Brimstone Flowers: Towards an Antipodean Poetics of Space

LAURA JOSEPH

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

UNSW Submitted for examination August 2010

Abstract

This thesis contends that the ancient topos of the antipodes offers a productive means of reconceptualising location in an age characterized by increasingly global and virtual concepts of space. I demonstrate through analysis of range of literary texts that the location offered by the antipodes is neither a simple return to the premodern, nor the apprehension of a coherent, linear succession of times and places, but rather a realization of the simultaneity of these. The texts I analyse, diverse in historical and geographic location as well as mode and genre, are all produced in and associated with key moments of modernity. Comparing these texts that range across early- modern, colonial and postmodern (specifically post 9/11) historical moments, I map the tropological function of antipodean space as it pertains to identity and inhabitation. As a real and imagined space where geographic location and classical and Judeo-Christian cosmologies collide, representations of the antipodes are circumscribed by a metaphorics of classical and biblical underworlds. I demonstrate that these tropisms are key to relationships between the imaginative operations of antipodean space, transformations in the geographic imaginary and the emergence of particular formations of subjectivity.

Showing how contemporary antipodean fiction uses the tropisms of the past to make sense of what Bill Brown has called a moment of temporal, spatial and ideological “bewilderment” in Western thought, I examine how literature both informs and responds to dilemmas of real and symbolic location. In the contemporary texts analysed in the second half of the thesis, the imaginative tradition of the antipodes with its affinity with, and proximity to hell and classical underworlds is able to offer contingent and materially grounded resolutions to contemporary bewilderment. Finally, I argue that from this imagination a new vertical metaphorics can be seen to emerge, where the material specificity of region as a location of possibility departs from colonial and national spaces.

Acknowledgements

I could not have done this without the support of my family and friends, especially my parents, Jennifer and Patrick Joseph. This thesis is dedicated to them.

Nor would this have been possible without my inspiring and brilliant supervisor, Dr. Elizabeth McMahon. While a few sentences can’t convey the work of a great supervisor and just how much she is a part of this work, I would like to use this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude to her. The word inspiration seems insufficient for the profound illumination she has lent this work, and the guidance she has offered when I was, so many times, bewildered by the task. She has also been the best editor anyone could hope for, and a source of motivation, encouragement and above all, enduring patience. Here, along with Dr. McMahon I would also like to include my co- supervisor, Dr. Brigitta Olubas. Thank you both for teaching me to think not only critically and creatively, but also poetically, and showing me the pleasure, possibility and worth of this kind of work. Thank you also for sharing your insights about Dead Europe that provided the initial inspiration for this project. Further thanks to Dr. Olubas for her brilliant insights and advice on the final draft. I would also like to thank Prof Elizabeth Wilson for her advice and support early on in the project and for her invaluable feedback during the review process.

I am deeply appreciative of the support of the Women’s and Gender Studies convenors (Dr. McMahon, Dr. Olubas and Prof Wilson) for this project throughout my candidature, for not only encouraging me to move between literature and gender studies, but for establishing an intellectual culture and community that promotes interdisciplinary work. I am also grateful for the teaching opportunities they have provided to me.

My sincerest thanks to Lorraine Burdett and Dr. Devon Indig for proofreading the final drafts, often at very short notice.

An additional faculty scholarship provided by the UNSW Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences made it infinitely easier to focus on my research throughout my candidature. Funding from the Postgraduate Research Support Scheme made it possible to attend the national literatures conference held by the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

I would also like to take this opportunity to express gratitude towards the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) for postgraduate scholarships that made it possible to attend a number of ASAL conferences throughout Australia. ASAL has not only provided a forum for presenting and receiving feedback on research throughout my candidature, but has also made me feel very welcome in a vibrant intellectual community.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter One: Hell’s Antipodes 25

An invention of the poets 37 Dante’s antipodes: the way among the lost 40 Petrarch’s antipodes: manufacturing grace 48 Rabelais’ antipodes: “salvos of the bum” 57 Swift’s antipodes: proto-colonial chaos 70 Figures 1-7 81

Chapter Two: The Gardens of Hell 88

The fifth part of the earth 96 Sodom of the south 103 Type of a coming nation 116 Brimstone roses 123

Chapter Three: Digital Demons and the Real Hell of Postmodernity 142

Undead realism and the politics of fantasy 149 A temple and a skyscraper 154 This is not digital 165 Inhuman ethics 168 Abject dissent 179 Faustian bargains 189

Chapter Four: Opening the Gates of Hell 192

Poetics of space in Carpentaria and Dreamhunter 198 Serpents and golems 211 Poetics of place 217 Opening the gates of hell 221

Conclusion 232

Works Cited 239

1

Introduction

`--yes, that's about the right distance--but then I wonder what Latitude or Longitude I've got to?' (Alice had no idea what Latitude was, or Longitude either, but thought they were nice grand words to say).

Presently she began again. `I wonder if I shall fall right THROUGH the earth! How funny it'll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downward! The Antipathies, I think--' (she was rather glad there WAS no one listening, this time, as it didn't sound at all the right word) `--but I shall have to ask them what the name of the country is, you know. Please, Ma'am, is this New Zealand or Australia?'

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland1

The reconsideration of space is a defining characteristic of the present moment. Indeed, John R. Gillis named the last decade the “second great era of global expansion” in which “what once seemed such firm geographic distinctions are dissolving” (Gillis 19). Writing just before the current proliferation of virtual cartographies such as Google Earth, Gillis’ comment is even more pertinent in light of the present trajectory towards increasingly virtual spaces. As the nature of relations between premodernity, modernity and postmodernity becomes increasingly ambiguous, the statuses of not just spatial positions but also temporal location are definitive dilemmas of this moment of globalization. In his 2005 PMLA essay “The Dark Wood of Postmodernity (Space, Faith, Allegory)”, Bill Brown addresses these dilemmas when he speaks of the “cognitive impasse provoked by late capitalism” (Brown 736), where individual, collective, ideological, ontological and rhetorical positions are deeply unstable. Invoking the figure of Dante lost in the wood, Brown calls this rhetorical, temporal and spatial crisis “bewilderment”, and argues that this dislocation is a crucial ambiguity of our time.

1 Thank you to Beth Franklin for drawing my attention to this passage.

2

This bewilderment is directly addressed by recent critically-acclaimed and award-winning Australian and New Zealand novels, Christos Tsiolkas’ Dead Europe (2005), Elizabeth Knox’s The Vintner’s Luck (1998), Daylight (2003), and the Dreamhunter duet (2005, 2007), and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006). These novels negotiate this spatial, temporal and rhetorical dislocation by invoking the older spatial co-ordinates of prehumanist cosmologies: for Tsiolkas and Knox, this is the Judeo-Christian cosmology of heaven and hell. Wright invokes this cosmology also, but in combination with, and challenged by, her incorporation of the ancient world of Indigenous creative spirits. This thesis takes up these shared returns of older spaces, arguing it is these returns that enable the texts to rethink the relationship between location and identity within the dislocations inherent in this moment of globalization. Further, it is through the invocation of past worlds that the novels, particularly Wright’s Carpentaria and Knox’s Dreamhunter, depart from colonial and national imaginaries and move toward a new metaphorics of inhabitation. By incorporating these ancient cosmologies into the contemporary world through realism, and thus rendering them material rather than metaphoric, these texts demand a critical rethinking of space. The questions of location and identity that the novels negotiate in this rethinking of space are not grounded in the specific terms of Australian or New Zealand nationality. Rather, these novels offer ways to inhabit and become according to the terms of the antipodean imagination.

This thesis argues that, as the subterranean stratum of contemporary globalised relations, the ancient topos of the antipodes offers a way to navigate and rethink these relations and contemporary questions of location and identity within economies of representation. Specifically, I demonstrate how poetic and rhetorical operations of the older spatial coordinates of the antipodes, such as they are deployed in these contemporary novels, can make sense of this present bewilderment. The innovation and intervention of these novels in relation to contemporary bewilderment and attendant questions 3 about the statuses of spatial and temporal location as they are formulated by Brown are inaugural to this thesis. Given that these texts and these questions are propelled by retrospective movements, this thesis also looks back to prehumanist cosmologies and the changing valences of the antipodes in the early modern European imagination. In order to read the particular interventions of the contemporary texts, I first analyse various formations of the antipodean imagination in a range of literary texts, beginning with Dante’s “Inferno”. These earlier texts, diverse in historical and geographic location as well as mode and genre, are produced in, and associated with, key moments of modernity. By looking back to these early modern and colonial texts, the first half of this thesis establishes a model that enables us to read the returns to earlier spatial imaginaries enacted by the contemporary fiction as both embedded within, and departing from, traditions of antipodean writing. This method of comparative reading across a diverse range of texts that have in common the imaginative and real space of the antipodes shows that thinking from the antipodes gives us a sense of the multitude of times within the present and of the multitude of spaces within what we think of as place. In the model of the antipodean imagination it develops, this thesis offers not only new ways to read the contemporary texts, but also contributes to the understanding of the antipodes as a productive vantage point from which to view contemporary globalised relations. Further, this thesis contributes to trans-Tasman studies by demonstrating some of the ways in which the antipodes constitutes a position from which to productively read Australian and New Zealand literature together.

In its particular focus on literary and poetic representations of antipodean space, this analysis is methodologically aligned with rhetorical geography. Indeed, the word “topography” itself exemplifies the mutual effects and complex relationship between rhetoric and geography, as J. Hillis Miller demonstrates. Combining the Greek words for place (topos), and to write (graphein), the etymological meaning of topography is “the writing of a place” (Miller 3). From this origin, Miller explains: 4

The current usage of topography is the product of a triple figurative transference…'Topography' originally meant the creation of a metaphorical equivalent in words of a landscape. Then, by another transfer, it came to mean representation of a landscape according to the controversial signs of some system of mapping. Finally, by a third transfer, the name of the map was carried over to name what was mapped (3-4).

Miller’s exegesis of the slippages inherent within “topography” exemplifies the extent to which space is symbolically inscribed and that notionality and reality can never be wholly separated. What rhetorical geography thus enables is an apprehension of the inter-implication of imaginative spaces and real places. Using space as a point of departure for literary analysis in this way furthers understanding of the relationship between space, subjectivity and literature in antipodean fiction. The particular terms of this analysis relate to the function of the antipodes as an underworld space.

As a point of collision between classical and Judeo-Christian cosmologies and geographic reality, the antipodes straddle the threshold of imaginary and real spaces. Because of their location between these real and imaginary worlds, the antipodes have a relation of proximity to classical and biblical underworlds in the European imagination: where the vertical cosmology of heaven, earth and hell is superimposed over the globe, the antipodes and hell share the same position. To cite an example from a key text of this thesis, in Dante’s “Inferno” the antipodes function as the point of egress from hell. From “Inferno” and a range of texts that follow Dante’s epic poem, this analysis argues for the locating and transformative effects of the antipodean underworld.

I use four perspectives, or compass points, to chart the various formations of this antipodean underworld imaginary, and the effects this representative schema has for location and identity. These coordinates are verticality, liminality, materiality and perversity, and pertain to narrative movement, spatial operations and modes of subjectivity. These related but distinct 5 locating points of analysis cast into relief the overlap of, and circulation between, imagined and real spaces.

Verticality, the first in terms of these lenses, pertains to the underworld associations of the antipodes, the residue of the prehumanist cosmology, and geographic location of Australia and New Zealand in the southern hemisphere. In all of these instances, the antipodes are reached through descent, in journeys from North to South. Both domains considered to be “below”, viewing the antipodes and the underworld in terms of their placement within a vertical metaphorics shows how the two might be conflated. Because of this imaginative connection, vertical metaphorics are key to the much of the narrative analysis undertaken in this thesis. Here I am specifically referring to the conventions of katabasis, or descent narratives, and anabasis or ascent narratives. The significance of the relation between verticality and narrative is underscored by Northrop Frye, who argues that descents and ascents constitute the “four primary narrative movements in literature…[a]ll stories in literature are complications of, or metaphorical derivations from, these four narrative radicals” (Frye The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance 97). At the level of the trope, vertical movements, and descents in particular constitute key metaphors of inhabitation. In Australian and New Zealand colonial texts, for example, digging, planting and burial are inaugural acts of settlement.

Also in the order of spatiality, the second critical lens or compass point deployed in this thesis is the terrain of the liminal. As we shall see, liminality designates the effects of the antipodes as a simultaneously real and imagined place. Furthermore, this constitutive paradox sees the antipodes enacting a threshold function, straddling a number of binaries. We thus see a range of contradictions where the antipodes move between ancient and modern, natural and artificial, utopian and dystopian, real and notional, literal and metaphoric. The antipodes do not always inhabit these contradictory terms simultaneously, but oscillate between them. This thesis contends that it is 6 precisely this dynamism and ambiguity that designates antipodean liminality as a state of potential.

The potential of the undefined also relates to the third point of critical location, materiality. This compass point specifically refers to the material imagination as Gaston Bachelard defines it. Opposed to the fixed limits of form, the imagined realm of matter pertains to the unformed, and is replete with the potential of the unmade. As liminal substance imbued with creative and destructive potential, this material domain is a generative domain. As Bachelard explains, this generative potential accords with the creative power of the material imagination. For Bachelard, as “the very principle that can dissociate itself from forms”, the material imagination is imbued with a transformative, “individualising power” (Bachelard Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter 2). Materiality is also connected to verticality. As opposed to the ethereal qualities generally attributed to higher realms, materiality is associated with realms of and below the earth, and is thus a conventional characteristic in the representation of underworlds. Understanding the material imagination as imbued with transformative properties, as Bachelard argues, shows that lower worlds of hell and the antipodes are sites of generative potential, and, as this thesis will argue, charged sites of colonial becoming.

As the mode of subjective response with the lower and liminal, perversity – the fourth frame of analysis deployed in this thesis – is a crucial mode of becoming and inhabitation in this schema. A response of the subject to the world, perversity connects the realms of space and self. The perverse subject inhabits a space that is at once aside from and below the norm. In the process of the white European subject not only travelling to, but attempting to live in the antipodean underworld, perversity is a key trope of inhabitation and a charged site of antipodean identity formation. In literary and poetic representations of this process, the perverse and protean becomings of the white antipodean subject are often enacted according to satanic self-invention. 7

Considered inaugural to Lucifer’s turn from God and thus instrumental of satanic self-invention, perversity is a definitive characteristic of hell and those who inhabit it. Perversity is thus crucial to the spatial, temporal and subjective formations discussed in this thesis, and enables us to chart the interconnection of colonial subjectivity, space and literature. It is not only implicated in the tropes of hell and the antipodes I analyse, but is specifically related to, and implicated in, the production of nineteenth-century discourses of subjectivity. I demonstrate this connection in my second chapter through the example of the Van Diemen’s Land penal colonies, where earlier biblical models of perversity intersect with the production of nineteenth-century discourses of sexuality, degeneration and aberrance.

I argue that as a key operation of antipodean space, perversity exhibits the generative functions that are both outlined and rehearsed by Sigmund Freud’s definitive work on the subject. The general understanding of perversity, particularly sexual perversity, locates it as a category of exclusion, of aberrations from the norm. But, as Freud shows us, the aberrant is actually what defines the norm. The generative qualities of perversity are both identified and rehearsed in Freud’s formulation of the term in his work on “The Sexual Aberrations”. Analysis of the operation of “inversion” leads Freud to see a perverse mechanism or potential in every subject, where “[n]o healthy person, it appears, can fail to make some addition that might be called perverse to the normal sexual aim…” (Freud 74). Perversity generates itself through a kind of metonymic contagion, where it then infects all sexuality:

[t]hus from the point of view of Psychoanalysis the exclusive sexual interest felt by men for women is also a problem that needs elucidating and is not a self evident fact based upon attraction that is ultimately of a chemical nature (57).

Here perversity not only demonstrates the autogenetic quality of satanic self- origination, but reproduces itself through contagion. These generative 8 mechanisms of autogenesis and metonymic dispersal are crucial to the concept of perversity as I deploy it in this analysis.

Through this rubric of antipodean liminality, verticality, perversity and materiality, this thesis seeks to extend and deepen understanding of the topoi through which we consider Australian and New Zealand colonial inhabitation, as habitation is a profound issue for colonialism. This analysis demonstrates how literature is specifically imbricated in and both informs and responds to the dilemmas of location and identity that mark key moments of modernity. Also at stake in this investigation are the formations of colonial, national and regional identities. This thesis demonstrates the utility of this spatial imaginary as a way to consider these identities through the literature of and from the antipodes and according to an alternative set of temporalities.

In order to engage with the dynamics of subject formation in a way that can identify particularity as well as paradox and that does not insist upon coherence or non-contradiction, this thesis draws on psychoanalysis, deconstruction and queer theory. Integral therefore to this analysis are Michel Foucault’s genealogical study of discourses of perversity, Julia Kristeva’s theorization of abjection and Jean-François Lyotard’s formulation of the inhuman. These theorizations of perversity and subjectivity are further pertinent as this thesis argues for the mutual constitution of perverse, colonial and national subjects. Furthermore, these models of where the subject comes undone allow us to understand how a subject is formed. In thinking the relationship between subjectivity, space, and language, and indeed for trans- national politics, aesthetics, and criticism to not be a universalising project, specificity, singularity, particularity, peculiarity must be accounted for. Queer theory is one approach in which this is possible – as queer literary theorist Lee Edelman puts it “queerness can never define an identity, it can only disturb one” (Edelman 17), an insight enabled by psychoanalysis’ understanding of the instability of subjectivity, of the difference within the self. 9

A model that can accommodate the complex dynamics of identity formation is also required when considering broader identity categories of colony, nation and region. In trying to conceptualise colonial, national and regional identities without privileging one of these as an organizing category, or even a point of departure, this work is methodologically aligned with settlement studies. Settlement studies is indebted to, and departs from, postcolonial studies through its concern with emphasizing the dynamics of encounter rather than focusing on locations of self and other. In their introduction to the 2002 Special Issue of Journal of New Zealand Literature, Alex Calder and Stephen Turner define settlement studies as “encompass[ing] issues to do with the large-scale movement of people to a foreign land, involving a full- scale reconstruction of people and place for both settler and indigene” (Calder 7). Calder and Turner distinguish settlement studies from postcolonial criticism through a different approach to subject positions, where:

[i]f postcolonial criticism can be said to complicate the relation of self and other in a simple moment of encounter, settlement studies reverses that emphasis: in a more complex understanding of the dynamics of the encounter, self and other are not particularly useful categories (8).

Of course, no encounter is ever, or has ever been, “simple”. Settlement studies offers a different way of thinking about encounter where self and other are not the main focus. Turner argues for the centrality of temporality in considering what he calls “colonial being”, which, as he explains is “a mode of being in a place which is discontinuous with the past of that place” (in Calder, 10). Here Turner indicates the imperative to consider temporality for the necessarily dislocated mode of inhabitation for the non-indigenous settler.

Because of its European origins, the antipodean imaginary I take as my focus is a white, western one, and the dislocation and bewilderment I refer to are the experiences of the white, western subject. Beneath, above and alongside this cosmology and topoi of inhabitation are competing imaginaries 10 of space. The European antipodean imaginary is most profoundly preceded and challenged by indigenous knowledges and narratives about place2. Kim Scott, Sam Watson, Alexis Wright in Australia, and Maori writers Keri Hulme, Patricia Grace, Witi Ihimaera in New Zealand, for example, are all contemporary writers that imagine, map, narrate models of and relationships to place that are radically different from the very specific white, western antipodean imagination I address in this thesis. Prior to, and simultaneous with, the western tradition I am examining are these narratives of place mapped according to very different parameters. As Lydia Wevers argues via James Clifford, “the power of place”, in which “a desire called ‘the land,’ is differently, persistently active”, is an “enduring constraint” within “the changing mix of ‘differently articulated sites of indigeneity’” (Wevers "Globalising Indigenes: Postcolonial Fiction from Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific" 123). Wright’s Carpentaria is a key focus of this thesis and the subject of the final chapter because it directly engages with and challenges the European antipodean imaginary precisely through such “power of place”.

Imposed upon these “differently articulated sites of indigeneity” the colonial narratives of inhabitation I examine are uneasy, unstable and inherently dislocated. As Turner explains in his work on “colonial being”, for the “colonial experience of place”:

the history of the place, considered as singular, continuous, now unified, the foundation therefore of identity and nationhood, is broken. The idea of one history/nation/people flies in the face of this historical discontinuity, making the attendant narrative a rickety footbridge through over an abyss. Colonial being registers the unstable ground of place, the hole beneath the whole, moral pit of settlement (Turner 63).

Attention to the instability of what Turner calls here the “rickety footbridge” of colonial narratives of identity and inhabitation might approach the mode of

2 For a comparative analysis of temporality and spatiality in contemporary Aboriginal and Maori literature in English, see Eva Rask Knudsen, The Circle & the Spiral: A Study of Australian Aboriginal and New Zealand Maori Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004). 11 thinking Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs call for in Uncanny Australia. In being attentive to the “unstable ground of place” in the colonial experience, this mode of thinking is able:

to contemplate the possibility of producing a postcolonial narrative which, rather than falling into a binary that either distinguishes ‘us’ from ‘them’ or brings us all together as the same, would instead think through the uncanny implications of being in place and ‘out of place’ at precisely the same time (139).

It is not only colonial texts that enable this perspective; Indigenous writing also opens these possibilities, and this is the key focus of the final chapter of this thesis. Wright’s Carpentaria recognises these multiplicities and opens possibilities for the antipodean imaginary in the way Lisa Slater argues Scott’s 1999 novel Benang does, as a text that “is a meeting place—a site…which recognises that on the ground beneath our feet ‘there are many stories’” (Slater 495). Texts such as these evidence Wevers’ claim that “[i]f indigenous texts are the counter-narrative to the discursive and ideological spectres of globalisation and work to dislodge the nation state as primary dialogic partner, the reimagined world has shifted ground” (Wevers "Globalising Indigenes: Postcolonial Fiction from Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific" 130).

In the tradition of both post-colonial and settlement studies, this thesis engages in comparative literary analysis. The primary comparison this thesis draws is between Australia and New Zealand. Here I follow models of reading across the Tasman established within Australian and New Zealand literary studies. As Elizabeth Webby and Lydia Wevers have argued, Australia and New Zealand share a range of proximities, and the literature of both countries “can claim many similarities, and in the colonial and immediately post-colonial periods particularly the commonly accepted notion of Australasia indicated the degree of identity felt by the two countries” (Webby and Wevers, vii). Reading via the antipodes contributes to trans- Tasman studies by offering a spatial model that, by not taking nation as a 12 point of departure, is able to read across these proximate nations and colonial histories.

In using the antipodes as a model for trans-Tasman reading, this thesis draws upon and contributes to the recent body of scholarship on the antipodes. Recent studies of the antipodes by Matthew Boyd Goldie (2009), Alfred Hiatt (2008), Paul Longley Arthur (1999), Simon Ryan (1996), William McCready (1996) and David Fausett (1995) are part of a current proliferation of scholarship on contemporary geographic regions, particularly outmoded ones. This scholarship can be seen as part of a global remapping, a means of considering the imaginative valences of space at this moment characterized by increasingly virtual cartographies. Of these studies, this thesis engages with Goldie’s work in particular because his model enables an understanding of the liminality of antipodean space. In his work on the “besideness” of the antipodes, Goldie demonstrates the ways in which antipodean spaces operate horizontally, how global opposites often sit next to each other. Further, Goldie draws attention to the paradoxical temporality of the antipodes, where:

their ambiguous location and ontology, and their complicated correspondences seem to punctuate time in uncanny ways, ways that can, for instance, seem prescient even in a very early chronological period and banally old-fashioned in the most recent times (Goldie 7).

I deploy Goldie’s model of this contradictory, Janus-faced temporality to argue for the liminal, threshold function of the antipodes. Indeed, this temporality structures this work, inspired as it is by the operations in the contemporary fiction (Dead Europe, Daylight, Carpentaria, and Dreamhunter) that glance backward to premodern imaginaries and cosmologies. I extend Goldie’s thesis arguing that the antipodes not only straddle ancient and modern, but also real and imaginary, and natural and artificial coordinates.

This thesis departs significantly from Goldie’s work in that while he examines the antipodes as geographical opposites, I am concerned with 13 where that opposite status intersects with the South. I specifically focus on the cohabitation of the vertical imaginary of the Judeo-Christian cosmology with the geographic reality of the Southern Hemisphere. Thus Australia and New Zealand are the focus of this thesis rather than the Pacific – the area that, as Goldie points out, includes the exact antipodes of England. While Goldie emphasizes relations of surface rather than depth, I am concerned with the tropology of verticality that circumscribes antipodean space, where depth is both a key image and narrative direction.

In his analysis of the antipodes, Goldie seeks, like Eve Sedgwick (whose approach of “besideness” he follows) to avoid “the topos of depth or hiddenness, typically followed by a drama of exposure, that has been a staple of critical work in the past four decades” (in Goldie, 8). This thesis argues for the productivity of reading the antipodes in light of metaphors of depth. In her work on the underground and technology Rosalind Williams claims verticality is intrinsic to the imagination itself, as “the metaphor of depth is a primary category of human thought” (R. Williams 8). She cites Marxism and Psychoanalysis as examples of this, as “both Marx and Freud depend so much upon subterranean images that it is now virtually impossible to read a text about the underworld without filtering it through a Marxian or Freudian interpretation” (48). The verticalities mapped in this analysis are not, as Sedgwick says, a critical “uncovering” or “expos[ing] of residual forms of essentialism”. Rather, these descending and ascending movements are the topoi of particularity that emerge from place itself. In tracing these descents and ascents, I seek to demonstrate the productivity of these vertical dynamics that are at once new and familiar, and avowedly material. This focus on verticality is not a return to a hermeneutics of essence, but rather an argument for an imaginative topography and rhetorical strategy that are enabling of departures from the horizontal perspective of colonial centres and peripheries.

14

As a narrative of both descent and transformation of the self, an understanding of the operations of katabasis offers a way to view these models of subject formation in relation to space as they unfold in literature. In her work on Hell in Contemporary Literature (2005), literary critic Rachel Falconer outlines the conventions of a katabatic narrative as follows:

In essence, whether comic or tragic, the narrative dynamic of katabasis consists of three movements: a descent, an inversion or a turning upside down at a zero point and a return to the surface of some kind (Falconer 45).

Katabasis enables a way to view the relation between the vertical imagination, writing and subjectivity as those spheres intersect in literature and poetry. As a narrative of the transformation of the self, katabasis is crucial to understanding the relation between antipodean imaginary and the range of identity formations that emerge from within it.

Katabasis is not only a key narrative device in the texts this thesis takes as its focus, but, as Falconer argues, constitutes a fundamental structure of the Western imagination I am exploring:

If Dante’s “Inferno” feels contemporary, this is not only because it embodies a vast inheritance of Western literary and theological myths, but also we are accustomed to thinking about the modern psyche, and political and social economy, in katabatic terms (3).

Falconer also reminds us of the function of katabatic narratives as narratives of identity formation, where “[i]n the Western imaginative tradition, even more important than the notion of Hell as a sacred space is our belief in the Journey through Hell, in the idea of a transformative passage, the destruction and rebirth of the self through an encounter with the absolute Other” (1).

This thesis extends Falconer’s contention that the Western psyche is characterised by a “katabatic imagination”, which she explains is “a world- 15 view which conceives of self-hood as the narrative construct of an infernal journey and return” (2), to argue that the imaginative and historical inhabitation of the antipodes unfolded according to the structure of katabasis. As such, katabasis remains a charged metaphor within this particular spatial imaginary. The thesis itself is structurally informed by the movement of a katabatic narrative. The first two chapters focus on descents, while the third concentrates on a ground zero moment, and the fourth and final chapter analyses ascent or anabasis in recent antipodean literature.

Given that the nature of this relation between imaginative spaces and real places is one of the key questions addressed by this thesis, Gaston Bachelard’s concept of the poetic image provides an ideal model for analysis. Further, Bachelard’s concept explicitly engages with liminality, verticality and materiality, which, along with perversity, constitute the four main operations of antipodean space I map. Bachelard’s phenomenological approach is enabling because it does not turn the material world into metaphor, it insists, rather, upon history and experience. Nor does it diminish the imagination, and thus offers a way to hold on to the complex exchanges between imaginary and real spaces. Bachelard lays a path to understanding that material and imaginative spheres are not so separate, as he explains “[a] material image dynamically experienced [such as the tactile sensation of digging into the earth with one's fingers], passionately adopted, patiently explored, is an opening in every sense of the word, in its real sense and its figurative sense” (Bachelard Earth and Reveries of Will: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter 24).

Not attributing precedence to either material or imaginative domains circumvents a causal, linear temporality, and can accommodate contradiction. As Bachelard puts it, “the poetic image is essentially variational, and not, as in the case of the concept, constitutive” (The Poetics of Space xix, italics in original). As an emergence of newness that is also an echo of an ancient, seemingly timeless archetype, for example one of the four elements of water, fire, air or 16 earth, the poetic image is itself contradictory. The poetic image as Bachelard outlines it is also in keeping with the contradictory, janus-faced and paradoxical temporality of the antipodes, as “[the poetic image] is not an echo of the past. On the contrary: through the brilliance of an image, the distant past resounds with echoes, and it is hard to know at what depth these echoes will reverberate and die away” (The Poetics of Space xvi). Indeed, as Bachelard clarifies in his final, unfinished work, “the poetic image for its part has no history at all” (Fragments of a Poetics of Fire 7).

Further, Bachelard’s phenomenological approach to the poetic imagination offers a mode of analysis that proceeds from the subject, rather than being imposed upon it. The case for this mode of thinking where one does not know in advance what the outcome will be was recently made by Sedgwick in her polemic argument against the “anticipatory” paranoid epistemology of critical theory. Sedgwick argues for the importance of finding a way out of an “always already” (Sedgwick 8-9) mode of criticism that knows its outcome at the outset. The poetic image requires an openness to surprise, and thus offers a way of thinking that can accommodate this, for, as Bachelard says, “to pick up on all the surprises in poetic language it is necessary that one give oneself over to kaleidoscopic consciousness” (Fragments of a Poetics of Fire, 7).

As such an emergence of newness within language in direct relation to the material world, the poetic image highlights the deep and intimate connections between spaces and subjects. In this dynamic model of moves between interior and exterior worlds, language is an origin as “the poet speaks on the threshold of being” (The Poetics of Space xvi). This process goes both ways, as Bachelard argues the poetic image takes us to the origin of language, placing us

at the origin of the speaking being…[The poetic image] has been given us by another, but we begin to have the impression that we could have created it, that we should have created it. It becomes a new being in our language, expressing us by making us what it expresses; in other words, it is at once a becoming of expression, and a 17

becoming of our being. Here expression creates being.[…]Through this creativeness the imagining consciousness proves to be, very simply but very purely, an origin (The Poetics of Space xxiii-xxiv).

As the source of this chiasmus of speech and being, the imagination is both a “becoming” and an “origin”. Reading via this understanding enables us to see the kind of becoming made possible by the particular imaginary that circumscribes antipodean space.

Each of the four chapters of this thesis analyses a different permutation of this antipodean imaginary and the particular consequences of this imaginary for temporality, representation and subjectivity. Though the chronological order demonstrates change over time in the tropologies in question, this arrangement of texts is not intended to make the case for a teleological progression, rather to show a complex and paradoxical temporality. This analysis also progresses according to a process of increasing differentiation, moving from Europe to the antipodes, from the antipodes to nations, and from nations to regions. The thesis is comparative, though the consideration of antipodean penal colonies in Chapter Two necessarily focuses on Australia, and Van Diemen’s Land in particular. The texts I examine are from Australia and New Zealand as antipodean space and not nation grounds my analysis.

Both Australian and New Zealand literature display elements of a shared metaphorics, which I argue is indicative of a particular antipodean imaginary. The contemporary texts that are the focus of chapters three and four are Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas’ novel, Dead Europe (2005), New Zealand writer Elizabeth Knox’s novels The Vintner’s Luck (1998), Daylight (2003), and the fantasy duet, Dreamhunter (2005) and Dreamquake (2007), and Indigenous Australian writer Alexis Wright’s novel Carpentaria (2006). These writers are three of the most controversial and critically acclaimed3 of their generation.

3 Dead Europe received the Age Book of the Year Award in 2006. Daylight was short-listed for Best Book in the South Pacific & South East Asian Region of the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize. The Vintner’s Luck was winner of the Deutz Medal for fiction in the 1999 Montana New 18

These comparative studies are ordered by contemporaneity (Knox and Tsiolkas, Knox and Wright). This arrangement of these particular texts aims to contribute not only original readings and open understandings of these novels but also move towards furthering work on rhetorical geography and the material imagination applied to Australian and New Zealand literature.

Chapter One argues for the function of the antipodes as an enabling spatial metaphor for a range of formations of the humanist subject. Specifically, I analyse the operation of antipodean space in relation to the emergence of four distinct versions of the human subject in iconic early modern texts. The texts I examine, Dante Alighieri’s “Inferno” (1308-1321), Francesco Petrarch’s Il Canzoniere (1327-1368), Francois Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532- 1553) and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), all explicitly engage with the changing European cartographic and cosmological imagination through the ambivalent space of the antipodes. Spanning the medieval period to the age of discovery, these four iconic poetry and prose works are all considered inaugural texts for a particular version of the humanist subject. Each of these distinct subjects emerges alongside shifts in the European philosophic and cartographic imagination. Dante’s “Inferno” rehearses a process of differentiation where the individual subject emerges from the collective. In the poetry of Petrarch, the “father of humanism”, a humanist subjectivity is realised through a turn from the divine to the self, and through melancholy insights that attend the contemplation of mortality. In the work of Rabelais, the humanist subject is reborn not through individuation, but the collapse of the separate self back into the collective body. As ontogenetic and phylogenetic chaos, Swift’s misanthropic vision enacts the undoing of all these subjects. The antipodes have a different spatiality and function for each of these subjects.

Zealand Book Awards, and has been adapted into a film by Niki Caro (Whale Rider; North Country) (The Vintner’s Luck, 2009). Dreamhunter won the Esther Glen Medal and an American Library Association (ALA) Best Book for Young Adults 2007, and Dreamquake won a Michael L Printz Award in 2008 and an ALA Best book award in the same year. Awards received by Carpentaria include the Miles Franklin Literary Award (2007) and the ALS Gold Medal (2007). 19

Tracing a shift from location, to dislocation, to collective integration and collective alienation in these texts, this first chapter argues that these movements are deeply implicated in the distinct representation of antipodean space in each text. On the cusp of medieval and Renaissance cosmologies, Dante’s “Inferno” rehearses a process of individuation that moves from bewilderment to location. I argue that the antipodes function as a trope of location in this journey of individuation, and, further, are integral to the poem’s construction of a coherent cosmos. A generation later, in Petrarch’s Il Canzoniere, the humanist subject emerges according to a melancholy formulation of subjectivity that is ungrounded, that lacks location. As the signifier of geographic distance par excellence, I argue that the antipodes function at this moment and for this subject as a spatialising trope of an abyss between language and the real. Nearly two hundred years later in the grotesque and comedic work of Rabelais, at the height of the French Renaissance, the antipodes figure the collapse of the individual back into the collective body, and the shattering of the hierarchical medieval world. I argue Rabelais’ antipodes signify the generative material sphere and thrust the subject back into the creative substance and dynamics of the corporeal. In the age of discovery during the eighteenth-century, Swift’s satirical Gulliver’s Travels constructs a subject alienated from both itself and its species, and at this moment the antipodes signify incoherence and dislocation on both individual and collective registers. As the proto-colonial novel, Gulliver’s Travels stands at an intersection of narrative and historical voyages; a collision of reality and fantasy. With this shift into the real, antipodean strangeness becomes threatening rather than fascinating.

This transposition from the imagined space of the antipodes to the European encounter with their geographic reality is far from simple, as Chapter Two will demonstrate. The features of antipodean verticality, liminality, materiality and perversity not only circumscribe this encounter, but are further complicated by the strangeness of the place itself. Here what seems like a straightforward move from a notional space to a real place 20 actually further complicates these co-ordinates. This chapter argues specifically for the productivity of this collision through its intersection with, and crucial role in the production of nineteenth-century discourses of aberrance and perversity. Further, I argue that perverse genesis is a particularly forceful mode of colonial becoming, and, along with hell, serves as a key trope of colonial inhabitation.

In examining a range of nineteenth-century texts, it becomes clear that the European encounter with antipodean space was both shaped by and crucial in shaping nineteenth-century discourses of typology and perversity. Australia’s unique ecology, for example, is represented according to familiar tropes of antipodean inversion and perversity, but the strangeness of the material reality exceeds these projections to the point where paradigm shifts in a range of disciplines appear as a result of this natural peculiarity. This chapter demonstrates further how the antipodes continue to function as an underworld space, as hell and perversity function as tropes of location and inhabitation. I argue for the deep resonance of these tropes through the example of the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land, which I argue is a literal manifestation of antipodean metaphorics. The complexity of this encounter is apparent as discourses of taxonomy and aberrance intersect with the Judeo- Christian imaginary, which remains present as the colony is repeatedly described according to biblical language of perversity, a “Sodom”, and “Gomorrah”.

Analysing the key literary text of Tasmanian hell and perversity, Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life (1874) in light of this intersection casts into relief key functions of colonial perverse becoming. In this reading I show that the transformations that propel this narrative are underscored by an abject materiality that is both monstrous and generative. These transformations and material becomings are generated at the intersection of the premodern imaginary and contemporary discourses of perversity. Suspended between contradictory terms of ancient and modern, natural and 21 artificial and notional and real, in this text antipodean liminality engenders a huge range of potential and partial formations. These multiple and avowedly material becomings are enabled through the contradictory tension that circumscribes the antipodes, and capture the colonial subject in a state of continual formation.

Having established the generative potential offered by the perverse and the liminal as modes of colonial becoming, I demonstrate the further operation of hell and perversity as tropes of inhabitation. I argue this tropology is crucial to the formation of national identity through the iconic literature and poetry of the 1890s. As Australian literary critics such as Vance Palmer and Richard White have argued, the literature and poetry of this “legendary” decade is considered formative of a national sensibility, even and especially if this significance is retrospective (Palmer; White). This literature is characterized by a proliferation of tropes of monstrosity, inversion and perversity. I argue that these tropes function as a strategy of inhabitation, working to inscribe increasing topographical specificity.

Chapter Three examines a return to premodern and prehumanist cosmologies in antipodean literature at a historical moment when co- ordinates of temporal, rhetorical, ideological and ontological locations are deeply unstable. This chapter specifically examines how Tsiolkas’ Dead Europe (2005) and Knox’s Daylight (2003) negotiate this crisis of ideology, history and meaning according to the antipodean tropology mapped by the previous two chapters. I compare these novels as antipodean rather than Australasian because both engage with the prehumanist imaginary of the antipodes where liminality, verticality, perversity and materiality are key features. These texts both invoke the pre-humanist cosmology of premodernity (heaven and hell) and the post-human forms of modernity and postmodernity (vampires) in response to a moment when domains of real and symbolic are deeply confused. This chapter asks how the antipodean imaginary functions in an age characterized by what Brown terms “bewilderment”. When conventional 22 trajectories tend towards symbolic meaning as a way to navigate this bewilderment, these antipodean responses instantiate the material.

Both concerned with temporalities, technologies and economies of representation, these antipodean novels display a configuration of reality and representation distinct from the versions of this relationship analysed in previous chapters. In these texts, the relationship between reality and representation is staged through the opposition between symbolic systems of analog and digital. Both insisting on anachronistic forms of representation, in Dead Europe photography, and in Daylight painting and writing, the novels offer the continuous signal of analog systems as a challenge to the binary components of digitality, insisting on the real when the usual symbolic markers of location – temporality and spatiality – are deeply unstable. In this antipodean imaginary, as in its various formations mapped by the last two chapters, new and old are still complexly, and paradoxically intertwined. I contend that the combined operations of verticality, liminality, perversity and materiality position the antipodean imaginary, as it is deployed in these novels, as uniquely suited to finding a way through what Brown calls the “bewilderment” generated by a postmodernity seemingly “unavailable to itself”.

These novels both mark a major return of the underworld in the antipodean imaginary. In Dead Europe, this is mainly a biblical hell, in Daylight, the classical underworld. Still material, these hells are spaces where the self is transformed, and location of sorts is achieved for the subject of the narrative. In Dead Europe, this return of hell emerges particularly as a trope of the relationship between self and other in a state of violent crisis both systemic and individual. In Daylight, underworld spaces figure the subsidence of both divine and monstrous presences that lurk beneath secular thought. In both, descents to these underworlds are both paths to location, as at the end of these descents, both protagonists emerge, like Dante, at the antipodes. With this emergence, a grace of sorts is reached. Achieved through compromise, 23 part of which is the embrace of mortality, and acts of self-sacrifice, this grace is not transcendent, but contingent. This emergence and this grace offers location, spatialised as the antipodes, as protagonists Isaac (Dead Europe) and Bad (Daylight) return to Australia and New Zealand respectively.

Chapter Four continues the ascending trajectory that concludes the previous chapter, examining verticality and materiality as enabling tropes of place figured according to region rather than empire, colony or nation state. Where Chapter Three showed antipodean hell as a spatial and temporal trope to engage with hopelessness and despair, this chapter demonstrates its subsequent function as enabling ascents into hope. A comparative reading of Wright’s Carpentaria (2006) and Knox’s cotemporaneous duet Dreamhunter (2005) and Dreamquake (2007), this chapter argues for the emergence of a new vertical metaphorics in the contemporary antipodean imagination as it is staged in these novels. With the materiality of region emerging from the form of nation, I argue that the particular arrangements of temporality, representation and the inhuman in these novels enable them to move from colonial imaginary to the material possibilities of particular places.

This chapter demonstrates how Carpentaria and Dreamhunter both deploy and refigure the materiality and verticality of the antipodean imaginary. I argue this new antipodean verticality, anchored in specific regions, constitutes an emergence from colonial topographies of inhabitation. These regional emergences from nation operate upon a vertical access in very particular ways. They do not expand horizontally to the domain of the global, but arise from the materiality of place. In comparing the vertical dynamics of these contemporary novels, this chapter ultimately suggests that the ascension of regional particularity above the horizon of the national and global offers possibilities of inhabitation away from the horizontal colonial imaginary of centres and peripheries.

24

In their emphasis on ascent rather than descent, Carpentaria and Dreamhunter can be described as anabatic narratives. Understood in relation to katabasis, anabasis refers to the ascent or emergence that conventionally concludes a katabatic narrative. As a return from the centre of hell, anabasis conventionally signifies an emergence from a place of despair into one of hope. This chapter demonstrates how Carpentaria and Dreamhunter privilege such ascensions on multiple registers. The narratives ascend figuratively through the emergence of regions from nations, through geographic inversions of North and South, through the disinterment and resurrection of bodies from the ground, and in Dreamhunter, through the raising up of the ground itself. I argue that these ascensions unmake and overturn hell, marking a departure from the vertical tropology that more commonly circumscribes antipodean spaces and identities according to katabasis, or descents. Thus the regional ascensions of the novels discussed here signal the emergence of a new verticality. This new vertical metaphorics is not a return of hierarchical structures, rather an emergence of generative materiality from specific regions.

25

Chapter One: Hell’s Antipodes

We are sail’d, I hope, Beyond the line of madness -- The Antipodes: A Comedie, IV. x. 55

The emergence of a range of formations of the humanist subject in Europe between premodern and early modern eras was in part enabled by the possibilities offered by the imaginative space of the antipodes. This chapter uses the four locating points of analysis, or compass points, of verticality, liminality, materiality and perversity to show how the antipodes function as a site of particular imaginative intensity and potential for these new subjects at key moments of modernity. The texts analysed here, Dante Alighieri’s “Inferno” (1308-1321), Francesco Petrarch’s Il Canzoniere (1327-1368), Francois Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-1553) and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) are all associated with paradigmatic shifts in theological and philosophical formulations of the relation between the self and the world4. Spanning the medieval period to the age of discovery, these works all explicitly engage with the changing European cartographic and cosmological imagination and display a shared metaphorics that figures the antipodes according to the conventions of classical and biblical underworlds. It is through a combination of their underworld status (conventionally a space where the self is remade) and their liminal, material and perverse qualities that the ambivalent space of the antipodes is enabling of the generation of new worlds and selves in these texts. These new versions of self and world are all connected in some way to changing valences of the antipodes at key moments of modernity in the European imagination. In each of these examples, the antipodes are primarily an imaginative space reached by

4 As Mikhail Bakhtin puts it, Dante’s La Commedia signals a moment characterised by “an extraordinary tension” where the hierarchical medieval cosmos “stands at breaking point”. As Aaron Gurevich argues in The Origins of European Individualism that Petrarch “bring[s] forth a new type of human individuality” (236). Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, as Bakhtin has famously argued, creates a “new model” of the world. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is widely considered to be the proto-colonial novel. Bruce McLeod argues via Glyndwr Williams that the novel is an “unofficial agent of imperialism”, crucial to the eighteenth- century “vogue for ‘voyages and travels’” (Williams in McLeod, 177). 26 journeys of descent. With its liminal, material and perverse qualities this fantastic lower realm is a locus of imaginative possibility from which new modes of subjectivity become possible. The different models of the humanist subject that emerge in “Inferno”, Il Canzoniere, Gargantua and Pantagruel and Gulliver’s Travels are distinct and are produced in accordance with the particular operation of the antipodes as a locating trope in that text. Thus, for each of these new subjects, the antipodes differently signify as a locating trope on the registers of temporality, spatiality and signification. What these subjects and these texts share is that their encounter with the antipodes unfolds primarily in the domain of the imaginary. In this way the chapter identifies and analyses imaginative operations that continue to inform imaginary and historical domains beyond the colonial encounter with antipodean space.

This chapter makes a number of related claims. The central claim is that the antipodes function as an underworld, often but not always, the Judeo- Christian hell. In the premodern imagination, journeys to the antipodes operate according to the direction and conventions of katabasis, a descent narrative that conventionally features a transformation of the self through a journey to the underworld. Following from this, this chapter demonstrates further than in antipodean katabasis, this transformation of the self is realised materially, rather than transcendentally, as is conventional5. Attendant to that, these material transformations occur in accordance with the individuating operations of satanic self-invention and perversity. Furthermore, and following from this underworld status, the antipodes

5 In their readings of descent narratives, literary critics Rachel Falconer and David Pike emphasise the influence of Christian conversion within katabatic narratives during and after the Middle Ages. Falconer explains that “[i]n Dantean and medieval Christian katabasis, the traveller’s sinful self dies upside down at the bottom of Hell, and a new self emerges, walking upright in the grace of God” (4) and argues further that “every Christian’s experience of conversion may be understood as a shadowy imitation of Christ’s own descent into hell and reascension” (2). Defining decensus ad inferos as a “transcendent narrative” (ix), Pike contends that “[c]onversion is the narrative structure of the mythic descent into the underworld” (viii). Rachel Falconer, Hell in Contemporary Literature: Western Descent Narratives since 1945 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005). David L. Pike, Passage through Hell: Modernist Descents, Medieval Underworlds (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997). 27 function as a liminal space, a threshold between ancient and modern temporalities, metaphoric and real domains, and prehumanist and humanist cosmologies. This chapter will show how the antipodes, traversing philosophic and cartographic, and abstract and material domains, wield the symbolic power of both registers. Thus, as both a fantastic and putative location, representations of the antipodes also symbolise particular formations of the relationship between language and materiality.

Themselves canonical, these texts have also influenced literature in the centuries following their production, and are directly referred to by the literature and poetry analysed in subsequent chapters of this thesis. In these later texts, antipodean space carries through the figurative weight of its prehumanist conflation with hell and the transformations of self this association enables. The texts examined by this chapter are aligned according to this shared tropology, and though this arrangement is chronological I am not making a claim for a linear progression of antipodean representation. The residue of earlier imaginations remains, and reversals, inversions and paradoxes are apparent. Rather than revealing a teleological progression, reading these texts together shows a complex temporality where past and present contain one another. As Matthew Boyd Goldie argues, the antipodes inhabit a paradoxical, Janus-faced temporality that looks simultaneously forwards and backwards:

the besideness of the antipodes in a temporal sense in that their ambiguous location and ontology, and their complicated correspondences seem to punctuate time in uncanny ways, ways that can, for instance, seem prescient even in a very early chronological period and banally old-fashioned in the most recent times (Goldie 10-12).

I argue this double model outlined by Goldie applies to representation as well as temporality; just as the antipodes traverse past and present, they also bridge metaphoric and real domains. It is this paradigm of besideness and betweenness through which I examine intersections of antipodean space and subjectivity in the texts I have chosen. Just as the progression between these 28 texts is not linear, my selection is not exhaustive. The operations I demonstrate are more generally applicable to a range of representations of antipodean space.

On the cusp of medieval and Renaissance cosmologies, Dante’s “Inferno” rehearses a process of individuation that moves from bewilderment to location. Erich Auerbach argues in his famous study of La Commedia that the poem is the literary origin point of the individual, humanist subject and inaugurates a European tradition of representation based on historical rather than divine temporality:

Dante was the first to configure what classical antiquity had configured very differently and the Middle Ages not at all: man, not as a remote legendary hero, not as an abstract or anecdotal representative of an ethical type, but man as we know him in his living historical reality, the concrete individual in his unity and wholeness; and in that he has been followed by all subsequent portrayers of man, regardless of whether they treated a historical or a mythical or a religious subject, for after Dante myth and legend also became history (Auerbach 174-75).

I argue the antipodes are an enabling spatial metaphor for this individuation, and as a trope of location are inseparable from what James Nohrnberg calls the “autobiographic imperative” of the poem (Nohrnberg 6). Further, as integral to the poem’s construction of a coherent cosmos, in “Inferno” the antipodes are part of a model of language and reality where the former faithfully represents the later. A different formation is apparent in Petrarch’s Il Canzoniere, where the humanist subject emerges according to a melancholy formulation of subjectivity that is ungrounded, lacks location. For Petrarch the antipodes serve to mark the chasm between language and the real. Two centuries later, in the grotesque and comedic work of Rabelais, the antipodes figure the overturning of the hierarchical, vertical cosmology of the medieval world. Part of a series of tropes of fecund materiality and corporeality, Rabelais’ antipodes signify the incorporation of the individual into a collective body. 29

In Swift’s satirical Gulliver’s Travels the antipodes come to signify incoherence and dislocation on both individual and collective registers. Situated in the eighteenth-century age of discovery, Gulliver’s Travels constructs a subject that is alienated from both itself and its species, and, as a spatialising trope of distance and dislocation, the antipodes stand for a loss of symbolic location on the levels of geography, identity and language. In the utopian and imaginary voyage fiction of the seventeenth century, the antipodes offered a stage for “the antipodes of inner life”, and were crucial in negotiating the dislocation of a decentered Europe and its bewildered subject. I contextualise the profound disillusionment and absurdity of Swift’s novel in relation to this tradition, and contend that here, antipodean space figures the relation of metaphor and real thrown into chaos. As the proto-colonial novel, Gulliver’s Travels stands at an intersection of narrative and historical voyages; a collision of reality and fantasy. With this shift into the real, antipodean strangeness is no longer fascinating, but threatening.

These iconic European works represent four moments, four subjects and move in four directions, and all exemplify the generative capacities of antipodean metaphorics. Historically, these four texts are suspended between the pull of the premodern cosmology, and its vertical, eternal temporality and the trajectory of humanist temporality, which is horizontal. Mikhail Bakhtin has emphasised the horizontal shape of historic temporality in his reading of the work of Rabelais, where he argues “[a] new model [of the world] was being constructed in which the leading role was transferred to the horizontal lines, to the movement forward in real space and in historic time”(403). This chapter argues that representations of the antipodes offer a number of ways at different points of time to negotiate this tension between premodern and modern cosmologies, metaphoric and real. In “Inferno”, the antipodes are a trope of location. In Il Canzionere, they are no location. In Gargantua and Pantagruel, they are the corporeal and material strata. In Gulliver’s Travels, they signify all coordinates of location thrown into chaos. These four 30 moments and subjects of emergence are all structured according to the narrative direction of katabasis. They all incorporate a metaphorics of hell, and tropisms of descent and inversion. As a lower realm and part of the earth, the antipodes in these texts display the structural contradiction of being an imaginative space and a real, material place. In subsequent chapters I will demonstrate how this contradiction is a consistent feature of the antipodes, and becomes increasingly complex when the material imagination mapped by the following analysis intersects with the geographic reality of the antipodes.

According to the verticality that structures the medieval imagination, hell and the antipodes are both perverse spaces. The generative possibility of this perverse origination is perhaps most famously figured by Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost, who, turning from God to himself, was banished to hell for an act of individuation. In his famous exegesis of the character of Satan in Paradise Lost, C.S. Lewis stresses the connection between individuation and perversity. Summarising St. Augustine’s definition of good and evil, he writes:

What we call bad things are good things perverted. This perversion arises when a conscious creature becomes more interested in itself than in God and wishes to exist ‘on its own’ (Lewis 66).

As part of the creation of a separate self, this perversion outlined by Lewis possesses a generative quality. In the four emergences of distinct subjectivity this chapter takes as its focus, the process of individuation is enabled by the perversity that Satan displays in his turn from the divine to the self, “As being the contrary to his high will/ Whom we resist…Our labour must be to pervert that end” Paradise Lost Book I: 159-162, 164).

The methodological approaches deployed in this chapter enable the movement between domains of metaphor and facticity, figure and ground and map the points of limitation as well as interdependence between these 31 points. I combine phenomenological, psychoanalytic, narratological and literary historical approaches in my analysis of antipodean space and subjectivity in these texts.

I use Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenological concept of the poetic image as a means by which to apprehend movements between subjectivity and space as relational; without beginning or ending with either. Bachelard argues in The Poetics of Space that the poetic image is above all an image of newness, capable of generating “a new being” (The Poetics of Space xxiii). As a way to glimpse the “topography of our intimate being” (xxxvi), Bachelard’s dynamic model of the poetic image allows a nuanced and complex understanding of the contradictions and paradoxes that characterise imaginative spaces. Indeed, Bachelard emphasises that such complexity is contained within the poetic image itself, as: “at the level of the poetic image, the duality of subject and object is iridescent, shimmering, unceasingly active in its inversions” (xix).

Sustained analysis of the imaginary and real space of the antipodes requires a model that can accommodate the inherent contradictions within subjectivity and within encounters between the self and the world. Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytical approach to literary subjectivity, which includes readings of Dante and Rabelais, offers a number of such models. Combined with Bachelard’s concept of the poetic image, Kristeva’s work on subject formation in Strangers to Ourselves and Powers of Horror enables us to see how the antipodes are a point of slippage between real and fictional, internal and external, and geographic and subjective extremes. Indeed Kristeva engages directly with this ambivalent status of the antipodes when she declares “that even the positive minds of the earth’s conquerors appear to have taken the inner voyage as a truthful indication on the reality of the foreign people at the antipodes” (Kristeva Strangers to Ourselves 114).

The particular operations of subject formation in the texts in question are further cast into relief when narrative analysis is added to the theoretical 32 approaches outlined above. Work by literary critics Bakhtin, Northrop Frye and Rachel Falconer on katabatic narratives offers a means to locate antipodean fiction within a tradition of narrative descents. In her analysis of hell in contemporary literature, Falconer outlines three stages of katabasis; descent, inversion and ascent, or anabasis. Further, recent scholarship on katabasis by Williams (1990), Ingebretsen (1996), Pike (1997) and Falconer (2005), has foregrounded the centrality of the underground in the Western imagination. Falconer in particular stresses the centrality of katabatic narratives to the western imagination, which she argues is a “katabatic imagination” (Falconer 2), and is related to dynamics of subjectivity, as “Western culture is saturated with the idea of a self being forged out of an infernal journey” (4). Structured according to a metamorphosis towards the divine achieved by journeying through the underworld, katabatic narratives are narratives of self-transformation. Antipodean katabases are narratives of self-transformation in the material realm, not towards the divine, but move towards the mortal, material plane.

These antipodean descents that are the focus of this chapter are grounded in literary historical data provided by thematic studies of the antipodes by Matthew Goldie, Paul Longley Arthur, David Fausett, Valerie Flint, Alfred Hiatt, William McCready and Simon Ryan, and literary historical analysis of the literature of imaginary voyages by Arthur, Fausett and Philip Gove. The critical work of these scholars has demonstrated through wide-ranging surveys that the antipodes functioned as a stage for the perverse, the monstrous and the upside-down in the European imagination. Fausett claims that in the premodern imagination, the antipodes functioned as the first “archetypal Other...in Western literature” (Images of the Antipodes in the Eighteenth Century 3). I extend this understanding of antipodean thematics to show how this imaginative space informs the emergence and individuation of four different literary and poetic formulations of the humanist subject during key moments in the medieval, renaissance and colonial periods. Reading these texts via the phenomenological, psychological, narratological lenses 33 outlined above shows the range of ways the antipodes are implicated in the production of new models of the world and the self at these key moments of modernity.

In the medieval era at the cusp of the renaissance, a moment emblematised by Dante’s La Commedia, the antipodes function as a trope of location and “autobiographical imperative”. A generation into the Italian Renaissance, they are a spatial image of Petrarch’s humanist turn and offer “a place to go instead of heaven”. A century later at the height of the French Renaissance, in Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, the antipodes signify material and corporeal domains and are a key trope by which the individual subject becomes part of a collective body. On the cusp of actual encounter with the geographic reality of the antipodes, in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels encounter with the space initiates a state of ontogenetic and phylogenetic chaos, where self, species and language all unravel.

First I focus on the subject that emerges, literally and metaphorically via the antipodes in Dante’s “Inferno”. As Bakhtin says of Dante, the poet was writing at a moment characterised by “an extraordinary tension” where the hierarchical medieval cosmos “stands at breaking point” (Bakhtin 402). This tension was the transition from the vertical, hierarchical model of the earth (Heaven, Earth, Hell) espoused by Christian cosmology to the Copernican, or heliocentric, understanding of the universe. The tension between these paradoxical cosmologies is symbolised by the ambiguous status of the antipodes, impossible in the former, accounted for by the latter. For Dante, the antipodes are a trope of location and emergence. Literally a point of egress from hell, antipodean space is also connected to the individuation from collective bewilderment enacted by the epic poem. I contextualise Dante’s antipodes through a brief overview of previous understandings of the antipodes as a blasphemous impossibility, contrary to reason and engendering monstrosity. I then overlay the work of Dante scholars Nohrnberg, Took, Hollander, Hiatt, Durling with Bachelard’s concept of the 34 poetic image, and Kristeva’s psychoanalytic reading of Dante as the “deject” in La Commedia. This constellation of critical apparata casts into relief the intersection of hell and antipodean space, subject formation and poetic innovation and shows that the ambiguous space of the antipodes is a site of imaginative possibility for the emerging individual humanist subject. At this intersection it becomes clear that, as the way out of hell, antipodean space works as a trope of locating the bewildered self and is further connected to the emergence of literary singularity. Combining Durling’s reading of Dante’s hell as a body with Kristeva’s theorisation of abjection demonstrates how these spatial, literary and subjective emergences rehearsed in “Inferno” are enabled by a material imagination.

Secondly I focus on Petrarch’s antipodes, where there can be seen a shift from Dante’s model of a coherent universe to an incoherent one. In Petrarch’s poetry the antipodes function as a trope of dislocation rather than location. Here I read Alfred Hiatt’s study of the significance of antipodean space for Petrarch alongside scholarship on idolatry and desire in Petrarch’s poetry by Giuseppe Mazzotta, John Freccero, Harold Bloom and Marguerite Waller to demonstrate the relation between the emerging humanist subject of Petrarch’s poetry and the antipodean trope. As an autobiographical poet who, according to Mazzotta “manufactures his own grace” (Mazzotta 58), Petrarch enacts a type of satanic self-invention. I argue his references to the antipodes are inseparable from this perverse autogenesis. As an ambivalent space figuring an impassible distance between divine and mortal, metaphoric and real, self and other, the blasphemous antipodes were a space of particular ambivalence and paradox at this time. I contend that it is precisely because of this liminal, threshold status that the antipodes function as a locus of becoming for the subject of Petrarch’s writing. This becoming offered a resolution to the mortal dilemma on the mortal plane. As Alfred Hiatt puts it, Petrarch’s antipodes offer “a place to go instead of heaven” (Hiatt "Petrarch's Antipodes" 29).

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Thirdly I examine the subject and cosmology that emerges in Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. Like Dante and Petrarch, Rabelais’ work marks the shift from old to new cosmologies. However, Rabelais’ humanist turn is distinct in that the individual subject collapses back into the collective, and highly corporeal social body. Rabelais’ antipodes are part of this new humanist cosmology; a crucial element of what Bakhtin calls “a new model” the world. In Gargantua and Pantagruel, the antipodes are a corporeal and material space, figuring the threshold between interior and exterior worlds. As a space of descent and overturning, the antipodes work in this novel to remake the self and world according to a promethean ingenuity which is again grounded in the material plane. In order to demonstrate this particular formation of perverse becoming enabled by the antipodes, I combine Bakhtin’s famous analysis of the work, David LaGuardia’s reading of the function of the body in the novel and Bachelard’s theorisation of the material imagination. As Bakhtin has argued, Rabelais’ carnivalesque and grotesque “lower strata” enabled a “movement forward in real space and in historic time” (Bakhtin, 403), from the vertical hierarchy of the Medieval Cosmos to the Renaissance horizon of historical time. Unlike Dante and Petrarch, this emerging newness does not take the form of an individual subject, but a collective body remaking the world.

Finally I focus on Swift’s proto-colonial novel, Gulliver’s Travels, which marks a shift from allegory of earlier Austral Utopias to an empirical, realist mode (Fausett). The novel progressively undoes narratives of identity and symbolic locations, concluding in a misanthropic dislocation and disarticulation of the individual subject and the human species. At this moment the antipodes signify the incoherence and dislocation on both individual and collective registers. Here I show how the antipodes imagined according to medieval and renaissance paradigms continue to inform the early colonial imagination. As the proto-colonial novel, Gulliver’s Travels stands at an intersection of narrative and historical voyages; a collision of reality and fantasy. With this shift into the real, antipodean strangeness 36 becomes threatening rather than fascinating, and the relationship between metaphor and the real becomes not just dislocated, but chaotic. I contextualise the particular rhetorical operation of Swift’s antipodes in relation to utopian literature located in the unknown southern continent “Terra Australis Incognita”. As in Swift’s novel, this last geographic unknown functioned as a stage for anxieties about the status of representation and ontogenetic and phylogenetic trajectories. Key works of this period I examine are Richard Brome’s play Antipodes: A Comedy (1640), and Joseph Hall’s novel Another World and Yet the Same (1605). Reading Gulliver’s Travels in light of literary historical work on Austral utopias and imaginary voyages between 1600 and 1800 shows how the text is located on the threshold between imagined and real encounters with antipodes. The increasing geographic reality of the antipodes does not diminish their figurative power; rather it is at this moment of real encounter that the relationship between metaphor and real becomes more complex, and deeply confused.

Gulliver’s Travels, the final text I analyse in this chapter, is on the cusp of real, historical encounter with antipodean space. In my next chapter, I argue that this encounter does not signify a straightforward progression from imagined to real, but rather a more complex relation of metaphoric and real domains. In emphasising the power of metaphor, and primacy of the imaginary at a moment of real encounter, the next chapter of this thesis continues to argue that the antipodes function as a threshold of metaphor and real, past and present. In traversing these contradictory domains the antipodes operate as both a real and imagined space in which to remake the self, the world and language on the material plane. As in the texts examined by this chapter, this refashioning of self and world is enacted as a perverse becoming, grounded in the weight of the association between the antipodes and hell.

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An invention of the poets

Opposed to reason, blasphemous, monstrous and impossible, the antipodes remained a problematic space for over two millennia of western philosophy and theology. In the first century BC, Cicero considered it impossible that “directly opposite to us on the farther side of the earth are people who stand with feet against our feet, and these men you call antipodes” (quoted in Ryan 106). Similarly, at the end of the third century AD, Lactantius asks:

And what shall we say of those who think there are 'antipodae' with their feet opposite ours? Is there anyone silly enough to really believe that there are men whose feet are higher than their heads? Or that things which lie on the earth with us hang downwards with them, and trees and fruits grow the wrong way up, and wind and rain and snow and hail fall upwards onto the ground? Who would number the hanging gardens among the seven wonders of the world when serious thinkers postulate hanging trees and cities and mountains? (quoted in Flint 68)

Like Cicero, Lactantius doubts the possibility of the antipodes on the basis of inversion, figuring them as an impossible, upside-down world. Likewise, two centuries later, St. Augustine offers perhaps the most famous denial of the antipodes in City of God. Pondering, “whether we are to believe in the Antipodes” (Book xvi, Chapter ix), he follows Cicero and Lactantius in emphasising the improbability of an inverted world:

But as to the fable that there are Antipodes, that is to say, men on the opposite side of the earth, where the sun rises when it sets to us, men who walk with their feet opposite ours, that is on no ground credible (City of God, Book xvi, Chapter ix).

For Augustine, an antipodean underworld is fabulous and incredible. In the same vein, the sixth-century Egyptian monk Cosmas Indicopleustes, a famous proponent of the “flat earth” theory, dismisses the idea of antipodes as both unnatural and irrational:

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But should one wish to examine more elaborately the question of the Antipodes, he would easily find them to be old wives’ fables. For if two men on opposite sides placed the soles of their feet each against each, whether they chose to stand on earth, or water, or air, or fire, or any other kind of body, how could both be found standing upright? The one would assuredly be found in the natural upright position, and the other, contrary to nature, head downward. Such notions are opposed to reason, and alien to our nature and condition… (quoted in Ryan 107).

In this argument against the existence of the antipodes, the inverted space carries the perverse associations of unnatural, irrational and “alien”. A century later, the association between this space “contrary to nature” and the “perverse and evil” remain. One example of this equation is given by Pope Zachary in 748. Responding to a letter from Archbishop Boniface of Mainz in regard to a disagreement between Boniface and Virgil about the existence of the antipodes, Zachery makes his position on this matter clear:

In the matter of that perverse and evil teaching, of which he delivers himself against God and his own soul--to be specific, his declaring that there is another world and other men underneath the earth, and another sun and moon--you are to hold a council and expel him from the church, stripping him of the honour of priesthood (in Flint, 65).

The blasphemous, “perverse and evil” qualities attributed to the notion of antipodes by Zachery here, as well as inverted and fantastic elements of the space also circumscribe accounts of antipodean inhabitants. When the unknown Southland began appearing on maps, it was peopled with fantastic monstrous races. As Goldie points out, “spatial discourses commonly turn into anthropological ones: antipodes (or antipodeans) as people who exist (or not) out or down there” (Goldie 6). In Ptolemaic and medieval maps the typology of the monstrous races described by Augustine in City of God6 is

6 Augustine’s meditation on “whether certain races of monstrous men are derived from the stock of Adam or Noah’s sons” precedes his meditation on “whether we are to believe in the Antipodes”, and contains a typology of the monstrous races:

It is also asked whether we are to believe that certain monstrous races of men, spoken of in secular history, have sprung from Noah's sons, or rather, I should say, from that one man from whom they themselves were descended. For it is reported that some have one eye in the 39 inscribed upon the great southern continent. This typology can be seen in the Psalter Map of 1265 (Fig 1, 2) the Ebstorf Map of 1290 (Fig 3, 4, 5) and the 1300 Hereford Mappamundi (Fig 6). Depicting the world as the body of Christ and with demons beneath Christ’s feet, the Psalter Map is also a very clear example of the association between “pervers[ity] and evil” and lower spaces.

However, these perverse and ambivalent qualities of antipodean space are precisely where their imaginative possibility lies. Credited with inventing the T-O map and considered one of the fathers of geography, St. Isidore of Seville associates this ambivalence with innovation when he claims the antipodes are an invention of the poets:

With regard to those who are called Antipodae--because they are thought to be opposite us in that, placed beneath the earth, as it were, their footprints opposite our own--it is by no means to be believed. Neither the solidity nor the centre of the earth permits it, nor is it confirmed by any historical evidence, but it is the poets, in a kind of quasi reasoning, who make such conjectures (in McCready, 110).

Inverted and impossible, the antipodes for Isidore exist entirely in the domain of the poetic imagination. However, in Book XIV of his Etymologies, Isidore describes a fourth, unknown continent in the Southern Hemisphere:

In addition to these three parts of the world across the interior Ocean to the South lies a fourth part, which is unknown to us due to the heat of the sun. In these regions, according to story, the Antipodes are said to dwell (in Edson, 48).

middle of the forehead; some, feet turned backwards from the heel; some, a double sex, the right breast like a man, the left like a woman, and that they alternately beget and bring forth: others are said to have no mouth, and to breathe only through the nostrils; others are but a cubit high, and are therefore called by the Greeks "Pigmies" they say that in some places the women conceive in their fifth year, and do not live beyond their eighth. So, too, they tell of a race who have two feet but only one leg, and are of marvelous swiftness, though they do not bend the knee: they are called Skiopodes, because in the hot weather they lie down on their backs and shade themselves with their feet. Others are said to have no head, and their eyes in their shoulders; and other human or quasi-human races are depicted in mosaic in the harbor esplanade of Carthage, on the faith of histories of rarities. What shall I say of the Cynocephali, whose dog-like head and barking proclaim them beasts rather than men?

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McCready argues that this ambivalence Isidore demonstrates towards the concept of antipodes is a result of oscillating between flat disk and spherical models of the earth. The antipodes standing between old and new worlds, poetry, myth and geography is a resonant image for a philosopher whose oeuvre is characterised by a concern with the relationship between external and internal worlds. His most famous text, De natura rerum, (“The Nature of Things”) progresses from cartography to etymology, while his final work, Etymologies or Origins7 was intended as a return to the origin of language as the key to knowledge, because “[w]hen you see where a name has come from…you understand its meaning more quickly. For everything is known more plainly by the study of etymology” (in Edson 46). The antipodes were an ambivalent space for early fathers of the church such as Isidore. Between language and cartography they wielded the symbolic power of both registers. It is because of this imaginative force they were a “conjecture” of “the poets”. For medieval Italian poets Dante and Petrarch, this “conjecture” offered nothing short of a means to remake the self and the world.

Dante’s antipodes: the way among the lost

The function of the antipodes as a space of newness, overturning and emergence in the medieval imagination is clarified by Gaston Bachelard’s concept of the “poetic image”. Describing the poetic image as “a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche” (xv), Bachelard emphasises its originary power. An image capable of “plac[ing] us at the origin of the speaking being” (xxiii), the poetic image also generates “a new being”:

It becomes a new being in our language, expressing us by making us what it expresses; in other words, it is at once a becoming of expression, and a becoming of our

7 An extensive catalogue, Etymologies encompasses grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music, medicine, history, God, the angels, zoology, cosmography, geography, petrography, mineralogy, agriculture, horticulture, war, games, ships, housing, apparel, alimentation, household arts, and includes a dictionary. 41

being. Here expression creates being[…]Through this creativeness the imagining consciousness proves to be, very simply but very purely, an origin (xxiii-xxiv).

This originary image is also an “emergence”; Bachelard describes the poetic image as “an emergence from language, it is always a little above the language of signification. By living the poems we read, we have then the salutary experience of emerging” (xxvii). Connecting subjectivity and space, Bachelard’s concept casts into relief the poetic image of the antipodes as a site of emergence for the humanist subject. As Isidore of Seville claimed, the antipodes were a creation of the poetic imagination; as “it is the poets…who make such conjectures”.

Dante’s antipodes function as a poetic image of emergence, literally as an exit from hell, and allegorically through their connection to the emergence of literary identity in La Commedia. Within the larger poetic image of Dante’s cosmology, the antipodes are a trope of location, emergence and individuation. This Dantean connection between the antipodes and hell carries directly through to Australian and New Zealand literature; it is, for example, explicitly memorialised in Janet Frame’s The Carpathians (1988), as protagonist Mattina “remembered that Dante had entered Hell through a doorway of the Antipodes – or had that been the exit?” (Frame 89). In Dante’s “Inferno”, the antipodes are the exit reached by climbing down the giant body of Satan. A confused Dante tells how Virgil, carrying him:

took a handhold on those hairy flanks. Then from hank to hank he clambered down between the thick pelt and the crusted ice.

When we had come to where the thighbone swivels, at the broad part of the hips, my leader, with much strain of limb and breath,

turned his head where Satan had his shanks and clung to the hair like a man climbing upward, 42

so that I thought we were heading back to hell (Dante "Inferno" XXXIV: 73-81).

This antipodal inversion throws Dante into a state of bewilderment as he thinks Virgil is carrying him back to hell. Asking his guide “Why is this fixed now/ upside down?”, Dante is told they have “passed the point to which all weights are drawn from every side” and “are now beneath the hemisphere opposite the one that canopies the landmass”(XXXIV: 100-114). Here the antipodes function as a trope of location itself. Perversely, in La Commedia antipodal space is accorded precedence as Virgil recounts the origins of the Northern Hemisphere. Explaining to Dante the effect of the fall of Lucifer upon the world, Virgil says:

It was on this side that he fell from Heaven. and the dry land that used to stand, above, in fear of him immersed itself in water

‘and fled into our hemisphere. And perhaps to escape from him the land we’ll find above created this lacuna when it rushed back up’ (XXIV:118-126).

Satan’s fall headfirst literally turned the world on its head as the land-mass “fled” “in fear of him”. Here, as in the Freudian formulation of perversity, the perverse precedes and defines the norm. From this territorial inversion, literary critic Alfred Hiatt argues that, for Dante, the antipodes offered “a means of mediating terrestrial and celestial life”, as they signify:

a moment before human history at which the known world did not exist but the unknown, antipodal, world did. Perhaps strangest of all is the idea that, after Lucifer, the known world is in fact the unknown reformed, turned inside out (Hiatt "Petrarch's Antipodes" 15).

Just as the antipodes stand for a new model of the world in this paradox that Hiatt identifies, they also figure the tension between renaissance and medieval worlds. As Mikhail Bakhtin argues, the universe of La Commedia is 43 permeated by an “extraordinary tension” between old and new worlds, stressing that Dante composes his epic at the moment the medieval universe stood “at breaking point” (Bakhtin 402). Literally a space of egress, the contested and paradoxical space of the antipodes offers a point of emergence both from an old world and for a new subject.

The function of the antipodal world as a literal space of egress is connected to a larger literary emergence enacted by La Commedia, as the new subject that emerges in the poem does so through the narrative dynamics of katabasis. Following the katabatic archetype, indeed, coming to signify that archetype, the narratives of both “Inferno” and the larger Commedia are structured according to a progression from descent to inversion and ascent. In her reading of contemporary katabastic narratives, Rachel Falconer stresses that in Western literature, this vertical journey signifies “the idea of a transformative passage, the destruction and rebirth of the self” (Falconer 1). The self reborn in La Commedia is differentiated from the divine and from the collective. As James Nohrnberg puts it, [“t]he self-conscious and self-voicing “I” is basic to the theme of the Comedy” as the poem is driven by an “autobiographic imperative” propelled away from the collective self (Nohrnberg 6). David Pike extends this argument, claiming that this “autobiographic imperative” enables Dante to remake the world. For Pike, Dante “provides the vehicle whereby the world may be remade and described in the same moment of descent through the underworld: the autobiographical voice” (ix). As the point of emergence from the underworld, antipodean space functions as a trope of location for this realisation of the “self-conscious and self-voicing ‘I’”8 that drives the poem.

8 Marking an evolution for Italian as a literary language, The Divine Comedy also enacts an emergence on the register of the collective. Robert Hollander argues that Dante’s epic was the first work to:

deploy Italian as a literary language on a major scale, incorporating the ‘serious’ subjects that had hitherto been reserved to Latin…Before him [Italian] did not exist in a global form, a complete language fit for all subjects; after him it did, Robert and Jean Hollander, "Introduction," The Inferno, ed. Robert and Jean Hollander (New York: Anchor Books, 2000) xxvii. 44

The centrality of self-differentiation or individuation in the poem is indicated immediately. Beginning in media res, the opening lines declare:

Midway in the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost (Dante "Inferno" I:1-3).

Here the emergence into consciousness “I came to myself” is also an emergence of the singular from the general. This differentiation is indicated in the transition from plural to singular in the first person pronoun – the “our” to the “I”. Nohrnberg draws our attention to a further specification of the “I” as “Dante” when Beatrice, welcoming the speaker to Paradise, addresses him by name (Dante "Purgatorio" 30:55). Trajectories toward individuation in La Commedia have been frequently addressed in the wealth of scholarship surrounding the poem. Recently, John Took (2006) has argued that La Commedia functions as a “discrete instantiation” of the “properly human” (Took), and Nohrnberg emphasises the “autobiographical imperative” that propels the poem. Individuation, or, as C.S. Lewis paraphrases the Augustine formulation, the perverse act of “a creature becoming more interested in itself than god” (Lewis 66), is rehearsed in La Commedia through moves into consciousness, poetic autonomy and singularity, and enabled through a cartography of the underworld.

The “dark wood” in which Dante finds himself not only signifies indeterminate and uncharted spaces of self but a collective bewilderment. As Hollander argues, the dark wood signifies Eden after the fall (Hollander 13). The poem, then, also struggles with a general fall. This individual and collective dislocation is negotiated through mapping as Dante moves through the nine circles of Hell, the seven terraces of Purgatory and the nine spheres of Heaven. Julia Kristeva further specifies this tension as she argues that the

45 poem is “an extraordinary device, for Dante, for endowing himself with a universe at the very moment when his own and proper place is lacking” (Kristeva Strangers to Ourselves 107). Kristeva stresses that Dante composed “his entire text in exile” (105, italics in original), and thus, “among the many keys that enable one to read this complex work, exile is not the lesser one” (106). As the entrance to the inferno proclaims “THROUGH ME THE WAY AMONG THE LOST” (III:3), construction of a coherent universe in La Commedia works as a locating device on both the collective register that Hollander identifies and the individual one Kristeva argues for.

In her earlier work Powers of Horror, Kristeva theorises the process of abjection as a shoring up of the self. As a visceral, and exilic model of subjectivity, Kristeva’s theorisation of abjection is ideal for reading “Inferno”. In her meditation on what she terms “the stray” as both an abject social subject and a subject of abjection, Kristeva emphasises the impetus to build that comes from the trauma of the lost and fractured subject:

Instead of sounding himself as to his ‘being’, he does so concerning his place: ‘Where am I?” instead of “Who am I?” For the space that engrosses the deject, the excluded is never one, nor homogenous, nor totalizable, but essentially divisible, foldable, and catastrophic. A deviser of territories, languages, works, the deject never stops demarcating his universe whose fluid confines—for they are constituted of a non- object, the abject—constantly question his solidity and impel him to start afresh. A tireless builder, the deject is, in short, a stray (Kristeva Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection 8).

The exile Dante is precisely this “deject”, “deviser of territories” and “stray”; lacking his place this double subject of abjection “creates for himself a universe”. Further, the hell Dante journeys through is literally a space of abjection according to Kristeva’s formulation of the term. Conceptualising the abject as “what disturbs identity, system, order” (4), Kristeva includes in this category “[a]ny crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law” (4). As a cartography of transgressions against divine law, “Inferno” is a map 46 of abjection. In keeping with Kristeva’s account of abjection, at the centre of hell, Dante experiences a total undoing of self, life and death. Face to face with the three-headed giant Lucifer in the centre of the abyss, Dante is deprived of all coordinates of being. He relates the loss of self as an experience of the void between life and death:

I did not die, nor did I stay alive. Imagine, if you have the wit, what I became, deprived of both (XXXIV:25-27).

Neither dead nor alive is the definitive state of abjection. It is for this reason that Kristeva invokes the corpse as the figure of abjection, as “death infecting life…the utmost of abjection” (4). Here she also reminds us that cadaver comes from “cadere, to fall” (4, italics in original). Falling is also one reaction of the subject of abjection, as “[d]eprived of world, therefore, I fall in a faint” (4, itals in original). Twice in “Inferno” Dante falls in a faint “as a dead body falls” (III:136, V:142).

If at the centre Dante experiences total abjection, a state of neither life nor death, then “Inferno” can be understood as a topography of increasing abjection9. A map of escalating corporeal punishment for increasingly serious transgressions, “Inferno” functions as a spatialisation of a typology of abjection. Boundaries of the bodies are repeatedly undone through rupturing,

9 Hell as realm of abject matter, death and monstrosity is iconically described in Paradise Lost as: Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death, A universe of death, which God by curse Created evil, for evil only good, Where all life dies, death lives, and nature breeds, Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, Abominable, unutterable, and worse Than fables yet have feigned, or fear conceived, Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeras dire.

John Milton, "Paradise Lost," Milton: Poetical Works, ed. Douglas Bush (London: Oxford University Press, 1967). (II:621-628)

47 shredding, dismembering, gnawing and eating10 of flesh. This connection between visceral undoing and spatiality is further specified in relation to “Inferno” through Robert M. Durling’s work on digestion and hell. Arguing in Deceit and Digestion in the Belly of Hell (1989) that the circles of incontinence are associated with the head, violence with the breast and fraud with the gut, Durling claims that Dante’s hell operates as a map of the human body. Durling further emphasises the dysfunction, or perversion of the flesh of hell; where the ten Malebolge “represent perhaps the most gigantic case of constipation on record” (Durling 65). As Durling argues, “Inferno” is a typology of perversions allegorised as corrupt flesh. As Durling explains, in his corporeal cartography of corruption, Dante “draws upon the traditional notion of the body of Satan as the infernal counterpart to the Body of Christ, the Church” (61). Hell itself, then, can be seen as an inverted body. This metaphor is literalised as Satan, fallen head-first from heaven, is trapped in the ice upside-down.

Within the tradition of katabasis, this centre of abjection is the narrative’s inversion point, enabling a remaking of self from this point of complete destruction, and a return to the world. This inversion point, which as Falconer describes it, is where “the traveller’s sinful self dies upside down at the bottom of Hell, and a new self emerges, walking upright in the grace of God” (4) and is a key operation of katabasis. In “Inferno”, this new self arises at the

10 Boundaries of bodies are perhaps most literally, and iconically, destroyed in Dante’s description of Count Ugolino eating the head of Archbishop Ruggieri:

As a famished man will bite into his bread, the one above had set his teeth into the other just where the brain’s stem leaves the spinal chord.

Tydeus gnawed the temples of Melanippus with bitter hatred just as he was doing to the skull and other parts (XXXII:123-132)

Dante scholars such as George F. Buter (2006) have pointed out that the simile of Tydeus and Melanippus refers to Statius’ Thebaid, which describes the dying Tydeus demanding the head of his killer, Melanippus and then eating his brains, his face “befouled with the shattered brains' corruption and his jaws polluted with living blood” (Theb. 8.758–759). Like Tydeus, Ugolino’s action is doubly abject as it has “transgressed the lawful bounds of hatred” (Theb. 9.3–4), an excess of rage, an act of violence beyond retribution for death, and therefore beyond death.

48 antipodes. Preceded and prefigured by Lucifer’s arrival at the antipodes, which in Dante’s universe is the fall that created the world, Dante’s individuation and antipodean emergence thus echo satanic self-invention.

A space of individuation for Dante’s “autobiographical imperative” and the emergence of the humanist subject in La Commedia, the antipodes figure a similar, but tellingly distinct process of differentiation for Dante’s successor Petrarch. As “the last Augustinian autobiographer” and the father of humanism, Petrarch’s antipodes also spatialise the emergence of a humanist subject. However, while Dante’s antipodes operate as a trope of location, for Petrarch they symbolise its lack. For Dante language faithfully describes the world, for Petrarch a gap between symbolic and real domains opens out. It is from this abyss of meaning and its lack that the humanist subject of Petrarch’s poetry emerges. As a space of descent, the antipodes are part of a transition from divine to mortal possibilities.

Petrarch’s antipodes: manufacturing grace

Petrarch’s antipodes are a space of possibility away from the divine and a trope of individuation. The ambiguous and blasphemous space of the antipodes is a locus of emergence for the humanist subject in the work of this poet who Aldo Scaglione names “the last Augustinian Christian autobiographer” (Scaglione 137). Petrarch’s most famous work, Il Canzoniere, is, according to Mazzotta, considered in its time to be “a narcissistic and idolatrous” collection composed by a poet “[w]ho manufactures his own grace” (Mazzotta 58). Alfred Hiatt (2005) has shown how the ambiguous and contested status of the antipodes offered “a place to go instead of heaven” (29). This “third term” offered an imaginative space for the Petrarchian subject to “[manufacture] his own grace”.

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Hiatt stresses the “poetic force” of the antipodes, arguing that it is a particularly charged imaginative space for Petrarch because it is “precarious, unlicensed but not unthinkable” (Hiatt "Petrarch's Antipodes" 29). He argues further that, suspended between classical and Christian cosmologies, the ambiguous space of the antipodes also figures tensions between heaven and earth and the human and divine:

Petrarch's characteristic juxtaposition of the antipodes with the heavens indicates not an elision of these two places, but rather…the function of the antipodes as a third term between - but also beyond - heaven and earth, the human and the divine. Part of the appeal of the antipodes seems to have been their unverifiable nature…as wholly imagined, without human experience. And, unlike the heavens, the antipodes existed outside of theology (29).

Hiatt’s formulation of Petrarch’s antipodes as a “third term”, an imaginative space beyond the theological cosmology shows how they offered a space of becoming for the particular subject that emerged in Petrarch’s poetry. This new humanist subject is formulated precisely according to the operations of antipodean space. Scholarship on idolatry and desire in the Petrarchian construction of self further specifies the function of the “poetic force” of Petrarch’s antipodes as a space of emergence for the humanist subject.

Individuation is a crucial trajectory of Petrarch’s writing, as Mazzotta declares, self “occupies an unquestionable centrality in his poetic discourse” (58). Similarly, Aaron Gurevich argues in The Origins of European Individualism that Petrarch “bring[s] forth a new type of human individuality” (236). Mazzotta emphasises the centrality of the poetic text in the construction of this subjectivity; where “the poetic text is the ground for the constitution of self: this may be a moral, idolatrous or esthetic self, but it is one that occupies an unquestionable centrality in his poetic discourse” (58). John Freccero specifies this centrality of the poetic text, arguing through his reading of “idolatry” that it is an apprehension of desire, distance and dislocation from which the autonomous self emerges in Petrarch’s poetry: 50

Idolatry, however repugnant to an Augustian moralist, is at the linguistic level the essence of poetic autonomy. Because language and desire are indistinguishable in a literary text, we may say that by accusing his persona of an idolatrous passion Petrarch was affirming his own autonomy as a poetic creator (John Freccero in Bloom 1).

Dislocation is specifically related to language and desire and the autonomy Freccero outlines here. The function of the antipodes as a recess for desire has been noted by Hiatt, who draws our attention to a letter from Petrarch to Barbato da Sulmona in which Petrarch positions the antipodes, or more precisely, their equivocation with Tiberianus’ “letter from below” as analogous to “known and ongoing feelings”:

The Apennines can separate our bodies – places do not separate minds. Interpose the Alps themselves, add the Caucasus and Mount Atlas and Mount Olympus high up in the clouds, and lastly insert the Ocean itself: even then we will meet, we will converse, we will parley, we will be one, we will walk together, we will dine together, we will pass the night together; not by a letter delivered by the winds, such as Tiberianus composed, sent from the antipodeans to the inhabitants of this hemisphere, but by our known and ongoing feelings will we conquer grievous absence (Hiatt, 15).

Here the antipodes are a trope of distance, figuring the space over which desire must travel. Unlike Dante’s antipodes, which were a trope of location, Petrarch’s antipodes offer no location.

For Petrarch, antipodean space retains hellish and perverse qualities of “vice”. One incarnation of the antipodes in Petrarch’s writing is as an underworld where “our vices have long since descended”. In a letter to Neri Morando of Forli, Petrarch asks:

So where does escape lie? Where will we go? Where do the army and standards of the wicked not lead the way, where is empire not established and held firm with the very worst customs? It would be necessary to cross the ocean, except that it is believable that our vices have long since descended to the antipodes. Rather we would have to fly away to the heavens, if we were not pressed by our weights to the earth (in Hiatt, 18). 51

Not quite a real space, but not as unreal as heaven, the antipodes here lie between metaphor and a real place that can be reached by “cross[ing] the ocean”. Hiatt uses this reference to the antipodes to draw attention to the paradox that binds representation of this place and its inhabitants in Petrarch’s time, as: “[f]ollowing Augustine, any antipodeans could not be reached by the word of God, and therefore cannot be human; but following the logic of satire, the antipodeans cannot help but be reached by human depravity” (Hiatt Terra Incognita 132). Inhuman, distant from the divine, but a recess for “vices” figures antipodean space as a paradoxical place entirely on the earthly plane. This contradictory and perverse space is a trope that enables the individuation and emergence of the humanist subject in Petrarch’s texts.

Connecting geographic distance and desire in terms of a dislocation, the perverse “third term” of antipodean space is imbricated in a number of breaks, separations and falls that characterise the writing of a poet “tenaciously intent...on making the self the locus of singular and significant experiences and…obsessively bent on registering its variable moods” (Mazzotta, 57). A comparison between the realisation of poetic autonomy through the feminine for Dante and Petrarch shows how language functions differently as a measure of location for each poet.

In his analysis of the autobiographic imperative in La Commedia, Nohrenberg pinpoints “Purgatorio” 30:55, the moment where Beatrice calls Dante by name, as the moment of the emergence of an unambiguously singular first person voice, “when Beatrice designates its author, Dante's poem becomes his story.” Charles Singleton similarly emphasises the appellation at 30:55; pointing out that ‘Dante’ is Beatrice’s first word, which is “the more striking in that it is the only place in [La Commedia]…where his name appears, and vs. 63 seems to apologise even for this unique occurrence, appealing to the necessity for it." (1) In the singularity of its utterance, then, 52

Beatrice’s first word is a hapaxlegomenon, a word of singular occurrence in a text that Jon Kertzer, in his study of literary singularity, explains has a “proximity to creation and destruction” (Kertzer 212). In “Purgatorio”, the hapaxlegomenon “Dante” confers singularity, and spoken by Beatrice at the point where Virgil vanishes, serves as a marker of poetic autonomy.

This moment is echoed by Petrarch in Il Canzionere, in Canzone 125, which Mazzotta argues “marks the beginning of Petrarch’s…quest for Laura” (72) and ironically inscribes Petrarch’s independence from Dante – Beatrice for Virgil, Laura, as Beatrice, for Dante. The relation to the feminine is one marker of the distinction between the subjectivities constructed by both poets. For Dante, the journey through a coherent universe enables identification, where Beatrice’s “Dante” confers singular, consistent selfhood. Petrarch’s initial invocation of Laura signals a dislocation, as forms of language, self and space unravel. Concluding with a renunciation of language, Canzone 125 also signifies a departure from La Commedia through its articulation of self as dispersal and dislocation rather than discovery and location. At the end of the poem Petrarch demands his verse to “stay here in this wood”; the poet lost again - the self as “verse” dispersed rather than found in the wood and an individuation realised through the downward turn to earth and flesh; from God to Laura. This shift below is marked by a cartography of the world through the object of desire: “I know so lovely a foot/ never touched the earth/ as the one that imprinted you”, “those lovely traces/ among your turf and flowers” leading to the failure of language “stay here in this wood” (193) in a dislocation of language - melancholy in its realisation of the impossibility of the prelapsarian unity of language and reality11.

Alchemical texts from the Middle Ages to the early Renaissance such as The Secret Book of Artephius (ca. 1100) and The Rosarium Philosophorum (1550) show

11 The prelapsarian unity of word and the world, or in Saussurean terms, the Signifier and the Referrent, is classically staged in Milton’s Eden through Adam’s account of naming the animals: “I named them as they passed, and understood/Their nature, with such knowledge God endu’d” (Paradise Lost Book VIII:352-353). 53 that this distance over which language takes place, figured by Petrarch as a shift from the divine to human, was a threatening gap in the cultural imagination of Petrarch’s time. A fetishising practice that seeks to bridge the gap between the symbolic and the real, alchemy is characterised by the fantasy of formulas that can alter substance. A unity between words and their objects is a defining fantasy of medieval12 and Renaissance scholarship, and is perhaps at its most obvious and ambitious in this discourse of the mystical transformation of substance. In his study of alchemy in The Psychoanalysis of Fire Bachelard argues precisely for the operation of alchemy as a fantasy of active, or potent language as, "[f]ar from being a description of the objective phenomena, it is an attempt to inscribe human love at the heart of things" (Bachelard The Psychoanalysis of Fire 51 italics in original). Alchemy further contextualises operations of Petrarch’s poetics through its emphasis on the generative properties of degeneration and artifice.

Bachelard draws our attention to the alchemical texts of an anonymous writer at the end of the seventeenth-century. For this alchemist there are:

...three sorts of fire, the natural, the ‘innatural’ and the unnatural. The natural is the masculine fire, the principle agent...The ‘innatural’ fire is the feminine fire and the universal dissolvent, nourishing bodies and covering with its wings the nudity of nature...It is almost impalpable, although, through physical sublimation, it appears to be corporeal and resplendent. The unnatural fire is that which corrupts the chemical compound and which first has the power of dissolving that which Nature had strongly joined together... (in Bachelard 52).

Here the unnatural, imbued with the power of dissolution, undoes and is thus able to remake nature. The forces of corruption and dissolution are generative in that they enable a point where artificial creation can begin. The unnatural fire "first has the power of dissolving", figuring dissolution as genesis,

12 Alchemy features somewhat differently in Dante’s Inferno, as, along with forgers, counterfeiters “in deeds” and falsifiers “in words”, alchemists populate the inner circles of the malebolge Inferno (XXIX- XXX). 54 destruction before creation, the unnatural before the natural.13 In its exegesis on “first matter”, the unattributed alchemical compendium Rosarium Philosopharium (The Rosary of the Philosophers) similarly emphasises the generative properties of corruption:

Arnoldus: Let the Artificers of Alchemy know this, that the forms of metals cannot be transmuted unless they be reduced into their first matter, and then they are transmuted into another form than that which they had before. And that is because the corruption of one thing is the generation of another thing, as well in artificial things as in natural things.

The Mirror: Nature makes her operation by little and little, therefore, I would also that you should do so, yea rather let your imagination be according to nature, and see according to nature, of which bodies are regenerated according to nature in the bowels of the earth (Rosarium Philosopharium).

Thus privileging corruption, putrefication and dissolution, alchemy is the material image of perverse genesis: gold from lead, bees from rotting cattle, life from death14. This gap between symbolic and real domains that alchemy

13 The transformative properties of degeneration are emphasised in the classical works that informs alchemical practice. Williams points out that the connection between particular types of decaying matter, such as rotting cattle, and particular generations, such as bees or wasps, shows a codification of Aristotlian notion of generative properties of matter. He cites the examples of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (XV, 361-371, I 416-433), where "bees come from rotting cattle, wasps from horses, scorpions from crab shells, snakes from decomposing spinal chords, and perhaps mice from slime" and Seville's Etymologies (XII, 8, 16-20) as a further specification, where "honeybees are now generated out of rotting cattle, bumblebees from horses, drones from mules, and wasps from donkeys" (167-168). Later the creation of bees from rotting cattle became a "virtual manual art" cites the fourth book of Virgil's Georgics (167-168).

14 An earlier text, The Secret Book of Artephius ca. 1100, transcribed from 'In Pursuit of Gold' by 'Lapidus', figures transformations of substance through a series of inversions:

Wherefore, let our body remain in the water till it is dissolved into a subtile powder in the bottom of the vessel and the water, which is called the black ashes; this is the corruption of the body which is called by the philosophers or wise men, "Saturnus plumbum philosophorum", and pulvis discontinuatus, viz. saturn, latten or brass, the lead of the philosophers the disguised powder. And in this putrefaction and resolution of the body, three signs appear, viz., a black color, a discontinuity of parts, and a stinking smell, not much unlike to the smell of a vault where dead bodies are buried. These ashes then are those of which the philosophers have spoken so much which remained in the lower part of the vessel, which we ought not to undervalue or despise; in them is the royal diadem, and the black and unclean argent vive, which ought to be cleansed from its blackness, by a continual digestion 55 tries to bridge is precisely where the humanist subject of Petrarch’s poetry emerges from.

Melancholy oscillations between transcendental signification and abject meaninglessness in Petrarch’s work, spatialised by the antipodes, announce a new language for formulating and locating the self and so mark Petrarch’s departure from Dante. A shift in the status of language between the poets has been addressed by a number of scholars, most famously Bloom, Durling and Waller. In her reading of Petrarch’s Trionfi as medieval catalogues, Waller argues that the typological projects of each poet stand in a relation of increasing incoherence. Akin to Kristeva’s reading of La Commedia as a cartographic response to exile, a means to anchor the dislocated self, Waller argues the typography of La Commedia is an internally consistent system that “suggests…a conception of the universe as a coherent totality” (Waller 99). In Waller’s formulation, Dante has created via synecdoche “a trope of totalisation”, a coherent model of the universe. Further, Waller locates both Dante and Petrarch’s typological works in the context of the “heavy monotonous” catalogues that characterised the birth of the renaissance; catalogues which constituted microcosmic encyclopaedic attempts to categorise the world (98). Against the “coherent totality” of the universe Dante maps, Petrarch’s Trionfi, while “exhausting”, are never “all-inclusive” (99). Typologies of an incoherent universe, the Trionfi catalogue the impossibility of coherence through language. This is an anxiety apparent in La Commedia, but contained as those of false tongue are accorded the inner circle of the malebolge.

The impossibility of totalising or stable signification rehearsed in the exhaustive lists of the Trionfi is further apparent in a consideration of the in our water, till it be elevated above in a white color, which is called the gander, and the bird of Hermes. He therefore that maketh the red earth black, and then renders it white, has obtained the magistery. So also he who kills the living, and revives the dead. Therefore make the black white, and the white black, and you perfect the work. Artephuis, The Secret Book of Artephius ca.1100, Available: http://www.levity.com/alchemy/artephiu.html.

56 operation of allegory, central to both Dante and Petrarch. Like Waller, Durling locates the shift between Dante and Petrarch in a realisation of the melancholy gap within language:

If on the one hand Petrarch subscribes to---even in a sense almost single handedly founds—the humanistic cult of literary immortality and glory, on the other hand he has an acute awareness that writing poetry involves a kind of death. This recognition has something very modern about it; it gives a measure of the distance that separates Petrarch from Dante… (in Bloom, 2).

The “humanistic cult” of Petrarch is inseparable from the recognition of an abyss, or as Waller puts it “a kind of death” that haunts the speaking, or writing subject. As the signifier of geographic distance par excellence, the antipodes function as a spatialising trope of this realisation: “not by a letter delivered by the winds, such as Tiberianus composed, sent from the antipodeans to the inhabitants of this hemisphere, but by our known and ongoing feelings will we conquer grievous absence” (Hiatt, 15). But this gap is also the space of creativity, a possibility also figured by the antipodes, as in Canzon 50, “where the setting sun is described as visiting another people beyond the known world, who 'perhaps' await him (ll. 1–3)” (Hiatt, 6). Hiatt emphasises the “poetic force” of this generative, “precarious, unlicensed but not unthinkable” position of the antipodes:

Beyond history, including sacred history, beyond memory, yet not beyond imagination and representation, a perhaps-land of 'siqui sunt' and the subjunctive mood, the antipodes offered a place to go instead of heaven, and more particularly a means of mediating, yet also complicating and undoing, the relationship of the human to the divine (29).

For Petrarch, the antipodes engender a poetics of emergence; antipodal space offers, in Bachelard’s words “an image to inhabit”. A trope of distance as well as ambiguity in relation to the Christian cosmology, the antipodes offer a space of perverse possibility in which a new self can emerge. Three centuries later, at the height of the French Renaissance, the antipodes figure the 57 emergence of a very different humanist subject. Rather than individuated, the world and self are remade through return to the communal body and material plane. In the grotesque and carnivalesque visions of Francois Rabelais, the antipodes are key in the transition from medieval to modern cosmologies.

Rabelais’ antipodes: “salvos of the bum”

In Rabelais’ classic Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-1553), the antipodes are located on the threshold between interior and exterior worlds. Antipodean space is a key image of both the descents towards the lower material strata and the overturnings that Bakhtin has argued engender a shift away from the individual humanist subject to a collective body. The operation of the antipodes as a fantasy space in the Renaissance imagination is clear in cartographic material contemporary with Rabelais’ classic. For example, Guillaume Le Tetsu’s 1555 Cosmographica Universelle, an atlas complied in the Dieppe style, catalogues fauna, flora and topography that is often “quite imaginary”, includes three maps of “Terra Australe”15. In Le Tetsu’s own description of the region, antipodal regions are “marked out from imagination”:

This land is part of the so-called Terra Australe, to us unknown, for that which is marked out is only from imagination and certain opinion; the land depicted is still quite undiscovered, for there is no report that anyone has yet found it and it is only marked out from imagination (in King 7-8).

15 Alongside Pierre Desceliers, Johne Rotz and Nicholas Desliens, Le Tetsu was of the Dieppe school of cartographers. Believed to be based on Portuguese cartographic sources, the Dieppe world maps (ca. 1540-1570) constitute the basis of the theory of Portuguese discovery of Australia. Kenneth McIntyre (1977) and more recently Peter Trickett (2007) have argued that there can be seen a correlation between the Australian coastline and the landmass "Jave La Grande" that appears on the Dieppe maps. For a more detailed discussion, refer to: Kenneth Gordon McIntyre, The Secret Discovery of Australia : Portuguese Ventures 250 Years before Captain Cook (Medindie, S. Aust: Souvenir Press, 1977). Peter Trickett, Beyond Capricorn: How Portuguese Adventurers Secretly Discovered and Mapped Australia and New Zealand 250 Years before Captain Cook (Bowden, S. Aust: East Street Publications, 2007).

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Two centuries after Il Canzoniere and the Trionfi, the Cosmographia populates the antipodal landmass, surrounded by sea monsters, with a variety of monstrous races and fantastic beasts. “Terra Australe” is home to canine- headed Cynocephali, unicorns, monkey headed lions, a rodent-toothed beagle with protruding eyeballs and a wombat-like creature qualified by the accompanying description “Demon”. The fabulous creatures arrayed across these pirate maps16 not only locate antipodean lands in the terrain of fantasy, but also emblematise the long tradition of association between monstrosity and the antipodes. The monstrous and fantastic possibilities of the fabulous antipodes are harnessed in the work of Rabelais to secede from medieval hierarchy and temporality and move towards historical time and a collective body. A trope of overturning and inversion, generative perversity and promethean innovation, in Gargantua and Pantagruel antipodean space is integral in the creation of a new world.

Like Dante and Petrarch, Rabelais’ work expresses the dilemma of tensions between old and new philosophical, political and scientific models of the world. As in “Inferno” and Petrarch’s poetry, geographic, cosmological, literal and metaphoric descents enable the emergence of a new version of the humanist subject. However, Rabelais’ downward movement differs from that of his Italian predecessors in its implication in a move away from, rather than towards, individual subjectivity. In his definitive analysis of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Bakhtin locates Rabelais’ innovation in his overturning of hierarchical structures and generative insistence on material, corporeal domain, arguing this carnivalesque and grotesque overturning offered nothing short of a “new model” of the world, a “movement forward in real space and in historic time” (403). Bakhtin characterises this “movement forward” as a shift in the European imagination away from the vertical hierarchy of the Medieval Cosmos to the horizontal possibilities of “grotesque

16 Accused of piracy, Le Tetsu was beheaded by the Spanish in 1573. Peter Barber, ed., The Map Book (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005) 104. 59 realism”, a mode in which the body is “deeply positive”, but “not individualised” (19). For this “new model” of the world, in “the most fearless book in world literature” (39), descent as “degradation” is a key movement. Bakhtin defines degradation as “the lowering of all that is high” to the material plane. This lowering is also a remaking; Rabelais’ downwards trajectories are “regenerative” (20-21). It is this generative katabasis and “degradation” that Rabelais’ antipodes signify. Bakhtin stresses the centrality of the downward movement and lower spaces in Rabelais’ world, as:

The mighty thrust downward into the bowels of the earth, into the depths of the human body, is reflected in Rabelais' entire world from beginning to end. This downward movement animates all his images, all the leading episodes, all the metaphors and comparisons. Rabelais' world in its entirety, as in every detail, is directed toward the underworld, both earthly and bodily (370).

As one location of this downward movement, the underworld of the antipodes is connected to both “the bowels of the earth” and the “depths of the human body”. Part of the world-body metaphor, and a trope of overturning, demonic inversion and Promethean ingenuity, antipodal space is inseparable from Rabelais’ descending genesis.

In a state of constant overturning and exchange, internal and external are never stable in the Rabelaisian world. Bakhtin points to the generative force of this dynamism in his analysis of the Rabelaisian body, which is:

…never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body. Moreover, the body swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world. […]In all these events the beginning and end of life are closely linked and woven (317).

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Another manifestation of descent and degradation, these interchanges of world and body, and the metaphor of world-body17 see the return of the individual to the collective.

One function of the antipodes in Pantagruel is to signify this world-body connection. This world body, and its image of the subject thrust back into the communal body makes Rabelais’ humanism distinct from the subjects that emerge from “Inferno” and Il Canzoniere. Viewing this operation though David LaGuardia’s reading of the body in Rabelais’ work further specifies this function of antipodean space. Like Bakhtin, LaGuardia emphasises the imbrication and exchanges of micro and macro bodies and topographies. Arguing that the relationship between the body and the world rehearsed in the writing of Rabelais adheres to contemporary medical discourse, LaGuardia reads Pantagruel as a literalisation of the “humoral interplay” between stomach and brain18. This model of “humoral interplay” is one that has its origins in classical texts such as Aristotle’s De Anima, Virgil’s Georgics and is literally mapped out by Isidore of Seville De Natura Rerum as the seasons and humours form the four parts of the Earth (Edson 43-44). According to LaGuardia, the bowel-brain connection is “one of the most

17 Inversions of world and body also characterise Bachelard's account of the operation of nutrition in the Medieval mind: Let us not forget that for the prescientific mind nutrition, far from being a function to be explained, is an explicative function. Between prescientific and scientific thought there will occur an inversion in the explanation of the biological and the chemical. The scientific mind will try to explain the biological by the chemical. Prescientific thought, closer to unconscious thought, explained the chemical through the biological. Thus the 'digestion' of chemical substances in a 'digester' was, for the alchemist, an operation of remarkable clarity. Chemistry, thus paralleled by simple biological intuitions, is in a way doubly natural. It rises without difficulty from microcosm to macrocosm, from man to the universe (The Psychoanalysis of Fire 123-124).

18 LaGuardia points out that the majority of medical texts from Rabelais’ period included a catalogue of the humoral properties of various animal products: “Beef, for example, was considered to be cold and dry, and to give rise to thick blood and melancholy.” (26) Here LaGuardia cites Aldebrandin de Sienne's Le Regime du corps (The Regime of the Body), a thirteenth century text, which, in its extensive typology of meats and their properties also lists the digestive effects of organs and body parts, “such as poorly nutritive ears and noses to feet and tails, which the text says 'produce abomination.'” (26) Further, these texts all warned against excessive consumption of meat, which could “literally have deleterious effects on the brain” (LaGuardia 26).

61 important subtexts of Rabelais' work” (LaGuardia 36). The “standard metaphor” (25) linking knowledge and digestion that LaGuardia deploys, also apparent in Dante’s hell, has its origins in Classical philosophy. Durling explains that the classical understanding of digestion was a categorical, processing mechanism, where the “Latin digero meant properly to force apart, to separate, hence to distribute" (Durling, 61). Further, when used to describe cognition, digero meant “to set in order” (62). As discussed earlier, the corporeal model of Dante’s hell was to shore up social order. For Rabelais, the world-body metaphor unmakes and overturns social order, it is above all transformative. In Gargantua and Pantagruel, antipodean space is one trope of this generative materiality.

In Chapter Two of The Second Book, the imbrication of body and earth is at its most literal, and explicitly references the antipodes as rain and sea water are figured as sweat. In answer to the question “why is sea water salty?” the narrator explains:

Earth at that time was so excessively heated that it broke into an enormous sweat which ran over the sea, making the later salty, since all sweat is salt. If you do not admit this last statement, then taste of your own sweat. Or savour the perspiration of your pox-stricken friends when they are put in sweatboxes for treatment. It is all one to me (Rabelais 171).

The sweat of the individual, the collective body of “pox-stricken” friends and the “enormous sweat” of the earth is figured as “all one”, a non- individualised world body that yields the same flavour (sweat or sea water) on both macrocosmic and microcosmic levels. Topographic perspiration is then accorded a particularly antipodean signification as the people of drought stricken Africa pray for rain and “suddenly they clearly saw some great drops of water stand out upon the ground, exactly as from a person sweating copiously” (171). Drops of water that were, according to some scientists, inverted rain caused by “a shower of the Antipodes, as described by Seneca in Quaestiones Naturales, Book IV, where he treats of the Niles’ source, attributing 62 its floods to distant rains washed underground into the river” (171-172). It is in keeping with tropes of antipodean excess and corruption that this water is undrinkable: “they found it was only pickle, far saltier than the saltiest water of the sea.”

The antipodes as a world-body metaphor also feature in the description of the uncharted terrain and strange races inhabiting the inside of Pantagruel’s mouth. In the chapter “How Pantagruel Covered A Whole Army With His Tongue And What the Author Saw In His Mouth” (The Second Book XXXII), antipodes as the “other” half of the world are implicitly diminished and incorporated. Here the narrator, having come across an entire world contained in Pantagruel’s mouth, meditates on the other half of the world:

I began to appreciate the truth of the axiom Not half the world knows how the other half lives. Imagine: no one has yet described this country though it includes more than twenty-five populous kingdoms, vast stretches of desert and a great arm of the sea (285).

As part of a giant body, this as yet undescribed country - which is metonymically the other, unknown half of the world - is overdeterminedly corporeal.

As for Dante and Petrarch, Rabelais’ antipodes also signify with the tension between language and the real. This association is explicitly staged in the farce of Panurge speaking to the giants in a typology of obscure languages, one of which is the “fantastic jargon” of the antipodes. In Chapter IX of the Second Book, “How Pantagruel Met Panurge Whom He Loved All His Life”, Pantagruel and Epistemon come across the disheveled Panurge, whose incomprehensible answers to their enquiries regarding his identity and journey initiate an escalating confusion of tongues. Encompassing thirteen languages in total, Panurge’s responses are a typology of babble, a cartography of the world as different tongues. One of these languages is “a fantastic jargon”: 63

“Can you make head or tail of it?” Pantagruel appealed to the others. “I think it is the language of the Antipodes,” Epistemon ventured. “But it’s such a jawbreaker not even the devil himself would dare twist his tongue to it” (196).

This antipodean “jawbreaker” is part of an extended farce of failed communication, and signifies both linguistic excess and insufficiency. This antipodean excess and meaninglessness is embodied more explicitly when Pantagruel and his companions actually travel to an “antipodean land”.

During the company’s sojourn on Sandal Island, the antipodes stand for Rabelaisian overturning of meaning and bodies, and work to generate a new wisdom. Antipodean inversion intersects with corporeal overturning in Sandal Island, home of the Holy Order of the Demisemiquaver Friars. Declaring “their contempt for fortune (which had honey in the mouth and a dirk at the girdle)” (764), this order is dedicated to living in every way contrarily. The nocturnal Demisemiquavers practice the “trouserflied duplication” of wearing two codpieces, “one before, one behind”, shave the back of their heads “clean as a bird’s arse, a monkey’s rectum or a swallow’s lungs”, grow the front of their hair long and “the tips of their cowls pointed not fore but aft; this hid their faces”, so:

[h]ad you seen them arising downward, you would have sworn it was their natural gait, because of their ball-bearing soles, their fore codpiece and the back of their heads, upon which was painted crudely two eyes and a mouth, as on coconuts at a country fair. Had you seen them fronting, or counter-arsing, you would have sworn they were playing blindman’s bluff (767).

In keeping with their effacement through the backward cowl, and artificial prosopopoeia through the skull painted “as coconuts at a country fair”, the Demisemiquavers also overturn hearing and speech, as “[w]hatever they did was always accompanied through antiphonal chanting, always uttered through their ears” (768). The dedicated contrariety of this antipodal order is 64 figured as a frustration of reason, and ultimately generates an inverted wisdom.

As the text connects inversion and innovation, this illogical and baffling antipodean behaviour is held by Pantagruel and Panurge to be the height of ingenuity. Father John of the Funnels, “having watched these jovial Demisemiquavers, and having learned full particulars of their statutes, lost all countenance”, rages:

oh, if but Priapus were here, as when he witnessed the nocturnal incantations of Canidia, the sorceress, and scared her off by salvos of the bum. How he would poop and counterpoop his gutful in quavers, semiquavers and demiquavers of rectal harmony. Now I realise we are in an antipodean land. In Germany, they pull down monasteries and unfrock monks; here they raise them awry and athwart (768).

Here, in a conflation, or “rectal harmony” of the antipodes and the body, Father John proposes that “salvos of the bum” and a “counterpoop[ing]” is the perfect solution for the bottom of the world, which is “awry and athwart”. Contrary to Father John’s loss of countenance, Panurge declares that the Friars “are wise as March hares, subtle as leaden daggers, intelligent as buzzards” (766), attributing contrariety with the wisdom of madness, the subtlety of the most obvious and the intelligence of death. As a lower space generative of perversity, the antipodes in Gargantual and Pantagruel demonstrate a shared operation with hell, which further underlines their operation as a space that overturns established order.

In Epistemon’s ‘Tidings of the Dead and the Damned’ (The Second Book XXX), hell is a domain where the social order is inverted, as:

It was the rule in hell, Epistemon explained, that all who had been great lords and ladies on earth were condemned to struggle for the most ignoble, precarious and miserable livelihood below. On the contrary, philosophers and such as had been needy on this planet became puissant lords in the inferno (277). 65

In the Rabelaisian hell, Pope Julius “makes his way by crying meat pies” and Diogenes, who ”enjoy[s] the most magnificent luxury” wears “ a rich purple robe and [holds] a sceptre in his right hand” (277), and once, Epistemon recounts, “[w]hen Alexander the Great failed to patch Diogenes’ breeches, he abused him until the ex-monarch trembled with fury. And Diogenes never failed to beat him for his incompetence”. With its inversions of established order, and with devils of “such excellent and jovial company”, hell is “rollicking fun”; such that Epistemon “regretted Panurge’s recalling him back to life so soon” (278). The function of hell as a domain of gaiety and dissent has been demonstrated by Bakhtin, who argues through his studies of medieval “diableries” such as “parodical legends and the fabliaux” that in Rabelais’ time, “the devil is the gay ambivalent figure expressing the unofficial point of view, the material bodily stratum” (40-41). As spaces aligned with the “material bodily stratum”, hell and the antipodes both operate in Rabelais’ world as places where world and body intersect, as tropes of overturning and points of generative perversity.

The novel’s conclusion, staged underground in the Southern Hemisphere, connects both to a Promethean creativity that unites language and matter. At the end of the fifth and final book of Gargantua and Pantagruel, the Promethean gift of fire and Bacchanalian excess found underground unites word and substance in a celebration of the richness of the lower stratum. In the Temple of the Holy Bottle, Bacbuc, High Priestess of the Bottle explains that Promethean art lives in the Southern Hemisphere:

What has become of the art of calling thunder and the fire of heaven out of the sky, which was invented of old by Prometheus the wise? You have certainly lost it. It has departed from your hemisphere, but it is in use down here (840).

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In a gesture that points to meta-narrative of Rabelais’ classic, Bacbuc instructs Pantagruel and his companions to “bear witness” to the treasures found below ground:

When you return to your world, bear witness to your fellow men that the greatest treasures and the most wonderful things lie hidden underground—and not without reason.[…] Your philosophers who complain that the ancients have left them nothing to write about or invent, are obviously very much mistaken. The phenomena you see in the sky, the wonders earth, sea and river offer you are not to be compared to what is hidden in the womb of the earth (839-840).

The bottom of the world, and the space beneath the earth is new territory to both “invent” and “write about”, source of the “greatest treasure” and “most wonderful things”. The “wonder” of the Holy Bottle, the “greatest treasure” found underground, is its function as a source of truth and renewal through its ability to unite substance and language.

As a substance Bachelard associates with the generative capacities of fire, the wine that saturates Rabelais’19 world fills the vessel of language, is the matter by which words and the world are refigured. Meaning filled with wine and the meaning of drinking is precisely what the Oracle of the Holy Bottle divulges to Panurge at the conclusion of the Fifth book. Wine as the word of truth is indicated by inscription on the gates at the entrance to the Temple of the Holy Bottle, where the company notice “Ionic letters of purest gold, , which corresponds to the Latin in vino veritas, in wine, truth,” (815). The priestess of the bottle explains that bottle’s word of truth and prophesy, “Trinc”, is “a panomphaean word, that is a word employed, understood and celebrated among all nations. It means simply: Drink!” (834).

19 In ‘The Author’s Prologue’, Rabelais offers the following explanation of the substance of his writing: I may add that in composing this masterpiece I have not spent or wasted more leisure than is required for my bodily refection—food and drink to you! Is that not the proper time to commit to the page such sublime themes and such profound wisdom? (5)

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In his meditation on the material imagination, Bachelard offers an account of the generative properties of the alcoholic unconscious:

The unconscious too, is a source of originality. Specifically, the alcoholic unconscious is a profound reality. One is mistaken if one imagines that alcohol simply stimulates our mental potentialities. In fact it creates these potentialities. It incorporates itself, so to speak, with that which is striving to express itself. It appears that alcohol is a creator of language (Bachelard The Psychoanalysis of Fire 87).

The means by which the word of the Holy Bottle is understood takes the connection between image and substance also circumscribes the relationship between word and substance. Language, image and matter are conflated as Bacbuc hands Panurge “a tome-shaped flask filled with Falernian wine, every drop of which she made Panurge swallow” (833) and explains to the company:

“The philosophers, preachers and learned doctors of your world feed you up with fine words, cramming their cant down your ears. Here, on the contrary, we really incorporate our precepts at the mouth. Therefore I shall not tell you to read this chapter or consult that gloss; I prefer you taste this succulent chapter or swallow this rare gloss…In older days,” Bacbuc pursured, “at the Lord’s bidding, an ancient prophet of the Jewish race, Ezekiel, ate a book and became scholarly to the back teeth. I now tell you to drink a book to become learned to your very liver. Come, open your jaws!” (833).

Drinking the words of this tome, Panurge, in a chiasmus of word and substance, comes to understand that the word means to drink. Priestess Bacbuc’s subsequent ode to the riches found underground colours this wisdom of transubstantiation, or the truth in wine, with both a hellish and antipodean inflection.

The antipodean metamorphoses of Rabelaisian substance and language are further specified as generative perversity when considered in light of Bachelard's theorisation of the material imagination. Foregrounding the 68 generative matter of the imagination, Bachelard explains that “a material reverie inlays its objects. It carves them… It descends, continuing the dreams of the worker, right down to the depths of substance.” (113) Matter not only has the property of carving, inlaying, but “descends”. In a Rabelaisian move it is the progression downwards and the substance of matter that creates, inscribes, inlays. This transubstantiation of the material imagination in the lower strata, which Bakhtin argues circumscribes all Rabelais' world, is most apparent through the fantastic fountain shown to the company at the conclusion of the last book. A fantastic model of the earth and heavens, flowing with water that “tasted of wine, according to the imagination of the drinkers” (827), the fountain at the temple of the Holy Bottle offers transformation at the level of substance. The transformative properties of contrariness are asserted by the Bacbuc, who explains that “[y]our philosophers…deny that all motion is generated by the power of figures. Here you see the contrary” (827). Contrary to knowledge, matter, imagination and wine flow in the world below as polymorphous possibility.

The significance of the association between imagination and matter in Rabelais’ time is further clarified by contemporary discourse on monstrous progeny20, in works such as Ambriose Paré Des Monstres et prodiges (1573) and Pierre Boaistuau, Histoires prodigieueses (1560). Marie Hélène Huet (1993) argues that “a remarkably persistent line of thought” of this period is that monstrous progeny was a consequence of an overactive or corrupt maternal imagination (Huet 1). An inversion of Platonic form and matter21, progeny is moulded by the vessel, so that rather than “reproducing the father’s image, as nature commands, the monstrous child bore witness to the violent desires

20 This connection between monstrosity and hell is famously staged in Milton’s hell, a topos of “death” populated by “All th’ unaccomplished works of Nature’s hand,/ Abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mixed” (Book II: 626-627).

21 Aristotle too associates monstrosity with aberration of generic design. Nominating any deviance as monstrous in The Generation of Animals he argues “Anyone who does not take after his parents is really in a way a monstrosity, since in these cases Nature in a way has strayed from a generic type” (Huet, 3).

69 that moved the mother at the time of conception or during pregnancy” (1). For example, Paré describes a child born in 1517 with the head of a frog. According to the father the “cause of this monster” was:

because his wife, who was suffering from fever, had followed a neighbour’s advice that she should hold a live frog in her hand until it was dead. That night, she went to bed with her husband, still having the frog in her hand; her husband and she embraced and she conceived; and by the power of imagination, this monster had thus been produced (in Huet, 16).

Similarly Pietro Pomponazzi (1556) remarks that “when a woman imagines something during the sexual act, she indeed imprints its image on the foetus. If, during pregnancy, she desires a pomegranate, she marks her child with a pomegranate or something that resembles it” (in Huet, 17-18). Listing “examples of the power of a mother’s imagination” Malebranche explains:

There is nothing so bizarre that it has not been aborted at some time. For not only do they give birth to deformed infants but also to fruits they have wanted to eat, such as apples, pears, grapes, and other similar things. If the mother imagines and strongly desires to eat pears, for example, the unborn, if the fetus is still alive, imagines them and desires them just as ardently; and, whether the fetus be alive or not, the flow of spirits excited by the image of the desired fruit, expanding rapidly in a tiny body, is capable of changing its shape because of its softness. These unfortunate infants thus become like the things they desire too ardently (In Huet, 48).

Read in light of the weight of contemporary belief in the relationship between imagination and matter, Bacbuc’s instruction to “[c]hange your imagination every time you drink” (828) is an invitation to remake the world through imagining deviations and possibilities. This transformation of substance through an imaginative leap precedes Bacbuc’s sermon on “the greatest treasures” and “most wonderful things” that “lie hidden underground”. For Rabelais, like Le Tetsu, the Antipodean land was “only marked out from imagination”. To use Bachelard’s formulation of the poetic image, the antipodes enabled “the salutary experience of emerging” into historical time, 70 were “sign of new being” in a new time, central to the “new model” of the world arising from worlds below. This function of antipodal space as a trope of emergence and newness becomes increasingly literal in the proliferation of utopian literature located in the unknown Southern continent Terra Australis Incognita.

Swift’s antipodes: proto-colonial chaos

As antipodean lands become an increasingly real location in the European imagination, the tension between metaphor and real that the antipodes stand for becomes more complex. Located on the cusp of real historical encounter with the antipodes and widely considered to be the proto-colonial novel, Jonathan Swift’s satirical Gulliver’s Travels (1726) imagines a world where both metaphoric and real domains are dislocated and chaotic. Reading Swift’s novel in light of the tradition of utopian and imaginative voyage literature located at the antipodes casts into relief the ways in which Gulliver’s Travels departs from the conventions of this genre.

As Bachelard puts it in his reading of Edgar Allen Poe’s novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, at polar extremes “we are, to all appearances, at the antipodes of inner life: the adventures require geographical settings” (Bachelard Water and Dreams- an Essay on the Imagination of Matter 60). As the “last earthly unknown” (Fausett, 1) the antipodal mystery of Terra Australis Incognita provided the geographic settings for “the antipodes of inner life” in the armada of imaginary voyage and utopian fiction from the seventeenth to late eighteenth centuries. This travel fiction was at its most prolific in the age of exploration; Philip Gove (1961) lists 215 tales of imaginary voyages between 1700 and 1800 (Gove 1). The direct correlation between unknown land as a destination for imaginary journeys is made further apparent by David Fausett (1993), who points out that Cook’s voyage to Australia coincided with the demise of utopian fiction 71 in its “original (geospatial) sense” (2). Literary-historical work by Hiatt, Gove, Fausett, Paul Longley Arthur and Simon Ryan on austral utopias and imaginary voyages has established that the imaginary continent of the “unknown southland” functioned as a “stage on which European fantasies of difference, aberration and monstrousness can be played out”, as Ryan puts it (108). Similarly, in his work on “Terra Incognita”, Hiatt emphasises that the unknown southland operates as a space of projection; declaring that “Terra Incognita marks the frontier, but also the interior” (Hiatt Terra Incognita: Mapping the Antipodes before 1600 9).

The fantastic monstrosities and absurd commonwealths that populate the unknown Southland display macro and micro dynamics, a concern with social order at a moment when Europe is increasingly decentered, as well as typical tropes of perversity, inversion and monstrosity. A reading of narrative dynamics of macrocosm and microcosm, phylogenesis and ontogenesis and anxiety about the status of representation in the key utopias of Brome, Hall and Swift shows how the poetic image of antipodean space provided the settings for “the antipodes of inner life”. Here we see a different bewilderment to Dante, though this formulation of the antipodes as a trope of location continues to display the spatial and temporal operations of katabasis.

Individual and collective pathology is spatialised in precisely this manner and connected to the antipodes in Robert Burton’s 1621 treatise Anatomy of Melancholy. In his theorisation of the black bile, the winter humour, Burton relocates the malady from the level of the individual to the collective, identifying “politic bodies” coloured by certain humours, a chiastic corruption of body and society. In his solution of a geographic relocation to escape social and individual ills, Burton deploys Terra Australis as a trope that connects both the individual and the social body and offers a space of possibility for both:

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I will yet…make a utopia of mine own, a new Atlantis, a political commonwealth…for the site of [which] I am not fully resolved, it may be in Terra Australis Incognita, there is room enough (for of my knowledge neither that hungry Spaniard nor Mecurious Brittanicus have yet discovered half of it) or else one of these floating islands in Mare del Zu (or) perhaps under the equator, that paradise of the world (in Fausett 42-43).

Fausett points out that the “hungry Spaniard” and “Mecurious Brittanicus” refer to Portuguese navigator Pedro Fernandes de Queirós and the hero of Joseph Hall’s Austral utopia Another World and Yet the Same respectively (42). In Burton’s solution to social ills, the fictional possibilities of Terra Australis Incognita are not fully realised, as real and imaginary travelers have not “yet discovered half of it.” As a “Utopia of mine own”, Terra Australis Incognita is exists for Burton as a fantastic space (he also references Bacon’s New Atlantis) that blurs the line between fiction and reality.

An overdetermination of the relation between antipodes and representation structures Richard Brome’s play The Antipodes: A Comedie (performed from 1638 and published 1640). In Brome’s play the antipodes are literally and metaphorically a stage on which “the line of madness” can be crossed; as Doctor Hughball announces, "We are sail'd, I hope, / Beyond the line of madness" (IV. x. 55). An intricate narrative of theatricality, sexuality and social satire, the main plot of The Antipodes centers around Doctor Hughball and nobleman Letoy’s attempt to cure Peregrin Joyless’ obsession with imaginary voyages, which has prevented him consummating his marriage, by staging a journey to the Anti-London at the antipodes. In this play within a play, the antipodes are characterised by direct inversion of English society. The prehumanist vertical cosmology remains connected to antipodean space, and can be seen in Diana’s concern that the antipodes exist in place of hell:

DOCTOR They walk upon firm earth, as we do here, And have the firmament over their heads, As we have here. 73

DIANA And yet just under us! Where is hell then? If they whose feet are towards us, At the lower part of the world, have heaven, too, Beyond their heads, where's hell? (I.vi.90-94)

This concern that lower geographic extremes take the traveler further from god is also reflected in Joseph Hall’s (1617) Quo Vadis ("Where are You Going?"), which, as Fausett points out, warns merchants "lest they go so far that they leave God behind them" (Fausett Images of the Antipodes in the Eighteenth Century 16). Fausett reads Antipodes as an “allegorisation of the stage itself”, and claims that the “mis en abyme of its rhetorical status and capabilities…inaugurated the abstractive thought of the enlightenment” (Fausett Writing the New World: Imaginary Voyages and Utopias of the Great South Land 74). Here a trope of the workings of the mind and of representation itself, the antipodes perform a similar function in the utopian literature of the time.

Normally a trope of difference, in Joseph Hall’s satirical travelogue, Another World and Yet the Same (1605), the antipodes represent regressive and degenerative homogeneity. In the protagonists set out on the ship fantasie for the ‘new’ New World, Terra Australis Incognita. Fausett argues that as a baroque “allegory of man’s voyage through life” (44), Another World and Yet the Same is typical of seventeenth-century Austral utopias (44); a reticulation of “spatial, social and moral inversion” (50), where the “voyage to the ends of the earth joins the two levels [macro and micro]; the adventures of an individual parallel or ‘act out’ a collective one involving configurations of culture” (50). This macro and micro drama of individual and social trajectories figure the antipodes as a recess of degeneracy and vice, where, to re-invoke Petrarch, “it is believable that our vices have long since descended to the antipodes”. The morally reprehensible antipodean world the protagonist of Another World and Yet the Same (Mercurius) discovers is divided according to six main vices: crapulia (disturbed or unhealthy digestion), pamphagonia (gluttony), Yvronia (excessive drinking), Viraginia (excess of 74 women), Moronia (land of fools) and Lavernia (translated as thievery, a land of crime). Moral perversity is mirrored in physical monstrosity. For example, off the coast of Viraginia is “Hermaphroditica Island, not unlike our Isle of Man in either form or size, where nature has standardised, as it were, the forms of everything indigenous into just one form: I observed no one without a double nature” (Hall 62). This trope of monstrous doubling recurs; for example the inhabitants of Lisonia are “the strangest I ever saw, two faced, two tongued, their front half in the shape of an ape, their rear in the shape of a dog, so they all seem composed of man, dog and ape” (Hall 92). Pointing out Mercurcius’ argument in the prologue that “incentive to moral behaviour is rooted in a commitment to a social culture—to a locale, a homeland” Fausett argues that the degeneracy and perversity of the antipodes front an opposition to the increasing globalisation of Europe during the age of exploration, which appears in Hall’s work as ultimately “an insular hermaphrodism – an absence of difference” (50).

The hermaphroditic theme of Hall’s narrative is also central to Thomas Arthus’ “Description of the Isle of Hermaphrodites recently discovered, contained the Manners, Customs & Laws of the Inhabitants” (1605), and Gabriel de Foigny’s La Terre Australe Connue (1676), which describes a great unknown southern land inhabited by hermaphrodites. Fausett argues that the inverted and monstrous antipodes of Hall and Foigny are models for later antipodean utopias, and that it was La Terre Australe connue in particular that provided Jonathan Swift with “the basic model for Gulliver”(39). The perverse corporeality flourishing in antipodal lands is overdeterminedly aligned with the inverted body in Tommaso Campanella’s socialist utopian story The City of the Sun (1602). Here those guilty of homosexual acts are “made to walk about for two days with a shoe tied to their necks as a sign that they perverted natural order, putting their feet where their head belongs” (In Ryan 108). In this corporeal inversion, the Rabelaisian connection between antipodal space and the material bodily stratum remains; as Fausett has demonstrated in his reading of Austral utopias of the seventeenth century 75 such as Hall’s and Campanella’s, “the theme of gender inversion clearly complements that of antipodean inversion, both literally and symbolically” (48). In utopian fiction in the later seventeenth century, the literal element becomes increasingly prominent, as narratives of fantastic journeys increasingly shift away from allegory and towards realism. Fausett locates this shift from allegory to narrative realism in two austral utopias, The Isle of Pines (1668) and The Hairy Giants (ca. 1671). This literal shift includes Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), a narrative that was, according to Fausett, influenced in part by William Dampier's "empiricist style of description" (39). Part of shift from metaphoric to literal that attends imaginative and actual inhabitation of the antipodes, antipodal space in Gulliver’s Travels is imbricated in a perverse departure from the philosophical and symbolic structures of humanism.

Where in the literature previously analysed, the antipodes were a trope of emergence for the humanist subject (Dante and Petrarch) and humanist cosmology of the collective body (Rabelais), in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, the geographic extreme of antipodes initiates a rejection of both the individual self and species. Swift’s fantastic satire22 opens with katabasis as Gulliver’s adventures begin in Lilliput, which is located “Northwest of Van Dieman’s Land” (Swift Gulliver's Travels 22). Moving from proportional extremes at the ends of the Earth - the miniscule Lilliputians and the giants of Brobdingnag – to map a spectrum of perverse and marvelous races of the earth, Gulliver’s Travels is fascinated with the dynamics of ontogenesis and phylogenesis. The centrality of the later is most apparent in the Fourth book; as Michael J. Franklin (2005) points out, the word “species” appears 22 times in this final book (Franklin 2) . Gulliver’s Travels begins by geographically and narratively locating the individual subject, Lemuel Gulliver. The novel concludes with the disarticulation and dislocation the subject in phylogenetic confusion in the

22 The Antipodes as a location for satiric literature has a long tradition from Hall, who, according to Fausett, called himself “the first English satirist” (46), to the British satires located in the colonies such as John Gay’s 1729 play Polly: An Opera.

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Land of the Houyhnhnms. The dislocation and disarticulation of subjectivity staged in the novel is clearly apparent through a comparison of the first and final words of the narrator. Commencing his narrative by giving “some account of himself”, Gulliver concludes it in a rage against the vice of pride in the inherently degenerate human race:

when I behold a Lump of Deformity, and diseases in both mind and body, smitten with Pride, it immediately breaks all Measures of my Patience; neither shall I be ever able to comprehend how such an Animal and such a Vice could tally together (271).

With its denouement a dislocation from species, nation, family and body through Gulliver’s identification with the equine Houyhnhnms and resemblance to the humanoid yahoos, the novel progressively disarticulates narratives of identity.

The centrality of perversity in Swift’s writing is announced by the narrator of A Tale of a Tub, who declares that “we of this Age have discovered a shorter, and more prudent Method to become Scholars and Wits, without the Fatigue of Reading or Thinking.” This prudent method is “to enter the Palace of Learning by the back door”, or in Rabelaisian terms, to “Counter-arse”:

for the Arts are all in a flying March, and therefore more easily subdued by attacking them in the rear. Thus Physicians discover State of the whole Body, by consulting only what comes from Behind. Thus men catch Knowledge by throwing their Wit on the Posteriors of a Book, as Boys do Sparrows by flinging Salt upon their Tails. Thus Human life is best understood by the Wise man’s Rule of Regarding the End (Tale of a Tub Section VII).

Circumscribed by a series of rhetorical inversions, this description operates via a catachreses of posteriors as the “rear” of the “arts”, the “posteriors of a book” and the “end” of “human life”. As an extension on the Man-as-Ass association Franklin argues is central to Gulliver’s travels (Gulliver’s name is Lemuel), Swift figures “human life” as asinine. Reaching its climax in misrecognitions and identifications in the Land of the Houyhnhnms, the 77 novel rehearses its move away from self and species first through the exaggerating and overturning corporeal and social bodies and then language and meaning.

Moving from the minutia of the Lilliputians to the massive inhabitants of the Brobdingnag, geographic extremes are aligned with corporeal ones. Further, the antipodes as Lilliput inverts bodies, world, life and death as the Lilliputians:

bury their dead with their heads directly downwards, because they hold an opinion that in eleven thousand Moons they are all to rise again, in which Period the Earth (which they conceive to be flat) will turn upside down, and by this means they shall, at their resurrection, be found already standing on their feet (55-56).

Inversion of life and death is later connected to the degeneration of humanity when the trope reappears in the necromantic antics of the sorcerers of Glubbdubdrib. Here “comparing the living with the dead” (188) Gulliver laments how the “Race of human kind” has become “degenerate”:

As every Person called up made exactly the same appearance he had done in the World, it gave me melancholy Reflections to observe how much the Race of human kind was degenerate among us, within these hundred years past. How the pox under all its Consequences and Denominations had altered every Lineament of an English countenance, relaxed the sinews and Muscles, introduced a sallow Complexion, and rendered the Flesh loose and Rancid (187).

In Gulliver’s Travels the social body is not only degenerate, but undone in the overturning of European norms. As in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Swift links the corruption of the individual and social bodies through the theories of “a most ingenious doctor” (175) of Lagardo who proposes a number of solutions for “Diseases and Corruptions, to which the several kinds of public Administration are subject by the Vices or Infirmities of those who govern” (175), including one of reversal, where:

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every Senator in the great Council of a Nation, after he had delivered his Opinion, and argued in the Defence of it, should be obliged to give his Vote directly contrary; because if that were done, the Result would infallibly terminate in the Good of the Publick (176).

Phylogenetic degeneration extends to linguistic degeneration, rehearsed through the research of the scholars at the Grand Academy of Lagado, located on the Isle of Balnibarbi. Inventions and experiments of the Academy are figured contrariwise; Gulliver’s first encounter at the academy is with a man who “had been Eight Years upon a Project for extracting Sun-Beams out of Cucumbers”, an elemental metamorphosis figured according to temporal reversal – transforming substance by returning it to its origin – the cucumber back to the sun beam. Similar rhetoric of backwardness circumscribes the other initiatives of the Academy, including “an Operation to reduce human Excrement to its original Food”, “a new Method for building Houses, by beginning at the Roof, and working downwards to the Foundation”, “condensing Air into a dry tangible Substance”, and “softening Marble for Pillows and Pincushions”.

As the relation between language and the world turns chaotic in Gulliver’s Travels there is an alchemical confusion of signification and substance. In the grand Academy of Lagado, language is undone through disassociation, materialisation as “things” and finally through visceral incorporation of signification. Disassociation of language and meaning is apparent in Gulliver’s description of the Academy’s giant “language machine” constructed from cubes of wood and papered with “all the Words of their Language, in their several Moods, Tenses, and Declensions, but without any Order.” At the command of the professor, the pupils:

took each of them hold of an Iron Handle, whereof there were forty fixed round the Edges of the Frame, and giving them a sudden turn, the whole Disposition of the Words was entirely changed. He then commanded six and thirty of the Lads to read the several Lines softly as they appeared upon the Frame; and where they found three 79

or four Words together that might make part of a Sentence, they dictated to the four remaining Boys who were Scribes. This Work was repeated three or four Times, and at every turn the Engine was so contrived that the Words shifted into new Places, as the Square bits of Wood moved upside down…Six hours a day were the young students employed in this labour (171).

In a vision of the catalogues of Dante and Petrarch gone mad, the inventor of this machine seeks to “give the world a complete Body of all arts and sciences”; a total representation of the universe through a systematic randomisation.

Meaning is further unravelled in this peculiar academy as the future projects of the School of Language are explained to Gulliver. Having successfully implemented a scheme “[t]o shorten discourse by cutting Polysyllables into one, and leaving out Verbs and Participles, because in reality all things imaginable are but nouns” (172), the School of Language was in the process of abolishing words altogether, as “since words are only names for Things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them, such Things as were necessary to express the particular business they are to discourse on” (172). This abolition of language is recommended because of an association of language with death, as the professors explain to Gulliver, “every word we speak is in some Degree a Diminution of our Lungs by Corrosion, and consequently contributes to the shortening of our Lives” (172). The corporealisation of signification through the manifestation of apparently fatal discourse as “Things” is further materialised through the incorporation of formulas. Gulliver describes an ingenious method of absorption of mathematical formulas, which are written on a wafer and eaten by students. However, the effectiveness of this method has yet to be proven “due to the perverseness of the lads” and the appalling taste of the formulas (174). The abolition of language is staged in the Southern Hemisphere, as the Academy of Lagado is on Balnibarbi, located East of Japan. On the map prefacing the chapter, Balnibarbi is surrounded by “parts unknown” (142). Here the erasure of language, which precedes the rejection of self and species in Houyhnhnm 80

Land and then, finally, in England, is staged in the geographic extreme of the “unknown” South. As the stage of the novel’s progressive unravelling of self, species and language, the Southern Hemisphere, particularly the antipodes as the protagonist’s first destination, works to spatialise Swift’s rejection of ontogenetic and phylogenetic narratives in Gulliver’s Travels.

The utopian tradition in the antipodes, and especially Terra Australis Incognita continues after Gulliver, but concludes at the end of the age of exploration. In his study of the literature of imaginary voyages, Paul Longley Arthur cites examples of mid to late eighteenth century Austral voyages, including Robert Paltock's The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1750), which depicts the Austral continent as home to flying creatures called “Gawrys” and “Glumms” (44), and Travels of Hildebrand Bowman (1778), published under the pseudonym of “Hildebrand Bowman”, which portrays the “native people of New Zealand [as] stunted semi-human creatures who eat human flesh and live by the light of the moon” (Arthur 44). As Fausett points out, the demise of utopian fiction in its “original (geospatial) sense” (2) coincided with Cook’s voyage to Australia. Utopian and imaginary voyage literature was thus inseparable from the age of exploration, with less new works in the genre appearing as cartographic unknowns diminished.

However, antipodean space retained its poetic valences of katabasis, overturning, and generative perversity during the colonisation of Australia and New Zealand. The next chapter of this thesis continues to argue for the precedence of the figural in the transposition of this tropology from metaphoric to real in the real and literary inhabitation of the man-made hell of the penal colonies.

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Figure 1: Psalter in Edson, Evelyn. Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed Their World. London: The British Library, 1999.

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Figure 2: Psalter detail in ibid

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Figure 3 Ebstorf: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/Ebstorfer- stich2.jpg

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Figure 4 Ebstorf detail: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Detail_%28south%29_ebstorf_wor ld_map.jpg

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Figure 5: Ebstorf detail: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Detail_%28south%29_ebstorf_wor ld_map2.jpg 86

Fig 6. Hereford Mappa Mundi: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/Hereford_Mappa _Mundi_1300.jpg

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Figure 7: From Guillame Le Tetsu’s 1555 Cosmographica Universelle, in Barber, Peter, ed. The Map Book. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005 p 105

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Chapter Two: The Gardens of Hell

"To people a new settlement with convicted criminals - to form a new nation of the scum and refuse of mankind, - appeared to them...preposterous..." Lady M. Fox, The Southlanders: An Account of an Expedition into the Interior of New Holland 26.

“the waving, whispering woods out on a brown horror, like the forests that wave and sigh through Dante’s tartarean vision.” – John Mitchel, The Gardens of Hell, Jan 5th, 1853.

The Imperial establishment of the antipodean penal colonies was a cataclysmic collision between the imaginative tradition of the antipodean underworld and the geographic reality of the antipodes. As a realisation of the antipodes of the premodern European imagination, the penal colonies of Australia were a case of hell made real. Following the transportation of Britons to the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the choice of the antipodean location for as a repository for England’s criminals was, in part, a manifestation of the belief in a space below where sinners were punished. This improbable, brutal penal endeavour was indebted to an imaginative tradition that associated the antipodes with an infernal space of despair and punishment, where the perverse, aberrant and deviant were sent. Located broadly within the discovery of the New World and the first great moment of globalisation, the colonisation of the antipodes distinguishes itself as a particular and intense collision between imaginative projection and geographic reality.

The new colony reached by the descending journey south that had characterised centuries of imaginative voyages to the antipodes, Australia was colonised through a literal katabasis. This literal katabasis was perversely generative in the terms Michel Foucault outlines the production of discourses of perversity; the colonies and nation were literally built by perverse subjects - by the abject refuse of the social order. This productivity of perverse and aberrant subjects explicitly intersects with the proliferation of discourses of perversity in the nineteenth century in the sciences and humanities. Indeed, 89 as a repository of social aberrance, the penal colonies were at the heart of contemporary discourse of the perverse subject.

The antipodean colonial subject is marked as perverse in a number of ways. These metaphorics of an antipodean underworld relate particularly to the white colonial subject, as it is according to the European social order that the transported convict is a perverse subject. As hell is traditionally a place inhabited by the dead, the Imperial endeavour of colonising hell marks its subjects as temporally perverse, where the process of inhabiting hell is a hysteron proteron genesis of life from death. This perverse arrival and process of inhabitation are both compounded and complicated by Australia’s natural perversity. As has been extensively documented, the unique and peculiar features of the Australian continent meant that the place was home to real strangeness that exceeded earlier projections of antipodean perversity. Exemplifying the generative potential of the perverse, these unprecedented and unpredicted natural aberrations had profound effects on European discourses of typology in the natural sciences. It is from this intersection of rhetorical, material and discursive perversity in the young penal colonies that this chapter argues for a constitutive chiasmus where the colonies are generative of perversity and where perversity is a potent site of colonial becoming.

This hellish colonisation and perverse metamorphosis of the antipodes is a complex transition from an imagined space to a real place. This chapter contends that this encounter between the imagined space of the antipodes and the peculiar realities of the geographical place generates a series of contradictions where Australia is seen to be at once ancient and modern, real and fantastic, natural and unnatural. The colonial identity that emerges from this state of suspension between contradictory terms holds its potential in its morphic and undefined qualities. In keeping with the status of underworlds as material domains and the liminal qualities of materiality, this potential and this becoming is avowedly material. As Elizabeth McMahon has argued in her 90 work on the colonial cyborg, abject becoming is a crucial mode of nineteenth- century identity formation in Australian literature (McMahon, “The Centaur and the Cyborg: Abject becoming on the colonial frontier” 112). This generative potential accords with the creative power of the material imagination as Bachelard has outlined it. For Bachelard, as “the very principle that can dissociate itself from forms”, the material imagination is imbued with a transformative, “individualising power” (2). These images of material potential and the possibilities of the deformed and yet to be formed are abundant in nineteenth-century literature. This chapter demonstrates this transformative and generative materiality is grounded in Australia’s proximity to hell. This combination of matter as a key site of becoming for the Australian colonial subject and the Australian penal colonies as a perverse and hellish space mean that colonial, and, later, national identity formation is achieved according to a process of perverse becoming.

The approach taken here extends the general thesis of national becoming as it is outlined by Richard White in Inventing Australia, where he stresses that “[a] national identity is an invention” (viii), a process, rather than a coherent, static fact. I specify this general approach to national becoming by arguing for its relation to the particular tropology of the premodern antipodean imaginary, the paradoxical temporality this imaginary produces and the collision between these metaphorics and nineteenth-century taxonomic discourses. In order to demonstrate the lines of continuance and particularity this encounter between the real and imagined antipodes generates, I use what is arguably the most extreme and brutal example of this collision, the Van Diemen’s Land penal colony. As Irish Nationalist, John Mitchel, (1815-1875) held in Van Diemen’s Land 1850-1853, described it, the island was “Dante’s tartarean vision” made real. As hell on earth, I argue that the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land is a literal manifestation of antipodean metaphorics. Further, that this “tartarean vision” is also a concentration of nineteenth- 91 century discourses of taxonomy and perversity23. In this new language of aberrance and deviance, the Judeo-Christian imaginary does not disappear as the colony is repeatedly described according to biblical language of perversity, a “Sodom”, and “Gomorrah”. The insistent presence of earlier metaphorics is felt further as the convict colony is a perverse realisation of the utopian and dystopian colonies of the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries, such as those of Hall, de Foigny and Swift.

In bringing these discourses of convict perversity and natural perversity together under the rubric of the antipodean underworld imaginary, this chapter argues for the mutual constitution of national and perverse identities, where perversity is key to the peculiar generation and particular forms of becoming of colonial identity formation. As a perverse space where the self is transformed, hell is a trope of particular resonance for this process of colonial inhabitation. This chapter demonstrates that hell is a crucial spatial metaphor of Australian colonial identity, working to inscribe a temporality of inhabitation, and functioning as a space of transformation through its association with satanic self-invention. Unlike Dante, for whom the journey through hell resulted in the conferral of identity, Australian hells figure colonial identity formation as a perverse genesis, grounded as they are in the tension between notionality and reality, nature and artifice, ancient and modern. Furthermore, this perversity and its relation to the underworld metaphorics of antipodean space appear as both contagious and coincidental as it occurs across a whole range of discourses. This chapter analyses texts that range across literature, poetry, the natural sciences and psychology to

23 As Michael Foucault has argued in Discipline and Punish, the nineteenth-century prison was both productive of and produced by discourses of abnormality:

Replacing the adversary of the sovereign, the social enemy was transformed into a deviant, who brought with him the multiple dangers of disorder, crime and madness. The carceral network linked, through innumerable relations, the two long, multiple series of the punitive and the abnormal.

Michel Foucault, "Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison," trans. Alan Sheridan, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al (New York; London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001) 1641. 92 argue for the centrality of perversity to Australian colonial inhabitation and identity formation.

In terms of literary fiction, as the novel of Tasmanian hell and perversity, Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life (1874) is the central literary text analysed by this chapter. A key staging of colonial becoming according to the topoi of verticality, liminality, perversity and materiality, Clarke’s iconic novel exemplifies the dynamics and processes of perversity as a mode of colonial inhabitation and identity formation. I argue that the range of transformations that propel this narrative are underscored by an abject materiality that is both monstrous and generative, and both these transformations and material becoming are firmly embedded in both a premodern imaginary and contemporary discourses of perversity. While this suspension between contradictory locations prevents the attainment of a coherent identity, it engenders a proliferation of partial and potential forms, rich with the possibilities of unformed matter.

This relation between discourses of perversity and colonial inhabitation is also evident in the canonical pre-national literature and poetry of Henry Lawson, A.B. Paterson, Rosa Praed, and other iconic writers published in popular journals in the 1890s. Through textual analysis of works by these key figures in literature of this “legendary” decade, I demonstrate how nineteenth-century discourses of taxonomy and perversity function as indicators of topographic specificity. The literature and poetry of the 1890s, considered formative of a national sensibility, also sees a proliferation of tropes of monstrosity, inversion and perversity. I argue that these tropes function as a strategy of inhabitation, of increasing topographical specificity.

The generative operations of the dystopian literalisation of Australia as the perverse space of hell become clear through a comparison of representations of hell before, during and after Federation. In order to specify the operations of this trope and its relationship to literary and national identity, I outline 93 conclusions from archival research into representations of Australia as hell in poetry appearing in periodicals between 1839 and 1912. Examining trends within this genre during this time period shows a shift in conventions of representing this hell, with a marked change around the turn of the century, coinciding with Federation. Australian hells draw on conventions of the English hell of “Satanic mills” and the dark underside of Romanticism, but are unique in that they combine these traditions with a hell arising from place itself. In this poetic tradition, hell is consistently figured as the Australian landscape, and when read together, these poems show a process of inhabiting hell.

Through this archival analysis I demonstrate that, after Federation in 1901, poetic images of hell increasingly depart from the biblical tradition of hell as a space of despair and torment. Further, this moment also sees a shift from didactic to parodic uses of the trope, where hell, previously grounded in representations of the natural environment increasingly becomes a device for resignifying the social. At the beginning of the twentieth century, what is now very clearly an Australian hell becomes fertile, edenic and even heavenly. In this poetic tradition, Australia is figured as an increasingly habitable hell, a place of genesis, life and possibility. The next decade sees examples of hell disappearing, freezing over or collapsing. From this transformation and subsequent diminution of the trope, I conclude that hell is a crucial mechanism of white Australian colonial identity and inhabitation.

These examples of typological discourse informing location is a process that goes both ways, as modes of becoming enabled by this perverse, underworld imaginary were not only productive in literature. In Havelock Ellis’ theorisation of the “congenital invert”, a discourse of the perverse subject can be seen to emerge from this proliferation of representations of antipodean perversity. I demonstrate that, along with altering taxonomic discourses, the intersection of the antipodean imaginary and geographic reality was key to Ellis’ concept of the “congenital invert”. An analysis of 94 metaphors of space in this text shows a connection between tropology, topography and typography, where, echoing Dante’s egress from hell, the inverted and perverse subject is figuratively generated from an inverted and perverse place. Here we have the emergence of the perverse subject from the particularity of Ellis’ experience in Australia, and conceptualised according to the rhetorical operations of the antipodes as a perverse space.

The methodology deployed by this chapter is directed by its object of study. A survey that moves across a range of different texts is required in order to map this moment in modernity when discourses of perverse generation proliferate across a range of fields. I examine literature, poetry, autobiography, newspaper articles, government reports, as well as material from natural sciences and psychology. Through this broad scope of technical reference, with a particular focus on archival study of the image of hell in Australian poetry, there can be seen coincidence of perverse generation along with the vertical spatial imaginaries mapped by the previous chapter in these different fields of enquiry. This survey is overlaid with theoretical and theological frameworks and literary analysis. Bringing these different lenses into alignment allows us to see the embeddedness of this rhetoric across a range of ways of understanding the world.

I extend the theoretical framework of productive perversity deployed in the previous chapter to show how antipodean metaphorics are inseparable from the emergence of new categories of subjects from discourses of sexual perversity and fin de siecle degeneration. In fiction, these subjects appear at the border of the human, becoming animal, monster or machine. Reading these emergences via Foucault’s concept of the dissemination and proliferation of discourses of perversity demonstrates how they are the product of the intersection of an antipodean imaginary and nineteenth-century discourse. Foucault’s theorisation of the discursive generation of new subjects in the nineteenth-century and the “complex deployment of networks connecting [these discourses]” (Foucault The History of Sexuality: 1 - the Will to Knowledge 95

34) not only provides historical context but also casts into relief the generative and productive operation of the category of the perverse.

As in the previous chapter, I apply Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection as a means to view the relation between real and symbolic domains. A corporeal response to a symbolic operation, Kristeva’s theorisation of abjection is particularly suited to reading the intersection of representation and the real in nineteenth-century Australia. Elizabeth McMahon has applied Kristeva’s theory to the Australian context, arguing that the abject constitutes a particular Australian mode of becoming, functioning as “a spectacle that enables the radical unmaking of the humanist subject and the constitution of a new colonial identity” (McMahon "The Centaur and the Cyborg: Abject Becoming on the Colonial Frontier" 223). Following McMahon, I deploy Kristeva’s concept of the abject as a lens through which to view the operation of material and corporeal domains in the never stable process of colonial identity formation. In this analysis, I combine Kristeva’s formulation with Kelly Hurley’s concept of the “abhuman” to further specify generations and disintegrations of colonial identity formation in relation to nineteenth-century literature. Also key to this model of reading identity formation is Bachelard’s concept of the transformative properties of the material imagination, where matter is a substance that can unmake and remake form. Applying this model based on the domains of the abject, the abhuman and the material imagination to read key texts in nineteenth-century Australian literature, I argue the material potential contained in the abject matter and abhuman morphic forms that populate nineteenth-century texts such as For the Term of His Natural Life constitute a crucial locus of Australian white colonial becoming: the potential of the unformed and the partially formed.

In order to demonstrate how this material domain of subject formation and inhabitation is imbricated in a metaphorics of verticality, I continue to deploy textual analysis of the narrative operation katabasis as it is outlined by Northrop Frye and developed by Rachel Falconer. My analysis of these 96 tropological operations in the taxonomic discourses of both the natural sciences and accounts of the Van Diemen’s Land penal colonies are grounded in the historical data provided by a number of key thematic studies. Central texts on the natural sciences for this research are literary and cultural critic Simon Ryan’s genealogical study of “how Cartographers saw Australia” and environmental historian Libby Robin’s survey of nineteenth-century natural sciences in Australia. In the Tasmanian context, David Coad’s archival evidence of a discourse of convict perversity provides crucial proof of the overlap of antipodean and nineteenth-century imaginaries. My analysis extends these thematic studies of antipodean inversion and Australian perversity by focusing on their embeddedness within a premodern theological imaginary.

The fifth part of the earth

As the reality of Australia’s unique ecology exceeded earlier projections of antipodean strangeness, lines between domains of artificial and natural, imagined and real and culture and nature became increasingly unstable. While the imaginative tradition associating antipodean space with inversion and perversity informed descriptions of the Australian landscape, the particularities of the natural world exceeded these projections. Further compounding this complex relationship between notional and real spaces, the apparent aberrances and contrarieties of Australian ecology overturned the classification systems of Linnaean biology. This collision between the metaphorics of antipodean strangeness, which still retains the residue of prehumanist imaginary, and nineteenth-century typological discourses results in the emergence of a contradictory temporality where Australia is figured as both ancient and modern.

The tropes of aberrance and perversity that defined antipodean space for centuries in the European imagination continue in descriptions of the 97

Australian landscape in the popular travelogue literature of the nineteenth- century. However, in this intersection between nineteenth-century discourse, geographic reality and the earlier imaginary, a chiastic relation of nature and culture emerges; where it appears as if the place itself is literally rather than metaphorically generative of perversity. This literal emergence of antipodean particularity is staged in Richard Whately’s 1846 poem “There is a Place in Distant Seas”, where composite forms and inversions constitute the “wonder” of this “place in distant seas”:

There is a place in distant seas Full of contrarieties: There beasts have mallards' bills and legs, Have spurs like cocks, like hens lay eggs. There parrots walk upon the ground, And grass upon the trees is found; On other trees, another wonder! Leaves without upper sides or under (Whately).

This tropology of inversion that structures Whately’s verse is typical of early representations of Australian topography. Literary critic Simon Ryan has shown how the rhetoric of inversion, perversity and aberrance carries over in the transition from the imagined space of the Antipodes “Terra Australis Incognita” to the colonisation of Australia, where the later came to be “the repository of all that was abnormal or perverse” (Ryan 107). Ryan draws particular attention to tropes of inversion in early nineteenth-century descriptions of the Australian landscape, such as those of French naturalist and explorer Francois Péron (ca. 1810) and J Martin (ca. 1830). For Péron, everything experienced on the continent “differ[ed] from all the principles of our sciences and all the laws of our systems” and “experience of every kind is always to be overturned in this singular part of the world” (Ryan 111). In Martin’s account, a particular Australian topography is inscribed via tropes of Antipodean inversion:

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trees retained their leaves and shed their bark instead, the swans were black, the eagles white, the bees were stingless, some mammals had pockets, others laid eggs, it was warmest on the hills and coolest in the valleys…even the blackberries were red (in Ryan 111).

In this overlap of the rhetorical structures of antipodean perversity and the reality of the Australian ecology, Australian peculiarities are cast as literal rather than metaphoric.

This formulation of nature being more fantastic than fiction is not a simple progression from metaphor to real, as the residue of the prehumanist cosmology remains. In Barron Field’s famous 1819 poem, “The Kangaroo”, this prehumanist cosmology is positioned as the origin of Australia’s fantastic nature. Field’s poem rehearses a shift from the fantastic to the literal, where the later is figured as more fantastic through the “contradiction” of the “anomalous” marsupial:

Kangaroo, Kangaroo! Thou Spirit of Australia, That redeems from utter failure, From perfect desolation, And warrants the creation Of this fifth part of the Earth, Which should seem an after-birth, Not conceiv'd in the Beginning (For God Bless'd His work at first, And saw that it was good), But emerge'd at the first sinning, When the ground was therefore curst; -- And hence this barren wood!

Kangaroo, Kangaroo! Tho' at first sight we should say, In thy nature that there may Contradiction be involv'd. Yet like discord well resolv'd, 99

It is quickly harmoniz'd. Sphynx or mermaid realiz'd. Or centaur unfabulous, Would scarce be more prodigious, Or Labyrinthine Minotaur, With which great Theseus did war, Or Pegasus poetical. Or hippogriff--chimeras all!

(New Oxford Book of Australian Verse, 6-7).

Introduced with the epigraph “mixtumque genus, prolesque biformis” (Virgil’s description of the minotaur in Aeneid VI), and compared to sphinx, mermaid and centaur, Field emphasises the fabulous ”contradiction” of the kangaroo. Yet as a real creature, the marsupial renders the fantastic creatures it is compared to “chimeras all” and “unfabulous”; the fictional competition “would scarce be more prodigious”. Emphasising that the kangaroo is “[n]one but nature’s hand can make” rather than “poetical”, the poet positions the natural as the more fantastic category. This circuitous relationship between notional and real categories becomes further complicated as it is grounded in the theological imaginary of the antipodes as already fallen. As the “fifth part of the Earth” the antipodes are figured as untimely, belated; “an after-birth”. Emerging at the “first sinning”, this extra, later part of the world is allowed no prelapsarian origin, it is already fallen, already “curst”. Yet the “prodigious” creation of this “curst” land, which is a space very clearly located within a Judeo-Christian imaginary, is “none but nature’s hand can make”; an organic aberrance inseparable from the prehumanist cosmology of heaven, earth and hell.

This effect of the “prodigious” reality of Australian biology exceeding the imagined strangeness of antipodean space is famously exemplified in the discovery of the platypus. The seemingly composite anatomical components of this monotreme (named Ornithorhynchus paradoxus in 1800) meant that, at least to British eyes, it was a creature so unusual that it could not possibly be 100 natural. Indeed, the first examination of the animal was an attempt to prove that it was a fabrication: when George Shaw of the British Museum received the first platypus specimen in 1798, “he assumed it was a skillful hoax and tried to find the place where two different animals were sewn together” (White 9). Environmental historian Libby Robin notes that this specimen “is still marked by the scissors that Shaw used to check that the beak had not been stitched on by a taxidermist” (Robin 36).

As with the platypus, ecologies particular to Australia not only exceeded the imagined strangeness of the place, but altered European discourse about nature. As Richard White points out, Charles Darwin, T.H. Huxley and J.D. Hooker - scientists largely responsible for the paradigm shift away from “the great chain of being” – all visited Australia, attributing shifts in ideas to the encounter with the region’s unique topographical, botanical and zoological features (White 9). Darwin himself says about his time in the Southern Hemisphere that “[t]he voyage of the Beagle has been by far the most important event in my life, and has determined my whole career” (in Laurent 14). The apparent aberrations and contrarieties of Australian nature in particular were crucial evidence in the shift away from Linnaean biology. Robin notes that“[t]he British became great collectors of curiosities that challenged the Linnaean system” and argues that “the empire was partly justified by this search for knowledge” (Robin How a Continent Created a Nation 32).

As a combination of the fantastic and the real, Australian ecology continued to signify both these domains well after the nineteenth century. In his 1956 treatise on the “new understanding” enabled by “the mescaline experience” in Heaven and Hell, Aldous Huxley invokes Australian mammals and marsupials to describe “the mind’s antipodes” (12):

If you go to New South Wales, you will see marsupials hopping about the countryside. And if you go to the antipodes of the self conscious mind, you will encounter all sorts 101

of creatures at least as odd as kangaroos. You do not invent these creatures any more than you invent marsupials. They live their own lives in complete independence. A man cannot control them. All he can do is go to the mental equivalent of Australia and look around him. Some people never consciously discover their antipodes (10).

Figuring both the real and the abstract, New South Wales and Australia stand for the topography of the unconscious. However, this comparison is drawn in order to emphasise the realness of both places, the real antipodes, and the mind’s antipodes. Further, this allegory is grounded in the Judeo-Christian cosmology, as these antipodes of the mind are “heaven and hell”.

The complexity of this relation between the imagined and real antipodes where the strangeness of the latter exceeds the former and alters European discourses of the natural world is that, as in Huxley’s writing, the metaphorics of the prehumanist cosmology do not disappear. White draws our attention to the commonality of this association in the nineteenth-century, citing the description of a flying fox by a member of Sir Joseph Banks' crew as "about as large and much like a one gallon cagg, as black as the Devil and had 2 horns on its head, it went but Slowly but I dared not touch it” (in White 7). White points out that this man “would not have been the only member of the crew whose main concerns were drink and damnation” (7). It is not only images of damnation that appear in relation to Australian peculiarities; biblical temporalities of eternity, the fall and the flood are invoked in a range of discourses in accounts of the continent. This heterogeneous temporality is an effect of this complex transposition from the antipodean imaginary to Australian particularity, and renders the place as at once accelerated, backwards and static.

Nineteenth-century accounts across a range of discourses located Australia between the eternal time of prehumanist cosmology, the ancient time of the Australian continent, and the historical time of progressive, industrial modernity. One version of Australia’s aberrance figures the continent as producing the “climatic” effects of accelerated growth and prolonged youth. 102

For example, an anonymous account of Australia’s “General Features and Resources” in the first volume of Leisure Hour (1852) begins with a typical typology of inversions from “a land of contrarieties; a kind of miniature world, in many respects turned upside down” – botanical, zoological etc. The description turns to temporal anomalies of this “land of contraries” worthy of Rabelais or Swift, where:

It has repeatedly been stated, that individuals in middle or advanced life, even after the decay of the animal system has commenced, have acquired a new vigour on proceeding to Australia, like trees transplanted to a more congenial soil, and have apparently received an addition to what might have been deemed in their case the ordinary term of existence. From some unknown reason, but doubtless climatic, birth is given to children by parents at a more advanced stage of life, and the young increase in stature more rapidly than in England (Anon "Australia. I – Its General Features and Resources" in Johnson and Anderson 48).

For the “animal system”, “trees” and “parents at a more advanced stage of life”, time is overturned in a place saturated with excessive youth. Sir James Edward Smith, the first president of the Linnaean Society, stresses the newness of the land, explaining how anyone working on the botany of New Holland found “himself as it were in a new world” where “not only all species that present themselves are new, but most of the genera, and even natural orders” (in White 6).

A further layer of this heterogeneous temporality consists of the arrested, prehistoric and antediluvian times of the continent. Robin emphasises the characterisation of Australia as “backward”, “precivilised” and “antediluvian” (33), citing the example of visiting naturalist John Gould’s (1848) description of Australia's "Low" fauna and flora as typical of the nineteenth century attitude. Gould argues that “[t]he great majority of [Australia's] quadrupeds are the very lowest of mammalia...while the low organisation of botany is indicated by the remarkable absence of fruit bearing trees” (in Robin, 33). Robin also emphasises the paranoia of contagion that 103 characterised “the shock of difference” that marked the first encounter with the Australian continent: “Perhaps there was some anxiety among some settlers that they might ‘catch’ the backwardness, and descend to a pre- civilised, ‘antediluvian’ society” (33). This backwardness is also figured as stasis. In his 1910 Lone Hand article, “Australia-A museum of living antiquities”, Joseph McCabe characterises Australia as “failing to evolve”, a place “where primitive types of life may retain their old-world ways, sheltered from the bustling competition of a younger and more forward generation” (in Robin, 33). Characterised by both an accelerated motion of time, with the “young increase[ing] in stature more rapidly” and the frozen temporality of a continent that remains “antediluvian”, Australia is in this formulation suspended between trajectories of becoming and disappearing.

The productivity of this intersection of temporalities, imaginaries and nineteenth-century discourse within typologies of the natural sciences is also true for contemporary formulations of subjectivity. In these new understandings of identity, this collision generates particular models of colonial becoming, as I will argue through the example of the Van Diemen’s Land penal colonies and, more specifically, the key text of colonial perversity and hell, Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life.

Sodom of the south

Suspended between the contradictory locations of imagined and real, ancient and modern24, and Judeo-Christian and secular, the “tartarean” world

24 This tension between natural and social worlds as well as an incongruous temporality persists in the material trace of and cultural monuments to the Van Diemen’s Land penal colonies. Discussing the tourist site of Port Arthur, John Frow emphasizes the significance of the site as one of ruins, as:

At the core of the aesthetics of the ruin is the sense that an edifice passes, with time and weathering, from its social function (punishment, for example) to a merging with the natural world. […] But in a lieu de mémoire like Port Arthur it is surely the softened glow that the ruin gives to a convict past now half-merged into the natural world that constitutes its appeal. Hence the paradox that, to the extent that the buildings of the Port Arthur penal colony are preserved at all, they are preserved precisely as ruins. 104 of Van Diemen’s Land also collides with nineteenth-century discourses of deviation and aberrance. This intersection produces particular effects for the white colonial subject who, emerging from the tension between these paradoxical points, is never fully formed. This yet-to-be-formed state is generative, a locus of potential both within representations of the penal colonies. Furthermore, this tension between notionality and reality produced by the collision of the imagined antipodes and the reality of antipodean particularity is crucial to the production of a new discursive form of the subjectivity in Havelock Ellis’ theorisation of the “congenital invert”.

As hell on earth, the Van Diemen’s Land penal colony was a literal and brutal dystopian realisation of antipodean metaphorics. The “natural penitentiary” (Clarke 346) of Van Diemen’s Land is the most severe example of the transposition from the imagined space of the antipodes to the white colonial encounter with its geographic reality. As Irish Nationalist John Mitchel (1815-1875, held in Van Diemen’s Land from 1850 to 1853) puts it, the island was “Dante’s tartarean vision” made real. An example of the persistence of this imaginary and its continued hold on the cultural imagination can be found in Jonathan Auf Der Heide's 2009 film, Van Diemen’s Land. In this film, both the natural world and the social order are both figured as hell. Made with the working title “Hell’s Gates”, Van Diemen’s Land is structured around Dante’s Inferno. Auf Der Heide explains how “in writing the script we paralleled Alexander Pearce's journey through the depths of Van Diemen's Land to Dante's own journey through the depths of hell” (in McCully). Van Diemen’s Land was not only a repository of vice in the infernal sense, but also in keeping with the tradition of Austral utopias and dystopias.

The transportation of convicts to Van Diemen’s Land literalised the antipodean utopias of seventeenth and eighteenth-century fiction; realising

John Frow, "In the Penal Colony," Australian Humanities Review (1999). (italics in original).

105 the land of vice from Hall’s Another World and Yet the Same, as well as the inverted worlds of de Foigny’s La Terre Australe Connue and Campanella’s The City of The Sun. Indeed, the carceral use of the space directly corresponds to Swifts Gulliver’s Travels, which begins “Northwest of Van Diemen’s Land” with the protagonist incarcerated (Swift Gulliver's Travels 22). This equation between the imagined antipodes and the colonial acquisition of the space as a repository of vice is not one drawn in hindsight; it was a clear and present connection in the contemporary imagination. Whately, for example emphasises both antipodean inversions and the place as a repository for vice in “There is a Land in Distant Seas”:

There every servant gets his place By character of foul disgrace; There vice is virtue, virtue vice, And all that’s vile is voted nice (1846, the life of Richard Whately, 110).

This “vile” pit of “vice” is realised at the intersection between Judeo-Christian imaginary and state policy. One of the particular horrors of convict transportation is that it is a conscious literalisation of this earlier imaginary: for example, as White points out, Lord Stanley “boasted in 1833...that he would make transportation worse than death” (White 17). Steeped as it is in this imaginary of hell, vice, inversion and utopian/dystopian projection, the historical reality of Van Diemen’s Land is all the more terrifying because it is the manifestation of all the horrific potential contained within those metaphorics.

The Van Diemen’s Land colonies not only literalise the association between antipodean space and hell, but also evolve as a concentration of nineteenth- century discourses of the aberrant subject. As Foucault argues in Discipline and Punish, the institution of the prison or penitentiary both produces and polices certain kinds of subjects (Foucault "Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison" 1641). An effect of this collision between the biblical imaginary of Sodom and hell and these emerging discourses of aberrance, combined with 106 the anxieties inherent in homosocial spaces, is that the place itself is seen as productive of perversity.

Circling back to the premodern imaginary, accounts of perversity in the penal colony are articulated according to tropisms of biblical vice. “Sodom”, Gomorrah” and “devilish contagion” were terms all used to describe the penal colonies of Van Diemen’s Land, which David Coad argues was considered a “Sodom of the South” (27). “Christianos” laments in 1847:

Shall Tasman's Isle so Fam'd. So lovely and so fair, From other nations be estrang'd-- The name of Sodom bear? (in Coad 31)

Here Van Diemen’s Land retains the associations of the premodern imagination of the antipodes, where, as Petrarch suggests, the space functions as the recess of humanity’s vice. In The Exile's Lamentations, Thomas Cook alludes to a “devilish contagion” (in Coad 29), while Welsh convict John Frost says of Van Diemen's Land that “each probation station” was ”a Gomorrah” (pamphlet published in London in 1857, in Coad 29).

This association is not just allegorical. Descriptions of social deviance are grounded in the language of Australia’s natural aberrance, where the effect is an understanding that the place itself generates perversity. For example, in “Frank the Poet”’s (Francis MacNamara) farewell to the “Land of Buggers”, the kangaroo and possum are signifiers of homosexual sex:

Farewell Tasmania's isle! I bid adieu The possum and the kangaroo Farmer's Glory! Prisoners' Hell Land of Buggers! Fare ye well (ca. 1850s, in Coad, 17).

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As Coad points out, here “possum” and “kangaroo” are operating as "slang terms for homosexual positions” (45). This slip from mammalian peculiarities signifying geographic particularities to marking perversities of the penal colony figures the place itself as generative of perversity.

This transposition of natural to social aberrance is not only present in poetical and fictional representations of the penal colony, but also circumscribes official reports on convict behaviour. William Gladstone, Secretary of State for the Colonies was informed that Van Diemen's Land was a “hotbed and composium of moral pollution” (in Coad 30). In Gender Trouble Down Under, Coad demonstrates a proliferation of accounts of:

Buggery, bestiality, rape, paedophilia, boys being addressed as girls, women acting as pseudo-males, convicts of the same-sex treating each other as 'husband' and 'wife', venereal disease…(Coad 26).

This discourse around perverse sexuality emphasises the excessiveness of the behavior – it was not just that the prisoners were doing it, but that they were doing it a lot. As Sir John Eardley-Wilmont, the Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen's Land explained to Lord Stanley in 1843, “[t]he men at the different stations, notwithstanding the utmost vigilance and superintendence, commit sodomy to a great extent with one another” (in Coad 30, my italics).

This excessive depravity was not the sole domain of the male prisoners. A 1841 report from Launceston to the prison discipline committee declared that the “conduct [of the female convicts] generally is most depraved and disgusting, and their language most obscene. Unnatural intercourse between them is carried on to a great extent” (in Coad 38). Similarly, at the Hobart Town Female Factory: "twelve months ago two women had recently been discovered in the very act of exciting each other's passions - on the Lord's day in the House of God - and at the very time divine service was performing” (in Coad, 38). The excess associated with such perversity has a centrifugal, or 108 contagious quality; here the “passions” in question come to infect, and thereby pervert the time and space of “on the Lord’s day in the House of God”. According to Coad, these accounts of sexual excess were not limited to the human. Coad points out that in the period from 1842-1846, convictions for bestiality recorded in Van Diemen's Land involved “a dog, mare, cow, bull and goat…” (31), and Bishop Ullathorne testified that “unnatural connexions with animals" in New South Wales "were not inconsiderable” (in Coad 32). Though intended as condemnations of such behaviour, these typological accounts of a proliferation of perversity are nonetheless accounts of a generative operation; of certain effects produced by a space that was already perverse. The potential of this perverse generation as a means of becoming and metamorphosis emerges in the most famous account of the Van Diemen’s Land penal colonies, Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life (1870-72).

In Clarke’s iconic novelisation of the antipodean convict experience, some of the most brutal punishments and inhuman treatment take place in the Van Diemen’s Land colonies. Apart from the spectacle of the horrific treatment of the prisoners, Clarke’s narrative is propelled by a series of transformations. The main characters all change their identities at least once in the novel, and thematics of transmutation are stressed as the denouement unfolds in an alchemist’s chamber. When viewed through this metaphorics of metamorphosis, images of unformed matter and semi-human forms populate the novel as sites of material potential. I argue that this material potential and the perverse generations that emerge in For the Term of His Natural Life are effects of the intersection of residual theological imaginary of antipodean space and the emerging discourse of perversity in the nineteenth-century that structure the novel.

The Australian penal colonies are explicitly figured as hell in For the Term of His Natural Life. Macquarie Harbour, or Hell’s Gates, as a “pit of torment was so deep that one could not even see heaven” (176). Port Arthur is “a den of horrors” (327), “a deep into which the eye of Heaven did not penetrate” (341), 109 and echoes with “[t]he never ceasing clashing of ions and the eternal click of hammers” (344). “Norfolk Island evokes [i]n its recklessness, its insubordination, its filth, and its despair it realises…the notion of hell (418). The description of Tasmania’s West Coast echoes Milton’s description of the topography of hell as “[r]ocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens and shades of death” (Paradise Lost Book II: 621-628):

The air is chill and moist, the soil prolific but in prickly undergrowth and noxious weeds, while the fetid exhalations from swamp and fen cling close to the humid ground. All around breathes desolation; and on the face of nature is a perpetual frown (Clarke 153).

Milton’s Lucifer is explicitly invoked in relation to Rufus Dawes, who, “[c]ut off from hope and surrounded by mystery”, “estranged from heaven and his kind”(76), “confessed” that “it was something to reign, even in hell” (76). Hell and the natural features of Van Diemen’s Land are in a chiastic relation; it appears as if one produces the other. The social hell of the penal colonies brings infernal punishments to the place, but the “desolation” and “fetid” “face of nature” makes it seem as if the place itself was already an underworld.

Just as these social and natural hells are in a relationship of mutual production, the novel is imbricated within nineteenth-century discourses of perversity to the extent that the text itself becomes a signifier for the sexual perversity it represents. Clarke’s novel gestures at homosexuality with typical nineteenth-century language of unspeakability in its descriptions of “unnatural” and “unspeakable” behaviour and “foul friendships that corrupt and destroy” (70) amongst convicts:

the infamies current, as matters of course, in chain-gangs and penal settlements were of too horrible a nature to be more than hinted at here. All that the vilest and most bestial of human creatures could invent and practice was invented and practiced there without restraint and without shame (160).

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In his exposition of representation of homosexuality in For the Term of His Natural Life, Damien Barlow demonstrates how, via a process of metonymy, the authorial signature Marcus Clarke comes to signify homosexuality in contemporary discourse. Barlow draws attention to an 1891 article “Our Gaol System. Sodom and Gomorrah’s Sins. Revolting Enormities. Unnatural and Unspeakable Crimes” that claimed that male prisoners were being “subjected to an existence such as that to which Marcus Clarke describes young Kirkland as being subjected to” (in Barlow 34). As Barlow demonstrates, in this proliferation of a discourse of sexuality where homosexuality is figured as unspeakable, Clarke’s novel comes to signify the acts it does not “more than hint…at”. Just as Clarke’s novel invokes and is invoked by these discourses of the aberrant or deviant subject, the narrative is driven by one effect of bodies harnessed by ideology in the penitentiary system, where subjects become interchangeable.

In For the Term of His Natural Life, no individual identity is stable or fixed; all the main characters assume aliases at least once. Protagonist Richard Devine is tried for murder, and transported to Van Diemen’s Land as Rufus Dawes. Villain John Rex has “many aliases”, including Mr Skinner, Mr James Crofton, Mr Anthony Croftonbury, Captain James Crofton (123), and finally, Richard Devine. Similarly, Rex’s lover, Sarah Purfoy poses as a lady’s maid for passage to Van Diemen’s Land. In a further move away from his original identity, Dawes/Devine assumes the name Tom Crosbie. From his trial onward, Dawes is increasingly desubjectified and alienated. This endless naming is a departure from Dante’s use of the antipodes as a trope of location with the emergence of a coherent and singular identity. This proliferation of naming in His Natural Life figures convict bodies - the bodies of labour - as interchangeable; desubjectified; endlessly replaceable. Clarke himself has explicitly signaled anxiety about the relation between the individual and the type in his essay on “The Coming Australian”:

The tendency of that abolition of boundaries which men call civilisation is to destroy 111

individuality. The more railways, ships, wars, and international gatherings we have, the easier is it for men to change skies, to change food, to intermarry, to beget children from strange loins. The ‘type’—that is to say, the incarnated result of food, education, and climate—is lost. Men rolled together by the waves of social progress lose their angles and become smooth, round, differing in size only; as differ, and remain similar, the stones of the sea beach (in A. McCann Marcus Clarke's Bohemia : Literature and Modernity in Colonial Melbourne 1).

This concern about individuality, manifested through the proliferation of identities in the novel, also emerges throughout the text as abject forms and unformed materiality. Further, this production of replaceable subjects is still a model of production; an artificial genesis that both accords with the novel’s preoccupation with a metaphorics of hell and offers a locus of becoming for the white colonial subject.

An analysis of liminal material substance in For the Term of His Natural Life shows that states of deformation and disintegration are perversely, potential sources of generation and metamorphosis. This hellish genesis is figured materially as the monstrous becomings are enabled through unformed matter and partially human, or “abhuman” forms as well as through the metaphor of the alchemical transformation that concludes the novel. Textual analysis of the abject materiality and monstrous, “abhuman” forms shows how the novel erupts with the material potential of a monstrous becoming. This material potential emerges most graphically through the recurrence of descriptions of unformed, or abject matter throughout the novel. For example, when the escaped John Rex spends a night above “the devil’s blowhole”, he is haunted by nightmare fantasies of “voracious polyp[s]” and “grumous tentacles” crawling out of the ocean. Between the shadows and the ocean, Rex hallucinates “ghastly and awesome shapes of death and horror”, “some shapeless mass of midsea-birth—some voracious polyp with far-reaching arms and jellied mouth open ever to devour---“ and “the most outrageous monsters…dwelling in the vermicular labyrinths that twined beneath him”. Of these “gelatinous stomachs…monstrous mouths…bloodless and bladdery 112 things” it seemed “all the horrible unseen like of the ocean was rising up and surrounding him” (385-386), that:

Each moist bulb of seaweed seemed to hold within it the germ of a ropy and mucilaginous monster which should put forth clammy and grumous tentacles to entwine him to a slimy death. Each splash in the water beneath him, each sigh of the multitudinous and melancholy sea, seemed to prelude the laborious advent of some misshapen and ungainly abortion of the ooze (385).

This half-formed, untimely and nightmarish progeny, while monstrous, is an image of material potential.

The specific function of these “gelatinous” and “bladdery things” as images of potential and becoming becomes clear when read in light of Kelly Hurley’s concept of the “abhuman”. A form on the border of the human, the abhuman “offers the spectacle of a body metamorphic and undifferentiated” (Hurley 3). Addressing the plethora of inhuman forms within the resurgence of the Gothic in British literature at the fin de siecle, three decades after the publication of Clarke’s serial, Hurley’s account of a fascination with “the ruin of the human figure” elucidates similar operations in For the Term of His Natural Life. Hurley argues that abhuman forms, which recall not quite, no longer and not yet states of being are "convulsed by nostalgia for the "fully human" subject whose undoing it accomplishes so resolutely, and yet aroused by the prospect of a monstrous becoming" (4). Within fin de siecle gothic literature, this results in an "[a]stonishing range of morphic possibilities” including “slug-men, snake-women, ape-men, beast-people, octopus-seal- men, beetle-women, dog-men, fungus-people" (4). Read alongside the transformation narrative of the novel, the insistent presence of unformed matter appears as part of a monstrous becoming.

Recurring images of atavistic monsters and nauseating substances in Clarke’s novel function as the “ruin of the human figure” which provides a space of transformation for the white colonial subject. In her theorisation of 113 the “abhuman”, Hurley argues that this fascinating and repulsive domain of the abject limits of the category of the human is anchored in discourses of monstrosity and aberrance produced by nineteenth-century biology, anthropology, evolutionism and degeneration theory. In Clarke’s novel, this domain of atavism and devolution is most obviously and horrifically embodied by Matthew Gabbett. Described early in the novel as a “hideously grotesque” “monster”, “drawn by the fantastic pencil of Goya” (143-144), Gabbett is demonic, monstrous and ape-like:

with his hideous countenance contorted with hate and rage, the giant seemed less a man than a demon, or one of those monstrous and savage apes that haunt the solitudes of the African forests (144).

Just as nineteenth-century discourse and the Judeo-Christian imaginary intersect in the novel, this description of Gabbett as “demon” and “ape” combines tropes of both natural and fantastic aberrance. As a creature “so horribly unhuman that one shuddered to think that tender women and fair children must of necessity confess to fellowship of kind with such a monster” (172), Gabbett threatens the very category of the human. In an appropriately antipodean literalisation of this threat, Gabbett explodes the human form as he kills and eats a number of his companions during an escape attempt. This anthropophagism is not the celebratory or collectively affirmative feasting of Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel; it is, rather, the sort of violent incorporation found in the ninth circle of Dante’s “Inferno”. This undoing of the human form has a further, terrifying literal element, as the character of Gabbett is based on the infamous cannibal, Alexander Pearce.

Though monstrous, these unmakings of form and the limits of the human are perversely generative. When read in light of the central thematics of transformation and alchemy in the novel they appear as a source of potential and becoming. Propelled by a series of transformations of identity, the denouement of Clarke’s novel is staged in an alchemist’s chamber. After a 114 series of spectacular coincidences, Devine returns to England, where he finds Rex is impersonating him. It is in “the chamber of an alchemist” (652), that Devine reveals his identity to his family. At this moment of confession, “The secret of Hans Blitzer” is also explained, which is Devine’s part in a failed attempt to transform coal into diamond. A geographic metaphor also subsists within these thematics of alchemy and transformation; the shift of Australia from the hell of the penal colonies to a place containing the paradisiacal possibility of gold. These transformations that structure the novel – hell to gold, penal to settler colony, Europe to Australia – emerge at the intersection of the prehumanist imaginary that locates the antipodes as hell and the nineteenth-century discourse that figures Australia as generative of perversity.

The productivity of the intersection of the earlier imaginary of antipodean space and nineteenth-century discourse is not limited to representation; the new subject category of the “congenital invert” as it is conceptualised by Havelock Ellis emerges from this tension. Like the defining aberrations Australia’s flora and fauna brought to classificatory systems in biology, according to Ellis, Australia produced the theory of the aberration that altered discourses of sexuality and psychology. Ellis developed his theorisation of the “congenital invert” partly in response to his experience of Australia, and comments within both his research and reflections position Australia as the literal birthplace of the “sexual invert” - the body marked by “[c]ongenital sexual inversion—that is to say, sexual instinct turned by inborn constitutional abnormality towards persons of the same sex” (H. Ellis, and Symonds, John Addington 1). In the introduction to Sexual Inversion (1897), Ellis’ definitive theorisation of homosexuality, he writes that:

The origin of these studies dates from many years back. As a youth I was faced, as others are, by the problems of sex. Living partly in an Australian city where the ways of life were plainly seen, partly in the solitude of the bush, I was free both to contemplate and to meditate many things (H. Ellis, and Symonds, John Addington v).

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For Ellis, the “Australian city” and the “solitude of the bush”, as “the origin of these studies” are the birthplace of the “congenital invert”; the subject of topsy-turvy gender and desire.

The metaphoric status of this new taxonomic category does not disappear; while the “invert” has become an objective phenomenon within this key discourse of interiority, its figural function is also insisted upon. Indeed, Ellis himself emphasises the centrality of metaphor to his new concept. In his account of an epiphany experienced at “the sacred spot underneath the Southern Cross” (H. Ellis 139), he explains:

What had happened could only be expressed by metaphors and similes. It was as though there had been developing within me, with a painful sense of strain and division, two diverse streams of tendency which had now suddenly come together, each entering into the other to form a fresh stream of a new potency… (131-2).

Ellis stresses that this epiphany about difference, which he nominates as the moment of the discursive emergence of the figure of the invert, “can only be expressed by metaphors and similes” [my italics]. Ellis’ insistence on rhetoric at the instant of birth of the congenital invert reveals the legibility or readability of inversion as crucial to the production of that identity. This relation between inversion and metaphorics or legibility is also fundamental to the inscription of narratives of individual subjectivity and Australian specificity within Ellis’ writing.

The particularities of Australian space are further implicated in the production of identity when we consider the prominence Ellis gives to Australia within his autobiographical account of his own identity formation. For Ellis, insights about sexuality gained in Australia are integral to not only the construction of general categories of identity, but also his own. For Ellis, sexuality was the means of articulating self: it was through the experience of desire that he “became a person” (Dutton 21). The connection between this assumption of identity and Ellis’ experiences of Australia within his work and 116 life has been made by Geoffery Dutton. Dutton draws attention to Ellis’ emphasis of the impact of his time at Sparkes Creek upon his life, where “[t]here has never been a moment when the foundation and background of my life have not been marked by the impress they received at Sparkes Creek” (in Dutton 19). In keeping with antipodean and Australian tropes of perverse genesis, Dutton formulates Ellis’ “love affair” with Australia “as a kind of parthenogenesis” (19). Here Ellis’ theorisations of sexuality and narration of his own life are united as a process of unnatural reproduction specific to his experiences in Australia; his attempts to locate himself are enabled through geographic specificity.

Type of a coming nation

While Havelock Ellis’ theorisation of congenital inversion is a case of geographical metaphorics inflecting discourses of typology, the converse is true with the iconic poetry literature of the 1890s, where typological discourses work to inscribe topographical specificity. In this particular rhetoric of inhabitation, tropes of antipodean space – inversion, perversity, aberrance and monstrosity – become markers of Australian space. Unlike Dante, the white colonial settler at the antipodes is not allowed coherent identity or location; these tropes of inhabitation are of partially human, metaphoric and disturbing forms. As we see in the proliferation of gothic fiction at this time25, the process of settlement is always ambivalent, often threatening, as its violent cost to indigenous populations and the inherent un- homeliness of the new can never be entirely repressed. This ambivalent process of white settler inhabitation and identity formation is figured at the intersection of old and new tropes of antipodean strangeness, inversion and perversity.

25 See Ken Gelder, and Rachel Weaver,, The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2007). 117

Within the iconic poetry of this decade, nineteenth-century typological categories of difference, combined with the earlier antipodean metaphorics of perversity serve as the language of location and national identity. For Arthur Adams, the singularity of “The Australian” in the 1899 poem of the same name is indicated by a deviation from “type”: this is figure is “Parturient of another type” and embodies aberrance and recalcitrance as “he slouches down the centuries” (Adams). In Lawson’s “Middleton’s Rouseabout” (1900), contradictory economic, creative and intellectual national trajectories are articulated through the body of Andy, who is “type of a coming nation” and “type of a careless nation”(Lawson "Middleton's Rouseabout "). Similarly, the repetition of “rot” and “vice” in Lawson’s “Faces in the Street” (1888) performs a prosopopoeia of urban perversity (Lawson "Faces in the Street"). For Bernard O’Dowd “The City” (1901) becomes flesh through excessive sexuality in “the bawdy-house where meet Lewd Wealth and venal joy”, a space also articulated through the inverted figures of “human cairns uprears”(O'Dowd).

One example of how these typologies of perversity and aberrance come to signify topographically is Henry Lawson’s 1900 short story, “The Hairy Man”. “The Hairy Man” rehearses a simultaneous transition of increasing geographic specificity and a shift from monstrosity to physiology that becomes legible according to race and gender. Lawson initially describes the Hairy Man, a figure of bush monstrosity that invokes traditions of Bunyip and Yowie legends, in terms of geographic generality: “[b]ut the Hairy Man was permanent, and his country spread from the Eastern Slopes of the Great Dividing Range right out to the ends of the western spurs.” (Lawson "The Hairy Man" 749-50). Generality also marks descriptions of sightings of the Hairy Man; Corny George provides “the usual” description of the Hairy Man: “Bout as tall as a man and twice as broad, arms nearly as long as himself, big wide mouth with grinning teeth – and covered all over with red hair” (751). This narrative hinges on a shift from general accounts of the monstrous ranging across the continent, to specificity where place, body and identity 118 become legible via the revelation that The Hairy Man is in fact Foley, a rather hirsute Scott:

They saw that he had enough hair on his chest to stuff a set of buggy cushions. He had red whiskers all over his face, rusty eyed, spiky hair all over his head, and a big mouth and bloodshot eyes. He was the hairiest and ugliest man in the district (753).

This shift from monster to a body that is legible according to gender and race (though still aberrant in its hairiness) demarcates a shift from geographic generality to specificity26: from the entire country to the district.

This transition from illegibility and generality to recognition and legibility also propels Lawson’s famous 1892 short story, “The Bush Undertaker”. Tropes of antipodean inversion, perversity and katabasis intersect with typological discourses of race and gender function to inscribe a narrative and temporality of inhabitation, as in this text a reversal of European and indigenous bodies is the means by which the landscape becomes legible as “home”. This intersection of antipodean tropology of inversion and nineteenth-century taxonomic categories functions to first differentiate and then erase this difference between the indigenous and the white settler subject. Beginning in “the dazzling glow of that broiling Christmas day”, a reference to the seasonal reversal of the antipodes, temporal and geographic inversions are signified from the outset. Similarly, a syntactical reversal early in the narrative anticipates a corporeal exchange:

‘I’ll take a pick and a shovel and root up that old blackfellow,’ mused the shepherd, evidently following up a recent train of thought; ‘I reckon it’ll do now. I’ll put in the spuds.’ The last sentence referred to the cooking, the first to a blackfellow’s grave about which he was curious (Lawson "The Bush Undertaker" 244).

This reversal in narrative commentary prefigures the inversion of the exhuming: the digging up of indigenous bones and burial of a white

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European body, which, blackened by the sun, is already figured as native as an inversion of flesh through landscape. In “The Bush Undertaker”, inversion is the rhetorical means by which the European body becomes native: white flesh blackened by the sun is exchanged for the exhumed indigenous bones.

This narrative of exchange explicitly invokes taxonomic discourses when the old man’s exhumation of the bones is followed by a failed attempt to identify them according to typological discourses of race and gender:

When he had raked up all the bones, he amused himself by putting them together on the grass and by speculating as to whether they had belonged to black or white, male or female. Failing however, to arrive at any satisfactory conclusion, he dusted them with great care, put them in the bag, and started for home (244).

On his way home the old man comes across another corpse: “an object which he at first thought was the blackened carcass of a sheep, but on closer examination discovered to be the body of a man” (245). This corpse is illegible according to physiology,“[t]here was nothing in the blackened features to tell aught of name or race” but is identifiable by the social signifier of clothing as “the dress proclaimed the remains to be those of a European”. In a further specification, the old man identifies the body by “the soles of the dead man’s blucher boots” as his alcoholic friend: “Brummy! by gosh!--busted up at last!” (245).

Placed under the ground by the old man, Brummy’s body inscribes a history of inhabitation into the Australian landscape. In “The Grave in the Bush”, Elizabeth Webby connects this image of the body under the soil with not only inhabitation, but ownership; where “the image of the bush grave in Australian literature and art usually functions as an indication of ownership of the land or the desire for such legitimacy” (E. Webby 30). This short story’s function as a narrative of inhabitation is made very clear through the reference to “home” in the final sentence: “And the sun sank again on the Australian bush – the nurse and tutor of eccentric minds, the home of the 120 weird, and of much that is different from things in other lands”(248). As not only “home” but “home of the weird” and “different”, the legibility of the “Australian bush” is inscribed through tropes of inversion, perversity and aberrance; through the “eccentric”, the “weird” and the “different”.

The exchange of bodies in the soil in “The Bush Undertaker” is not just a simple inversion. This act of substituting an indigenous body for a European one is haunted by a surplus that emerges as the experience of the uncanny. As Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs argue via Freud, the uncanny, as the familiar rendered unfamiliar, is an inherent experience for the settler in the Australian landscape. For this subject, Australia is a place where “the familiar is [always] becoming strange” (K. Gelder, & Jane M. Jacobs 23). This strangeness underlying and rendering the familiar strange to itself is an effect of the erasure of indigenous presence, and more specifically, as Gelder and Jacobs argue in Uncanny Australia (1998), the repression of Aboriginal Sacredness in European understandings of place27. In “The Bush Undertaker” this uncanny excess appears in the form of the recurring apparition of black “gohanners” throughout the narrative. Abnormal in size and number (“I’ve seed swarms of grasshoppers an’ big mobs of kangaroos, but dang me if I ever seed a flock of black gohanners afore!” (246)), the presence of these creatures remains unaccounted for. Further, they embody an unnamed terror as “the old shepherd, though used to the weird and dismal, as one living alone in the bush must necessarily be, felt the icy breath of fear at his heart” (247). In a repetition of the actual violence and psychological repression already enacted by the settler colony, the old man fires his gun as “he saw a black object coming over the ridge-pole…the thing disappeared” (247). In this psychic excess as the “flock of black gohanners” and its material residue, “a great

27 In the New Zealand context, Sean Sturm argues via Zizek that, as with the uncanny in Australia, the sublime is the experience of dislocation and menace that manifests as the trace of “tarrying with the negative” of indigenous presence in an “empty land”: “In these symptoms, the longer history of the place—the history of first settlement (by Maori)—makes itself felt imaginatively” Sean Sturm, "George Chamier and the Native Question ," JASAL 5 (2006): 112.

121 black goanna in violent convulsions on the ground” (247) carries the actual and figural cost of the transformation of the Australian bush into “home”, the real and psychic erasure of indigenous presence.

Australasia is quite literally mapped through the uncanny in A.B. Paterson’s 1891 short story about a robotic book salesman, “The Cast-iron Canvasser”. This mechanical man disseminates a literal and literary mapping of Australasia, and, at the novel’s conclusion, collides with a human figure of perversity to inscribe a temporality of inhabitation through haunting. Opening with publishers Sloper and Dodge, in a state of distress because their canvassers are being “ill-treated and molested by the country folk in all sorts of strange bush ways” (A. B. Paterson 288), Paterson’s narrative begins a crisis of mapping, reading and capitalism as “[t]o make matters worse, Sloper and Dodge had just got a map of Australasia on a grand scale, and if they couldn’t sell it, ruin stared them in the face; and how could they sell it without canvassers!” (288). The solution to Sloper and Dodge’s dilemma of the ”country folk”s’ refusal to read is presented to them in the form of the “cast- iron canvasser”, an automaton which “when wound up would walk, talk by means of a phonograph, collect orders and stand any amount of ill usage and wear and tear”. Capitalist modernity, the colonial project of mapping and the imagined community constituted by simultaneous reading - which, as Benedict Anderson reminds us, is the basis of nation - unite in the figure of this mechanical man. Going beyond the nineteenth-century discourses of naturalism into emphatically artificial technologies of modernity, this collision of colonial economies is further compounded when the automaton encounters Officer O’Grady, a perverse embodiment of the law.

The encounter between the bookselling robot and the homosexual police officer is figured according to tropes of both ancient and modern perversity, antipodean strangeness, and the more modern deviance of homosexuality. Officer O’Grady is notorious for his extremely persuasive and friendly way with intoxicated men: 122

Excitable revelers, who were being carried along by their mates, struggling violently, would break away from their companions, and prance gaily along to the lock up with the sergeant, whom, as likely as not, they would try to kiss on the way. Obstinate drunks who would do nothing but lie on the ground and kick their feet in the air, would get up like birds, serpent-charmed, and go with him to durance vile (293).

Mistaking the cast-iron canvasser for “a man in the horrors”, O’Grady “laid his hand on the outstretched palm of the figure”, imploring “Come along wid me now, and I’ll make you nice and comfortable for the night”. This is a “fatal mistake” for O’Grady as this intimacy is nightmarishly manifested by the automaton as it “hugged the sergeant to its breast, with a vice like grip. Then it started in a faltering, and uneven, but dogged way to walk towards the steep bank of the river, carrying the sergeant along with it” (294). The narrative concludes with the embrace of O’Grady and the canvasser as an image of haunting:

As for the canvasser himself there is a rusted mass far down in the waters of the creek, and in its arms its holds a skeleton dressed in the rags of what was once a police uniform. And on calm nights the passers-by sometimes imagine they can hear, rising out of the green and solemn depths, a husky, slushy voice, like that of an iron man with mud and weeds and dishcloths in his throat, and that voice is still urging the skeleton to buy a book in monthly parts (295).

Here bodies not only serve as a perverse marker of place, a ghoulish and homoerotic signposting the town of Ninemile, but the haunting voice of the “iron man”, repeatedly demanding the listener to “buy a book in monthly parts”, literally marks the bush as literary space. As a material and aural spectre of artificiality, this “iron man with mud and weed and dishcloths in his throat” inscribes not just a temporality of inhabitation, but also one of modernity.

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Brimstone Roses

As we have seen through these examples of the natural sciences, the Van Diemen’s Land penal colonies and the iconic literature and poetry of the 1890s, the collision of the antipodean imaginary mapped by the previous chapter, the reality that exceeded that imaginary and nineteenth-century discourses of typology and perversity generated a series of productive paradoxes. The tension produced by these resulting contradictions where Australia is both ancient and modern, real and fantastic, natural and artificial is a site of becoming. Formed by this tension, white colonial inhabitation does not secure a stable identity, but moves between states of metamorphosis, degeneration, disintegration and transformation. As a space where the self is transformed, hell is a trope of particular resonance for this process of colonial inhabitation. Given the combination between the antipodean imaginary and the carcereal origins of the Australian colonies, hell is a key trope of Australian colonial identity. This topoi not only inscribes a temporality of inhabitation, but functions as a space of transformation through satanic self- invention and matter as a site of potential. Unlike Dante, for whom the journey through hell resulted in conferral of identity, Australian hells figure colonial identity formation as a perverse genesis, grounded as they are in the tension between notionality and reality, natural and artificial, old and new. Further, representations of Australia as hell transform. In the nineteenth- century this trope remains closer to biblical and classical underworlds. In a relation of chiasmus with Australian topography and climate, the process of settling the landscape is figured as the process of inhabiting hell.

As a key trope of colonial inhabitation, it stands to reason that, following the establishment of nation, representations of hell would transform or disappear. References to hell in The Bulletin do both. We see the transformation of hell into an increasingly habitable space, and, further into the twentieth century, poems that stage the collapse or end of hell. Around the time of Federation references to hell change genres; at this point there is a marked shift from the 124 use of the trope as a didactic device to its use as a parodic one. Archival analysis of the image of hell in Australian periodicals from the nineteenth- century onward demonstrates clearly that, after Federation in 1901, poetic images of hell increasingly depart from the biblical tradition of hell as a space of despair and torment. Further, this analysis shows that this moment also sees a shift from didactic to parodic uses of the trope, where hell, previously grounded in representations of the natural environment increasingly becomes a device for resignifying the social. It is in keeping with this hypothesis that hell is connected to white colonial inhabitation that after Federation, hell is not only depicted as an increasingly habitable space, but that representations of the end, collapse and freezing over of hell begin to appear. Thus these accounts of the end of hell would indicate a diminishing of earlier colonial figurations of identity with the formation of a national identity.

Hell is a colonised space in theological, literary and poetic traditions. In the Christian tradition, hell is the place Lucifer is banished to, as: “fallen from heaven…brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit” (Isaiah 14:12-15) and “the dragon…and his angels…prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven” (Revelations 12:7-9). Perhaps the most important text where Christian cosmology meets humanism is John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost (1667). The antipodes do not figure in this text, but hell is a colonised space where the banished angels build their kingdom. This tradition continues to inform contemporary antipodean fiction. Hell is very clearly a colonial space in New Zealand writer Elizabeth Knox’s novels The Vintner’s Luck (1999) and The Angel’s Cut (2009), where “[d]emons are the oppressed native people of Hell,” and “[f]allen angels are their colonial masters” (The Angel’s Cut 320). As well as signifying the colonising process, hell is a space of perverse genesis. As Lucifer’s crime was self-origination, the space of hell and figure of Lucifer or Satan are archetypes of individuation.

The trope of hell is also a commonplace of colonial literature. Falconer cites Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as emblematic of the particular colonial 125 hell, as here ”[o]ne thinks immediately of Kurtz’s inarticulable cry when gazing through the rent veil of Europe’s colonial dream: ‘the horror! The horror!” (Falconer 50). Another iconic example can be found in Saladin Chamcha’s transformation into a devil, one allegory Salman Rushdie offers of colonial identity in his 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses. Hell’s affinity with the colonial experience also manifests through images of hell as an artificial space. For example, in For the Term of his Natural Life, Clarke emphasises the human design for the penal hells; Norfolk Island is a “man made hell”, and of Point Puer “it seemed that a large number of Honorable Gentlemen, together with Her Majesty’s faithful Commons in Parliament assembled, had done their best to create a Kingdom of Hell” (Clarke 353). Rudyard Kipling also emphasises the social origins of the convict hells, saying of Hobart in “The Song of the Cities” that “man’s hate made me hell”.

Like the antipodes, these man-made hells are part of a tradition of hell as a domain of the unnatural, where perversity flourishes. This particular version of hell is perhaps most famously articulated by Milton in Paradise Lost, as a space where “nature breeds perverse”:

Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death, A universe of death, which God by curse Created evil, for evil only good, Where all life dies, death lives, and nature breeds, Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, Abominable, unutterable, and worse Than fables yet have feigned, or fear conceived, Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeras dire (Paradise Lost, Book II:621-628).

Milton’s hell is not only defined by “evil” and “death”, but by their constant generation. It is a space of unending, unnatural reproduction as “nature breeds perverse” and death flourishes. This perverse genesis is also figured as repetition. In his vision of Sin in an endless state of procreation, Milton gave visceral form to the idea of hellish reproduction as repetition. Guarding the 126 gates of hell alongside Death, Sin gives birth over and over to “cerberean” hounds:

The one seem’d Woman to the waste, and fair, But ended foul in many a scaly fould Voluminous and vast, a Serpent arm’d With mortal sting: about her middle round A cry of Hell Hounds never ceasing bark’d With wide Cerberean mouths full loud, and rung A hideous Peal: yet, when they list, would creep If aught disturbed thir noyse, into her womb, And kennel there, yet there still bark’d and howl’d Within unseen (Paradise Lost, Book II: 650-659).

In this image of unnatural genesis, the identical hellhounds are procreated, but not individuated. As William Blake emblematically identified, this generation as repetition of Sin and her offspring is consonant with the artificial and identical objects of mass production.

It is precisely these elements of repetition and unnatural genesis that characterises Milton’s hell that are emphasised in the “dark satanic mills” of representations of nineteenth-century industrial cities. In a work published in 1839, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote that “Hell is a city much like London A populous and smoky city”(Peter Bell the Third: III). From the slums of Dickensian London to the “dark satanic mills” of the North, the literature and poetry of post industrial-revolution England was populated by such urban hells. For the alienated subject of these infernal cities, hell was also interiorised, as in the “termless hell” and “waking dream” of James Thomson’s 1874 poem, The City of Dreadful Night. In her study of the underground imagination, literary critic Rosalind Williams argues that the association between the underworld and the artificial has its roots in mining. Williams draws attention to Lewis Mumford’s work on mining. Author of Technics and Civilisation (1934), and the man who coined the term “manufactured”, Mumford explains that “the mine…is the first completely 127 inorganic environment to be created and lived in by man…” (in R. Williams 5) and argues that “nineteenth century cities were, in fact and appearance, extensions of the coal mine” (in R. Williams 6). For Williams, it is through this connection to mining that “[t]he underworld setting…takes to an extreme the displacement of the natural environment by a technological one” (R. Williams 4). In the Australian context we see this operation informs For the Term of His Natural Life through the figuration of convict bodies as replaceable and interchangeable in the hell of the penal colonies.

Australian hells both invoke and crucially depart from these traditions of classical, biblical, urban and technological representations of hell. The European traditions Australian hells are most sympathetic with are the tragic, but self-originating Miltonian Satan, and William Blake’s deployment of hell as both a parodic device, and a source of energy in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”. Analysis of representations of hell in Australian poetry and literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shows moves between these various traditions, and a larger transformation that connects Australian nationality and hell, where hell is a trope of identity and inhabitation.

Poems that invoke the classical and biblical tradition of hell as a space of despair and torment include Frank the Poet’s (Francis MacNamara)’s “A Convict’s Tour to Hell” (1839), “The Eternity of Hell” (Adelaide Ironside, 1853), “A Balled of Blazes” (anon "A Ballad of Blazes" 1882), Wyvis’ (Adam Cairns McKay) “Song of the Damned” (1895), “A Song of Smith” (anon 1886), Frank Radcliffe’s “Hell!” (1909), and David McKee Wright’s “Down” ("Down" 1909). The use of the Christian cosmology as a stage for Australian identity formation appears in the anonymous 1886 poem for The Bulletin, “A Song of Smith”. Prefaced with an excerpt from the Sydney Morning Herald obituary for James Smith, “the gentleman who spoke so highly of the New South Wales contingent he met in the Soudan”, the poem narrates this man’s entry into 128 heaven as cause for a divine celebration. The rejoicing across “Elysium’s unspeakable width” will also reverberate through hell as:

all the Tartarean deeps of damnation will reel; all the gulfs of blind night To their depths will confess the vibration Of that wild-volumed yell of delight- In Gehenna’s dark nadir that thunder Will boom and re-echo and die, And the sad, singed, fierce devils will wonder What the blazes they’re up to on high ("A Song of Smith" 1886).

The poem dwells on the reaction of hell (10 stanzas) far longer than heaven (2 stanzas) or reflecting on the identity of this man who “cracked our contingent up highly” (5 stanzas). These biblical hyperboles mobilised in response to a compliment from an unknown Scotsman connects the reputation of the contingent, and by association the colony, as a concern of heaven and hell, with the later more heavily weighted due to its dominance in the poem. Here the colony is not hell itself, as is conventional, but becomes the object of hell’s and as well as heaven’s attention, where the poem shows far more concern with the reaction of the former.

While invoking classical and biblical representations of hell, as in the poem above, the Australian hell is unique in that it is a suturing of theological and natural imagery. Incorporating the topography and climate of various regions of the continent, particularly the desert interior and tropical north, Australian hells of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century poetry figure hell and the natural landscape as chiasmus. A combination of classical and biblical hells as the landscape of Van Diemen’s Land appears in the jail journals of Irish nationalist John Mitchel. Held in Van Diemen's Land 1850-1853, Mitchel describes how the “subterranean and altogether infernal mood” of the penal colony is heightened by the names given by early colonists to the region:

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the waving, whispering woods put on a brown horror, like the forests that wave and sigh through Dante's Tartarean vision. The soft west wind that blows here for ever, has a moan like the moan of damned souls! the stars look dim; and on the corner of the moon there hangs a vaporous drop profound. The Devil's in it. This subterranean and altogether infernal mood of mind is helped by some of the names that the early colonists have given to the hills and rivers. In Bothwell district we have a ravine called 'Hells Gates', through whose dismal shade you pass to a hill overlooking the junction of two rivers, a steep and grassy hill, embowed with thickets of mimosa, but bearing the awful name--'Hill of Blazes'. Into the Derwent, near New Norfolk, flows the river 'Styx'; and Charon's ferry-boat never touched the banks of the Asphodel meadows so fair as the tufted hills that are laved by the crystalline waters of this Tasmanian hell-stream, named of hatred. Flows here too, the real Lethe; and men grow like Lethe's own fat weeds, that rot themselves at ease. There is darkness all around us, and a sulphery smell (Jan 5, 1853) (79).

Home to “Hells Gates”, “Hill of Blazes”, the “Styx” and the “Lethe”, the penal colony is inscribed topographically as both classical and biblical underworlds.

The figuration of Australian topographic and climatic features as a landscape of hell appears frequently in the iconic poetry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In A.B. “Banjo” Paterson’s “Hay Hell and Booligal” (1896), the town of Booligal is “worse than hell itself”. Those forced to stop in the township pray “with bated breath” that:

Our fate in other lines might fall: ‘Oh, send us to our just reward In Hay or Hell, but, gracious Lord, Deliver us from Booligal!’.

In Paterson’s poem hell is comparatively preferable to Booligal. A similar operation appears in Louis Esson’s “A song of Sheol” (1909) “Sheol down below” burns beneath an Australian climate:

a land where the air is warm, and the sun burns bright and red 130

[…] and with tropic heat the rosy sky doth glow.

While these poems figure hell as Australia, other cotemporaneous works figure Australia as hell, as with John Philip Cook’s “Up North” (1903) which refers to “the Northern land” as a “suburb of hell”. The Australian landscape, the penal system, biblical hells and the internalised hells of the Romantic tradition are conflated in Scotty the Wrinkler’s (Philip Mowbray)’s chilling “Hanging and Hell” (1896). Similarly, Henry Lawson’s “Out on the Roofs of Hell” (1898) charts a descent from the country as hell to an internal hell; moving from:

Over the roofs of hell we go For Wool, Tallow and Hides

to:

Down through the roofs of hell they go For Wool, Tallow and Hides

This katabasis structure not only locates the Australian landscape as hell, but a place of internal torment, as:

The life is a hell to the man that thinks – He must drink or his reason go

The subject of this poem goes down into hell rather than over:

Down for a change! for a rest! he goes Down through the roofs of hell”(Lawson "Out on the Roofs of Hell").

Such a descent also concludes the popular Australian bush ballad “Click go the Shears” (ca. 1900), which ends with the shearer’s descent into hell, as 131

His eye is on the keg which is now lowering fast, He works hard, he drinks hard and goes to hell at last!" (Anonymous, Oxford Book of Australian Verse 122).

These two traditions place Australia and hell in a relation of chiasmus, where hell is Australia, and Australia is hell. Both sides of this formulation structure T. the R.’s (Charles Hayward’s) 1927 poem “The Devil and the Dingo”, which is premised on the chiasmus of the animal and the Beast:

O, the dingo is the Devil, not the shadow of a doubt, To the chaps whose jumbucks pasture on the stations Further Out, And the Devil is a dingo, deadliest of the ravening pack, To the spiritual shepherds of the human flocks Out Back.

Creeping furtive on his victims, soon in carnage red to revel, Canis dingo’s execrated for a wanton, murderous devil; And malignant Satan, luring souls from grace with grog and stingo, Lights o’ love and cards and such-like, is a stinking, slinking dingo.

Still, conditions of existence hardly seem upon the Level, Where the Devil plays the dingo and the dingo plays The devil (Hayward).

Each a metaphor for the other, the devil and the dingo not only figure hell and Australia as similarly interchangeable, but render Australia as doubly hellish; “[w]here the Devil plays the dingo and the dingo plays the devil”.

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As in For the Term of His Natural Life, hell is a space of material potential in nineteenth-century poetry. This function of the trope is very clearly deployed by an untitled, anonymous poem from The Bulletin on April 15, 1882 (p 8). This poem stages anxieties about the status of the individual within the often conflicting worlds of science and theology. Apparently written in response to an article in the “Evening Horror” about “revolting disclosures made regarding the Melbourne hospital”, the poem maps a typography of undifferentiated bodies:

It appears post-mortems are conducted in the dead-house, a place used as a receptacle for dead bodies and amputated limbs. The practice followed is to remove the intestines supposed to be affected into a large trough, to await examination. The vacuum thus created is filled by intestines kept over from the last dead body operated upon. The operator has been known to cram the brains of two dead men into the head of one, and to place in the coffin of dead patients as many amputated legs and arms as possible. The intestines of two or three bodies are frequently lying mixed under a tap, and the water running upon them finds its way into the street, and thence through the city.

Last night we had a fearful dream -- This far we had just read— Corpse after corpse we saw arise, The disemboweled dead.

[…]

Some had no noses, some no eyes, Some were without a head, Like figures children bite in two— Like men of gingerbread.

[…]

And brains were slopped in anyhow To skulls they didn’t fit; So holy men grew full of fun, 133

And comic men of wit.

And Ugliness did ogle, and Old age skipped round like Youth; And jurymen were sensible And lawyers told the truth.

[…]

All Heaven was boiling glue to keep Heads unto bodies jammed Just long enough for them to be Brought up and judged and damned.

Judge, juries, lawyers, were so mixed, “Gabe” would have smashed his trump

In sheer despair, but SATAN yelled— “Oh! damn them in a lump!”

Recalling Tennyson’s In Memoriam28, the medical examination of the body is figured as de-individuating and unnatural. However, this depiction of undifferentiated flux also performs a generative function as the image of “Mankind, like an old patchwork quilt,/ Around Jehoshophat”, of bodies in a heterogeneous state, of material potential. When read via Bachelard’s theorisation of the material imagination, these monstrous, multiple and abject bodies emblematise the “individualising power of matter”, because “matter is the very principle that can dissociate itself from forms” (2). In “damn[ing] them in a lump” hell can accommodate this state of material potential that is, in the eyes of heaven, an irresolvable crisis of form. It is the combination of this real material possibility, the legacy of the Judeo-Christian imaginary and the generation through repetition of Miltonian and industrial hells that renders hell such a charged trope of Australian inhabitation.

28 Are god and nature then at strife That nature lends such evil dreams? So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life;” (In Memoriam 55). 134

Literary theorist Northop Frye’s theorisation of the relationship between hell and parody productively elucidates this connection between hell and inhabitation. In his work on “Demonic Imagery”, Frye demonstrates a connection between hell and parody, arguing “one of the central themes of demonic imagery is parody” (Frye Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays 239). For Frye, hell generally becomes a locus of parody through tropes of inversion, and specifically "the turning of the literal act into play” (239). As Australia was a literalisation of antipodean metaphorics in which hell was a central feature, it follows, as Frye argues, that “play” emerges from this “literal act”. Frye calls this transformation a “demonic epiphany”, the realisation, through hell, that “on the other side of this blasted world of repulsiveness and idiocy, a world without pity and without hope, satire begins again” because:

Tragedy and tragic irony take us into a hell of narrowing circles and culminate in some such vision of the source of all evil in a personal form. Tragedy can take us no farther; but if we persevere with the mythos of irony and satire, we shall pass a dead centre, and finally see the gentlemanly Prince of Darkness bottom side up (239).

Reading the satirical and sardonic hells of weekly magazine The Bulletin in the nineteenth-century via Frye’s theorisation enables us to read the transition into this genre as a move from a “dead centre” into the new space of nation. Examples of these satirical hells include Edward Dyson’s “M’Dougal’s Hell” ("M'dougals Hell" 1900), where the worst of infernal tortures is not a skull filled “with bubbling lead”, but the presence of Tam M’Dougal’s wife. As Satan explains to M’Dougal, “There’s no marriage up in Heaven—and there’s no divorce in Hell!”. In “A Ballad of Blazes” hell is not as painful as reading The Herald, The Evening News, Punch and The Telegraph, tabloid torments by which even the most hardened of hell’s inmates is subdued in anguish:

So was the row put down in Hell By the rags we have to bear, God grant that copies are no more sent by the time that we get there” ("A Ballad of Blazes" 1883). 135

Similarly, in “The Collapse of Hell” (S.S. 1912), of all the damned the narrator decides the most deserving is

The very man of all the men I loved on earth the least- A scorched and scurrying city editor!” (Cassidy).

As Frye argues, such perseverance with “the mythos of irony and satire” operate as an inversion point. Historically, this point intersects with Australian Federation in 1901, with the poetry of the following decade populated with hells that become increasingly inhabitable, and often edenic.

Hell is a key trope at this time not only as an image of inhabitation, but also through the figuration of Federation as a process of satanic self-invention. An explicit connection between an emerging federal identity and hell is drawn in a 1890 editorial in The Bulletin ("Parkes and Federalism"). This editorial compares Henry Parkes, “the Father of Federation” to Milton’s Moloch:

We might bring in evidence New South Wales our own G.O.M., the Moloch of local politics, and would-be dictator of intercolonial relations MILTON says of the Prime Minister of his hero that -- His trust was with the Eternal deem'd Equal in strength, and rather than be less Cared not to be at all Our only Parkes shows the mould of his immortal and "damned" archetype, for an attitude that is not greatest has no fascinations for him, and rather than play second fiddle, he cares not to play at all (The Bulletin, Feb 1, 1890 p 4).

Milton is invoked to figure Parkes as demonic and the movement towards federation of the colonies a satanic “archetype” of individuation. Similarly, an 1884 anonymous poem “To the Devil” commands the devil kick Sir Henry Parkes and then himself: ‘…give the gifted compo./ This, you diabolical elf,/ With our curse, and—stay for a moment--/ Take this kick home for yourself.” 136

("To the Devil") , and “Satan and the Statesman” (1891 Anon) attributes Parkes with Lucifer like pride “from crest to spur” ("Satan and the Statesman").

A shift occurs in post-Federation poetry, where hell becomes not only inhabitable, but preferable to heaven, and satan becomes a figure of sympathy. Furness Born’s (Peter Airey) “Advocatus Diaboli” (1908) urges the world to “Seek not to wipe the Devil Out—but let him have/ his due”:

He rose, himself, in days gone by, to pull the tyrant down, To crack his whip and fill with fear the things that wore a crown. The poor man in his poverty—he fearful was, ‘tis true, But blessed the Grimy Potentate who smote Oppression’s crew.

[…] Doth he not deal out equity to all the villain crew And need we not his Grimy Hand to hold the balance true?

In Esson’s “A Song of Sheol” (1909), the singer seeks out “pearl and gold- pilastered pubs of/ Pandemonium” and “a real hot time in Sheol/ down below” over heaven’s “clouds of dim, damp/ tenebrosity”.

It is because of this material potential of a metaphorically colonial space that hell offers an image to inhabit. This hypothesis is supported by the increase of images of hell as a space where European gardens flourish following Federation. This is very clearly a colonial trope, as hell blooms with roses and lilies, not wattle and banksia. For Randolph Bedford (1903):

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The road to hell is bright and rose-bedight, The way is fair and wide; And wit and Grace with smiling face Walk with thee side by side (Bedford).

In Edward Dyson’s “Hades Irrigated” (1909) “a walking tour of hell” reveals "A fertile land of green and rose,/ And Satan squirting with a hose”, hills “ripe with golden corn,” “Plenty spread upon the plain” and “Sweet wild flowers bubbled from the soil” as “millions crammed...delighted to be damned” (Dyson "Hades Irrigated"). In two poems by David McKee Wright, “Going Down to Hell” (1910) and “Compensation” (1911), hell blossoms with roses, lilies and brimstone flowers. “Going Down to Hell” announces that “down below the ways are rich with roses”, and opens with the narrator “Going down to Hell to gather flowers,/ For the roses and the lilies blossom there” (D. M. Wright "Going Down to Hell"). This hell that leaves heaven “dull” is not only metaphorically flourishing, but also literally as poets recline amongst the flora:

Where Marlowe sits, amid the brimstone bowers, And Shakespeare occupies a sulpher chair.

In comparison, “the level meads of Heaven are dull and yellow” “The music’s rather heavy for the fellow Who prefers to sit with Omar and his girl.”

“Down below the ways are rich with roses”.

Similarly, “Compensation” announces that “In the bottom pit of Hades”, “the brimstone flowers are blue" (D. M. Wright "Compensation"). In her work on the relationship between gardening and colonial subjectivity, Susan K. Martin argues for the garden as site of becoming for the white colonial subject, where “rather than being...a frozen, static space” gardens “are always in process, they are constantly made and remade, they have no static moment, except within an imaginary space” (183). Martin points out that in nineteenth- 138 century literary and poetic representations of gardens it is the process of gardening rather than the object of the garden that is emphasised. Not “fit objects for the unproblematic formation of a stable subject” (183), gardens figure, as Martin suggests, the forever in process, never complete colonial subject.

A look across the Tasman to New Zealand confirms the status of these tropes of materiality and verticality as crucial antipodean, and not just Australian, tropes of inhabitation. Specifically, images of gardening and digging into the earth are recurring tropes of the iconic New Zealand poetry of the 1940s, part of the larger national literary renaissance of that decade. These metaphorics of verticality and materiality are central to the work of Ursula Bethell, who according to Allen Curnow “the most original, most significant” (in Murray 86) of New Zealand poets at this time. Indeed, it is according to this metaphorics of verticality and gardening that she is credited with “discovering” New Zealand - D’Arcy Cresswell famously says of Bethell that “New Zealand wasn't truly discovered, in fact, until Ursula Bethell, ‘very earnestly digging’, raised her head to look at the mountains” (in Murray 89). In her painstaking descriptions of planting and tending to “a garden in the antipodes”, Bethell renders topography into landscape through typography; a “catalogue” of inhabitation. According to Stuart Murray, Bethell was “the first to formulate an appropriate language of location” (89). Bethell’s routine, domestic and aesthetic “discover[y]” of New Zealand is also inscribed through the tropology of old testament cosmology that position the country alternately as Eden, Heaven and Hell. The garden described as “paradise” “eden”, and “the dimly mirrored image of a grove laid up in heaven” ("Trance"), is guarded by Bethell’s cat “Michael” the archangel. Hell appears in her poem “Primavera”: “You should not be here, Primroses, yet I must have you here,” ("Primavera") – an allusion to the Shakespearean “primrose way to the everlasting bonfire” (Macbeth II.iii.20). Bethell’s “appropriate language of location”, then, “discovers” New Zealand as the landscape of the prehumanist cosmology – Heaven, Earth, Hell. 139

The action of digging and the substances of earth and soil, linked to prehumanist cosmology, are also central to the writing of Bethell’s contemporary, the poet, novelist and journalist Robin Hyde. In “Digging” (1952), Hyde gives spades the place between earth and heaven:

Yet between earth and Heaven (So it was given,) Spades shall throw kingdoms up Into life's cup; Spades shall throw kingdoms, colours up, Into life's cup (Robin Hyde "Digging" 54).

Like Bethell discovering New Zealand “very earnestly digging”, Hyde uses spades as a metaphor of settlement, “throw[ing] kingdoms up”. Similarly, the descending movement of digging and the materiality of earth stands for nation and New Zealand for Katherine Mansfield. Responding to Coleridge’s formula of country in Table Talk as not the sod under the feet but “language, religion, laws, government, blood”, Mansfield famously declared that “[t]he sod under my feet makes mine” (in Alpers 44)29. Later, Hyde invokes earth, dirt, sod and dust in her elegy for Mansfield, in “Katherine Mansfield” (1939):

Our little Darkness, in the shadow sleeping Among the strangers you could better trust, Right was your faring, Wings: their wise hands gave you Freedom and song, where we had proffered dust (Robin Hyde "Katherine Mansfield" 91).

29 The formation of New Zealand from “the very soil of the land itself” is a metaphor that appears in a range of genres. M.H. Holcroft's iconic trilogy of essays, Discovered Isles (published in 1950, comprising The Deepening Stream [1940], The Waiting Hills [1943] and Encircling Seas [1946]) constitute what Murray calls "an extensive effort to formulate some notion of a cultural psychology for New Zealand” in "the very soil of the land itself." (80) Holcroft says of writing on New Zealand that "I found that the country itself kept breaking in: its beauty, and the long silence in which it had been hidden, were facts which drove me to the margins of experience..." (in Murray, 80). For Holcroft, as for Mansfield, Bethell and Hyde the matter of place as “the very soil of the land itself”, or “the sod under the feet” grounds the language of colonial inhabitation.

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By figuring Mansfield as both belonging to, and signifying nation “Our little darkness”, Hyde doubles that signification as dust, as both the grave and New Zealand, where “Dust is the unthrown wrestler at our gate”, “And after marble, dust fulfils a need” (91). Soil, sod and Mansfield intersect again in the dislocated and migratory New Zealand of Hyde’s iconic 1938 novel, The Godwit’s Fly to equate “country” and “soil”:

where is Katherine, with weeds on her grave at Fontainbleau, when what she really wanted was the dark berry of our creeks (don't you remember? We call them Dead Man's Bread.) […]We are old and can wait, said the untamed soil against which she pressed her fingers; although it, more than anything else, was awake and aware of its need to be a country...the integration of a country from the looseness of its soil (Robin Hyde xxi)

This “integration of a country” within Hyde’s own oeuvre does not occur until her 1937 collection of poems, Persephone in Winter (1937), which, according to Lydia Wevers "contains, for the first time, a few poems that refer directly to New Zealand”(Wevers Robin Hyde Selected Poems xv). As with Australian literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in these examples of iconic New Zealand literature of the 1940s, national specificity is figured according to a metaphorics of katabasis.

Returning to the example of Australia, it is in keeping with this operation of verticality, and specifically hell as a trope of colonial identity that Federation sees a transformation of images of hell in Australia. Along with changes discussed so far – the shift into parody, and representations of hell as an increasingly inhabitable space – this transformation also takes the form of the end of hell, as “collapse”, “freezing over” or “freezing under”. In the short story genre, Zef’s (Edward James Dempsey) “Dies Irae” (1897) tells how “hell froze over” by using heaven as fuel for the infernal flames. Satan tells his demons to “turn out those ten thousand Australian miners we damned in the nineteenth century. Tell ‘em to prospect all Space”. The prospectors find 141

“something huge and filmy” and “triumphantly dumped it at hell’s gates, and sent it bodily down into the furnaces”. R.J. Cassidy’s 1912 poem, “The Collapse of Hell”, opens upon “the subterranean vastness of incalculable/ space”, where Satan is unable to carry out torture of a much hated editor because “the bottom’s gone and fallen out of hell!”. “Outing Hell” (S.S., 1913), a response to moves to eliminate the word hell from the Bible, concludes with hell “frozen under”. Another direction in this convention is hell moving from Australia to New Zealand. A.H.A’s 1912 poem “The resumption of Hell” begins with Satan discovering that his eternal lease on hell has been revoked and concludes with Satan’s lease reinstated under “orders from Maoriland”.

Though “collapsed” and “frozen under” in Australia at this point, as this move to “Maoriland” shows, hell remains a crucial trope of inhabitation in the antipodean imaginary. Just as it was key to the formation of colonial and national identities at these early moments of globalisation, the antipodean underworld continues to be a crucial literary means of negotiating identity and location in the postmodern era. A century later, in what Gillis has called the second great moment of globalisation, antipodean literature makes a major return to hell to seek a way out of contemporary dislocation. These new journeys to hell to navigate temporal, rhetorical and ideological bewilderment in Australian and New Zealand literature at the beginning of the twenty-first century are the focus of the next chapter of this thesis. Specifically, I address how the underworld imagination outlined in this chapter resurfaces in Christos Tsiolkas’ Dead Europe and Elizabeth Knox’s Daylight in response to crises of historical, ideological and symbolic location. Structured as katabasis narratives, these contemporary antipodean novels offer particular, contingent and materially grounded resolutions to this moment of bewilderment. Within the larger katabasis movement of this thesis, the opening of this next chapter constitutes the dead centre, the lowest point, the ground zero at the heart of hell that must be reached before overturning and anabasis, or ascent. It is appropriate then that this chapter begins at Ground Zero, the World Trade Centre site in lower Manhattan. 142

Chapter Three: Digital Demons and the Real Hell of Postmodernity

“To make yourself it is also necessary to destroy yourself” Patrick White, Voss.

In his polemical 2005 PMLA essay, “The Dark Wood of Postmodernity”, Bill Brown argues that the beginning of the twenty-first century is characterised by particular forms of “bewilderment” of the western subject trying, and failing, to locate himself (sic) politically and rhetorically in what he identifies as a post 9/11 crisis of representation. Brown juxtaposes the postmodern figure of Fredric Jameson, disoriented in the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles with the premodern figure of Dante, lost in the wood as twin images of bewilderment to argue for a “religious unconscious” at work in the “secular vision” (748) of postmodernity. Arguing for the immanence of this “religious” unconscious in modernity and postmodernity, Brown highlights the emergence of theology in political and philosophical discourses in the twenty-first century. The spectre of the theological in secular thought arises in a very particular way following 9/11; Brown declares that “9/11 would seem to pose an obvious question: what do we take religiosity to be?” (735). Further, Brown argues that this historical moment, inaugurated with the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York City, and sites in Washington, D.C. on September 11, 2001, constitutes an historical break that is nothing short of “the advent of postmodernity, a postmodernity we’ve just begun to live” (Brown 734). Australian literary and cultural critic John Frow, too, locates this event as a marker of a distinct historical shift, arguing that “the events of 9/11 did indeed inaugurate a genuine historical break which has transformed the conduct of politics throughout the Western world in ways that push us beyond the informing values of modernity” (Frow "Unaustralia: Strangeness and Value").

It is clear from his choice of bewilderment as a metaphor for epistemological impasse and of representation met with its own limits, and 143

Dante a “figure for the cognitive impasse provoked by late capitalism” (736) that Brown’s essay is fascinated with the intertwining of premodernity, modernity and postmodernity. He asks:

When will we know that 9/11 marked the advent of postmodernity? The answer…is that we won’t know; relations among modernity, premodernity, and postmodernity have become so ambiguous that, if I may put it this way, postmodernity seems unavailable to itself, characterised by a temporality that is no less bewildering than the spatiality Jameson describes, haunted by scenes from the past and voices of the dead that promise no epistemological clarity (885).

With responses to his essay from Rey Chow, Simon During, Susannah Henschel, Klaus J. Milich and Mary Louise Pratt, the terms of Brown’s analysis have generated much debate30. Similarly, preoccupation with the theological imagination and the limits of representation also characterise Slavoj iek’s controversial Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2001). For iek, the attack on the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001 marked “the climactic conclusion of the twentieth century art's ‘passion of the real’”(iek 11). Stressing that in this attack, “the ‘terrorists’ themselves did not do it primarily to provoke real material damage, but for the spectacular effect of it” (italics in original, 11), iek declares the event marks a shift in the status on representation, a shift emblematised by Karl-Heinz Stockhausen's claim that the planes hitting the WTC towers was “the ultimate work of art” (in iek 11).

These issues of the ambiguous relationship between premodernity, modernity and postmodernity, the religious unconscious of the secular, the spectatorial nature of reality and the limits of representation directly pertain to this chapter, in which I analyse how two antipodean novels of European underworlds, Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas’ Dead Europe (2005) and New Zealand writer Elizabeth Knox’s Daylight (2003) deeply engage with this particular historical moment. These novels, as I will argue, negotiate this crisis

30 See PMLA 120:3 (2005) 144 of ideology, history and meaning at the beginning of the twenty-first century according to a new formulation of the antipodean metaphorics of verticality, liminality, perversity and materiality mapped by the previous two chapters. As two novels that take as a central concern the various inheritances of monotheism and are propelled by a dilemma of the status of real and symbolic, Dead Europe and Daylight share thematic, geographic, historical and generic features. Both texts invoke the pre-humanist cosmology of heaven and hell and the post-human forms of vampires. These supernatural forms are not allegorical, but are woven into the fabrics of the novels’ realism. I argue that the material presences of the Judeo-Christian cosmology and vampiric figures are a direct response to contemporary bewilderment. At this moment when coordinates of location are in flux, these antipodean novels invoke the creative and destructive power of the underworld to locate and remake the self Further, the irreducible materiality of this cosmology and these impossible forms - vampires, and in Dead Europe ghosts - within realism traverses the problematic status of the real in the early twenty-first century according to a particular antipodean metaphorics. I argue that, in this moment of confusion of the relation between real and symbolic domains, these antipodean responses instantiate the material when conventional trajectories tend towards symbolic meaning.

According to John R. Gillis, the cultural climate in which these novels were written is the “second great moment of globalisation” (Gillis 19). The collision and crisis these novels and this chapter take as their focus relate directly to the legacy of the first great moment of globalisation dealt with by the previous chapter. This crisis of the real and symbolic that both novels address is a different collision to the one mapped by the previous chapter. Another moment in modernity where the status of reality and metaphor are in flux, here at the beginning of the twenty-first century the status of the real becomes problematic, an incursion into a symbolic structure, rather than the collision between real and imagined worlds outlined in Chapter Two. At this moment 145 we see representation met with its limits in the face of the legacy of the twentieth century and the violent realities of global politics.

In navigating the violent cost of this “second great moment of globalisation” as the complex and fraught legacy of the first, both novels emphasise the continuity of premodern, modern and postmodern temporalities. In this antipodean imaginary, as in its various formations mapped by the last two chapters, ancient and modern cosmologies exist simultaneously. I contend that it is this paradoxical temporality that has always circumscribed the antipodes that positions the antipodean imaginary as it is deployed in these novels as uniquely suited to navigating the bewilderment arising from a postmodernity seemingly “unavailable to itself”. Along with this heterogeneous temporality, a metaphorics of pre and post- human figures of vampires, demons and ghosts and a concern with economies of representation are means by which these texts directly engage with, as Brown puts it a postmodernity “unavailable to itself”, “haunted by scenes from the past and voices of the dead that promise no epistemological clarity”. Intertwined with World War Two narratives, one way both Dead Europe and Daylight stage this bewildering temporality of postmodernity is through such “voices of the dead”. In keeping with the antipodean tradition of material underworld mapped by the last two chapters, the dead are not ethereal specters, but material presences. Both concerned with temporalities, technologies and economies of representation, these antipodean novels display a configuration of real and metaphor distinct from the relations between these two domains analysed in previous chapters. In these texts, the relationship between metaphor and reality is staged through the opposition between symbolic systems of analog and digital. Both insisting on anachronistic forms of representation, in Dead Europe photography, and in Daylight painting and writing, the novels offer the continuous signal of analog systems as a challenge to the binary components of digitality, insisting on the real when the usual symbolic markers of location – temporality and spatiality – are deeply unstable. 146

These descents to older times, earlier technologies and lower spaces do not advocate for a simple return to an earlier moment, but open up the possibilities of transformation afforded by a journey to the underworld. These novels both mark a major return of the underworld in the antipodean imaginary. In Dead Europe, this is mainly a biblical hell, in Daylight, the classical underworld. Still material, these hells are spaces where self is transformed, and a location of sorts is achieved for the subject of the narrative. In Dead Europe, this return of hell figures a state of violent crisis in both systemic and individual relationships of self and other. As the underside of secular thought, divine and monstrous presences subside in the cavernous underworld of Daylight. In both Dead Europe and Daylight, the underworld journeys that propel narrative enable location. At the novels’ conclusions, protagonists Isaac (Dead Europe) and Bad (Daylight) return to Australia and New Zealand respectively, emerging, like Dante, at the antipodes. As well as location, these final emergences signify a grace of sorts. Achieved through embracing mortality, and acts of compromise and self-sacrifice, this grace is contingent rather than transcendent.

These novels are very firmly located within the tradition of katabatic narratives, which as Rachel Falconer demonstrates in her work on Hell in Contemporary Literature, is a genre that enjoys a particular prominence within post 9/11 representation. Dead Europe and Daylight not only use this narrative structure to figure contemporary dislocation and despair, but distinguish themselves from other contemporary katabatic works through their incorporation of prehumanist and supernatural forms into realism. Both novels directly invoke the figure of Dante and the cosmology of Dante’s Divine Comedy, a response to the symbolic bewilderment in the precise terms by which Brown conceptualises it. To further underscore the particularity of these novels’ engagement with this historical moment, I will demonstrate the ways in which both Dead Europe and Daylight constitute significant departures from Tsiolkas’ and Knox’s previous novels. 147

Along with katabatic trajectories, anachronistic forms of representation are key features of both novels. In Dead Europe, this focus takes the form of photography; and in Daylight, painting and literature. By foregrounding these modern technologies of representation, both novels privilege analog forms over digital ones. In Dead Europe this emphasis on analog pertains to anchoring the horrors of Europe and late capitalism in material reality, not allowing dissolution of past and present violences through abstraction. In Daylight, analog is aligned with the substance of the soul, against the digital process of vampiric reproduction.

Through their incorporation of prehumanist cosmologies and the posthuman hybrid of the vampire, both novels move away from the category of “human”. The masculine protagonists of both novels emphasise that it is the western, male subject at stake. For Dead Europe a journey away from humanity unfolds through a grotesque disintegration of the forms of genre, temporality, subjectivity and narrative to draw attention to structural and psychic inhumanities of this particular historical moment. For Daylight the move from human also questions the constitution of that category – where do the limits of the human lie? As the supernatural figure shared by both novels, the pre and post human form of the vampire is at once a means of artificial genesis, and a point where both realism and the subject comes undone. I argue that the figure of the vampire not only operates as a marker of the continuity between past, present and future, a comment on global networks, economies of consumption, capitalism and exploitation, but also enables an ethics of the inhuman as it is outlined by Jean-Francois Lyotard. Reading via Jacques Derrida’s and queer theorist Lee Edelman’s respective conceptualisations of this inhuman ethics, I demonstrate how Dead Europe deploys the inhuman as refusal of the late-capitalist temporality of futurity, progress and reproduction through the twin moves of queerness and haunting. With the queer figure a threat to futurity through natural reproduction and the ghost an insistence of the past within the present, these 148 inhuman figures of temporal otherness are the outside and the excess that threaten the teleological fantasy of the western subject at this moment.

These metaphorics of moving away from the human in both novels have specific implications for subjectivity. In Dead Europe, it is death drive negativity, refusal of the terms of futurity and an evisceration of the masculine first person subject that ends with the new possibility of living as a subject of compromise. This resolution is purchased through the sacrifice of the maternal. The masculine subject of Daylight escapes the underworld through the sacrifice of a religious life as it is a priest rather than the protagonist, Bad, who ultimately chooses to live as a vampire. It is through these sacrifices that the novels offer a material resolution to an epistemological impasse of a postmodernity “unavailable to itself”.

Having established the particular terms of the novels’ engagement with contemporary bewilderment (katabasis, analog and digital, the inhuman), I argue for the specific politics of dissent enacted through abjection, shame and rhetorical operations of queerness in Dead Europe. Abjection, shame and queerness all emerge at the limits of the human, and I argue that it is on this terrain that the novel’s most potent political challenge is made. I demonstrate through this analysis that the novel’s most disturbing elements are the site of the novel’s most powerful act of dissent. Julia Kristeva’s theorisation of abjection specifies the political charge of the novel in its vision of a disintegrating subjectivity. Further, iek’s analysis of a moment at the limit of moral reasoning brings into focus the novel’s exploding of all tenable ideological positions as part of this charge.

Central to the critical controversy surrounding Dead Europe was contention over the way the novel implicates its reader. I contend, through reading the novel alongside Pasolini’s contentious film Salo (Pasolini, 1975), which a number of scholars and Tsiolkas himself claim as an influence of Dead Europe, that compromising the audience is precisely where the challenge of the novel 149 lies. I will then continue to extrapolate the abject politics of compromise through the intersection of abjection and shame in the novel, reading it alongside Jean Genet’s European underworld of The Thief’s Journal. Here queer theorist Lee Edelman’s analysis of the political charge of the death drive elucidates the novel’s disintegration of the self as the gesture of a politics of self-sacrifice. Feminist theorist Judith Butler’s reading of Antigone further casts into relief the stakes of this sacrifice. As Butler argues, the act of “rushing by oneself to one’s own destruction” (46) is an act of dissent that threatens the very borders of the human. It is precisely through this type of sacrifice, outlined by Edelman and Butler, that Dead Europe is able to move towards the possibilities of compromise.

Further, these figurations of subjectivity go back to the impasse of ideology Brown and iek address, of the lack of epistemological clarity in a state of bewilderment. Having set up this framework, we can now see the conclusions of both novels, which both involve demonic bargains, as contingent resolutions to this state of bewilderment, of crises of representation and the limits of the human, on the material plane. These contingent resolutions offer the subject location in relation to others, to the world, within time, spatialised through the return to the antipodes, which, as we see in “Inferno”, offers a path out of hell.

Undead realism and the politics of fantasy

The confused status of symbolic coordinates of location that Dead Europe and Daylight navigate is clearly exemplified by two New Zealand novels written at the end of the twentieth century, Chad Taylor’s Heaven (1994) and Knox’s The Vintner’s Luck (1998). Heaven and The Vintner’s Luck both take as their focus impossible subjectivities, and end with irresolvable temporal dilemmas. When read together, these two novels by two of New Zealand’s most acclaimed contemporary writers explicitly stage the impasse that Daylight and Dead Europe seek a way out of. Taking as their respective subjects 150 a transvestite with psychic powers locked in a state of repetition, and a relationship between fallen angel and an eighteenth-century vintner, Heaven and The Vintner’s Luck both focus on crises of representation and the category of the human.

Heaven begins with confusion of and substitution between place and self as the transvestite Heaven explains the origin of her name - “[t]he city [Auckland] was the perfect place, it was…Heaven. And when I got here people said, who are you? But I thought they were asking where so I said, Heaven” (Taylor Heaven 10). According to Heaven’s therapist, Dr. Melrose, Heaven is “neither fish nor fowl. Here nor there.” Her reply to the doctor’s “who are you, really? What are you?” moves from identity, subject, object to temporality when are you “I’m never good during the day…I’m never together. I’m better at night.” (80) The novel concludes with the protagonist, suspended between male and female, reality and fiction, waking and sleeping, and day and night, caught in a “time loop”.

Heaven ends with an irresolvable breakdown of temporality, narrative, genre, language and gender as the novel concludes with a repetition of its opening scene, where Doctor Melrose explains that Heaven:

confronted with the very scenes he thinks he imagined, [is] locked. The gap between his perceptions of past and future has vanished. A sort of catatonia.

Banging around in some memory loop, over and over again.

‘There is a painting,’ Robert said, ‘of a boy holding a picture of himself holding a picture of himself holding a picture of himself…and so on. On and on and on. To infinity’ (181).

The equation of Heaven with a painting of a picture within a picture so on “to infinity” is a locked, or looped state of being. Heaven, “locked” between tenses, or “banging around in some memory loop”. Heaven’s final words are 151 a repeated sequence of “Da” (177), which is both nothing as “dada” and the Freudian “here”, a sort of catatonic suspension in the present. Heaven, at once a place, a time, a body and a novel, is locked at the limits of possibility of twentieth-century identity.

Like the protagonist of Heaven, as the story of a fallen angel trapped on earth, the temporal, spatial and desiring locations of The Vintner’s Luck are impossible. This impossibility is perhaps most poetically rendered at the scene of the death of the novel’s human protagonist, Sobran, as he orders the angel Xas to end his life:

‘I want you to put my hand on your mouth’ He saw his hand lifted, his clawed fingers and one damaged nail like a chip of agate. He felt the kiss, the smooth, plump mouth. ‘It wasn’t possible’ He said. What he had wanted, with all his heart, was to match this being stride for stride over the miles. But a crippled angel will outstrip a man (Knox The Vinter's Luck 235).

Sobran’s last breath “a long second, like the shock of falling” is an apprehension of the impossibility of “matching this being, stride for stride”. Impossible is also the last word of the text. Revisiting Sobran’s cellar over a century later, the immortal angel Xas addresses his long dead lover:

You fainted and I caught you. It was the first time I’d supported a human. You had such heavy bones. I put myself between you and gravity. Impossible (241).

The binds these novels conclude with emblematise the instability of coordinates of location at the end of the twentieth-century. As Brown, iek and others have argued, the events of 9/11 deepened this bewilderment. It is this bewilderment that Dead Europe and Daylight respond to through katabasis, finding location through descent.

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As novels that both literally and metaphorically descend into underworlds, both Dead Europe and Daylight are katabatic narratives. In Daylight, the caves that traverse the Franco-German border constitute this nether world. Dead Europe unfolds in the underworlds of Europe as hell. In keeping with the typical operations of katabasis as outlined by Falconer and Pike, both the protagonists Isaac (Dead Europe) and Brian ‘Bad’ Phelan (Daylight) move through descent, a “ground zero” point, inversion and emergence in their journeys. These novels are two in a number of contemporary katabasis narratives. In her work on hell in contemporary literature, Falconer argues that in contemporary fiction the topos of the underworld continues to “[function] mythically as the space in which the self is unmade”(Falconer 18). For Falconer, contemporary katabatic narratives depart from their classical and premodern predecessors in that “what unmakes [the self] now is the failure of a human community rather than a divine wrath” (18). Falconer lists Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Haruki Murakami, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Tony Harrison and Derek Walcott as “contemporary katabasists” (4).

Part of this katabasis sub-genre of contemporary antipodean fiction, Dead Europe and Daylight distinguish themselves from it through the incorporation of supernatural presences into realism. In recent Australian fiction, the katabasis genre is predominantly realist, though sometimes satirical. A narrative dynamic concerned with the formation of the masculine subject in Australia, contemporary katabasis is generally the domain of male writers. Some examples include Anthony Macris’ novel Capital Volume One (1997), which juxtaposes the tube station underworld of London and multiple first person narratives of a male subject/s in suburban Brisbane. Similarly A.L. McCann’s Subtopia (2005) moves from suburban Melbourne to the criminal underworld of Berlin. Katabasis is deployed satirically in Andrew McGahan’s Underground (2006), a hyperbolic satire of contemporary conservative rhetoric, which centres around the underworld of the Oz Underground, a resistance 153 movement that takes the upside down southern cross as their symbol: “‘We’re about a complete overthrow of everything. So we flipped it’” (McGahan 161).

New Zealand katabatic novels also tend towards realism and are generally structured according to the formation or transformation of a masculine subject31. For instance, major works include Chad Taylor’s novels Heaven (1994), (Shirker: A Novel 2000), (Electric 2003) and (Departure Lounge 2006) are located in urban and criminal underworlds. Underground spaces are central to Tim Corbellis’ novels (Below 2001) and (The Fossil Pit 2005). As Trevor James argues, the prolific writing of Maurice Gee is characterised by a sense of abyss, or void (James 48). In contemporary New Zealand poetry, Richard Reeve’s work (Dialectic of Mud, 2001, The Life and The Dark, 2004) descends into material depths of corporeality and decay. Mike Johnson, author of katabatic novels Dumb Show (1996),which he describes as ‘kiwi gothic’, and Stench (2004) has also translated medieval Chinese poet’s Li He’s cosmography of heavenly planes and underworlds The vertical harp: selected poems of Li He (2007).

In both Australian and New Zealand literature, katabatic narratives generally unfold in the real spaces of natural, or urban underworlds. Dead Europe and Daylight are exceptions to this convention as they move out of realism. This generic secession is directly related to the political stakes and philosophical dilemmas of both novels. The political implications of such departures from realism have been explicated by Rachel Falconer, who draws attention to realism’s complicity with capitalist modernity. Falconer locates fantasy’s challenge to the excesses and injustices of capitalist modernity in terms of its proximity to capitalist modes of representation; arguing that “ironically, the genre that seems to be mounting the most insistent challenge

31 One exception to the katabasis as masculine subject formation is New Zealand writer Kapka Kassabova’s Reconnaissance. In this novel where the traveling protagonist Nadejda attempts to locate herself between the Balkans and New Zealand, the latter is figured according to the underworld images of a katabatic narrative; as “somewhere at the far end of hell” (99).

154 to capitalist excess currently is not realism or tragedy but the one most sympathetic to capitalism’s entire ‘illusory apparatus’, that is fantasy” (Falconer 182-83). Falconer also emphasises realism’s complicity with late capitalist economies of representation, where ‘[i]n the context of speculative capitalism, realism is the fantastical genre, providing the illusion of material solidity and permanence that the actual world lacks’ (183). Dead Europe’s rupture of the realist genre is a key part of the novel’s political charge. By insisting on the presence, the realness, of its horrors, Dead Europe and Daylight do not allow allegorical readings.

A temple and a skyscraper

Dead Europe’s response to the bewilderment of the historical moment that Brown terms as “a postmodernity unavailable to itself” is perhaps most clearly staged through the protagonist’s recounting of a dream where ancient and modern worlds are combined. A crisis of temporal, spatial and symbolic location is articulated as, halfway through the novel, Isaac dreams he is “flying over a great city, a magnificent metropolis”:

I could not tell if it was ancient or modern. I was flying towards one of the great buildings in the city and it was both a temple and a skyscraper that seemed to dominate the horizon. It curved and slid across the centre of this world and I saw that this structure was in the form of a serpent. Its scales were bricks and its ribs were pylons of steel. I was flying towards the great serpent’s head and I could see that its eyes were composed of myriad windows. Light shone from every window and in every window I could see myself…I was being propelled with greater and greater speed toward the serpent’s head. I began to panic. I was no longer soaring but I was being driven towards my death. I gazed into the serpent’s eyes (336).

This anonymous dream city has no recognisable markers of temporal or geographic location. There is confusion of premodern and postmodern as Isaac “could not tell if it was ancient and modern”, and the vertical form of that dominates the horizon is “both a temple and skyscraper”. The biblical 155 form of the serpent is constructed from the materials of modernity, from “bricks and steel”. Movement is also confused, as the vertical trajectory of “soaring” becomes falling, and the autonomy of “flying” and becomes the compulsion of “being driven”. Isaac’s bewilderment of location, temporality and direction here is representative of the contemporary dislocation that propels the novel.

This bewilderment that characterises both novels, such as this scene from Dead Europe emblematises, is specifically articulated through Dante’s La Commedia, referenced explicitly in both novels. The figure of Dante lost in the woods, or entering the gates of hell are images repeatedly invoked to articulate the particular crises of location and meaning specific to the beginning of the twenty-first century. As a poetic rendering of the religious imagination, La Commedia, particular “Inferno” is ideal for figuring the presence of this imagination, or, as Brown puts it, “unconscious” in secular Western culture. In Brown’s discussion of the post September 11 world “The Dark Wood of Postmodernity (Space, Faith, Allegory)”, the figure of Dante is a metaphor for the bewilderment of contemporary culture. Pointing to New York Mayor Rudolph Guiliani’s description of the city on the evening of September 11, 2001 as: “Hell, what Dante must have meant when he described Hell’” (in Falconer, 1), Falconer, like Brown, argues for the archetypal status of this image, and the specific deployment of “Inferno” as a metaphor to articulate the philosophical and political crises of this moment.

Dead Europe and Daylight both invoke the particular cosmology of Dante’s Commedia as part of their response to this specific historical moment and its heightened instability of temporal, figural and subjective coordinates. Further, this reference to La Commedia locates these novels in the long tradition of tropes of hell and the antipodean imaginary. Daylight explicitly refers to all three books of La Commedia. Along with a spa and a salon named “Paradiso” and “Inferno” respectively (Daylight 199), Dante’s epic is summoned to describe the writing of the vampire Marquis de Chambord and 156 visions of painter Jean Ares. “Inferno” is invoked to depict Chambord’s novel Daylight, “a romance with a touch of the Infernal”(95), while Dante is mentioned in conjunction with the “real”ness of religious experience over secular doubts as Eve explains how Jean:

got migraines, with beautiful auras. And Jean was an atheist. So he had to conclude what he saw was a pathology. He said to me that Dante wrote that there was a place in Purgatory for those who believe but don’t profess. ‘Well, this is professing,’ Jean said, ‘but am I only deceived by my spectacular brain chemistry?’ And he said that the experience, the religious experience, was more real than his doubts about it (302).

Here the figure of Dante stands for the ambiguous status of the theological, secular image of superstition, fitting with Brown’s question, “what do we take religiosity to be?” (735).

La Commedia appears figuratively rather than literally in Dead Europe, with “Inferno” operating as a spatialising trope. Dead Europe incorporates the cartography of “Inferno” as protagonist Isaac descends into an increasingly abject European hell. The cities Isaac travels to, Athens, Karpenissi, Venice, Prague, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, Cambridge, London, can be seen to directly correlate to the nine circles of Dante’s “Inferno”. Like Dante, Isaac emerges at the antipodes, after an experience of total abjection in the centre of hell32. Further, Tsiolkas, as well as Ken Gelder and Paul Salzman (2008) connect Dead Europe and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film 1975 Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom. With the Anteinferno, the Circle of Manias, the Circle of Feces, and the Circle of Blood, Salo’s structure also references “Inferno”.

Along with these explicit invocations of Dante and La Commedia, the direct engagement of these novels with the ontological, political and aesthetic dilemmas of the start of the twenty-first century becomes clear when they are viewed in relation to the rest of the writers’ oeuvres. While Dead Europe and

32 As the experience of a state which is neither life nor death, Dante’s apprehension of the centre of hell is a classic example of abjection in the Kristevan sense. He says “I did not die, nor did I stay alive,/ imagine what I became,/ deprived of both” (Inferno: XXXIV 25). 157

Daylight display points of continuance within the authors’ previous work, both works constitute major shifts in Tsiolkas’ and Knox’s oeuvres, consonant with the specific dilemmas of the climate of that particular moment. Both Dead Europe and Daylight depart from the earlier novels of their respective authors in terms of genre, temporality, and a concern with the status of representation and the limits of the human.

While it continues the thematics of loss of faith and rage against the institutional and individual injustices of late capitalism of Tsiolkas’ previous novels Loaded (1995) and The Jesus Man (1999), Dead Europe breaks with these texts in terms of genre, temporality, geographic location, and through the extent to which it magnifies the despair of its predecessors. In an interview with Michael Williams, Tsiolkas explained that, for him, the three consecutive novels Loaded, The Jesus Man and Dead Europe formed a trilogy:

In hindsight, though, thinking about myself as a writer and as a human in relationship to the work, the first three novels feel like a trilogy. They were written at a time when I was really confused and I was really disappointed and heartbroken about the failure of politics and the failure of a radical revolutionary politics. To put it bluntly, it’s almost like you can read them as a trilogy about the loss of faith: from the young boy at the centre of Loaded to the world of family in Jesus Man and then the whole of European history (M. Williams).

Beginning with the first person voice, grungy realism and urban mapping of Tsiolkas’ Loaded, Dead Europe quickly departs from these conventions as the novel incorporates unreal presences from modern and ancient pasts.33 Isaac’s first person narrative is also interweaved with the folkloric, fairytale third person account of his grandparents in the Second World War, a clear generic departure from the first person realism of Loaded. Loaded and Dead Europe both foreground the transgression of corporeal boundaries through detailed descriptions of sexual encounters and drug use. In Loaded these disruptions to a discrete and contained self are often celebratory and euphoric34. In Dead

34 See Elizabeth McMahon, "Lost in Music," Meanjin 59.2 (2000). 158

Europe, this consumption of substances and bodies is figured as both metaphorically and literally vampiric. While Loaded is a cartography of Melbourne, divided into the four cardinal points of the compass, Dead Europe maps Europe according to the nine circles of Dante’s “Inferno”.

Dead Europe literalises the demons and underworlds that are phantasmagorical and metaphorical in Loaded. Halfway through Loaded, Ari is in a taxi, listening to Manos Loizos’ The Road, as the driver explains to Ari and his friend Johnny that the song “is about the students gunned down by fascist tanks. You know about the polytechnic don’t you?” Ari then describes the demonic vision the driver becomes, a hellish creature like the spectres plaguing Isaac in Dead Europe:

His face, in shadow, seems much too large, his teeth much too bright, his eyes are dark and black and I’m panicked for a moment because I can’t see any white in his eyes. A demon’s eyes. I relax back in the seat. I’m tripping (Tsiolkas Loaded 86).

Drugs are the altered space in Loaded, but Dead Europe does not allow the escape of the trip; the novel’s demons are horrifically present, inseparable from the fabric of the novel’s realism. Any phantasmagorical status is refused in the abject materiality of the curse in Isaac’s blood. In Loaded, Toula/Johnny reveals Ari’s stage name, Persephone. Ari is Persephone “because she spends half her time in hell, the other half in the real world” (96). Toula/Johnny anticipates the hell of Isaac’s experience in Europe when he tells Ari that “The trouble is our little Persephone is starting to enjoy her time in hell. Aren’t you, sugar? You don’t know what’s real anymore do you?” (96-97) The horrific difference of Dead Europe is that it is all real, the ghosts, the vampires, the violence are not metaphoric or phantasmagorical, but become terrifyingly corporeal through the novel’s realism.

Though it carries through a preoccupation with the status of the theological in secular culture, Dead Europe also marks a departure from Tsiolkas’ previous 159 novel, The Jesus Man. Opening with a secular experience of the sacred: “I am an atheist but I once did experience the shock of a vision. […] The terror I experienced is indescribable. All I can say of it is that I had stumbled across the mad order of nature: it was screaming out the riddle of God” (1), The Jesus Man locates this terror in the abject of the capitalist order. Dead Europe invokes this “riddle of God” directly, not only through real effects of religious unconscious, but demonic presences, curses, ghosts, and Faustian bargains.

As with Tsiolkas and Dead Europe, while Knox’s Daylight continues a number of themes in her previous novels, it reverses the direction of trajectories that mark these earlier novels. Some general thematics that characterise Knox’s work include the exploration of the relationship between reality and metaphor, the question of what constitutes the human, and an emphasis on the humanity of peculiarity, imperfection, fragility and mortality. This question of humanity is often raised through the becoming human of inhuman figures, such as the angel Xas in The Vintner’s Luck (1998) and Avra/Ido/Sean, the chameleon protagonist of Black Oxen (2001). Ending with a priest choosing to become a vampire, Daylight reverses this trajectory as both the human and vampire characters of the novel move away from, rather than towards the human.

Daylight in many ways reverses the trajectory of The Vintner’s Luck, which centres around the contradictory figure of the fallen angel whose increasing proximity to and affinity with humanity is both an ascent and descent. While it continues this ambivalence, Daylight displays a more definite katabatic trajectory. The Vintner’s Luck charts the process of an angel becoming human; Daylight focuses on human becoming demon; a vampire who is “a dust devil who dances forever”. While The Vintner’s Luck has hell itself as its underworld space, Daylight rehearses a different katabasis, where the natural underworld of caves signify the subsidence of Judeo-Christian theology within the modern and postmodern Western imagination. Daylight is also distinct from Knox’s Black Oxen in its insistence on corporality and literality rather than 160 metaphoricity. Both these novels begin with a death, in Black Oxen this death is figurative, in Daylight, it is literal. A novel of perverse genesis and literary generation, Black Oxen appropriately begins with death through protagonist Avra/Ido/Sean’s first incarnation as “cadaver”. Daylight opens similarly, beginning protagonist Bad’s recovery of the corpse of the vampire Martine Dardo. In the case of Daylight, this inaugural death is material, rather than metaphoric.

Not only singular and somewhat aberrant within the writers’ oeuvres, both novels also push the boundaries of the Künstlerroman genre. Dead Europe features a photographer protagonist, while Daylight features a painter and a writer, both foregrounding forms of representation that are anachronistic when juxtaposed with the contemporary media that characterises the historical context of these novels. In Dead Europe it is emphasised that Isaac’s photographs are film, not digital. This novel uses photography as a modern mode of representation, a technology of the past that is able to capture the ghosts that haunt the present. In Daylight, the nineteenth-century forms of painting and writing work to scaffold the novel’s dizzying, ambiguous temporality and highlight the immanence of the past in the present. Both novels exceed conventions of the Künstlerroman genre in their incorporation of supernatural forms.

With its photographer protagonist, Dead Europe is directly concerned with the status of representation, as the narrative as well as the criticism surrounding the novel are framed by questions of the worth and limits of art. Indeed, Tsiolkas has stated explicitly that this question is central to his novel, commenting in an interview that it is “interesting that Isaac is a photographer, he’s an artist…that’s the most autobiographical element: what is the worth of what we do as artists? What are we hoping to achieve?” (in Padmore ""Blood and Land and Ghosts:" Haunting Words in Christos Tsiolkas' Dead Europe" 456). Concerns over aesthetics and ethics also dominated the critical reception of the novel, which was characterised by debates over the artistic and political 161 merit of the inclusion of such violent, racist and pornographic material.35 Les Rosenblatt, for example, asks if the novel is “redeemed by sophisticated reading as literary fiction?” (46).

Dead Europe is firmly located within and, crucially, departs from the sub- genre of Australian novels that focus on the photographer figure. In his study on the camera in recent Australian fiction, Paul Genoni has drawn attention to a number of recent novels centering around a photographer protagonist.36 Stressing that the recording gaze of the camera is often a colonising one, Genoni argues that the photographer is the successor of the cartographer, where “it may well be that the photograph has supplanted the map as the primary means of knowing and imagining postcolonial space” (Genoni 138). With protagonist Isaac “determined to bring this place to clear rational modern life with my flash and camera, through film and chemicals” (Dead Europe 134) encountering and recording supernatural presences - whose irreducible, analog realness is insisted upon - Dead Europe enacts a significant departure from this genre.

Structured in part around a novel, three biographies, paintings and drawings, Daylight, too, is explicitly concerned with anachronistic modes of representation. The aurified status of these decidedly un-twenty-first century media is foregrounded as Jean Ares and Eve Moskulete, the painter and the writer, both associate their experience of migraines with inspiring “auras”. Ares, who “got migraines, with beautiful auras” (302), “wouldn’t be willing to trade in the aura with the headache” (60). Similarly, “Eve said she always had her best ideas in the days before a migraine. She’d solve problems in her

35 See: Humphrey McQueen, Radio National Book Talk Interview with Jill Kitson rec 02/07/2005, 2005., Les Rosenblatt, "A Place Where Wolves Fuck," Arena Magazine Oct-Nov 2005.79 (2005). Robert Manne, "Dead Disturbing. A Bloodthirsty Tale That Plays with the Fire of Anti-Semitism," The Monthly June.2 (2005)., Andrew McCann, Jeff Sparrow and Christen Cornell,, "The Spectres Haunting Dead Europe," Overland 181 (2005). 36 Gerald Murnane’s The Plains (1982), Liam Davidson’s Soundings (1993), Christopher Koch’s Highway to a War (1995), Robert Drew’s The Drowner (1996), Delia Falconer’s The Service of Clouds (1997), Kate Grenville’s The Idea of Perfection (1999), James Bradley’s The Deep Field (1999), Simone Lazaroo’s The Australian Fiance (2000), and Candida Baker’s The Hidden (2000) (Genoni 137). More recently, Gail Jones’ Sixty Lights (2004) is structured around the fortunes of a photographer protagonist and focuses on the haunting temporality of the photograph. 162 work” (60). Ares’ migraines with their auras are also figured as divine inspiration. Ares explains to Eve how “he knew his own mind – he should, at seventy – but his migraines weren’t his mind, as such; they were more like dramatic mental weather. A divine light that turns into sunstroke” (60). This connection between the aura and artistic production has been famously theorised by Walter Benjamin in his iconic essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. For Benjamin, the original artwork possesses an “aura” that “[e]ven the most perfect reproduction of a work of art” lacks. Pertaining to “presence in time and space” and “unique existence at the place where it happens to be” (214), Benjamin declares “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art” (215). The painting with its aura is part of Daylight’s concern with singularity, with the status of uniqueness within economies of identical reproduction. The focus of on the aurified and singular artwork in Daylight is an anachronistic means of locating symbolic stability in a historical moment characterised by a shift in the relationship between the event and its representation.

Daylight further stages and navigates the contemporary dilemma of the status of the real through its moves from coincidence to subsidence. Halfway through the novel, the detective asks Jesuit priest Daniel Octave to explain a number of uncanny coincidences relating to the Blessed Martine Raimondi’s miraculous rescue of villagers trapped underground during the Second World War:

Two people from the saint’s story were dead in suspicious circumstances, and it seemed to Daniel and the detective that subsidence had appeared in the world, around the saint’s story. The kind of subsidence that first brings a hidden cave system to notice, to light (169).

Meaning to sink or fall to a lower level, subsidence can be seen as a type of katabasis. The katabatic narrative trajectory of Daylight is structured according to the revelation of subsidence, moving from coincidence, the dynamics of surface, to “a hidden cave system” of subsidence. 163

This move from coincidental resemblances to an apparent pattern of history and identity and from a series of collisions to a network of connections in Daylight can be seen as symptomatic of a drive to locate meaning and identity through metaphoric and literal descents and an emphasis on the real. Early in the novel real and fictional identities are in a state of flux. Mysterious circles of uncanny resemblances, coincidental encounters and strange connections emerge as the novel moves from the domains of literary and visual representation to reality. Throughout the novel the reality of the fictional, generally as vampires and specifically as vampire Marquis Guy de Chambord’s novel Daylight, is increasingly insisted upon. This impossible reality, or the subsidence of the real within and beneath representation is figured as both divine and monstrous. A divine version of this subsidence can be seen in Eve’s description of the painter Ares’ visionary migraines as an overwhelming presence, or realness, within reality where:

sometimes, the world at which he was looking would turn transparent, or seem to, as if someone was applying terrific pressure, pointing at one place with the tip of a powerful finger – from the other side. In the place that was pointed at, Jean would see what was there – a raft of cloud or a flowering bush – but these things would say what God says: “I am” (301-302).

This “I am” is an assertion of material presence, of supernatural significance in nature, or the real emerging from the symbolic.

However, while the logic of the pattern of recognition and resemblance the novel traces is one of immortal significance, it is eventually revealed to be not divine but monstrous. Daylight’s revelation of a monstrous subsidence is previewed early in the novel through Father Daniel’s meditations on statistical probability:

Statistical probability. Daniel couldn’t recall exactly what he had said to the young tourist on the train. Something about odd events and the normal curve. But what was the normal curve? A run of blind wall, in a maze, along which you could walk, seeing 164

only a little of the way ahead, until, eventually, around a long corner, you come face- to-face with the minotaur (170).

Later, in a boat with the vampire Ila, who is waiting for the sun to end his life, Daniel comes to understand all the unexplained gaps in the story of Saint Martine Dardo as not holy mysteries, but a monstrous bargain. The saint’s story is revealed to be the intervention of the vampire Lou Ila37, a pact made not with god but with “a dust devil who dances forever” (65):

Daniel had come to an end. He had wandered in his maze, or followed his thread of suspicion. He had dropped down in a dark shaft, had released the rope’s end, and had fallen free. And he was sitting in a boat opposite the monster at the heart of the maze – his Minotaur (322).

Here the supernatural presence that is the source of temporal and identity confusion is shown to be not divine, but monstrous, a demon rather than a god.

Analogous to this question of significance in the novel are problems of appearance and precedence. The novel’s parable of appearance is offered by Bad who, determined not to be defeated by a Rubik’s cube, steamed off all the coloured squares and replaced them in order: “As far as I was concerned, I had solved the problem, the problem of appearances” (272). For precedence, Daylight offers the analogy of Christ doubled as dead and risen. These images are juxtaposed on a medallion made by the vampire Ila, and with neither in front, Ila had “solved the problem of precedence” through the image of grace, a rabbit sniffing an arrow (238). This temporality of coincidence and resemblance is not unraveled in the logic of precedence, but remains as a paradox of surface and depth, real and representation and sacred and secular. Though not a way out of this bewilderment, Dead Europe and Daylight both

37 One of the connections highlighted by the novel is that Ila is the artist of a 1775 illumination of Chambord’s collection owed by Eve, Chambord’s biographer. This image is described by the artist Jean Ares as “the world of humans with human individuals exorcised.” (65)

165 offer analog over digital systems of representation and reproduction as a means of emphasising the presence of the real in the face of instability of symbolic coordinates.

This is not digital

Dead Europe’s insistence on analog over digital forms of representation is an assertion of the real presence of past, present and future violences as the cost of late capitalism. “[Y]ou ignorant sad old fuck, I was screaming inside, it’s film, it’s real, this is not digital” (361) is Isaac’s response to his old teacher Sam’s assumption about the ghastly apparitions in his photographs. Sam:

threw a set of proofsheets across the bed. – What the fuck are these Isaac? They were the cities of modern Europe. The modern streets of Europe: Alexanderplatz, Rue d’Alsace, Kalvernstraat. The streets were modern and sleek but the bodies in these landscapes seemed ancient and damaged and broken. In print after print, there appeared the same reptilian face […] -What the fuck are these, Isaac? Sam’s voice was shaking. He was furious. He was perplexed. -I don’t know, I answered (336).

The terrifying material presence of bodies “damaged and broken” and the “reptilian face” that signifies hate and violence as the legacy of monotheism are realities attested to by their appearance on film, which is “real…not digital”.

In Tsiolkas’ novel the photograph stands for, in Lacanian terms, the incursion of the Real into the symbolic. As Roland Barthes has famously argued in Camera Lucida, photography is a medium that stands in a privileged relationship to the Lacanian Real. Emphasising the “singular adherence” of the referent (6), Barthes argues that the Real and the Symbolic, the signifier 166 and the referent, the world of meaning and the world of things unite in the photograph. For Barthes, the Real irrupts in every photograph as:

the absolute Particular, the sovereign contingency, matte and somehow stupid, the This, (this photograph and not photography), in short what Lacan calls the Tuché, the Occasion, the Encounter, the Real, in its indefatigable expression (4).

Isaac does not correct Sam’s assumption that the photographs are digital montages, but his silent scream “it’s film, it’s real, this is not digital” insists on the analog substance of the images. Analog asserts the irreducible realness of the hellish images; as Barthes puts it, “the Real in its indefatigable expression” (Barthes 4).

Slavoj iek’s formulation of the spectatorial nature of reality at this time further casts into relief the challenge these analog presences pose to the status of the image in late capitalism. iek could be describing Dead Europe when he declares that “the ultimate truth of the capitalist utilitarian de-spiritualised universe is the de-materialisation of the ‘real life’ itself, its reversal into a spectral show” (14). The ghosts in Isaac’s photographs, impossible analog presences, are a materialisation of such a “spectral show”. The analog presences of Isaac’s horrific images as incursions of the real are cast into relief by iek’s formulation of the structural chiasmus, or inevitable inversion of Real and virtual, where if “the passion of the Real” leads to “pure semblance”, the “passion of the semblance…ends up in a kind of real” (iek 10). iek argues that the subject who cuts into their flesh rather than inscribes upon it embodies post-9/11 post-modernity:

So, if the passion of the Real ends up with the pure semblance of the political theater, then, in an exact inversion, the "postmodern" passion of the semblance of the Last Men ends up in a kind of Real. Recall the phenomenon of "cutters" (mostly women who experience an irresistible urge to cut themselves with razors or otherwise hurt themselves), strictly correlative to the virtualization of our environs: it stands for a desperate strategy to return to the real of the body (10). 167

This eruption of material, bodily substance from under a surface that would otherwise be inscribed upon repeatedly appears in Dead Europe. Isaac notices bleeding cuts in his photographs, where it seems as if “[s]omeone or something had scratched the prints; serrated tears through Pano’s face and body and neck” and “[i]n the near-dawn light it seemed that the portraits were bleeding from their wounds” (234).

Daylight also deploys analog systems in opposition to digital ones, where the continuous signal of analog is an analogy for humanity, while digitality is the mode by which the inhuman, as vampire, reproduces itself. In Knox’s novel vampiric reproduction is achieved on a cellular level, through a kind of parasite that gradually replaces the host’s cells with identical but immortal copies. The ancient vampire Ila explains that “[t]he parasite’s aim—if the machineries of nature could be said to have aims—was to colonise its host by making a copy” (210). Martine Dando, the novel’s composite saint-vampire figure learns of the operation of the parasite that:

was everywhere, percolating throughout her entire system. It was everywhere, and it looked exactly like the cells at each site, performed the same functions, acting in the liver as the liver, in the muscles as the muscles, in the blood as blood. It was a mimic (209).

The parasite’s reproduction through the mimicking of discrete systems and cells is a digital one, the transformation of minute, but separate parts. By contrast, the soul is figured as analog, a continuous signal. Ila tells Daniel how Martine would “say to me that she’d hoped her own soul was going to God like a slow vapour, like the mist lifting as daylight comes” (211). The analog soul contains a kernel of singularity that can’t be copied as cells are; Martine “was afraid that while the parasite could copy her human capacity to learn, it couldn’t reproduce what she had learned, her memories. She was concerned for her soul. Would the parasite replace her soul with its own?” (211). This question of the status and limits of the human is crucial to both 168 novels, the stakes of which are cast into relief through an analysis of the inhuman figures of vampires and ghosts that haunt Daylight and Dead Europe.

Inhuman ethics

Both Dead Europe and Daylight most explicitly stage the question of where to locate the human within this moment of bewilderment through figures of inhumanity. In both novels, vampires figure the terrain of the inhuman. In Dead Europe, this terrain is also shared with ghosts. In her iconic introduction to Human, all too Human (1996), a collection of essays on the inhuman and the posthuman, Diana Fuss draws attention to the instability of the category of the human, where at the end of the twentieth century, “the question of what it means to be human has never before been more difficult--and more contested”(1). Asking “what has become of the human” following the demise of humanism, and what might constitute the “the human after human”, Fuss emphasises the human’s fictional status as a figure that “may, in fact, be one of our most elastic fictions" (2), and reminds us of the function of the category as one of exclusion, as with “its unstable boundaries perpetually challenged and redrawn to exclude entire groups of socially disempowered subjects…the human is not, and never has been, an all inclusive category” (2). As the title of this collection, and of Nietzsche’s collection of aphorisms from which it was drawn, implies, the limits and possibilities of the figure of the human are perhaps most forcefully addressed through the transgressions and impossibilities figured by the excesses of the human; by the inhumanity figured in the “all too”.

As the last two chapters have shown, the antipodean imaginary has historically engaged the generative and destructive powers this excess wields in relation to fantasies of the human in various ways. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the antipodean novels Dead Europe and Daylight reopen these questions of the limits of the human specifically in relation to the lack of location in relation to spatial, temporal and ideological positions in 169 postmodernity. In keeping with the legacy of the antipodean imaginary, this inhuman terrain is material and enables both location and becoming through descent. The category of the inhuman in both novels is also tied to the crisis of real and representation of both novels, as we have seen through the digitality of vampires in Daylight. In this respect, these inhuman figures are complexly embedded in the interplay of reality and notionality in and by the novels, as the presence of these unreal figures is insisted upon within realism, and as a direct engagement with questions about the status of the real and metaphor the novels pose.

This relation between the inhuman and representation, and the aesthetic and political potential the terrain of the inhuman offers is clarified by Lyotard’s concept of the inhuman. Positing the particular inhuman, or the inhumanity of particularity, against the general inhumanity of “development”, Lyotard locates the former as the means to challenge the latter, asking “what else remains as ‘politics’ except resistance to this inhuman [of the system consolidated under the name of development]?” (Lyotard 7). Lyotard’s inhuman is the name of a particular and contradictory force of both politics and aesthetics. In his 1988 treatise on the limits of the human, a series of essays entitled The Inhuman, Lyotard offers a double model of the inhuman, where on the one hand the inhumanity of systemic violences called “development” and on the other hand the singularity or excess of particularity that resides in the “I” as the indefinable and thus “infinitely secret” inhumanity “of which the soul is hostage”. It is this inhumanity that “it is the task of writing, thinking, literature, arts, to venture to bear witness to it” (7). Giving voice to the aesthetics of the inhuman, or art as necessarily inhuman, Lyotard invokes both Apollinaire and Adorno, who argue respectively that “[m]ore than anything, artists are men who want to become inhuman” and “[a]rt remains loyal to humankind uniquely through its inhumanity in regard to it” (2). As Lyotard connects the spheres of humanity and art, in Dead Europe and Daylight the inhuman is the space where the novels show most clearly their “loyalty to humankind”. 170

What constitutes the inhuman or the limits of the human is a central question of Daylight, which asks what remains of self in the vampiric becoming undergone by Grazide, Ila, Martine, Dawn and Tom. The problem of humanity, of whether the immortal cells copied by the parasite retain the pre-vampiric soul, is most pressing for Martine, who “was afraid that while the parasite could copy her human capacity to learn, it couldn’t reproduce what she had learned, her memories. She was concerned for her soul. Would the parasite replace her soul with its own?” She wondered “whether it was possible for a soul to go to god piecemeal” (211). Ila tells Daniel how “[s]he’d say to me that she’d hoped her own soul was going to God like a slow vapour, like the mist lifting as daylight comes” (211). By contrast, ancient vampire Grazide embraces her post-human state, claiming that the residue of this evaporation is the pure essence of “self”, as “my history has evaporated…leaving only myself – a powdery residue” (287) and:

Love, like every other impurity has left me. What is God’s has gone to God – leaving my self, whole and utterly happy. Perhaps I’m the first inhabitant of a world that has split off from this one. A world that will replace this one if fledglings don’t kill nestlings, and nests breed and increase, and grow older, and forget, and become fully themselves, as I have (289).

Echoing the images of heaven as a distillation of souls in The Vintner’s Luck, Grazide’s description of a post-human world emphasises imperfections and vulnerability to the affections and violences of others as constitutive of humanity. Martine and Bad both refuse this post-human world; Martine through self-immolation, Bad through a return to Australia. Martine cannot bear that she had become infectious, and Bad cannot bear the inhumane connotations of becoming inhuman: “he realised that in choosing Dawn’s life he would, in fact, be choosing to become one of another species” (336). Here choice and self-sacrifice, in this case, both refusals that require an embrace of mortality, are accorded the place of grace. The grace enabled through this dissent is not a transcendental nor positive position, but contingent, 171 compromised. Dead Europe offers a similar resolution, where, like Daylight, this location of humanity is realised by a journey away from the human. In both novels, the inhuman figure of the vampire enables compromise.

In both novels, the vampire figures both the sacred and profane edges of the human. Daylight’s Martine is both saint and vampire, and, as Noel Rowe argues Dead Europe combines Eucharistic and vampiric traditions (Rowe 218). Literary critic Graham Huggan points out that this is a paradox the vampire already carries, as:

Vampires and their victims – vampires as victims – blur the boundary between what Terry Eagleton calls ‘the two opposed ideas of the living dead’: the ‘good’ figure of the martyr ‘ who embrace[s] non-being in the name of a more flourishing existence’, and that figure’s evil twin, the predatory creature ‘who battens on non-being as an ersatz form of life’ (Huggan 203).

As vampire and saint, “martyr” and “predator”, Daylight’s Martine explicitly figures these contradictory valences of the undead creature. As death infecting life and life infecting death, the Blessed Vampire literalises the abjection that underpins both saint and vampire as beyond the human.

As a transnational figure, the vampire has no specific location, and in Dead Europe is specifically deployed to figure the boundless consumption characteristic of late capitalism. The political charge of Dead Europe’s rendering of these tropisms of consumption, capitalism and the transnational figure of the vampire is made clear through critical readings of the relationship between vampirism and capitalism by Gelder and others. The connection between vampire and capitalism as accumulative and violent consumption has been iconically established by Karl Marx. In Capital the vampire is capital: “Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks” (in K. Gelder 20). Vampire scholars such as Gelder, Wall and Case speak of the internationalisation of the vampire; the contagious and predatory operation 172 of the undead creature as a metaphor for capitalism. Geoffry Wall draws attention to the intersection of vampire fiction and the (predominantly English) travelogue. Emphasising the function of the vampire as nationally excessive, Gelder argues that money, like the vampire is ‘mobile, nomadic, ‘polyphonic’, everywhere at home’ (16). Further, the “unassimilated”, “internationalised” and “cosmopolitan” vampire, exceeding national identity “threatens the very notion of identity” (Gelder, 23) functions as an excess akin to Kristeva’s concept of the foreigner in Strangers to Ourselves: like the foreigner, the vampire appears “in addition” “a doubling” and excessive “something has definitely been exceeded” (2).

Shifting from the Marxian metaphor of the consuming vampirism of capitalism to literal consumption of bodies, Dead Europe conjures the fetish of the commodity – object of consumption that hides its labour – into flesh, in McCann’s words a “nightmare of…dead labour and a parasitic capitalism” (27). In Dead Europe Isaac consumes across nations, as his hunger for sex - “I will enter a porn cinema and have sex with three men, a German, and Italian and a Korean: I wish to have my fill of bodies, to consume and devour” (302) - becomes a hunger for flesh. He understands “that the sexual encounter with the woman on the train had nothing to do with lust, and everything to do with nourishing myself on her blood and her spirit” (260).

In Dead Europe the nightmare of what McCann calls “parasitic capitalism” is at its most terrifying when bodies are divided into typologies of consumption; consumed and consumable. This macabre synecdoche is spectacularly deployed in Isaac’s encounter with the American, at the end of his first person narrative:

Meat, blood and flesh. I know then what man is. Meat. Flesh. Blood. He moans, low, desperate, ill. I sniff the air. It is the American behind me. I can smell all of him. Lubricant, sweat, semen, muscle, blood, amyl nitrate, shit, piss, spit, soap, leather, cotton, denim, metal, plastic, steel, wood, alcohol, marijuana, coke, pepsi, fries, wine, beer, petrol, chips, chocolate, gelatin, 173

dollars, euros, pounds, Omo, Oreos, Oil of Ulan, porn, television, cinema, gold, silver, cash, stocks, bonds, insurance, tanks, guns, rifles, Versace, Gucci, Prada. Piss, sweat, blood, shit. God. The American stinks of Him. Piss, sweat, blood, shit. It stinks of Him (381).

An olfactory catalogue of “the American”38 following the “meat, blood and flesh” of the Russian. The European “man” and American “God” opposed through oral and economic consumption are both incorporated by Isaac as he kills and eats them. In this catalogue we again see the bewilderment of a postmodernity “unavailable to itself” emerging, as Brown describes it, “not just as a nominal impasse but also as excessive assertion, as a kind of allegorical frenzy” in response to “the impossibility of conveying the essential attributes of a cultural logic that evacuates or eradicates essence” (736).

The figurative connection between queerness and vampirism that Sue Ellen Case and others have drawn attention to further specifies the function of the inhuman in Dead Europe. In her seminal essay “Tracking the Vampire” (1991), which precedes and prefigures Lee Edelman’s work on the death drive inherent in queer representation, Case explains that:

Queer sexual practice, then, impels one out of the generational production of what has been called 'life' and history, and ultimately out of the category of the living. The equation of hetero=sex=life and homo=sex=unlife generated a queer discourse that reveled in proscribed desiring by imagining sexual objects and sexual practices within the realm of the other-than-natural, and the consequence other-than-living. In this discourse, new forms of being, or beings, are imagined through desire. And desire is

38 In both Dead Europe and Daylight one national inflection of violent vampirism is American. In Dead Europe, Isaac hears the imperative to kill from the American “I order you to kill him…I command you. Destroy him, kill him, annihilate him. I command you. Slaughter him.” (381). In Daylight, Tom Hilxen, the volatile and “dangerous” vampire who “gave up daylight and kept his credit cards” (323), is repeatedly signified nationally as he is referred to throughout the novel as “the American”. Next to the eroticism and violence of the descriptions of the European vampires feeding, Tom’s ingestion of human blood seems like mundane, passionless consumption: [Daniel] watched the urbane American drink his blood. It was done with delicacy, with no great show of appetite. Mr Hilxen had the appearance of a therapist or craftsman. There was no naked interest or possessiveness in his posture. He was polite. He sipped. But he didn’t stop (281).

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that which wounds - a desire that breaks through the sheath of being as it has been imagined within a heterosexist society. Striking at its very core, queer desire punctures the life/death and generative/destructive bipolarities (Case 200-01).

Here Case identifies a shared figurative connection between the queer and the vampire where both reproduce themselves artificially. Through this unnatural generation, they bear the contagious symbolic threat of death. Indeed, as Talia Schaffer has shown, Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, the most iconic representation of the vampire figure, exhibits the figurative weight of this association. Schaffer argues the narrative of this novel is propelled by “Stoker's fear and anxiety as a closeted homosexual man during Oscar Wilde's trial” (Schaffer 381), and that it is from the suspension between secrecy and disclosure, discretion and revelation felt by Stoker in relation to his own homosexual desires and popularised by Wilde's trial and conviction, that Schaffer argues "Stoker invented the discourse that became Dracula” (385). For Schaffer:

Dracula represents the ghoulishly inflated version of Wilde produced by Wilde's prosecutors; the corrupting, evil, secretive, manipulative, magnetic devourer of innocent boys. Furthermore, Dracula also carries the weight of Stoker's identification with Wilde (398).

Thus, Stoker’s Dracula is both "an accusation and an elegy". Demonstrating similarities between the novel and Wilde’s trial, where themes, images and “even phrases” from the trial appear in Dracula “barely disguised” (405-406), Schaffer shows how Stoker’s novel directly corresponds to the trial. For example, Dracula might “create a new and ever widening circle of semi- demons to batten on the helpless”, while Wilde's judge called him “the centre of a hideous circle of corruption”(400).

The political function of this mobilisation of the association between the two inhuman figures of the vampire and the queer in Dead Europe becomes clear when read in light of queer literary theorist Lee Edelman’s theorisation 175 of the inhuman as an ethics of negativity (1994, 2004). Edelman extends Case’s reading of the death-bearing signification of homosexuality to argue that the rhetorical location of the inhuman is the space where queerness can pose the most radical ethical challenge to the socialising fantasy of futurity. Drawing on Jacques Lacan’s concept of the “[i]nsistent particularity of the subject, impossible to fully articulate and ‘tend[ing] toward the real’” (5), the “particular, irreducible character” of Wunsch (6)39, Edelman argues queerness, insofar as it inhabits the space beyond the human, figures the death drive of the social order insofar as that order demands the coherence of identity and is constituted by a logic and fantasy of futurity. The queer figure, emblematic of the queerness within figuration itself, mobilised in Edelman’s neologism of the “sinthomomsexual” bears the rhetorical weight of the death drive, that “inarticulable surplus that dismantles the subject from within…the negativity opposed to every form of social viability” (9), a negativity that presents the most radical and powerful challenge available to queerness. The sinthomosexual figures the undoing, defacing, or to borrow Edelman’s formulation in Homographesis, the de-scribing of the human by embodying “a jouissance from which everything ‘human’, to have one, must turn its face” (109). For Edelman, the inhuman is crucial to a queer ethics of negativity; he declares “[t]o embrace the impossibility, the inhumanity of the sinthomosexual: that, I suggest, is the ethical task for which queers are singled out” (109). In exposing the delimitations of the human, Edelman suggests that “[r]ather than expanding the reach of the human, as in Butler’s claim for Antigone, we might…insist on enlarging the inhuman instead” (152). Figuring the impossibility of the future, the inhuman as it is defined by Edelman, and mobilised in Dead Europe offers a space of possibility, for the ethics of inhabiting a space of “no future”.

39 Lacan’s concept of the “true Wunsch”, which Edelman points out has nothing to do with happiness, or even with “good”, betrays the paradoxical centrifugal motion of particularity – always circling out to a generality, when he emphasises it’s “most particular” status: The Wunsch does not have the character of a universal law but, on the contrary, of the most particular of laws – even if it is universal that this particularity is to be found in every human being (in Edelman, 6).

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This inhuman ethics of negativity that Dead Europe enacts through the disintegration of the subject becomes clear when it is examined through descriptions of oral incorporation in the novel. After ghosts begin to appear in Isaac’s photographs, conventional moves of out to in, world to self, other to self, are reversed: After a meal with friends, unable to stomach the food he has eaten, Isaac “vomited a spray of such volume that the basin was covered in streaks of black and red and purple slime. I retched again and again, into the basin, onto the floor” (295). Food might be taken into the body, the self, as a token of otherness, or piece of otherness. In Strangers to Ourselves, Kristeva explains that for the foreigner, the banquet, the shared meal offers a moment of cosmopolitanism: “A miracle of flesh and thought, the banquet of hospitality is the foreigner’s utopia—the cosmopolitanism of a moment, the brotherhood of guests who soothe and forget their differences, the banquet is outside of time” (11). Taking the meal as the possible cosmopolitan incorporation of otherness, Isaac cannot stomach the other, cannot ingest as nourishment, yet he hungers. The other he must eat is a more literal other: the other of flesh and blood, concrete difference that he must recognise and annihilate by feasting on, taking it into himself. In this sense, like the regurgitated meal, normative social interactions are reversed, thrown up, impossible. Just as food is expelled, when Isaac eventually eats, it becomes an incorporation of death. First through the consumption of drugs rather than food, nourished by unnatural artificial substance, then through the consumption of blood and flesh, which is eventually revealed to be dead flesh. The novel inverts the traditional vampirism as Isaac is nourished by the blood of the dead rather than the blood of the living.

Isaac’s incorporation of dead flesh, a ghastly synecdoche of Europe, can be seen as a cartographic impulse of sorts when read through geographer Yi Fu Tuan’s “Topophilia” of hell. The undead flesh and blood Isaac consumes comes from what can be read as a typology of European nations and races: Jewish, Slavic, Russian, Serbian, English. This typology is ingested as a topography, the parts of Europe collected and destroyed, consumed by Isaac 177 as by capitalism; a violent process that is productively read via Tuan’s account of hell in Escapism. Tuan’s meditation on otherness through “other” places, hell consists of a typology of cruelty, and violence, which Tuan groups together as means of “[e]xploding the other” (Tuan 124). For Tuan, hell is an excess or failure of connection displaced or disconnected (134); a point of crisis in relation to the “dissociative monstrosities” (137) of others. The hellish exploding of the other is also connected to any kind of consumption, where “storing up oneself at this basic level of necessity depends on the evisceration (the ‘explosion’) of the Other” (125). The topophilia of hell is not unlike the spatialisation of vampirism, which proliferates centrifugally through consumption. In Dead Europe it is not only hell and vampirism that figure systemic and individual violences visited upon otherness, but also ghosts, which when read via Derrida’s theorisation of the spectre, constitute crucial challenge to symbolic structures of late-capitalism.

For Derrida, the ghost is an other who is no longer there or to come, whose presence is a revolutionary ethical and political call to arms; “a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations” (Derrida xviii). Like the vampire, the ghost is a recurring figure in Marx’s formulation of modern social and economic structures; indeed as Derrida points out, Manifesto of the Communist Party opens with the words: “[a] spectre is haunting Europe—the Spectre of Communism” (2). The ghost is central to Spectres of Marx, Derrida’s 1993 exegesis on global capitalism and the political and philosophic legacy of Marxism. Like Dead Europe, Spectres of Marx explicitly addresses the failure of European communism. Derrida’s analysis of haunting, in the particular context of late twentieth century western politics, enables a reading of Dead Europe as not only mobilising the ghosts of politics, but enacting a politics of ghosts.

Tsiolkas’ novel is haunted across narrative, genre and time in precisely the way Derrida argues is the condition of revolutionary politics: he warns that the more a culture tries to conjure away the spectres of the other, of the past 178 and of future possibilities the more insistent their haunting becomes. Derrida tells us in Spectres of Marx that “anxiety in the face of the ghost is properly revolutionary” (Derrida 135). The ghosts of Dead Europe violently insist upon this anxiety. Halfway through the novel Isaac, looking at the photographs he had taken in Agrio Dassos, (the Dark Wood - his mother’s village), says “what I first noticed were the ghosts” (133). The violence of these apparitions is emphasised; in one photograph:

The boy’s face was haggard and lean, and even though he was simply an element in the background, his eyes shone brightly. I peered closely at the black ink of his eyes. Everything about him—his body, his face—was blurred and faint, except for that violence in his eyes (133).

The haunting of Dead Europe is virulent as well as violent, the spectres spiral out from Isaac’s images to shadow narrative, genre and time as the first person realism of Isaac’s travels in contemporary Europe is shadowed, or ghosted, by third person, gothic tale of his ancestors in the mountains of Greece during the second world war. In both narratives, the European landscape is haunted by the persistence of legacies of hate – racist, anti- Semitic, anti-Muslim – by the spectre of centuries of violence attempting to fend off, annihilate the terror of the other. Otherness, the other within the self, is what Derrida emphasises when he speaks of the ghosts of Europe:

In a word, the whole history of European politics at least, and at least since Marx, would be that of a ruthless war between solidary camps that are equally terrorised by the ghost, the ghost of the other, and its own ghost as the ghost of the other (Derrida 131)

For as Derrida shows us, the ghost is a figure of temporal otherness, a figure of what has come before, what is yet to come, and what is to return. As the presence of absence, as a temporal excess; the ghost is other to the present. In its devouring of the dead, and of ghosts, Dead Europe goes against positive fantasy of a consistent and knowable yet-to-come, stays in the space of the 179 ghost as revenant. The specific political challenge of Dead Europe is further specified when read in light of the undoing of subjectivity the novel enacts.

Abject dissent

So what does dissent mean for us? That’s my question. Because otherwise it’s just to drown in the mantras of capitalism, which are saying just as Candide did, this is the best of all possible worlds. There’s nothing to argue against. There’s nothing to protest against. There’s nothing to be outraged against. And I don’t think that’s true (Padmore "Interview with Christos Tsiolkas "What Does Fiction Do?": On Dead Europe: Ethics and Aesthetics" 457).

The abject disintegration of the subject that propels the novel to its apocalyptic climax is central to Dead Europe’s political challenge. Reading the disturbing presences that haunt Tsiolkas’ novel via Kristeva’s theorisation of abjection and Edelman’s work on the death drive shows that the apocalyptic impetus of Dead Europe and the novel’s compelling revelation of the impossible constitution of being is the site of the novel’s political charge. These theorists enable a reading of Dead Europe as an abject politics, where, in perversely inhabiting the “other side of politics”, Dead Europe violently opposes the logic of opposition – makes all recourse to the space of ‘two’ – self/other, life/death, inside/outside- impossible.

In terms of this perverse opposition, Dead Europe continues and extends certain thematics of The Jesus Man as Andrew McCann outlines them. McCann argues that The Jesus Man focuses the fury of the cost of late capitalism on the individual, masculine subject, so central to Loaded, through the constitutive abjection of that order as it is emblematised by pornography. McCann argues further that Dead Europe is a continuation of Tsiolkas’ interrogation of the effects of commodity capitalism on the subject rehearsed in The Jesus Man, particularly in the novel’s pornographic aesthetics, as pornography “reveals the egocentric subjectivity incited by consumer culture, and the abjection that lies in wait for it” (16). Demonstrating via iek that pornography functions as the “obscene underside” (1), or constitutive domain 180 of abjection in commodity capitalism, McCann contends that the “poetics of obscenity” rehearsed by The Jesus Man and Dead Europe are the locus of Tsiolkas’ most furious attack on the “empty dream of enjoyment” (17) of consumer culture. McCann argues not only for the similarity of the novels, but claims Dead Europe constitutes a rewriting of The Jesus Man:

Indeed one gets the sense that in Dead Europe Tsiolkas has had to rewrite The Jesus Man as a European travelogue in order to make the political stakes clearer, and perhaps more palatable, for an Australian readership more likely to assimilate images of a necrotic, decayed ‘old world’ than images of suburban abjection that are much closer to home (A. McCann "Christos Tsiolkas and the Pornographic Logic of Commodity Capitalism" 14).

Dead Europe maintains the fury of Loaded and the politics of abjection of The Jesus Man, but in its rupture of genre it rehearses a politics of dissent that is distinct from both novels and in keeping with the particularities of the historical moment during which it was written.

The unravelling of self is the novel’s particular response to the contemporary crisis of self and other that iek has argued constitutes the “limit of moral reasoning. Ambigiuity about borders in the register of politics and ideology has been addressed by iek, where the opposition of fault and innocence for both America and the Middle East takes us to this limit as:

[t]he only consequent solution is here to reject this very opposition and to adopt both positions simultaneously, which can only be done if one resorts to the dialectical category of totality: there is no choice between these two positions, each one is one- sided and false. Far from offering a case apropos of which one can adopt a clear ethical stance, we encounter here the limit of moral reasoning (iek 50).

Dead Europe is the product of historical moment at “the limit of moral reasoning”, and its opposition to both positions is consonant with the abject politics of Radiohead’s 2003 album Hail to the Thief, as they are outlined by literary critic Kate Livett. Cotemporaneous with Dead Europe, Radiohead’s 181 album rehearses a similar “commentary on subjectivity in the face of contemporary political events” (Livett). Livett argues via Kristeva and Arendt’s theorisation of the proximity of the fascist and abject subject that “contingent resolution” of East/West binaries is made possible “by entering into the fascist potential of the self, by wallowing in that horror”, because “[i]t is only the compromised subject who can suggest compromise itself”. Livett proposes that the compromised subjectivity produced within Hail to the Thief offers a way out of the cyclical exchanges between abject and fascist subjects. Livett aligns compromise with hell, where to enact such an ethics is to “walk into the gates of hell”. In inhabiting both the abject and fascist potentials of the self through a descent into hell, which, as Tuan has shown us is a hell of “exploding the other”, Dead Europe can be seen to offer the possibility of such a compromise.

The abject subjects and matter that permeate Dead Europe are perhaps best summarised by Les Rosenblatt’s now infamous description of the novel as “a Judeo-Christian devil’s jumping castle submerged in excrement, blood and foul vapours”(Rosenblatt 49). Most responses to this novel –(A. McCann, Jeff Sparrow and Christen Cornell,), (McQueen), (Padmore ""Blood and Land and Ghosts:" Haunting Words in Christos Tsiolkas' Dead Europe") and (Rosenblatt), for example, incorporate the word “disturbing”. It precisely such repulsive matter that disturbs, disperses and finally disintegrates the speaking self to offer a contingent resolution through the maternal in the centre of hell. On a train from Prague to Berlin, the protagonist Isaac says “this journey seems to be taking me further and further away from myself, from all my certainties, even from a sense of my own origins” (259). Isaac’s journey away from himself is realised through abject undoings of the body and violent consumption of others.

Isaac’s first person narrative in Dead Europe unfolds according to a trajectory of escalating abjection, a progressive breakdown that is apparent in an analysis of the first and last scenes of the novel. Isaac’s story, the book’s 182 first person narrative, begins and ends with a sexual encounter with a Russian prostitute in a hotel room. The uncanny repetition of this space and nationally inflected body serves as a very clear marker of the protagonist’s trajectory. The first of these scenes emphasises boundaries, rules and limits as Isaac indicates to the youth the limits of their encounter: “I mimed to him that we would not need any condoms as I had no intention of fucking, or being fucked”(26). The second rehearses, through the murder and consumption of the Russian, a total disintegration of bodies, subjectivity and narrative. In this final, harrowing scene, Isaac not only penetrates the Russian, but violently kills and eats him: “my teeth sink into its face and the eyes disappear forever. I pull away skin and muscle and bone and the blood gushes”(382). It is at this point that consciousness falls away, the “I” disappears forever, the first person narrative concludes in the ripping apart and consumption of others.

The ferocious, apocalyptic trajectory of Dead Europe is further elucidated through an analysis of the rhetorical operations of queerness in the novel. Dead Europe’s narrative of escalating abjection and death drive disintegration resonates with Edelman’s argument for occupying the side “outside all political sides”(Edelman 7). Queerness is a rhetorical figure that, as Edelman puts it “can never define an identity, only disturb one”(17). Asserting that the most potent challenge queerness can pose is by embodying this disturbance, Edelman calls for representations of queerness to harness “our ability to insist intransitively. To insist that the future stop here”(31). This call is answered by Dead Europe as the text grotesquely materialises this “other side” of politics. Ending with the disarticulation of the first person narrative, Dead Europe can be seen to eviscerate coherent identity positions.

The disturbance of coherent positions and inhabitation of the “side outside all political sides” is most explicit in Dead Europe when Isaac recounts a conversation about religion, war and politics to his boyfriend in Melbourne:

“--Religion’s fucked. 183

--And capitalism? --Fucked. --Communism. --Fucked. --Australia? --Very fucked. --Europe? --Doubly Fucked. --America? --Arse-bleedingly fucked” (349).

This furious negativity and repetitive recalcitrance echoes Edelman’s untenable call to “fuck laws with both capital ls and with small, fuck the whole network of the symbolic order and the future that serves as its prop”(29)40. Tsiolkas’ position, like Edelman’s, is a realisation of impossibility. In the conversation Isaac recounts, this realisation concerns the impossibility of political identities – capitalist, communist, continental, national, religious. A litany of identity categories, positions that are disturbed, or “fucked”, rendered unstable and impossible. Rather than being a depoliticisation, Dead Europe’s evisceration of coherent subject positions speaks the politics of destroying the self. Edelman calls the undoing operation of queerness “politically self-destructive” but suggests, via Lacan’s reading of Antigone that “perhaps…political self-destruction inheres in the only act that counts as one: the act of resisting enslavement to the future in the name of having a life” (30).

Judith Butler’s reading of the figure of Antigone further specifies the politics of self-sacrifice in Dead Europe. Deploying the story of Antigone’s dissent to argue for the politics of self-sacrifice and the limits of the human,

40 Edelman’s argument about “the fascism of the baby’s face”, the representational function of The Child as a fetish of the future is articulated perfectly by Loaded protagonist Ari: They’ll tell you god is dead but, man, they still want you to have a purpose. They’ll point to a child and say there it is, that’s purpose, that’s meaning. That’s bullshit. A child is a mass of cells and tissues and muscle that will grow up and will become Jack the Ripper or the president of the world. More likely it will grow up and become a dole statistic. Worse, it will grow up and become an accountant. A child isn’t purpose, a child isn’t meaning (149).

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Butler foregrounds the “shadowy realm” of less than human populations. Insisting that we live “increasingly in a time” of proliferation of these underworlds in which populations without full citizenship exist within states, Butler asks:

How are we to understand this realm, what Hannah Arendt described as the ‘shadowy realm,’ which haunts the public sphere, which is precluded from the public constitution of the human, but which is human in an apparently catachrestic sense of that term? (Butler 81)

Calling up Antigone as a figure of “rushing by oneself to one’s own destruction” (46), Butler offers an act of self destruction an act of dissent that threatens the borders of the human:

If she is human, then the human has entered into catachresis: we no longer know its proper usage. […]Antigone is the occasion for a new field of the human, achieved through political catachresis, the one that happens when the less than human speaks as human…(82).

This catachresis of the human, realised through the escalating disintegration of Isaac’s first person narrative, is central to the self-destructive dissent rehearsed in Dead Europe.

Through the disintegration of the speaking subject, Dead Europe resists enslavement to futurity according to the terms Edleman argues is the most powerful challenge to the structural fantasies of late-capitalism. On the train to Berlin, when Isaac realises his journey is taking him further way from himself, he experiences “an impossible hunger. I say impossible because nothing could satisfy it” (255). It is at this point he notices that the smell of blood has “a course corporeal solidity to it”, a scent with the texture of velvet (255). Journeying away from self is achieved via vampiric communion with the corporeal solidity of blood – the velvety matter between life and death, self and other that disintegrates individual, national and ideological forms of 185 subjectivity. In this impossible undoing, the hellish matter and dark substances of Tsiolkas’ novel constitute improper and hopeless dissent.

Read alongside Pasolini’s controversial film Salo41, it becomes clear that the implication of the reader in the novel’s violence and rage is crucial to the dissent Dead Europe enacts. Speaking about Pasolini’s influence on the novel, Tsiolkas says: “the political challenge thrown down by that man began to inform the way I wanted to work on Dead Europe” (in Padmore, 448). With its relentless positioning of the viewer as voyeur, indeed its most horrific scene is framed by binoculars, what is most confronting about Pasolini’s final film Salo is the extent to which the viewer is implicated in the violence and pornography. A comment by Rodney Welch, in response Ben Simington’s essay, “The Fearful Symmetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ‘Salo’”, argues the compromising experience of viewing the film is precisely the location of Salo’s anti-fascist protest:

I kept feeling he was punishing me as a viewer. In my own head, I found myself asking him why he was subjecting me to this, why he was going out of his way to make me ill, not with one scene or two but with many, over and over and over.

He (again in my imagination) seemed to be answering back: “I don’t know — why are you watching? Was I supposed to entertain you? Are Nazis supposed to be entertaining? Is that what you want from a film: Nazis which are safely up there on the screen and don’t penetrate your safe little world? Well, fuck you.”42

As in this account of Salo, the reader of Dead Europe is compromised, becomes the subject of abjection according to the terms by which Arendt and Kristeva argue such abjection forfeits the self/other opposition required by fascism. With much of its actual and rhetorical violence contained within the first person voice, Dead Europe, like Salo, allows the reader no distance from its

41 Salo is currently banned in Australia. 42 Rodney Welch on Fri 05 Dec at 07:26 PM, response to Ben Simington, “The Fearful Symmetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ‘Salo’” http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/347

186 violences. It is this compulsory identification with the increasingly hateful, vampiric and violent Isaac that is the basis of many readings of Dead Europe as anti-Semitic. Padmore emphasises complicity as “Tsiolkas’ work transforms the reader into the racist self” (442), adding that this tactic “might well perpetuate or glorify” anti-Semitism. Similarly, Sparrow argues that the novel is “deeply disturbing” because “it implicates the reader” in “the most poisonous anti-Jewish slanders of the twentieth century” (28). But attention to the politics of abjection in the novel locates the transformation of the reader into “the racist self” as well as the violent self, the vampiric self, and the murderous self as the political charge of the novel as the reader too, becomes the subject of abjection.

Part of this politics of abjection, the affect of shame is a potentially redemptive side of the abject, or compromised subject. Shame has a direct relation to abjection when read in light of Silvan Tomkins’ concept of affect. Formulating shame as the most ambivalent, most abject affect, Tomkins tells us that looking, and being looked at is a process of incorporation, of taking the other inside the self. Linking the eyes and the face to the mouth and stomach via the breakdown of speech, Tomkins explains that shame “stands in the same relation to looking and smiling as silence stands to speech and as disgust, nausea, and vomiting stand to eating” (Tomkins 134). Following Tomkins, Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank point out that shame operates through a reversal of internal and external, explaining how “as precarious hyperreflexivity of the surface of the body, shame can turn one inside out, or outside in” (Sedgwick and Frank 22). In the exchanges and of inside and outside, shame is a breakdown of self through the real or imagined gaze of the other. Halfway through the novel, watching a sex show in Prague, Isaac says:

You are in Hell….You are in Hell, the voice repeated, and I was sure that it spoke Greek. My belly was on fire, as if a ghostly iron fist was at work, slowly, methodically grinding my intestines and belly to dust (Tsiolkas Dead Europe 223). […] 187

I did not know where my shame was coming from…If I could not be sure if I was ashamed of being a man, or of being a man who was a fag, or of both, or of being a white man in an Eastern city, or all of it, I knew enough to know that I was ashamed of being human. You are in Hell. This time I whispered the words to myself (226).

In shame the self is split: having incorporated the gaze of the other, subject has become object and Isaac addresses himself in the second person “ you are in hell”. The visual and oral incorporations that characterise shame and vampiric abjection respectively are already connected to hell, frozen into Cocytus by Dante.

The face of shame and the incorporation of the other both have their place: “Inferno”. In Dante’s hell, shame is written on the faces of those assigned to Cocytus, the frozen innermost circle of the inferno, where “shades, ashen with cold, were grieving, trapped/ in ice up to the place the hue of shame appears,/ their teeth a-chatter like the bills of storks” (Inferno XXXII:33-36).

The coalescence of shame and abjection in Dead Europe is made further legible when read in light of Jean Genet’s queer underworld cartography of Europe in The Thief’s Journal (1949). Similarly characterised by experiences of shame and abjection, Genet’s writing not only influenced Dead Europe but also sheds further light on the novel’s abject aesthetics. Similar to Isaac’s vampirism, Genet’s narrator connects the biting of flesh with boundaries of self and fallen status when he describes how:

I bit Lucien until blood flowed. I was hoping to make him scream; his insensitivity conquered me. But I know that I would go so far as to rip my friend’s flesh and lose myself in an irreparable carnage wherein I would preserve my reason and know the exaltation of the fall (145).

Such an “irreparable carnage” of violence, violent sexuality and the accompanying “exaltation of the fall” colours Genet’s underworld cartography of Europe, which, like Dead Europe, unfolds as it transgresses 188 legal, national and corporeal boundaries. According to structural inversions of The Thief’s Journal, abjection and shame are considered the most desirable state, as “[t]he outcast invents his guilt, then inverts it”(in Hassan 181). The Thief’s Journal describes the mourning of a “most beloved pissoir” by “the daughters of shame”:

Those whom one of their number called the Carolinas paraded to the site of a demolished street urinal. During the 1933 riots, the insurgents tore out one of the dirtiest, but most beloved pissoirs. It was near the harbour and the barracks, and its sheet iron had been corroded by the hot urine of thousands of soldiers. When its ultimate death was certified, the Carolinas-not all, but a formally chosen delegation-in shawls, mantillas, silk dresses and fitted jackets, went to the site to place a bunch of red roses tied together with a crepe veil. The procession started from the parallelo, crossed the Calle Sao Paolo and went down the Ramblas de Las Flores until it reached the statue of Columbus. The faggots were perhaps thirty in number, at eight A.M., at sunrise. I saw them going by. I accompanied them from a distance. I knew that place was in their midst, not because I was one of them, but because their shrill voices, their cries, their extravagant gestures seemed to me to have no other aim than to try and pierce the surface of the world’s contempt. The Carolinas were great. They were the daughters of shame (Genet 65).

Through the abject space of the “dirtiest…pissoirs” and the abject subjects of the Carolinas, or faggots, the “daughters of shame”, shame and abjection unite in a spectacle to “try to pierce the surface of the world’s contempt”. In its unrelenting immersions in abject matter and insistence on Isaac’s shame, Dead Europe too marches with these Carolinas. The novel further accords with Genet’s metaphorics and politics, aligning with incitement to inhabit horror as,“[t]he only way to avoid the horror of horror is to give in to it” (in Hassan 181). Dead Europe gives in to horror, and in its apocalyptic trajectory annihilates all reasons for living, in consonance with Genet’s generative undoing of conventional co-ordinates of being. This undoing is where Genet locates courage, which “consist[s] of destroying all the usual reasons for living and discovering others” (in Hassan 181). As Hassan puts it, “Genet sings to destroy reason, history, and society… He sings to undermine all the 189 assumptions of being.” (208) In its destruction of self, world, and the future, Dead Europe too undermines, or perhaps more appropriately, explodes and eviscerates the assumptions of being.

Faustian bargains

Following the conclusion of his first person narrative, protagonist Isaac reappears within the novel’s final third person narration, critically ill. His life is saved by his mother, Reveka, who offers her soul in exchange for her son’s life: “If you save my son, Lord, the Devil can have my soul” (409). Following this bargain, Isaac’s “sickness did pass. Its passing was swift”, and he “returned to the world but as he did they all noticed that his appearance had changed forever. He was no longer a young man” (410). Returned to Australia, thrown into time as the fallen man made mortal, Isaac is permitted to live. As subject status requires the separation of self from the presubjective union with the mother, a state of abjection can only be resolved through the maternal. Tsiolkas himself declares that Dead Europe’s denouement could only occur through the mother: “Reveka was for me where it had to come from, and it had to be a sacrifice, because I think the history that I’m dealing with requires a sacrifice” (in Padmore, 455). Having exchanged her soul for Isaac’s life, Reveka realises she is condemned to a Hell on earth. She thinks: “This earth, this earth that smelt of sparse rain and parched ground, this earth and this boundless sky, was Hell” (Dead Europe 411). Resigned to an eternity alone, she meets Angelo, the ghost of the Hebrew child that has haunted the novel. He wraps himself around her, comforting her. The last lines of the novel are: “Not alone, but together. You and I, together, for all of time, for all of eternity” (411). This over determinedly abject conclusion constitutes an act of walking into hell, where contingent resolution is permitted – for the masculine subject, anyway – through a bargain with the devil.

A similar Faustian bargain is rehearsed in Daylight. The Blessed Martine Raimondi’s miracle was leading a group of villages trapped in a cave to the 190

Italian side of the border. The end of the novel reveals that she in turn was led by the vampire Ilas, with her infection (in her mind) part of a deal made with this creature.

Ila asked Martine ‘Do you think I’m a demon you raised, that you’re damned already, so you might as well use me?’ ‘Yes!’ Martine was fierce (316).

If the path back to origins is foreclosed, like Dante in the wood, or Edelman’s impossible place of dissent, perhaps one must, like Isaac, Reveka, Martine and Dante, walk into hell. An equation of hell and otherness is offered by Tsiolkas in an epigraph in his previous novel, The Jesus Man. A quote from Franz Kafka, this epigraph reads:

When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours? And if I were to cast myself down before you and weep and tell you, what more would you know about me than you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful? For that reason alone we human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly as we would before the entrance to Hell (The Jesus Man 37).

That love and hell, love and sacrifice are not so separate is also apparent when Colin, Isaac’s boyfriend, says to him: “I’ll tell you this my love, if there is the one god I still choose you. I choose Lilith and the demons, I choose Lucifer who too knew love. I choose to be with you. I choose hell” (Dead Europe 390).

For Reveka, Colin and Martine to choose hell, to know hell is also to choose and know love. Similarly, the capacity to feel shame is also the capacity to feel empathy – Tomkins says that “having experienced shame through sudden empathy, the individual will never again be able to be entirely unconcerned with the other”. By inhabiting hell and shame, by remaining in these abject spaces, Dead Europe apprehends the relation to otherness in all its complexities, paradoxes and fragilities. And it is through remaining 191 ambivalent in narrative, generic, temporal and national terms that Dead Europe casts a necessary shadow, is an urgent disturbance of and a menacing spectre within a contemporary political landscape that is haunted by the terror of the other. As Kristeva says of otherness “to worry or to smile, such is the choice when we are assailed by the strange; our decision depends on how familiar we are with our own ghosts” (Strangers to Ourselves 191). Dead Europe walks into hell in order to become viscerally familiar with the ghosts of the psyche, of nations and of history.

With its devil in place of god, and monster in place of saint, Daylight, too, permits contingent resolution for the Antipodean subject through the underworld. Like Inferno, it is with emergence from hell at the earth’s antipodes where both novels conclude. It is from this locatedness that further differentiation is enabled and it is at this point in contemporary Australian and New Zealand fiction that we see a new metaphorics of verticality that moves away from earlier colonial models. This new verticality, grounded in elemental materiality and emphasising the emergence of regions from nations is taken up in detail in my next chapter, which analyses these emergences in Knox’s Dreamhunter duet (2005-2007) and Australian writer Alexis Wright’s 2007 novel Carpentaria.

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Chapter Four: Opening the Gates of Hell

“The clocks, tick–a-ty tock, looked as though they might run out of time. Luckily, the ghosts in the memories of the old folk were listening, and said anyone could find hope in the stories: the big stories and the little ones in between, so…” (Carpentaria 12).

This chapter presents a comparative analysis of two contemporary writers from Australia and New Zealand to argue for their shared secession from the category of nation. The texts in question, Australian writer Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006) and New Zealand writer Elizabeth Knox’s cotemporaneous duet Dreamhunter (2005) and Dreamquake (2007), rehearse this secession by replacing the now evacuated space of nation with the space of region. These regional emergences from nation operate upon a vertical access in very particular ways. They do not expand horizontally to the domain of the global, but arise from the materiality of place. This chapter demonstrates how Carpentaria and Dreamhunter both deploy and refigure the materiality and verticality of the antipodean imaginary. I argue this new vertical metaphorics of the antipodes, anchored in regional particularity, constitutes an emergence from colonial topographies of inhabitation.

Carpentaria and Dreamhunter differ in terms of genre, as well as in terms of the significantly distinct cultural locations of their authors. Wright is one of Australia’s most critically acclaimed Indigenous novelists, and Knox one of New Zealand’s most celebrated contemporary Pakeha novelists. In generic terms, the epic Carpentaria is grounded in the oral tradition of Indigenous storytelling, while the Dreamhunter series is located in the young adult fantasy genre. Lydia Wevers points out that although Dreamhunter’s readership includes young adults, the novel “has also had a broad adult appeal” (Wevers “Fold in the Map: Figuring Modernity in Gail Jones’ Dreams of Speaking and Elizabeth Knox’s Dreamhunter” 188). What the comparative analysis undertaken in this chapter demonstrates is the productivity of reading across these cultural, national and generic distinctions. A precedent for reading 193

Dreamhunter against and alongside Australian literary fiction has been established by Wevers, who in her 2007 Australian Literary Studies essay, “Fold in the Map: Figuring Modernity in Gail Jones’ Dreams of Speaking and Elizabeth Knox’s Dreamhunter” compares Knox’s Dreamhunter to Gail Jones’ 2006 novel, Dreams of Speaking. Reading Carpentaria alongside Dreamhunter shows how these critically acclaimed and multiple award-winning 43 novels both respond to and remake the katabatic colonial traditions of the antipodes.

As with the previous chapter, this chapter focuses on a moment in postmodernity. Only a couple of years after Dead Europe and Daylight we find ourselves at a very different moment, which as these novels enact, is something of an emergence from the ground zero of bewilderment analysed by the previous chapter. It is fitting then that the novels privilege ascending over descending movements as they both constitute emergences from hopelessness. Indeed, the location of hope is a key trajectory of both novels. While Chapter Two focused on the move from North to South, with its focus on antipodean novels located in Europe, and Chapter Three reversed this move, the novels this chapter focuses on do not make these hemispheric shifts, but demonstrate a new verticality anchored in specificities of place.

As this chapter will show, this metaphorics of verticality is the most significant in a range of imaginative strategies shared by these texts, which are also significantly different in genre, tone and cultural specificity. In narrative terms, the plots of the two novels centre around destroying the man-made hells of industrial modernity. Carpentaria figures the town of Desperance, an allegory of Australia, according to literary conventions of hell, particularly as a place of despair. Indeed, the text itself claims this allegorical

43 In 2007, Carpentaria won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, ALS Gold Medal, the Fiction Book Award in the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards and the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction. Dreamhunter won the Esther Glen Medal and an American Library Association (ALA) Best Book for Young Adults 2007, and Dreamquake won a Michael L Printz Award in 2008 and an ALA Best book award in the same year.

194 space of nation is hell, as the Pricklebush people tell travelers, “you is in hell” (60). Dreamhunter’s narrative is propelled by an attempt to escape from the totalitarian nightmare future of the industrial state, in which “the whole country’s a prison” (Dreamquake 97) of “terror and despair” (106). This chapter will show how the overturning of these hells in both novels is achieved by harnessing the elemental materiality of their respective regional locations. Through this analysis of Carpentaria and Dreamhunter, I demonstrate the particular formations of and variations on the key operations of verticality, liminality, perversity and materiality in the antipodean imaginary at this historical moment.

Carpentaria and the Dreamhunter series deploy matter itself as the fabric of their political and aesthetic challenges to national modernity. The materiality these novels emphasise is both intensely imaginative and avowedly historical. Here we see a combination of the imaginative tradition of the antipodes as a material domain I outlined in Chapter One and the specific, material reality of Australia and New Zealand. As a substance able to differentiate itself from the limits and boundaries of form, matter is the transformative element that enables departures from spatial, temporal and generic forms in these novels. In analysing the “individualising power of matter”, or the way matter tends towards particularity (Bachelard Water and Dreams- an Essay on the Imagination of Matter 2) Gaston Bachelard enables us to read the presence of materiality in literature as a formal challenge. Asking, “[w]hy does everyone always associate the notion of the individual with form?” Bachelard argues to the contrary, emphasising that “matter is the very principle that can dissociate itself from forms” (2). Carpentaria and Dreamhunter dissociate themselves from the form of nation through the matter particular to region, or the particular matter of region. In Carpentaria this dissociating material imagination takes elemental, alchemical and archipelagic forms. In Dreamhunter, mineral consciousness, generational memory and alchemical differentiation constitute the substance of the novel’s material challenges. As fictional spaces overlaying real places, doubling with a world of dreams and an underworld 195 of nightmares of colonial violence, these novels also move beyond the form of realism. I argue in this chapter that in dispersing the forms of nation and genre though the matter of particular places, these contemporary antipodean novels deploy a politics of fantasy to reimagine the futures of nation.

In this move away from nation towards the material specificities of region, these contemporary antipodean novels enable a transnational reading from the vantage point of region to region. The insistence of these novels on the particular matter of place then, can be understood as a reimagining of nation towards region in an historical moment characterised by a trajectory towards the expansive (as global) and immaterial (as virtual). I argue that this emphasis on the material specificities of particular places locates the particular matter of place as a locus of possibility for an ethics of inhabitation, formation of nation aligned with justice and a site of political charge.

Both novels are characterised by geographic, literal and metaphoric verticalities anchored in regional specificity. This verticality privileges ascent over descent and encompasses moves from South to North, from earth to air, from burial to resurrection and from hell to hope. In their emphasis of ascent rather than descent, Carpentaria and Dreamhunter can be described as anabasis narratives. Understood in relation to katabasis, anabasis refers to the ascent or emergence that conventionally concludes a katabatic narrative. As a return from the centre of hell, anabasis conventionally signifies an emergence from a place of despair into one of hope. This chapter demonstrates how Carpentaria and Dreamhunter privilege such ascensions on multiple registers. The narratives ascend figuratively through the emergence of regions from nations, through geographic inversions of North and South, through the disinterment and resurrection of bodies from the ground, and in Dreamhunter, through the raising up of the ground itself. I argue that these vertical metaphorics unmake and overturn hell, marking a departure from the vertical tropology that more commonly circumscribes antipodean spaces and identities according to katabasis, or descents. Thus the regional ascensions of the novels discussed 196 here signal the emergence of a new verticality. This new vertical metaphorics is not a return of hierarchical structures, rather an emergence of generative materiality from specific regions.

In this way, the novels may signal a significant moment in contemporary negotiations of locality and identity, for the ascension into hope they enact is grounded in the materiality of particular places. The hope offered then, is not so much figured as delayed or futural, as is conventional, nor is it abstracted. It is, rather, anchored in, and made possible by the elemental matter of particular places, by dirt and air, earth and breath. The very material presence of hope in these novels initiates a shift away from the linear, historical temporality of nation: in Carpentaria, hope emerges in accordance with an ancient, cyclical temporality; in Dreamhunter, through the plot device of time travel.

The methodology and direction of this reading is informed by the texts’ own spatialities, comparing them as two verticalities rather than placing them in a horizontal relation. Here I attempt to follow Bachelard’s phenomenological approach to the poetic imagination in order to set up a critical model that proceeds from the specificities of its subject.

First I demonstrate how both texts move away from nation through a focus on the materiality of region. In Carpentaria this materiality emerges to undo and refigure forms of national modernity through elemental, alchemical, and archipelagic manifestations. The enraged animation of earth, wind, water and fire of the Gulf country challenges national and international attempts to control the region and its people. Such elemental energies of region work to transform the waste of national modernity into islands in a literal shift from continent-nation of Australia. Dreamhunter warns against the potentially epidemic contentment that resides within dreams of nation. Just as Carpentaria conjures the elemental energies of region to resist coercive national and international forces, Dreamhunter raises the ground itself to oppose national 197 contentment and government corruption. In both novels, this emphasis on the materiality of place works to undo the space and time of the nation. In its sacred and magic inflections, this generative and destructive matter also works to undo genre, which, as a politics of fantasy, I argue presents a further challenge to nation.

I then analyse repetition in both novels as part of the cyclical exchanges of creation and destruction. Reading via Gilles Delueze’s theorisation of repetition as futurity, I argue these repetitions - in Carpentaria the serpent, and in Dreamhunter the golem – oppose the linear, historical time of nation and progress through an insistence on heterogeneous temporalities. In this sense, the novels remain grounded in, and offer a new version of the contradictory temporality of the antipodes.

As in the previous chapters, these examples of the antipodean imaginary are predicated on a complex intersection of and exchanges between notionality and reality. Reading Carpentaria alongside Libby Robin’s work on Australia’s unique ecologies, I argue for some of the real implications of the material imaginary deployed by the novel. I then analyse Carpentaria and Dreamhunter as anabasis novels, locating them within the tradition of antipodean katabasis narratives mapped by my previous chapters. Here I overlay the narratological understanding of vertical dynamics outlined by Falconer, but also explicated by literary critics David Pike and Northrop Frye, with Gaston Bachelard’s phenomological account of the “ascensional imagination” to show how the regional verticalities of Carpentaria and Dreamhunter signal a new direction within this antipodean convention.

Finally I show how this new verticality in the antipodean imaginary constitutes the emergence of hope. Grounded in the material and the present, anchored in the space and time of place itself, part of this hope is the challenge it poses to the linear, historical time of nation and progress. I argue that a crucial part of this temporal opposition is enabled by the novels’ focus 198 on the inhuman. Here I draw on Lyotard’s double concept of the inhuman, where the particular inhumanity of singularity opposes the systemic inhumanity of “development” on the register of temporality. This articulation of the inhuman is in accordance with the antipodean imaginary, which, as I have argued, takes us to the threshold of the human.

In comparing the vertical dynamics of these contemporary novels, this chapter ultimately suggests that the ascension of regional particularity above the horizon of the national and global offers possibilities of inhabitation away from the horizontal colonial imaginary of centres and peripheries.

Poetics of Space in Carpentaria and Dreamhunter

Cyclonic, mythic and epic, both novels are charged with a tremendous elemental force and are characterised by fantastic elements of ancient and modern magic. These fantastic elements are of course culturally specific; the award-winning Carpentaria is a massive presence in Australian indigenous literature. The Dreamhunter novels are award-winning Pakeha New Zealand literature. Both Carpentaria and the Dreamhunter duet mobilise elemental energy to contest oppressive forms of nation. In Carpentaria the dynamic, furious, disobedient, alchemical and archipelagic material elements of the gulf country are harnessed to challenge juridical, discursive and economic claims to the region made by both the nation and international corporations. In Dreamhunter, alchemical transformations of the matter of place in and as “The Place” and the invocation of a mineral consciousness carve out a space outside the temporality and gaze of nation in order to resist the injustices of national regulatory institutions. Both novels undo the spatial and temporal forms of nation, a challenge doubled as an undoing of genre.

Carpentaria and the Dreamhunter duet clearly depart from the space of nation by moving away from it nominally and geographically. All three novels unfold within imaginary places that are not quite their geographic 199 equivalent. In Carpentaria, most of the action is located in Desperance, a fictional port town bypassed by the ocean. Dreamhunter and Dreamquake take place in Coal Bay in the fictional nation of Southland, which as Lydia Wevers has pointed out is “[a] place which both is and is not Golden Bay”(Wevers "Fold in the Map: Figuring Modernity in Gail Jone's Dreams of Speaking and Elizabeth Knox's Dreamhunter" 188) in New Zealand. While Southland erases the nominal space of New Zealand, the geographic formations and particularities remain. Decorating the prefacing maps of Dreamhunter and Dreamquake are images of New Zealand’s famous flightless bird, the kiwi, metonymically and emblematically figuring national particularity. Similarly, while the nominal space of Australia remains in Carpentaria, Wright’s novel disperses a model of national continence in its coastline movements between and among islands.

Where space is “not-quite”, temporality in Carpentaria and Dreamhunter is characterised respectively by an overlay of cyclical and generational time and discontinuity. Generational memory in particular is deployed to underwrite the historical time of nation. John Frow, via Pierre Nora’s work on history and memory, explicates the distinction between generational memory and historical time in terms of the “discontinuity or lack of fit between the historical time of the generation and the historical time of the nation” (Frow "In the Penal Colony"). Performing a continuous rejection of the historical time of the nation, Carpentaria is narrated according to the cyclical, eternal time, of “the ancestral serpent”. The first chapter “From time immemorial” opens with the creative serpent’s descent “those billions of years ago”, “long before man was a creature who could contemplate the next moment in time” (Carpentaria 1). While Carpentaria stages an ancient and cyclic temporality, Dreamhunter operates according to a deliberate manipulation and disruption of futurity and sequence. In Knox’s duet past and present and cause and effect are unraveled as the future manifests itself in the dreams of the Place. In both Carpentaria and Dreamhunter, generational memory is the key to resisting violent actions of nation. Carpentaria’s Joseph Midnight sings directions to 200 activist hero Will Phantom “unraveling a map to a Dreaming place he had never seen” (375) so that Will might avoid his murderous pursuers. For Dreamhunter’s protagonist Laura Hame, it is a magical hymn called The Measures, passed down along the Hame line that conjures a servant able to stand against the future planned by corrupt and violent authorities. The co- ordinates mapped by the novels’ spatiality of “not-quiteness” and temporality of overlay and discontinuity refuses nation but also provides the ground on which the texts move beyond realism.

Ironically, this departure from realism is precisely where Carpentaria and Dreamhunter cast into relief the political stakes of secession from nation. As I outlined in the previous chapter, the political implications of this move away from realism towards fantasy have been identified by Falconer as a mode of departing from realism’s complicity with capitalist modernity. Falconer locates fantasy’s challenge to the excesses and injustices of capitalist modernity (to which the form of nation is central) in terms of its proximity to capitalist modes of representation; as the genre “most sympathetic to capitalism’s entire ‘illusory apparatus’” (Falconer 182-83). This mobilisation of fantasy as a challenge to the symbolic structures of late-capitalism is distinct from the deployment of fantasy in Dead Europe and Daylight. While these novels incorporated supernatural presences into realism as avatars of despair and hopelessness, the fantastic elements of Carpentaria and Dreamhunter are crucial to the emergence of hope in both novels.

The specific deployment of a politics of fantasy in Carpentaria is explicated by Carol Ferrier. Ferrier emphasises the significance of Wright’s break with realism, where Indigenous women’s writing has come to be attended by the expectation of certain truth effects. Contextualising the innovativeness of Carpentaria and Vivienne Cleven’s 2002 novel, Her Sister’s Eye within Indigenous women’s writing in the later half of the twentieth century, Ferrier argues that the partial move away from realism of these texts “marks something of a departure from Aboriginal women’s writing” (Ferrier 47). The 201 conscious shift towards a different kind of story is apparent in the opening lines of Carpentaria. Beginning as “a nation chants, but we know your story already”(Carpentaria 1), Carpentaria dramatises from the first instant its contestation of what the nation knows. The novel then unfolds as a challenge to, and refusal of the knowledge of the nation, as a story, or more appropriately stories, outside what this nation knows of the region and its people. The politics of the novel’s shift away from realism (as the story the nation knows already) and the time of the nation have also been explicated by Wright herself. In her essay “On Writing Carpentaria” she talks about her move away from history –the story the nation knows, or expects to be told- as an escape from “the colonising spider’s trapdoor”(A. Wright "On Writing Carpentaria" 90). Ferrier focused on this quote from Wright, I repeat it here because of its emphasis on specific difference as a departure from nation. Wright says:

I did not want to write a historical novel even if Australia appears to be the land of disappearing memory . . . I have had to deal with history all of my life and I have seen so much happen in the contemporary indigenous world because of history, that all I wanted was to extract my total being from the colonising spider’s trap door. So, instead of picking my heart apart with all of the things crammed into my mind about a history which drags every Aboriginal person into the conquering grips of colonisation, I wanted to stare at difference right now, as it is happening, because I felt the urgency of its rule ticking in the heartbeat of the Gulf. The beat was alive. It was not a relic (Wright, “On Writing Carpentaria” 90).

Here it is a focus on difference, the particular difference of place ‘in the gulf’; in its heartbeat, that counters history as the story “the nation knows” already. Ferrier also emphasises the presence of the regional and the elemental in Wright’s assertion of difference; she discusses this specifically in relation to the particular differences of the North – its:

difference in terms of its different composition of capital, its different population distribution and its different patterns of exploitation of labour…the difference as well perhaps lies in the ability to feel the presence of the natural world evoked so 202

persuasively (50).

As Ferrier points out here, regional materiality or “the presence of the natural world” is a crucial articulation of difference within nation in Carpentaria.

Frances Devlin-Glass further specifies this relation between Carpentaria’s generic innovation and regional materiality through her reading of “place specific” knowledge in the novel. Devlin-Glass argues that Wright’s incorporation of Indigenous knowledge, and in particular the Indigenous sacred, functions to create “a new form of magic realism” (Devlin-Glass 392). Further, Devlin-Glass demonstrates how the Indigenous sacred presented in Carpentaria, and in particular the novel’s oscillations between “vital” and “supervital” phenomena, constitutes a “place-specific ‘logic of classification’” that “refuse[s] hierarchical distinction between human beings and the natural world” (396). Wright herself emphasises that this “presence of the natural world”, the particular difference of the North is not only central to the novel, but originary. Recounting a conversation she had with a friend on the banks of the Gregory River in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Wright offers her response to her friend’s comment that “the white man had destroyed our country” and the spectacle of introduced weeds choking the indigenous trees:

What he said was true, but what I saw was the mighty flow of an ancestral river rushing through the weeds, which were only weeds fruitlessly reaching down into the purity of this flowing water. […] The river was flowing with so much force I felt it would never stop, and it would keep on flowing, just as it had flowed by generations of my ancestors, just as its waters would slip by here forever. It was like an animal, very much alive, not destroyed, that was stronger than all of us (“On Writing Carpentaria” 79-80).

This “place specific” knowledge not only refuses the difference between humans and place, but draws on the latter to stand against the destruction that the weeds signify both literally and metaphorically.

203

This river and the “particular kind of knowledge” it takes “to go with the river, whatever its mood” (3) opens the novel and inaugurates a shift from national knowledge to regionally specific knowledge as the narrator asks:

Can someone who did not grow up in a place that is sometimes under water, sometimes bone-dry, know when the trade winds blowing off the southern and northern hemispheres will merge in summer? Know the moment of climactic change better than they know themselves? (Carpentaria 3)

In Carpentaria this “particular kind of knowledge” it takes to read the region undermines the nation’s claims to knowledge and attempts to control the region. This first chapter concludes in a telling shift from the institutional spaces of nation, as knowledge and church, to the elemental dynamics of place:

But this was not Vaudeville. Wars were fought here. If you had your patch destroyed you’d be screaming too. The serpent’s covenant permeates everything, even the little black girls with hair combed back off their faces and bobby-pinned neatly for church listening quietly to the nation that claims to know everything except the exact date its world will end. Then, almost whispering, they ask shyly if the weather has been forecast correctly today (11).

Just as a cyclone tears apart Desperance “the most improbable of all coastal towns” (457), the nation “that claims to know everything” is undone here by a shy question about the weather forecast – where unexpected wind or rain or drought might arrive, carving out a space for place that is beyond, and prior to, the knowledge and gaze of the nation

Carpentaria invokes the elements not just to call forth a knowledge older and deeper than nation, but conjures the furies of water, earth, fire and air as the matter of resistance to national as well as international attempts to claim, know and control the region. The novel’s epigraph, Seamus Heaney’s “the first words”, is an invocation to: “Let everything flow/ Up to the four elements,/ Up to water and earth and fire and air”. In Carpentaria, as in 204

Heaney’s poem, the elements are called upon to wash away the pollution of words; to “drink” in the deeper knowledge of “what the birds and the grass and the stones drink”. The elemental fury that Carpentaria seethes with – the enraged, volatile and dynamic elements of earth, water, air and fire – rise up to foil attempts by international corporations to locate and kill the local resistance groups: “Fishman and his men were saved by a stroke of nature from early detection by the helicopters. Even the afternoon rainstorms could beat the monitors in New York” (445). Further, it is a whirlwind that gives the final impetus to the fire set by Fishman and his men to destroy the mine. When “[i]t looked as though the fire was going to peter out…just sitting, smouldering, not knowing where to go next because the wind was not blowing strong enough to fan it in the right direction” (410), a whirly wind emerges from “the hills themselves”, “just as a matter of fact sprang up” to revive the inferno. This “fiery whirlwind shot into the bowsers and momentarily, lit them up like candles” (411). In Carpentaria, it is the enraged animation of wind, water, dust and fire alongside the action of the region’s people that enacts a furious resistance to the dispossessions and violence of both national and international power structures.

Along with the dynamism and force of the elemental matter of the novel, Carpentaria deploys an alchemical genesis in its rearrangements of the matter of waste. This material ingenuity is similar to, and productively read alongside the move away from “one Australia” Georgine Clarsen identifies in her analysis of Bush Mechanics. Through this creative refiguration of waste material, national modernity is disfigured and ultimately seceded; literally culminating in an island of matter floating away from nation. From Angel Day’s fabulous tip construction, to the “The red ochre spectacle” of Mozzie Fishman’s “travelling cavalcade of religious zealots’ as ‘an astonishing modern day miracle of recycling” (120), Carpentaria is replete with alchemical transformations of the waste of the modern nation. For example:

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On the spiritual road, which was indeed hard and bumpy, the life of these vehicles had been refashioned many times over. In an astonishing modern day miracle of recycling by those spiritual men of Fishman’s convoy who had artisan hands and the minds of genius, using tools and parts found only in nature, all of these vehicles survived over thousands of the country’s hardest rock and gravel (120).

Such alchemical ingenuity as it specifically applies to desert car repairs has been addressed by Clarsen in her reading of Bush Mechanics. This 1998 documentary series showcases the car repair advice of five bush mechanics from Yuendumu in the Central Desert. Like Mozzie Fishman’s convoy, where “[t]he motors were pieces of modern art held together with rusty wire and leather belts or whatever it took to keep the cars on the road” (143), Bush Mechanics constructs everything from brake fluid and windscreen-wiper blades to mufflers and emergency clutch pads from a combination of materials on hand. Clarsen argues that these assemblages of waste matter of “[s]pare parts filed in collective memory, and scattered in old car wrecks along dirt tracks” suggests “that technologies do not carry within themselves one fixed meaning and direct us to consider new ways to imagine the country we are told is ‘one Australia’” (Clarsen). As well as Angel Day’s and Mozzie Fishman’s miraculous assemblages of waste matter, Carpentaria moves away from “one Australia” when the waste of the modern nation forms new islands that float away from the continent.

Carpentaria contests the continence of “one Australia” on the level of spatiality through a shift from the singularity and coherence of the continent form towards the multiplicity and dispersal of islands. The alchemical arrangements of the waste of national modernity in Carpentaria become literally a move away from nation as the wreckage of cyclone ravaged Desperance (which with its Uptown, Eastside and Westside functions as an allegory of Australia) forms “an extraordinary floating island of rubbish” (493). “The serpentine flotation”, an “embryonic structure” (494) of matter floating and congealing is figured as a birth resonating with “the sounds of labour” (494). This genesis metaphor is continued as it becomes a sustaining 206

“new island” (494), where “astonishing plants grew in profusion”. The centrality of the island metaphor to Carpentaria has been emphasised by Wright, who says “when I look at the novel it is like seeing a myriad of ideas that have created the same thing: islands”. The multiplicity of island forms, which form the matter of Carpentaria evoke the image of the archipelago, which Elizabeth McMahon has argued offers a model of “sustained inhabitation” away from the border anxieties of the continent nation (McMahon "The Gilded Cage - from Utopia to Monad in Australia's Island Imaginary" 202). The archipelagic model of floating matter, set in motion by the fury of the cyclone – and as Bachelard assures us, “a poetics of the storm” is “a poetics of anger” (Bachelard Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement 16) – is the creation of an ancient regeneration far older than nation, mobilised by Wright to literally and metaphorically undo the form of nation through the creation of new islands.

The political potential of disobedient, alchemical and archipelagic matter such as that Carpentaria imagines has been taken up by Gail Jones in her theorisation of the politics of hope and dreaming. Jones asks “[m]ight the metaphorics of dreaming allow for, or even inaugurate, a social imaginary that includes the forms of daydreaming necessary to imagine a politics of hope?” (Jones 19). Carpentaria concludes with Hope searching for Will, who she sees in her dreams, stranded on this floating island of rubbish. The fate of Hope and Will is left untold but the possibility the novel leaves open is perhaps this politics of hope - Hope searching for Will, on an assemblage of matter that is literally floating away from the nation.

The matter and hope of the future and the will to change it in Carpentaria is realised through furious elemental energies, alchemical and archipelagic rearrangements and regenerations of the waste matter of national modernity and a cyclical and ancient temporality that undoes the historical linear temporality of nation. Like Wright’s novel Knox’s cotemporaneous Dreamhunter duet unfolds in the “not-quite” allegorical space of nation and is 207 characterised by a temporality of discontinuity and overlay44. In Dreamhunter, a mineral consciousness, self-differentiating matter and alchemical magic of and as civil disobedience constitute the matter and hope of the future.

Centered around a magical place of discontinuous space and time, the Dreamhunter novels dream into existence a space outside of the cartographic space and historical time of nation. This spatial and temporal resistance at the core of the duet is forged from the waste matter of national modernity. A desert-like landscape of indeterminate distance, this place is called simply the Place. The Place, which as Wevers has argued, functions as a wasteland of modernity, where “The Place, as well as the commodity culture built on it, represents the future in the past: what modernity can and has looked like” (196). Like Carpentaria, Dreamhunter mobilises the waste of modernity to carve out a space of resistance. The Place is a space of suspended temporality: in The Place, “leaves don’t fall from the trees here unless someone walking by brushes them off. Nothing is alive, and nothing is dead” (Dreamquake 451). In its stopped and overturned time, the Place is outside the linear temporality of the nation. “[O]nly continuous from the outside, not from within” (Dreamhunter 165) and “out of the world of longitude and latitude” (10), the Place eludes the nation’s institutional gaze in its inability to be coherently mapped. Institutional control is further circumvented through the Place’s use of dreams as appeals toward civil disobedience.

44 While temporalities of discontinuity and overlay frequently appear in Pakeha fiction (e.g. Frame, Knox, Taylor, Quigley, Kassabova), non-linear temporalities are central to Maori writing. Some iconic examples of overlaying of mythic and historical temporalities through splicing of ancestral and contemporary stories in Maori fiction can be seen in “tangle of dream and substance” (261) that compels Keri Hulme’s analeptically structured The Bone People (1984) and the articulation of a circular/cyclical temporality (and generational memory) in Patricia Grace’s Potiki (1986):

I had other stories too, stories known from before life and death and remembering…Given stories. But ‘before life and death and remembering’ is only what I had always thought. It was a new discovery to find that these stories were, after all, about our own lives, were not distant, that there was no past or future, that all time is a now-time, centred in the being…these outer circles being named ‘past’ and ‘future’ only for convenience. The being reaches out to grasp those adornments that become part of the self. […] These are the things I came to realise as we told and retold our own-centre stories.” Patricia Grace, Potiki (Auckland: Penguin Books, 1986) 39.

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The duet’s politics of fantasy becomes explicit in Dreamquake when it is revealed that dreams from the Place are the Place’s attempts – as a ‘mineral consciousness’ to communicate future injustices of an increasingly centralised, corrupt and punitive government: “It tried by the only means available to it – the memories of the lives its territory had encompassed – to tell anyone who would listen” (Dreamquake 478). The most horrific message from the mineral consciousness of the Place is “the dreadful dream”, Buried Alive, the nightmare the duet’s protagonist Laura Hame infects hundreds with in order to spread the message of the Place. A visceral experience of someone trapped in a coffin, Buried Alive is the Place’s attempts to say “there is something underneath all of this, someone buried alive” (Dreamquake 478), an encryption of the cost of national modernity to, as Laura’s father Tziga Hame puts it, “Let them see that their dreams are ghosts and the Place is a tomb, a tomb of the future” (Dreamhunter 284). The narration of this dream is a script of cinematic terror:

He began to scream. The reverberations of his screams gave him the whole shape of the box, narrow-walled, low-roofed, unyielding. It’s lid was screwed down hard and would not give. Earth was piled over the lid, airless earth, pressing down hard. He screamed and moaned, he fought the box, in a frenzy of terror. He struggled and scuffled, strained his head up so that it beat against the coffin’s lid. […] The dream went on. Laura knew it did. The buried man suffered. He waited to die in a mess of blood and filth (Dreamhunter 389-390).

In its “frenzy of terror” and “mess of blood and filth”, this dream, and indeed all the dreams that can be found or “caught” in the Place is deployed to challenge corrupt and malevolent authorities, and reveal the violence, horror and waste buried beneath national modernity.

The function of dreams of the Place as resisting national modernity is most apparent in the dream contentment. A potentially epidemic dream, contentment turns people into “serene sleepwalkers” (Dreamquake 398). 209

Contentment and nation are explicitly conflated through the thoughts of the dream’s focaliser: “he was the architect of the prosperity of his nation’ and ‘whatever wrongs he’d committed were only, in the end, part of this loveliness, this life he’d made, this nation he’d shaped…” (Dreamquake 401). Dreamhunter insists that contentment is the most insidious and the most dangerous aspect of nation; in the duet it is discontent and disobedience to authorities – enabled through the particular magic and dreams of place - that change the future.

The Place as this space of discontent and disobedience, confounding to the time and gaze of nation, is created through generational memory and an affinity with soil. A magical song called The Measures, passed down through the Hame family, combined with The Hame family’s “peculiar[ity] about dirt and sand and stones” (Dreamhunter 96) works to raise a golem-like servant from the ground. This servant is controlled by arrangements of letters NOWN inscribed upon it. Reading literally, Laura refers to the sandman she summons as Nown. Nown is sculpted and called forth from the matter of the place in a peculiarly overdetermined way – it is revealed towards the end of Dreamquake, when Laura discovers the letters N and O carved into the ground at the borders of the Place that the Place is a Nown, that “someone had brought the land itself to life and tried to make a slave of it” (Dreamquake 314). Created out of elemental matter, an echo of alchemical holy-grail of the homunculus or artificial man, the Hames’ successions of golems are overdeterminedly alchemical figures. Indeed, Nown’s material challenge extends to the level of the letter. As an arrangement of letters from the present as the now to nown – noun, thing, subject or object, Nown moves towards either non-existence of non or self-determination of own.

Viewed as one aspect of these two possibilities, the self-determination of matter operates along the lines of prosopopoeia. As an act of prosopopoeia, Laura Hame’s creation of one of these golems can be read as raising up and differentiating of the matter of place. After completing the spell, Laura saw: 210

the back of the head she had shaped stir, a crack appear in the sand where what she had shaped came to an end, and the earth itself began. Laura watched Nown lift his face from the riverbed. He came up shaking off clots of sand. Only not all of the sand fell. Instead it sorted itself out, some grains rising like steam against Nown’s face settling there and shaping it. He turned towards Laura, his skin of sand still rearranging itself. She saw his skin move to make sharp ridges of an eyelid. She saw his nostrils becomes dark and deep, then flare, as though he drew breath. She saw his lips split in two, and teeth rise up before the hollow of his mouth, and sand run from the hollow, leaving only enough for a tongue… (Dreamhunter 367-368).

As the ground raised up, this sandman is instrumental in the task of resisting the nightmarish future of the nation. Reading via Gilles Deleuze’s model of differentiation reveals a further layer of the sandman’s elemental resistance, that is as matter’s challenge to form. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze says of differentiation that “it is as if the ground rose to the surface, without ceasing to be ground” (Deleuze 28), emphasising the destructive power the matter of differentiation holds over form:

all the forms are disintegrated when they are reflected in [the] rising ground [of matter]...the rising ground is no longer below, it acquires an autonomous existence; the form reflected in the ground is no longer a form but an abstract line acting directly upon the soul. When the ground rises to the surface, the human face decomposes in this mirror in which both determinations and indeterminate combine in a single determination which 'makes' the difference... It is better to raise up the ground and dissolve the form (28-29).

The form of the raised up ground in Dreamhunter, then, is differentiated matter that acquires an autonomous existence to undo temporal, geographic and economic claims of national modernity, and resist the nationalising force of epidemic contentment. Even in the seemingly solid form of this sandman figure, matter is foregrounded as being at the heart of things. The last image of the final sandman, turned to glass and the last words before the epilogue, describe how: “The setting sun shone through his glass body, and showed up 211 the dark matter at its heart – his heart, a rust stained rock from the track bed” (Dreamquake 501). Visible through the form of his body, the matter at his heart – metaphorically his connection to the Hame family - enables his action against national contentment.

Serpents and golems

The generative possibilities of materiality in Carpentaria and Dreamhunter are further cast into relief when viewed in terms of the cyclic exchanges of creation and destruction that propel both novels. In Carpentaria, this repetition is figured through the ancestral creative serpent. In Dreamhunter, the succession of Nowns stands as a material reiteration of an act of genesis. Generated through and animated by song, these figures of creative- destructive energies operate at the edges of language to refigure substance of place and nation.

In both Carpentaria and Dreamhunter, the acts of creation and destruction that propel and conclude the narratives incorporate elements of both repetition and differentiation. One structuring trope of Carpentaria is the cyclical image of the creative serpent. The creature acts as both creator and destroyer in a cyclical process of making/unmaking emerging from below national modernity’s temporality of progress. The novel opens in the temporality of the eternal; “From time immemorial”, following the “creative serpent” as it sculpts the landscape with its “heavy belly”:

The ancestral serpent, a creature larger than storm clouds, came down from the stars, laden with its own creative enormity…it came down those billions of years ago, to crawl on its heavy belly, all around the wet clay soils in the Gulf of Carpentaria…picture the creative serpent, scoring deep into – scouring down through – the slippery underground of the mudflats, leaving in its wake the thunder of tunnels collapsing to form deep sunken valleys (Carpentaria 1).

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This inaugural creative act is repeated in the “serpentine” flotation that emerges from the wreckage of cyclone ravaged Desperance. The “embryonic structure” (494) that Will Phantom finds himself stranded upon becomes an edenic island. This island, the new creation, the nation rebuilt by ancestral elements, is what draws Hope to find Will. The work of the new serpent is the destination of Hope. The repetition of the creative serpent is not the erasure of national modernity, but a refashioning of its constitutive parts. Thus the genesis of repetition is not a utopian, pre-national space, but a remaking of the waste of national modernity to a space of growth and hope, which, as I have argued earlier, is spatialised as the archipelagic process of becoming- islands.

Mozzie Fishman’s serpentine pilgrimage further demonstrates this process of refashioning the modern nation through the cyclical temporality of repetition. The image of the serpent recurs in Mozzie Fishman’s “the thirty car procession, moving, eating, sleeping, living in second-hand Falcon sedans and Holden station wagons of 1980s vintage” (119-120). Fishman’s “traveling cavalcade” is figured as the serpent as “[t]he long dusty convoy, passing through the pristine environment of the northern interior, seemed to have risen out of the earth itself” (119), “the snake lizard moving along the roads” (125), and as “[t]he convoy, with its noisy exhaust pipes spewing black fumes, drove like a long black snake through the storm-darkened town” (365). The “snake lizard” procession of automobiles performs a serpentine repetition, retracing the creation of the land as convoy maps the movements of the ancestral serpent through “an ancient religious crusade along the spiritual travelling road of the great ancestor, whose journey continues to span the entire continent and is older than time itself” (119). On Fishman’s pilgrimage:

Travel had become same, same and mandatory, as the convoy moved in reptile silence over the tracks of the travelling mighty ancestor whom they worshipped through singing the story that had continued for years (124).

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The reassemblage and repair of this “black snake” of “Falcon sedans and Holden station wagons of 1980s vintage”, discussed previously as alchemical matter, figures the creation and recreation of the land as cyclic and able to draw on both natural and artificial material. Sacred and ancient repetition of creation and recreation does not differentiate between elements of nature and artifice as the cars are repaired with “tools and parts found only in nature and it is a “black snake” of “1980s vintage” cars that repeats the “tracks of the travelling mighty ancestor”.

This recurring figure of the serpent in Carpentaria is not only a creative image. The snake appears as a harbinger of destruction at the explosion of the Gurfurrit mine, the “pride of the Banana state”, into “a big panorama of burnt chop suey” (411). This explosion is likened to “a fiery serpent” (410). Similarly, during the cyclone’s destruction of Desperance, Will Phantom hears “the underground serpent, living in the underground river that was kilometres wide, responded with hostile growls” (470). One description of the cyclone is “the giant waterspout of the ancestral serpent” (475), and it is at the annihilation of the town that:

Will Phantom realised how history could be obliterated when the gods moved the country. He saw history rolled, reshaped, undone and mauled as the great creators of the natural world engineered the bounty of everything man had done into something more of their own making. Was he shocked? Bugger the hotel, he thought, it could go with the rest. The bulwark of the spirits rose from the waters, and he saw nothing monstrous or hideous in this new creation taking shape, moving, rolling, changing appearance, and beauty in its strident crashing back into the water (491-492).

Will’s insight about the “obliteration” of history unites destruction with creation and figures the erasure of the town as an act of “new creation”.

It is with this image of “new creation” that Carpentaria concludes. This generation is also a repetition, directly echoing the image of the creation of the land that opens the novel. The final words speak a renewal: “It was a 214 mystery, but there was so much song wafting off the watery land, singing the country afresh as they walked hand in hand out of town, down the road, Westside, to home” (519). “Singing the country afresh” is a reprisal of the opening descent of the “great ancestor” creating the land, and Mozzie Fishman’s journey “over the tracks of the travelling mighty ancestor…singing the story that had continued for years”, framing the narrative in a cyclical temporality of renewal/destruction that is both ancient and modern.

While Carpentaria is structured according to repetition of ancient genesis, the repetition of an avatar of the present as ‘Now’ propels the narrative of the Dreamhunter duet. Dreamhunter centers around the recurring golem figure of Nown. The first incarnation of this figure in the novel says to Laura Hame “I am the eighth of myself” (Dreamhunter 258). Laura comes to realise that “Nown was a being who had been made eight times, and could remember his earlier selves. He had appeared in time, in history, on eight occasions” (Dreamhunter 262-263). But before the emergence of Nown as the figure that may move between the self-determination of “own” or disintegration of “non”, the servant “now” must be given speech by the inscription of the final “n”, in order that the servant’s account of its actions be known. The ninth Nown explains to Laura that “the Hame servant [Nown] cannot be undone until after its final N has been inscribed” (Dreamhunter 396). He tells her “[n]o Hame can undo a servant without first giving it a voice so that it can talk to its maker, give its maker an account of what has done, what it has been asked to do” (Dreamhunter 397).45 Giving voice to the “now” before destroying it or letting it become its “own” requires that the spirit of the moment, the “now”, be allowed to account for itself and its deeds (and those of its master). These

45 This emphasis on speech and accountability is a repetition of a common theme within New Zealand literature – the move towards speech. This trope is apparent in Knox’s other novels The Vintner’s Luck, Black Oxen and Billie’s Kiss. It also deployed in the work of Knox’s contemporary, Sarah Quigley, particularly in Shot (2003) in the mute boy, Moses. The mute figure acquiring speech is central to a number of texts that metonymically figure New Zealand national identity; perhaps most famously in the writing of Janet Frame (particularly Scented Gardens for the Blind), Keri Hulme’s 1984 novel The Bone People, and Jane Campion’s 1993 film, The Piano.

215 incarnations of a singular consciousness are multiple iterations of one event; Nown says “I am the eighth of myself” rather than “I am the eighth.” But each of these repetitions is particular, and it is in this particularity that the future emerges as a possibility distinct from fate; as Laura asks in Dreamquake, “wouldn’t it be terrible if none of us had futures, only fates?” (393).

This relationship between futurity and repetition is further clarified when read in light of Deleuze’s theorisation of repetition. Deleuze argues that repetition is a recurrence of the irreducible and the irreplaceable; a reiteration of “non-exchangeable and non-substitutable singularities”, where "[t]o repeat is to behave in a certain manner, but in relation to something unique or singular which has no equal or equivalent” (1). For Deleuze, repetition is a phenomenon of the future. He says, “repetition is the thought of the future” (7) as repetition instigates the temporal transgression of not only linear temporality, but opposes permanence. One example of the generative futurity of repetition can be seen in the novels’ focus on singing as a magical or sacred act of creation.

The excesses of singularity outlined in Deleuze’s concept of repetition – unequivocable, irreducible and irreplaceable, in the domain of affect and unintelligible within an economy of exchange – constitute the creative surplus of the material imagination in Carpentaria and Dreamhunter. Deleuze points out the “economic difference” between generality and repetition, where “exchange is the criterion of generality” and “theft and gift are those of repetition”. Further, Deleuze emphasises that repetition is an affective act, conducted according to an economy of affect and not cerebral exchange46. The affective and creative surplus, as the gift status of repetition, is most apparent in Carpentaria and Dreamhunter in the narrative centrality of songs invested with sacred or magical powers of creation. Sonorous animation of matter is central to Dreamhunter, indeed constitutes the magic by which a servant can

46 Thus, for Deleuze, “it is not by chance that a poem must be learned by heart. The head is the organ of exchange, but the heart is the amorous organ of repetition" (1-2). 216 be raised from the earth by “[t]he Hames who could sing true” (258). This song remains as the animating magic with the golem; for “[w]hen she had touched the sandman Laura had felt an ancient, complex music in him” (259). The song of creation, The Measures, a means to “sing [a new] reality”, is composed of a succession of singularity elements. The Measures is a hymn of singularity:

The chant was made of complex, shifting tonal patterns, of strings of words that didn’t sound like sentences, because each word sounded like a new word, as if no word was used twice, as if the language of the song had no use for ‘and’ and ‘to’ and ‘it’ (359).

A collection of singularities, this song is repeated throughout generations to call the same spirit to serve. Literary critic Jon Kertzer has aligned singularity and generative or destructive power through the first word. Here the first word, or collection of first words, is amplified by the sonorous excess of the singing voice. In Dreamhunter, singularity is invoked, as a repetition of singulars, to conjure the Hame servant. This incarnation is both new (as Now) and a repetition of the original (Nown). In Carpentaria too, singing is explicitly aligned with genesis and generative acts47. In the closing lines, “so much song wafting off the land” is “singing the country afresh”.

The generative and destructive power of song as one of the repetitions that structure both texts and its function as both an excess and disavowal of the meaning of language is further explicated via Bachelard’s formulation of the poetic image as “singing” reality. Bachelard explicitly aligns song, creativity and the material imagination in his account of imaginative work. Indeed, singing is the precise term he uses to explain the function of the imagination:

47 The challenge of singing and music as excess appears in Kim Scott’s Benang (2000). Lisa Slater has argued that song functions in Benang, “both a political critique and a reimagining of contemporary Australia,” as part of protagonist Harley’s attempt to “pick up a rhythm begun deeper and long before those named Fanny and Sandy One Mason” (Scott, 32) and works to create “narratives in excess of colonial logic” (Slater, 156). 217

The imagination is not, as its etymology suggests, the faculty for forming images of reality; it is the faculty for forming images which go beyond reality, which sing reality (16).

For Bachelard, singing is both a shift away from language and meaning and a register where both are exceeded. Sound manifests and is experienced as both a temporal and spatial phenomenon, and the sound of singing constitutes an auditory presence beyond the meaning of the word, as an excess of the speaking voice. In Bachelard’s formulation of the imagination, such excess within language and reality is the generative matter by which a new image may be created – no small feat, for, as Bachelard reminds us via Jacques Bousquet, "A new image costs humanity as much labour as a new characteristic costs a plant" (3).

Poetics of place

In keeping with the complex intersections of notionality and reality in and for the antipodean imagination, the material imagination deployed by these texts has material consequences. The specific consequences of regional particularity as it is emphasised by Carpentaria are explicated by Robin in her work on Australia’s unique ecologies. Arguing that the natural world is more than a static background or blank canvas upon which culture and history write, Robin offers an inversion of the precedence of knowledge model, demonstrating how singularities of the natural world shaped scientific thinking rather than the other way round. Robin specifically addresses the writing of nature and the future of nation in her article “The Eco-Humanities as Literature: A New Genre?” In the context of Anthropocene Stage II (1945-), where “humans are no longer just biological creatures amongst others, but potent physical agents for change on Earth” (Robin "The Eco-Humanities as Literature: A New Genre?" 290), Robin emphasises literary images of place as a necessary alternative and important complement to scientific discourse. Robin argues that “if we are to take nature seriously, there must be a poetic of 218 nature as subject that counterbalances the overwhelming ‘objective’ voice favoured by science” (299). She stresses that this poetic must be “sensitive to the particular – both the literal detail and the mood of the country” (299). Here Robin quotes Nicholas Rothwell, who argues that the:

rich, dominant European derived vocabulary of the Western tradition, with its sense of the romantic sublime in nature [does not always serve the purposes of] the softer, less emphatic word map brought forth by Australian country, with its ragged, hollowed, scrubby trees, is exiguous plains of mallee and mulga, its patterns that rely on reduplication and variation rather than grandeur for their tonal effect (in Robin, 299).

Carpentaria’s attention to the sensation of mud plains, “rattling grasses dried yellow from the prevailing winds” (2) and “the moment of climatic change” “when the trade winds blowing off the southern and northern hemispheres…merge in summer”(3) is such a “poetic of nature”. It is, as Robin suggests it should be, “sensitive to the particular” as “both the literal detail and the mood of the country”. In this way, Carpentaria’s “poetic of nature” offers a new way to inhabit and imagine nation and nature.

The ways in which Carpentaria’s “poetic of nature” reimagines, and offers new ways to inhabit nation is further explicated when read alongside Robin’s analysis of the relationship between continent and nation in Australia. In How a Continent Created a Nation, Robin argues that looking from the part of non- human actors (such as the continent itself) enables a different vision of the formation of Australian national identity, and means of developing that identity to accommodate the particularities of the natural world. One example she offers of this perspective is that of the Banded Stilt. A migratory bird that inhabits Australia’s most arid regions, the Banded Stilt breeds only after the area’s infrequent and unpredictable rains. Banded Stilts challenge economic models based on seasonal production because they exist outside the cycle of seasons. Thus for Robin, Banded Stilts differentiate Australia from annual global industry and “are a species that can teach Australians much about living with boom-and-bust ecologies” (How a Continent Created a Nation 4). 219

Robin uses the further examples of wattle, the platypus, the desert and the northern tropics to emphasise that attention to Australia’s unique environment reveals “exceptions to patterns generated by Old World expectations that forces us to consider nature and culture together” (4). In particular, it is Robin’s discussion of regional differences and representations of the desert and the north that offers a productive means by which to read the ways in which Carpentaria contests historical constructions of Australia’s north.

Robin’s analysis of the desert spaces and the “empty” space of the north in the national imaginary enables a reading of Carpentaria as a way of looking at the particularities of the North that is both new and ancient. Discussing the “microclimates” of the Desert and North that are “spatially and temporally unpredictable” (121), Robin suggests a mixture of minute ground vision versus aerial mapping, where:

The large-scale survey is useful for strategically embracing the arid interior, but real ‘on the ground’ detail is needed to make sense of an arid zone with variable microclimates, whose very biodiversity is dynamic and spatially unpredictable. The view from the ground and from the air must work in concert (121).

Opening with the bird’s eye view of the serpent, then descending to the ground level vista of the creature breathing as the river’s tides, the focalising lens of Carpentaria moves between the large-scale visions of cyclones and plains to ground level specificity. An integration of old and new knowledges, large and small stories and perspectives from sky, sea and land, Carpentaria is a vision of region from “the ground and the air” that contests what Robin calls the “empty North”. Robin says of the North that its “tales are too often told in the future tense, and they are about filling absence and emptiness. They miss acknowledging the stories of the communities who pre-date and post-date each ‘moment of enterprise’”(145). This “absence and emptiness” is one manifestation of the terra nullius tropology that still circumscribes the North. Robin tells us that 220

Modernity’s yearning for ‘empty lands’ upon which to inscribe a particular future depends on a ‘Year Zero’ mentality, a not-so-innocent and systematic form of misinformation, where every project can start afresh. Terra nullius is historical as well as spatial (147).

Terra nullius enables one structuring fantasy of modernity, that is, progress as a constant series of breaks with the past. Robin argues that “settlement schemes of Northern Australia in general…have exemplified this trope of modernity par excellence” (147). In Carpentaria, the Gulf is described as “a place few Australians had been to…it was a world apart from their own. Anything in the new world could be created, moulded, and placed on television like something to dream about, or a nightmare” (413). As a “new world” that “could be created, moulded” the Gulf of Carpentaria is an empty space where “dream[s]” and “nightmares” can be projected. The “untameable” or uncultured status of the north is explicitly emphasised as, after the explosion of the Gurfurrit mine, “[o]rdinary people living thousands of miles away, who had no former interest in the mine or its location, joined the growing numbers of bereaved viewers gandering at the still untameable, northern hinterland” (415). This “world apart from their own”, a space for “gandering” and an “untameable” space constructs the Gulf as outside-inside nation; an image juxtaposed with the particular, local knowledge’s cast into relief by the novel. This contrast highlights the latter as contradictory to the “empty”, “untameable” terra nullius space the former romanticises. It is this vision of, as Robin says, “the stories of the communities who pre-date and post-date each ‘moment of enterprise’”(145) that Carpentaria articulates “deep, locally grounded understandings of [Australia’s] variable and uncertain environments” (Robin 218), something that Robin emphasises that “Australia’s independent ‘national’ voice in the global world depends more than ever on” (218).

This regionally specific voice that Carpentaria enables remains both complexly embedded within and refigures the antipodean imaginary mapped 221 by the previous chapters of thesis. The new direction both Carpentaria and Dreamhunter offer is not only a move away from nation to region, but a shift in the trajectory of the katabasis trope that heralds new possibilities in the antipodean imaginary away from conventional tropes of colonial inhabitation. Carpentaria and Dreamhunter break with both Christian and classical conventions of antipodean verticality as the novels invert longitudinal positions, stage the destruction of hell and bodies are raised up rather than interred in the ground. The novels refigure these conventions on their own terms, through regional and material specificity. Furthermore, unlike the texts analysed by previous chapters, the hells of these texts are not tropes of despair or descent as is conventional, but are tropes of emergence. In Carpentaria and Dreamhunter, hell operates according to “anabasis”, which as emergence or ascendance is the final movement of a katabasis narrative. These ascending movements are intertwined with the emergence of hope in both novels.

Opening the gates of hell

The operations of the trope of verticality within a colonial imaginary are explicated via Bachelard’s work on the ascensional imagination. In his meditations on the four elements, Bachelard argues that the “ascensional imagination”, with its images of flight and fall, is a fundamental psychic structure. Further, he claims that “of all metaphors, metaphors of height, elevation, depth, sinking, and the fall are axiomatic metaphors par excellence. Nothing explains them, and they explain everything" (10). Emphasising that “man qua man cannot live horizontally”, Bachelard goes on to argue that every transformation, every evolution emerges from “the dual material imagination of earth and air” (263). He uses the example of “the flower with its aerial perfume” and “the seed with its terrestrial weight”, which “are formed in opposite ways, but together” (264) where “the evolving action deposits sediments in order to rise upward, while at the same time rejecting the already materialised result of a previous impetus” (264). This dual process, 222 moving in both ethereal and material directions could be analogical for colonial identity formation. Colonial becoming requires a depositing of trace and subsequent disavowal of previous formations – whether imperial or generational. This image of material becoming is a powerful site of genesis; as Bachelard announces “[t]he metaphysics of freedom could be based on [this] image (264). The regional emergences of Carpentaria and Dreamhunter are generative ascensions, like Bachelard’s metaphor of the flower both embedded within and a departure from tropes of verticality that inform Antipodean spaces and identities.

By raising bodies from the grave and overturning markers of cartographic location, Carpentaria and Dreamhunter depart from Christian and classical representations of antipodean verticality. The novels refigure these conventions on their own terms, through regional and material specificity. The disinterment or resurrection of bodies from the ground is central to both novels. Dreamhunter’s narrative is propelled by the search and exhumation of a body from the grave as protagonist Laura, the young dreamhunter, discovers that the existence of the mysterious Place is connected to the grave at its centre. The novel makes the centrality of this trope of exhumation explicit on the level of allusion, as the body in question is named Lazarus. Similarly, the emergence of bodies from the grave is central to Carpentaria, and indeed the novel is prefaced with such a resurrection. The opening chapter “From time immemorial”, a highly symbolic and heavily allegorical direct address to the reader, concludes with the dead of the Gulf Country rise up to contest colonial and national histories:

If you are someone who visits old cemeteries, wait awhile if you visit the water people. The old Gulf country men and women who took our besieged memories to the grave might just climb out of the mud and tell you the real story of what happened here (Carpentaria, 11).

In both Carpentaria and Dreamhunter, an act of disinterment motivates the narrative, as both are premised upon learning the secrets of the resurrected 223 dead. This connection accords with Walter Benjamin’s argument in his essay “The Storyteller”, in which he identifies the knowledge conferred by death as the inaugurating authority for the transmission of story. Benjamin explains that the storyteller “has borrowed his authority from death”, as the authority bestowed by death “is at the very source of the story” (Benjamin 93). In Carpentaria and Dreamhunter this death is not metaphorical or abstracted but literal and material. The intimacy of these bodies with the ground, of corpse and soil, points to an interchangeability of the human and the material that characterises these novels, where the narrative agency of the buried can be read as region speaking on its own terms. The raising up of the buried is one in a number of vertical overturnings where regional particularity is articulated over the horizon of nation.

Another complex shift these novels make away from nation and towards region can be seen in their inversion of fixed markers of verticality. In overturning the order of North and South, the texts create a not quite topographic space of nation. Both Carpentaria and the Dreamhunter series are located in a vertically inverted geography, figuring their respective locations, the Gulf of Carpentaria, and a combination of Golden Bay and Southland as not quite spaces of nation. Carpentaria is located in the fictional town of Desperance. A variation of Western Australia’s Esperance, the Northern Desperance is nominally Southern. The Dreamhunter series takes place in Coal Bay in the fictional nation of Southland, which as Wevers points out is ‘[a] place which both is and is not Golden Bay’(Wevers "Fold in the Map: Figuring Modernity in Gail Jone's Dreams of Speaking and Elizabeth Knox's Dreamhunter" 188). Southland, as New Zealand’s southernmost region, and Coal Bay as Golden Bay, offer a similar inversion, as Northern Golden Bay descends via Southland, and Southland shifts North in relation to Golden Bay. This inverted geography directly corresponds to the conventions of katabasis, as inversion is a central maneuver in a katabasis narrative, signifying the point of transition from descent to ascent, from katabasis to anabasis. 224

This inverted geographical imaginary is combined with the vertical structure of the theological imaginary, particularly so with the allegory of hell in Carpentaria. A characteristic feature of katabasis narratives, inversion has been identified by critics such as Falconer, Northrop Frye and David Pike as a crucial operation of hell – where the subject is unmade and then reborn. For Pike, inversions are a “key lesson of… hell: critical reflections on the loss of hope engenders hope, immersion in images of falsehood reveals truth, descent leads to return” (Pike viii). Spatial overturnings are connected in this tropology, where regional emergences are also figured as ascents from despair into hope. As one of the heavenly virtues (1 Corinthians 13:13), and the yet-to-emerge of Pandora’s box, hope is aligned with aerial, ascensional rather than terrestrial qualities.

The emergence of hope from hell is explicit in Carpentaria, indeed opens the novel. Beginning with two descents, the aerial to subterranean journey of the serpent, and the terranean to the subterranean in the mining of the region, the novel shifts to the ascent of hope through the materiality of region. One of the novel’s ascents, Hope is central, and its function becomes elucidated by understanding of anabasis. The emergence of hope from hopelessness introduces the novel’s second chapter, “Angel Day” in the form of an epigraph that reads:

One evening in the driest grasses in the world, a child who was no stranger to her people, asked if anyone could find hope. The people of parable and prophecy pondered what was hopeless and finally declared they no longer knew what hope was. The clocks, tick–a-ty tock, looked as though they might run out of time. Luckily, the ghosts in the memories of the old folk were listening, and said anyone could find hope in the stories: the big stories and the little ones in between, so… (Carpentaria 12).

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In this highly symbolic language that invokes “parable” and “prophesy”, hope is located by ghosts, resonating with the voices from the grave that open the novel.

This emergence of hope in Carpentaria is deeply rooted in the novel’s vertical metaphorics and arises from the materiality of place. The novel opens with an image of ancient, mythic descent, as “The ancestral serpent, a creature larger than storm clouds, came down from the stars, laden with its own creative enormity” (1). The creation of the Gulf country is figured as a katabasis, the descent of the creative spirit that

came down all those billion years ago, to crawl on its heavy belly…scoring deep into – scoring down through – the slippery underground of the mudflats, leaving in its wake the thunder of tunnels collapsing to form deep sunken valleys (1).

This terrestrial genesis also contains the aerial qualities of breath, as:

The tidal river snake of flowing mud takes breaths of a size that is difficult to comprehend. Imagine the serpent’s breathing rhythms as the tide flows inland, edging towards the spring waters nestled deeply in the gorges of an ancient limestone plateau covered with rattling grasses dried yellow from the prevailing winds (2).

The organic verticality of the creative serpent, the above and below of “flowing mud” and “breaths” is positioned against, and works to undo the vertical forms of nation as Desperance’s Uptown and mining in the region.

Viewed through the operations of katabasis and anabasis, Carpentaria’s organic verticality works to reverse dismantle the spatiality of colonial imaginary. Devlin-Glass argues that this hope arises not only from the materiality of place, but from an intersection of the natural world and the Indigenous sacred which “refuse[s] hierarchical distinction between human beings and the natural world” (396). This refusal of a nature/culture hierarchy is enabled by an organic verticality that emerges as earth and 226 breath, and as an egress from hell. Man-made hell is an allegory for nation in Carpentaria, with the fictional town of Desperance figured as both hell itself and the consequence of a bargain with the devil. Desperance is literally announced as hell in the Pricklebush people’s advice to travellers: “You is in hell, Pricklebush could have told them travellers, but name the traveller or the one single tourist who ever goes to the Pricklebush for a piece of advice” (60). In an interview, Wright emphasised Desperance’s allegorical function: “Desperance is very much Australia today, a desperate place that needs to grow better understanding between one another” (in England 8).

The settler allegory of Desperance is figured as satanic through the town’s diabolically unnatural Mayor, Stan Bruiser. Bruiser “spoke of being the epitome of the self-made man” (35), but:

The old people said the story about the money of hell was different, because Bruiser had unnatural scars that looked like someone had welded an extra skin to his body… Was that unusual? Darn right! Everyone in the Pricklebush thought so. Some of the old ladies were more than curious and yelled out whenever he came down to the Pricklebush camps – ‘Hey! How come the devil stitched you up like a pod?’ Bruiser was sensitive about his scars and ignored their questions. So they spread the word he was an alien… (35).

The “self-made man” stitched up “like a pod” by “the devil” and the naming of Desperance as hell figures the material wealth of the colonial nation, allegorised by Desperance, as a bargain with the devil. In Hell in Contemporary Literature Falconer has specifically addressed the colonial hell. Falconer reminds us that “hel means ‘cover’ in old Norse”, and so hell also operates to ‘cover’ ineffable horror. Here Falconer offers Heart of Darkness as the archetype of this colonial hell, where “[o]ne thinks immediately of Kurtz’s inarticulable cry when gazing through the rent veil of Europe’s colonial dream: ‘the horror! The horror!” (50). The extra skin welded to Bruiser’s body in Carpentaria functions as similar hellish cover; a material excess metaphoric of a profane bargain. The allegory of colonial Uptown as hell continues in the 227 novel’s mining plot, where both the town and the mine are dismantled by regional forces working from above and below.

The forms of nation – the hellish Desperance and its Uptown and the neighbouring mine are annihilated by more powerful forces from above and below, rising up from beneath the earth and coming down from the sky. These furious destructions of artificial structures and subsequent regeneration of place are enabled through regional elemental fury. Activists Will Phantom and Mozzie Fishman destroy the mines that “became established in the region with little regard to anyone’s say so” (10) through an explosion from beneath, described as an opening of the gates of hell as:

we watched the fire rage like a monster cut loose from another world. It might even have come from hell. Even the devil himself would have least expected us weak people to have opened the gates of hell (410).

The infernal destruction and violence of national modernity is erased from below and above - Desperance is destroyed by the aerial fury of a cyclone.

The terrestrial and aerial elements that raze the man-made hell of Desperance and the surrounding mine are explicitly aligned with will and hope when we consider the metaphor of the characters of the same name. The novel ends with the possibility of protagonist Will Phantom being rescued by his lover, Hope – with a chance for Hope to find Will. Bachelard’s insights further clarify this allegory. By aligning will with Earth as Bachelard does, when he argues that human relation to terrestrial matter consists of acts of will, Hope and Will are imbued with aerial and terrestrial qualities respectively. Through such a reading, it becomes apparent that for hope to be realised, it must find, and be grounded in the solidity of will.

In Carpentaria the material emergences of regional elements of above and below dismantle the man-made hell of nation and despair of its colonial history. The bodies emerging to tell the story “of what really happened here” 228 positions Wright’s novel as a rising up through the hopeless horizon of the nation’s past. Dreamhunter also deploys a vertical metaphorics in its emergence from a violent future of a totalitarian nation. Unlike Carpentaria, Dreamhunter’s mode of exceeding realism is not allegory, but fantasy, which enables the overturning of temporality through the device of time-travel. Dreamhunter centres around two kinds of resurrection, Lazarus emerging from the grave and a golem called up from the earth. The twin ascensions of human returning from the dead, and the ground becoming human enable an escape from the suffocatingly hopeless space of the totalitarian future in the past.

Dreamhunter’s narrative of dreams caught in a magical place and screened cinematically is structured by a time-travel device, a spell involving summoning the power of place, the ground itself, to overturn a hopeless future. This future is a totalitarian state, where “the whole country’s a prison” (Dreamquake 97) a place of “terror and despair”, “rage and crushed hope” (106). The hellish quality of this future nation has been identified by Lydia Wevers, who points out that “[b]ehind the dream economy of Southland lies a future of satanic mills, a wasted earth and its enslaved or conscripted people” (Wevers 197). Central to undoing the nightmare of this future in the past is the double resurrection of the Lazarus and golem figures.

The Lazarus resurrection is a structuring trope of the series, as four characters, Lazarus himself, Lazarus’ grandfather Tziga, Lazarus’ father Sandy and the Sandman Nown all return from the dead. The vertical trajectory of this trope is apparent as the series moves from an underworld to raising the ground itself to the resurrection of Lazurus, whose burial created the Place, and whose disinterment destroys it. As in Carpentaria, an underworld image opens the Dreamhunter series, as:

That night at the Opera, after frost-fall, Hame lay gazing up at the dome high above him as a drowning man looks back at the surface, the underside of a world of air (Dreamhunter 5). 229

This subterranean image of famous dreamhunter Tziga Hame in the “dream palace” of the Rainbow Opera proleptically introduces recurring images of burial and drowning. Like Carpentaria, the ascensional metaphorics of the series are materially located, with an emphasis on earth and breath.

The Place, which is central, produces images of drowning and burial, buried truths, and the buried cost of industrial modernity. At the core of the duet is a magical place, a desert-like landscape of indeterminate distance, called simply the Place. Dreams may be caught in the Place by the few able to enter. Images of drowning and burial recur in these dreams. Two of the worst nightmares caught by dreamhunters in the Place are Sunken, which relives the experience of a drowning man, and Buried Alive, a horrific vision of a man waking in his coffin “stifled on the condensed vapour of his own breath…shut in, shut in, scuffling on in the stifling dark (Dreamhunter 389). Buried Alive leads protagonist Laura Hame to realise the horrific truth of the Place, that “there is something underneath all of this, someone buried alive” (478). Unlocking the secret of Lazarus’ grave, Laura understands that “this grave is the heart of the Place. Its unhappy, horrible heart” (450). Lazarus’s resurrection is, in keeping with the katabasis tradition, the novel’s inversion point.

The disinterment of Lazarus disintegrates the horizontal dreamscape of the Place and unmakes the horizontal future in the past of nation. This unmaking is realised in material emergences, not only the terrestrial, corporeal image of the image of Lazarus raised from the earth, but in the calling up of the ground itself. Lazarus’ resurrection is only possible through an invocation of the power of place, in summoning the earth to rise up. Lazarus explains how he “made the final mark that finished the spell…and then said to the land, ‘Bury me, and rise up. Rise up and crush them all.’” This burial and raising up of the ground function to overturn the “terror and despair”, “rage and crushed hope” of his present – the novel’s future in the past, to open away for a future of possibility, or to paraphrase Laura, the chance to have a future and not a 230 fate. The material emergences of Dreamhunter offer a means to breath above the horizon of the hopeless fate of the totalitarian state; an ascension of hope and possibility, anchored in the matter of earth and soil, away from the future-in-the-past of nation.

The emergence of hope in Dreamhunter is anchored in the metaphoric anabasis of becoming human. Nown, the golem called from the earth to serve the Hame family figures the process of becoming human. As the tenth incarnation of the Hame servant, the Place is also circumscribed by this becoming. Initially a transition from unformed matter to humanoid form as “Nown got up, separated his sandy self from the sand of the river bed” (368), Nown becomes increasingly human in form and affect. The Nown Laura raises is “a little bigger than life-size” (409). This Nown is diminished after he is hit by a train: “As he came towards her, Laura saw at once that he was a little shorter and more slender than before…’You look younger,’ Laura said” (217). In his final incarnation, transformed into glass by immersion in fire, Nown is “a little over six foot and slender like a young man” (409). Laura’s sandman is also doubled as Laura’s human lover, Sandy. When both are thought lost in the fire, Laura tells her cousin Rose that she won’t make another sandman “because I can’t make Sandy.” (393) Rose:

thought about the logic of Laura’s statement. Of course it was flawless. It made perfect sense. Rose knew that her cousin had loved both of them, Sandy and the monster. Laura wouldn’t resurrect one if she couldn’t resurrect the other (393).

When Laura discovers that Nown, now “a human-shaped volume of glass”, had survived the fire, she dresses him in Sandy’s clothes (409). While a figure of becoming human, Nown’s status as not-quite human remains a central dilemma for Laura. Awakening from the nightmare Buried Alive, “Laura rushed at him, put her arms around him and pressed her head into his creaking chest. ‘Be human!’ She begged. Nown said, ‘How?’” (391).

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As a figure of the potential and possibilities of becoming human, Nown is central to the emergence of hope in the novel. When Laura asks Nown to dig up the grave at the heart of the Place and resurrect Lazarus Hame, she realises that “[e]verything she had asked her servant to do trapped her further in what had already been done. Nown’s pity was a promise fulfilling itself over time – a long, inhuman time” (454). This inhuman soul overturns time and space in defence of the dignity of human life “against which injustice is a blasphemy” (478). This instance of the inhuman in service of the human is further cast into relief through Lyotard’s concept of the inhumanity of the soul. Lyotard offers a double model of the inhuman, where the category refers to both the inhumanity of systemic violences called “development” and indefinable singularity, or “infinitely secret” inhumanity “of which the soul is hostage”. Lyotard declares that “it is the task of writing, thinking, literature, arts, to venture to bear witness to” the inhumanity of the soul in order to resist the inhumanity of “development” (7). Lyotard also points out the inhuman temporality of both development and the “secret” inhumanity of the soul, and explains that the latter may challenge the former through the “slow” processes of “writing and reading”, as:

Development imposes the saving of time. To go fast is to forget fast, to retain only the information that is useful afterwards, as in 'rapid reading'. But writing and reading which advance backwards in the direction of the unknown thing 'within' are slow. One loses one's time seeking time lost (Lyotard 3).

In the Dreamhunter series, “bear[ing] witness” as “los[ing] one’s time seeking time lost” is literalised, as the novel advancing backwards in time, seeking the body of Lazarus as the “unknown thing ‘within’”. This search for time lost is enabled through the inhumanity of place, as the Place, or the ground becoming human, which works to ground the human away from the inhuman of development. As literature that literally gives voice and soul to the terrain of the inhuman, Carpentaria and Dreamhunter both doubly “bear witness” to the inhumanity that is antithetical to the inhumanity of development. 232

As this thesis has argued, new ways of inhabiting are preceded by new ways of imagining. Inhabiting (in terms of nation, global, particular and general) is an urgent question of the current historical moment. In their undoing and remaking of national modernity, these novels offer new ways of imagining, and thus new ways of inhabiting particular places. The politics and ethics of this imaginative anabasis is explicated by Bachelard’s assertion of the necessity of imaginative excess and his alignment of the dynamism of imaginative matter with justice:

How unjust criticism is when it sees in language only an ossified form of an inner experience! On the contrary, language is always a little ahead of thought and a little more impetuous than love...Without this [imaginative] exaggeration, life cannot develop. Life always takes too much of everything in order to have enough. The imagination must take too much for thought to have enough. The will must imagine too much in order to realise enough (253).

In their arrangements and rearrangements of matter, Carpentaria and Dreamhunter imagine too much so that thoughts of a future away from the violent pasts of nations might, as Bachelard puts it, “have enough”.

In Dreamhunter, the overturning of a hopeless future, and in Carpentaria, the opening of a future of possibility are enabled materially, through the vertical imaginary of regional emergences, of earth and air. Further, the verticality of possibility is apparent in a departure from the horizontal logic of centre and periphery, the dead centers of a colonial imaginary. Perhaps thinking on this access offers a way of moving inhabited space away from a colonial model towards the material possibilities of particular places.

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Conclusion

“Then we came forth, to see again the stars” (“Inferno”, XXXIV: 139).

As the subterranean strata of contemporary globalised relations, the ancient topos of the antipodes offers not only a way to make sense of these relations, but a way to rethink location within them. The location offered by the antipodean underworld is neither a simple return to the premodern, nor the apprehension of a coherent, linear succession of times and places, but rather a realization of the simultaneity of these. Thinking from the antipodes gives us a sense of the multitude of times within the present and of the multitude of spaces within what we think of as place. As I have shown, these spaces are both real and imaginary, and reality and imagination are domains deeply and intimately connected.

As Dante emerges from hell through the antipodes to see the stars, this space continues to offer a way of locating the self in relation to the cosmos, even if (as if often the case) that location is a realization of one’s dislocation or bewilderment. Moving between the pre-Copernican European imagination, the age of discovery, imperial expansion and the colonial endeavor to the de- colonising imperative and move to get out of late capitalism, this thesis has mapped temporal, spatial and rhetorical trajectories of the antipodean imagination. In these transpositions and transformations I have shown how older temporalities, topoi and cosmologies have not only remained present within, but were crucial to these transformations at key moments of modernity. Charting also processes of differentiation, moving from Europe to the antipodes, from Australia and New Zealand back to Europe, and regions from Australia and New Zealand, I have argued for specific effects for habitation and identity generated by the antipodean imaginary. This mapping of differentiation demonstrates the centrality of the combination of liminality, verticality, perversity, and materiality to the production of humanist, colonial, national and regional identities. 234

This conclusion is in part designed to test the implications of the thesis by examining contemporary Australian and New Zealand literature through the model I’ve established, and to show some of the ways in which this methodology continues to be useful. I aim to show how this model of understanding the antipodean metaphorics can offer insight into to the future trajectories of this imaginary. In this way, this conclusion is also offered as a prolegomena of the present moment, the end of a decade, and a glance towards the future. The novels I examine here are in many ways sequels to those I have focused on in this thesis. Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap (2008) follows Dead Europe, Andrew McGahan’s Wonders of a Godless World (2009) follows Underground and Elizabeth Knox’s The Angel’s Cut (2009) is the sequel to The Vintner’s Luck and follows Dreamhunter. I include Nam Le’s The Boat (2008) here as a collection of short stories that achieves a global scope within the range of places and identities it focuses on but retains the particular difference and locatedness of each of these.

Tsiolkas’ novel The Slap and Le’s collection of short stories in The Boat are both award-winning, critically acclaimed works that traverse distance, difference and global dispersal, engage and stage multiplicity without the binary logic of self and other. In these texts protagonists cross lines of gender, race, age, sexuality, class, nationality, culture and religion, but there is no erasure of these differences. Antipodean literature is capable of this imaginative scope and diversity, not through recourse to a homogenizing horizon of the global, but through moving across a world of verticalities of subjective, spatial and social difference. This is one possibility enabled by the material antipodean imaginary – a means of inhabiting away from colonial centres and peripheries but also away from global totality and coherence.

Unlike Tsiolkas’ previous work, in The Slap there is no first person voice, and rather than one protagonist ranging through space, the novel largely remains in Melbourne. The main movement of the text is not geographic, but 235 across eight focalisers that vary across age, gender, race and class. The Slap is a hopeful turn for Tsiolkas, and indeed ends with a glance toward the future, as Richie, the final of the novel's eight focalisers ends one of the best days of his life: “Soon, unexpectedly, like the future that had begun to creep up on him, sleep did come” (483). Earlier, Richie announces that he wants to study "Geomatic Engineering." In response to his mother's friend's "what the fuck is that?" he thinks "I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. Computers and maps, one of the treacherous paths in the matrix which is the future" (443). Here we see a futurity that was not present or possible in the “loss of faith” trilogy of Loaded, The Jesus Man and Dead Europe.

Nam Le’s The Boat similarly moves between focalisers and places, in a metonymy of astonishing individual and regional diversity. Peter Craven says of Le that “he is an effortless geographer of the imagination”, and “there is a willingness, at once expert and freewheeling, to inhabit whatever persona or nationality might come to hand” in his short fictions that “are both extraordinarily variegated and impressively embodied” (65). What these contemporary texts have in common is that they traverse and inhabit a range of irreducible subjective differences without fetishisation or erasure. This embodied diversity is one legacy of the generative perversity of the antipodean imaginary.

This observation of present and future departures from generic and figurative conventions is not an argument for chronological progress in representations of subjectivity and space. The katabatic antipodean imaginary and the residue of the prehumanist cosmology it carries have not disappeared. The presence of this imaginary is felt most keenly at the moment in Elizabeth Knox’s The Angel’s Cut and Andrew McGahan’s Wonders of Godless World. Sequel to The Vintner’s Luck, The Angel’s Cut is narrated by Lucifer and again takes up the story of Xas, the fallen angel. Wonders of a Godless World is structured around a descending and ascending imaginary, 236 and this vertical, material dynamics along with an act of self-sacrifice are harnessed to prevent a diabolic apocalypse.

The Angel’s Cut furthers and deepens the cosmology established in The Vintner’s Luck. Unfolding in Hollywood in the 1930s, another key moment of modernity, The Angel’s Cut continues the narrative of Xas’ becoming human, becoming reconciled to life on earth. The novel ends with Xas holding up the child he has promised to raise, positioning her between himself and heaven, an image of generation as one path to or through the future. This concern with generation, particularly non-normative forms appears throughout Knox’s oeuvre. In Daylight this was rehearsed through vampiric reproduction, in Black Oxen reincarnation, family generations in Billie’s Kiss and Dreamhunter, and Xas’ relationships through time in The Vintner’s Luck and The Angel’s Cut. Perhaps even more so than in The Vintner’s Luck, this novel offers hell as a place of origin, from which to speak and think originally. This place away from God as a place of original thought is explicitly staged in The Angel’s Cut, as Satan goes to hell to think:

Lucifer maintains that, like earth, Hell was there already, inhospitable and ugly, but a whole real world. He says he first went to Hell about the same time God started to store souls there—and that he took to going there to be alone with his thoughts. Out of Heaven—its colour and clamour—he was able to think, he said, and he came up with his heretical ideas (320).

Indeed, in this novel Lucifer is at the origin of narrative, The Angel’s Cut told by Lucifer, put together as if it were a film. At the end of the novel, Lucifer explains that “I put this story together from the testimony of the damned, and I used my imagination” (448).

Perhaps more significant than Lucifer's heresy “that God didn’t make the world, only found it. And that when He made angels it was an attempt to discover how people worked by copying them” (320), is Xas’ heretic 237 conclusion that “souls in hell were more like themselves than souls in heaven” (444):

Xas had his own heresy-his very own. His heresy was that God didn’t just sort individual from individual but within each individual, at least all those He let near Him, so that souls in Heaven were not the people they’d been on earth.[…] Xas wouldn’t show Flora the fine print, because what all the old songs had to say was true—in Heaven there was no trouble or sorrow or pain. … ‘Who are you? Who are you?’ he thought, as if by concentration, and questing will, he could keep her, all of her, alive forever and out of the happy conglomerate good that was Heaven—that was her best hope (321).

In Xas’ original formulation, it is the combination of contradictory elements of imperfections and good, pain as well as pleasure that constitute the substance of humanity. The distilled souls in Heaven are “not the people they’d been on earth”. Xas does not entirely side with Lucifer, however. As he tells his archangel brother: “I’m not on your side, Lucifer. I’m not going to say, ‘What kind of God does that?’ like people do. There’s another way of thinking about all this, only I haven’t found it yet” (444). Here it is fallen angel who can hope for, and move towards a new way of seeing, from the perspective of neither God nor Lucifer.

This thesis has argued that “[a]nother way of thinking about all this” is a possibility offered by the antipodean underworld. As Bachelard says of the poetic image “[t]hrough this creativeness the imagining consciousness proves to be, very simply but very purely, an origin” (xxiv) and asks “if we render speech unforeseeable, is this not an apprenticeship to freedom?”. As such an image of the “unforeseeable”, the antipodean underworld still is perversely enabling of this possibility. Colonial identity will never be stable, and will always have the legacy of its violent origins and inheritance. Continuing to acknowledge this requires a subject open to compromise, and this possibility of compromise opens a space of hope for relations with indigenous, national, and cultural others. This space of openness is first and foremost an 238 imaginative one, and this thesis has argued, the antipodean imaginary has a long history of this possibility, enabled by doing and thinking about things perversely, in “another way”.

239

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