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Department of English and American Studies Postcolonial Critique In Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Andrea Kohoutková Postcolonial Critique in Selected Novels by Peter Carey Master’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Mgr. Martina Horáková, Ph. D. 2018 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………… Author’s signature Table of Contents: Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 1 1 Historical Events Depicted in Carey’s Novels .............................................................. 9 2 Features of Postcolonial Literature and Criticism ....................................................... 19 3 Illywhacker ................................................................................................................... 24 4 Oscar and Lucinda ....................................................................................................... 32 5 Jack Maggs .................................................................................................................. 42 6 True History of the Kelly Gang .................................................................................... 50 7 A Long Way from Home ............................................................................................... 56 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 66 Works Cited .................................................................................................................... 70 English Summary ............................................................................................................ 74 Czech Summary .............................................................................................................. 75 Introduction Claire Armitstead, literary editor of The Guardian, asked the Australian writer Peter Carey, one of Australia’s best-known authors, in an interview about his new book A Long Way from Home (2017) (according to Armitstead Carey’s first attempt to address Australian legacy of colonialism) at a special Guardian Live Event in London why had he never dealt with Australia’s colonial past before. Carey responded that the issue of colonialism had always been in a way a part of his work. However, he stated that he was strongly influenced by a press conference that took place in Canberra in the middle of 1980s where one of the Aboriginal participants criticized white authors writing about the Aboriginal experience and appealed to them to abandon this practice. It was not until he was 60 that he came to terms with this complicated topic and decided to write openly about it. In this diploma thesis which deals with Peter Carey and his works I want to show that even though his earlier novels, Illywhacker (1985), Oscar and Lucinda (1988), Jack Maggs (1997), and True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), do not express such a direct and crushing critique of colonialism and settlement of Australia as his last novel, the elements of postcolonialist critique are an essential part of each of them. In those novels, Carey challenges the traditionalist history of Australia. That is the history told and recorded from the point of view of the white and mostly British colonizers of Australia that typically glorifies successful settlements of European immigrants, their culture, traditions, and values brought into a new environment, and completely omits the experience of the Aboriginal inhabitants of Australia and the convicts forcibly relocated into new foreign and hostile continent. Carey revises and rewrites this traditionalist history with his own fictional version of history in which he tries to rectify the untruths, misinterpretations and omissions that are the integral part of the former one. 1 The diploma thesis provides an overview of the theoretical background to Carey’s novels as well as detailed analyses of individual novels to demonstrate how they are influenced by Carey’s own vision of Australian history. It also compares Carey’s earlier novels with his newest book A Long Way from Home. The first chapter is devoted to Peter Carey himself, it contains information about Carey’s life and work. The aim of this chapter is to introduce the writer, to provide basic facts about Carey’s social background, his roots, education and family life. Such an introduction is particularly important because in his novels Carey often uses locations, towns, situations and characters that he is closely familiar with – he knows them from his personal life. The second chapter provides a brief summary of political and cultural background of Carey’s novels; it introduces Australia’s history of a settler colony and explains the difference between Australian experience and the experience of other settler colonies. It is necessary to mention that this chapter does not represent an exhaustive overview of Australian history, rather, it focuses only on historical events that play a significant role in Carey’s novels. The last theoretical chapter contains information about postcolonialism: what postcolonialism is, what do postcolonial writers want to achieve and how. The more extensive part of the thesis consists of detailed analyses of the five novels with an emphasis on political criticism Carey expresses in each of his books, the criticism of imperialism, British colonialism and neocolonialism. Each of these chapters contains a brief summary of the novel in question and an in-depth analysis of the work, highlighting the passages that can be linked to the colonial past of Australia and that express some kind of critique, or reveal a hidden history of Carey’s home country. The concluding chapter is dedicated to the comparison of the five novels and focuses on the recurring themes and topics that present an integral part of each of the 2 novels and that altogether make up the image of Australia as a postcolonial country facing the legacies and burdens of its colonial past. As it was already mentioned, Peter Carey is one of the best-known, most popular, and most critically acclaimed Australian authors. Therefore, there have been already published numerous books about his work. The most important and helpful secondary sources that I used for the first part of this diploma thesis regarding the life and work of Peter Carey were two books written and edited by Andreas Gaile, a German scholar with a long-standing interest in Peter Carey, Fabulating Beauty: Perspectives on the Fiction of Peter Carey and Rewriting History: Peter Carey’s Fictional Biography of Australia, Mary Ellen Snodgrass’s Peter Carey: A Literary Companion, and Dancing on Hot Macadam: Peter Carey’s Fiction by Anthony J. Hassall. Much interesting information associated with the questions of colonialism and postcolonialism was gathered from the well-known book The Empire Writes Back by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffith, and Helen Tiffin. The collections of essays The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons edited by Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti and Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature and History in South Africa and Australia edited by Kate Darian-Smith, Liz Gunner and Sarah Nuttall explained some of the approaches and opinions of authors living in some of the countries with colonial and postcolonial experience. I also used some of Peter Carey’s opinions and ideas that he shared with the public in the course of a number of interesting interviews that were published on YouTube and different podcasts. The materials and sources for the deeper analyses of the novels were collected from Anthony J. Hassall’s Dancing on Hot Macadam: Peter Carey’s Fiction (1984) which presents a thematical study of Carey’s work, Bruce Woodcock’s Peter Carey (2003) and Shahram Sistani’s Peter Carey’s Fiction: A Critical Study (2011). 3 Peter Philip Carey is Australian novelist, the winner of many international and Australian fiction awards, including two Booker Prizes for Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and True History of the Kelly Gang (2001) and two Commonwealth Writers Prizes for Jack Maggs (1998) and True History of the Kelly Gang (2001). Andreas Gaile claims in his work Rewriting History: Peter Carey’s Fictional Biography of Australia that Carey can be seen as “a darling of literary criticism”, “one of the icons of the New Literatures in English”, and “one of the most highly-decorated writers in English” (7). In their book Crabtracks: Progress and Process in Teaching the New Literatures in English, Collier et al. explain that “by now ‘postcolonial’ and ‘new’ literatures are more often than not used simultaneously” and that “the terms developed out of the concept of ‘Commonwealth’ and therefore emphasize the political and cultural inheritance of British imperialism” (86). In compliance with this statement, Gaile then sees Carey as one of the most important authors of former Commonwealth literature who discuss or criticize British colonialism and its legacy. Carey (1943–) was born in southeastern Australia into a middle-class family of English, Irish, and Welsh descent. His social and cultural background and the relationships in the wider Carey family, especially the strong bond between him and his grandparents, often mirror in his works. Indeed, Snodgrass claims that the relationship to his grandparents “is central to his life and as important as birth parents” (5). Their own immigrant experience
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