Broken Gates and Leaky Graves: Spectral Language and Australia’S Ghost Stories
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View metadata, citation and similarbroughtCORE papers to you at by core.ac.uk provided by Queensland University of Technology ePrints Archive BROKEN GATES AND LEAKY GRAVES: SPECTRAL LANGUAGE AND AUSTRALIA’S GHOST STORIES Samuel Patrick Finegan Bachelor of Creative Industries (Creative Writing) First Class Honours, Creative Industries (Creative Writing) Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Media, Entertainments and Creative Arts Faculty of Creative Industries Queensland University of Technology 01/2014 KEYWORDS GHOSTS, HAUNTINGS, PARANORMAL FICTION, AUSTRALIAN FICTION, POSTCOLONIALISM, CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY i Broken Gates and Leaky Graves: Spectral language and Australia’s ghost stories. ABSTRACT Broken Gates and Leaky Graves: Spectral language and Australia’s ghost stories. Ghost stories are unusual amongst supernatural literatures in their modelling of a recognisable, mimetic reality interrupted or infiltrated by immaterial forces. Despite this, the dominant approaches to criticism of the literary ghost story do not address the ghost story in terms of its modelled reality. This thesis, in its discussion of Australian ghost stories, advances a new approach to ghost narratives which seeks to model and articulate the mechanics of ghosts and hauntings as something reliant on and engaged with the material and the mundane. This approach is termed spectral language is grounded in the philosophical work of Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin and Ludwig Wittgenstein and is attuned to the fictive, folkloric and cultural logic that allows the ghost and haunting entry into the otherwise rigorously ‘real’ reality of the text. A spectral language reading of Australia’s corpus of ghost literature, including works by authors such as Mudrooroo, Tim Winton, Lucy Sussex, Christos Tsiolkas, Carmel Bird and Sam Watson, reveals an Australia perpetually troubled, but also reassured by a dynamic and continually shifting language of memory, haunting and ghostly presence. ii Broken Gates and Leaky Graves: Spectral language and Australia’s ghost stories. TABLE OF CONTENTS Keywords i Abstract ii Table of Contents iii Statement of Original Authorship iv Acknowledgements v Introduction 1 Chapter One: Stained and Fertile Soil 31 landscape, history and ‘Gothic Australianness’ Chapter Two: Fractured Bodies and Fracturing Narratives` 61 violence, monsters and traumatic tales Chapter Three: Red Heart/Black Spirit 93 indigeneity, the colony and spectral property Chapter Four: A Troubled Medium 133 utterance, story-tellers and the tyranny of text Chapter Five: A Cult of Graves 175 monuments, architecture and concreted identity Chapter Six: The Cussed Junkyard 213 reproduction, bricolage and the machine Conclusion 251 Bibliography 273 iii Broken Gates and Leaky Graves: Spectral language and Australia’s ghost stories. STATEMENT OF ORIGINAL AUTHORSHIP The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted to meet requirements for an award at this or any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made. Signature: QUT Verified Signature Date: ___29/04/2014______________________________ iv Broken Gates and Leaky Graves: Spectral language and Australia’s ghost stories. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor Dr. Lesley Hawkes. Beyond supervision, she also gave me the full trust and support I needed to undertake this project, steering me towards theorists, theories and concepts without which this project could not have been completed. Over the seven years I have spent at QUT, she has been a continued inspiration and guiding light. I would also like to thank Dr. Vivienne Muller, whose insight and critical eye curtailed my excesses and with which I could not have done without. To Imogen Smith, Sarah Kanake, Mark Piccini and the HDR Creative Writing and Literary Studies cohort as a whole thank you for your collegial support as well as for the free and frank exchange of ideas and the simple pleasures of kvetching about the academic process. I would like to acknowledge the contributions of my friends and family, for their support and near limitless patience with an occasionally moribund and obtuse topic. Finally I would like the acknowledge the contribution of the Australian Government with whose funding I was able to devote my full time and energy to the completion of this project. v Broken Gates and Leaky Graves: Spectral language and Australia’s ghost stories. vi Broken Gates and Leaky Graves: Spectral language and Australia’s ghost stories. INTRODUCTION “No disembodied spirit can resist an open medium… like moths to a flame they come” -Traci Harding, ‘The Detox Factor’ Australia is haunted. Its architecture and its literature are shadowed and penetrated by the unquiet dead. In some ways this haunting is well known: tacitly acknowledged in Australia’s ‘guilt industry’ and implicit in the anxieties and ambivalence surrounding Australian identity. As with many other nations, it is a rare historical site in Australia that does not claim some form of haunting or other. Ghosts also weave in and out of Australia’s media, both canonical and contemporary dragging with them a rhetoric of dread, debt and historical troubles. The Australian cultural climate, in this sense, is a haunted one. In its short history as a ‘settled’ nation, it has more than earned this haunting. Where the injustices of the colonial system go, the ghosts of the wronged follow and intermingle with other ghosts which seem to throng wherever people live: the ghosts of suicides, infanticides, murders and deaths by deprivation. As such tables rattle, lights flicker, graves glow and apparitions are glimpsed in the mirrors and corridors of old colonial houses. These are the physical signs that Australia is haunted, and the means by which its citizens detect the dark histories which underlie its colonisation and continued settlement. Taken in isolation, these signs, however, are arbitrary: little more than random and occasionally entirely mundane phenomena. The system of signs and phenomena that constitute a ghostly or haunting encounter are not empirically obvious: rather they are an inherited cultural language. The significance of rattling, flickering and so on are learned rather than intuited. Given the scepticism which greets claims of real ghostly encounters, at least within the rationalised and empiricised 1 Broken Gates and Leaky Graves: Spectral language and Australia’s ghost stories. ‘West’, this information is no longer imparted seriously, or with deliberate intent. This information is absorbed from a media environment that indulges regularly in the fiction or potential of ghostly experience and encounter: educating audiences in a cultural logic that governs the ghost and the haunting, As the ghost story must be central to this kind of education, it is curious that there has been only limited engagement with the structures and mechanics of the form which operate according to this cultural logic. While the form has often been plumbed for its psychological or ideological weight, less attention has been paid to the underlying logic that is recognisable in ghost stories across media: a logic shared, developed and informed by folklore, urban legends, mass media and literary ghost stories. Because of the instrumentality of this logic, it can be said that Australia is haunted because of its stories. It is the narrative that transforms a rattling table, a flickering light and the momentary impression of a woman at the window into something more than coincidence. It is a story that calls the ghost into the wail of wind through the gapped walls of a homestead, or articulates the sense of discomfort and dread that hangs over massacre sites, marked or unmarked. What makes the supernatural logic of the ghost story intriguing is its ability to embrace the real world and its concerns not only metaphorically, but mimetically. Instead of embodying, by way of metaphor, the types of concerns signalled above the ghost and haunting are responses to those concerns; they articulate rather than represent guilt, unsettlement or dark histories. The ghost story in this thesis is a narrative defined by that mimetic engagement. It is a form which models a mimetic reality, and which invests the material, objectively present elements of that world with paranormal significance, agency or presence. While not framed in those terms, this quality is recognised by both authors and critics of the ghost story as essential. Michael Cox and R.A. Gilbert argue in their introduction to The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories that ‘we must feel this imagined 2 Broken Gates and Leaky Graves: Spectral language and Australia’s ghost stories. world to be in its essentials a reflection of our own, making us anxious witnesses to a sudden and often fatal violation of everyday reality by the supernatural’(Cox and Gilbert 2008, p. x). This mimetic effect means that any instance of a ghost text will be informed by the tropes, logic and trappings of ghost texts from other media, and forms of storytelling. This results in a hybridised language borrowed and developed across the fields that the ghost story emerges in rather than discrete folkloric, filmic, or literary heritages. Each of these individual heritages partakes in an ‘everyday reality’ which contains the narratives and tropes of the others. Inexorably,