origin. In order to ‘fill in’ this kind of lack, it seems the orphan must attempt to engage in an affiliational relationship with more ‘authoritative’ sites of power—ultimately casting itself into an ambivalent position that rests between the differing practices of filial and affiliational relationships. Reading such ambivalence through post-colonial theory, I argue that re-writing Dickens’s Great Expectations allows both Carey and Jones to draw attention to the ambivalence of the orphan as both a powerless and powerful figure by positioning the site of the orphan simultaneously outside of speech and the centre/family location. As such, the figure of the orphan problematises the imposition of a dominant binary discourse, which positions it as ‘other’ to the colony and creates the space of the ‘in-between’. In occupying the space of the in-between, the orphan figure poses a threat to the idea of a stable and homogeneous empire.

Re-writings of Great Expectations

Adaptations, extrapolation, pastiche or imitation: re-writings of Dickens’s Great

Expectations are numerous. Even Dickens himself adapted his fiction for his public readings. The book was also adapted for the theatre. Film and TV drama adaptations

count more than ten.3 But this thesis concentrates on only two of the most recent re- writings by Australian writers, Jack Maggs and Sixty Lights. Examining the phenomenon of re-writings through Slavoj Žižek’s concept of ‘hysteria’, Ankhi

Mukherjee writes that this repetition of re-writing the inherited material of Great

Expectations are also ‘unwritings, which worry their precursor’s critical engagement with the place and claims of marginalised alterity’.4 In this manner, Mukherjee suggests that it is a residue of re-writing that facilitates continual production of other re- writings of the canonical work. However, when the postmodern idea of pastiche undermines the originality of the artefact, such re-writings facilitate a proliferation of readings. The question one must ask, then, is: where can one locate such literary responses between Dickens, Carey and Jones to render the reading meaningful? Using post-colonial theory as a reading strategy, this thesis investigates these literary responses to illustrate the often complicated and complicit relationship between the centre and the margin, the canon and counter-discourses.

Edward Said and the Colonial Charles Dickens

This thesis concerns two conceptualisations of post-colonial resistance to the world of canonical discourse: firstly, Edward Said’s concept of ‘contrapuntal reading’; and, secondly, Bhabha’s concepts of ‘mimicry’ and ‘ambivalence’. These concepts work together in the production of post-colonial re-writings. But, this thesis is particularly interested in Said’s concept of contrapuntal reading, since it offers the ability to elucidate elements of colonial process that are obliterated from canonical texts. In

3 See George J. Worth, Great Expectations: An Annotated Bibliography, New York: Garland Publishing, 1986. Film and TV drama adaptations 1986 onward, I referred to available at The Internet Movie Database, under the name of Charles Dickens, at http://us.imdb.com/name/nm0002042/. 4 Ankhi Mukherjee, ‘Missed Encounters: Repetition, Rewriting, and Contemporary Returns to Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations’, Contemporary Literature, 46: 1 (Spring 2005), p. 131.

terms of Bhabha’s concept of mimicry, this thesis recognises the kind of resistance that the effect of paranoia can induce in the colonial ‘centre’. So, Bhabha’s concept of

‘mimicry’ is employed to locate moments of resistance that reside in the coloniser’s psyche.

Returning to Edward Said’s notion of ‘contrapuntal reading’, one can see that Dickens’s

Great Expectations is open to a range of possible interpretations—born of the material condition of colonies at the time when the author wrote the book. Said explains that one must approach a cultural archive contrapuntally, which is to say, the reader must hold

a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts.5

Thus Said emphasises the importance of reading the text with the wider implication of colonial references in the text. In other words, Said’s contrapuntal analysis contributes to ‘fill in the gap’ of colonial discourse. As such, Said calls Pip a ‘colonial businessman.’6 It is because he spent eleven years in the Eastern Branch7 of the

Clarriker & Co., and such an experience indicates trade and cultural exchanges between the centre and the East. Likewise, it is important to refer to the historical context that affected the relationship between metropolitan England and New South Wales in order to better understand the position of Magwitch. Robert Hughes writes:

Dickens knotted several strands in the English perception of convicts in Australia at the end of transportation. They could succeed, but they could hardly, in the real sense, return. They could expiate their crimes in a technical, legal sense, but what

5 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism [1993], New York: Vintage, 1994, p. 51. 6 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. xvi. 7 The office is most probably located in Cairo, Egypt as Herbert mentions when he talks about his intension to be a partner of the Clarriker firm, which is expanding its business in the East (Volume III Chapter 13 and 16).

they suffered there warped them into permanent outsiders. And they were capable of redemption – as long as they stayed in Australia.8

Therefore, contrary to Dickens’s reference to the felons returning to Britain, (which includes Magwitch); it is clear that this rarely happened. Furthermore, Said criticises

Dickens’s ‘failure’ to write any account of encounters of white convict settlers and the indigenous Australians, such as those penned by Robert Hughes in The Fatal Shore or

Paul Carter in The Road to Botany Bay.9 Besides, Dickens’s Australia is constructed as a series of stereotypes, representing a Eurocentric view of the non-Europe. As such,

Said’s contrapuntal reading of the colonial text elucidates interactions between the centre and margin, which creates a counter-vision to Dickens’s Eurocentric point of view.

Said’s contrapuntal readings of other Victorian novels also elucidate the imperial context of Pip’s ‘expectation’, which is to say, the wealth that flowed into metropolitan

England from the overseas colonies. As Said’s contrapuntal analysis of Jane Austen’s

Mansfield Park demonstrates, domestic issues were certainly related to imperial issues.

Said’s reading shows how the condition of Sir Thomas’s household is sustained by his sugar plantations in Antigua, not just materially but also morally. That is, most importantly, Sir Thomas’s household is financially maintained by the outcome from sugar plantations, which provides enough means to satisfy the requirements necessary to maintain a sense of the class and reputation in ‘high society’ England. But, his property in Antigua is also related to the sustenance of the morality of his Mansfield

Park estate. So, when the father is called away to deal with problems on his Antiguan

8 Robert Hughes The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia 1787-1868 [1987], London: Vintage, 2003, p. 586. 9 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. xvi.

estate, problems arise in his home in England, which ultimately damages the reputation of his family. Similarly, Pip’s domestic condition is related to the imperial issue.

Indeed his convict benefactor, who has created wealth in the penal colony from stock farming, financially supports him. In such a manner, both novels show that life in

England is related to overseas territories. Most importantly, just as Sir Thomas’s inheritance is dependent on the performance of his Antiguan plantations, Pip’s inheritance is dependent on the performance of England’s overseas colony, and the law of inheritance.

In the discussion of Dickens’s vision of Australia, Leon Litvack’s close analysis points out that Australia changed in a ‘revolutionary’ manner in the late 1840s from a ‘penal colony’ to the place where one can offer a ‘solution to the perceived social distress plaguing England.’10 Moreover, Michael Hollington argues that Dickens conceived

Australia as a place in which to explore the specific theme of redemption.11 Indeed,

Dickens envisioned Australia as a blank slate onto which one can write one’s history afresh, a place where the author can offer his characters a ‘second chance’.

It is in this context that the post-colonial production of canonical re-writings can be located. Both Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs and Gail Jones’ Sixty Lights ‘fill the gaps’ of a historical context that canonical texts seem to omit. In terms of the history of Australia,

Carey’s novel concerns Australia’s foundation as a penal colony, while Jones chooses to present Australia as a free settler colony. In addition to this historical context, both

10 Leon Litvack, ‘Dickens, Australia and Magwitch Part I: The Colonial Context’, The Dickensian, 95: 1,447 (Spring 1999), p. 33. 11 See Michael Hollington, ‘Dickens and Australia’, Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens, 33 (1991), pp.15- 32.

re-writings play on the geographical location of Australia as the antipodean space. As the first epigraph to this introduction shows, Wemmick describes Australia as ‘down- under’, in order, presumably, to conjure the image of Hell. However, the second epigraph refers to family history as the ‘history of orphans’. Here Carey questions

Dickens’s silence on the historical gravity of Australia, and draws into sharp focus the issues of nationhood and nationality.

The Orphan Figure

The figure of the orphan necessarily refers to an ontological condition of parentlessness.

All three protagonists, namely Pip of Great Expectations, Maggs of Jack Maggs, and

Lucy Strange of Sixty Lights, are orphans. Such ontological conditions are the shared characteristic not only for these three protagonists but also among most of the characters in the three novels. Indeed, in Victorian novels, there is an abundance of orphans, regardless of gender, race, class, nationality, or wealth. For example, Dorothea

Brook, of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, is an orphan with a great fortune. Similarly,

Heathcliff, of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, is an orphan without fortune who ultimately manages to create his own wealth. In Oliver Twist (1837-39), Dickens demonstrates that a lack of parentage is often associated with poverty, which subsequently leads to an engagement with crime and exploitation. So, it is important to note that the condition of each orphan figure is so varied that it seems almost impossible to generalise a dominant representation of ‘orphanhood’. But, even more important to the discussion at hand, is the fact that an orphan can be both a child and an adult.

Furthermore, it is tempting to generalise the orphan as being simply insecure, since the parentless condition of the orphan implies various kinds of insecurity, such as the lack

of financial support or domestic care—which, again, often leads to a condition of uncertainty in terms of a stable genealogy, family history, and/or inheritance.

The orphan figure was conceived as a mark of boundary to the ‘normal’ familial society of London and beyond; to be absorbed into, or abrogated by, hegemonic control. In such a role, Laura Peters writes that in the Victorian era the concept of the orphan was widened to include the ‘one who was deprived of only one parent’.12 Moreover, the notion of the orphan has changed to incorporate the dominant ideology, either through the practice of discipline or benevolence. According to Foucault, who conceptualises the body as the site of visibility and stately control, the body of a prisoner (and by association that of the orphan) is the site where the stately power demonstrates its control.13 Peters argues that Victorian culture considered the orphan as a ‘scapegoat– a promise and a threat, a poison and a cure’.14 Thus, it seems as though Victorian society needed the orphan figure in order to emphasise the importance of the family.15 So,

Peters discusses the orphan as a text that functions in terms of Derrida’s concept of the pharmakon, which is to say the supplementary double relationship of a binary opposition that eliminates the excess in the construction of the idea of the family.16

Thus, the state of ‘parentlessness’ reveals the very nature of the powerlessness that the orphan experiences. In other words, the lack of parents and parentage creates a desire for them. Being constructed out of a legitimate blood-based family relationship, the orphan engages in affiliative relationships rather than filial ones.

12 Laura Peters, Orphan Text: Victorian Orphans, Culture and Empire, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000, p. 1. 13 See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [1975], Alan Sheridan (trans.), London: Penguin, 1991. 14 Peters, Orphan Text, p. 2. 15 Peters, ibid., p. 2. 16 Peters, ibid., pp. 26-29.

The trope of the child, and that of the orphan, can therefore be read differently. The idea of family as a fundamental and secure relationship of parents and children can be used as an allusion to the operation of empire that is thought of in equal terms of providing fatherly guidance to the infantilised colonies. That is to say, colonial discourse provides a legitimacy and a stable identity to the endeavours of both the coloniser and, perhaps more importantly, the colonised. Therefore, while it has often been the case that the metaphor of family is used to describe the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised, and the trope of the child is used by an imperial hegemony to describe the condition of the colonised within which all the contradictions are resolved.17 Being constructed out of such a binary, the orphan as a trope poses a significant threat to the idea of a stable and homogeneous empire. As such, the empire needed the orphan figure to demonstrate its legitimacy through its patriarchal stance. In other words, the orphans are the site where colonial power demonstrates its legitimacy and authority to absorb the excess of the filial relationship of both family and the empire. Therefore, the abundance of orphan figures in Victorian novels can be read as a demonstration of the assertion of power in empire. But, it is also true that the orphan figure needs some kind of support from a parental figure. That is to say, the empire needs the orphan figure and the orphan figure needs the empire to emphasise the legitimacy of the child, which symbolises the colonial project itself.

Therefore, the figure or trope of the orphan facilitates a turn away from a simple discussion of the child. Importantly, the orphan becomes a location of resistance to a

17 Bill Ashcroft, ‘Primitive and Wingless: Colonial subject as Child’, in On Post-Colonial Futures: Transformations of Colonial Culture, London: Continuum, pp. 36-37.

dominant colonial discourse that circulates within the complexity of the post-colonial debate of resistance. Moreover, the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised becomes something different from the traditionally conceptualised account of colonised dependency on the coloniser. Indeed, the relationship turns towards a relationship of ‘interdependence’. This thesis emphasises the importance of the orphans’ nominal condition of the parentless not only as a disadvantage but also as an advantage. It is because its social construction as the ‘abject’ to the familial arrangement of the parent and child has the ability to re-politicise and possibly to disrupt ideological assumption of patriarchal and imperial family.

The thesis itself assumes a fairly conventional structure of four chapters. Chapter one considers the colonial figure and the trope of the parent and the child. The chapter investigates why the trope is so influential and has the capacity to naturalise the parent’s dominance over the child. Both the conceptualisation of the child and inception of colonialism are located in early modern European history. Indeed, the conceptualisation of the child itself was the ‘necessary precondition of colonialist imperialism’.18 Firstly, this chapter examines such a conceptualisation of the child. Then secondly, it will investigate the trope of the child as the ‘child-like’, which acquires a particularly strong totalising power when it is translated as ‘savage’ and ‘primitive’ and applied to the racialised colonial Other.

18 Jo-Ann Wallace, ‘De-Scribing The Water-Babies: “The Child” in Post-Colonial Theory’, in De- Scribing Empire: Post-Clonialism and Textuality, Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson (eds.), London: Routledge, 1994, p. 180.

Chapter two explores the possibility of the figure and trope of the orphan as a vehicle to disrupt the homogenising power of an Empire that survives through the persistent construction of the hierarchical binary relationship of parent and child. This chapter is especially concerned with drawing a schema to elucidate how the orphan figure can disrupt the construction of Empire. My discussion turns to think about the way in which the illegitimacy of the orphan becomes positioned as abject, inheriting the condition of ‘neither subject nor object’.19 In such a manner, the orphan can be described as an element that contaminates the patriarchal textual homogeneity of canonical literature. So, chapter two implicitly considers Australia’s literary relationship to the European ‘centre’. Yet, key to this discussion is the implicit apprehension of Said’s concepts of filiation and affiliation.

Importantly, the orphan is in a nominal state of ‘lack’ in a filial relationship.

Consequently, the desire for seeking such filial relationships leads the orphan to enter into affiliative relationships. Edward Said uses these concepts of filiation and affiliation, initially, to describe two very different ways for critics to engage with culture: that is, inherited culture and adapted culture. As such, ‘filiation’ refers to a relationship that the critic is bound to by ‘birth, nationality, profession’; while,

‘affiliation’ refers to a kind of relationship that is bound to the critic by ‘social and political conviction, economic and historical circumstances, voluntary effort and willed deliberation.’20 Primarily, the set of terms in Said’s reinterpretation on Giovanni

Battista Vico’s (1668-1744) use of ‘family’ and ‘marriage’ metaphor, describe the

19 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay of Abjection [1980], Leon S. Roudiez (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press, 1982, p. 1. 20 Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983, p. 25.

notion of human history as a ‘series of genealogical repetitive cycles.’21 As Vico suggests, the generational energy of human reproduction has an affinity with literary production. Said adapts these concepts to draw attention not only to the character of familial relationships, but also to a kind of cultural continuity that is sustained by inheritance, mixture and transformation of culture—which inevitably reflects the

‘worldliness’ of the critic. According to Said, one such material reality is the condition of exile or displacement, which makes it more difficult for the critic to conduct his or her scholarly practice entirely within the culture of their filial associations.22 Thus, the relationship between the critic (and writer) and the text has become more and more identifiable as ‘affiliative’.

Said’s concept of affiliation can be considered in its particular association with hegemonic control, making it particularly important for post-colonial readings. Said explains:

It is the case with cultural or aesthetic activity that the possibilities and circumstances of its production get their authority by virtue of what I have called affiliation, that implicit network of peculiarly cultural associations between forms, statements, and other aesthetic elaborations on the one hand and, on the other, institutions, agencies, classes, and amorphous social forces. Affiliation is a loose enough word both to suggest the kinds of cultural ensembles Gramsci discusses in the passage I quoted earlier, as well as to allow us to retain the essential concept of hegemony guiding cultural and broadly intellectual activity, or elaboration, as a whole.23

Said suggests that homogeneous cultural hierarchy can be disrupted through affiliative associations of dominant and colonial culture, which leads to cultural heterogeneity even though the operation of such is always complicit with hegemony. What Said implies is a work of literary authority (dominant ideology) that naturalises affiliative

21 Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, p. 117. 22 Said, ibid., p. 17. 23 Said, ibid., p. 174. Emphasis is original.

relations between the critic and the text as a filial one. As such, Said points out the fissures in a seemingly seamless genealogy of literary tradition, and draws our attention to the operation of literary authority that makes up such slippage.

Similarly, it is through the idea of ‘affiliation’ that the colonised is connected to the imperial culture through the filtering process of inclusion, exclusion and appropriation.

Abdul R. JanMohamed points out, it is the element of contiguity that the view that

‘things exist side-by-side’ that facilitates Said’s view of the world as a network of affiliation. 24 Affiliation, therefore, is a marker that the system of mimetic reproduction of the father’s art is dysfunctional. Yet, a desire to sustain the system survives through adoption. Thus, affiliative textuality also represents the operational outcome of hegemonic control.

As is discussed later, this thesis applies the concept of filiation and affiliation not only to investigate the ontological and epistemological condition of the orphan figure and subject position of the writer, but also to describe the literary genealogy of the canon in

English and the counter-discourse. Said himself provides the rationale that it is Vico himself that conceptualised there was a ‘vacillation’ in what is regarded to be the filial.

Reading European novels such as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary in terms of its biological discontinuity, Said provides a contrapuntal reading that argues the literary texts themselves reflect a historical discontinuity that can be closely associated to the

24 Abdul R. JanMohamed, ‘Worldliness-Without-World, Homelessness-as-Home: Toward a Definition of the Specular Border Intellectual’, in Edward Said: A Critical Reader, Michael Sprinker (eds.), Oxford: Blackwell, 1992, p. 109.

repetition of history that survives through the ‘parodied’ processes of filiation. Said writes:

The direct genealogical line is parenthood and filiation which, whether in language or in the family, will produce a disguised quasi-monstrous offspring, that is farce or debased language, rather than a handsome copy of the precursor or parent – unless the past is severely curtailed in its powers to dominate present and future. 25

Thus, imperial parenting does not only include taking care of direct offspring but also choosing and disciplining adopted children. An affiliative approach to the text allows the critic to elucidate the operation of power that authorise affiliative identification as a filial relation.

Chapter three focuses on Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs by drawing on the theoretical work of the first two chapters. This chapter investigates how Carey writes back to Dickens and his Great Expectations. Carey’s re-writing is significant in its treatment of

Australia’s geographical position as the ‘antipodean colony’ and its strategy nearly escapes the ‘upside down’ of the patriarchal and colonial power hierarchy. Locating

Maggs’s counter-discursive writing prior to Tobias Oates’s The Death of Maggs, Jack

Maggs concerns the profound ambivalence of the issues surrounding the colonial subject and subjectivity. In order to inscribe his history in the European centre, Maggs willingly submits to the authority of the author figure, while still managing to retain a certain amount of authorial control (over the accounts to be written). Maggs’s desire to be inscribed in the centre can be understood as an attempt not to be orphanised from the centre.

25 Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, p.123.

Chapter four considers Sixty Lights by Gail Jones. This chapter adopts a similar structure to chapter three in order to analyse the ways in which Jones responds to

Dickens and Great Expectations. Jones’ novel can be characterised as a ‘meta-reading re-writing’ of the pre-text. It sets the location of reading and re-reading in the canonical text of Great Expectations and describes how the text’s authoritative position is proliferated through the characters’ reading activities to consume the narrative for their own purposes. In so doing, the narrator illustrates how the orphan figures locate their origins, create their own story and finally depart from Great Expectations and its author/father figure. Jones’ re-writing pays attention to the issue of generating the readerly subject and explores its possibility of resistance through the practice of reading and how readers’ ‘unbounded’ responses to the text consequently hybridise the textuality of the canonical text. However, what unites both chapter three and chapter four is the shared importance placed on the concept of counter-discourse. As such, it is perhaps unsurprising that the key theoretical element to this chapter is Homi Bhabha’s concept of ‘ambivalence’.

Bhabha’s concept of ‘ambivalence’ is a way of reading hybridity in the text that allows the possibility of textual resistance. This concept enables the text to describe the often- complex mixture of resistance and the complicity existing within the colonial relationship itself. Therefore, the concept of ambivalence in colonial discourse implies an ‘in-betweenness’ of the colonial subject, suggesting that there has never been a clear- cut division between the coloniser and the colonised. The concept of ambivalence can be further developed with his concept of ‘mimicry’ and ‘menace’. In the essay ‘Of

Mimicry and Man: the Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’,26 Bhabha develops the concepts of ‘mimicry’ and ‘menace’ to show how the colonial subject is ‘almost the same, but not quite’.27 That is to say, how the concept of ambivalence can cause a threat of paranoia amongst the colonisers. As such, Bhabha’s theory of ambivalence is not premised on a direct oppositional model of resistance. Bhabha thinks of such non- oppositional strategies as returning the ‘gaze’ of the coloniser as a means of resistance to the homogenising impetus of colonial discourse.28 As such, it is the ambivalence inherent in the practices of colonial discourse that suggests there can never be a fully homogenised representation of the colonial subject.29

Bhabha’s concept of ambivalence finds its strength as an exemplification of resistance by resting on the force of both deconstruction and psychoanalytic theory. As a theory of destabilising the binaries produced by colonial discourse, the concept of ambivalence allows the investigation of the contradiction within colonial discourse without replicating the colonial binary. Consequently, ambivalence disrupts the homogenous authority of colonial dominance. It is a particularly useful concept in the re-reading of

Dickens’s Great Expectations. If one accepts Said’s charge that Pip is a colonial businessman, then one can suggest that his narrative discourse already contains elements of ambivalence. Moreover, the two re-writings of Carey and Jones demonstrate the profound ambivalence of ‘the master discourse’, since these writings do not merely copy Great Expectations. Indeed, these two re-writings will be read as a

‘mimicry’ of the ‘pre-text’ of Dickens’s work, so that their threatening power constantly

26 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994, pp. 85-92. 27 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 86 28 Bhabha, ibid., p. 86. 29 Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, London: Routledge, 1998, p. 89.

hybridises the discursive practice of colonial discourse, thereby illustrating the moment in which the colonial subject returns the gaze of the coloniser.

Similarly, the concept of ambivalence is also strengthened as a way of reading resistance by the employment of psychoanalytical theory. In ‘Of Mimicry and Man’,

Bhabha refers to Jacques Lacan’s idea that ‘the effect of mimicry is camouflage’.30

Bhabha goes on to say that the element of ‘inauthenticity’, which is the element of being ‘almost the same but not quite’, suggests a fissure within colonial discourse. This element of fissure is further related to Sigmund Freud’s idea of ‘split origins’,31 which gestures towards the mythic ‘oneness’ of colonial textuality. Moreover, Bhabha writes that the element of ‘almost the same but not quite’ in the colonial discourse turns

‘mimicry’ in to ‘menace’, which poses a threat to the coloniser in terms of a proliferation of paranoia. Bhabha’s use of psychoanalytic theory seems not to rest in the diagnosis of the psyche of the coloniser per se, but rather, as Bart Moore-Gilbert suggests, in the use of such clinical terms in order to intentionally misread the products of Western knowledge for his own purposes.32 In doing so, Bhabha creates a moment of subversive mimicry that locates his writing in an affiliative line rather than a filial one. In such a manner, ambivalence proves to be a useful tool for reading resistance, since it illustrates the moment of returning the authoritative gaze of the coloniser.

Counter-Discourse

As a way of resistance to, and the transformation of, colonial discourse, the production of counter-discourse is a vital way of disrupting the hegemony of the canon in English.

30 Jacques Lacan, ‘The Line and Light’, in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis [1973], Jacques-Alain Miller (eds.), Alan Sheridan (trans.), London: Penguin, 1979, p. 99. Quotation modified. 31 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 89. 32 Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics, London: Verso, 1997, p. 115.

Through re-writing the canon, the post-colonial subject undermines the homogeneity of dominant colonial discourse which contains and brutalises the colonial subject.33 Helen

Tiffin, who coined the term ‘canonical counter-discourse’, writes:

It has been the project of post-colonial writing to interrogate European discourses and discursive strategies from a privileged position within (and between) two worlds. … Thus the rereading and rewriting of the European historical and fictional record are vital and inescapable tasks.34

By re-reading and re-writing Great Expectations, Carey and Jones challenge the containing power of colonial discourse. Tiffin also writes that through the production of a counter-discourse, writers do not simply subvert the canon but also write back to

‘the whole of the discursive field within which such a text [English canonical text] operated and continues to operate in post-colonial worlds’.35 Therefore, counter- discourse operates by appropriating the colonial discourse as well as hybridising textuality itself. Such a transformative capacity can be demonstrated through the re- writing of the canon in English.

Initially, the term ‘counter-discourse’ was used by Richard Terdiman in his discussion of ‘symbolic resistance’ that seemed to permeate nineteenth century French literature.

By the term ‘counter-discourse’, Terdiman specifically refers to an ‘alternative system’, which incorporates the voice of the artist who seeks an ‘alternative’ or ‘liberating newness’ in light of the paradox that such a search is always recuperated by the dominant ideology and is therefore predestined to be incapable of bringing about a

33 See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. In the chapter of ‘History’, Spivak refers to ‘epistemic violence’ of colonial discourse in the section originally titled, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ 34 Helen Tiffin, ‘Post-Colonial Literature and Counter-Discourse’, Kunapipi, 9:3 (1987), pp. 17-18. Quotation modified. 35 Tiffin, ‘Post-Colonial Literature and Counter-Discourse’, p. 23.

genuine revolution.36 Reflecting on such difficulties, Tiffin reinvests Terdiman’s term for the purpose of post-colonial studies: that is, the ‘counter-discursive’ is one of those characteristics of post-colonial literatures or cultures that does not ‘overturn views’ but rather ‘exposes and erodes’ the ideological implications of dominant discourse.37 As such, Tiffin states that the role of post-colonial studies is to ‘offer “fields”’ of counter- discursive practice.38 For what Tiffin calls ‘canonical counter-discourse’, a post- colonial strategy which particularly engages with the re-writing of the canon in English, is meant to be a discursive field where basic assumptions of the canonical text are exposed and alterity is highlighted in order to subvert the dominance of naturalised

European assumptions that proliferate in an ideologically fixed reading practice.39

Therefore, it is understood that canonical counter discourse facilitates ‘discursive functions of textuality’ rather than actually subverting the power dynamics of the dominant ideology.40 It is also understood that canonical counter-discourse is a way of appropriating the canonical text.

What are the strategies and practices that post-colonial theory has offered in this field?

Stephen Slemon suggests that the homogeneity of colonial discourse can be undermined by allegorical approaches to the text. As an allegory operates through revealing what is hidden underneath, allegorical reading of the dominant colonial discourse will ‘expose’ the politics of representation that continues to ‘produce and naturalise the hierarchical

36 Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985, p. 13. 37 Tiffin, ‘Post-Colonial Literature and Counter-Discourse’, p. 18. Quotation modified. 38 Tiffin, ibid., p. 18. Tiffin adapts from metaphorical use of ‘fields’ by Dennis Lee. See Dennis Lee, Savage Fields: An Essay in Literature and Cosmology, Toronto: House of Anasi, 1977. Russell M. Brown further explains Lee’s concept of ‘fields’ as ‘a way of talking about the overall structures that govern the relationships among a collection of separable items.’ Russell M. Brown, ‘Critic, Culture, Text: Beyond Thematics’, Essays in Canadian Writing, 11 (Summer 1978), p. 176. 39 Tiffin, ibid., p. 22. 40 Tiffin, ibid., p. 22.

power structures of the imperial enterprise’.41 So, John McLeod considers the canonical texts as ‘resources’ that enable writers to create a moment of entering into a critical discussion with the canonical text.42 McLeod also points out the danger of fixing the position of the canon in merely supporting the ideology and practices of colonialism. Sometimes, the canonical text itself already has the element which is subversive to dominant patriarchal or imperial ideologies.43

John Marx sums up the production of counter-discourse into three options: firstly, the one to repudiate the canon; secondly, the one to revise the canonical text; and, thirdly, what Marx calls the ‘mainstreaming of postcolonial literature’.44 In his discussion,

Marx points out that the vision and practice of ongoing post-colonial criticism has already begun to feed into shaping its own range of canonical texts.45 Thus, it should perhaps be emphasised that post-colonial re-writings of the canon are not simply oppositional: that it is in a way, subjected to the canon but aims, ultimately, to introduce a kind of heterogeneity into a text.

Taking these aspects into consideration, John Thieme uses the term ‘con-text’ for counter-discursive literary works and ‘pre-text’ for their canonical counter-parts.46

Indeed, it is Thieme’s intention to apply these terms to ‘the full range of discursive

41 Stephen Slemon, ‘Monuments of Empire: Allegory/Counter-Discourse/Post-Colonial Writing, Kunapipi, 9:3 (1987), p. 6. Emphases are original. 42 John McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000, p. 143. 43 McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism, pp. 157-160. 44 John Marx, ‘Postcolonial Literature and the Western Literary Canon’, in The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, Neil Lazarus (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 83- 96. 45 Marx, ‘Postcolonial Literature and the Western Literary Canon’, pp. 92-95. 46 John Thieme, Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing back to the Canon, London: Continuum, 2001, pp. 4-5.

situations (contexts), many of which have little or nothing to do with the canon’.47 In so doing, Thieme aims to proliferate the intertextual operation of counter-discourse, preventing a fall into the trap of straightforward oppositional writings. Thieme characterises such diverse operations of intertextual ‘con-texts’ as being ‘affiliative’, borrowing Said’s terminology. Thus, filial relationships are unsettled by affiliative identifications,48 which lead to a subversion of the genealogical authority of the

‘original’ text. What Thieme emphasises in his use of the term ‘affiliation’ is the complicit relationship between post-colonial con-text (re-writings) and the colonial pre- texts (the canon in English). Significantly, colonial pre-texts do not dominate post- colonial con-texts for two main reasons: firstly, that the canon in English is far from homogenous (despite its many claims to universality); and, secondly, it is ‘the text’s practice of constructing its own literary genealogy from a multiplicity of sources’.49

Using the trope of the genealogy of family to elucidate cultural production and reproduction, Thieme explains:

Straightforward lines of descent, such as one, at least supposedly, finds in canonical English literature, are replaced by literary genealogies that reject colonial parent figures, or at least only allow such figures to exist as members of an extended, and usually hybrid, ancestral family. … Problematic parentage becomes a major trope in postcolonial con-texts, where the genealogical bloodlines of transmission are frequently delegitimised by multiple ancestral legacies, usually but not always initiated by imperialism. Orphans and bastards abound in postcolonial texts.50

Thus, the very notion of illegitimacy, which is regarded to be powerless in the light of patriarchal as well as imperial filial relationships, can be the marker of cultural differences that ultimately offer a power of resistance to the post-colonial con-text.

47 Thieme, Postcolonial Con-Texts, p. 5. 48 Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, p. 174. 49 Thieme, ibid., p.9 50 Thieme, ibid., pp. 7-8. Quotation modified.

It is in this context that this thesis relates post-colonial re-writings to affiliation to the canon in English, and by their affiliative relationship to the dominant culture, to the orphan as both a figure and a trope. That is, the orphan is related to both the dominant ideology of Empire and also the notion of post-colonial re-writing by its affiliative identifications. As Said’s metaphorical use of the concept of filiation and affiliation is indebted to Vico’s, this thesis uses the orphan not only as a figure but also as a trope to elucidate the cultural production and reproduction of post-colonial societies. As such, the performance of the orphan figure in Great Expectations as well as Jack Maggs and

Sixty Lights is understood to be a textual performance.

As mentioned earlier, Said uses the concept of ‘affiliation’ as almost an equal to hegemony. In such a manner, affiliation refers to the subject position of the writer, cultural genealogy, and the operation of a hegemony that operates through coercion and consent of subjected peoples—and through which the hybridity of culture is sustained.

Therefore, it is with an ‘affiliative impulse rather than filiative acceptance’51 that the moment of resistance to the dominant colonial discourse occurs. Thus, this thesis takes precaution to use the term ‘affiliation’ as an element of complicity and willingness of the post-colonial con-text with its English ‘parent’, the pre-text. Reading the power relations of the orphan figure allegorically, this thesis elucidates the ways in which the post-colonial con-texts take on, reject, escape or reinvent their parents while refiguring their position as an orphan, even if their attempts are finally absorbed into a cultural hegemony.

51 Thieme, Postcolonial Con-Texts, p. 11.

Nonetheless, it is a kind of beginning. The orphan seeks an affiliative parentage in the canonical text to launch its dialogue while also initiating a kind of departure. Through the reading of the orphan figure as a vehicle to destabilise the colonial trope of the family, this thesis problematises the notion of the family as a stable site for the operation of colonial parenting and literary genealogy. Yet, one must still ask the question how orphan figures perform in each canonical re-writings to hybridise their genealogy or cultural influence. What is the significance of post-colonial ‘subversion’ which does not mean to ‘take over’ the colonial father’s position? As Tiffin’s use of the words ‘expose and erode’ suggests, post-colonial challenges to the dominant discourse seem to be located within the dominant discourse but also outside such a discursive field.

Chapter One: The Child and Empire

Caliban: This island’s mine by Sycorax my mother, Which thou tak’st from me. When thou com’st first Thou strok’st me and made much of me; wouldst give me Water with berries in’t; and teach me how To name the bigger light, and how the less, That burn by day and night. And then I loved thee And showed thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle, The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile. Cursèd be I that did so! All the charms Of Sycorax – toads, beetles, bats – light on you! For I am all the subjects that you have, Which first was mine own king; and here you sty me In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me The rest o’ th’ island.

Prospero: Thou most lying slave, Whom stripes may move, not kindness. I have used thee (Filth as thou art) with humane care, and lodged thee In my own cell till thou didst seek to violate The honour of my child.

(William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act I Scene 2) 52

In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the relationship between Caliban and Prospero not only demonstrates how the colonial relationship begins, but also how it is subsequently problematised. Their relationship begins without much conflict. Caliban registers their contact as friendly, even affectionate. Indeed, Prospero ‘strok’st’ Caliban, to lull him into divulging valuable local knowledge. In such a manner, Prospero’s affection towards Caliban develops into a ‘filial’ relationship when Prospero begins to teach him language. However, it is a relationship of ‘affiliation’ that sees Prospero replace the subject-position of parent with that of the subject-position of one who claims total ownership of the land.

52 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Norton Critical Edition, Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (eds.), New York: Norton & Company, 2004, pp. 18-19.

Of course, this ‘affiliational’ relationship contains the seemingly contradictory elements of exploitation and cultivation from its inception. Prospero’s act of stroking Caliban is a cunning way of establishing a hierarchy of power through the colonising ‘gaze’. Such a hierarchy is materialised through the teaching of language, which positions and constitutes Prospero and Caliban not only in terms of the binary of teacher and pupil, but also in terms of adult and child. It is perhaps the element of mutual affection that sustains such an unequal relationship between the two. An affectionate undertone is suggested between the two, since Caliban openly ‘loved’ Prospero, and Prospero gave

Caliban ‘humane care’ in turn. Arguably, this element of affection is the only element that sustains their relationship as one of surrogate father and child, and which leads to

Caliban telling Prospero ‘all the qualities o’ th’ isle’. But the relationship once again becomes problematic when Caliban attempts to transgress the boundary of the child’s subject-position by trying to become ‘a man’; that is, ‘independent’ from Prospero.

Due to his attempt ‘to violate the honour’ of Miranda, which results in the loss of

Prospero’s favour, Caliban is redefined by Prospero as a ‘slave’. After this redefinition,

Caliban’s subject-position as an adopted son cannot be sustained. It develops into the relationship of master and slave, based not on hegemonic consent but on oppression, yet still maintained within the framework of affiliation.

Although Shakespeare’s The Tempest presents a certain conflation of the trope of the child and the figure of the racialised Other through the character of Caliban, there is nonetheless a tension to be explored here. Caliban’s position as both the child-like subject and the racialised Other is clearly administrated by Prospero. As Prospero’s reason for punishing Caliban with the ‘pinch’ suggests, his identity is conflated with the

logic of disciplining the child-like, savage, criminal colonial subject. Thus, the rationale for Prospero’s necessary control over Caliban is conflated with various aspects of Caliban’s oppressed identities: formerly adopted son and submissive child, now rebellious and fallen, the child-like primitive and criminal Other. In the figure of

Caliban, Prospero’s rhetoric of punishment creates a certain tension between these different identities and subjectivities. It is Prospero’s role of both ‘the father and the oppressor’,53 which presents a certain conflation of a monolithic notion of identity, that facilitates such dominance over subjected peoples. Reading The Tempest, Stephen

Greenblatt calls Caliban ‘anything but a Noble Savage’: that is, the ‘Wild Man’ who would never wish to become civilised in Prospero’s ideology.54 Nevertheless,

Greenblatt suggests that there is a deep yet utterly ‘unsentimental’ bond perceived between Caliban and Prospero.55 Shakespeare, however, remains silent about the significance of the bond.56 It is in these contexts that this chapter discusses the colonial trope of the family, especially the trope of the child.

The trope of the parent and child has played a crucial role in imperial control because of its capacity to naturalise representation of colonial dominance. Given such a context,

Shakespeare’s The Tempest exemplifies how the metaphor of parenting can be used to convey the ways in which hegemony operates. Bill Ashcroft points out that the binary of the parent and child has an ‘inordinate hegemonic potency’ to the colonial subject due to the discursive capacity of the trope of the child, which balances the

53 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 96. 54 Stephen J. Greenblatt, ‘Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century’, in Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture, New York: Routledge, 1990, p. 26. 55 Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, p. 26. 56 Greenblatt, ibid., p. 26.

contradictions of ‘cultivation’ and ‘exploitation’ inherent in the rhetoric of Empire.57 In order to transform such a disabling binary construction, Ashcroft discusses the position and constitution of the colonial subject in terms of the ambivalence between the colonial subject and the abject. Ashcroft argues that that the colonial subject can create its own discursive representation which has the potential to subvert the dominant ‘word of the father’. Jo-Ann Wallace discusses that the conceptualisation of the child itself facilitated a colonial apparatus which has been premised on ideological assumption of nurturing the child,58 since the idea of the child was often used to depoliticise colonial hegemony. Looking at colonial discourse and the strategy of post-colonial re-writings of European texts in Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1863) and Jamaica

Kincaid’s short story ‘Wingless’ (1983), Wallace examines how the conceptualisation of childhood in the West served to ‘deny the constructedness of the figure’,59 a point demonstrated through Kincaid’s child narrator who resists imperialism by interpellating colonial others.

Following Wallace’s argument that the trope of the child demonstrates a tendency to naturalise its ideology, this chapter investigates the binary relation between parent and child. I argue that the colonial rhetoric of the parent and child rests on its naturalising power through the consolidation of two dominant ideologies: the patriarchy and the colonial. My discussion will consider firstly the Western conceptualisation of the child—which coincides with the rise of colonialism—and then continue on to investigate the different ways in which the colonial subject is described as the child-like

57 Ashcroft, On Post-colonial Futures, pp. 36-37. 58 Wallace, ‘De-Scribing The Water-Babies’, p. 176. 59 Wallace, ibid., p. 180.

Other. So, my discussion in this chapter will focus on both the trope and the figure of the parent and child. As such, the question one must ask is what kind of power is operating to absorb such contradiction into the neat category of the child or the slave?

i. The Child and Empire – Conceptualising the Child

If colonial dominance not only takes the form of political repression but also cultural control, it is the trope of the parent and child that contributes to such colonial discursive control. As is evident in the case of Prospero and Caliban in Shakespeare’s The

Tempest, this trope of a filial relationship marginalises the colonial subject while also totalising the image of the colonised subject as one of the subordinate Other. The ‘lack’ inherent in the colonised condition is paradoxically associated with cultivation and the possibility of future improvement. As Edward Said examines in Orientalism, European hegemony has controlled the Orient through dominating the system of producing and disseminating representation from the eighteenth century onwards. Thus, the discursive construction of the Orient, as an imagined geographic place, is also directly applicable to further Western constructions of the colonial Other.

A crucial aspect of this Orientalist discourse is that the imagined Orient begins to ‘see’ itself through the coloniser’s eyes.60 As Said points out, certain texts

can create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe. In time such knowledge and reality produce a tradition, or what Michel Foucault calls a discourse, whose material presence or weight, not the originality of a given author, is really responsible for the texts produced out of it.61

60 Edward W. Said, ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’, Race and Class, 27:2 (Autumn 1985), p. 12. 61 Edward W. Said, Orientalism [1978], New York: Vintage, 1979, p. 94. Emphasis is original.

Of course, while literary texts do not always support the dominant ideology, such texts provide the reader with vocabularies, expressions and perspectives with which to interpret the world; interpretations, which ultimately construct a single view of the world as the ‘knowable’. And then, even though the central strategy in post-colonial writing is the ‘seizing of self-representation’,62 the self-representation of formerly colonised people cannot be legitimised by simply returning to a pre-colonial state. Such representations inevitably become ambivalent because every ‘originary’ location is

‘contaminated’ with outside cultural influences. Thus, the major aim of the post- colonial strategy to re-write the European literary record is to subvert colonial cultural hegemony by transforming dominant cultural modes of expressions. Clearly, literary texts contributed to the coloniser’s authority, via controlling the representation of the colonised Other.

In this context, the trope of the family, and especially the trope of the child as a metaphor for the colonial subject, is significant in a number of ways. The most important is the trope of the child, which has the most ‘far-reaching’ and naturalising effect among other colonial tropes.63 Undoubtedly, other tropes also feed into the conceptualisation of the colonial relationship – such as the ‘stream and tributary’ trope, and the plant metaphor which emphasises the quality of maturity embedded in the notions of ‘age, experience, roots, tradition and most importantly, the connection between antiquity and value’.64 It is the trope of the family, especially that which renders the colonial Other as child, which has had the most extensive and disabling

62 Ashcroft, On Post-colonial Futures, p. 36. Said, Orientalism, p. 291. 63 Ashcroft, ibid., p. 36. 64 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffith and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post- colonial Literatures, 2nd ed., London: Routledge, 2002, p. 15.

effects on the colonised subject. Constructed as ‘both inherently evil and potentially good’, the trope of the child presents enormous possibilities for parental inscription and nurture.65 Ashcroft writes that the trope of the colonial subject as child absorbs the moral conflict and contradictions stemming from colonial dominance and thus naturalises ‘the “parent’s” own contradictory impulses for exploitation and nurture’.66

For example, Prospero’s contradictions over parenting – his professed ‘benefactorial’ patriarchal dominance over a land that he exploits for his resources – rests on his suggested ability to nurture the primitive Other into a state of enlightenment. So, while it is claimed the Other needs to be rescued from debasement,67 Prospero claims that he is making life more bearable for Caliban. Such a situation arises because of the trope’s ability to conflate different metaphorical functions. Thus, Prospero dominates Caliban as a slave and racialised Other, while simultaneously relying on Caliban’s labour for duties concerning ‘house keeping’: ‘we cannot miss him’ says Prospero.68 As such,

Prospero’s reasons for punishing Caliban can be considered to be mostly a camouflage for the benefits he will inherit from such a situation. Furthermore, if Miranda’s virginity is read as a commodity that Prospero can trade for a return to a territorial

Dukedom,69 then Caliban’s transgression acquires another layer of signification. In such a context, Caliban does not simply try to disgrace Prospero’s dear daughter, but instead attempts to damage his most valuable commodity. It is perhaps this interpretation that explains the harshness of Caliban’s (henceforth) ‘deserved’ punishment.

65 Ashcroft, On Post-colonial Futures, p. 36. 66 Ashcroft, ibid., p. 36. 67 Said, Orientalism, p. 206. 68 Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act I Scene 2. Quotation modified. 69 Ashcroft, ibid., p. 46.

This trope found such strong economy among the machinations of a colonial Europe.

The trope of the family has a totalising and naturalising power because it combines two ideologies that proliferate in imperial European culture: the imperial itself and the patriarchal.70 The combination of an imperial and a patriarchal ideology finds its strongest expression in the composition of the European State. Such a synergy creates the capacity for a naturalising discursive practice, which eventually feeds into a power that controls the ontological, as well as epistemological, condition of subjected peoples.

In considering the relation between the figure of the child and the racialised Other in the history of theatrical performance, Trevor Griffiths writes that the image of the family provided a medium where subordination of the racial Other is ultimately legitimised.71

This monolithic structure of the State and social ideology enhances the extensive homogeneity of the ideological mapping of colonialism, and also extends into the debate of nationalism. Under consolidated ideologies, the coloniser creates an infinite range of opportunities to legitimise political as well as economic interventions or exploitation under the ‘name of the father’. In other words, the activity of securing personal benefits is legitimised in the very action of ‘parenting’ itself. As an allegorical reading of Shakespeare’s The Tempest suggests, in colonial discourse, the trope of the parent and child has the overwhelming capacity to naturalise the contradictions of colonial operations and administration. Despite the historical changes in the idea of the

70 In the essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak analyses the ‘double colonisation’ of Indian women. Here Spivak criticises the dominance of both patriarchy and imperialism, stating that the female subaltern is totally silenced. I use this consolidation of patriarchy and imperialism in order to reflect the interpellating effect of the two ideologies to the reader. In the process of forming the framework of the argument, I was influenced by Spivak’s argument, but due to the length of the thesis, my discussion is not able to cover the ranges of gender issues specifically concerning the engendering of the female subaltern. As a result, this thesis takes a different view from Spivak’s conceptualisation of resistance to colonialism: through articulating the exact point where colonial governance totally wipes out the subjectivity of the subjected people. See Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reasons, pp. 198-311. 71 See Trevor R. Griffiths, ‘“This island is mine” Caliban and Colonialism’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 13 (1983), pp. 154-180.

family itself, the most important aspect of the trope of the family in the colonial context is that of the parent. The parent stands as the genealogical ‘origin’ of the child, and assumes an unquestioned authority over the colonial child—even to the extent of determining the issue of ‘taste and value’.72 Parental authority is based on the ideological mantra that the parent is ‘more experienced, more important, more substantial, [and] less brash’ than the child. In other words, the parent assumes a position of authoritative independence while the child is predestined to reside in a position that is wholly subordinate to the parent.

Clearly, the association of the concept of hegemony with the concept of the family is not specific to imperial discourse. Similar rhetoric has been used to represent the relationship between ‘the nation’ and ‘the public’. Ania Loomba describes such tendencies concerning the national metaphor of the family by noting that ‘the family and the State shaped each other’s development’ so that role and responsibility of the public is defined by using familial metaphor.73 Yet, it is important to note that the metaphor of the parent can also take the female gender. When the feminine is used as an emblem of nationhood, the crafted figure often takes the form of mother or wife in order to signify the fecundity of a nation.74 Thus, while the metaphor of family refers to the concept of nation, the nation’s ‘leaders’ and national icons are bound to the trope of the parent. In such a context, Mahatma Gandhi is unproblematically constituted as the ‘founding father’ of a nation while Winnie Mandela becomes the mother of another.75 It is, however, curious that such iconic figures of nation are not tied to

72 Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, p. 15. 73 Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, p. 216. 74 Loomba, ibid., pp. 215-217. 75 Loomba, ibid., p. 216.

gender, race or class. Most importantly, under colonialism the State metaphor of the family is translated not only to bind the relations of the nation and the national public but also the ways in which race and ethnicity, as well as cultural relationships, are represented. As such, even though both the idea of the nation and the idea of the family have been constructed differently through time and place, the metaphor of ‘nation’ still constitutes a major tool for colonial control.

If the trope of parent and child is used to legitimise the coloniser’s dominance over the colonial Other, one must question the ways in which the child was conceptualised by the colonial parent. What expectations were placed on the trope of the child? Behind the strong naturalising capacity of the trope of filiation there is a complex combination of ideological posturing and social practice. As Loomba suggests, the figurative association of the State and the family is not simply ‘a metaphor’, nor just an abstract idea, but is something that can refer to the actual practice of a family: it works through the operation of an interpellation that connects ideology to the individual.

Interestingly, the formalisation of the idea of the child was developed in the West during the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, coinciding with colonial expansion and the resultant creation of Europe’s Others. As Philip Ariès writes, the idea of the child as having a particular nature distinguishable from the adult did not exist in mediaeval Europe.76 Examining a repository of cultural representations—icons, epitaphs, diaries, and letters—in terms of ‘mantalite’ (affection or sentiment), Ariès argues that some changes are recognisable in the family’s attitude to the child following

76 Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood [1960], Robert Baldick (trans.), London: Jonathan Cape, 1962, p. 128.

the mediaeval period.77 Indeed, it would seem that in a mediaeval Europe the concept of the child as it is understood today did not exist for the child is represented as ‘petit adult’, the figure similar but smaller than the parent or the adult.78 Consequently, Ariès argues that the emergence of the ‘modern’ conceptualisation of the child, which is to say the emergence of a specific kind of affection towards the child, initiated a change in the idea of the family.79 For example, until thirteenth-century, the child wore the same clothes as an adult of the same class.80 It was not until the seventeenth century that the children of the upper classes started wearing different clothes from the adults.81 This change, as Ariès notes, is attributable to the role of education and training. As childhood ‘education’ shifted from vocational apprenticeships to a school-based environment, Ariès detects a significant change among the representations of children belonging to the upper classes. Here the pupils are distinguished from the teachers in terms of age, which signifies an almost tangible difference in the maturity of social morality and knowledge. For Ariès, the adult acceptance of the ‘immaturity’ of the child meant that the child no longer left home to complete an apprenticeship which enabled the parent and the child to spend more time together. This environment of

‘close-contact’ between parent and child in turn fostered a deepening emotional attachment between the two.82 Importantly, Ariès’s observation that the child grew into a condition of maturity over time also goes some way to explaining the close discursive relationship between childhood and education. It seems certain that the social reconceptualisation of the child in the seventeenth century resulted in the production of

77 Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, p. 365. 78 Ariès, ibid., p. 128. 79 Ariès, ibid., p. 365. 80 Ariès, ibid., pp. 50-51. 81 Ariès, ibid., pp. 54-57. 82 Ariès, ibid., pp. 329-336.

two key concepts, both of which played a significant part in the European expansionist drive of the nineteenth century: parenting and schooling.

The idea that the child is the one who is in need of ‘looking after’, and is therefore in a sense always already dependent and undeveloped, has been conceptualised in various ways by writers of the Enlightenment. And post-colonial theory has been criticising such conceptualisations. John Locke considers that the child is born as a tabula rasa,83 which is to say, with their mind blank. For Locke, personal experiences are imprinted on the mind of the child, which ultimately ‘furnish’ the individual with their individuality.84 Born blank, the child starts inscribing their experiences when ‘the memory begins to keep a register of time or order’,85 and this, Locke says, corresponds to the beginning of the child’s soul.86 As such, perception, experience and the ability to translate and inscribe such experiences lie at the core of Locke’s idea of human subjectivity. Given this conceptualisation of the child, it is the responsibility of the child’s parents and schoolmasters to deal with the issues of what to ‘inscribe’ the blank mind of the child with.87 Colonial discourse translates Locke’s idea of tabula rasa into a metaphor that associates the blank space of uncharted geography of the savage

83 John Locke, ‘An Essay Concerning Human Understanding’ [1690], in The Empiricists, Sydney: Anchor Books, 1974, p. 10. Here Locke writes that the child’s mind at birth is ‘white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas’. As for English translation of the Latin expression of tabula rasa, there have been variously translated as ‘scraped tablet’, ‘blank slate’ or ‘a soft tablet.’ While the specific translation of the term is clearly questionable, the meaning attains a certain level of consistency that renders its further use unproblematic. 84 Locke, ‘An Essay Concerning Human Understanding’, pp. 10-12. 85 Locke, ibid., p. 11. 86 Locke, ibid., p. 13. 87 See John Locke, ‘Some Thoughts Concerning Education’ [1693], in On Education, Peter Gay (eds.), New York: Bureau of Publications, 1964. Locke states that ‘a sound mind in a sound body’ (p.19) is produced by educaion: the method of ‘inscription’. Considering the environment of education, including punishment and reteped practice, Locke argues that ‘children are not to be taught by rules, which will be always slipping out of their memories. What you think necessaty for them to do, settle in them by an indispensable practice, as often as the occasion returns.’ (p.42)

mind.88 This association ultimately legitimises colonial expansionism and the exploitation of indigenous lands.89 Indeed, as Captain Cook declared Australia Terra

Nullius, further colonial expeditions translated the condition of tabula rasa onto the geographical and cultural space of colonial territory. Similarly, this geographical metaphor also became the literary allusion to refer to the control and dissemination of colonial representation in every colonised territory. Thus, Locke’s concept of the child gave the colonial mission the rhetorical background to fulfil the ambition of the colonising expedition.

However, contrary to Locke and his conceptualisation of the ‘blank’ child, Jean Jacques

Rousseau describes the child as a ‘noble savage’ who preserves the ‘natural state of a man’ whose primal innocence is yet to be corrupted by contact with society.90 For

Rousseau, ‘natural man’ represents the ideal state of man, and such a state of

‘naturalness’ is upheld in the ‘unspoiled’ and ‘idyllic’ nature of the child mind.

Rousseau sees this state of natural man as one to which every adult should aspire.91

Rousseau’s conceptualisation of the child derives from an esteemed philosophical tradition. Rousseau uses Montaigne’s claim that the cannibal is a ‘noble savage’, a claim first postulated in his essay ‘On Cannibals’ (1580).92 Montaigne compares the

‘corruptions’ and ‘artful devices’ proliferating in Europe to the more ‘pure’ and

‘simple’ states enjoyed by the cannibal who lives under ‘the law of nature’.93 In preserving the initial ‘uncorrupted’ condition of man’, Montaigne writes, each cannibal

88 Ashcroft, On Post-Colonial Futures, p. 40. 89 Ashcroft, On Post-Colonial Futures, pp. 39-40. 90 Jean Jacques Rousseau, Émile [1762], Barbara Foxley (trans.), London: Everyman’s Library, 1963, pp. 6-7. 91 Rousseau, Émile, p. 10. 92 Ashcroft, ibid., p. 40. 93 Michel de Montaigne ‘The Cannibals of Brazil’ [1580], in Shakespeare The Tempest, pp. 107-108.

is to be considered noble.94 It is this sense of purity and simplicity bound to

Montaigne’s natural and noble cannibals that Rousseau imports into his representation of the child. Indeed, as Rousseau depicts in Emile, the child’s ‘unspoiled’ nature should be fostered by living in nature and striving to attain the condition of ‘a natural man’ through the rejection of any socialising force. Rousseau constructed such socialising forces to extend into the realm of literature and warns of the dangers of reading any book save Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe,95 which he considered a self-help guidebook to exist in the natural environment. Thus, in Rousseau’s view, the ideal parent should keep the child away from the evils of society, or at the very least maintain a strict supervision that limits their susceptibility to corruption by an evil society.

Although Locke and Rousseau have divergent views concerning the nature of the child, they agree that education is the key to the development of man. Locke’s concept of the child as a tabula rasa suggests that what is to be written has to be strictly supervised and controlled through education, while Rousseau’s idea of the child as inherently good yet savage suggests that education can control the child’s path to adult maturity. In other words, both Locke’s and Rousseau’s idea of the child share a belief in which the child is constructed as ‘lack’ through discourse, and how such a ‘lack’ is best filled in practice. A crucial aspect in regard to the concept of the child is that even though the child’s discourse is constructed through a series of negations, this does not negate the possibility for future improvements of the child. Indeed, the discourse of the child suggests that their current condition of ‘lack’ is amenable in the future, if proper education and parentage are provided. Nevertheless, the colonial discursive

94 de Montaigne, ‘The Cannibals of Brazil’, p. 108. 95 Rousseau, Emile, pp. 147-148.

arrangement of the concept of the child, which is most aptly described by the terms inherited from the Enlightenment such as the ‘primitive, which also signifies the pre- literate, pre-writing, pre-historic,96 combines the contesting properties of negation and future possibility under the authority of a paternal Empire.

ii. The Childlike Primitive and Savage

The politics of colonial interpretations of the child as a ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ stresses the particular habit of representation, and such a habit extends representation beyond the specific. Through this developmental process, the human subject learns with whom they should identify themselves and, conversely, the child-like quality that requires negation, which is translated into anything ‘un-adult-like’. The binary of parent and child is constructed in order to enter the condition of the child’s subordination to the parent. Thus, the discursive formation of the child is appropriated in order to repress adult colonial subjects. As such, the proliferation of images that represent the colonial subject as child-like ultimately cement the idea that indigenous populations lack rationality, and suffer from the same type of social immaturity that ‘plagues’ the child.

The practices of parenting and schooling cannot be separated from either the operation of a power dynamic that runs through the filial relationship, or the resistance that such an arrangement of power ultimately breeds.

Discursive control of the colonised as the child figure becomes truly disabling when it comes to the discussion of the issue of language and self-representation. As the word

96 Wallace, ‘De-Scribing The Water-Babies’, pp. 174-175.

‘infant’ comes from the Latin word infants, which literally means ‘without speech’,97 each child is preconditioned by an inability to represent themselves—or at least, they are in need of an adult’s assistance to do so. The notion that the colonial subject is childish, primitive and savage in the use of the colonising ‘master’ languages of Europe has contributed to the perception of colonised people as ‘naturally’ childish and primitive. Indeed, the idea of the child as an object of the parent’s affection and protection only emerged after the invention of the printing press, an invention that created a clear distinction between those who could read and write and those who could not. The ‘pre-literate’ or ‘pre-writing’ condition, which is often described literally as being ‘childish’, exposes the hierarchy of value given to ‘unsophisticated’ or ‘primitive’ writings. Such Eurocentric views are still persistent in many fields of academia, such as this one from the field of linguistics:

The first articulate word pronounced by a child is often sometimes like da, ma, na, ba, ga or wa. The vowel is most commonly a short ah sound, and the consonant a nasal or a plosive. ...When the child attempts to copy words used by adults, he at first tends to produce words of this form, so that ‘grandfather’ may be rendered as gaga, ‘thank you’ as tata, and ‘water’ as wawa. This explains why, in so many languages, the nursery words for mother and father are mama or dada or baba or something similar: there is no magic inner connexion between the idea of parenthood and words of this form: these just happen to be the first articulated sounds that the child makes, and the proud parent attributed suitable meaning to them. Such words may also have been the first utterances of primitive man…98

Barber exemplifies the process of linguistic development here in order to explain how each different consonant is combined with the same vowel in order to create one syllable; and how the same sound unit is duplicated in order to produce one meaning.

In Barber’s discussion, such an element of repetition seems to suggest limited linguistic competence, which is the characteristic Barber suggests to both the child and primitive man (I assume Barber is comparing baby talk to the ‘adult’ primitive man here). Both

97 Wallace, ‘De-Scribing The Water-Babies’, p. 175. 98 C. L. Barber, The Story of Language [1964], London: Pan Books, 1972, p. 25. Emphases are original.

figures are regarded to be powerless because they cannot accurately represent themselves. This inability to represent themselves is often used to justify a parent figure’s representation of the child/native for they can render an ‘accurate’ account of the world. The mission of colonial dominance was to educate the native subject to civilise them.

The term ‘childhood’ suggests a precondition to adulthood, and, by allusion, a sense of belonging to a family. But the colonial subject conceptualised in terms of the child is clearly never able to grow up to take the position of the parent—a radical disconnection from the father’s genealogy is implied. As such, the colonial trope of the parent and child is already contradictory since real children eventually grow up to be adult and possibly ‘the parent’. The trope of the family requires the future growth of the child for its livelihood, but such growth is discursively castrated by colonial discourse. This is particularly true in the case of the racialised Other, where the ‘child’ can demonstrate possibilities of growth but should not grow in reality. In this rhetorical control, the colonised subject’s development to maturity is eternally suspended. This eternal infancy is ascribed to the silence of native history. Perhaps, the most extreme denial of the right of producing self-representation by the colonised peoples can be found in

Hegel’s thoughts on African history:

Africa proper, as far as History goes back, has remained – for all purposes of connection with the rest of the World – shut up; it is the Gold-land compressed within itself – the land of childhood, which lying beyond the day of self conscious history, is enveloped in the dark mantle of Night. 99

Hegel conceptualises Africa as ‘pre-historic’ and ‘pre-lingual’, a site without history or language. Described as isolated from the ‘world’—and here one should perhaps read

99 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, J. Sibree (trans.), New York: Dover Publications, 1956, p. 91.

Europe—Hegel conceptualises Africa as a helpless child confined to a state of pre- civilisation. Africa is infantalised, stereotyped and denied its own history. As such, it is only brought into the historical record through its subordinate relation to Europe. Thus, the history of Africa becomes ‘variations on a master narrative that could be called “the history of Europe”’.100 But, of course, Africa has always had a history of its own, its own conceptualisation of time and events, probably ‘hidden’ from writers like Hegel because they were bound to the strong oral tradition that formed the root of various

African cultures. Each African country or region had its own history before the onset of colonisation, but the Western representation of the history of Africa only began with reference to the European colonial endeavour.

While the nature of ‘primitiveness’ and ‘savageness’ are translated into the

‘unformedness’ of the colonial subject, and imperial discourse perpetuates the infinite possibility of inscription and nurture, it is also perceived as fear that was registered through colonial encounter. Whether the colonial subject is considered as either a tabula rasa or as a ‘noble savage’, the fear instilled by the unknowable, savage Other was translated into the associated paradigm of the child and the child’s irrational, primitive and sometimes animalistic state. Such negative associations of the child and the colonial Other seem to have begun in the latter half of the eighteenth-century, and by the nineteenth century they had become widespread.101 Gustav Jahoda writes that there were two rationales for the child-savage trope: that is, social evolutionism and the

100 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for “Indian” Pasts?’, Representations, 37 (Winter 1992), p. 1. 101 Gustav Jahoda, Images of Savages: Ancients Roots of Modern Prejudice in Western Culture, London: Routledge, 1999, pp. 131-132.

‘biogenetic law’.102 The important element identified by Jahoda is that the racial difference of the colonial subject was constructed through a pseudo-scientific discourse that provided the colonial subject with ‘child-like’ quality that eternally marginalised it from the European ‘centre’. Images of the child-like Other that ascribed to it a ‘weak personality’, a ‘lack of emotional control’, a ‘lack of intelligence’, or a ‘lack of morality’ perpetuates not only the inevitable dependency of the colonial subject on the coloniser, but also the superiority of the colonial civilising mission. Indeed, since the child signifies a suspension of maturity, the discursive violence that the trope of the parent and child imposes on the colonial subject only results in the possibility of an infinite ‘civilising’ mission that perpetually seeks to interpellate the colonial subject.

So, colonial rhetoric further invests in Rousseau’s concept of the ‘noble savage’, an image that pervaded the discourse of the entire European colonial endeavour in two major ways. Firstly, even though Rousseau celebrates the innocence of the child, it is precisely the word ‘savage’ that invites the civilising mission, because the term suggests the ‘unformedness’ of the colonial landscape and the infinite possibilities of amenabilities.103 In other words, by claiming the unformedness of colonial landscape, the space presents almost unlimited potential for the announcement of Enlightenment teachings. Secondly, as the concept of the ‘noble savage’ is primarily associated with cannibals, it has a racial connotation. More importantly, racial difference was often related to the moral or social backwardness of the group. Hayden White writes that the ideological effect of the term is

102 See Jahoda, Images of Savages, pp.152-163. 103 Ashcroft, On Post-Colonial Futures, pp. 40-41.

to draw a distinction between presumed types of humanity on manifestly qualitative grounds, rather than such superficial bases as skin colour, physiognomy, or social status.104

Thus the term ‘noble savage’ ties racial images, social conditions and morality together to give a concrete representation of the colonial subject. Since Rousseau did not address colonial issues in his writing, the usage and shifts in the usage of the term

‘noble savage’ exemplifies how colonial discourse appropriated an expression for its own purpose.

Psychoanalytic theory provides terms and vocabularies to describe the human development of the colonial subject who is primarily represented as ‘savage’. With its particular emphasis on patriarchal ideology, Freud connects historical or cultural development with maturation of human subjects. In his works, such as Totem and

Taboo (1913) and Civilisation and its Discontents (1930), Freud applies his psychoanalytic theory of the Oedipus complex to explain the social progress from paganism to monogamy and patriarchy through allusion to the development of the human subject from child to adult. Freud’s application of the Oedipus complex to other cultures creates serious problems for the colonial subject. According to Freudian theory, those who fail to master the Oedipus complex are neurotic. Then, it is perhaps unsurprising that the colonial subject can neither overcome Freud’s Oedipus complex nor ‘grow up’ to finally become an adult. For example, in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of

Darkness, the black people are never described as either individuals or adults: they are

104 Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays on Cultural Criticism, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, p. 17. Quotation modified. Quoted in Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, p. 118.

primitive, pre-lingual and ‘prehistoric’.105 Of course, such a totalising effect of Freud’s theory occurs merely because Freudian theory disregards cultural or social differences in the processes of subject formation. Frantz Fanon writes that such cases of neurosis due to the failure of overcoming the Oedipus complex are scarce in the French colony of the Antilles.106 Fanon speculates that this is because the black people never actually come to identify themselves in the same way as the white coloniser.107 Nevertheless,

Freudian theory has proved to be influential in keeping the colonial other in the position of the child by pathologising the difference between them. Due to its status as a theory based on clinically collected cases, psychoanalytic theory offers perhaps the most confining effect to the discourse of childishness on the colonial subject.

The parent figure’s superior linguistic ability to the child is further connected with the parent’s knowledge to create the dominant discourse. The idea that the parent can represent the child better than the child is itself based on the assumption that the parent has superior knowledge—especially that of childhood, because they have themselves experienced childhood and should, after all, remember how it was.108 The adult’s knowledge and experience of childhood, even though they are temporally and spatially distinct from the one that they are attempting to represent, can achieve more discursive authority than the child’s own self-representation. In this way, the child is subjected not only to the language of the parent, but also to the discursive authority that combines language and knowledge. In this way, the language of the parent becomes the dominant

105 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness [1899], Norton Critical Edition (3rd ed.), Robert Kimbrough (ed.), New York: Norton & Company, 1988, p. 37. 106 Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks [1967], Charles Lam Markmann (trans.), London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1968, pp. 151-153. 107 Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks, pp. 151-153. 108 Ashcroft, On Post-Colonial Futures, p.41.

language of the family, which is used to construct and disseminate the dominant ideology of patriarchy as well as that of imperialism. This consolidation of the imperial and patriarchal ideologies also constitutes the condition of ‘phallogocentricism’, which recognises the privilege in the words of the father and that of the master. The child, as primitive and pre-lingual, even though bound by their own material reality, is to be read and represented only in terms proposed by the parent and master. Therefore, resistance to and transformation of the trope of the parent and the child maintains a two-fold dynamic: a resistance to patriarchal discourse, but also, and significantly, a resistance to a dominating colonial discourse.

Conclusion

This chapter has discussed the colonial trope of the parent and the child. The major strength of this dichotomy is found in its power to naturalise and consolidate two dominant ideologies: the colonial and the patriarchal. Both ideologies have invested in the notion of the child and childhood, which formed a ‘pre-condition’ to the colonial dominance. As Philip Ariès argues, the concept of the child as the object of parental affection and care itself is the product of European philosophy after the seventeenth century. The concept itself was constructed by and gave rationale to the development of

Western patriarchal society and the expansion of Empire. A particularly important element of this birth of the European conceptualisation of the child is that it contributed to the creation of certain differences between the parent and the child in terms of language and knowledge, which were then cemented in the form of a power hierarchy.

The child’s subordination to the parent was justified not only by the age of difference

but also by the child’s perpetual need for education and schooling. Besides Ariès, John

Locke’s conceptualisation of the child as tabula rasa and Jean Jacques Rousseau’s interpretation of the ‘noble savage’ provided the colonial expedition with the means to translate their experience of encounter with the indigenous people and control the representation of colonised places. More importantly, such conceptualisations of the child as the unformed and subordinate is further interpreted into the idea of the child as the ‘child-like’, that is, the trope of the child that the colonial and the patriarchal discourse have invested upon. It is this simile of the child which is used as a trope whereby the colonial discourse constructed their power hierarchy over the colonised.

The most problematic use of such a trope can be found in the discourse of the racialised colonial Other. In this colonial discourse, the Other is placed in a subordinate position to the coloniser in terms of language, history or psychological human development. As the child, the colonial subject is expected to be taken care of by the parental coloniser.

This idea of nurture within the colonial rhetoric of the child creates the capacity to absorb the possible conflicts and contradiction of colonial discourse.

In this chapter, my discussion of the trope of the child has focused on a certain conflation of the notion of the child and the racialised colonial Other. As noted in my observation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the character of Caliban is constructed as the conflated figure of child, slave and racialised Other. Caliban is encompassed within

Prospero’s hegemony by the arrangement of affiliation. But he is also an orphan.

Having lost his mother Sycorax, he is divorced of the biological parental arrangement

(filiation). Thus, he is already outside of the relationship of filiation, yet he is still positioned within the Prospero’s dominance through affiliational identification. As

such, the figure of Caliban is constructed with yet another layer of conflation: the orphan figure. Living in the memory of Sycorax, his mother, the absent position of

Caliban’s parents is replaced with the surrogate father and patriarchal and imperial dominant master, Prospero. Caliban resists Prospero’s dominance but is also well aware that he must obey the rule and the order of Prospero’s empire. In this sense,

Prospero’s dominance, which is facilitated through the relationship of affiliation to

Caliban, can also be observed as the hegemonic control. It always operates to establish the imperial binary by totalising the exegesis into the neat classification of either the parent or the child. In the next chapter, I will discuss the possible ways in which a post- colonial reading of the colonial trope of the parent and the child can offer resistance to this confining power of imperial hegemony through the trop of the orphan, the parentless.

Chapter Two: The Orphan in Empire

‘Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time, there were many blank spaces on the earth and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say; when I grow up I will go there.’109

The Map functions as a mirror of the world, not because the representation of the earth has the status of a natural sign, but because it aims to invoke a simulacrum of an always inaccessible totality by means of an arrangement of symbols.110

Marlow tells his audience how his younger self came to know the world through maps.

He continues to explain how intoxicated he was to see the ‘glories of exploration’, which are clearly visible on the map as the places where Western exploration had already reached. Western achievement is signified by the term of ‘filling the gap’; after which the space becomes signified by a Western name. At the same time, Marlow saw spaces that needed to be filled in, which urged him to give these ‘blank spaces’ proper names. Here, the map serves as a vehicle not only to connect the young Marlow’s ambition for adventure with its tangible destination, but also to legitimise the ideology of colonial exploration. Marlow interpreted the map as an ‘invitation’ from the world to explore and exploit it, rather than as his own self-interested ideological fulfilment, which would be achieved through his heroic endeavour to fill in these ‘blank spaces’.

In Marlow’s mind, the world is reduced to a mere signifying practice, which operates through matching a spot on the map with its name. Blank space is a nameless area where this practice falters, thus it is his task to go there, explore the place and give it a name: that is, to ‘father’ the place. The unnamed spaces, the ‘orphan spaces’ which do not have proper parentage, must be properly filiated. The place name signifies the

109 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 11. Quotation modified. 110 José Rabasa, ‘Allegories of Atlas’, in Post-Colonial Studies Reader, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffith and Helen Tiffin (eds.), London: Routledge, 1995, p. 358.

marker of civilisation, by which the place can be identified on the map, and hence in the world. In this way, colonial exploration is legitimised as an attempt which aims to eliminate unnamed spaces from the cartographic representation of the world, and thus give a sense of wholeness to its referent.

The young Marlow’s episode is crucial because it tells how an individual conceptualises the world through a representation, which is also a misrepresentation. As José Rabasa points out, the map is always a misrepresentation, because it is never able to achieve a

‘totality’ on a sheet of paper. As such, what is represented as a form of the map is always a manipulation of geographical space and, ironically, can never be completed: a map always indicates a mapped space – and implies its unmapped other. As such,

Marlow’s episode can be read as one which elucidates how the European subject grows up to integrate an Eurocentric perspective of the world, not only through works of fiction, but also through scientific discourses such as maps. Cartographic representation is powerful precisely because it actually ‘shows’ the geographical divide between the centre and the periphery, which allows the boy Marlow to touch a place on the map with his finger and declare his ambition to go there when he grows up. Indeed, colonisation could not be achieved, if it were not for the possibility of conceptualising and cementing the Eurocentric perspective of the world in a similar way. Thus the whole process of naming unknown spaces is aimed at establishing the hierarchy of

Western ‘parentage’. This hierarchy usually operates through sets of binary oppositions of imperial rhetoric, such as parent and chid, or centre and margin.

Marlow’s act of naming and pointing to the place forms an ’imagined’ encounter with the local culture, although the members of this culture are left blank and silent. Apart from its function as a totalising power to construct a binary, colonialism was also a product of connecting the margin with the centre. The young Marlow can easily put his finger on the map, but he fails to recognise two key elements of the colonial expedition.

Firstly, connecting where he is to where he wants to go requires means of transportation, which obviously takes much longer than simply pointing at a map.

Secondly, what he conceives as ‘blank spaces’ were not empty spaces at all: many of those spaces had already been inhabited by the natives well before the European colonial endeavour began. Colonial expedition was not simply a journey to an unknown place, as the young Marlow imagined, because it necessarily included an encounter between different cultures. Marlow seems to have neither the vocabulary nor the rhetoric to describe such an encounter, other than reducing the native to a symbol of darkness. Kurtz’s last cry, ‘“the horror, the horror”’,111 which Marlow remembers as ‘a cry that was no more than a breath’, reflects Marlow and Kurtz’s joint fear towards

Africa. Its implication is that Africa is a vast, uncivilised space which has the potential to destroy the European self, if, like Kurtz, one mingles with the natives. As such,

Marlow’s ‘contact phobia’ is reflected in his description of Kurtz and the native, which describes them both in terms of insanity. Moreover, Marlow’s European self, which is represented through his narration, and shared among his primary audience on the cruising yawl ‘Nellie’, blocks any meaningful interaction with the colonised Other.

111 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 68. Quotation modified.

Although the precise cause of Kurtz’s madness is not stated, Marlow’s depiction or

Conrad’s construction of Africa and the Africans as Europe’s other is nonetheless the product of a particularly Eurocentric point of view, not a universal one. Thus,

Marlow’s, Kurtz’s and Conrad’s Africa is very different from the material reality of the

African people. Chinua Achebe, in his essay ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s

Heart of Darkness’, contests Conrad by arguing that the book creates an image of

Africa as ‘“the other world”, the antithesis of Europe and therefore civilisation’,112 and that the author of Heart of Darkness is a ‘thoroughgoing racist’.113 Due to its dehumanising depictions of Africa and the Africans, Achebe argues that it is impossible to refer to the book as a ‘great work of art’.114 Achebe acknowledges that Heart of

Darkness is a great stylistic achievement and arguably better than any other fiction that features the colonial Other, ‘read and taught and constantly evaluated by serious academics’.115 But, it is exactly this power of manipulation among scholars and readers that drives Achebe to such criticism. Achebe challenges Conrad's portrayal of African people as nameless, primitive masses by presenting an alternative representation which depicts an individual who has virtues and flaws, Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart (1957).

Such an attempt to subvert the imperial and patriarchal ideology can also be understood as an attempt to upset the imperial father’s authority by the infantalised colonial Other.

This canonical counter-discourse does not aim for the reversal of power hierarchy between the coloniser and the colonised, but rather, it converts the hitherto homogenous representation of the other into a heterogeneous one. But, when the binary relationship of the parent and the child is disrupted by the emergent self-representation of the

112 Chinua Achebe, ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’, in Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965-1987, London: Heinemann, 1988, p. 3. Quotation modified. 113 Achebe, Hopes and Impediments, p. 11. 114 Achebe, ibid., p. 12. 115 Achebe, ibid., p. 3.

colonial child figure, how can the position of the counter-discourse be described in order to subvert the colonial rhetoric of the parent and the child?

It is this context of cultural hegemony and the possible disruption of the literary construction of Empire that this chapter investigates. The chapter aims to theorise the ways in which the operation of hegemony is described and criticised in terms of both the imperial and the national. In order to create a model for theorising the literary relationship between the coloniser and the infantalised other, I will use Edward Said’s critical terms ‘filiation’ and ‘affiliation’, combined with the concept of the orphan, which describes the Other’s position of abjection. This chapter also focuses on the cultural relationship between the centre and Australia. I argue that the orphan figure as the abject element of the parent/child arrangement is a potential site of imperial contestation and complicity. This position of the orphan as the abject applies not only to orphan figures themselves, but also to the literary relations between the centre and the margin. My discussion will thus examine how the colonial trope of the parent and the child is translated into the literary relationship between the centre and the margin. I will also explain how the margin generates its subjectivity by adapting the image created in the centre as their self-image.

i. Resisting Colonialism

The tropes of the parent and child are often used metaphorically to describe the literary relationship between the coloniser and the colonised. This relationship is often translated into the binary relationship of the centre and margin. This translation

foregrounds the geographical aspects concerning the establishment and operation of

Empire. That is, this translation visibly cements the Eurocentric ideology that a work of literature produced and disseminated in the metropolis has higher artistic and moral standards than one produced in the periphery. Through such a translation, the parental trope acquires not only a linear genealogy, but also a specific kind of deployment.

Three aspects of this trope are significant. Firstly, the trope creates the textual hierarchy of centre and margin, which establishes the canon in English as the representation of universal human values and artistic qualities such as originality, creativity and tradition.

Secondly, the trope defines the literary genealogy between the centre and the margin.

The history of literature produced in the colony has been established in relation to the privileged centre, making this history into a derivative version of the parent’s literary tradition. Such tendencies can be observed in the idea of ‘Commonwealth Literature’.

In the preface to A Manifold Voice: Studies in Commonwealth Literature, William

Walsh states that he intends to ‘explore some of the less familiar resources – less familiar to the British reader’, implying a critique of the literary hierarchy between the centre and the margin.116 Thirdly, the literary relationship between the centre and the margin defines the value of literary works, by considering subordinate works to be

‘childish’. That is, the Eurocentric concept of literary value marginalises less privileged texts, judging them as ‘savage’, ‘native’ or ‘primitive’ – the quality of the ‘child-like’ – in comparison to the European self. 117 As Walsh notes, only the works of literature produced in the former colonies displaying a ‘maturity’ of language are considered worth introducing to the British readers.118

116 William Walsh, A Manifold Voice: Studies in Commonwealth Literature, London: Chatto & Windus, 1970, p. 9. 117 Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, p.3. 118 William Walsh, Commonwealth Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973, p. v.

As discussed in the Introduction, this kind of literary relationship between the centre and the margin can be described using Edward Said’s distinction between the two kinds of family relationship: ‘filiation’ and ‘affiliation’. The concept of filiation and affiliation is particularly important for the discussion of writers from the margin, and their textual statues in the periphery, for these two terms provide post-colonial critical practice with a vocabulary that can explain the operation of cultural hegemony and the colonial subject’s resistance to it. When Said describes the relationship between filiation and affiliation, he writes that ‘the filiative scheme belongs to the realm of nature and of “life”, whereas affiliation belongs exclusively to culture and society’.119

How are the latter elements incorporated for the purpose of resistance?

Colonialism, when it is examined as a system of cultural hegemony, creates the rule of

‘inclusion to’ and ‘exclusion from’ the cultural expressions of the centre. In such a system, all ‘worthy’ texts are drawn into the centre by the centripetal force of the literary ideal. For example, many high modernist writers in English, such as Joseph

Conrad, Henry James or T. S. Eliot, are from a background outside the English upper classes. They are included in the centre because their literary works ‘measure up’ to certain standards in the centre by the parental authority of filiation which gives privilege to certain literary productions.120 Such a process of inclusion and exclusion can also be applied to the formation of the canon in English. As the word ‘canon’ etymologically came from the ancient Greek word kanon, which means ‘reed’ or ‘rod’ for measurement, literary works are ‘measured up’ to an existing body of literature which

119 Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, p. 20. 120 Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, pp. 2-4.

conforms to certain standards of the literary community.121 This operation of

‘canonisation’ of literary works is a way of entering the prestigious list of the most valuable contributions to Western literature.122 The inclusion of a Henry James or a

Joseph Conrad to the ‘great tradition’ of literature in English continues a judgement of the authors’ literary contributions, but it is also the work of cultural hegemony. Said describes such an inclusion to the father’s tradition as a filiation which functions through an affiliational identification process.123 Therefore, canon formation is understood to be a demonstration of the affiliational power of literary hegemony that affiliates literary works to the line of filial tradition.

The creation and reformation of a literary hierarchy by privileging filial texts is clearly the work of cultural hegemony. The canon has, however, never been a stable entity of universally worthwhile works of literature.124 It is continually revised and refigured so that it reflects the specific literary and ideological values of its time and place.125 As such, what makes the canon a collection of privileged texts is not just the literary value that it is supposed to represent. Furthermore, although the canon in English is considered to represent universal human values, it was predominantly addressed to the readers of the upper classes in England. Imperial representation is designed to be understood by its addressed people, and is written in their specific vocabulary. For

121 John Guillory, ‘Canon’, in Critical Terms for Literary Study, second edition, Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (eds.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, p. 233. 122 Guillory, ‘Canon’, p. 233. 123 Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, pp. 16-24. 124 John Guillory argues that it is not the selection of the text but material availability of the text, which decides a canonisation of literary work. It is because the most important element of the canon is not the list itself but how it is read and taught at school to produce a common cultural heritage. Guillory, ‘Canon’, p. 233-249. 125 For example, in the 1980s America, there was a major debate on the revision of the canon. See ‘Revising the Literary Canon’, in Contemporary Literary Criticism, 81, Detroit: Gale Research, pp. 465- 509.

example, one of the inauguration members of the Melbourne Branch of the Dickens

Fellowship, the first one to be established in Australia, writes that young Australians do not like Dickens because Dickens’s humour is particularly based on the ‘local environment, of which young Australia has had no experience’.126 Another contributor laments that Dickens is not popular among the ‘native-born’ Australians.127 These comments suggest that one may be disillusioned by Dickensian locales, equivalents to which one cannot find in one’s own environment. Indeed, Dickens can be regarded as a local English writer rather than universal writer, even though he has an international readership. So, Dickens is considered to be one of the master writers in English, but his social or cultural representations may confuse the non-English reader. Therefore, it was the aim of the Dickens Fellowship Melbourne Branch to promote appreciation and readership for the great author Dickens among Australians.

Literature is a medium through which colonial ideology is constructed, represented, disseminated and interpellated. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak points out, British literature in the nineteenth-century has to be read in light of the fact that imperialism was a ‘crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English’.128

Covering issues within England’s specific reality, and addressing them to the small yet elite body of English readership, colonial representation can hardly claim universality.

However, literature transmits imperial and patriarchal ideology as universal, even though it only represents the ideology of a particular class, race, gender and culture.

126 Henry Gyles Turner, ‘The Dickens Fellowship’, in Dickens in Our Commonwealth, F. Deering Johnstone (compiled), Melbourne: Atlas Press, 1909, p. 39. 127 A. H. Hunt, ‘Why Are Dickens’ Works Not Popular with Young Australians?’, in Dickens in Our Commonwealth, F. Deering Johnstone (compiled), Melbourne: Atlas Press, 1909, p. 57. 128 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’, Critical Inquiry, 12:1 (Autumn 1985), p. 243. Emphasis added.

Indeed, in early nineteenth-century India, English was taught at schools as a kind of substitute for the Bible for the purpose of civilising the already subjected peoples.129

This kind of literary value judgement, even though it is done almost unconsciously, is an ideologically informed operation that the reader must learn through engaging with dominant texts. As such, if the trope of the parent and child represents the relationship between the centre and the margin, it is demonstrated through the figure of the child in colonial literature.

The child figure in colonial literature is important because it demonstrates the position of the colonial subject, and as a reflection, the colonised Other learns how to act. So, literary texts teach the colonial subject behavioural ideals which are cemented through colonial educational systems. One such inscription of ‘otherness’ in the centre is mentioned by Bill Ashcroft, who notes that one of the recurring themes in the

Australian popular imagination is the metaphor of the nation as a child.130 For example,

Norman Lindsay, resident cartoonist at the Bulletin during World War I, represents

Australia as a little boy called Billjim. By using this child to symbolise Australia’s national position, Lindsay draws a clear line between the grown-up Europe as ‘them’ and the young Australia as ‘us’.131 Lindsay’s Billjim identifies the Australian nation not only with a great cause, but also with moral confusion and ambivalence. As such,

Billjim symbolises the two kinds of ambivalence in the concept of the Australian nation.

Firstly, the image objects to the injustice of engaging an under-aged boy like Billjim into a brutal war. Secondly, it expresses an urge to achieve emotional and material

129 See Gauri Viswanathan, ‘The Beginning of English Literary Study’, in Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, pp. 23-44. 130 Ashcroft, On Post-Colonial Futures, pp. 49-50. 131 Peter Fullerton, ‘Introduction’ to Norman Lindsay, Norman Lindsay War Cartoons 1914-1918, Peter Fullerton (ed.), Carlton; Vic: Melbourne University Press, 1983, p. 5.

independence from European influence, and looks towards the creation of Australians’ own political identity. The figure of the child in the Australian popular imagination not only takes on the coloniser’s system of representation, but also recasts it as a figure of national identity which symbolises feelings of alienation from Europe, a frustration with

European traditions, and a lingering sense of belonging and dependence on the

European tradition while also in search of a national identity. Lindsay’s innocent and helpless boy suggests that Australia is in need of further development, maturity and strength in order to become culturally and politically independent from Europe. A sense of immaturity and subordination has been imbued into the colonial culture.

ii. Resisting Nationalism

The issue of nationalism is an important element to consider for post-colonial resistance, but it is too broad to give a substantial outline here. Therefore, I limit myself to point out one of the most important aspects of nationalism in the post-colonial debate: that is, the duplication of the same system of exclusion as that practised by colonialism.132 Post-colonial criticism problematises the simple replacement of colonialism with nationalism, if it merely reproduces the same system of dominance over subjected people. In post-colonial, independently governed countries, the search for the definition of ‘national’ culture and the issue of decolonisation is always a contentious issue. As exemplified in the post-colonial language debate between Ngugi and Achebe, the discussion of ‘national’ culture is rarely separated from a discussion on the possibility of returning to a ‘pre-colonial’, original, condition. Nonetheless, there is

132 Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, p. 198.

a need for creating a separate cultural tradition from the European ‘centre’, in order to suit the material conditions of decolonisation to its forms of art. A good example is the composition of the history of national literature, or the compilation of an anthology of national literature, such as H. M. Green’s History of Australian Literature (1961) or L.

Kramer’s The Oxford History of Australian Literature (1981). However, the composition of a history of national literature is itself a process of inclusion and exclusion based on certain ideological standards, even though the ideological background for the selection process may change over time. Besides, because the idea of the nation state is a Western concept which does not really apply to, say, tribal societies in Africa, and the use of the concept of ‘the nation’ has certain conceptual limitations. Its monocultural or monoethnical implications do not always constitute a majority of the group, an extremely complicated issue which is always associated with the issues of class, race, gender and ethnicity. Because the division of native populations into specific groups is already contaminated with the experience of colonialism, it is necessarily a post-colonial issue. In any case, it is sufficient to acknowledge that political decolonisation does not necessarily mean the termination of dependency.

Cultural and literary relations with the colonial father’s text present differences between settler colonies and other colonies. In the settler colonies, white settlers’ literary relation to the centre can be characterised as the co-existence of filiation and affiliation, as settlers who became alienated from European traditions found it difficult to describe the New World in their old language.133 Although the coloniser’s language was used in

133 Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, pp. 8-11.

settler colonies such as Australia or New Zealand, white immigrants became profoundly ambivalent about cultural productions in the metropolis, and in the periphery. White settlers could not identify their cultural tradition with indigenous culture, and the indigenous culture could not identify their tradition through the culture of the white settlers.134 In such places, both filiation and affiliation to the dominant culture exists.

In addition to the relation to the Empire’s centre, the cultural hegemony between white settlers and the indigenous people has to be considered. Therefore, the transformation of colonialism presents some differences between white settlers and indigenous people.

White settlers do not have any cultural traditions of their own, except the ones inherited from the old world. But the language and ideology of the imperial father had a limited capacity to accommodate the new reality. As discussed in the introductory section of this chapter, this reality was treated as a dysfunction of the coloniser’s language system, a dysfunction that the colonising expedition faced in the practice of naming. Thus, the white settlers had to invent their own terms, while keeping their allegiance with the centre. Indigenous culture, which was oppressed by both the European and the settler culture, cannot simply return to its pre-colonial condition. Instead, it has to transform the dominant colonial discourse and subvert its ideological authority. In countries like

India or Sri Lanka where there was no migration scheme, small minorities of colonisers took power and subordinated the local culture. In such colonies, the cultural relations between the centre and the margin can only be characterised as affiliation, because the local inhabitants already had their own culture.135 As with the indigenous people in

Australia or New Zealand, they had to transform and subvert colonial legacies imposed by the master.

134 See Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, pp. 131-143. 135 See, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, ibid, pp. 116-122.

So, clearly, resistance must maintain a threefold dynamic: a resistance to patriarchal discourse; a resistance to a dominating colonial discourse; and, a resistance to nationalist discourse. As such, the trope of the family is already a conflation of at least three different ideological entities. Yet, such conflation creates a strong homogenising effect, which binds subjected people to colonial ideology. In order to describe different levels of resistance, Said’s concept of filiation and affiliation must be further adapted in this thesis so that these concepts also describe the critic’s relations to national culture.

Said’s terms are not limited to imperial contexts. The terms initially describe the critic’s cultural relations with the dominant ideology, emphasising imperial cultural relations between genealogy by birth and by retrospective adaptation. Since nationalism produces the homogenising parent/child binary that reinforces the hierarchal relation between the dominant self and the marginalised other, which often includes ethnic or racial minority groups from former colonies, the concept of filiation and affiliation can be expanded to apply to the context of nationalism and anti-colonial resistance in the post-colonial world.

Norman Lindsay’s Billjim exemplifies another layer to the complex dynamism of post- colonial resistance: nationalism. Nationalism must be problematised, because it replicates the same binary structure established by the colonial father. It is often the case for formerly colonised countries that political decolonisation and national independence does not mean the end of colonial legacies, which have to be criticised and transformed after the colonial power has formally withdrawn. As mentioned earlier, while handing over sovereignty does mark political change, resistance to

colonial cultural hegemony does not end with independence. If legacies of colonialism are imbued into cultures, a simple replacement of colonial culture with a nationalist ideology is bound up with a search for a homogenous cultural tradition that could wipe away all colonial legacies with nationalist fantasies. For example, the journal Bulletin, in which Norman Lindsay published his cartoon character Billjim, was initially established to foster a nationalist tone. The Bulletin continually presented the vision of

Australia as a boy, especially the national myth of the ‘lost child’ in the bush.136

Moreover, the bush in Australian literature symbolises colonial displacement, and is a marginalised space of vulnerability.137 Of course, the boy in the bush is predominantly homosocial, even though it signifies a general cultural confusion and alienation from

Europe. Therefore, anti-colonial nationalism is an equally homogenising alternative to imperialism. If simply reversing the binary opposition by casting the colonised as the parent is also problematic, how can this disabling colonial trope be resisted and transformed with the language of the post-colonial? How can we describe the situation in which the child still remembers, and is still somehow bound to, the colonial parent figures after they have formerly departed?

As the case of Lindsay’s Billjim exemplifies, for imperialism and nationalism, the conflated trope of the colonial and the patriarchal and the parent and the child constitutes a powerful binary with the capacity to naturalise operations of colonial ideology. Locked in such a confining binary, the colonial subject-as-child seems to be eternally suspended from independence. But is there no way of resisting the

136 See Peter Pierce, The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 137 Ashcroft, On Post-Colonial Futures, p. 49.

hegemony? One way of problematising the colonial trope of parent and child is to refigure the trope of child through the post-colonial counter-discourse. By presenting an alternative portrayal of the child figure, the ‘given’ image will be transformed, and the colonial power hierarchy will be upset. Indeed, refiguring the colonial figure of the child in Australian literature, as Henry Lawson, Marcus Clarke and Joseph Furphy do, is a profoundly ambivalent operation, because the trope of the child is both colonial and national. Although the figure of the child has been popularised in Australian literature and culture as a metaphorical representation of the nation, it can also be said that

Australian writers see themselves under the gaze of the coloniser—and stare back. But, there is a certain genealogical discrepancy between how colonial Australian and post- federation Australian writers and readers engage with the colonial discourse, particularly in canonical texts. I propose to describe this discrepancy using Edward

Said’s concept of filiation and affiliation.

How can post-colonial theory offer resistance to the infantalised colonial subject? One way of resisting dominant discourse is by transforming the trope of parent and child by expressing the contradictions concerning the construction of the binary. One such contradiction is the element of the orphan. For instance, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest,

Caliban is addressed as slave and monster, the abject colonial child. But he was also born fatherless, and has since become an orphan. Therefore, Caliban’s subjectification to Prospero’s dominance, which is legitimised through the filial relationship by affiliative identifications, can be problematised by his orphanhood, which suggests an ambivalent parentage: he is not only a child and a slave, but also an orphan. Caliban’s conflated, and thus inherently ambivalent, subject position is simplified as ‘child-like’,

primitive and savage. If imperial hegemony takes the form of cultural control, how can the colonial Other represent themselves? Caliban can resist Prospero by transforming negative or damaging influences from Prospero’s colonial culture into legacies for his subjective empowerment.

iii. The Orphans

One of the shortcomings of Said’s concepts of filiation and affiliation is that he does not provide a term to describe the imperial textuality and genealogy that is created as the result of the affiliative work of hegemony. Also, Said is not particularly clear about associating two kinds of contradicting consciousnesses: the consciousnesses of consent and that of resistance, which is implied in Antonio Gramsci’s discussion of the way in which an oppressed people negotiate hegemonic power.138 Here, I intend to associate these two concepts more closely. Said explains the exiled condition of Erich Auerbach, who says that he would not have written a book like Mimesis if he had not experienced the condition of exile.139 Said explains that it is only from this position of exile that

Auerbach could have constructed himself as a European subject. Therefore, a critic’s subject position affects his/her critical work. Said claims that this is because Auerbach had to engage with culture in two different ways: through a process of filiation to his native European culture; and in addition to this, an affiliation to the culture of his place of exile.140 As such, the concepts of filiation and affiliation constitute a kind of

138 Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, p. 28. 139 Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, pp. 5-9. 140 Said, ibid., pp. 15-16.

binary,141 but in a state of exile like Auerbach’s, one has to engage in both of these relations to culture. Yet, although the relationship between filiation and affiliation seems to be qualitatively similar, in fact the process of filiation is granted dominance due to its mark of authenticity. Moreover, Said’s concept of affiliation reflects

Gramsci’s observation of hegemonic control, which is maintained by two different tendencies of oppressed people: a desire to be included (consent), and a resistance to the enforcement of a dominant power.142 So, it is clear that Said is primarily interested in analysing the dynamic of imperial power and control. However, as his Orientalism is sometimes criticised as too simplistic. That is, without giving full consideration to the historical or psychological aspects of colonial dominance, his argument actually contributes to the construction of binary oppositions143 and does not facilitate the possibility of resistance.144 As such, his conceptualisation of filiation and affiliation seems to leave no space that is ‘outside’ of hegemonic power. But, if there is no space external to this apparatus of power, one must question how to resist its operation.

Clearly, in Said’s conceptualisation of affiliation there is an outside to the structure of hegemonic power, but it remains implicit to his argument, rather than explicitly articulated.

Since Said adapts the terms of filiation and affiliation from Vico’s metaphor of the family, I propose to develop the conceptualisation of affiliation by introducing the

141 Bill Ashcroft and Pal Ahluwalia, Edward Said [1999], London: Routledge, 2001, p. 25. 142 Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, pp. 29-30. 143 For example, Homi Bhabha criticises Said saying that his Orientalism seems to suggest that ‘colonial power and discourse is possessed entirely by the coloniser’, and that is ‘a historical and theoretical simplification.’ Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism’, in The Politics of Theory, Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iverson and Diana Loxley (eds.), Colchester: University of Essex, 1983, p. 200. 144 Robert J. C. Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West, 2nd ed., London: Routledge, 2004, p. 168.

concept the orphan as a site of intrigue between the traditional familial roles of parent and child. Indeed, I want to suggest that the orphan figure is most profitably considered in terms of its double aspect: both inside and outside of any kind of familial relationship. So, the orphan figure always constitutes a kind of abjection, between the dualism of the parent and the child, between the dualism of the coloniser and the colonised, and between the dualism of the subject and the object. As Julia Kristeva observes, the abject is recognised by its complicit position between the subject and object. Kristeva explains:

The abject is neither the subject nor the object. ... It represents the crisis of the subject … insofar as it would not yet be, or would no longer be separated from the object. Its limits would no longer be established. It would be constantly menaced by possible collapse into an object. It would lose definition. It is a question then, of a precarious state in which the subject is menaced by the possibility of collapsing into chaos of indifference. 145

Thus, Kristeva conceives the abject in terms of the collapse of the relationship between the subject and the object. It is the appropriation of this ambivalent condition of the abject that one recognises in the parentless condition of the orphan figure. Since the orphan figure resides between filiations and affiliations, genealogies and histories, its ability to simultaneously consent to and resist the operation of hegemonic power dictates its value.

In this way, what Said refers to as ‘affiliation’ can more clearly be understood as

‘abject-filiation’. Given such an arrangement, cultural hegemony becomes a form of domination that absorbs abjections into a neat set of binaries. That is to say, imperial hegemony seeks to control contradictory elements of the ‘proper’ arrangement of genealogies. As such, the significance of the orphan figure is situated in its ontological

145 Julia Kristeva, ‘Interview’, All Area, 2 (1983), p. 39.

condition of abjection, which insists that the orphan can be affiliated to either the site of the parent or the child. So, each moment of abjection (that is each orphan), suggests the possibility of a competing arrangement of genealogies and textualities, where the orphan transforms and inscribes new engagements of power. In a discussion of Peter

Carey’s fictions and the concept of the orphan, Bruce Woodcock suggests that it is both necessary and important to acknowledge that the orphan figure is not just an orphan character, but also a metaphor: it describes the subject’s position in the patriarchal family of Empire.146 In such a context, my analysis of the orphan figure will be useful in understanding the operation of hegemony. The orphan belongs both inside and outside of the family structure. They are subjected to dominant patriarchal, imperial and national ideologies, but because of its very subjectification, it can also inscribe alterity and transform any attempt to map the dominant imperial ideology.

In such a manner, what is to be elucidated by the trope of the orphan through its ontological condition of the parentless is not only the socially constructed condition of

‘being an orphan’, but also the desired position of ‘becoming’ an orphan. Such a

‘becoming’ can be achieved through what Said describes as ‘voluntary effort’ or ‘willed deliberation’.147 Indeed, Said explains his meaning of affiliation in an interview with

Bruce Robbins, in which he refers to the critical practice of:

mapping and drawing connections in the world between practices, individuals, classes, formations … Above all affiliation is a dynamic concept; it’s not meant to circumscribe but rather to make explicit all kinds of connections that we tend to forget and that have to be made explicit and even dramatic in order for political change to take place.148

146 Bruce Woodcock, Peter Carey, 2nd ed., Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001, p. 124. 147 Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, p. 25. 148 Edward W. Said, Power, Politics, and Culture – Interviews with Edward W. Said, Gauri Viswanathan (eds.), London: Bloomsbury, 2004, p. 336. Interview was conducted in 1998.

What Said refers to as ‘affiliation’, then, is not only the condition of the necessity to adapt different cultural inheritances through which one must generate one’s subject position, but also one’s willingness to do so. To make ‘explicit and dramatic’ of the point of connection is to mark a point in the affiliative network where resistance may happen.149

For the purpose of resistance, the figure and the trope of the orphan must be investigated on both a colonial and a national level. In a way, the orphan is already a threat to the colonial family trope with its ambiguous parentage, which signifies a fissure in the supposedly seamless colonial family relationship. Yet the trope of the orphan must still be considered on a national level. Even though the orphan refutes their filial relation to the Empire, their parentage within the nation still has to be hybridised, and their national parentage subverted. As a site of complicity and contradiction, the orphan’s affiliative relation to the nation undermines the homogeneous lines of cultural and literary genealogy. As mentioned above, if simply reversing the binary structure of the centre and the margin only replicates the same imperial and national hierarchies, such cultural hierarchy has to be problematised instead of reversed. The figure and the trope of the orphan threaten the stable entities of colonial and national discourse, which employ the trope of the family for its own ends.

The ambivalence inherent in the orphan eventually feeds into an ambivalence of the canonical re-writings. This ambivalence is what Gramsci calls the two consciousnesses of the oppressed people, and what Homi Bhabha calls the ‘in-betweenness’ of the

149 Said, Power, Politics, and Culture, p. 65. Interview was conducted in 1986.

colonial subject. The orphan problematises the binary construction of the parent and child as a fixed, given and universal condition of the family. The figure of the orphan reinscribes aspects of memory, mimicry and performance to maintain its position as both the child and the parent of the Empire and nation. The orphan figure mimics the behaviour of the child, which is designated by the dominant discourse. Moreover, the figure of orphan only exists on the condition that parental authority is permanently suspended. Living in such an aporia, the orphan figure invents two survival techniques to relate itself to the world: firstly, by living in the memory of the parent and in so doing, rescuing the parent from total oblivion; secondly, by creating and revising its possible parentage, which is always ambiguous. The orphan figure, whose parent exists only in memory, recovers its position as child through mimicry and performance, which allows it to create its own parentage. Such ambivalence disrupts the homogeneity of both Empire and nation.

Conclusion

As each orphan figure comes from a different family (filial) background and is placed under the care of other parents (affiliation), each counter-discursive piece configures colonial text differently. The concept of the orphan problematises the binary opposition of the parent and child and, since the orphan can function as both adult and child, it provides a critical opportunity to elucidate conflations of subjectivities and identities for both the concept of the parent and that of the child. Importantly, the concept of the orphan undermines the power hierarchy behind the binary construction of the parent and the child, without simply inverting these power dynamics. Therefore, the orphan

exposes the fissures in the trope of the parent and child, which is the moment that imperial dominance fractures. This trope is most profitably adapted in the context of

Australian literature. Having lost the biological parent, the orphan lives in its memory.

Their endeavour to accommodate themselves to affiliational relations leads them to mimic their adopted family’s way of life. Since their parentage is ambiguous and unstable, they always have to reinvent and refigure their identity constantly. This thesis thus reads the orphan figure not as a powerless but as a powerful figure that enables a post-colonial counter-reading of inherited discourse, and production of counter- discourse, by their capacity for inscription and intervention, undermining the power behind the father/master’s narrative.

Chapter Three: Fathering the Orphan, Orphaning the Father – Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs

Carey’s Jack Maggs presents an extremely mixed, yet affectionate response to its father text, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. Carey’s novel seems to willingly subject itself to the authority of its Victorian pre-text. This affectionate undertone is unmistakable from the opening few lines of the novel:

It was a Saturday night when the man with the red waistcoat arrived in London. It was, to be precise, six of the clock on the fifteenth of April in the year of 1837 that those hooded eyes looked out the window of the Dover coach and beheld, in the bright aura of gas light, a golden bull and an overgrown mouth opening to devour him – the sign of his inn, the Golden Ox.150

Deliberately mimicking the style of Victorian novel,151 the narrator immediately sets the scene and style appropriate for the year 1837. Indeed, the props of Victorian antiquity, such as the Dover coach and the gas lights, are in evidence throughout the novel. Yet, the style seems to mock the formality of the classic writing through the introduction of humorous touches: the sign of the inn, which is described lively and comically as ‘an overgrown mouth opening to devour him – the sign of his inn, the

Golden Ox’. This tendency to slightly exaggerate descriptions echoes a Dickensian style of writing. The narrator also connects the man with the red waistcoat with the golden bull by the man’s searing look, as if he is confronting the bull. Just as Magwitch is depicted as a ‘fearful man’ with association with an cannibalism in the opening scene of Great Expectations, this encounter between the man’s eyes and the bull in the sign seem to constitute a reflection of each other, suggesting that there is something of a ferocious nature about the man. The mode of writing also suggests that the narrator wishes ‘to be precise’ about the details of his story: about the time and place, about the

150 Peter Carey, Jack Maggs [1997], St. Lucia: Queensland University Press, 2001, p.1. 151 Bruce Woodcock writes that this opening scene follows the ‘best traditions of Victorian melodrama.’ See, Woodcock, Peter Carey, p.119.

specific details of the scene. It is also this narrator who recreates Dickensian London with both the street names and his description of shops and houses. As Dickens encapsulated the representation of imperial London, Carey’s narrator reconstructs the metropolitan centre, and through such acts of writing, ultimately seems to colonise the imaginary space of ‘London town’. By mimicking the depiction of Dickens’s London,

Carey’s narrator is almost willingly copying the work of the master, a point that encourages John Thieme to write that Jack Maggs is in some ways paying ‘homage’ to the canonical pre-text.152

Yet more than simply paying homage to Dickens’s novel, Jack Maggs reinvents Great

Expectations. Carey brings up these issues in his re-writing in a particularly antipodean way. The novel is a literary response and intervention to the authority of imperial rhetoric, and as such it is a response that overtly plays on the geographical location of

Australia and the notion of the world turned upside down. Carey explores the possibility of writing back to this geographical metaphor by the use of the mirror, which suggests a permanent slippage between an individual in front of the mirror and its reflection in the mirror. This idea of the inverted or the ‘upside down’ is suggested in the opening scene of Great Expectations when the narrator Pip says, ‘the man, after looking at me for a moment, turned me upside-down, and emptied my pockets.’153

Clearly, Dickens playfully suggests the humorous via a sense of the unusual. But, importantly, thereafter the man who turned Pip upside down is always associated with a childhood memory that haunts Pip’s narrative, until the memory materialises as the figure of Magwitch much later. It is unsurprising, then that Carey develops the idea of

152 Thieme, Postcolonial Con-Texts, p. 116. 153 Dickens, Great Expectations, p. 4. Quotation modified.

the ‘upside-down’ further in Jack Maggs, particularly when considering the terra firma of Australia as geographical metaphor. This use of the geographical metaphor of the antipode is also a response to recent developments in cultural criticism. Writing after

Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993), Carey seems well aware of the way in which his book is destined to be read by critics,154 and pre-empts their response in order to avoid criticism of being careless about certain aspects of the history of Australia. In this sense, Jack Maggs is partly produced by its subjected to the recent critical praxis which concerns the issue of the representation of the Other.

Whether analysing the text from the perspective of post-colonial rewriting or postmodern pastiche, most critics mention that Carey’s Jack Maggs is based on

Dickens’s Great Expectations. The majority of the criticism discusses the similarities and differences between the two novels, as well as the significances of these differences. As John O. Jordan writes, while it is difficult not to notice the similarities to Great Expectations, Carey plays on the canonical pre-text by keeping ‘the resemblance constantly before us’ and simultaneously ‘introducing discrepancies, … that force us to recognise that these are not Pip, Magwitch, or Dickens’.155 The critical perspectives can be roughly divided into two areas: firstly, the Australian appropriation of the convict figure, Magwitch; and, secondly, the use of the meta-fictional narrative structure, which includes the conflation of the author figures, Charles Dickens and

Tobias Oates. As John Thieme points out, Jack Maggs, in both the title and the character of the novel, focuses on writing against the ‘negative representations of

154 Laura Moss, ‘Car-Talk: Interview with Peter Carey, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 32:4 (October 2001), pp. 90-92. 155 John O. Jordan, ‘Dickens Re-Visioned: <> and the “English Book”’, in Dickens: The Craft of Fiction and the Challenges of Reading, Rossana Bonadei, Clotilde de Stasio, Carlo Pagetti and Alessandro Vescovi (eds.), Edizioni: Unicopli, 2000, p. 295.

Australia as antipodean penal colony’.156 Carey’s reconfiguring of Abel Magwitch can be considered to be a form of cultural intervention, to instate an Australian perspective in the representations of Australia produced in the centre. Jack Maggs has also captured critical attention for his ability to represent himself, an ability that is clearly not granted to Dickens’s Magwitch. As Anthony J. Hassall states, ‘the business of writing is insistently foregrounded’.157 Thus, the question of ‘who writes?’ and the metaphor of writing as a mean of colonisation, are a central issue of Carey’s rewriting.158

Among the growing field of critical work on Carey’s work, John Thieme’s article,

‘Turned upside down? Dickens’s Australia and Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs’, is important because it offers a full analysis of Carey’s novel from the perspective of a post-colonial

‘con-texts’.159 My discussion here intends to build on Thieme’s detailed analysis by developing a particularly enigmatic remark he makes: ‘Jack Maggs seems to bring a hitherto invisible dimension into being, by holding an antipodean mirror up to

Dickens’.160 I argue, then, that Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs concerns the politics of a colonial discursive representation of Australia as the antipodean colony. As such, this chapter considers the narrative strategies that Carey uses to subvert the constructed authority of the ‘pre-text’ of Great Expectations. Thus, of particular importance to my reading of Jack Maggs will be the post-colonial issue of the relationship between authority and the author figure, and how their relationship is dramatised through a

156 Thieme, Postcolonial Con-Texts, p. 107. 157 Anthony J. Hassall, ‘A Tale of Two Countries: Jack Maggs and Peter Carey’s Fiction’, Australian Literary Studies, 18: 2 (October 1997), p. 131. 158 James Bradley, ‘Bread and Sirkuses: Empire and Culture in Peter Carey’s The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith and Jack Maggs’, Meanjin 56: 3-4 (October 1997), p. 661. Also Woodcock, Peter Carey, p. 130- 35. 159 Thieme, ibid., pp. 102-126. 160 Thieme, ibid., p. 116.

perceived combat between author and subject. Indeed, in examining this relationship I will claim that the simple practice of reversal, the ‘turning upside down’ of the antipodean novel, is complicated by the intervention of a mirror whose reflection mimics and returns a menace to the authority of the author figure. I will also argue that

Jack Maggs presents a profound ambivalence inherent in the foundation of Australia as a white settler colony—there are no characters obviously recognisable as indigenous people.

Thus, in the following section I will discuss the text’s politics of representation with particular emphasis on the issue of the author and authority. The focus of the analysis will be Carey’s strategy of ‘writing back’ to the author figure of Great Expectations.

Since the power and ability of writing are also the metaphor of dominance and colonisation—the French feminist claim of a phallogocentric discourse—the post- colonial strategy of writing back to the author figure can also be seen as writing back to the patriarchal father figure who dominates the relationship of filiation and affiliation.

Indeed, Jack Maggs is a figure who claims multiple parentages, the father of different genealogies. In such a manner, John Thieme claims Jack Maggs is concerned more with the notion of parentage than the issue of childhood.161 However, it would be too cavalier to critique Carey’s novel by claiming he simply replaces notions of British colonial parenthood with ‘another myth, the vision of an Australian homeland’.162

However, the use of the unnamed third person narrator allows Carey to take a certain distance from such acts of closure. The use of the third person point of view is a crucial

161 Thieme, Postcolonial Con-Texts, p. 121. 162 Márie Ní Fhlathúin, ‘The Location of Childhood: “Great Expectations” in Post-Colonial London’, Kunapipi, 21:2 (1999), p. 91.

aspect of the narrative structure of Jack Maggs, ultimately problematising the authority of the canonical pre-text through insisting on a textual heterogeneity that can only disrupt the ideology of Empire, while at the same time negating any kind of nationalist ideology.

i. Authors and Subjects: Contesting Authorities

One of the crucial differences from Great Expectations is the characterisation of Abel

Magwitch. Re-figuring the figure of Magwitch is important in both Australia’s colonial and national context. This is important aspect for post-colonial debate, because

Magwitch combines a figure of the infantalised criminal other with a figure of the convict father. Though Magwitch and Jack Maggs have some similarities, such as their project to create the ‘English gentleman’ by their fortunes, their shared demeanour as a

‘fearful man’,163 and their physically overwhelming presence, they are represented differently. Magwitch is portrayed as a naïve and simple-minded convict, whose image perfectly fits the stereotype of the infantalised Other, ‘both inherently evil and potentially good’,164 while Carey’s Maggs is given a more complicated characterisation.

While Magwitch comes back to London very quietly, Maggs returns to London wearing an attention-grabbing sleek red waistcoat that contrasts nicely with his ornamental silver walking-cane. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Pip notes of Magwitch when he changes into new clothes, ‘whatever he put on, became him less (…) than what he had worn before. … there was something in him that made it hopeless to attempt to disguise

163 Dickens, Great Expectations, p, 4. 164 Ashcroft, On Post-colonial Futures, p. 36.

him’.165 Pip is at a loss to see that his new clothes cannot concede Magwitch’s demonic nature. On the contrary, Maggs controls both what he wears and what he carries.

The differences between the two characters proliferate: Pip notices that Magwitch has fewer teeth than before, whereas Maggs has ‘very good and regular’ teeth;166 Magwitch continues to work in the sheep farm to which he was assigned when he was pardoned from prison and gains success. On the other hand, Maggs establishes his brick manufacturing business from ‘mucky clay’.167 Magwitch is marginalised both geographically and socially in the New World—located in a rural farming area and thus literally and metaphorically outside the polite society of the coloniser who does not care if their horses ‘fling up the dust’ over Magwitch while he is walking on the street,168— while Maggs is closer to the centre of a colonial society—living in a ‘grand house’ in

Sydney and possessing the freehold property in the heart of London.169 Yet the most significant difference between the two men is found in their relationship to the concept of family. Magwitch has virtually no family. Believing that he has lost both his wife and daughter, he claims one son through a benefactory arrangement. On the other hand,

Maggs has two Australian-born sons, born of different mothers but brought up in the same family environment. Even this quick overview of the differences between the two main characters suggests that Dickens’s Magwitch figure has been substantially altered in Carey’s rewriting. Indeed, unlike Magwitch who devotes his whole life after transportation to making Pip a gentleman, Maggs is capable of handling both the relationship of affiliation and filiation simultaneously: through a beneficiary

165 Dickens, Great Expectations, p. 333. Quotation modified. 166 Carey, Jack Maggs, p. 7. 167 Carey, bid., p. 305. 168 Dickens, ibid., p. 317. 169 Carey, ibid., p. 250.

arrangement, he sustains an affiliational relationship with his English son Henry Phipps; through a biological relationship, he holds the relationship of filiation with his

Australian sons, John and Richard.

In Jack Maggs, Tobias Oates’s The Death of Maggs is considered to be the English book that is what Homi Bhabha calls a location of culture.170 Although there is no resemblance between the titles, The Death of Maggs can be considered as an equivalent to Dickens’s Great Expectations, given that there are some distinct similarities between the texts, especially in terms of content and the shared history of production. As for content, Carey’s Jack Maggs presents the first draft of the first chapter of The Death of

Maggs which covers a court scene that similar to the story of Abel Magwitch and his wife Molly. Moreover, Oates’s novel is published in the year 1861, the same year as

Dickens’s Great Expectations, giving The Death of Maggs and Great Expectations a shared production history. The narrator of Jack Maggs explains that after the premature death of his sister-in-law in 1837, Oates abandoned the writing of the book. He resumes writing the book in 1859, which appears first in serial form in 1860, then in book volume in 1861. According to Dickens’s biography, he started writing Oliver

Twist 1837 and, significantly, starts writing Great Expectations in 1860.171 Great

Expectations was first made available to the public in serial form, from 1860 to 1861, and was subsequently made into a three-book volume in 1861 that was revised into a single volume in 1862.172 Referring to these chronologies from Dickens’s writing career through the eyes of the narrator, who is generally precise about time but

170 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 102. 171 Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990, pp. 215-219. The association of the poor orphan child and crime is a shared subject matter for Jack Maggs and Oliver Twist, in which Dickens criticise the New Poor Law. 172 Worth, Great Expectations: an Annotated Bibliography, pp. 17-19.

occasionally departs from recorded history, Carey uses published Dickens biographies as resources and plays on literary allusions. The slight difference between the writing period of The Death of Maggs and Great Expectations is important, because it shows that Tobias Oates’s writing of the novel pre-dates Dickens’s.

Dickens had no relative with the Christian name Tobias or the surname Oates. Yet

Tobias is the name of one of Pip’s dead brothers whose names are inscribed on the epitaph of the tombstone that Pip reads out in the opening scene of Great Expectations.

Also, when Dickens began his serial of Great Expectations for his American audience in Harper’s Journal—a week earlier than his serial appeared in the British journal All the Year Round—he named Pip’s father ‘Tobias Pirrip’, not Phillip Pirrip as appeared in the British serial.173 As such, the name of Tobias was associated with the author figure, and by implication, an authoritative father figure.

Carey does not recreate the author of the canonical pre-text, Charles Dickens, in the character of Tobias Oates by name, but by the author’s biographical details. An interesting aspect of Carey’s reconfiguration of Dickens is that he does not depict Oates as an unquestionably authoritative father and author figure: Oates inherits the flaws and scandals that punctuate Dickens’s biography. So, the reader can trace quite easily the features of Dickens that Carey wishes to recycle in the figure of Oates: a popular author, a previous journalistic career, financial difficulties, an interest in mesmerism, and a more than sibling-like relationship with a sister-in-law. Indeed, Carey seems to be most interested in Dickens’s biography between the years of 1836 and 1837, particularly

173 Worth, Great Expectations: an Annotated Bibliography, p. 17.

those three weeks following the 15th April 1837 when his novel is set. The novel’s chronological setting allows Carey to create narrative climax on the premature death of

Dickens’s sister-in-law due to heart failure as Oates’s trauma of losing his love and baby. Carey’s representation of Oates subverts the authority of the author figure as the creator of dominant imperial and patriarchal the discourse because the author himself is struggling to sustain his position defined by dominant ideology. Adapting Dickens’s biographical details into the characterisation of Tobias Oates, Carey uses Dickens’s biographies as a resource or a ‘launch pad’ to challenge the moral implication of the author who created the marginalised criminal Other and the convict father through his writing. While this method of demystifying the authority of the author figure may be considered voyeuristic, and the process of subverting the authority of a body of Dickens biographies can be endless, it can be useful in challenging the authority of the conventional author figure.

Contrary to Dickens’s Magwitch, who is always represented via the narrator Pip, Jack

Maggs produces his own discursive representations. In the canonical pre-text of Great

Expectations, Magwitch opts to tell the story of his life to Pip and Herbert Pocket rather than take authorial control of his own history through the process of writing down his accounts.174 Carey further invests on this Magwitch’s potential ability to write. So, the story of Magwitch develops via the mediation of Pip, Pocket, and Mr Jaggers. In contrast, Jack Maggs writes incessantly, especially to his beneficiary, Henry Phipps.

They begin correspondence well before Maggs comes back to England. Therefore,

174 The reader must be reminded that Magwitch is not completely illiterate. See Dickens, Great Expectations, where Magwitch says ‘“a deserting soldier in a Travellers’ Rest, … learnt me to read; and a travelling Giant what signed his name at a penny a time learnt me to write. I warn’t locked up as often now as formerly …”’ (Volume III, Ch. 3, p. 343.) Quotation modified.

Maggs has been a possible threat to Phipps much earlier. After his homecoming back to

England, Maggs corresponds with Phipps in order to relate an account of his life, so that

Phipps has a clear understanding of Maggs’s situation before they eventually meet.

However, Maggs must compose his life story, his discursive representation of himself, in a confidential manner because he was sent to Australia for life: if he is found back in the centre, he will be executed. To disguise his own story, Maggs uses special ink that becomes invisible to the human eye, writes backwards, from right to left. To read

Maggs’s story, Phipps is required to first sprinkle lemon juice over the letter in order to render the script visible, and then pass a mirror over the letter so that the backwards script becomes readable in the reflection of the mirror.

Maggs’s self-representation offers several important considerations for the endeavour of self-representation as a whole. Firstly, Maggs’s covert means of writing can be read as a metaphor of his status of legality in England, and secondly, the mode of writing backwards also signifies Maggs’s status as a convict of the antipodean colony.

Moreover, reading the reflection in the mirror signifies an uncanny double that paradoxically corrects the order of his writing. The implication of such a mode of writing critiques the Eurocentric point of view. However, the most important aspect is

Maggs’s ability to craft his own story. Such means of self-representation suggests a kind of decolonisation, since Maggs intentionally alters him to legitimately contest dominant European discourses, such as legal documents or Oates’s book The Death of

Maggs, that aim to objectify and confine him. Maggs’s letters initially have a very limited address; but they get a wider audience through the narrator of Jack Maggs, and

his early letters to Phipps eventually enter into the collection of the Mitchell Library and thereby into the unrestricted public domain.

In the discussion of self-representation, the ability to write the self can be a way of decolonisation. Maggs’s life narrative is important for the purpose of presenting alterity to upsetting the authority of Oates’s novel. As mentioned earlier, Maggs’s mode of

‘invisible’ writing reflects his subject position in London, just as Mr Jaggers refers to

Magwitch as ‘Magwitch … in New South Wales’.175 Despite its invisibility, an important aspect of the letter is that Maggs creates his life narrative of beginning.

Maggs begins his story as follows:

You have known for many years that my name is Jack Maggs, although Maggs was not my father’s name, but a name given to me by my foster mother who believed I talked too much. What my father’s name was I cannot tell, for when I was just three days old I was discovered lying in the mud flats ‘neath London Bridge.176

Maggs’s beginning is stereotypical and full of uncertainty. It is stereotypical in the sense that it follows conventions of the orphan’s narrative as sites such as bridges are popular locations for orphan babies to be found. Also Maggs was found nameless. By repeating the phrase ‘my father’s name’, he seems to suggest that the condition of not knowing this name means that he is without genealogy. Maggs begins his story with a discussion of the significant act of naming: who named him and the significance of having a name that means to ‘talk too much’. But there already is a certain slippage in his story. The meaning of his name – ‘talk too much’ – suggests that he was given this surname only after he became fluent in speech. This suggests that he was nameless for an extended period. Indeed, he is inventing his story. Both accounts already suggest

175 Dickens, Great Expectations, p. 331-333 176 Carey, Jack Maggs, p. 82.

slippage from the ‘true’ story of his birth. Of course, all stories of one’s birth are retelling of the original, but those stories are considered to be more accurate if told by one’s biological parents. As such, his filiation by birth is already somewhat unavailable to both the reader and Maggs himself. In such a manner, Maggs’s story, especially his early story, is a retelling of stories told by someone else. Maggs’s personal history thus indicates a profound ambiguity concerning his origins.

Maggs goes on to say that after he was picked up by Mudlarks, he was sold to Silas

Smith, his foster father, and was brought up by Mary Britten, ‘be-in’ useful’ for family business.177 Maggs’s life narrative can be read as an allegory of Empire, as Maggs is placed in the colonised position of the illegitimate and adopted son. In this context, the management of domestic affairs alludes to the Empire’s sense of parenting and house- keeping. In the household of the young Maggs, Silas is responsible for the family business of stealing silver while Mary Britten, whom Maggs addresses as both ‘Ma

Britten’ and ‘the Queen of England’,178 is responsible for domestic affairs including disciplining the children. Maggs’s brother, Tom England further associates the family with Empire. The family is most profitably read as an empire in which Ma Britten’s parenting dominates the other members of the family. Thus one finds a highly structured hierarchy within the family that plays itself out in the highly structured way in which the ‘family business’ of theft is run: Tom breaks locks, while Sofina and

Maggs choose and pack the silverware for collection. In such a way, Maggs is complicit in the family’s business. However, Ma Britten’s regime faces a crisis when two of the family members become intimate and, subsequently, create their own family.

177 Carey, Jack Maggs, p. 101. 178 Carey, ibid., p. 100.

When Ma Britten has discovers that Maggs and Sofina are having an affair, she punishes them severely, causing them to lose the baby.

This allegory of Empire can also be read as the conflation of two allegories: Prospero’s island and the Queen of England. Under double empires, Maggs is forced into an ‘in- between’ position of the illegitimate orphan figure and by allusion, the colonial subject.

In Maggs’s letter, Silas is portrayed as a figure similar to Prospero, or the Bard himself.

In the letter Maggs writes that Silas knew Shakespeare very well: he could often recite

‘whole scenes from Shakespeare’ at home.179 Maggs remembers him as a man with

‘lanky thief with the long face and claret nose’,180 wearing an ‘old-fashioned turned-up collar’.181 Just as Prospero has only one child, Miranda, Silas has a daughter, Sofina

Smith, his only child. Jack Maggs is also characterised as similar to Caliban, as he is also associated with blackness. When Maggs first sees Sofina, he is covered with soot as he used to have to enter the house from the chimney. When Sofina came to work with Maggs for Ma Britten’s enterprise, their work relationship develops into a romantic one after Silas was caught by the authorities due to Tom’s betrayal. Their relationship, and Sofina’s pregnancy, has the implication of miscegenation. Just as

Shakespeare’s The Tempest suggests a fear of racial hybridity between Miranda and

Caliban, so too did the British colonial administration suggest that inter-racial marriage is sexually abhorrent. Maggs’s doubly marginalised ‘in-between’ condition of subjugation strips him of his potency as a father figure. As such Maggs’s letter can be read as a powerful criticism of operations of empire.

179 Carey, Jack Maggs, p. 103. 180 Carey, ibid., p. 82. 181 Carey, ibid., p. 100.

ii. The Cartographer of the Criminal Mind

Whether it is represented as an Arcadia or a penal colony, it is clear that Australia itself is much more than just a geographical terrain—it is a constructed and controlled body of representation. Since Captain Cook declared the land Terra Nullius, colonial expeditions have inscribed their desires, fears and ambitions on the blank space of

Australia. By exploring the place, naming it, and making the land into a map, the colonisers gained control over it. As such, colonisation turned an unknown space into a reality conceivable to the Western mind. Such colonial expeditions and conceptualisations of Australia also contributed to the expansion of overseas markets through the acquisition of its natural resources. In such a manner, colonisation became a process of colonising the space of both the subterranean and the surface geographies of new territories, through the mastery of the father’s language and ideology. This is not to suggest that the colonising process was homogenous, even though it aimed at producing a homogenisation of space. The colonial process was actually an ambivalent process of negotiation, adaptation and interpretation. In the process of making a map, for example, the naming of space exposed the limitations of the European language system. Paul Carter discusses the sense of ‘absurdity of associative naming in

Australia’182 registered by Barron Field in his Geographical Memoir (1825). Carter argues that Field’s sense of absurdity was a sign that the ‘law of association’ was dysfunctional, since such naming relied on ‘a mechanism for making analogies’.183

182 Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History, London: Faber and Faber, 1987, p. 45. 183 Carter, The Road to Botany Bay, p. 43.

Carter makes clear that the act of naming is primarily a matter of rhetoric, through which history is brought into being.184 It is the point of reference where history is written as palimpsest. As such, territorialisation of colonial space can be understood as an operation in which ambivalence is obliterated through colonial discourse.

Carey’s Jack Maggs interrogates this process of colonial territorialisation and possession of resources through dramatising the process of negotiation between the author figure and the subject. To set the scene of conflict, Carey uses the sessions of mesmerism between Tobias Oates and Jack Maggs. The inclusion of animal magnetism is yet another borrowing from Dickens’s biography.185 As Fred Kaplan has shown,

Dickens not only attended Dr Elliottson’s mesmerism sessions,186 but also practiced by himself.187 Kaplan writes that Dickens was interested in mesmerism because of its potential to read dreams, which would allow him to gain a clearer understanding of the hidden human psyche so that he could describe the psychology of his characters more realistically.188 As opposed to the mesmerism session in which the conductor dominates the subject, Carey draws on Dickens’s biographical account to articulate the issue of power politics between the author and the subject, appropriating such means of storytelling to elucidate the complicated relationship of dominance and complicity.

Oates wants Maggs’s story for its commercial value, while Maggs wants to have his story inscribed in the centre. By employing such biographical details that Carey begin

184 Carter, The Road to Botany Bay, pp. 46-47. 185 But Carey alters Dickens’s biography here. Dickens did not attend his first animal magnetism session until the year of 1838, a year later than the setting of Carey’s novel. See Fred Kaplan, Dickens and Mesmerism: The Hidden Springs of Fiction, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975, p. 36. 186 Kaplan, Dickens and Mesmerism, pp. 36-54. 187 Kaplan, ibid., pp.55-73. 188 For example, Kaplan suggests Dickens’s depiction of hands was influenced by his interest and practice in mesmerism. For example, Mrs Joe brings Pip up ‘by hand’, and it is through the resemblance of hands that Pip guesses that Jaggers’s maid Molly is Estella’s mother. Kaplan, ibid., pp. 133-134.

to link the space of human unconscious to the space of the exploitative colonial geography. Just as the colonial expeditions achieved of territorialisation by conceptualising the land of the unknown in the map form, Oates justifies his experimenting mesmerism by saying “‘it’s the Criminal Mind … awaiting its first cartographer”’.189 Oates’s mesmerism sessions begin as a cure for Maggs’s Tic douloureux—the painful twitching of facial muscles induced by a severe nervous disorder. But the first session brings a totally unexpected result: Oates’s subject is a returned convict and ‘treasure house’190 of raw materials which Oates can steal whatever the guise of a ‘cure’. Mesmerism is also connected with the geography metaphor: Oates gets into Maggs’s unconscious, explores it, and finds hidden resources, which Oates calls ‘memory’191 and exploits them: that is, figuratively, to colonise.

In Jack Maggs, storytelling is not simply the way in which one can construct one’s own world and thereby generate subjectivity. Stories themselves assume the condition of a commodified raw material—something to which commercial value can be attached, and something that one can claim ownership. According to the narrator, buying stories is not an unusual practice for Oates. Indeed, the activity of buying stories is regarded as a common professional practice. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the housemaid mistakes Maggs for a person who has come to sell a story for the price of one shilling192 when he visits Oates’s house for the first time. In any case, it is certain, for Oates, the stranger the story, the more commercial value it possesses. Oates has established his writing career by relying on the cultural resources of others, out of which he can make

189 Carey, Jack Maggs, p. 97. Quotation modified. 190 Carey, ibid., p. 94. 191 Carey, ibid.. p. 94. 192 Carey, ibid., p. 45.

his own story. Reflecting on Oates’s habit of writing, his sister-in-law, Lizzy Warriner, observes:

Toby had always had a great affection for Characters...dustmen, jugglers, costers, pickpockets. He thought nothing of engaging the most gruesome types in Shepherd Market and writing down their histories in his chap book. The subject of this Mesmeric Exhibition did not know it, but he was likely to appear, much modified, in Toby’s next novel. There he would be Jack Muck, or Jock Crestfallen – a footman with a coster’s voice and a chest like a strong man in a circus.193

Since Maggs’s story is unique, Oates recognises its high commercial value. Indeed,

Maggs becomes a subject from whom Oates can obtain much ‘raw material’, since it is clear that Maggs is no mere criminal but a returned convict from Australia, a person whose physical existence in London, the centre of the colonial endeavour, is banned by law. It is for this reason that Oates estimates the value of Maggs’s story as in the region of fifty pounds.194

Carey’s drama of colonisation interrogates the questions of ‘who writes whose history?’ and ‘who prospers from the story?’ The drama is further developed into a phase of negotiation between the author and the subject. Oates’s mesmerism session becomes problematic when Maggs notices the theft of his secret memories while he has no control over his speech. In order to regain control over his story, Maggs realises that he needs to check what is written in Oates’s chapbooks. Jack Maggs thus employs a similar strategy of writing back to the author figure to J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986). In

Foe, Coetzee situates his narrative as the preceding text to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson

Crusoe.195 In doing so, Foe demonstrates that Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe obliterates the many accounts and complexities of the stories that have constituted it. While most

193 Carey, Jack Maggs, p. 89. 194 Carey, ibid., p. 139. 195 Sue Kossew, Pen and Power: A Post-Colonial Reading of J.M. Coetzee and André Brink, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996, p. 163.

would think here of Alexander Selkirk’s journal, Foe charges Defoe with the elimination of other stories in the composition of Robinson Crusoe—the most notable of which is the elimination of the female narrator, Susan Barton, and eventually her entire castaway story.

Yet, it is also true that Susan Barton requires help from Mr Foe because she has ‘no art’196 with which to compose her own story. That is to say, she has no means by which to ‘father’197 her story. Once again, and much like the events proposed in Jack Maggs,

Susan Barton must ‘sell’ her story as raw material that Mr Foe can turn into a more valuable commercial commodity. However, even though Susan Barton is adamant that in this exchange she ‘will not have any lies told’ about her time with Cruso and

Friday,198 it seems she is consequently seduced by the power of the author.199 It is clear that Susan Barton is marginalised from the patriarchal discourse in which her story will be rewritten, as well as the system of exchange that wrestles the story from her in the first instance. Interestingly, just as Susan Barton is concerned about how her story is to be told, so Maggs is similarly concerned about how the author figure controls the writing process. Thus, a battle is fought over the necessity to turn Maggs into a fictional character.200 Frustrated that Oates is hiding the true accounts of the session from him, Maggs even claims to Oates that ‘“This is where my secrets are. … Inside this box. The brain box. This is what we must break into”’,201 suggesting complicit nature inherent in the practice of story telling. At some point, though—especially in the

196 J. M. Coetzee, Foe, London: Penguin, 1987, p. 40. 197 Coetzee, Foe, p. 123. 198 Coetzee, ibid., p. 40. 199 Coetzee, ibid., p. 131. 200 Hassall, ‘A Tale of Two Countries’, p. 129. 201 Carey, Jack Maggs, p. 254. Emphasis is original.

episode in Maidenhead202—the relationship between author and subject seems to attain a certain level of balance, as Maggs threatens the process of writing by employing a kind of censorship over what should be noted by Oates or, indeed, what should be altered. As it is the power of the author figure that constructs the subject as a character in the novel, Maggs’s censorship can be understood as a moment of intervention that challenges the ethics of writing the Other by using literary resources.

However, unlike Susan Barton, what Jack Maggs cares most about in the narration of his story is not how truthful it is to his memory of events but rather the social appropriateness of his character. This is why Maggs is keen to check the records of their mesmerism sessions:

‘All this is me?’ ‘One way or another.’ Jack Maggs, for his part, united each bundle and, although he did not read everything, he did read a good deal, enough to cause a very great embarrassment to show upon his face. ‘My boy must not read this,’ he said. ‘We burn it’, agreed Tobias Oates. ‘We burn it now.’203

Maggs’s expression ‘My boy must not read this’ is ambiguous. Whether Oates’s draft contradicts Maggs’s own account of himself that he has previously sent to his son or it generally damages his reputation, it is certain that Oates’s manuscript contains some descriptions which will work against Maggs’s interests. Such a situation also suggests that Maggs fabricates his life story to some degree in the letters that he addresses to

Henry Phipps. So, after realising how much he has made known about Sofina, Maggs hurriedly composes a letter to Henry that offers a contradictory ending to the first draft of chapter one of The Death of Maggs. Since not everything is described clearly by

202 Carey, Jack Maggs, chapter 63-82. 203 Carey, ibid., p. 331.

Maggs, Oates engages in a project of interpretation in order to make sense of his accounts. In Oates’s own words, it was like ‘stumbling through the dark of the convict’s past, grouping in the shadows, describing what was often a mirror held up to his own turbulent and fearful soul’.204 In such a manner, the practice of mesmerism becomes a metaphor for the process of colonisation as a whole: the signs of unnamed lands are read and conceptualised according to subjective interpretation, and ultimately formalised into a map/story that is constructed as much by the reflection of the Self as it is by the actual landscape of objects and events. Thus, the map/story also belies a certain genealogy, since an object or event cannot claim a genealogy or history if it is not first configured, for example, through the site of the map or the story. This process of colonising the unconscious through mesmerism is also a process of ‘fathering’ the subject’s painful memories.

The implications of mesmerism in the text are not limited to the metaphor of colonisation. It is also used to demonstrate the complicated and often complicit relationship between the coloniser and the colonised. For example, the mesmerism sessions held between Oates and Maggs are used as the means for Maggs to generate his subjectivity and to thereby gain a kind of self-realisation. Mesmerism is also used to fill in the gap of Magwitch’s life in the penal colony, which Carey raises in Maggs’s mesmerism sessions through the notion of ‘pain’. As already mentioned, Maggs’s mesmerism sessions initially begin as a cure for his Tic douloureux. Oates’s ‘cure’ for

Maggs’s condition is to give his nervous tic a personality – the phantom – who must be buried in order to quell the pain. Thus, Maggs associates the phantom of the pain with

204 Carey, Jack Maggs, p. 98.

his memories of other painful encounters, such as Captain Logan,205 who used to torture

Maggs in Morton Bay, and the figure of Sofina Smith, who bore the son that Maggs tragically lost. Such are the memories that Maggs dare not consciously speak or write about. As such, the phantom is a reflection of these painful memories, against which

Maggs’s subject and his subjectivity is generated. So, the unnamed narrator relates:

By mesmerised he [Maggs] understood that he was made the subject of magnets, and that these magnets in some way tugged at his Mesmeric Fluid, a substance in his soul he could not see. He understood that, under the effect of magnets, he was able to describe the demons that swam in this fluid, and that Tobias Oates would not only battle with these beings—named Behemoth and Dabareiel, Azazel and Samsaweel,— but also, like a botanist, describe them in a journal where their host might later see them.206

As already mentioned, what Maggs comprehends under the spell of Oates’s mesmerism is not so clear that Oates does not need to embellish Maggs’s accounts with his own interpretation of the signs. Nevertheless, the relationship between Oates and Maggs is complicit, since it is Oates who gives Maggs pain the personality of the phantom, through which Maggs seems to generate his subjectivity.

There is also a certain irony played out in Maggs’s mesmerism sessions with Oates, since it is clear that Maggs does not want to cure the pain of his facial tic. Indeed, it would seem that Maggs recognises that he needs the pain caused by his condition in order to restore not only his memory, but also his subjectivity. Thus, by resisting the

Oates’s order to bury the phantom, Maggs resists the mastery of the author figure, who attempts to colonise his unconscious altogether:

‘I want it.’ ‘No, look and see the wound is healed. Your pain is gone.’

205 Captain Patrick Logan of the 57th Regiment arrived in Moreton Bay in 1826 and strayed there until his violent death in 1830. Captain Logan had ‘the worst reputation for cruelty’. Hughes, The Fatal Shore, p. 444. 206 Carey, Jack Maggs, p. 98.

‘I want it,’ cried Jack Maggs, raising himself on his elbow and staring to Tobias Oates with such alertness that it was hard to believe he was still mesmerised. ‘I want it, fool. It is all I have left of him.’207

Maggs quickly identifies the pain of his facial tic as the only way to gain access to his lost son; it becomes a connection to a line of filiation that can be traced all the way back to England. However, his attempts to sustain this line of filiation to England through the financial arrangement with Henry Phipps abruptly terminates when Phipps attempts to murder him. An even more ironical aspect of Maggs’s resistance to the cure for the pain is that it is the pain itself constitutes his colonial subjectivity as the felon, and sustains his subjectivity as abject colonialism’s being.

Born as an orphan and marginalised as the criminal other, and thus with no clear genealogy with which to locate himself, Jack Maggs seeks to maintain his filial relationship to England to ‘father’ an English son to stay inside the discursive community of the parent and child. However, after his relationship to Phipps is broken, and subsequently his relationship to England and empire, such relationships reside solely in Maggs’s memory. That is to say, he becomes an orphan once again.

Conclusion

When two different representations of the same person are available, the question arises of which one is closer to the ‘truth’? Is it Maggs’s own story or Oates’s novel? A post- colonial reading of the text, as a way of deconstructing the homogeneity of the dominant discourse, does not seek to dismantle one kind of ‘truth’ in order to establish

207 Carey, Jack Maggs, p. 224.

another. Carey responds to this question of ‘truth’ by dramatising the relationship between the author and the subject. In terms of reconstructing the narrative structure of the canonical pre-text, interrogating the authority of the master discourse is beneficial for Carey’s rewriting, since his novel can thereby avoid simply reversing Pip’s narrative authority over Magwitch. In the canonical pre-text, Magwitch is figuratively colonised by becoming the subject of Pip’s first person narrative. In contrast, Jack Maggs is narrated by an unnamed third person, who manages to unite the divergent narratives of the other figures in the novel without simultaneously ‘colonising’, or dominating, them.

This change of narrative structure allows Carey to disrupt the authority of Pip in Great

Expectations by proliferating the textuality of his rewriting. Carey locates the battle between competing representations in the moment of the narration’s delivery. In such a manner, Carey’s Magwitch figure not only returns to London to become physically present in the centre of the imperial endeavour, but also attempts to interfere with the subjectifying discursive practice expounded in the metropolis. Thus, the battle of representation fought between Oates and Maggs develops into something of an equal fight between equally authoritative father figures. Eventually Maggs becomes the subject of Oates’s fiction: in becoming a character of Oates’s text and thereby a colonised subject. However, Carey playfully shows the process of negotiation that constitutes Oates’s particular representation of Maggs, with Maggs controlling the discursive practice of the centre that sustains his position as the authoritative, patriarchal father figure. So, in Carey’s rewriting of Great Expectations, Maggs is reconfigured as to present the possibility that is powerful enough to control the representation of the centre.

Writing back to Charles Dickens’s Victorian classic Great Expectations, Peter Carey’s

Jack Maggs presents a profoundly ambivalent subject position of white settler writing.

Refuting colonialism and distancing himself from nationalism, Carey’s Jack Maggs is located in an orphan space of ambivalence, where a filiation and an affiliation of the literary text intersects with imperial, patriarchal and nationalist ideology. Shifting Pip’s first person point of view to an unnamed third person point of view, the novel refutes

Pip’s assumed claim to narrative dominance. By dramatising the contesting power relations between Tobias Oates (the author figure) and Jack Maggs (the subject figure), the novel demonstrates the process of colonial inclusion and exclusion. Carey’s re- writing also plays on the idea of Australia as the antipodean colony. Using geographical metaphor, the novel interrogates the issue of authorship, territorialisation and exploitation of resources. Although Jack Maggs offers a certain kind of ‘counter- discourse’ to that proposed by Great Expectations, Carey is careful not to directly oppose the canonical pre-text. Developing the themes and issues raised in Dickens’s classic, Carey proposes an ethical response to the consumption of a cultural resource from the past. In a post-colonial world where globalisation promotes a singular unified heritage from the diverse cultures of the world, Carey’s radical revision of the orphan figure reminds us that ethical questions should never be far from colonial representations.

Chapter Four: The Family of the Orphan – Gail Jones’ Sixty Lights

In Gail Jones’ Sixty Lights, the idea of family is closely associated with Charles

Dickens’s Great Expectations. Such an association may seem implausible, for the novel is narrated by an orphan protagonist who does not have a meaningful family relationship, but only a beneficiary arrangement with the unnamed sponsor figure.

Although the amended ending of Great Expectations reads that Pip sees ‘the shadow of no parting from her’,208 suggesting that Pip and Estella will eventually be together, it is still not a story of the creation of a family unit. In the last chapter, returning from the

East after spending eleven years there, Pip sees himself in little Pip, and asks the child’s parents Joe and Biddy whether he can adopt him. This option seems to be refuted in the novel’s revised ending.

In Sixty Lights, Dickens’s classic provides the basic model for the family. For instance, it is after reading Great Expectations that a makeshift family consisting of Neville

Brady and his nephew and niece from his late sister, Thomas and Lucy Strange, have their first chance to foster a meaningful familial bond. Lucy thinks of her sister-in-law

Violet’s family in terms of Dickens. Violet and her parents Max and Matilda Weller look, Lucy thinks, ‘like a family out of Dickens’.209 Such an allusion implies that their family’s relationship and mannerisms are similar to the ‘Dickensian family’: that is, an adopted daughter takes care of elderly parents, and all of them look and behave

208 Dickens, Great Expectations, p. 479. 209 Gail Jones, Sixty Lights, London: Harville Press, 2004, p. 175.

eccentrically – particularly their habit of sustaining ‘an idiosyncratic culture of wordplays and jokes’.210

Sixty Lights is Gail Jones’ first book to be published in London. It was long listed for the Man Booker Prize 2004,211 which suggests the novel’s popular appeal in the international market.212 Overall, the book has been well reviewed. There are two aspects of the novel to which the reviews pay particular attention: her prose style, which has been called ‘accurate and without cliché’;213 and her exploration on the theme of the photograph, a term that derives from the Greek for ‘light writing’.214 Some reviews mention that each chapter is a ‘literary equivalents of photographic images’215 that

‘shimmer with light and carry poetic images of enduring beauty and pathos’.216 As light is the precondition of the photograph, there are many references to light and optic phenomenon in the novel such as bioluminescence, magnifying glasses, the

‘scintillating desert’,217 Thomas’s magic lantern show and the ‘green ray’,218 to name a few. It is in the context of such observations that Liam Davidson calls Jones’ writing

‘photosensitive’.219 As such, it is fitting that Jones names her heroine in a manner that

210 Jones, Sixty Lights , p. 175. 211 There are no essay length criticisms available on the book. The critical summary that is presented here is based on reviews from newspapers and literary periodicals. 212 Jones has published two short story collections (The House of Breathing [1992] and Fetish Lives [1997] both from Fremantle Arts Centre Press) and Black Mirror from Picador Australia in 2002. 213 Alex Clark, ‘The Wish to Beautify’, The Times Literary Supplement, 19 November 2004, p. 25. 214 Bron Sibree, ‘Writing in Light’, The Courier-Mail, 4 September 2004, p. M07. 215 Kasia Boddy, ‘A Visionary Victorian’, The Daily Telegraph, 18 September 2004, p. 9. 216 Liam Davison, ‘Framed by Loss’, The Australian, 14 August 2004, p. B12. 217 Jones, Sixty Lights, p. 57. Quotation modified. 218 Jones, ibid., p. 212. Quotation modified. 219 Davison, ‘Framed by Loss’, p. B12.

indelibly casts her as a ‘small flare of light’.220 One review deftly summarises Sixty

Lights as a ‘neo-Victorian novel of orphans and new technologies’.221

Books of photographs and photography constitute major ‘inter-texts’ for Jones’ novel, towards which she presents her own position. Among the book’s most notable inter- texts are the writings of Roland Barthes, particularly his Camera Lucida, and Susan

Sontag’s On Photography. As some early reviews have already mentioned, both

Barthes and Sontag investigate the relationship between photography and the photographic metaphor of death. Barthes explores how the subject of the photograph eventually becomes the object of the photographer. For Barthes, the photographic subject is either dead or dying. Thus, he claims with reference to one of the photographs in Camera Lucida that ‘Death is the eidos [nature] of that [Barthes’s]

Photograph’.222 Sontag writes that ‘all photographs are memento mori’: that is, the life of the photographic subject is frozen by the photographer, and this idea that the moment is frozen in the photograph is the reason why photographs contribute to the ‘promotion of nostalgia’.223 However, Jones clearly states in interview that she attempts to argue against these two theorists of photography, especially in their measured attempts to link photographs and photography with death and absence. Jones says:

In the 1870s, they [photographs] were a confirmation of presence, of the self in history. Of the way we exist in time. I wanted to return to that incredibly positive moment when photography was full of the promise of returning us to the world and lovingly inscribing us in the world.224

220 Jones, Sixty Lights, p. 157. 221 Boddy, ‘A Visionary Victorian’, p. 9. 222 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida [1980], Richard Howard (trans.), London: Vintage, 2000, p. 15. 223 Susan Sontag, On Photography [1973], New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977, p. 15. Quotation modified. 224 Sibree, ‘Writing in Light’, p. M07.

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Thus, she emphasises the light of life, rather than the darkness of death, in the photograph. Moreover, Jones’ idea of photography as the medium for ‘inscribing’ one’s life in the world forms the key to her process of re-writing. Furthermore, Jones adopts Barthes’s and Sontag’s observations on family photography: that is, both

Barthes’s writing on his mother’s photograph and Sontag’s writing on the family associates family photographs with ‘ghostly traces’225 of existence. The photograph shows noema, which is ‘the thing has been there’.226 Whilst turning away from the power hierarchy between the photographer and the photographic subject that the representation of the photograph ultimately establishes, she embraces Barthes’s concept of ‘grief’, the element of ‘affect’.

Photographic representation also links Sixty Lights to the context of post-colonial re- writing from the antipodes. That is, the daguerreotype camera that Lucy uses projects its image upside down in the finder, but it is rectified when it is developed, just as Jack

Maggs’s writings become legible when reflected in a mirror. As such, it is tempting to explore the possibility of resistance that the photographic medium can create. This chapter takes Jones’ idea of the photograph as the medium of ‘inscribing’ one’s own life in the world, and develops such an idea through the medium of a canonical text,

Dickens’s Great Expectations. This chapter investigates the ways in which the characters of Sixty Lights inscribe or interpolate their lives in the text of Great

Expectations, thereby creating a moment of resistance. For the purpose of my investigation, this chapter only discusses aspects of post-colonial re-writings of

Dickens’s Great Expectations but that is not to say that other elements are not

225 Sontag, On Photography, p. 9. 226 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 76. Quotation modified.

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important. Sixty Lights has references to two Victorian orphan classics, Dickens’s Great

Expectations and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.227 Jones herself comments that she intended to give particular attention to Great Expectations in order to ‘play with inheritances’, that is, in the form of emotional and narrative inheritances, rather than financial ones.228

Sixty Lights develops an affectionate relationship with its pre-text, Great Expectations.

This re-writing strategy, which emphasises attachment rather than detachment, is similar to Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs. After all, it is not an oppositional re-writing intent on improving the original’s historical accuracy, or filling the gaps of the preceding work. In fact, Jones’ re-writing pays homage to Charles Dickens and Great

Expectations in many ways. As such, Sixty Lights seems willing to fill the gap of its pre-text. In terms of a contrapuntal reading of the canonical text, Jones’ fiction certainly presents a more dynamic portrayal of colonial exchanges than did Dickens. It links

Australia with other British colonies or occupied regions: such as China and India. In drawing such parallels between colonial lives, Jones looks beyond the simple dual geographical relation between the centre and the periphery. Thus, the narrative in Sixty

Lights covers Thomas and Lucy’s childhood in Australia, but it also refers to their father’s childhood in a Chinese mission, their mother’s childhood in Nottinghamshire, and the Chinese diaspora in the gold mines of Ballarat. It also features Lucy’s experiences in India, focusing on her relationship with the local servants and her obsession in ‘going native’. Jones also plays with the phrase ‘new beginning.’

227 While Jane Eyre also relates to Sixty Lights in many interesting ways, space does not permit a discussion of this text. 228 Sibree, ‘Writing in Light’, p. M07.

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Contrary to Dickens’s vision of Australia as the New World, Jones locates new beginnings everywhere. In her re-writing, the ‘new beginning’ becomes a motif that is repeated without an institutional location. It is in this context that Jones’ Sixty Lights can be positioned as a counter-discursive narrative to Dickens’s Great Expectations.

The post-colonial agenda of the creation of a counter-discourse which aims for a resistance and a transformation of the British literary canon concerns itself with two major practices: the practice of re-reading and re-writing the British literary canon.

However, it is important to note that in this model of literary resistance, the production of a re-writing is somewhat taken for granted. As post-colonial theories of resistance problematise the homogeneity of the empire’s textuality, its discursive practice weighs on the practice of writing rather than reading. Even though the creation of a re-writing assumes the precedent of a counter-reading, the reading itself does not transform the nature of the canonical texts’ textuality, since the act of reading does not necessarily produce an/other written text. As such, post-colonial counter-discursive practice weighs on the ‘writerly’ subject more than the ‘readerly’ subject, to borrow Barthes’ phrasing.

But, surely, if the act of re-writing is followed by the practice of re-reading, there must be a readerly subject who responds to the canonical text. The question then arises of how such an actual process of contrapuntal reading can be incorporated into the post- colonial theory of resistance. How can the colonial subject use reading as a way of resisting the homogenising power of hegemony? It is in this context that I argue that

Gail Jones’ Sixty Lights is a ‘meta-reading re-writing’ of Charles Dickens’s Great

Expectations. In this chapter, I will investigate the ways in which the text of Great

Expectations can be read and appropriated to accommodate the needs of the reader. I

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will also argue that this process of reading for the benefit of oneself is also an ambivalent process, during which the reader consents to the dominant ideology for the purpose of learning and knowing, but simultaneously produces her own reading, which makes the values and meanings of the canonical text proliferate. Therefore, the canonical text is the resource from which the argument develops, both for the orphan figure itself, and for the author Gail Jones.

The act of reading undertaken by her characters is not to be regarded as a passive activity, a way of absorbing projected norms. Rather, reading becomes a truly active mode of understanding, responsible for the constitution of characters’ subjectivity via their interaction and response to the canonical Victorian novel. In the following discussion, I will first discuss how Jones’ characters become readers of the canonical text. Then, I will examine how Great Expectations becomes the location of memory for both individual members of the family, and the family as a unit to inscribe their memories. By this I mean that Sixty Lights presents how the appropriated story becomes the shared memory of the individual and the family of Neville, Thomas and

Lucy, and eventually subverts the authority of the canonical text. Indeed, the characters of Sixty Lights attempt to inscribe their ontological condition as marginalised orphans against the canonical text, which has already attempted to constitute their subject position in terms of Empire. This is a very ambivalent process, as the characters are ideologically taken in by the canonical text’s hegemony, yet unknowingly produce their own narrative from this encounter. In the last section of this chapter, I will discuss the issue of author and authority by borrowing Roland Barthes’ expression, ‘the Death of

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the Author’. This section will explore how the moment of resistance is suggested by way of defamiliarisation by the dominant father figure.

i. A ‘Partickler’ Ghost

Lucy Strange first contemplates the meaning of reading on her way to India when she finds books by Victorian authors such as Dickens, George Eliot, and Thackeray in the small library of the ship. Her discovery of the library connects her to the English cultural inheritance:

She thought for the first time what it meant to read a novel. What process was this? What self-complication? What seance of other lives into her own imagination? Reading was this metaphysical meeting space – peculiar, specific, ardent, unusual – in which black words neatly spaced on a rectangular page persuaded her that hypothetical people were as real as she, that not diversion, but knowing, was the gift story gave her. She learnt how other people entered the adventure of being alive. She saw them move and think and make various choices. Rain fell, sun shone, journeys were undertaken.229

It is a moment of enlightenment. In the novels, she meets characters similar to her, characters who plunge into adventure and have to make their own decisions. Lucy’s reaction to the books reflects her own condition on her travels: she is alone on the sea and willing to protect herself, but she is also having an affair with Captain William

Crowley of the East India Company. Her contradiction is normalised by knowledge she gains from English books, which renders her ‘unusual’ ontological condition ‘usual’.

As Homi Bhabha argues in his essay ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’, the scenario of the discovery of the English book is a ‘moment of originality and authority’.230 Lucy thus discovers the authenticity of her existence within the pages of the English books.

Therefore, the knowledge that Lucy gains through this discovery is a ‘gift’ because it is,

229 Jones, Sixty Lights, p. 114. 230 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 102.

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in the words of Bhabha, ‘memorable for its balance between epiphany and enunciation’.231 In such a moment of discovery, Lucy’s ontological ambivalence is absorbed into the authority of the English text.

Just as Lucy describes the English book as a ‘metaphysical meeting place’, it is also in the location of the canonical English novel where various modes of communication or engagement are situated, registered and achieved. The characters are educated, nurtured and can sometimes create counter-arguments in this imaginary ‘meeting place’. As such, the English books that Lucy finds in the ship’s library are not just material objects, but also where her personal reading practice is directed and situated. Such a practice of reading can also be understood as the character’s engagement with the dominant power and its modes of authority. Therefore, the act of reading is not just a process of learning and knowing, but can also be understood as a practice that the characters’ attempt to learn in order to understand the relationship between parent and child. In this light, reading as learning and knowing also accommodates the characters’ displaced position into the authority of the canon and makes them become ‘filiated’ to dominant ideologies. And, as mentioned above, such filiation can happen through affiliational relations. This aspect of the canonical text is particularly important for the orphan figures such as Thomas and Lucy, who are ‘doubly’ orphaned: firstly from the parent, and secondly from the country. Therefore, it is unsurprising that both Thomas and Lucy need to enter into an alternative parental arrangement. They find this alternative parental arrangement in the canonical English novel.

231 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 102.

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Dickens’s Great Expectations is first introduced into the household of Uncle Neville,

Thomas and Lucy for the purpose of nursing the invalid children. Both Thomas and

Lucy suffer from a bad cold during their first winter in London, as the weather is too cold for their ‘Antipodean’ bodies. Each night, Neville reads one chapter from the serial edition of Great Expectations at their bedside, an act that is described by Lucy as a ‘new beginning’. It is such a moment of ‘originality and authority’232 that young

Thomas and Lucy gain from Great Expectations that allows its author to become an imagined father or teacher figure to them. The difference that Dickens made to their lives is indeed significant. It is through Great Expectations that Thomas and Lucy learn about London and that the city becomes ‘more actual’ to them after reading the text.233

Having been bullied at school for their Australian accents, and having suffered from the chill in London, they are delighted that Dickens includes Australia in the plot of his novel, because ‘it validated an existence others here took as vague conjecture’.234 They become more confident about their Australian background because they feel that their existence is in some way recognised by a revered figure. Through this line of affinity, the orphan children are affiliated into the world of the canonical text. In Louis

Althusser’s word, this episode demonstrates how the orphan figures are

‘interpellated’235 into the Dickensian family ideology by reading Great Expectations.

This type of readerly subject explains the relationship of filiation to the ideology of

Great Expectations, as the figure of Charles Dickens becomes their imagined father figure.

232 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 102. 233 Jones, Sixty Lights, p. 84. 234 Jones, ibid., p. 84 235 Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus (Notes Towards an Investigation)’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Ben Brewster (trans.) , London: NLB, 1971, pp. 160-165

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Lucy’s subject seeks her identity in the representation of the Australian map, not the

‘real’ Australia. Recognised by Dickens, Lucy feels more comfortable about her country of birth when she looks at the map of Australia.

Lucy looked at Australia on the map, it was a fat anomalous island, loosely adrift by itself, with that bit sticking up on the right that had no reason to be there and looking like someone at school with their hand up, but with the wrong answer to the question. Nevertheless the shape pleased her, so she looked at it again, cross- eyed, and it pleased her still.236

Lucy’s attention is drawn to the shape of the continent itself. Indeed, Lucy here is reading her own position in the representation of the map of Australia. Her unsettled mind is reflected in her reading of the map, which personifies the map of Australia.

That is, she sees the island of Australia as ‘floating’ in the map as if it is uncomfortable.

The island is sticking its hand up, only to make a fool of itself. Her appreciation of the shape of the continent indicates that she is beginning to feel more confident about her background. Apparently, Lucy is reading her own uncomfortable condition in the representation of the Australian map itself, whereby she identifies herself with it, but she does not identify with the actual Australia as a nation.

What is most important about the episode of reading Great Expectations is the specific location of reading: the family. It fosters a feeling of familial unity through sharing the story and providing a group experience of reading. Jones invests in this very Victorian practice of reading the serial at home,237 and turns it into a subtle practice of resistance.

The moment of resistance is translated from an instance in Great Expectations, when

Joe Gargery visits Pip for the first time since Pip has left for London. Gail Jones re- writes this scene directly in Sixty Lights:

236 Jones, Sixty Lights, p. 84. 237 Julia Prewitt Brown, A Reader’s Guide to the Nineteenth-Century English Novel. London: Macmillan, 1985, pp. 108-11.

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In Great Expectations Joe Gargery, the country father-figure, honest and uneducated, has been to his first theatrical performance – of Hamlet. Pip asks, ‘Was there a great sensation?’ and Joe answers charmingly, according to his senses: the odour of orange peel. The children had needed the joke explained, and Neville thereafter enjoyed replaying the phrase. ‘Partickler!’ Lucy repeated as Neville said goodnight. He doffed an invisible cap, having discovered in himself, through the agency of the children, hidden resources of play as well as parenthood. ‘Partickler!’ he echoed. ‘“Partickler when he see the ghost”!’238

There are four important elements in this quotation: firstly, the aspect of role play which simulates the position of parent and child; secondly, the explanation of the pun; thirdly, the repetition of the phrase ‘Partickler when he see the ghost!; and lastly, the implication of the scene of Hamlet in Great Expectations.

Neville’s reading of Great Expectations to Thomas and Lucy exemplifies the performative element of forming a family. The ontological condition of the parent is generated not only through its biological relation to the child, but also through performing the role of the parent. As such, the distinction between the parent and child is not naturally ‘given’ but retrospectively ‘nurtured’. In this household, where the role and position of family members are not based on biological relationships but retrospective adaptations, each has to learn acceptable familial behaviour. One of these cases where the role of the parent is performed is in instances of ‘looking after’ the child, just as Neville does to Thomas and Lucy. This nursing of the child by reading from the serial constitutes the parent linguistically superior position in the parent/child hierarchy. Moreover, Neville is assuredly consented of his position by the positive responses received from the children. As Althusser theorises the ways in which the subject is constructed through ‘interpellation’, and shows how one’s ideology is

238 Jones, Sixty Lights, p. 85.

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represented by the repetitions of rituals,239 Uncle Neville’s subjective position as the parent is interpellated by his reading of Great Expectations. Thus he feels that he

‘discovered in himself … the hidden resources of play as well as parenthood’.240

Neville is in the process of becoming a parent by identifying himself with Joe Gargery through relaying Joe’s original phrase.241 This performative aspect of the family holds the key to the formation of the family between the members of affiliational relations.

Jonathan Rée points out the importance of play-acting elements in the process of identification which necessarily reconfirms one’s belief.242 Indeed, as Rée points out,

Dickens wrote his novels with public reading in mind.243 With his passion for, and involvement with the theatre, it is not surprising that Dickens wrote Joe’s speech for such a purpose. By following the rituals associated with playing the roles of father and child, Neville, Thomas, and Lucy ultimately become a family.

Neville’s superior position of parent is strengthened further when he comes to explain the pun on the word ‘sensation’. The children’s inability to understand this pun indicates that they are both outside the discursive community that Great Expectations primarily addresses; and thus Neville has to introduce them to this privileged world.

Dickens’s text reads:

‘Were you at his performance, Joe?’ I inquired. ‘I were,’ said Joe, with emphasis and solemnity. ‘Was there a great sensation?’

239 Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus’, pp. 165-170. 240 Jones, Sixty Lights, p. 85. 241 For the distinction between the concept of identity and identification, I refer to the following article. Stuart Hall, ‘Introduction: Who Needs “Identity”?’, in Questions of Cultural Identity, Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (ed.), London: Sage, 1996, pp. 1-17. I am also indebted to Simon Frith’s article, ‘Music and Identity’ in the same volume (pp. 108-127). Frith argues that through performing the music as a kind of rites within the mutual group, one lives an imagined self with whom one wants to identify. 242 Jonathan Rée, ‘Funny Voices: Stories, Punctuation, and Personal Identity’, New Literary History, 21:4 (Autumn, 1990), p. 1055. 243 Rée, ‘Funny Voices’, pp. 1045-1047.

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‘Why,’ said Joe, ‘yes, there certainly were a peck of orange-peel. Partickler, when he see the ghost. Though I put it to yourself, sir, whether it were calc’lated to keep a man up to his work with a good hart, to be continiwally cutting in betwixt him and the Ghost with ‘Amen! … if the ghost of a man’s own father cannot be allowed to claim his attention, what can, Sir? Still more, when his mourning ’at is unfortunately made so small as that the weight of the black feathers brings it off, try to keep it on how you may.’244

Here, Joe Gargery is explaining why he has come to London, and his opinion of the play. Realising that Pip is uncomfortable in his company, Joe makes excuses so that he does not have to see Pip, but instead attends Mr Wopsle’s theatre troop, which is showing Shakespeare’s Hamlet (although the title is never mentioned in Great

Expectations). Pip asks Joe’s opinion of the show, with “Was there a great sensation?” meaning ‘was it a gripping performance?’, to which Joe answers ‘“yes, there certainly were a peck of orange-peel. Partickler, when he see the ghost”’. Both Thomas and

Lucy do not get the pun on ‘sensation’, which means both ‘excitement’ and

‘perception’. Pip meant the former, but Joe misconstrued his meaning, and gave the answer corresponding to the latter meaning of the term. As the language, particularly the cultural code of the joke, has to be taught, learnt and practiced, this incident signifies a moment of teaching and learning which consequently introduces them to the previously inaccessible discursive community. This incident identifies the readerly function of the characters of Thomas and Lucy, and presents a subtle yet powerful moment of resistance to the dominant patriarchal and imperial discourse. It indicates the moment when the ‘naturalisation’ of signification in language fractures; when its signs, codes and values are necessarily acknowledged as local rather than universal.

This episode of the joke is significant because the three readers adapt the joke specifically for their own situation. Neville, Thomas, and Lucy appropriate not only the

244 Dickens, Great Expectations, p. 218. Emphases added.

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meaning but also the use of the joke, so that it becomes their ‘private three-way joke’.245 The key to their private joke is not so much to do with the pun on the singular word ‘sensation’, but rather with the association drawn from three words: ‘sensation’,

‘partickler’ and ‘ghost’—with an additional emphasis on ‘partickler’. The use of the word ‘particular’ becomes something special to the three people when Neville explains the pun of the word ‘sensation’ and enjoys ‘replaying the phrase’246 thereafter. The word ‘partickler’, which is written in order to suggest a specific phonetic pronunciation, signifies Joe’s accent, which sounds (and is certainly written) differently from the accepted standard use of ‘particular’. As such, it sounds a bit funny to the children.

Indeed, Joe’s ‘partickler’ becomes even funnier when Neville mimics Joe’s accent and repeats it. Through his act of repetition, the word acquires its own use and meaning among the family members. And it is precisely this limited access to the joke that formulates the circle of family by excluding those who do not share the same language.

Neville, Thomas, and Lucy’s group appropriation of the text of Great Expectations is a radical transformation of the previously accepted meaning of the canonical work. The section of Great Expectations that the three of them transformed into their ‘private three-way joke’ is usually read as the scene where Pip’s presumptions towards Joe and his class become obvious. For Pip, Joe represents everything that he now detests: Joe’s speech registers the differences in social position between the two, and his manner is unsophisticated, a difference that is metonymically represented in the word ‘partickler’.

Joe does not understand Shakespeare, and cannot comment on Mr Wopsle’s staging of the drama. Moreover, since Joe’s nature precludes him from criticising people, Joe

245 Jones, Sixty Lights, p. 85. 246 Jones, ibid., p. 85.

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shifts the topic of discussion to something more general—the relationship between father and son. In such a context, Joe’s ‘partickler’ becomes a metonym of Pip’s condescension towards Joe, and, as such, assumes a critical charge. However, Thomas and Lucy find the word simply funny. As the joke must be explained to them, they do not comprehend the importance of the social background that constructs Joe’s position.

This represents a powerful moment of resistance through elision, because it rejects the binary opposition of the centre and margin, or the coloniser and the colonised. In this way, the power hierarchy of the dominant ideology that attempts to construct Joe’s

‘partickler’ as an uneducated and thus childish other is teased out in Jones’ re-writing.

Indeed, both Thomas and Lucy have to be introduced to such an ideology. Moreover, though performing Joe’s speech and mimicking the accent and manner of his speech, the three of them can only imagine how the word is actually spoken by Joe. This means that the three individuals actually re-invent their own Joe in their own context. When

Neville, Thomas and Lucy create their own Joe by mimicking his pronunciation of

‘partickler’, they also undermine the power that attempts to marginalise them.

Their response to the text creates a different interpretative space out of the original text of Great Expectations. The interaction between Neville, Thomas, and Lucy make this space possible only via the literary entity called Great Expectations. By sharing the joke, they establish their small interpretative community which can be called a ‘family’, within the entity called Great Expectations. Moreover, the children do not respond directly to the text of Great Expectations, but rather to Neville’s performance of Joe

Gargery: they create their own version of Great Expectations. In the letter to his sister

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in India, Thomas explains what happened in the magic lantern show of Hamlet. He writes:

Recently we showed a series of scenes from Shakespeare, and I thought of you, dear sister, when the ghost scene from Hamlet arrived. Mr Childe had arranged for a puff of smoke and a cymbal clap to accompany the ghost’s appearance (the slide itself was a little disappointing…), but a woman in the front row rose up, screamed, and then collapsed in a faint. This event caused a sensation. I could not help thinking: partickler when she see the ghost!247

Thomas is referring to the section of the joke analysed above. But here, Thomas tells his sister that the scene of Hamlet’s encounter with the ghost of his father produced a real effect of terror in a lady in the front row. This is markedly different from Mr

Wopsle’s production of Hamlet, which causes only a booed ‘sensation’ in the audience.

Thomas’s allusion to the scene is his way of explaining what he witnessed. He replaces the subject of the sentence, the ‘he’ in the sentence ‘when he see the ghost’, which refers to Mr Wopsle, to the ‘she’ of the woman who fainted. Such a permutation of the subject suggests that the subject of the sentence ‘partickler, when he see the ghost’ is changeable according to the context of speech. That is, the phrase is applicable to different contexts. As such, this sentence from Great Expectations is appropriated so that it can refer to anybody who sees the ghost.

As such, Dickens’s Great Expectations is the index that signifies the site of the family’s memory, which is retrievable by the word ‘partickler’. Later in the novel, Joe’s speech—‘partickler, when he see the ghost’—is shortened and comes to refer to the particular photo, the family photo of Thomas, his wife Violet, Lucy and Ellen. This occurs because Lucy moves to check the condition of the camera before the chemical corrosion process takes place. Thus, the developed photograph shows a blurred image

247 Jones, Sixty Lights, p. 148-149. Emphases are original.

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of Lucy, which the photographer calls a ‘ghost’: ‘clearly I am meant from now on to be a partickler ghost’248, Lucy says to her brother Thomas. But, the other people around

Lucy and Thomas do not understand this ‘partickler’ joke. Every time they articulate this joke, they visit this parasitic space attached to the text of Great Expectations. In such a way, this particular section can be understood as a literary equivalent of a family picture that frames the family, which constitutes what Marianne Hirsch calls ‘familial subjectivity’ that is constructed ‘relationally’. In these familial relations, one is always

‘both self and other(ed), both speaking and looking subject and spoken and looked at object’.249 It is this family frame that three of the characters invest their own memory and feelings into, thus creating their own readings of Great Expectations as a kind of mimicry and mockery of the original. As a result, the textuality of Great Expectations is demonstrated to be perpetually expanding and transforming.

Jones’ interpolation of Dickens’s text can also be considered as a subtle challenge to the existing body of criticism on Great Expectations. Many scholars from different contexts have discussed the episode of Mr Wopsle’s theatre performance. Even though the section that Jones incorporates into her own writing is not exactly the scene of theatre but rather the scene prior to Pip’s actual theatregoing, it is still relevant to locate

Jones’ reading of the text in the context of Mr Wopsle’s stage due to its relation to the

‘ghost’. Peter Brooks refers to this section as the one that signifies Pip’s repression of fear of crime, failure and ridicule, represented in Mr Wopsle, who voluntarily

248 Jones, Sixty Lights., p. 236. Quotation modified. 249 Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 9.

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terminates his position in the clergy to pursue a theatrical career.250 Stephen Connor reads the scene as exemplifying Pip’s growing sense of detachment and ever increasing sense of ‘his own mastery’ over the people from the marsh country.251 Edward Said uses the scene to draw attention to a way of deconstructively reading the text, which becomes more explicit in theatre performance. Said writes:

If we say that Hamlet as Shakespeare wrote it is at the centre or origin of the whole episode, then what Dickens gives us is a comically literal account of the centre not only unable to hold, but being unable to hold, producing instead a number of new, devastatingly eccentric multiples of the play.252

It is this operation of creating ‘eccentric multiples’ that Jones’ re-writing is presenting.

What Said suggests here is developed in post-colonial theory using Homi Bhabha’s concept of mimicry. The strength of Bhabha’s concept of mimicry rests on notions of slippage or excess produced by the colonial subject, who does not reproduce the same reading as the coloniser. This difference consequently becomes apparent from the act of enunciation. As such, Jones’ Thomas and Lucy presents the possibility of hybridising textuality. Moreover, by making specific reference to the section of Great

Expectations that specifically relates to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Jones’ characters are performing a double mimicry of the canonical texts. Sixty Lights exemplifies the possibility of further complicating the post-colonial project of unsettling canonical values by showing that it can write back to two canonical texts simultaneously.

Thomas and Lucy’s attempts to locate or inscribe their memory in the canonical text of

Great Expectations is an expression of a desire to become a part of the parents’ culture.

Through the operation of cultural consent, they wish to enter into the hegemony of

250 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intension in Narrative [1984], Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992, pp. 130-135 251 Steven Connor, Charles Dickens, London: Basil Blackwell, 1985, p. 131. 252 Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, p. 199.

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colonial rule. Yet, such inscription consequently contaminates the integrity of imperial discourse: the orphan figure is trying to fix its own ontological condition, against which a position is already constituted. How, then, can such position be disrupted? As observed above, both Lucy and Thomas do not seem to object to the Dickensian vision of Australia, but rather identify themselves with it, and thus refute conventional notions of self and other. On the other hand, both Thomas and Lucy read themselves in the dominant canonical discourse: that is, they read self into the other’s discourse, which constitutes their otherness as the expected condition in the centre, a marginalization that ultimately contradicts their expectations. The next section will explain how Jones opens up the moment of resistance within the characters who are under the spell of a dominant discourse. This is the reverse case of what Edward Said analyses as

Orientalist discourse, where the West displaces their own negative, repressed elements onto their construction of the Other. When the Oriental other reads Western Orientalist discourse, they find what the West expects them to be, whether such discourse accommodates with their vision or not. How do Thomas and Lucy become aware of their constructed position in the centre? As Marx used the metaphor of the camera obscura to explain the concept of ideology, how does Jones write a moment when her characters begin to see the original vision, before it has been adjusted ‘upside down?

ii. The Death of the Author

Sixty Lights features a particular case of the ‘death of the author’: that is, Charles

Dickens. Through the episode of the death of Dickens, Jones’ re-writing explores three layers of significance: firstly, the moment of a physical disappearance; secondly, the

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moment of an emotional detachment; and lastly, the metaphorical significance of the author as the father figure. Of course, the issue of the death of the author has particular resonance with Roland Barthes’s essay ‘The Death of the Author’, in which Barthes declares death to the conventional idea of authorship. Accordingly, Barthes argues that the concept of the author as the creator of sole authority over his/her work must go: it is the text that the critics engage with for their interpretation, not the author. In such a context, Barthes concludes his essay saying that ‘the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author’.253 Roland Barthes’s works are certainly one of the literary allusions in Sixty Lights, but it is assumed that the episode of Dickens’s death is explored in the book as an opportunity to examine the responses to the historical event of the author’s actual death, rather than his/her metaphysical death.

The death of Charles Dickens as a historical event occurred in June 1870. Jones’ reference to this historical date is accurate. Thomas joins in the funeral ceremony in

Westminster Abbey, and he feels a certain kind of ‘dignity’ in being able to pay his respects to the author at a ceremony of ‘historical importance’.254 Thomas certainly feels honoured that he can formally show his mourning to his favourite author and pseudo father figure. He also feels a sense of ‘dignity’ because of his official participation in the ceremony of national mourning. By attending the funeral and performing his role as part of the centre, he feels that he has become a part of the nation, and a spiritual son of Charles Dickens. This episode demonstrates how the orphan and the marginalised other desires to inscribe their own stories in a supposedly homogenous

253 Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image, Music, Text, Stephen Heath (trans.). New York: Hill and Wang, 1977, p. 148. 254 Jones, Sixty Lights, p. 172.

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place like Westminster Abbey; and as a consequence, the supposed homogeneity of the place is temporarily contaminated. However, this episode acquires another layer of sorrow when Thomas associates it with the death of his Uncle Neville, their adopted father. He speaks about Dickens’s funeral in a more elaborate manner in order to prevent himself from talking about the truly painful story of his Uncle’s death. Indeed,

Thomas’s loquacity about Dickens’s death is invoked to camouflage his agonising sorrow. Compared to Dickens’s, Neville’s death is a petty circumstance. For Thomas and Lucy, Dickens is simultaneously a site of authority, a spiritual father, and their rightful cultural inheritance—thus his novels show them the world and offer them the opportunity to describe their responses to it in the text produced in and by the centre.

But Neville was their material father figure. Later, Thomas tells Lucy about the scene of Neville’s death. He explains to her that ‘it was not like Dickens; it was base and awful and Neville looked disfigured and forlorn’.255 Thus, Thomas’s trust in his cultural father and his authority is disrupted. His ambivalent position in the centre becomes more critical towards his cultural inheritance, which is represented by

Dickens’s fiction.

This disruption of trust in canonical discourse and the author figure initiates an undermining of the dominant authority of Empire. Both Thomas and Lucy register their sense of alienation from Dickens’s world. Jones draws attention to how the historical event of the death of the author figure affects the reader, through the conjunction of their relative’s death. As discussed above, both Thomas and Lucy become critical of

Dickens and his authority. For them, the Dickensian world becomes illusory. The

255 Jones, Sixty Lights, p. 183. Quotation modified.

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brother distances himself from the Dickensian text, while the sister demystifies the author’s personal standing. After returning from India, Lucy always feels as though she is misplaced in the world. Her continuing sense of ‘wrong-being’ accelerates when she goes to see her brother Thomas’s magic lantern show, which featured in the Indian

Mutiny of 1857. There, she sees that the magic lantern show constructs a clear binary opposition between the civilised West and the barbarous Indians. Lucy complains with

Thomas after the show, but he says that it is a popular show that nourishes the ‘National

Spirit’.256 Having her view isolated from Thomas and his wife, she consults with

Dickens in a dream:

That night Lucy dreamed she met the dead author, Charles Dickens, walking in the street. He carried a lamp, like Diogenes, and his head was bent like a detective looking for clues. ‘This way,’ Dickens kept saying. ‘Follow me. This way. I’ll show you where it is.’ He pointed with his beard, as Indians do, and had a gently persuasive manner and a comic appearance. Ellen awoke Lucy before she discovered their destination or what they were seeking.257

Dickens shows her the light but he does not wait for her. Then she loses the light. This suggestive scene presents Lucy’s departure from Dickens, though it is not explicitly stated. It is Ellen that actually holds the light. Therefore, Lucy does not follow Dickens who is the author and a father figure. But Lucy’s departure from Dickens can be considered more critically, for Jones associates the Indian Mutiny with Dickens in this chapter. Dickens publicly made some racist comments and demonstrated a certain prejudice towards non-white races in response to the Indian Mutiny. 258 Although many recognise that Dickens’s views were probably driven by his concern for his son, Walter,

256 Jones, Sixty Lights, p. 185. 257 Jones, ibid., p. 186. Quotation modified. 258 See Grace Moore, ‘A Tale of Three Revolutions: Dickens’s Response to the Sepoy Rebellion’, in Dickens and Empire: Discourses of Class, Race and Colonialism in the Works of Charles Dickens, London: Ashgate, 2004, pp. 113-134. Also, Laura Peters, ‘Popular Orphan Adventure Narratives’, in Orphan Texts, pp. 61-78.

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who was in India as a colonial officer at the time of the upheaval,259 nonetheless, this section subtly suggests that Lucy finally comes to seek other lights, which do not come from the authoritative pen of Dickens.

So, Thomas takes distance from the Dickensian world of Great Expectations because its discourse becomes incapable of guiding him. Some time after Lucy passed away,

Thomas takes to his bed, just to read Great Expectations again. He takes time over its reading, choosing to revisit each memory that it evokes. He stops reading, however, at the scene of Magwitch’s deathbed in prison:

He lay on his back, breathing with great difficulty. Do what he would, and love me though he did, the light left his face ever and again, and a film came over the placid look at the white ceiling. ‘Are you in much pain to-day?’ ‘I don’t complain of none, dear boy.’ ‘You never do complain.’ He had spoken his last words. He smiled, and I understood his touch to mean that he wished to lift my hand, and lay it on his breast. I laid it there, and he smiled again, and put both his hands upon it.260

Nobody around him dies like this: all the death that surrounds Thomas is much more tragic and violent. Thomas cannot allow Dickens and Great Expectations to be his guidebook to the world, because it does not explain the reason for, or help him recover from, the deaths he has experienced: the story is thus seen as unreal, and the author as unreliable. While he has invested and inscribed many memories, even his history, in this location, he can no longer locate himself there. Through this process, the English book is stripped of its authority and universality. In his deep unfathomable grief,

Thomas loses himself. Entering a place of sheer abjection, he becomes detached from the location of his memory, history and time itself. He becomes an orphan all over again.

259 Moore, ‘Dickens and Empire, pp. 131-132. 260 Quoted in Jones, p. 249. Dickens, Great Expectations, p. 454.

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Conclusion

This chapter examined possible ways of resisting a dominant ideology through the practice of reading. In Gail Jones’ Sixty Lights, this mode of resistance is realised through the narrative structure, which takes a third-person point of view and describes how the characters respond to canonical English literature. In Jones’ ‘meta-reading re- writing’ of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, the characters become readers by being subjected to the ideologies represented in the canonical texts which ‘interpellates’ their subject. Sometimes, however, Jones’ characters do not intend to subvert the authority of the canonical text, but rather intend to gain filiation with the centre through learning the plots and scenarios of their own subject position. Therefore, it is not a rejection or denial of the dominant discourse, but rather the sense of alienation and disillusionment registered by the characters of Sixty Lights, that opens the possibility of further resistance and transformation of the dominant patriarchal and colonial discourse.

In Sixty Lights, the act of reading becomes a major mode of resistance to the dominant colonial discourse. It is this seemingly passive mode of resistance that undermines the universality of the canonical text and disrupts the homogenising authority of Empire.

Most of the characters in Sixty Lights read Victorian novels. They read for knowledge, leisure and communication with the enigmatic other. Being orphans who are adapted to life in the centre, the main characters’ displaced subject positions are further dislocated throughout the canonical text, which they read ultimately in search of a filiation or location of their history. Through the reading of canonical literature and the

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engagement with literary hegemony, their literary inheritance is transformed through their expectation of filiation, which is infinitely rehearsed and proliferated in the location of the canonical English text, Great Expectations.

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Conclusion: Inheritance and Expectations

The orphan figure signifies an ontological condition of ambivalence. It continuously searches for its origin, genesis and parentage. In the opening scene of Great

Expectations, little Pip is in the church graveyard. He attempts to read the epitaph on his family’s tombstone, but can only imagine their appearance from its shape and inscriptions: his father was ‘a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair’ and his mother was ‘freckled and sickly’. Later, he relates how he conceives this early memory in the churchyard as his beginning.

My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things, seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain, that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried.261

Pip designates his beginning as this tombstone, which he can now read. These names constitute his only genealogy, even though he has never seen their owners before, and has never had any sense of kinship towards them. It is a relationship of filiation, though its inheritance is ambiguous and uncertain. Immediately after identifying himself with the genealogy of the tombstone, Pip has a second beginning: he meets Magwitch, a man who scares him into bringing food, drink and a file from his brother-in-law’s household.

This is a relationship of affiliation, although its expectations of filiation are never fully realised. These scenes describe Pip’s double beginnings: he is parented both through his genealogical bloodline, and through his beneficiary arrangement. This is how he began, although later he comes to deny his ambiguous beginning.

261 Dickens, Great Expectations, pp. 3-4.

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This thesis has discussed the possibilities of the orphan as both figure and trope, in order to disrupt the authority and homogeneity of Empire. Its central assumption is that the orphan’s nominal condition as ‘parentless’ problematises the binary distinction between coloniser and the colonised, often represented as the parent and the child. It also focuses on the ambivalence of the orphan figure as a trope constituted by its double parentage, a duality that Said described as filiation and affiliation. The orphan figure is ambivalent because it necessarily has to engage with two types of familial relationships: the biological relationship of filiation, and the retrospective arrangement of affiliation.

Yet both filiation and affiliation operate through the construction of the binary of parent and child. As such, the question that this thesis poses is how the child becomes the orphan, a process that I have termed ‘to orphanise’. This process occurs at the moment that the orphan figure’s illegitimacy upsets the neat categorisation of the parent and child, and it is abjected to the outside of the family discourse. They begin by being subjected to the canonical text, only to challenge the ideological expectations of colonialism, which establishes them in the subordinate subject position of the child.

The orphan writes their own expectations over the expectations of their parent figure.

Even though both Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs and Gail Jones’ Sixty Lights are inspired by Great Expectations, each of these re-writings develops on this pre-text in different ways. In order to clarify the different ways of re-writing used in these novels, I would like to revisit three aspects from my previous discussion, and offer some comparisons.

Doing so will clarify how both texts subvert the dominant authority of the canon in a different way. The aspects that I would like to draw attention to are firstly, the

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historical setting; secondly, the issue of colonial inheritance; and thirdly, the issue of the author as the authoritative father figure.

The first comparison concerns the issue of truth. The story of Jack Maggs predates The

Death of Maggs, the equivalent work to Dickens’s Great Expectations. This reverse in chronology concerning the production of the canonical text and its re-writing is an attempt to subvert the authority of the canonical text. In Carey’s Jack Maggs, both

Maggs’ letter to Henry Phipps, which contains Maggs’ life story, and Oates’ records from his mesmerism session, which contains Maggs’s criminal secrets, take place prior to the writing and publication of Tobias Oates’ The Death of Maggs. In other words, both of these are pre-texts to the published canon, which is seen as containing undistorted ‘truth’. Here, the power hierarchy concerning the authentic and authoritative narrative is subverted: Maggs’ letter and Oates’ mesmerism records are more powerful than the published novel. But at the same time, both of these are only source-texts to the published novel: their use value is ‘consumed’ or ‘exploited’ by the authoritative author figure, whose narrative is informed by these raw materials. Jones’ re-writing is set in the period between the late 1840s and early 1870s, and the characters are Dickens’ contemporary readers. They do not influence the production of the canonical text itself, but they certainly do so by reading and responding to the story of

Great Expectations. The characters in Sixty Lights demonstrate the way the subject is generated through reading, and how a readerly subject can influence the way the text is read differently. In such a manner, the ‘truth’ is presented as a construct rather than a given, and is therefore not fixed. Jones also highlights the contingent nature of the reading practice. Accordingly, Sixty Lights suggests the possibility of subverting the

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dominance of imperial and patriarchal ideology by foregrounding personal interpretations of canonical texts, producing different kinds of readings, and revealing the constructed nature of canonical ‘truth’.

The second comparison relates to literary inheritance. Jack Maggs interrogates the myth of convict settlers as the nation’s founding fathers. Although the convict settlers are often considered to be the first settlers in Australia, and thus the first Australians,

Jack Maggs himself insists that he is an Englishman. Carey portrays Maggs as a successful and wealthy emancipist, but his birth and upbringing in England prevent him from becoming an Australian. By admitting he is a convict, but refusing to identify himself as an Australian, Maggs clearly denies his common identity as a convict and

Australian. Such an association contradicts Australia’s literary inheritance of convict narratives. Here, Carey contradicts those who hastily associate the convict settlers with the first Australians. In such a manner, Carey also problematises the genesis of the history of Australia and Australian people. Jones’ Sixty Lights finds its colonial inheritance in English books. These literary expressions are ‘remnant philosophies’262: words of wisdom that educate the characters in the skills essential for life. The archive of cultural inheritance to which the characters of Sixty Lights would like to belong is engaged with the relationship of filiation. Jones’ text uses the canonical works of

English literature as locations where subjects can generate and position themselves.

This cultural inheritance is not a fixed entity – it keeps changing shape according to the attitude of the person who receives it.

262 Jones, Sixty Lights, p. 117.

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The final comparison to be made is the issue of the author as patriarchal father figure.

In Jack Maggs, two father figures, that of Maggs himself and Tobias Oates, produce equally powerful discourses on the life of Maggs. Indeed, at least four discourses on

Maggs are presented in Carey’s narrative: Maggs’s letter to his benefactor son Henry, which tells the story of his life; Oates’ notes from the series of mesmerism sessions with

Maggs; Oates’ novel, The Death of Maggs; and the court procedure at the Old Bailey, during which Maggs is sentenced to transportation for life. Yet none of these rival discourses are permitted to dominate Carey’s re-writing. The issue of the author as the keeper of authority is also refuted by his characterisation. Contrary to Dickens’s

Magwitch, who risks his life to see Pip but is primarily obedient to the court’s decision,

Carey’s Maggs returns to London with an attention-catching ‘red waistcoat’.263 The author Tobias Oates is struggling financially, artistically and emotionally, and has almost ‘failed’ as an author and a father. This is a distinct contrast to Charles Dickens figure in Sixty Lights, who is respected as an exemplary father- and author-figure.

Dickens is considered to be an author who possesses superior knowledge and insight, particularly in England. He is also an author who knows about Australia, a trait that

Lucy and Thomas greatly respect. Thus, Dickens’ Great Expectations is an entry point into English society for them. Yet the dominant father eventually comes to lose his dignity in Sixty Lights not because of his death in 1870, but because of the decreasing persuasiveness of his story. In such a manner, the dominance of the authoritative father figure is disrupted.

263 Carey, Jack Maggs, p. 1.

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If the canonical text is a ‘point of departure’,264 where is the point of arrival? This brings the thesis to its last consideration: the issue of resistance in post-colonial rewritings. Do these re-writings actually achieve any form of resistance? My answer to this question would be a qualified ‘yes’: they achieve individual resistance, rather than collective ‘revolutionary’ resistance. Besides, post-colonial literary practice and criticism does not primarily intend to upturn the power hierarchy of coloniser and colonised. As Gramsci conceptualises hegemony as working through consent and coercion, so too an oppositional literature is born within the dominant ideology of the society. As such, it never achieves a completely independent subjectivity from such a position of dominance. But certainly, the post-colonial practice of counter-discourse is a politically driven reading practice. Indeed, it is a practice that re-politicises often hidden ideological assumptions in order to criticise them. Thus, post-colonial re- writing creates a moment of encounter in much in the same way as Lucy describes the

English classics as a ’metaphysical meeting space’265: to launch a dialogue between inheritance and expectations.

264 McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism, p. 143. Quotation modified. 265 Jones, Sixty Lights, p. 114.

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Bibliography

Primary Sources

Carey, Peter, Jack Maggs [1997], St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2001.

Dickens, Charles, Great Expectations [1861], Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

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