Chapter 1 Introduction: a Whisper in the Mind 1

POSTSECULAR SPIRITUALITY IN AUSTRALIAN YOUNG ADULT FICTION

Dale Kathryn Lowe

Bachelor of Arts (Macquarie) Master of Arts (UNSW) Master of Education (UTS)

This thesis is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

January 2016

Department of English, Faculty of Arts Macquarie University

CONTENTS

Abstract

Declaration

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1 Introduction: a whisper in the mind 1

Chapter 2 The authoritative word: organised religion in 27 Australian YA fiction

Chapter 3 Right here, right now: spiritual quests in realistic 57 YA fiction

Chapter 4 The realm of the marvellous: spiritual quests in 87 speculative YA fiction

Chapter 5 The ineffable in-between: spiritual quests in 117 multimodal texts

Chapter 6 Crossing thresholds: death and afterlife beliefs in 153 YA fiction

Chapter 7 Nature and supernature: science, faith, nature and 185 culture in YA fiction

Chapter 8 Gendered bodies, gendered souls? 215

Chapter 9 Conclusion: a shy hope in the heart 253

Bibliography 263

ABSTRACT

Spirituality has been described by some international authors and critics as ‘the last taboo’ in young adult literature. It is not therefore surprising that in Australia, a country often perceived as resolutely secular, spirituality is rarely an explicit theme in children’s and young adult fiction. This thesis offers a postsecular understanding of expressions of young adult spirituality in late twentieth and early twenty-first century Australian novels. Postsecularism, a contested concept which emerged in the late twentieth century, is positively interpreted by many critics as the development of a respectful dialogue between secular and religious viewpoints since the ‘return of the religious’ in contemporary Western cultures. This thesis takes a postsecular dialogic approach to the analysis of a range of contemporary Australian young adult novels. The study is informed by a number of literary and sociocultural theories and predominantly draws on Bakhtin’s concept of the dialogic struggle between authoritative and internally persuasive discourses, leading to the process of a subject’s ideological becoming (Bakhtin 1981, 342-348).

The textual analysis centres on a diverse selection of Australian novels published from the late 1980s until the current time, with a focus on twenty-first century texts. The discussion begins with a brief examination of texts that engage with traditional religious discourses and moves on to more tacit portrayals of the modern spiritual quest in realistic, speculative and multimodal genres.

The final chapters investigate the discrete topics of afterlife beliefs, the relationship between spirituality, science and ecology, and the gendering of spiritualities. I argue that in recent

Australian young adult fiction spirituality is expressed more implicitly than explicitly – in the words of Manning Clark (1985, 77) “a whisper in the mind and a shy hope in the heart” - but that this representation is starting to reflect the emergent postsecular turn in many Western cultures.

This trend thus reveals a previously concealed awareness of the interrelationship of spiritual and secular discourses that embraces possibilities of spiritual and ideological becoming in characters and readers leading, as Bakhtin proclaimed, to “ever newer ways to mean” (Bakhtin 1981, 346).

DECLARATION

I certify that this thesis entitled Postsecular Spirituality in Australian Young Adult Fiction is entirely my own work and has not been submitted for a higher degree to any other university or institution. Where I have used the work of others, both primary sources consisting of fictional texts and secondary sources consisting of theoretical texts, these sources have been appropriately referenced and acknowledged.

No ethics approval was required for any part of my research.

Dale Kathryn Lowe

______Signature

______Date

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are many people and organisations I want to thank for their assistance to me throughout the long journey towards completion of this thesis. A number of people in the Department of English, Macquarie University played critical roles and deserve my particular thanks: most importantly my primary supervisor, Dr Robyn McCallum, provided invaluable insight, extensive knowledge and ongoing guidance throughout my years of candidature, as well as re-reading and offering feedback to enable me to reach my goal; my associate supervisor, Dr Victoria Flanagan, offered constructive feedback and smiling encouragement all along the way; and Emeritus Professor John Stephens was always there in the background with his great wisdom and advice. Macquarie University assisted me with funding to present a paper at the 2013 IRSCL conference in The Netherlands, for which I am grateful. I also made full and regular use of the wonderful space provided for research students on the top floor of the Macquarie University Library. The Austlit database was an essential resource for my research in Australian literature and I am thankful to the people who created and maintain it. Above all, my long-suffering family, Ian and Victoria, gave me unflagging encouragement, love and support throughout my candidature in more ways than I can express. Ian’s technical expertise and help with formatting documents allowed me to persevere when such peripheral matters frustrated me. Victoria provided a wonderful sounding board with her perceptive literary expertise. They both have my eternal gratitude and love as they share my relief that the journey is nearly over.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: A WHISPER IN THE MIND

One of the major functions of spirituality is to provide metaphors for answering the hard questions. Some of us prefer shared metaphors, others of us like to find or invent our own. Jenny Pausacker, 2000

Australian spirituality was described by the historian, Manning Clark (1985, 77), as “a whisper in the mind and a shy hope in the heart”. Building on this trope, Gary Bouma (2006, 2) argues in

Australian Soul: religion and spirituality in the 21st century that “Australians hold the spiritual gently in their hearts, speaking tentatively about it”. It is not surprising then that in a country perceived as so reserved about the subject, spirituality rarely appears as an explicit theme in

Australian children’s and young adult (YA) literature. This thesis investigates representations of spirituality in Australian YA fiction from the late 1980s to the present – an era sometimes called postsecular - with a major focus on twenty-first century texts. The articulation of my research topic to colleagues and friends often elicited the bemused response that it was perhaps oxymoronic, as distinct expressions of spirituality were unlikely to be voiced in Australian culture generally, let alone in Australian YA fiction with its preoccupation with the here and now. Such reactions inspired me to pursue evidence that manifestations of spirituality, as defined in this thesis, are amply represented in novels recently written for Australian adolescents. This assertion is augmented by an analysis of the ways in which authors use various narrative strategies in a selection of contemporary novels to evoke a sense of spirituality or the sacred. I argue that while mainstream organised religion is indeed thematised only sparsely, a contemporary individualised form of spirituality is increasingly discernible in Australian YA fiction. My argument is supported by scholarly work in literary, cultural and social theory and I claim that, in concurrence with the postsecular hypothesis, representations of spirituality are becoming more perceptible, although tacitly expressed as suggested by Clark and Bouma. This introductory chapter aims to explain the

concepts as they are used here, to delineate the context of the study and to outline the methodologies used.

Defining spirituality In the course of my research, one of the more challenging problems has been to establish an adequate definition for the pivotal concept of spirituality. In Fantastic Spiritualities, Jobling (2010,

8) asserts that “Spirituality is a very ‘baggy’ term and notoriously difficult to define, as it comprehends so many variant interpretations”. Dictionary definitions tend to be vague, self- referential or negatively oriented, for example, “the quality or condition of being spiritual; attachment to or regard for things of the spirit as opposed to material or worldly interests” (OED online) and “incorporeal or immaterial nature” (Macquarie Dictionary online). This apparent deficiency in the English language is indicative of the elusive and equivocal nature of the concept of spirituality. Looking beyond concise dictionary definitions, explorations through various humanities and social science sources - including philosophy, psychology, theology, sociology, anthropology and cultural studies - provided the following succinct definition which initially seemed functional for this project: “an awareness of a being or force that transcends the material aspects of life and gives a deep sense of wholeness or connectedness to the universe” (Myers et al

2000, 252). Even more pithily, “a conscious way of life based on a transcendent referent” is the definition used in The Spirituality of Generation Y (Mason et al 2007a, 39), a study which stimulated my initial interest in this project. In another study that appeared to be thematically related to mine, entitled Rewriting God: spirituality in contemporary Australian women’s fiction,

Lindsay (2000, xiv) defines spirituality as “the ways in which humans perceive the presence – or absence – of a suprahuman force, and how this affects their interpretation of the universe, their role within it, and their hopes for an ongoing existence beyond the death of the body”. To some extent, all of these interpretations are applicable to the phenomena and perceptions that emerge in the primary texts selected for analysis in this thesis. However, as my approach is from a broad secular perspective, definitions that depend on a ‘transcendent referent’ do not always fit comfortably with the experiences encountered in the contemporary Australian YA fiction surveyed. Rather, the

accounts cited above – especially the second two - lean towards a conventional Judeo-Christian view and fail to accommodate major non-theistic belief systems such as Buddhism, nor more secular manifestations. According to Sheldrake (2014, 183), the concept of spirituality is

“increasingly used outside religion to describe a quest for values and practices in the pursuit of a meaningful life” and sometimes involves “non-religious systems of thought such as philosophy or science.” The notion of a quest resonates clearly with many of the YA novels considered in this thesis.

Early attempts to resolve the definition challenge entailed reading broadly across the humanities and social sciences and it was neither surprising nor unexpected that the term

‘spirituality’ is very often used interchangeably with ‘religion’, a similarly difficult concept to define (Jobling, 11). A considerable degree of scholarship has been devoted to the relationship between the two concepts and the term ‘spiritual but not religious’ is so prevalent, particularly in the United States, that it has been condensed to a widely-used acronym, SBNR (Sanders 2010).

This predilection for non-religious spirituality may be partly attributed to the idea that institutional religion “is increasingly associated with complex and unhelpful dogmatic systems, heavy and judgemental moralism, authoritarian clerical hierarchies, the constraints of social expectations and an excessive concern with buildings and money“ (Sheldrake 2014, 57). Regarding related expressions, recent literary scholarship has tended to use ‘the sacred’ interchangeably with

‘spirituality‘(for example, Ashcroft et al (2005, 2009); Paranjape (2009); McCreddin (2010),

McAvan (2012)). While the two terms are often used synonymously in the current study, a demarcation between spirituality and the sacred emerges occasionally with 'the sacred' used as a descriptive quality with concrete concepts such as sacred ground, sacred texts and sacred music, denoting their disconnectedness from everyday objects.

While references to traditional religious experiences were frequently encountered in the primary texts surveyed as well as in the secondary readings, many less conventional spiritual concepts also frequently recurred. Such instances involved the evocation of sense of transcendence beyond the everyday materialism and consumerism that dominate our embodied subjectivities, with or without reference to a deity, force or any other external referent. Circumventing allusions to

referents beyond the self, the following description was taken from a research paper on 'Religion vs. spirituality: a contemporary conundrum' (Schneiders 2003,165) that contrasts the two notions.

This definition seemed the most inclusive of the traditional religious experiences and the humanistic spiritual phenomena which emerge in much of the fiction:

the experience of conscious involvement in the project of life-integration through self- transcendence toward the ultimate value one perceives.

The reference to life-integration and self-transcendence is particularly relevant to spirituality in YA fiction because of the centrality to that genre of the search for self-identity and maturation beyond solipsistic childhood. Although the elusive concept of spirituality continued to defy the constraints of a concise summarising sentence, Schneiders’ definition proved a useful guide towards the development of a definition specific to the current thesis.

In order to avoid the trite sentimentality that sometimes overwhelms discussions of spirituality, in both traditional religious and New Age discourses, it was helpful to incorporate some of the more tangible intellectual aspects of spirituality encountered in the novels, such as the formation and integration of beliefs and values. Yet, such demonstrable concepts are often inadequate to capture the impressions experienced in reading novels which evoked an emotional and ineffable sense of mystery and wonder. Likewise, literature reviews often noted a feeling of awe and transcendence paradoxically accompanied by an immanent sense of connectedness with the universe, the self, other people and perhaps the numinous. I therefore retained a definition of spirituality that synthesised the more tangible cognitive concepts of belief formation and ideological development with an often indescribable sense of self-transcendence. Drawing on

Schneiders’ description, the following attributes seemed to encapsulate the experiences and perceptions that emerged from the novels: belief formation, development of ideological consciousness, transcendent awareness beyond the self as well as a sense of immanent connectedness within the self, with other people and with all of existence. In summary, the concept of spirituality is defined in this thesis as the ongoing development of beliefs, values and a sense of connectedness that transcends materiality. In the context of this study, spirituality is treated phenomenologically as an aspect of subjectivity rather than as an ontological investigation of the

existence of a spiritual realm and the textual analysis thus focusses on the narrative construction of spiritual subjectivities of fictional characters. As the foregoing investigations demonstrate, there are many diverse manifestations and conceptions of spirituality, hence the plural term ‘spiritualities’ will be used concurrently with the singular throughout this thesis.

The postsecular hypothesis In some sociocultural and artistic domains, it has been declared that “God is no longer dead”

(McAvan 2012, 1), recalling the pronouncement by Nietzsche’s madman in The Gay Science that

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? … Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? (Nietzsche 1882/2001, 125, my ellipses)

Many scholars of the nineteenth century believed that “religion would gradually fade in importance and cease to be significant with the advent of industrial society” (Norris and Englehart 2004, 3). As a supplement to such arguments, valuable insights about current views of spirituality can be gained from scholarship about postsecularism, a notion which has been the subject of discussion since the

1990s in sociological, political and theological disciplines1, as well as in literary domains2. This period of intellectual debate dovetails with the production of the focus texts explored in this thesis.

The term postsecularism first appeared in the late 1980s (Connolly 1991), gaining momentum in the1990s and the twenty-first century, partly in response to the events of September 11, 2001

(hereafter referred to as 9/11). Other contemporaneous trends in Western cultures have also contributed to the development of postsecular discourse, including a perceived conservative turn in religious observance, the rising popularity of evangelical religions, particularly among young people, and fundamentalist extremism in some organised religions. The postsecular hypothesis continues to be refined but currently, according to many of its more optimistic proponents, it refers very basically to the acknowledgement that the anticipated secularisation of the Western world had not materialised completely and had been overtaken by the development of a respectful dialogic relationship between religious and secular interests. A postsecular society could be described as

1 For example, see Habermas (2001, 2008, 2010), Blond (1998), Hamilton (2008) 2 For example, see McClure (1995, 2007), During (2002), Paranjape (2009), Carruthers and Tate (2010), 5

one “that wishes to move beyond the limiting options of being either dogmatically religious in a particular vein or militantly secular” (Mews 2006, 78). This conciliatory venture has been stimulated by a number of sociologists, most notably Jurgen Habermas, in public forums and publications such as An awareness of what is missing: faith and reason in a postsecular age

(Habermas 2010). The title of this document encapsulates the essence of the postsecular concept.

Postsecularism continues a long tradition of theorising about the role of religion and spirituality in Western society. Nietzsche’s famous proclamation was followed by Max Weber's concerns about understanding the processes of rationalisation, secularisation, and disenchantment that he associated with the rise of capitalism and modernity, when he stated that “The fate of our times is characterised by rationalisation and intellectualisation and, above all, by the

‘disenchantment of the world’” (Weber 1918, 16). By the 1990s, however, it appeared that the predicted demise of religion in favour of the rationalism of scientific and Enlightenment discourses had been overstated. In fact, references to ‘the return of the religious’ are commonly heard, although the nature of the revitalised phenomenon is complex. However, it is argued that some forms of secularisation exist paradoxically alongside a movement towards sacralisation and the re- enchantment of the world. According to Heelas et al (2005, 78), in line with the return to the religious there has been a shift away from participation in institutional religion towards a more individualised form of spirituality and “subjectivization is significantly affecting membership of traditional institutions; those not adapting to this need are showing signs of decline and attrition”.

In A Secular Age (2007), philosopher Charles Taylor provides another significant contribution to this conversation as he extensively traces the progression of Western society from a state where belief in god was almost inevitable to one where such belief is one option among many.

In reaction to the postsecular hypothesis, defenders of the earlier secularisation thesis include sociologist Steve Bruce (2011) who claims that although it is currently “an unfashionable theory”, statistical evidence indicates that the decline in power, popularity and prestige of religion across the modern Western world is not a short-term or localised trend, nor is it an accident. The new atheist movement, championed by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris who are sometimes called “the four horsemen of the New Atheism” (Gribbin

2011), provides another perspective, stridently promoting secular and scientific discourses and optimistically anticipating the demise of religious authority in contemporary sociocultural dialogues and its consignment to the status of mythology, as has been the fate of many ancient religions. While some conservative religious participants in the conversation welcome postsecularism, not as an equitable dialogue between the sacred and the secular, but as a return to the predominance of religious discourses in society, other observers anticipate the dawn of a cultural era which privileges neither the secular nor the religious, but permits both worldviews.

Among those who welcome the idea of a postsecular turn, Landy & Saler (2009) and Tacey (2000) herald the re-enchantment of the world as a postmodern reaction to Weber’s modernist proclamation of disenchantment. Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama (2008, section 4.2), supports the notion of a humanist dialogue between sacred and secular interests, asserting that

Secularism does not mean rejection of all religions. It means respect for all religions and human beings including non-believers. I am talking to you not as a Tibetan or a Buddhist but as a human being having a friendly discussion and sharing my experiences on the benefits of cultivating basic human values.

This polyphony of voices provides valuable contexts for the current study. Literary representations of both the disenchantment envisaged by Weber and the re-enchantment anticipated by others are found in the focus novels of this thesis, often more implicitly than explicitly, evoking Manning

Clark’s “whisper in the mind”.

Spirituality of young Australians Contemporary Australian spirituality has been the central subject of some monographs published since the turn of the millennium. In Re-enchantment: the new Australian spirituality, David Tacey

(2000) claims that Australians continuously engage in spiritual quests that seek to redefine human identity and construct a new consciousness about Aboriginal reconciliation, a recognition of youth culture and its spiritual directions, a quest for environmental integrity and responsibility to community and each other. At the beginning of the new century, he envisages a quest for a re- enchantment that enables Australians to build a more harmonious and integrated society. In accordance with the postsecular hypothesis, Tacey argues in The spirituality revolution: the

emergence of contemporary spirituality (2003) that a new social situation has emerged “in which we no longer accept secular society’s reliance on rationality alone and in which the spiritual life is no longer restricted to those who belong to a religious tradition” (Rolph 2001, 409). In light of his university teaching experience, Tacey expresses optimism that a spirituality revolution is most powerfully at work in Australian youth culture. As cited above, Bouma’s Australian soul: religion and spirituality in the twenty-first century (2006) utilises Manning Clark’s characterisation of

Australian spirituality as a “whisper in the mind, and a shy hope in the heart” as a framing metaphor to challenge the idea that religious and spiritual life in Australia is in decline. Bouma

(2006, 206) argues that contemporary Australian spirituality takes a form that is “quieter, less charismatic and more towards the low-temperature end of the scale of religious intensity than elsewhere”.

Some recent publications suggest a growing interest in young Australians’ spirituality and religious beliefs. Reasons for living: education and young people's search for meaning, identity and spirituality (Crawford and Rossiter 2006) explores the development and psychological function of meaning, identity and spirituality in the lives of young people and is aimed towards an

Australian religious education readership. While it is biased towards Christianity, particularly

Catholicism, it also provides a considerable non-sectarian overview of youth spirituality, as the authors argue that “by using a language of spirituality that is not limited to the religious, there is a better chance of articulating the spiritual and moral dimensions to general education in a productive way” (Crawford and Rossiter 2006, 9). Sociology of religion for generations X and Y (Possamai

2009) emerges from a sociological rather than an educational perspective and examines the intersection between consumer culture, cyber-culture and popular culture in the lives of young

Australians. The text explores concepts such as secularisation and the multiple modernisation thesis, re-enchantment, the “McDonaldisation” of society and the “easternisation of the west”, as well addressing emergent phenomena within a range of traditional religions that includes

Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, as well as New Age, Scientology, and Witchcraft. Possamai also considers new religious trends such as the mixing of religion and popular culture on the internet as evidenced in new faith categories such as Jediism and Matrixism. These and other ‘invented

religions’ are investigated in depth in an international context in Invented Religions: imagination, fiction and faith (Cusack 2011).

A major stimulus for my research that specifically investigated young Australian spiritualities was the publication of The spirit of generation Y: young people’s spirituality in a changing Australia (Mason et al, 2007a). This report details the results of a survey of a nationally representative sample of Generation Y Australians (which the study identifies as those born between 1976 and1990), with comparison groups from Generation X (born between 1961 and

1975) and the Baby-Boomer generation (born between 1946 and 60). The survey is supplemented by extended, face-to-face interviews that examine the Generation Y participants’ range of worldviews and values, their construction of a sense of meaning and purpose in life, the ways in which they find peace and happiness, their involvement in traditional religions and alternative spiritualities, the ways they relate to their society and the influences which shape their outlooks and lifestyles. Although the study is written from a perspective which presents Christianity as normative (Cusack 2011, 414), the research reveals “three main strands in the spirituality of young

Australians: traditional, alternative and humanist”, the latter strand also termed secular elsewhere in the study (Mason et al, 2007b, 149). The category labelled ‘traditional’ encompasses the major religions practiced in Australia – Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism.

Alternative includes New Age or paranormal beliefs outside of the traditional domain, including neo-paganism, goddess worship, Wicca, channelling, Reiki, crystals, spiritualism, belief in ghosts, superstition and astrology as well as spiritual practices detached from their original religion, such as yoga, tai chi and transcendental meditation. The humanist or secular group was deemed to have

“a worldview which affirms human experience and human reason, rather than adopting religious traditions or ‘spiritual’ paths” (Mason et al 2007b, 150). However, the researchers conclude that

“for the most part, young people are not active spiritual seekers, but instead have highly individualistic and relativistic approaches to life and spirituality, and are hardly familiar with religious traditions” (2007c, 1) which partially conflicts with Tacey’s perspective that young

Australians are enthusiastically involved in a spirituality revolution.

Spirituality in literature

Australian contexts

Australian culture is not renowned for overt scholarly discussion of spirituality in its artistic production, even if it can be argued that eclectic forms of spirituality pervade much Australian literature and other art forms. The stereotypical Australian identity - particularly the Anglo-Celtic version - is often viewed as fervently secular and even anti-religious, “directly related to the construction of the typical Australian as a physical, horse-riding, unintellectual, sport-mad male, uninterested in creativity or thought” (Ashcroft 2005,141). However, in a recent collection of articles devoted to the sacred in Australian literature, Ashcroft, Devlin-Glass and McCredden

(2005, 124) attempt to dispel the entrenched “myth of Australian secularism”, arguing that the sacred emerges

in the diversion of spiritual imagination in Australia away from institutional religion towards creative production; in the effects of indigenous sacred forms and practices on the Australian psyche; in the usurping of the time-honoured tenets of received religion by the spatial realities of post-colonial life.

The ‘Sacred in Australian literature’ focus issue of Antipodes: a North American journal of

Australian literature (December 2005) in which these articles appeared was followed by two special issues of the Australian journal Meanjin (Summer 2006 and Autumn 2010) dedicated to the representation of religious or spiritual faith in Australian literature and culture. In addition to these special journal issues, the recent publication of a number of monographs suggests a developing interest in the sacred in Australian culture (for example, Lindsay (2000); Ashcroft et al (2009);

Paranjape (2009); McCreddin (2010)). While these articles and monographs are mostly concerned with adult literature, ‘The horizonal sublime’(Ashcroft 2005) discusses several novels3 which have distinct characteristics of YA fiction in their young adult focalising protagonists, their “coming-of- age” plots and their thematic “preoccupation with subjectivity, especially the development of notions of selfhood, relationships between the self and others and between individuals and society”

(McCallum 2006, 217).

3 The Service of Clouds (Falconer 1997), The White Earth (McGahan 2004) and Cloudstreet (Winton 1991) 10

Literature for young adults

While it is beyond the scope of this thesis to propose a comprehensive definition of young adulthood or adolescence, it is useful to outline some of the characteristics that distinguish the selected focus novels as YA, rather than children’s or adult literature. Where relevant throughout the study, I have noted that certain focus texts defy specific categorisation and that others have varying classifications internationally, usually determined by publishing and marketing interests.

Waller (2009, 14) contends that “identifying what we mean by ‘young adult literature’ or ‘teenage fiction’ continues to generate difficulties” and Cart (1996, 11)) more emphatically argues that the field has always been in flux, reflecting the constantly changing nature that is the essence of adolescence. Indeed, for this reason Cart is “not sure we need a formal definition” and believes the best one will be the least specific (11). However, Waller (2009, 14) particularly commends

McCallum (1999) and Trites (2000) for their contributions to the discussion of YA literature as a distinct category.

In framing a tentative definition for this study, I have drawn on McCallum’s comprehensive account of YA literature (2006, 214-219) in which she asserts that books categorised as YA generally include themes and writing strategies that suggest an audience from about thirteen years upwards, with a focus on the upper end of teenage years. The recent expansion of the market for YA literature is a related to changing social and economic conditions, such as increased years of schooling and delayed departure from the family home. Although YA literature is concerned with specific cultural and social formations, the texts not only reflect the culture but also shape it “by determining what issues are deemed to be relevant to young people and by representing what it means to be a young adult in contemporary society” (McCallum 2006, 217). A potential problem with this process is that young people themselves do not generally participate in the writing of authoritative discourse on themselves - it is usually adults who write and interpret adolescence and its concerns.

Among common thematic and ideological concerns that are listed by McCallum (2006,

217) as characteristic of YA literature, the following are particularly relevant to the representation

of postsecular spirituality: a recognition of the selfhood of others and movement out of solipsism; a sense of “knowing where one is going”; solidarity with a group’s ideals (although in this thesis there is often a move away from the authoritative discourses of parents and organised religions); and, most importantly, reevaluation of values, worldviews and belief systems. McCallum claims that such motifs are more commonly the domain of YA literature than of adult fiction (2006, 217) as they are underpinned by a preoccupation with subjectivity and personal maturation, along with a reminder that the process is ongoing and ever-changing. The capacity of characters to develop personal agency involving independent thought and action often arises in opposition to the constraints of social and cultural influences (2006, 218). This development is reflected in the characters’ ideological becoming in response to the authoritative discourses encountered by the young adult protagonists.

McCallum refers to Trites’ claim (2000, 3) that a characteristic that distinguishes YA novels from children’s fiction is the concern with power relationships within society through which protagonists “must learn about the social forces that have made them what they are … [and] learn to negotiate the levels of power that exist in the myriad social institutions within which they must function, including family, school, the church, government”. Along with the fictional characters, readers of YA novels may thus be empowered to develop insights and learn valuable lessons. With particular relevance to spiritual themes, McCallum concludes that the cultural and ethical dialogue incorporated into YA fictions reflects a wider debate about the development of a sense of meaning, informed by the values and assumptions about adolescence that are dominant in the fiction at the time of its production. In the focus texts discussed in this thesis, the time of production is the postsecular era of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

International YA literature

Three decades ago, Perry Nodelman (1986, 55) noted the existence of a "vast conspiracy of silence about children's literature with a spiritual emphasis". This observation concurs with the claim of this thesis that scholarly research on spirituality in contemporary YA fiction has been very limited.

An exception to this shortage has been the decennial publication (in 1989, 1999 and 2011) of focus issues of the American-based journal Children's Literature Association Quarterly dedicated to 12

religion in children’s literature. These periodicals encompass the broad spectrum of children’s literature, with YA literature well represented in the articles, and although they use the more restrictive term ‘religion’ rather than ‘spirituality’, the breadth of discussion extends beyond conventional religious discourses. Over the two decade period of their publication, the articles ranged across topics such as the ‘born again’ phenomenon, religious fundamentalism, classic texts, didacticism and self-searching. While the articles are dominated by Judeo-Christian discourses, an interesting innovation in the 2011 issue was the inclusion of atheism and the rewriting of traditional religious myths - mostly in relation to Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy - as part of the conversation about belief systems. It is noteworthy that these issues were raised in an American context where religious issues tend to have greater cultural and political importance than in

Australia. Other than these dedicated journal issues, occasional articles in open issues of children’s and YA literature journals and a few book chapters with historic focuses (for example, Pinsent

(2011) and Hillel (2003)), there is little academic scholarship that addresses postmodern and postsecular spirituality and religion in a broad range of YA literature.

A number of factors may contribute to the gap in the critical literature. The literary category ‘young adult fiction’ itself is a relatively recent construct in Western literary culture, with

Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1951) frequently cited as the first novel written in a young adult voice that addressed themes and topics relevant to a young adult audience (McCallum 2006).

Compounding this, the development of YA fiction coincided with the occurrence in Western society of a significant downturn in practices associated with mainstream religion, notably church attendance and active involvement in traditional religious activities. Cusack (2011, 410) notes that

The emergence of the independent teenager in the second half of the twentieth century was part of a rapid process of wide-ranging social change, in which the interrelated phenomena of secularisation, individualism and consumer capitalism emerged as the dominant discourses in Western culture.

The simultaneous rise of YA literature and the secularisation of Western culture may therefore be a significant contributing factor to the current paucity of critical discourse on religion or spirituality in YA fiction. Conversely, the purported postsecular turn may account for the small but increasing number of sociological and literary publications which have recently addressed the topic. However,

some welcome additions concerning representations of spirituality in fantasy fiction have recently appeared in Towards or back to human values?: spiritual and moral dimensions of contemporary fantasy (Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Oziewicz 2006) and Fantastic spiritualities: monsters, heroes and the contemporary religious imagination (Jobling 2010). Another study, Environmental Crisis in young adult fiction: a poetics of earth (Curry 2013) centres on the way spiritualities are inherent in an ecofeminist approach to YA apocalyptic fiction. Finally, just before the completion of the current thesis, a monograph was published that specifically addresses the lack of critical analysis, entitled Spirituality in young adult literature: the last taboo (Campbell and Crowe 2015).

Australian YA literature

A survey of spirituality in Australian YA fiction is far-reaching and encompasses broad-ranging sociocultural and philosophical discourses and contexts as observed above. In The spirit of generation Y study, Mason et al (2007, 49) envisage a link between Australian youth spirituality and fiction as they describe the role played by narrative in the lives and meaning-making of young

Australians. Young people make sense of their lives, identities and experiences, they assert, by constructing a story which fits an interpretive structure for their personal journey. In this way, young people can order their life events coherently, interpret the reasons for particular occurrences, attribute importance and influence to certain people, events or ideas that they have encountered and a sense of biographical continuity for themselves. They can borrow from and rearrange the stories they have heard, seen or read, and consequently invent their own narratives. Although there is a general absence of commentary on spirituality in Australian YA fiction, two articles in Viewpoint: on books for young adults specifically discuss the issue. Evoking Manning Clark’s allusion to

Australian spirituality as a “whisper in the mind”, Australian author James Moloney (2005b, 6) notes the absence of God in YA literature when he claims that “Australian society only ever whispers the word God, preferably in private and between consenting adults” even though “up to a third of Australia’s young people are educated in schools professing a religious base and more

Australians than not claim belief in some kind of creator or deity”. Moloney unleashed this neglected topic into Australian YA literature with his novel Lost Property (2005a), which is

considered in later chapters as a pivotal text in this thesis. In brief, Moloney’s novel is a response to his own challenge to critics: “Go on. Name an Australian YA novel where he [God] gets a guernsey” (Moloney 2005b, 6). As with much of the critical discussion on spirituality or religion in literature, as well as in the fiction itself, Lost Property explicitly privileges Christianity as the major religious affiliation of the dominant culture with no contemplation of beliefs beyond the dichotomy of Christianity and atheism.

On the other hand, in ‘Let’s Get Spiritual’, another Australian YA author and “third generation agnostic”, Jenny Pausacker (2000) reviews spirituality in YA and children’s literature from a broader pluralistic perspective, similar to the approach taken in this study. Although she initially, and unsuccessfully, sought representations of ‘Christ figures’ in Australian children’s literature, her argument is less concerned with mainstream religious icons and progresses to a more general exploration of

one of the most basic – and I mean basic - urges towards spirituality, the need for an Imaginary Friend who knows everything and can bail you out of any trouble. Sometimes the Imaginary Friend is called God, sometimes Gaia or St Anthony or dolphins or the universe, but either way she/he/it represents a belief that, somewhere and somehow, there’s something bigger than you. (Pausacker 2000, 13)

However, Pausacker inclines towards the idea that spirituality must encompass a 'transcendent referent' rather than the possibility of an immanent form of 'self-spirituality' (Heelas 1996, 18) which permeates many of the focus texts of this thesis. Other than these brief articles by Moloney and Pausacker, spirituality as a discrete topic is virtually absent from the critical literature on

Australian YA fiction. The primary aim of my research is to address this absence.

Multicultural-multifaith Australian YA literature

As noted above, traditional Western European belief systems and ideologies are often portrayed as normative in Australian spiritual discourses. This attitude persists despite the multicultural and multifaith nature of contemporary Australian society, as well as an estimated fifty thousand years of Indigenous history. When considering spirituality in an Australian context, Indigenous spirituality often occupies a prominent position and its place in children’s literature is expounded in

Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children's Literature (Bradford 2001), with a chapter devoted to religious discourses. Bradford argues that Aboriginal sacredness was largely neglected or denied in children’s books until the 1980s and 1990s “when they began to disclose a variety of cultural influences including environmentalism, New Age-ism, and the growth of syncretic movements incorporating elements of Aboriginal and Christian religious beliefs and practices”

(Bradford 2001, 49). The dearth of critical discussion about Indigenous spirituality in YA literature specifically is compounded by the lack of Aboriginal-authored YA fiction compared with a considerable corpus for adults and for younger children, particularly in the form of picture books.

A database search (‘Black Words’ dataset on Austlit) indicates an increase in the publication of contemporary YA novels by Indigenous writers, although critical literary analysis remains sparse.

Non-Indigenous contemporary Australian writers such as James Moloney, Gary Crew and

Phillip Gwynne have produced a number of YA novels addressing Indigenous issues, with

Aboriginal characters as the main protagonists and focalisers, and traces of Aboriginal spirituality can often be detected even if not overtly thematised. These texts have invited occasional accusations of misappropriation, with ‘whitefellas’ attempting to represent ‘blackfella’ perspectives, beliefs and mythologies. The risk of such misappropriation was previously highlighted in relation to the work of some prominent children's and YA authors in the mid- twentieth century. Among the few prominent examples of Indigenous-authored YA fiction, Monty

Boori Pryor collaborated with non-Aboriginal writer, Meme McDonald, on a sequence of novels for children and young adults. These follow the life and maturation of a young Aboriginal man in

My Girragundji (1998) for younger readers, The Binna Binna Man (1999) and Njunjul the Sun

(2002), both for adolescent readers, concluding with the protagonist’s reconnection to his

Indigenous spirituality4. A pertinent issue noted by Bradford that complicates the production and analysis of Aboriginal-authored novels is that such texts “may resist incorporation into Western genres and discursive modes by drawing on systems of meaning in large part inaccessible to non-

Aboriginal readers, and insisting on the observation and maintenance of practices that protect

Aboriginal knowledge” (cited in Stephens 2006, 98). Throughout this thesis, texts that deal either

4 Discussed in Chapter 3 16

explicitly or peripherally with Indigenous spirituality are integrated within the overall theme of

Australian young adult spirituality rather than segregated as a separate topic.

Regarding the representation of multiculturalism in Australian children’s and YA literature, Stephens (2006, 100) notes that “by the early 2000s, the area had turned to depict an already blended society, self-conscious about its origins, but comfortable in its hybridity’. The representation of multicultural spirituality in Australian YA fiction shares some features with

Indigenous spirituality, in that examples of explicit spiritual themes and content are limited although often enmeshed with and embedded in cultural issues. Some notable examples of explicitly spiritual or religious themes include: Does my head look big in this? (Abdel-Fattah 2005) which is focalised by a young Muslim woman and much cited in contemporary discussions of

Australian-Islamic relations; Only the heart (Caswell and Chiem 1997) and its sequel, The full story (Caswell and Chiem 2002) which articulate Australian-Vietnamese spiritual perspectives; and

The Rage of Sheep (Cooper 2007), in which a young Australian-Indian woman re-evaluates her

Christian faith. Abdel-Fattah and Caswell and Chiem demonstrate the way religion is integral to the cultures represented, rather than thematising spirituality as a separate component of life. Similar patterns are apparent in novels with Jewish protagonists which also tend to highlight Jewish cultural issues more than the spiritual beliefs. Thus, while Australian multifaith novels tend to highlight racial and cultural aspects, this simultaneously expresses the connectedness of spiritual belief and culture for the communities concerned. As with Indigenous spirituality, focus novels that incorporate multicultural spiritualities are thematically integrated in this thesis rather than treated separately.

Methodology, structure and aims

Theoretical framework

In the quotation by that opens this chapter, Jenny Pausacker (2000, 13) claims that “one of the major functions of spirituality is to provide metaphors for answering the hard questions”. The posing of questions and pursuit of answers are significant features, almost defining qualities, of many of the focus texts of this thesis. Pausacker’s assertion suggests that answers to the hard 17

questions are more likely to be formulated in the allegorical rather than in the literal domain. She further notes individual preferences for either shared or private metaphors, a perception which dovetails with Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas about authoritative and internally persuasive discourses and the struggle between them which leads to the process of ideological becoming (Bakhtin 1981, 342-

348), a concept which provides the major theoretical framework for this study. The sociocultural conversations that have informed and guided the research for this thesis are outlined above. These are supplemented by insights gained from a range of literary theories, most notably Bakhtin’s notions concerning dialogism, polyphony and the “unfinalizability” of the human subjectivity or soul and its literary representation (Bakhtin and Emerson 1984, 61; Morson and Emerson 1990).

Bakhtin (1981, 346) explains ideological becoming as “an intense struggle within us for hegemony among various available verbal and ideological points of view, approaches, directions and values”.

This ongoing struggle is waged between two forms of discourse, authoritative and internally persuasive, and “[T]he struggle and dialogic interrelationship of these categories of ideological discourse are what usually determine the history of an individual ideological consciousness” (342).

These conceptions of the two interactive discourses, framed within Bakhtin’s broader theories of the dialogic construction of subjectivity, are particularly applicable to struggles inherent in adolescent maturation and in the formation of beliefs and ideologies leading to spiritual development. Young people “are now understood to be active agents in relation to their own spiritual experience and spiritual knowledge” rather than “passive recipients of their parents’ values and perspectives” (Sheldrake 2014, 173-174). Dentith (1995, 54) succinctly describes Bakhtin’s concept of ideological becoming as “the growth of the individual's belief-system”. This growth is perpetual according to Bakhtin’s account of ideological becoming as a process involving struggles for dominance among various “ideological points of view, approaches, directions and values” which he argues are not finite but open and “able to reveal ever newer ways to mean” (Bakhtin

1981, 346).

Explaining the concept of authoritative discourse, Bakhtin (1981, 342) offers as his first example the “religious” word, followed by other illustrations including “political, moral; the word of a father, of adults and of teachers, etc.” He stresses that “[T]he authoritative word is located in a

distanced zone, organically connected with a past that is felt to be hierarchically higher. It is, so to speak, the word of the fathers”. The concept of the authority of the father is metaphorically, and sometimes literally, significant in a number of YA texts and carries implications of ‘the heavenly father’ in many authoritative religious discourses. Bakhtin further likens authoritative discourse to the verbal discipline of “reciting by heart” (341). This notion is pertinent to the dogma frequently asserted by organised belief systems, even if their authority has been dwindling in deference to the hegemony of scientific knowledge, to which Bakhtin also refers, citing both “religious dogma, or

… acknowledged scientific truth” (343) as prime examples of authoritative discourse. The dialogic relationship between these two customarily conflictive authoritative discourses is manifest in several focus texts in this study, particularly those discussed in Chapter 7 which explores the interrelationship between science and faith, the natural and the supernatural. In opposition to authoritative discourse, Bakhtin contends that internally persuasive discourses develop from the assimilation of a range of pre-existing authoritative discourses, tempered by the ideas and voices of other people and influences, as well as by one’s own life experiences. He likens internally persuasive discourse to “retelling in one's own words” (341) as opposed to reciting authoritative discourses by heart. Internally persuasive discourse is thus “half-ours and half-someone else's”

(345). Bakhtin proposes the concept of ideological becoming as a development that occurs when independent thinking is characterised by a “separation between internally persuasive discourse and authoritarian enforced discourse” (345). These ideas are integrated in the spiritual and ideological quest themes revealed in many contemporary Australian YA novels, several of which are analysed in this thesis. I argue that authoritative discourses are manifest in channels such as organised religion, parents, schools, peer groups and popular culture, while internally persuasive discourses are nurtured in association with the growth of individualised spiritualities and the formation of autonomous beliefs and values. Along with the overarching theoretical frameworks of ideological becoming and postsecular dialogism, individual thesis chapters draw on an eclectic range of sociocultural and literary theories.

Selection of primary texts

Temporal and national parameters It is a clichéd truism to observe that we live in increasingly changing times. Because my aim is to provide an analysis that provides insights and is “symptomatic” of contemporary culture (Mackay

2011, 139), my selection of primary texts is restricted to novels published in recent decades.

Because many novels written for adolescent readers in the 1980s seem dated to young adults of the twenty-first century, the focus texts were predominantly selected from those published this century, with a few from the 1990s and one from 1986. Some of these early novels contain significant insights not found in later texts as well as providing recent historical context for the development of contemporary spirituality. For example, Winton’s That Eye the Sky (1986) was contentiously described by Helen Garner as Australia’s first Christian novel (Mitchell 2010, 91). The focus on twenty first century novels obviously intersects with ‘post 9/11’ novels which is a pertinent point in terms of the religious context of the 9/11 incident and the subsequent attention directed to the

‘return of the religious’ in global affairs. Relevant Australian YA novels continue to be published but the latest publication date of the focus texts is 2012, chosen for research practicality as the inclusion of primary texts needed to be delimited. The focus novels are confined to novels written by Australian authors (a contestable issue) and although the geographic settings are often identifiably Australian, a number of the texts are intentionally ambiguous about their locations, particularly among those which fall outside the firmly realist genre.

Generic parameters A number of studies (for example, Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Oziewicz 2006, Jobling 2010, McAvan

2012) have identified fantasy as the genre most suited to the fictional exploration of spirituality, as fantasy permits the inclusion of supernatural or metaphysical elements which lie outside of everyday consensus reality. Among the literary conventions available to contemporary writers, fantasy is considered especially suitable for investigating themes of spirituality and values as “it troubles our oldest certainties and rekindles the hope we have almost given up, the hope of finding the meaning and reaching human fulfilment” (Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Oziewicz 2006, summary).

Similarly, Ursula Le Guin (1982, 68) contends that fantasy is the natural and appropriate language for “recounting of the spiritual journey and the struggle of good and evil in the soul” as it is

“radically open to the imagination of new potentialities” and “deploys mythic patterns and archetypes, thus resonating with culturally-rooted questions, impulses and anxieties”. McAvan

(2012, 6) argues that it is in “unreal” popular culture texts such as The Lord of the Rings, Harry

Potter and The Matrix “that we find religious symbols and ideas refracted through a postmodernist sensibility, with little regard for the demands of ‘real world’ epistemology”. While these views are persuasive, my research includes a range of genres and is often focussed towards representations of settings closer to the real worlds of young twenty-first century readers which are commonly best portrayed through realism. Historical realist fiction sometimes represent spiritualities in the form of traditional religious practices resulting from the more dominant role of religion prior to the current era. As my concern is with contemporary Australian spirituality, historical fiction occupies only a peripheral position, mostly where the historic context has a bearing on the current time, for example in time-slip fiction. A number of predominantly realist novels feature multi-stranded narratives with one strand set in the past. Boys of Blood and Bone (Metzenthen 2003) and

Fireshadow (Eaton 2004), for example, use this device to evoke a sense of spiritual connectedness across time and place.

The generic parameters of this study are thus unrestricted and particularly open to representations of spirituality in fiction that nudges the border of realism, such as magical realism, metafiction, allegory and fable. These borderline genres are particularly appropriate for the depiction of the elusive, tangential phenomena explored in the realm of spirituality. In particular, magical realist texts offer a bridge between a rigid materialist worldview and possibilities that might lie beyond it. Faris (2004, 68) argues that “magical realism can be seen to open up a space of the ineffable in-between that accommodates the camouflaged presence of the spirit amid material reality”. Regarding the temporality of the genre, Mackay (2011, 150) contends that “what drives magical realism and most other postwar fictional modes is a widespread sense that what purports to be realistic captures only the most consensual, limited versions of reality’. Such an approach has

great potential to facilitate an exploration of spirituality in twenty-first century Australian youth culture.

Implied readership The boundaries between YA fiction and novels written for both younger and older readers are often difficult to specify. Some of the focus texts have early teenage target audiences while others could be considered cross-over or adult novels and some marketed as adult fiction in one country are categorised as YA elsewhere. The main criterion used for inclusion as YA fiction in this study was that the narrative voice of the novel is appropriate, relevant and convincing for YA readers. In novels which meet this criterion, it is usually but not always the case that the main protagonists are adolescents and the issues and concerns raised in the novels are relevant to young adults. Such concerns are, of course, extensive and debatable but usually include broad issues such as identity development, family, friendship and sexual relationships and developing independence and maturation. These thematic concerns are underpinned by “a common preoccupation with subjectivity, especially the development of notions of selfhood, relationships between the self and others and between individuals and society” (McCallum 2006, 217). Issues related to the

“reevaluation of values, worldviews and belief systems” (217) frequently constitute YA fictional narratives and are of particular relevance to the definition of spirituality adopted for this study as the ongoing development of beliefs, values and a sense of connectedness that transcends materiality.

Research bias

Throughout the process of textual analysis of a large number of contemporary novels, my conjecture that conventional religious experiences would play only a secondary role in Australian

YA fiction was confirmed. Although representations of institutional religion are included in this study, I was concerned to avoid favouring a particular brand or brands of religious experience as being normative. However, a wide reading of contemporary Australian YA texts did indicate in a predominance of Christian perspectives in the representations of organised religion in Chapter 2.

Likewise, as it is by far the largest religious affiliation reported in the Australian census, it is not surprising that references to Christianity outnumber those to other institutional religions in the focus texts. The approach to spirituality taken in my research comes from a secular, agnostic perspective and, without privileging a Buddhist view, emulates the Dalai Lama (2006, section 4.2) when he contends that “secularism does not mean rejection of all religions. It means respect for all religions and human beings including non-believers”. Pausacker (2000, 12) was also influential in her approach to spirituality as a “third generation agnostic” who “wasn’t using the word ‘agnostic’ in the wishy-washy sense of hedging my bets, but in the sense that, if the new physicists proved conclusively that there was indeed a single supreme being of some kind, it would make absolutely no difference to the way I live my life”. Despite my aim to avoid approaching spirituality ‘through the normative lens of Christianity’ (Cusack, 201, 418), my perceptions and interpretations are inevitably biased by my Anglo-Australian background, influenced by the dominant Christian culture of this country’s recent history. One manifestation of this background bias is my recognition of Christian motifs, metaphors and references in the texts, accompanied by unintentional but certain lack of awareness of many signifiers of other belief traditions, including the new religions and popular culture spiritualities described by Cusack (2010) and McCredden

(2010).

Thesis structure This thesis falls structurally into three parts. Chapter 2 stands alone as an exploration of spiritual beliefs and practices within an explicit framework of organised religion, compared with the more implicit and individualised manifestations in later chapters. The chapter takes up Moloney’s contention that God is absent from recent Australian YA fiction and seeks examples to demonstrate the presence of diverse gods in a range of novels in this postsecular era. It provides a historic view of relevant Australian YA fiction produced in the past three decades, with an overview of religious diversity. The five focus novels include the earliest published novels in this study through to one of the latest. Bakhtinian theories concerning authoritative and internally persuasive discourses are further expounded and aligned with the oppositions between the monologic authoritative discourses

of organised religion and the subjects’ development of more autonomous dialogic spiritualities in their ongoing ideological becoming.

The next section of the thesis examines the portrayal of spiritual quests in different generic or modal forms. Chapter 3 outlines views about contemporary quest narratives and considers

Australian spiritual quest narratives portrayed in realistic modes. It is argued that although speculative modes are often viewed as the most appropriate channel to explore spirituality, some

YA novels utilise realism to present contemporary spiritual quests in ‘here and now’ chronotopes recognisable to young Australian readers. Following the realistic portrayals, Chapter 4 analyses the construction of spiritual quests in several speculative modes and uncovers additional layers of meaning and constructions of more outwardly-focussed morality than was portrayed in the somewhat solipsistic soul-searching of the realistic novels. The chapter thus concedes that speculative modes are more conducive to the exploration of spiritual quests, presenting a broader vision than the more confined realistic representations. Chapter 5 continues the examination of quest narratives through a selection of multimodal texts. It draws on dialogical self theory

(Hermans) and aspects of magical realist theory (Faris) to argue that the interplay of different visual and verbal modes provides a valuable vehicle for exploring the ‘ineffable in-between’ that resides in the intermodal spaces, constructing an appropriate analogy for the exploration of ineffable spiritual spaces.

The final three chapters consider discrete issues and themes that emerged in readings of the corpus. In Chapter 6, beliefs about death, afterlife and eternity are examined in a range of novels written in different modes, with a focus on three largely realist texts that enter the magical realist domain to varying degrees. Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope of the threshold provides a framework for an exploration of the boundaries that are crossed in the contemplation of post- mortem existence. Relationships between the natural and the supernatural are surveyed in Chapter

7, as manifested in the apparent dichotomies of nature and culture, science and faith. Theories of deep ecology that advocate the intrinsic value of the earth underlie the exploration of conflicts between the opposing ideologies portrayed in four focus texts that range across narrative modes from realism to magical realism and otherworldly fantasy. The chapter argues for the resolution of

conflicts and integration of opposing ideologies in discussions about science, faith and environmental issues. Continuing the interrogation of apparent binary oppositions, Chapter 8 utilises some established theories of gender (Butler, Connell, de Beauvoir) to interrogate the idea that spiritual subjectivities might be gendered in a similar way that bodies and minds are commonly considered to be. It considers the alternative view of a gender spectrum and examines the construction of subjectivities beyond a narrow binary view of gender.

Ultimately, the main objectives of this study are to address a topic neglected in current scholarship on Australian YA fiction and to contribute a previously unexplored facet to the postsecular dialogue of twenty first century culture and literature. This thesis utilises an eclectic range of theories to support the exploration of contemporary portrayals of spirituality in a selection of focus texts and to affirm that, while explicit traditional religious representations are sparse, a variety of more implicit individualised spiritualties pervade contemporary Australian YA fiction as

“a whisper in the mind and a shy hope in the heart”.

CHAPTER 2

THE AUTHORITATIVE WORD: ORGANISED RELIGION IN AUSTRALIAN YA FICTION

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. John 1:1, Holy Bible

Funny when you talk to God. He’s like the sky (well, he is the sky, kind of). Never says anything. But you know he listens. Right down in your belly, even in your bum you know. Tim Winton, That Eye the Sky

I was already aware, thank you very much, that Jesus had ordered His followers to turn the other cheek when they were slapped in the face, but He hadn't had Jo Jameson call Him a dyke in the changing room. Michelle Cooper, The Rage of Sheep

In a 2006 interview, sociologist Ulrich Beck commented that

[T]he basic assumption of the secular society is that modernity overcomes religion. In this sense most continental European countries seem to exist as secular states, while Britain and America seem to be post-secular - they see atheism is only one of the belief systems and that religion still is an important voice of humanity. (Jeffries 2006, 1)

As in many other respects, Australian society reflects British and American cultures in its postsecular outlook, as well as in the expression of itself through literature and other arts. This chapter investigates the conscious and explicit exploration of spiritual beliefs and practices in recent Australian YA fiction. It considers the relevance of the postsecular hypothesis that claims that religious discourses have experienced a resurgence in the last few decades, rather than declining significantly as predicted by the secularisation theory. Along with sociocultural views about the interrelationship of secular and religious interests, the following discussion integrates

Bakhtin's concepts of authoritative and internally persuasive discourses (1981, 341-348), as outlined in Chapter 1, with a postsecular dialogical analysis of a selection of Australian YA novels.

In his definition of authoritative discourse, Bakhtin's first reference is to the “religious” word, followed by “political, moral; the word of a father, of adults and of teachers, etc.” (342).

Authoritative discourse is likened to the verbal discipline of “reciting by heart”, compared with

“retelling in one's own words” which equates with Bakhtin’s concept of internally persuasive discourse (341). He suggests that “[T]he struggle and dialogic interrelationship of these categories of ideological discourse are what usually determine the history of an individual ideological consciousness” (342). This interrelationship provides an appropriate framework for exploring the narrative interrogation of beliefs and values that subsequently lead to the ideological becoming of protagonists in YA fiction, with its prevalent concerns centred on the construction of subjectivity and identity formation. Bakhtin’s theories about polyphony and heteroglossia further contribute to an exploration of the multiple voices and discourses proclaiming religious or spiritual5 messages in

YA fiction, including intertextual allusions to sacred texts and traditional stories, as well as more secular canonical works.

A postsecular age? Debates about secularisation as a dominant discourse of modernity emerged some decades ago with such publications as Cox's The Secular City (1966) while more recent works such as Charles

Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007) advanced the discussion to include consideration of postsecular trends that embraced more diverse and individualised spiritualities than had traditionally been expressed in the public domain. Recent sociocultural theories of postsecularism have been expounded by prominent scholars, notably Jurgen Habermas, who is often credited with popularising the term, Beck (2010), Caputo, Vattimo and Robbins (2007) and Zizek (2003).

Habermas (2008, 9) appeals for tolerant dialogue between religious and secular interests in the twenty first century, proposing that “if all is to go well both sides, each from its own viewpoint, must accept an interpretation of the relation between faith and knowledge that enables them to live together in a self-reflective manner”6. Numerous reasons have been posited for the revival of interest in religion in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, including “the rise of so- called fundamentalisms in the established faiths - Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, even

5 Demarcation of the terms 'spiritual' and 'religious' is discussed in Chapter 1. 6 Habermas’s appeal resonates with the Dalai Lama’s views and appeal for tolerance between religious and secular interests, cited in Chapter 1.

Buddhist--and the rise of a New Age style spirituality that draws from aspects of those faiths”

(McAvan 2012, 7). The rise of fundamentalisms that contributed to the events of September 11,

2001 intensified religious tensions on a global scale, indicating that religion was far from being in decline in world affairs. In Western countries like Australia, a term commonly heard in relation to the escalating tensions is ‘Islamophobia’, signifying the dominant position of religion in the political arena. As McAvan (2012, 1) asserts: “God is no longer dead”.

A vigorous counter reaction to the persistent power of religious discourse also emerged in the New Atheist movement, contributing additional voices to the postsecular dialogue. In

Australia, discussion of public religious conviction entered the 2010 Federal election in an unprecedented way in this allegedly secular nation. Regarding the religious beliefs of the then leaders of the two major parties, Maddox (2010, 16) notes that “Gillard’s atheism made headlines.

It was contrasted with opponent Tony Abbott’s well-known Catholicism” despite the fact that “as recently as the 1990s, politicians rarely paraded religiosity”. Further to this, there has been passionate public debate about a National School Chaplaincy Program established by the federal government and the introduction of ethics classes in NSW public schools. The latter program was proposed as a secular alternative to optional religious education classes and major conservative church groups mounted spirited protests against what may have been perceived as competition and a potential threat to the appeal of religious education classes (Bagshaw 2015). Although the formal introduction of secular ethics classes for the first time in the history of NSW public education might be viewed as verification that Australian society is becoming increasingly secularised, the vehement debate highlights the persistence of robust religious voices in opposition to secular trends. In literary scholarship, a number of monographs are contributing to the dialogue about the place of spirituality and the sacred in Australian literature, for example, Ashcroft, Devlin-Glass and

McCreddin (2009), Gelder and Jacobs (1998), Lindsay (2000), Paranjape (2009) and Tacey (2003,

2015). These texts are accompanied by special editions of Australian literary journals Antipodes

(December 2005) and Meanjin (Summer 2006 and Autumn 2010) devoted to spiritual and religious issues. The central argument of this chapter is that while the representation of organised religion – that is, the public expression of religious beliefs and practices by established institutions such as

churches and schools - is sporadic in contemporary Australian YA fiction, broader spiritual themes are emerging in tandem with the purported postsecular turn in society. Some contemporary YA novels invite readers to contemplate, through association with their fictional characters, the validity of religious perspectives presented by various social institutions that are important in the lives of young adults – notably families, schools and churches – as well as by their peers.

Organised religions are often perceived as judging those outside their particular belief systems as being not only ontologically misguided but also morally deficient. Beck (2010, 144) comments that “we often encounter the idea...that without the institutionalized belief in God no one can guarantee that people will behave morally” and Lohrey (2006, 69) adds that “nothing is more annoying to non-Christians than the Christian presumption that without religion, morality would cease to exist”. In the focus novels discussed here, this presumption is often revealed to be misleading, with protagonists finding profound meaning and connectedness in more diverse and individualised forms of spirituality that evolve from their inner ideological struggles between authoritative and internally persuasive discourses. Such outcomes correspond with Beck’s view

(2010, 145) that

In moral terms, the individualization of faith should be more highly valued than mere obedience to church doctrines, because, in the final analysis, the believer him- or herself is the only person who can decide what is morally right and good - and even what is morally right and good about the dogmas of religious morality.

Determination of “what is morally right and good” is the motivation underlying the protagonists’ spiritual quests in each of the YA texts cited in this chapter, whether their eventual conclusions involve “God or no God” (Moloney 2005a, 256).

Pluralism in Australian YA fiction The novels considered here are among a small but, I believe, increasing number of Australian YA texts in which religious beliefs and spirituality are important themes. The novels which are closely analysed - That Eye, the Sky (Winton 1986), The First Day (Masson 1995), Lost Property

(Moloney 2005), The Rage of Sheep (Cooper 2007), and Winter of Grace (Constable 2009) – have overtly Christian focuses with peripheral references to other belief systems. There are still few

Australian YA novels that thematise non-Christian faith issues or religious pluralism and those that do tend to privilege sociocultural issues rather than spiritual beliefs and values. Indigenous and multicultural communities are among the major cultural domains in which non-Christian religions reside in Australia. However, analysis of the literatures of these communities is problematised by the inherent interweaving of spiritual beliefs and practices to a greater extent than is obvious in secularised Anglo-Australian cultures.

Does my head look big in this? (Abdel-Fattah, 2005) was the sole Australian novel included in a recent study by American researchers (Sanders, Foyil and Graff 2010) which surveyed children's and young adult novels and non-fiction works published in Australia, Canada,

Britain and the USA, seeking texts which conveyed a stance of religious pluralism. While Does my head look big in this? promises to illuminate the religious beliefs of a young Australian Muslim protagonist, the spiritual aspects of the novel are overshadowed by more easily conveyed social and political concerns. This sociocultural focus is also apparent in a number of other YA texts with non-Christian religious themes, such as Dubosarsky’s ‘Jewish novels’, The First Book of Samuel

(1995) and Theodora’s Gift (2005). This tendency to focus on sociocultural issues is possibly due to the ineffable quality of spirituality compared with more tangible sociocultural matters, which is a recurrent phenomenon throughout this thesis. However, in one episode of Does My Head Look Big in This? that does elucidate her spiritual beliefs, the first person narrator, Amal explains to the reader

I feel like my passion and conviction in Islam are bursting inside me and I want to prove to myself that I'm strong enough to wear a badge of my faith. I believe it will make me feel so close to God…this warm feeling buzzes through you and you smile to yourself, knowing God's watching you, knowing that he knows you're trying to be strong to please Him…your own personal friendship with your Creator. I guess when I'm not wearing the hijab I feel like I'm missing out. I feel cheated out of that special bond. (Abdel-Fattah 2005, 6, my ellipsis)

The switches between the first and second person narration in this testimony evoke a sense of ambiguity, with the second person segments slightly distancing Amal from her declaration, despite her professed close relationship with God.

There is little interrogation by Amal and her friends of the authoritative religious word, although they readily question parental authority. The young women approach their religion intellectually, unlike Leila’s mother: “Do you know my mum hasn't even read the Koran? She goes on what her mum told her and what her mum's mum told her. That's her scripture” (86). These allusions to the authority of both sacred texts and parents resonate with Bakhtin's reference (1981,

342) to the authoritative “word of the fathers” (or mothers in this case) whose “authority was already acknowledged in the past”. The novel’s focus on Islam is diluted by the arguments between

Amal and her bigoted Greek Orthodox neighbour, who eventually concedes, “No-one should telling no-one what to do when come to God. You no have salvation but you laugh a lot. Maybe

Jesus let you in” (197). Sanders et al (2010, 182) commend this and other techniques that highlight the similarities among religions as when “Abdel-Fattah has her main character, Amal, explain commonalities among Islam, Judaism, and Christianity to her friends”, a strategy which they believe lessens “the fear of the unknown for readers unfamiliar with diverse religions” and helps

“break false dichotomies among religions”. However, they find Abdel-Fattah's representations of atheism “problematic and stereotypical” (180), for example, Amal's aunt Cassandra was an atheist

“who eventually finds religion, confesses to her friends that she was ‘so unhappy’ and ‘felt so empty’ when she was an atheist”, implying that “only when she ‘found’ a religion - in this case

Islam - was she fulfilled”. In concurrence with Beck (Jefferies 2006, 1) affirming the validity of atheism as a belief system, Sanders et al (2010, 183) claim that

Although it is easy to exclude atheism and agnosticism from discussions of religious diversity, when taking critical literacy and religious pluralism stances that question the power and hegemony exercised by dominant, mainstream religions, the exclusion of these groups from religious discussions becomes problematic.

Also problematic and contrary to the notions of spirituality endorsed in Does My Head Look Big in

This? is the often greater emphasis on such corporeal notions as fashion and body image than on spirituality. For example, her friend Yasmeen reprimands Amal for failing to wear eye makeup when she wore the hijab to school, exclaiming

Do you not understand that if you wear eyeliner and eye shadow your eyes will be devastating with the scarf? ...When Mum does her eyes up under her hijab she looks hot.' (45, my ellipsis, original italics)

While such an injection of frivolity can lighten and facilitate the exploration of a subject that is often treated with undue gravity, the superficiality expressed here does little to enhance the non-

Muslim reader’s understanding of the spirituality of the hijab. With escalating Islamophobic tensions in countries such as Australia, it would be beneficial to this conversation to have more

Muslim-authored YA novels that lucidly demystify Islam.

In addition to the major monotheistic religions of Christianity, Islam and Judaism, Eastern religious beliefs are portrayed in a small number of Australian YA novels, but again with few written by authors from the religious backgrounds represented. In Only the Heart (1997) and The

Full Story (2002) by Brian Caswell and Vietnamese-born David Phu An Chiem, the religions are not clearly demarcated in the way many Western religions are, but encompass Buddhism, Shinto and Taoism, as well as alluding to Confucian philosophies which verge on being a secular religion.

The lack of specificity in pigeonholing the beliefs reflects a spiritual approach less inclined towards the segregation found in the Western monotheistic religions. More specific references to Buddhism appear in Hey Joe (Hyde 2003), Tumble Turn (MacLeod 2003) and Tracking the Dalai Lama

(Tolbert 2001), all from authors of Anglo-Australian origin, which may account for the tendency to compartmentalise the beliefs portrayed. Crew and O'Hara's The Blue Feather (Crew and O’Hara

1997) alludes to sacred Dharmic concepts such as Atman and Mala through the embedding of references in characters’ names and interweaving numerous mystical concepts, rather than thematising them overtly.

Indigenous spirituality is more often represented in Australian literature for adults and younger children than in YA fiction, where representation tends to be implicit rather than thematic

(as discussed in Chapter 1). As with the multifaith texts mentioned above, novels that encompass

Indigenous spirituality are most often authored by non-Indigenous writers and are therefore potentially problematic in their interpretations. Among the contemporary offerings of spiritually- themed YA novels written (or co-written) by Indigenous authors are Killing Darcy (Lucashenko

1998), The Binna Binna Man (McDonald and Pryor 1999), Njunjul the Sun (McDonald and Pryor

2002), Swallow the Air (Winch 2006) and Grace Beside Me (McPherson 2012), which embraces the idea of postsecularism with its blend of Christian, Indigenous, New Age and other belief systems. A survey of Austlit database indicates a discernible increase in Indigenous-authored YA novels in the current period. While these novels are published outside the timeframe of this thesis

(which includes novels published up to 2012), further research is warranted to capture these trends towards the production of spiritually-themed YA novels written by Indigenous authors as well as those of other multicultural heritages.

Talking about God in Australian YA fiction Possibly in response to the perceived sceptical secularism of Australian society, some authors seem defensive about the inclusion of religious themes in their novels, particularly when they pertain to traditional Christianity. Comments from Winton, Moloney, Cooper and Constable about some of the focus novels discussed in this chapter reveal a self-consciousness by the authors about their inclusion of religious content. Explaining his purpose in writing Lost Property, Moloney (2005b, 6) claims that “it's about something that doesn't get much of a run in fiction for adolescents... discussion of religious belief “, as he challenges critics to “name an Australian YA novel where he gets a guernsey”. In the cited article, Moloney's perception of God seems limited to a traditional

Judeo-Christian God, and does not include Aboriginal spirits like the Moodagudda, who inhabits the town's river and plays a significant role in another Moloney novel, Dougy (1993). This chapter aims to demonstrate that Moloney's claim about the absence of religion in YA fiction is overstated, even when confined to the conventional Christian perspective to which he alludes. Australian YA fiction does lack the inherently spiritual or religious - and sometimes anti-religious - themes of

British novels by authors such as David Almond, Neil Gaiman and Philip Pullman or American novels by Katherine Paterson, Madeleine L'Engle and a scattering of later writers such as Pete

Hautman. However, each of the Australian texts considered here does overtly address the subject of religious beliefs and practices. Further, while it can be argued that religious issues are more often threaded throughout the novels rather than being centrally thematised, much Australian YA fiction

is strongly influenced by the Christian metanarrative of the dominant culture. As self-professed

“third generation agnostic”, Jenny Pausacker (2000, 13) claims in her article on spirituality in

Australian children's literature, “no one could fully understand Western literature without knowing the Christian tradition”.

Michelle Cooper justified her focus on religion as a major theme in The Rage of Sheep as a response to her students’ interest in talking about religious intolerance after the 9/11 terrorist attacks (Haley 2008, 7). While few Australian YA novels directly address the twenty-first

Muslim/Judeo-Christian conflict, several investigate religious beliefs and practices in a more general way, located at a safe temporal and geographic distance from high profile incident. Of the five focus novels discussed here, two were written pre-9/11 - That Eye, the Sky (Winton 1986) and

The First Day (Masson 1995). In a quantitative analysis of the construction of youth in Australian

YA literature published between 1980 and 2000, Heuschele (2007, 145) claims that “the most significant book to explore religion in greater depth is The First Day (1995)”. Although That Eye, the Sky might have claimed this status, it is not usually categorised as YA despite having typically

YA attributes such as an adolescent focaliser whose major life concerns are family, friends and identity formation. Heuschele’s analysis sampled twenty percent of Australian YA novels published in each year from 1980 to 2000 and concluded that only six percent had a major focus on religion, with a minor focus in a further twelve percent. While this suggests Moloney's claim is somewhat exaggerated, Heuschele's study does affirm that God is an elusive participant in these novels. A survey of the Austlit database further supports this assertion, listing few YA novels with

'religion', ‘spirituality’ or related terms as their subject keywords, although variable assignation of keywords undermines their reliability for the current analysis, along with the mostly implicit presence of spirituality in the texts. After the period surveyed in Heuschele's study however, there are indications of increasing recognition of spirituality in Australian YA fiction, in tandem with the postsecular trend which is posited here. In addition to the focus novels in this chapter, religious observance in modern Australian life occupies a prominent position in a number of recent YA and crossover novels such as Confessions of a liar, a thief and a failed sex god (Condon 2009), The anatomy of wings (Foxlee 2007), Grace (Gleitzman 2009), Everything beautiful (Howell 2008),

The gospel according to Luke (Maguire 2006) and Love like water (McDonald 2007). The five focus novels were selected for close analysis because of their overt exploration of religious beliefs in contemporary Australian culture, particularly those with agnostic focalisers who are nevertheless active spiritual seekers.

Australia’s first Christian novel Preceding the publication of Winton's spiritually infused novel Cloudstreet (1991), which could be argued to have heralded a postsecular age in Australian fiction, That Eye, the Sky (1986) was described by Helen Garner as “Australia's first Christian novel” (Mitchell 2010, 91). Pre-dating

Moloney’s later comments, Winton himself “doubted that an Australian readership would tolerate a book that had so much to say about God” (McGirr 1999, 53). Although published a few years earlier than other novels considered in this thesis, it is included because of its overt and unique representation of religion in YA fiction. Narrated in the first person by twelve year old Ort Flack, the novel draws on events from Winton's own early life, telling of a rural Western Australian family forced to cope after the father is seriously injured in a road accident. A stranger, Henry

Warburton, arrives unsolicited to assist the family and, after some time with them, confesses, “It's time I stated my purpose...God has sent me here...God told me to come to you” to which Ort innocently responds, “Who's God?...I thought it was just a word. Like heck...” (Winton 1986, 87).

From this point, God becomes more than just a word to Ort as the family explores various varieties of organised Christianity. These are mingled with Ort's unique spiritual perception which is influenced by his connectedness to the natural environment and his vision of a pink cloud hovering over the family house, seen only by Ort himself. This feature takes the novel from the gritty realism of the working class family into a magical realist realm that encompasses Ort’s unusual perception of the world. Like Fish Lamb in Cloudstreet, Ort was intellectually impaired when he was in a coma as a young child and it is hinted that this experience connected him to a mystical level of existence.

Ort's incipient belief in God is conveyed comically and subversively through his naïve first person narration. As a supremely innocent and unsophisticated character who can feel his soul “in

me belly and in me bum” (122), he is an unreliable narrator who addresses the reader with a distinctive style of dialogue:

Funny when you talk to God. He’s like the sky (well, he is the sky, kind of). Never says anything. But you know he listens. Right down in your belly, even in your bum you know. (115)

In his artless approach to life - his scornful sister Tegwyn suggests that he is “a bit slow” - Ort seems almost immune from authoritative influences and in possession of an existential wisdom about life's mysteries. Winton commented that

most of the apprehensions of transcendence and mystical sensibilities that I experience are gained in an instinctive way rather than in an intellectual way. So, my characters are typically apprehending but not understanding, getting it without getting it. They are not the kind of people who define what they are sensing. (Ben-Messahel 2006, 188)

Spiritual sensibility is expressed in That Eye, the Sky through the characters who speak the least and are in that sense absent from the main action. As a contrast to the proselytising Henry

Warburton, who attempts to exert an authoritative spiritual presence in the house, Ort's father, Sam, is silent and immobile because of his injuries suffered in the car crash. Sam appears little throughout the novel but embodies an omniscience which is conveyed through the dialogue of other characters. The novel's events are dependent on Sam, without whom there would be no story.

As in Lost Property (Moloney 2005a) which is discussed later, there is a metaphoric connection between the narrator’s earthly father and God. The little pink cloud hovering over the house, seen only by Ort and providing him with personal comfort, first appears the day the incapacitated Sam returns home from hospital. Ort reflects on this:

Sometimes, some nights, it's just so stupid. And I just go out and look back at the house, and that little cloud of light that came on the house the day they brought Dad back, it stops me from bawling. It makes me stop everything. Something in it says to me, says to me soul in me belly and in me bum, Hang on, Morton Flack. Crazy, eh? (122)

Sam's intrinsic spirituality is further suggested when Ort sees a statue in the Catholic church and realises that his father resembles Christ:

And all the time I'm looking up at this statue up on the wall, trying to figure out who it reminds me of. It's Jesus on the cross in the statue, I s'pose, but it reminds me of someone I know better...That long hair, those wonky eyes, those holes in him - it looks like my Dad. That's who it is. (146, my ellipsis)

These naïve associations between Sam, the mystical cloud and Christ, narrated in Ort’s unpretentious language, evoke an enigmatic sense of the conflation of simplicity and profundity and a humorous insight into his childish perception of Christ with “long hair, wonky eyes, those holes in him”. Similarly, Sam’s mother (Grammar), living unseen in a back room and imprisoned inside her senility, is present only as a voice calling out apparently meaningless utterances, most often “Is that you, Lil Pickering?”, referring to a dead friend whose ongoing presence she senses.

Grammar seems to anticipate the arrival of something ineffable known only to herself and, like Ort, she is attuned to a mystical level of existence. Her symbolic role in the text is ambiguous and her death near the end coincides with the departure of the false prophet, Henry Warburton, with Ort's rebellious, self-mutilating sister. The confluence of events heralds the arrival of hope and happiness for Ort and his parents.

At the story’s enigmatic magical realist closure, Ort's cloud exultantly pervades the house at the moment when Sam opens his eyes and smiles for the first time since his accident, ending the novel with a correlation between the eye of God and the eyes of Ort's father:

His eyes are open and they're on me and smiling as I come in shouting 'God! God! God!'...Mum comes in laughing and the cloud fills the room till all I can see is his eyes burning white and I know that something, something here in this world is gonna break. (150, my ellipsis)

While such individualised expressions of faith are honoured in That Eye, the Sky, the authoritative voices of organised religions and their adherents are scorned as being hypocritical. The attempts by

Ort and his mother to participate in mainstream religious services are “a comic parody of orthodox practice” (Taylor 1996, 324) which highlight the churches’ repressive and exclusive attitudes. In the fire-and-brimstone Protestant Revivalist service, Ort perceives a “gutsy story with drinking blood and scorching and earthquakes and no reason for it” (124) after which a man with a blue suit and oily hair gets up and shouts at them. Their reception is little better at the larger and more traditional Catholic church where they are confronted by a “bloke with a dressing gown and a party

hat” and “people in white sheets, music coming flat-chat out of these pipes up the front and some bloke singing or talking like nothing you’ve ever heard before in your life. Scary, boy!” (146).

Ort’s ingenuous and comical interpretations of practices that would be recognisable to many readers have the effect of subverting and demystifying these Christian rituals (Ben-Messahel 2006,

201) and disenfranchising them of authoritative power by using strategies of humour and ridicule.

Through his attention to various authoritative religious voices - including Henry Warburton's idiosyncratic preaching and the institutionalised voices of the Protestant and Catholic churches –

Ort’s own internally persuasive spiritual discourse develops. This process accords with Bakhtin’s assertion (1981, 345) that “one's own discourse is gradually and slowly wrought out of others' words that have been acknowledged and assimilated”.

Ort's spiritual and ideological becoming is instilled with the “Christian-inspired nature mysticism” (Mitchell 2006, 94) which is characteristic of Winton’s work. In this regard, Mitchell claims that “a call for connectedness with the natural world is one of the ‘safest’ points of religious dialogue”, linking religious moderates and environmentalists by a mutual desire to preserve and respect the environment. He argues that “Winton offers his Christian-inspired nature mysticism to a readership open to the spiritually transformative power of nature, even if the reader is ambivalent about the origins of Winton's commitment” (94). Although Winton is viewed by many critics as a patently Christian writer, That Eye, the Sky extends beyond conventional Christianity to encompass other visions of spirituality, sometimes portrayed through realism and sometimes venturing into magical realistic territory. Along with the exploration of several versions of Christianity, the novel opens a dialogue which supports the postsecular notion of hybridity in modern portrayals of religious faith. In accordance with this idea, Ben-Messahal (2006, 204) contends that “Winton’s stories are imbued with a New Age environmentalism, and a Jungian spiritualism [sic] that turns to

Aboriginal religion as a means of making modernity reconcilable with itself.”

As discussed below in relation to Moloney’s Lost Property, the action in That Eye, the Sky culminates with a family and personal reconciliation on Good Friday, evoking a strong Christian inference of spiritual rebirth. There is an inclination towards the individualisation of religion which

Beck (2010) describes as symptomatic of the postsecular age with his notion of “a God of one's

own”. Ben-Messahal (2006, 202) affirms the development of individualised religion in this novel as he contends that “the dymystification of religion corresponds to the distorted use of beliefs by people in modern society, and hints at the idea that beliefs can be expressed in various ways, that the individual can be a true believer according to his own acts”. That Eye, the Sky interrogates the authoritative discourses of organised religion and the subsequent development of internally persuasive discourses that Bakhtin (1981, 345) describes as “half-ours and half-someone else's”.

The ensuing struggle for “hegemony among various available verbal and ideological points of view, approaches, directions and values” leads to Ort’s ideological becoming in this novel which presents a unique postsecular approach in Australian fiction.

Interrogating religious authority The authority of organised religion is typically expressed monologically, while more individual forms of spirituality are most effectively constructed dialogically between protagonists and the multiple influences on their development. Thus many YA novels are polyphonic in their use of multivoiced or multistranded narratives (McCallum 1999, 23). Lost Property, with its chronologically linear plot and single first-person narrator, is not overtly polyphonic but multiple voices and discourses are distinctly heard, mostly unfiltered despite the first-person narration by

Josh Tambling. This effect is particularly seen in Josh’s apparently reliable retelling of conversations with other characters, coupled with his internal dialogic reflections on matters such as religious faith and his urge to find his own voice amid pressures to conform to the beliefs and values of other people. Although the novel is exclusively focalised by Josh, his character is sufficiently receptive to enable a sensitive representation of other perspectives. He is often aware of his own biased assumptions about other people and their lives and is conscious of the discrepancies between his conjectures and reality, a narrative effect which creates a slight sense of the omniscient author’s voice behind Josh’s thought processes. However, this facilitates the tendency “to assimilate others' discourse [which] takes on an even deeper and more basic significance in an individual's ideological becoming” (Bakhtin 1981, 342) and is apparent in Josh as he undertakes a spiritual quest to work out “what the soul is” (257).

Seventeen year old Josh Tambling lives in Sydney with his comfortable middle-class family. He is a high achiever at his Catholic school (named Fidelis, the Latin word for faithful), has an amiable but half-hearted relationship with his girlfriend, Alicia, and is lead singer in an amateur rock band comprised of school mates. During the summer holidays, Josh takes a job at the lost property office at Central Station where seemingly inconsequential events challenge his already shifting sense of life's meaning, including his wavering faith in the traditional Catholicism of his family and school. The reader gradually learns that Josh's ostensibly tranquil family life had been shattered three years earlier when his older brother Michael left home in a rebellion against parental authority - an allusion to the Biblical parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32). Implicit intertextual Biblical references occur throughout Lost Property, creating a covert second narrative strand. As well his likeness to the prodigal son, Michael's character is imbued with Christ-like imagery, particularly in his work. He had been an apprentice carpenter in Sydney (an occupation imposed on him by his father) and after leaving home he wandered in a metaphoric wilderness before finding meaning and connectedness for himself in a job of his own choosing - as a fisherman, again evoking Christian allusions. The novel is primarily a Bildungsroman focused on younger brother Josh's quest, but with a sub-plot in which Michael, the prodigal son, rejects the authoritative voice of his father to develop his own internally persuasive discourse, revealing “ever newer ways to mean” (Bakhtin 1981, 346, original italics). In a subversion of the Biblical story, this prodigal son does not return to the family home but becomes the saviour of the faithful son, Josh, who had travelled to north Queensland with the aim of rescuing his wayward brother. The novel closes with an image of Michael, his partner Kelly and their infant son - suggestive of a Christian nativity scene - having built a life independent of his birth family, but finally reconciled with them.

The events of the story begin at Christmas and finish at Easter, further contributing to the implicit

Biblical intertextuality. Through the subversion of Biblical allusions, Lost Property interrogates authoritative religious discourses and invites the reader to re-evaluate the Christian metanarrative which pervades this and other narratives, as argued by Pausacker (2000, 13).

Although set in twenty-first century suburban Sydney, Lost Property inhabits a monocultural, monofaith world in which Anglo-Australian Catholicism dominates, reminiscent of

1950s Australia and still existing in some areas. Josh, as the main focaliser whose outlook is presented to readers, views the world from a white, male, heterosexual, middle-class suburban perspective. His spiritual quest extends only from Catholicism to atheism and then towards a secular humanism which acknowledges the possibility of a spiritual dimension to life. Exploration of non-Christian religious beliefs doesn't “get a guernsey” as Moloney might express it - for Josh, it appears to be the Catholic God or none. This is presumably an intentional authorial constraint, in light of the broader spiritual view of much of Moloney’s other work, such as the Dougy trilogy which encompasses Indigenous spiritualities. Lost Property's socially restricted worldview is not shared by The Rage of Sheep (Cooper 2007) which, despite being set in 1980s conservative rural

Australia, is more socially diverse. This diversity arises from the thematic importance of Otherness in addition to the interrogation of religious faith. Even in The Rage of Sheep, however, religious meandering extends only from traditional Christianity to agnosticism without considering other spiritual options, despite Cooper's claim that her motivation to write the novel was stimulated by her students' interest in inter-religious tolerance following 9/11 (Haley 2008, 7).

The voices of both church and family in Lost Property evoke Bakhtin's (1981, 342) concept of the authoritative word which “is located in a distanced zone, organically connected with a past that is felt to be hierarchically higher. It is, so to speak, the word of the fathers”. The authoritative paternal voice is significant throughout Lost Property, in the novel's concern with father-son relationships from the earthly to the celestial. Religious and parental authorities are constructed as parallel influences in Josh's life and form two of the multiple voices with which he engages. His loss of faith in the Catholic heavenly father coincides with his realisation that his earthly father is not the omnipotent superhuman he had once believed in. This doubt is inferred in family stories of the father's adolescent battles with Josh's alcoholic grandfather, such as

I just couldn't imagine fighting my own father. It's not the fists and the punches, it's how it would mess with your head...Niggling doubts cut across the picture of my dad that those stories had built into my own mental scrapbook, the same niggles that made me work out what I thought about God. (72, my ellipsis)

Conversations between Josh and Gemma, his mate’s sister and a potential love interest, provide an impetus for Josh's spiritual quest. Gemma’s awareness of the authoritative and monologic nature of

much religious discourse is revealed in her assertion that “Maybe people do think about it but nobody talks about it much. School is about the only place and even then we just jump through hoops the teachers hold up for us” to which Josh responds inwardly, “She was right about that.

Until I started watching the night sky and reading and wondering, those hoops were all I ever jumped through” (109-110).

In addition to the authoritative stance of his Catholic school, Josh's parents – particularly his father - attempt to prescribe their children's religious conformity and discourage interrogation of their beliefs. Like the dutiful son in the parable, Josh endures parental rules begrudgingly but more empathically than his rebellious brother had, as evidenced in the following story:

Wish I had Michael's balls when it came to all this. 'I'm not going,' he shouted through his bedroom door one Sunday morning when Dad called us all to get ready for church. 'We're a family and we all go,' Dad told him. 'Not me. I'm staying in bed. It's all a load of boring bullshit anyway and I'm sick of it.' … I remember the disappointment in Dad's face, though, and that's the trouble. I don't want to make him look like that again. The whole religion thing means a lot to Dad, even if he doesn't talk about it much. (55, my ellipsis)

Josh's retelling of this incident conveys important information about the family dynamics. His proclamation that “we're a family and we all go” conveys the father's inflexibility about something that is important to him. Josh's empathy for his father, despite his uncompromising reaction to

Michael's justifiable rebellion, demonstrates his sensitivity concerning the importance of religion to his father regardless of Josh’s own doubts.

Unlike Alicia, Josh’s current girlfriend, Gemma is responsive to his musings about 'big questions', such as why the universe is so vast, as she responds

'Don't ask me. You need a higher authority to answer that one.' She flicked her eyes upward, eyebrows too, but left the word 'God' unsaid...'Sounds like you don't believe there is such a thing.' Had I sounded like that? Words are dangerous. They can give you away if you're not careful. (52, my ellipsis)

Words and voice are recurring motifs throughout Lost Property, performing both metonymic and metaphoric functions. The Biblical passage, “In the beginning was the word...and the word was

God” (John 1:1) signifies the authoritative power of words in organised religion, although Bakhtin argued that “the sacred and authoritarian word…is the word that retards and freezes thought” demanding “reverent repetition and not further development, corrections and additions” (Bakhtin,

Holquist and Emerson1986, 133, my ellipsis). Such conflicting attitudes to authoritarian words reinforce Josh's assertion that “words are dangerous”. In the above quote, the external discussion between Josh and Gemma switches to Josh's internal direct speech, which operates as a dialogue between Josh and the reader with another hint of authorial intrusion, as the reader perceives

Moloney's voice accentuating his stated motivation for writing the novel. This intrusion is also evident when the conversation with Gemma is followed by Josh's further private reflection that

God is not something you talk about, certainly not to mates like Dave and Neven...How do we know it's all true? Stupid question, really, because we can't. The whole point is that you are supposed to have faith, and there was the problem for me. I began to suspect a monumental con job...No, God is all in our minds. Or at least he's in the minds of the people around me, but he's not in mine, not any more. (53-55, my ellipses)

At this point, Josh's spiritual quest is more intellectual than emotional, leading him from the authoritative Catholic faith of his childhood to the atheism declared in his thoughts. Yet he still has considerable distance to cover in his quest, as he soon begins to react emotionally to the sense of loss experienced after making the intellectual break with his belief in God. He ponders

I hadn’t counted on mornings like this when an emptiness opened up inside me despite my rock-solid certainty. Though I was sure God was never there, when I finally let go of all the crap, something else disappeared, too. I looked at people around me, all devoted to an elaborate myth. I pitied them for their delusions but in a ridiculous way I envied them, too...They could make a kind of peace for themselves out of something, even though it didn’t exist. I won’t do that, I can’t, but I want that peace all the same. (112, my ellipsis)

Although, Josh considers religion to be a “monumental con job” as Richard Dawkins implies in

The God Delusion (2006), his existential dilemma is more in line with ideas expressed in An awareness of what is missing: faith and reason in a post-secular age (Habermas 2010) which highlights the limitations of secular reason to answer many of the metaphysical questions that challenge humans.

Like Josh, the focalising character in The Rage of Sheep (Cooper 2007) undertakes a spiritual quest that leads her to doubt the validity of her parents' conventional Christian beliefs which she has accepted up to this stage of her life. The novel explores religious faith and behaviour through interactions between the mainstream but moderate Christianity of fifteen year old Hester

Jones, the focalising first person narrator, juxtaposed with that of Joshua Mason, a fundamentalist sect member and school colleague. Hester's ideological quest also leads her to scrutinise some of her more secular values involving friendship, conformity and prejudice, as she confronts the insular attitudes of the inhabitants of the fictional town of Hastings in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney.

The author, Michelle Cooper, acknowledges the partly autobiographical nature of the novel, disclosing that she had grown up in a “very Christian family” who “went to church twice on

Sundays, Bible study, prayer meetings, Christian youth camps” (Haley 2008, 7). Further, the young

Cooper had “always got into trouble in Bible study for asking difficult questions” that eventually led her towards agnosticism, like the protagonist she constructs in The Rage of Sheep. Expression of the authoritative voice is not the role of Hester's moderate Baptist parents though, who are liberal-minded compared with the various factional groups, both religious and secular, that inhabit the small town world of the story. The narrative device of setting the novel in an insular community facilitates the exploration of the novel's various manifestations of prejudice - racial, homophobic, cultural and religious - which is a dominant theme of the novel. The town's social groups each display their prejudices in the manner of the unthinking sheep that metaphorically pervade the novel.

Religious prejudice - encompassing racial prejudice through a skewed interpretation of the

Bible - is embodied in Joshua, who voices the views of the fundamentalist Church of the Blessed

Lambs of God of which he and his family are members. Joshua's dogmatic religious beliefs are introduced early in the novel when he defends Creationism against the correspondingly authoritative evolutionary perspective of the science teacher, Colonel Saunders. The dogmatic presentation of both sides of the Creationism-Evolution argument invokes Bakhtin's reference

(1981, 342-343) to “the authority of religious dogma, or acknowledged scientific truth, or a currently fashionable book”. Along with these rigid religious and scientific attitudes, other

prejudices thrive in Hastings, evoked by the authority of the current fashion in popular culture.

Although the reader is positioned to contemplate the irrationality of the creationist position in relation to the scientific perspective, Joshua’s character is sympathetically constructed, at least initially, as he presents his case respectfully in contrast to the bullying behaviour of Colonel

Saunders who champions the evolutionist argument. An early scene of confrontation in the science class provides an opportunity for Hester to reveal her own religious views which are informed rationally rather than by the authoritative teachings of her church:

[Joshua] 'I...uh, I just wanted to say...that you should warn the class that, that evolution is just an idea. It's not facts...God buried them [dinosaur bones] sir...when He created the whole world. To, to test our faith. In Genesis...' He fumbled with his Bible. Colonel Saunders leaned forward. 'This is a Science class,' he said, still in his quiet, menacing voice. 'Not Religious Education. Not Sunday School. This is Science, the study of...What is it the study of, Miss Jones?' He whipped around towards me. 'Um...the study of the physical universe, based on observation, experiment and measurement?' I said. 'Thank you,' he said. He turned back to Joshua. 'So if you wish to examine the history of superstition contained in that book,' and he twitched his hand at the Bible, 'do so in your own time.' (8-9, my ellipses)

Reflecting on Colonel Saunders' uncompromising authoritative attitude, Hester reveals her own religious stance – retorting privately “history of superstition, indeed!” - and confronts her inner conflict as she wonders whether she should have taken a more defensive position:

In the Bible, true believers never hesitated to leap to God's defence, even when they were threatened with starving lions and fiery furnaces. What kind of a Christian was I?...A very wimpy Christian, it seemed. (10, my ellipsis)

This episode foreshadows Hester's ideological journey through the course of the novel. As well as reconsidering her belief in a caring God, Hester reviews her attitude towards friendship and her yearning for a sense of belonging that requires conformity to the standards of the popular students at school. Her development of personal agency and ideological becoming, disconnected from the values of both the majority culture and alternative cultures portrayed, is fostered by Mr

Everett, the gay English teacher and main representative of Otherness in the novel. The character of

Hester is also constructed as Other, in her disregard of the fashion sense of her school colleagues,

her high academic achievements and her ethnic difference, being the child of a Fijian-Indian mother and an Anglo-Australian father. The subversive notion of individualism is pitched against the pressure to conform in many aspects of Hester's life, including her spiritual identity as a member of a traditional organised religion. She begins to connect the authoritative word of the

Bible with conformity to group ideologies, after her church's minister proclaims:

“For God will separate the people...as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on His right and the goats on His left"...I ask you then...Will you be a sheep...Or a goat? (178, my ellipses)

Soon after this sermon is delivered, more seeds of conflict and doubt are planted in Hester's mind as Mr Everett expresses an alternative view of sheep and goats, applying the animal metaphors to himself and his school colleagues:

Sheep. When I was at school, it always helped me to imagine the others as sheep. Not very intelligent animals, sheep. Tend to panic and rush around in circles if anything interesting appears in their midst...Stupid, but essentially harmless. Now goats on the other hand, they're quite different animals. Smart. Stubborn. Able to scale high mountains, that sort of thing. Mind you, on really bad days, I pictured myself as a wolf. (202-203, my ellipsis)

In addition to Bible references, two significant intertexts in The Rage of Sheep are Nineteen

Eighty Four (Orwell 1949) - the year in which The Rage of Sheep is set as well as the subject of an

English class discussion with Mr Everett - and The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger 1951) which Mr

Everett obtains for Hester from the school library's restricted section. As traditional school texts, these novels would be known to most contemporary adolescent readers, perhaps in greater depth than the Bible. Both novels uphold values of individualism and are introduced to Hester by Mr

Everett, who recognises in her an Otherness and individuality similar to his own, amid the sheep- like conformity of the small town inhabitants. Hester's journey towards an individualised agnostic spirituality is nurtured by her detached analysis and integration of the various discourses she encounters. These discourses are constructed through the numerous voices of her moderate yet authoritative church, the misguided insensitivity of Joshua's fundamentalist church, the unthinking conformity to mainstream culture of her school colleagues and teachers, the gentle authority of her parents and the marginality of Mr Everett.

Incorporated into its straightforward first-person narrative structure, the novel utilises the extraliterary device of letters written by Hester, mostly to her absent friend Krystena. Bakhtin

(1981, 320) claimed that the use of such “incorporated genres” is “one of the most basic and fundamental forms for incorporating and organizing heteroglossia in the novel”, thereby facilitating its dialogic discourse. This dialogic potential of this device is not fully developed in The Rage of

Sheep, however, as the letters are written by only one author, the focalising narrator Hester, and therefore do not enhance the heteroglottic impact. The dialogic effect is more successfully achieved through the distinct discourses of various characters’ voices and the intertextual references discussed above. Hester's initial letters are all addressed to the absent Krystena but eventually, when she concedes that Krystena, like God, is not responding to her, she writes to herself. This progression leads Hester to realise the value of self-sufficiency and independence from the authoritative social norms, as she bemoans in her final unsent letter to Krystena

[W]riting to you is a little like praying - I always feel a bit better afterwards, even if the words don't go anywhere. I'm sure that amuses you, being compared to God...while I'm sure you both exist, I'm not sure that either of you care much about MY existence - I think you're both pretty busy with other stuff now. (243-244, my ellipsis)

As in Lost Property, where Josh's loss of faith in God parallels his loss of faith in his father's supremacy, Hester's acknowledgement of God’s deficiencies coincides with her epiphany that

Krystena was not the friend she had presumed and that the popularity she sought at school was a shallow reward for sacrificing her personal agency and integrity.

Until the writing of the final letter, the narrative is convincingly polyphonic with the focalisation by Hester complemented by the other characters’ voices. However, the extraliterary device acquires a feeling of contrivance at this point, as Hester writes

Anyway, I'm going to pretend you're wondering what's happening since That Day. Well, firstly, Ms Oliver not only let me take another algebra test... (244, my ellipsis)

This awkward storytelling strategy is accompanied by a sense of authorial intrusion as Hester expresses a multitude of theological doubts and asks difficult questions, as Cooper admits to having done in her Bible study days. While the novel continues to employ the subversive humour which infuses the novel and facilitates the exploration of the weighty subjects of religious belief and

prejudice, there is an increasing urge to ensure that the reader has grasped the author's message, in case it was not sufficiently conveyed through the discursive interactions between the characters.

The voice that emerges in the final letter remains Hester's but with a proselytising tendency to advocate the virtue of doubt, as she wonders

What if the Bible isn't always right? Or what if it was right for the people who wrote it down, but not for me, thousands of years later and on the other side of the world?...When I think about the ministers of Joshua's church and the apartheid leaders in South Africa who truly believe that the Bible supports their racism...how is that different to the minister in my church using the Bible to attack Mr Everett... (245, my ellipses)

The questioning style used here and the valorising of religious doubt dilute the potential for the narrative to revert to the authoritative discourse it rejects. By the time the story closes with her family's departure from Hastings and its small town prejudices, the dialogic construction of the narrative has positioned the reader to accept that Hester is progressing towards ideological becoming as an independent agent and thinker. Hester's philosophical move towards agnosticism corresponds with the thematic openness which accompanies the plot closure, despite its contrivance. Her “coming to ideological consciousness” (Bakhtin 1981, 348) is a journey similar to that of Josh in Lost Property, when he concludes that “God or no God, the soul's a human thing”

(Moloney 2005a, 256). Both Josh and Hester transition from a belief in a Christian God to an agnostic or secular humanist outlook, with Hester admitting that Doubting Thomas “was always

(secretly) my favourite disciple of Jesus. Thomas was the one who asked the tough questions”

(Cooper, 245).

Interrogating atheist authority The virtue of doubt is similarly extolled in some Australian YA novels whose characters travel in a different direction. While Lost Property and The Rage of Sheep are focalised by characters whose spiritual quests lead them to question the religious beliefs of their Christian parents, the following novels approach the issue from the opposite position. Published fourteen years apart, The First Day

(Masson 1995) and Winter of Grace (Constable 2009) each employ plot devices that facilitate the ideological isolation of the main characters. The main protagonists in novels are 16-17 year old schoolgirls living in single parent/only child families with devoutly atheist mothers who, a

generation earlier, had rebelled against the Christianity of their own pious parents to become dogmatically anti-religious. Subsequently they each attempt to protect their only daughters from the tyranny of organised religion. Each girl is thus free of a religious background, apart from a little knowledge gleaned in their secular schools. In this way, the novels construct similar plot structures to facilitate the exploration of spiritual options from an almost tabula rasa perspective of the focalising characters. Both Skye in The First Day and Bridie in Winter of Grace are “religiously illiterate…drawn by vagrant promptings into the obscure countries of the spirit, where they find themselves…without even those rudimentary maps that have helped mark the way for earlier, better schooled, predecessors” (McClure 2007, 9, my ellipses). Skye's state school offers comparative religion classes and when she auditions for a role in Jesus Christ Superstar, she feels that some broad religious research might assist:

I got books from the library on all kinds of things - mythology, the Bible, Judaism and Christianity and Hinduism, on new research into religion, the life of Jesus, and all kinds of topics that made my head spin. There were so many different ways of asking the question, 'Why are we here?' and so many ways to answer, too. (12)

Bridie's opportunities for religious education in Winter of Grace are more restricted. When her best friend Stella changes schools to St Margaret's Catholic College, Bridie asks to do the same but her mother's angry response reveals the strength of the opposition which Bridie faces throughout the novel and explains her 'religious illiteracy':

'I don't believe in them [religious schools], on principle. I believe in state-funded, secular education. If people want to teach their children lies and superstition, let them do it at home.' Mum's voice rose, and two red spots glowed in her cheeks. (23)

The mother’s vehement use of the word “believe” reinforces the strength of her atheism in opposition to, and yet paradoxically similar to, pro-religious beliefs. These narrative mechanisms establish the circumstances in which each focaliser develops curiosity about other people’s religious beliefs and wonders whether their own lives are lacking a spiritual facet – “an awareness of what is missing”, as Habermas suggested. While Skye's burgeoning interest in religion is stimulated by the production of Jesus Christ Superstar, in Winter of Grace Bridie's exploration of spirituality begins when she befriends a Christian boy who introduces her to his church. Both of

these incidents elicit opposition from the atheist mothers corresponding to that of Josh’s Catholic parents in Lost Property, although the devout atheism of Skye's and Bridie's mothers may be more a reaction to unjust parental authority than to their authoritarian religious beliefs. Skye's mother,

Susannah had suffered her parents’ authoritative and dogmatic religiosity, as she explains when justifying her anti-religious stance to Skye:

'I was brought up Catholic. My parents had a fit when I married your father. He wasn't Catholic...It turned me off religion, that blindness of theirs....I read the Bible...And I thought, well, it's not that different from Greek myths, fierce and angry and strange....I said that to my father, hoping he'd try to explain some of the things to me...but do you know all he said? He said, You don't ask questions, you just believe, that's all!' (10-11, my ellipses)

This parental command echoes Josh’s father’s unquestioning faith in Lost Property. Susannah's reminiscence also evokes Bakhtin's account (1981, 342) of the authoritative word which “demands that we acknowledge it” because “its authority was already acknowledged in the past” and ”it is therefore not a question of choosing it from among other possible discourses that are its equal” .

Questions of religious faith become a point of conflict in the close relationships which

Skye and Bridie have with their mothers, parallelling the situation experienced by Josh in Lost

Property whose path, like Hester’s in The Rage of Sheep, leads away from the faith of the Christian families. The authoritative religious discourse in The First Day is moderated by the novel's dialogic interactions between several varieties of belief, including Susannah's humanist rejection of religion and the high value she places on doubt and interrogation:

‘But Skye, haven’t you thought that maybe we’re meant to have doubts, and questions? That maybe we’re not really human if we don’t?’ (13)

The virtue of doubt flows thematically through many of the YA novels that contemplate religious faith and, rather than being portrayed as anti-religion, it reflects Beck's contention (2010, 16) that

“religious individualism is another term for doubt, the brother of faith whose narratives thread their way through the history of religion”. Beck further applauds members of religious communities

“who find space for doubt and even welcome it as a way of revitalizing religious life, as opposed to those who do not share this view and who barricade themselves behind the constructed ‘purity’ of their faith” (2010, 171). This attitude embraces Bakhtin's notion of internally persuasive discourse

as a “retelling in one's own words” in preference to authoritatively and monologically “reciting by heart”.

Numerous forms of contemporary religious practice and belief are portrayed in The First

Day. The reverent Catholicism of Skye's friend Marco, as he lights candles in church for his uncles missing in Argentina after persecution by the police, contrasts with Skye’s grandparents’ intolerant and unforgiving Catholicism. The fundamentalist Congregation of Zion, with its authoritarian

Reverend Wilton, presents another manifestation of contemporary Christianity. The reader is consequently positioned, along with Skye, to consider religion's dual facility for both consolation and harm or, as Beck (2010) asserts, its capacity for peace and potential for violence. The authoritative religious word is also subjected to somewhat carnivalesque treatment with the use of

Jesus Christ Superstar as the main intertext. The 1970s rock opera presents a subversive, ambivalent and often comic interpretation of the story of Christ. However, The First Day characters' involvement in their assigned roles in the production provides an opportunity for the novel to convey aspects of the original Biblical version, using the ‘story within a story’ device with fictional characters playing other characters. This strategy creates a sense of the multi-layered complexity of religious stories and beliefs. In Winter of Grace, Bridie's appreciation of the varieties of religious faith is nurtured by her close relationship with her friend Stella's family, whose members are constructed with an eclectic mixture of spiritual beliefs. Nana Kincaid is a traditional but compassionate Catholic; the father, Paul, is lapsed in his belief but has retained the spirit of social justice inspired by his Catholic upbringing; the mother, Mish, leans towards New Age spirituality; while the politically-conscious Stella embraces atheism in reaction against her conservative Catholic schooling.

Beck's notion of religion's ambiguous “capacity for peace and potential for violence” is further highlighted in the opening scene of Winter of Grace, when Bridie and Stella attend an anti- war rally and, like Biblical good Samaritans, come to the aid of Jay as he is violently attacked by a group of young men who are later revealed to be fellow anti-war protestors reacting against Jay's placard which proclaims “Jesus loves our soldiers” (100). The authoritative voices in Winter of

Grace consequently come from both ends of the belief spectrum - the uncompromising

fundamentalist Christianity of Jay's 'Northside' church and the correspondingly blinkered atheism of Bridie's mother, who happens to be an academic scientist, a narrative feature commonly used to construct the purported opposition between science and faith, and also seen with the evolutionist science teacher in The Rage of Sheep. An even stronger atheist voice is heard in the character of

Professor Randall Martinez, who shares the stage with Bridie's mother at a lecture on evolution versus creationism at which members of Northside church protest, mirroring the anti-war protest which opened the novel. Northside church is perhaps an allusion to the modern evangelical churches that operate in Australia, such as Hillsong and Catch the Fire Ministries, while Professor

Martinez, on the other ideological side, resembles New Atheist Richard Dawkins. While such contemporary allusions provide some appealing currency to the text, they may also jeopardise the novel's relevance to future young adult readers.

Faced with the ideological and emotional conflict between loyalty to her mother and attraction to the church and her new friends, Bridie eventually concludes

Suddenly I realised: it wasn't a choice between God and no God, between Northside and science, between Stella and Jay. It wasn't about finding a person, or a set of rules, to follow; it was about working it out for myself. (125)

The authorial voice is evident in this clichéd revelation, inviting the reader to take a similar position. This contrivance is somewhat ironic, given the intended message conveyed through Bridie of “working it out for myself”. However, both Winter of Grace and The First Day implicitly attempt to avoid authoritative, prescriptive or simplistic resolutions to the characters' interrogation of the various religious faiths portrayed. The equitable presentation of several religious alternatives

- including atheist, agnostic and New Age options - facilitates the dialogic construction of the novels' themes within a conventional narrative structure. Although the plot events and characters’ dialogues are sometimes clichéd and contrived in some of these novels which explore representations of organised religion, they do illustrate Bakhtin's concept of authoritative discourse evolving towards internally persuasive discourse, as summed up in the closure of Winter of Grace:

Another thing I'd learned this winter was that I didn't have to rely on other people to tell me what to believe or do or think. I could listen to the voice inside me and decide for myself. It wasn't always easy to hear; and whether I called it God, or the Light, or my conscience, or whatever, didn't really matter. And whether I found it at Northside, or St John's, or the little weatherboard church, or with the Quakers or the Buddhists, or all alone on the beach didn't matter either. At least now I knew how to listen. (165)

This reasoning was endorsed by the Psychologists for Peace judging panel who, on awarding

Winter of Grace the 2009 Children's Peace Literature Award, commented that “a variety of religious beliefs is portrayed, and Bridie's quest is not over by the end of the book” (Australian

Psychological Association 2009). The judges commended “the underlying message” that “people with different religious beliefs including atheism can all be sincere seekers after truth and an honourable code of behaviour”, reflecting the views of the Dalai Lama cited in Chapter 1 . The

Award further recognised the overriding ideology of inter-religious dialogue and tolerance expressed in Winter of Grace which recognises “that friendship and trust allow people to disagree about religious beliefs without damaging their relationship” and that “the model of respect for diverse belief systems and their adherents is a timely one in our age”. Echoing Cooper's incentive for writing The Rage of Sheep, and Moloney's for writing Lost Property, Constable affirmed that her reason for writing a YA novel with religious themes was that she “wanted to write something about young people and spirituality, because I feel it's a neglected area. Exploring religion and God and spirituality (and politics) is just as important to some young people as finding their way around sex and space and cyberspace, but it doesn't get nearly as much attention” (Constable 2009a). Also like Cooper, Constable's implied reader appears to be a younger version of herself, exploring religious options and asking questions which are unanswered in secular environments such as those depicted in The First Day and Winter of Grace, similar to those inhabited by many contemporary young Australian readers.

Conclusion In response to James Moloney's challenge to name an Australian YA novel where God “gets a guernsey”, this chapter has examined a selection of novels, published both before and shortly after

Moloney's assertion, in which traditional religious beliefs are overtly thematised and alternative

spiritual possibilities are envisaged. The value of doubt and interrogation expressed in these novels reflects current sociocultural discussion of the postsecular hypothesis that posits the endurance and resurgence of religious beliefs and practices in the current era, supported by a respectful dialogue between secular and religious interests. The publication of contemporary Australian YA novels whose authors consciously contribute to the dialogue without overtly promoting personal beliefs indicates an ongoing interest in religious and spiritual matters. Discussion of gods in the context of authoritative religion does not inherently evoke a sense of spirituality, however, if the religious ideas are presented in a dogmatic or monologic manner. Lost Property and The Rage of Sheep portray young people reconsidering the authoritative religious and social environments in which they exist and choosing to follow more individualistic paths. With similar yearnings but from a different belief background, the protagonists in The First Day and Winter of Grace investigate a broader range of spiritual options, eventually adopting similarly flexible outlooks. Each of these focus novels remains grounded in realism, with the exception of That Eye, the Sky in which the protagonist meanders from religious illiteracy, through an exploration of several traditional

Christianities into a magical realist space where he reaffirms his own uncommon spiritual perceptions.

The discussion of individualised spirituality is, of course, not new. In The Varieties of

Religious Experience: a Study in Human Nature, William James (1902, 6) claimed that a religious life, exclusively pursued, “does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric”. He was not speaking of ordinary religious believers who follow “the conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan” as these religions had been made by others and communicated by tradition, in accordance with authoritative discourses described by Bakhtin.

James (1902, 17) claimed that “it would profit us little to study this second-hand religious life” but

“we must make search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern-setters of all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct.” Following this chapter’s discussion of the representation of “this second-hand religious life” in Australian YA fiction, the following chapters explore more individualised and implicitly expressed forms of spirituality. In particular, the next

three chapters investigate the portrayal of ideological and spiritual quests in realistic, speculative and multimodal narrative styles.

CHAPTER 3

RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW: SPIRITUAL QUESTS IN REALISTIC YA FICTION

The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others. Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

One should plan for spiritual enlightenment. At least bring a torch. Lia Hills, The Beginner’s Guide to Living

I'm all for getting some of that happiness happening now. Right here, right now, like fully. Not in some way off maybe heaven. Meme McDonald and Boori Pryor, Njunjul the Sun

“The gods have departed” according to Jill Paton Walsh and “in the absence of religious and philosophical ‘truths’, we are ultimately left with fictions, theories and ideologies as to the nature, purpose and meaning of what we conventionally refer to as ‘selfhood’.” (McCallum 1999, 255).

The previous chapter considered very literal and explicit representations of spirituality in

Australian YA novels, with protagonists exploring ideas of gods and religious and philosophical truths as they are expressed in organised religious contexts. It concluded in an ambivalent and interrogative space with ongoing questions about gods, selfhood and transcendent meaning.

Moving away from the conscious exploration of spirituality as organised religion, the following chapters encompass more tacit and individualised understandings that are expressed metaphorically as well as literally. These portrayals manifest as spiritual quests, emanating from traditional heroic quests such as those described by Joseph Campbell ([1949]1993), in which characters seek to develop beliefs, values and sense of connectedness that transcends the materiality of the everyday world. In the current era, however, we live in “a post-heroic age” where “heroes are for debunking and deconstructing” (Jones and Watkins 2000, 1) along with traditional conceptions of spiritual quests. This chapter incorporates the seemingly incongruous concept of secular spirituality, as

expounded by a number of scholars including high profile atheists such as Daniel Dennett (2010) and Sam Harris (2005). The concept is alternatively discussed as ‘atheist spirituality’ (Compte-

Sponville 2007), ‘agnostic spirituality’ (Payne 2010) or ‘naturalised spirituality’ (Solomon 2002) but all of these labels suggest the notion of spiritualties detached from conventional religious spiritualties. The postsecular approach encompassing a dialogue between religious and secular discourses blends well with this analysis as does the concept of ideological becoming (Bakhtin

1981, 342-348) as the ongoing struggle between authoritative and internally persuasive discourses.

Not surprisingly, the quest or journey metaphor is a recurring motif in most of the novels discussed in this thesis. In YA literature, the quest for self is almost a defining characteristic and

“[T]he quest for the sacred informs much of young adult literature, although often under other names” (Patty Campbell 1994, 3). Adolescents are innately on a quest for meaning, purpose and identity which often involves spirituality, according to educational psychologist Lisa Miller

(Howard 2012). She claims adolescents, with their “hot pink or bright red” emotions, are uniquely equipped for the task of “looking into the universe and finding meaning and asking the deep questions” such as “who am I in the deeper sense?” and “what is my purpose?”. In the following chapters, different narrative modes are examined for their ability to explore spiritual quests and to position readers to participate in the exploration. This chapter outlines the nature of spiritual quests in literature and analyses their representation in a number of realist texts. Chapter 4 considers spiritual quests in speculative fiction, including fantasy and some ‘in-between’ modes that lie along the realism-fantasy spectrum, and Chapter 5 examines multimodal constructions that blend verbal and visual text to portray spiritual journeys.

Spiritual quests One definition of spirituality cited in the introductory chapter is “the experience of conscious involvement in the project of life-integration through self-transcendence toward the ultimate value one perceives” (Schneiders 2003, 165). This account evokes a sense of movement and encompasses dynamic notions about the formation of beliefs, values and a sense of connectedness which are major elements of the definition of spirituality that frames this thesis. The active nature

of these concepts dovetails with the idea of a quest being undertaken by the novels' protagonists, particularly in the form of a spiritual journey. While the journey metaphor often manifests as a physical quest, it always involves a psychological excursion which takes place across time as much as space. Writing about growth in adolescent literature, Trites (2012, 65-66) claims that it “does not actually involve or require a journey, but travelling is nonetheless an embodied metaphor that critics are very likely to employ when they write about growth in the Bildungsroman”. The

Bildungsroman and the spiritual quest narrative paradigms are used interchangeably in the current discussion, as discussed below. Trites (2012, 67) further argues that “[A]lthough life is neither a journey nor a voyage, we frequently map the passing of time as if it were a land or sea over which we have travelled”.

Traditional quest narratives tend to encompass masculine heroic quests (Campbell [1949]

1993) although McCallum and Stephens (2000, 343-344) argue that “narrative fictions which target a contemporary Australian adolescent audience now characteristically eschew any kind of traditional male heroic image”. However, in the texts selected for this chapter as the most representative of realistic spiritual quest narratives in contemporary Australian YA fiction, young men dominate as the main protagonists. This raises the question of whether such narratives do in fact continue to perpetrate the paradigm of the traditional masculine hero’s quest, at least in ‘real world’ portrayals. More diverse gender representations are found in the speculative chronotopes of the novels selected for Chapter 4, while Chapter 8 questions whether spiritualities can be gendered in narrative constructions. Although the realist focus texts in this chapter are dominated by male spiritual questers, the masculinities are presented in ways that evoke images of the “anti-hero and the sensitive guy” rather than the “bronzed Aussie” or “iron man” of earlier eras (McCallum and

Stephens 2000, 343-344). As background, it is useful to consider some accounts of traditional heroic quests, as traces of such archetypal concepts persist in the contemporary Australian fiction discussed here, even though the depiction of the modern hero, whether male or female, has acquired a more profound psychological aspect.

Traditional hero quests

Perhaps the best known account of the quest in the recent literary discourse is that characterised by

Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces ([1949]1993). Campbell notes that most quest narratives have a common pattern – which he designates the monomyth - and characterises heroic quests as consisting of three main stages: departure, initiation and return. Departure (or separation) involves the hero leaving home to venture forth on the quest; initiation entails the hero's various experiences along the way; and return completes the sequence with the hero's homecoming with knowledge and powers acquired on the journey. Within each major stage there are numerous sub-divisions. The sub-categories most relevant to the current study are the call to adventure, the refusal of the call, the crossing of thresholds (on the journey out and the return), the trials and the freedom to live. Campbell’s description of the hero's journey between the two worlds experienced

– the divine and the human - resonates with Bakhtin's concept of a subject’s ongoing development of ideological becoming as a struggle between authoritative and internally persuasive discourses, resulting in an assimilation of the various external and internal voices that a character absorbs. A key to the understanding of myth and symbol is that

the two kingdoms are actually one. The realm of the gods is a forgotten dimension of the world we know. And the exploration of that dimension, either willingly or unwillingly, is the whole sense of the deed to the hero. The values and distinctions that in normal life seem important disappear with the terrifying assimilation of the self into what formerly was only otherness. (Campbell [1949] 1993, 217)

Binary perceptions of reality thus dissolve and merge into a continuum between the divine and the human, the spiritual and the secular.

The crossing of thresholds occupies an important place, often symbolised in rituals, the purpose and effect of which “was to conduct people across those difficult thresholds of transformation that demand a change in the patterns not only of conscious but also of unconscious life” (Campbell [1949]1993, 8). While the role of traditional religious rituals to commemorate rites of passage has diminished in contemporary Western society - possibly replaced by other forms such as eighteenth and twenty-first birthdays and school graduation rituals - the journeys depicted in the focus texts are often triggered by a transitional life event. This is usually the loss of

something significant, perhaps a death or the end of a life stage such as formal schooling. The trigger sometimes seems accidental or a “blunder” that “reveals an unsuspected world, and the individual is drawn into a relationship with forces that are not rightly understood” (Campbell

[1949]1993, 46). Citing Freud, Campbell suggests that blunders are not chance but “the result of suppressed desires and conflicts” and “ripples on the surface of life” that may be “as deep as the soul itself. The blunder may amount to the opening of a destiny” (Campbell [1949]1993, 46).

Rather than conforming to the traditionally dynamic heroic paradigm, the focus texts of this chapter represent more personal and introspective quests for identity and meaning. Jobling

(2010) argues that the hero journey envisaged by Campbell was “only superficially over-ground”

(Jobling 2010, 190) was more of “a journey to inner depths, involving travelling a road of many trials, the overcoming of hidden blockages and revivification of forgotten powers” (190). The quest is thus “a mode of spiritual transcendence” (190) in which the hero is enabled “to recognize the divine in the other, and the other in the self” (190) as “opaque materiality gives way to shadows of an immanent eternity” (190). Jobling points out that in this way the hero journey becomes a “model of and analogue for the spiritual quest” (190) and “the spiritual journey is related to psychoanalytical development and transformation” (190). Such an introspective quest may be viewed as solipsistic, an accusation that is often made against young adults in the current era (and historically), and the inwardly focussed perspective thus often operates metonymically. In this regard, Stephens (1999, 194) asserts that YA novels “that are structured as a quest for the self usually centre on characters who are represented as solipsistic, fragmented, or displaced and their stories articulate a quest for a sense of identity that is stable, coherent, unique, and whole – an essential self”. Consequently, in the personal quest for self, a modern heroic quality sometimes emerges alongside the protagonist’s solipsistic soul-searching. Stephens and McCallum (1998,

102) note that the change from mythical symbolic concepts of earlier literature to the ideals of the secular state does not necessarily mean the end of the hero, but a transformation of the hero’s role to make contemporary life spiritually significant. Campbell ([1949]1993, 388) proclaims that “the modern heroic deed must be that of questing to bring to light again the lost Atlantis of the co-

ordinated soul”. The quest for the “co-ordinated soul” is central to the construction of characters’ subjectivities in the focus novels discussed here.

Spiritual quests, Bildungsroman and ideological becoming

As the image of the hero quest is rather archaic, the Bildungsroman is perhaps a more appropriate label for the phenomenon in contemporary realistic portrayals. The Bildungsroman genre was comprehensively elucidated by Buckley (1974) as well as by Bakhtin in terms of its significance in the history of realism (1986, 10-59) and more recently in relation to contemporary YA fiction by

Bradford (2007) and Trites (2012). While it originally translates to a ‘novel of education’, the term

Bildungsroman is often used interchangeably with the novel of emergence or coming-of-age, a genre which often utilises the framework of the quest or journey. Buckley’s account of the

Bildungsroman (1974, 17-27) parallels the ‘separation-initiation-return’ paradigm of Campbell’s heroic quests. In summary, “a child of some sensibility” (Buckley 1974, 17) grows up in socially and intellectually constraining circumstances; his family proves hostile to his creative instincts or ambitions; his first schooling is a frustrating experience; he leaves the repressive atmosphere of home and innocence to make his way to the city where his real education begins; after “painful soul-searching…he has left his adolescence behind and entered upon his maturity” (Buckley 1974,

17, my ellipsis) ; the story often concludes with a return to his old home “to demonstrate by his presence the degree of his success of the wisdom of his choice” (Buckley 1974,18). For Bakhtin,

“the greatest advance of the Bildungsroman genre is that it, for the first time, manages to show people living and changing in time” (Iversen 2009, 138). It constitutes the apex of the development of fictional characters from the “flat, static characters of Antiquity toward round, changing characters” who “are many-sided and complex, they have psychological depth, and their psychology and identity are capable of undergoing real change” (Iversen 2009, 137). Further,

Bakhtin (1986, 21) asserts that “the novel of emergence provides an image of man in the process of becoming” (original emphasis) in which the hero’s character “becomes a variable in the formula of this type of novel” and the “changes in the hero himself acquire plot significance…Time is introduced into man” (my ellipsis). The use of the word ‘becoming’ here echoes Bakhtin’s concept

of ideological becoming, entailing the struggle between authoritative and internally persuasive discourses. In the current context, the authoritative voices inherent in hegemonic social structures such as organised religion become assimilated with the subject's internally persuasive discourses leading to his or her ideological becoming.

In an analysis of contemporary postcolonial Bildungsroman texts, Bradford (2007, 10) describes the attainment of self-actualisation in conventional Bildungsroman where protagonists

“negotiate their transition from childhood to young-adulthood by way of educative experiences, trials of various kinds, and a search for identity, which is generally formulated as a fixed or stable essence which they must discover or accept”. This description resonates with Campbell’s account of the hero quest. Trites (2012, 77) views the contemporary Bildungsroman in terms of metaphors of psychological growth and claims that growth “is the norm, although authors rely on an infinite variety of embodied metaphors, such as the journey or voyage, to depict that growth”. Thus, as the genre so frequently employs metaphors of embodied growth, readers come to expect any

Bildungsroman novel to encompass psychological growth. Just as contemporary YA fiction has progressed from the traditional quest model, Trites believes it has evolved around the

Bildungsroman where psychological growth is its predominant theme. In the same way that adolescents follow different growth patterns, she notes that

many narratives written for young adults defy the patterns of the traditional Bildungsroman…If our minds script what our bodies know, it seems inevitable that psychological growth would become the predominant model in literature written for people experiencing the greatest biophysical growth of their lives. (Trites 2012, 77-78, my ellipsis)

The interrelationship in YA fiction between spiritual quests, Bildungsroman narratives and psychological growth or ideological becoming underlies the textual analysis of the realistic

Australian YA novels discussed below, each written in a distinctive narrative style within the realist genre.

Spiritual quests in realist Australian YA novels

Real world and literary realism

Until recently, YA fiction tended to be dominated by realist narrative modes, perhaps a legacy of its emergence as the ‘adolescent problem novel’ in the 1960s. Realism is a highly unstable notion though, both inside and outside of fiction. In everyday life, there are conflicting beliefs about the nature of reality: many people believe in the existence of angels and ghosts or that the movements of stars and planets influence their personalities and daily lives. While these beliefs are widely accepted in popular culture, sceptics who maintain physicalist worldviews deny such existents or possibilities. Of particular relevance to the current study, supernatural religious beliefs including acceptance of mystical concepts like transubstantiation, miracles, reincarnation or bodily resurrection after death, have a high degree of acceptance and respectability in most human societies and cultures. Indeed, institutions such as churches and schools which endorse some of these beliefs receive certain privileges in contemporary Australian society. In the United States the privileging of religious groups is even more evident, with presidential candidates openly professing their religious beliefs during election campaigns. A Gallup Poll in 2012, surveying the number of

Americans prepared to vote for particular types of candidates, showed that only 54 percent of respondents supported those who did not believe in God, coming in behind every other group polled for, including gays and lesbians (68 percent) and Muslims (58 percent) (Huffington Post

2014). Although professed religious affiliation may implicitly be more about conservative values, including “belief in belief” (Dennett 2006, 200), supernatural beliefs are essential to the social and ideological structure of organised religious groups and are condoned by a significant proportion of

Western culture.

All fiction is, of course, an imaginative construction whether classified as realist, fantasy, historic, detective, horror or any other narrative mode or genre. Fictional realism is often characterised in opposition to fantasy literature. A precise demarcation of realist fiction in relation to other narrative modes is difficult to achieve, partly because “opinions of what constitutes a truthful representation of reality inevitably differ: realistic fiction, as all fiction, cannot avoid being subjective, selective, and ideological” (Joosen 2006). Further to this argument, Mieke Bal (1993,

388-90) identifies several conceptions of realism that foreground the influence of ideologies on literary interpretation. Among these conceptions, she argues that realism serves the interests of dominant moral and political structures and of mystification in what it conceals and obscures, revealing not only what is present but also what is absent. Bradford (1997, 1) accordingly notes the common assumption that forgets that a realist novel is not “‘real life’ written down but constitutes a representation of ‘reality’ incorporating the selection, ordering and interpretation of elements of story such as characters, events and settings, the language of the text and its use of such strategies as focalization and point of view” (1997, 1).

While a detailed account of realism is beyond the scope of this study, a brief review of recent scholarship conveys the general parameters used here. In a study of death, gender and sexuality in contemporary adolescent literature, Kathryn James (2009, 74) claims that “[T]he aim of the realist novel is to create an authentic or faithful reproduction of ‘reality’, to represent ‘life’ in such a way that is consistent with the/an external reality and human experience outside the text”.

She disputes the idea that a realist novel can somehow reflect reality, however, because “a realist text is as much a fictional construct as any other literary text”. With regard to the literary devices used to construct a realist narrative, Stephens (1992, 251) contends that “[a] fiction’s claim to be re-presenting truth can be supported in two complementary ways: by the use of conventions which affirm the text’s veracity; and by avoiding discoursal elements which foreground its literariness”.

He points out that the “most pervasive strategy for effecting the illusion of realism in modern children’s literature is first-person narration, where narrator and principal focalizer are the same”

(251). This remains rare in fantasy, he claims, and so “constitutes a significant discoursal discrimination between the two modes” (251). As well as creating “an illusion of verisimilitude”

(289), realism is characterised by “a commitment to closure (at the level of significance), and by its depiction of characters with inner mental processes” (289) as well as organising its “internal narrative transactions so that social truths are expressed at the level of character interaction” (289).

However, an analysis of twenty-first century fantasy novels indicates a possible trend towards greater depiction of inner mental processes and the expression of social truths in character interactions than was typically evident in earlier fantasy fiction.

Regarding essential characteristics that differentiate realistic and fantastic modes, Bradford

(1997, 1) notes that the “idea that fantasy and realism can be seen as polar opposites is frequently conflated with notions about reality and ‘the real’ world in a simplistic identification of realism with reality and fantasy with escapism”. Stephens asserts that an effective terminology that illuminates the difference between fantastic and realistic modes “is to define fantasy as a metaphoric mode and realism as a metonymic mode” although he concedes that “realistic fictions will use metaphors along the way…and fantasies can use metonymy” (1992, 249)7. In the focus novels of this chapter, the realistic style frequently veers towards the related device of synecdoche, portraying concepts by reference to their part of a whole. A further distinction between the realistic and fantastic modes lies in the different ways of encoding the central theme of language and power, with “realistic fiction doing so particularly through conversational encounters and allusions to social practice, and fantasy through a mythic representation of transcendent meaning” (Stephens

1992, 7). Conversely, however, “virtually any serious realistic text…is overtly concerned with the meaning of life” (281, my ellipsis) and the exploration of ‘meaning of life’ is inherently a key component in the spiritual quest narratives considered here, whether represented through realism as discussed in this chapter or through the various speculative modes explored in the following chapters.

Poetic and philosophical quests

Among twenty-first century Australian YA realist fiction, The Beginner’s Guide to Living (Hills

2009) exemplifies the secular spiritual quest and provides its most overt expression among the novels discussed here. The book’s peritext (Text Publishing edition) informs the reader that

“Isolated and angry, Will begins a search for the answers he craves. He uses his mum’s old camera to document the experience and scrambles to find an idea for which he can live and die”. This idea comes to Will when he reads from Kierkegaard's The Laughter is on My Side: “The thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die” (48). Death is a narrative device commonly used to trigger a quest – in this case the death of the protagonist’s mother. Will

7 For further discussion of the metaphor/metonymy distinction, see Roman Jakobson’s landmark paper Fundamentals of Language (1956)

Ellis, the narrator and sole focaliser, is seventeen and approaching his final high school exams when his mother is hit by a car and killed. The novel opens at her funeral, plunging the reader abruptly into Will’s tragic situation with the line “She looks good for a corpse” (1). Stephens

(1992, 260) argues that “[I]nner mental processes…can be portrayed by the use of first-person narration or character focalization, but the portrayal of an active fantasy life, in the everyday sense of day-dream or make-believe, is a further strategy common in realism” (my ellipsis). The realistic depiction of Will’s anguish is constructed through intimate access to his thoughts, dreams, memories, interactions with other people and his mindful search for answers to existential questions after his mother's death. In addition to the portrayal of conscious thoughts, the representation of dreams is an effective device for providing access to the protagonist’s subjectivity, as a “related but contrasting convention” that can “offer access to a character’s inner thoughts and fears. Dreams have a much higher truth value than day-dreams…because the character can have no control over them” (Stephens 1992, 261, my ellipsis). Such is the case with

Will who, as well as experiencing unsettling dreams during sleep, is frequently at the mercy of random and involuntary mental images during his waking hours.

The sole focalisation by Will produces a very self-absorbed view of the world. First person narration, as is frequently characteristic of realism, has immediate ramifications and tends to create

“extremely solipsistic subject positions for character-narrators which are then replicated by readers” (Stephens 1992, 251-252). This kind of solipsism is not uncommon in a seventeen year old boy and, given the circumstances of his mother’s sudden death and his impending crucial exams, readers might excuse his intense self-focus and lack of empathy for the suffering of others, most notably his father, his brother, Adam and his girlfriend, Taryn. Will exhibits the predictable

“narcissism inherent in grief” (Stephens 1992, 284) and the experience of his mother's death expands into Will's sudden realisation of mortality – his own and that of everyone he knows. His solipsism is disrupted by the construction of an alternative view of life through a camera lens.

Photography motifs operate metonymically and metaphorically throughout the novel, capturing fragmented partial aspects of the subjects of the photographs as well as what they symbolise in the bigger picture. Will’s mother had been an amateur photographer and after her death his

appropriation of her camera aids his spiritual quest, with the aim of envisaging life with the instrument his mother had used to do the same, and thus attempting to view the world through a perspective beyond his own cognitive limitations. Actual photographs are inserted throughout the text, thematically and narratively supporting the written text through this extraliterary visual device.

As well as depicting a character’s inner mental processes, interaction with other characters facilitates the construction of a convincingly real protagonist with whom readers can identify.

Stephens (1992, 260) contends that “to construct in realistic fiction a character able to make sense of what is happening in her life, a writer needs to endow that character with inner mental processes and with access to an other”. Will’s inner mental processes are sometimes expressed in stream of consciousness form, transitioning from his self-obsessed thoughts to the outer world and connection with other people. On one occasion during a train ride (27), Will’s wayward mind autonomously creates associations that lead him back to the ever-present thoughts of his mother's death:

I look out the window and lose myself in the rattling past of things – people’s backyards, their washing, some woman’s red undies flailing in the wind. I half imagine how that woman might look as I close my eyes, think of Taryn, and that knife, a red Honda crashing into Mum. I open my eyes to a sign nailed up on somebody’s tree: Jesus is coming soon. Prepare for His return.

This dense cascade of thoughts indicates the turmoil of Will’s mind, mingling the mundanity of backyard clothes lines with the erotic profanity of the flailing red undies. It concludes with a sacred reference of the sign nailed to a tree, evoking Christian allusions to Christ on the cross, followed by a touch of ridicule that suggests the perpetual but so-far erroneous anticipation of “His return”.

Soothing and distressing images of Will’s girlfriend, a knife suggesting violence and the red car that killed his mother become conflated in his mind. The literal reference to Jesus’ triumphant return, coupled with the metaphor of the nailed sign that suggests his death by crucifixion, further mingles comforting and painful images.

At the next station, a woman in a bright orange jumper gets on…On her foot, a tattoo. It says serendipity…’Do you believe in fate?’ She asks…’It’s all about looking out for the signs…’ They keep slapping me in the face, I think, staring at fences, though I’m not sure what you’re meant to do with random pages, a poster about Jesus, and a foot about fate. What’s the equation? Maybe you need to throw something in sideways, see what comes out. ‘My mother died. Nine days ago.’ Her hand goes to her mouth, ‘Oh, shit.’ (27, my ellipsis)

The confession by Will and empathic exclamation by the girl with the tattooed foot abruptly concludes the swirl of images with a profanity which, like the metaphoric slap in the face, brings his existential pondering of serendipity and fate into harsh reality.

The sense of the real world portrayed in The Beginner’s Guide to Living is enhanced by the inclusion of excerpts from actual philosophy and poetry texts. Will’s reading of these is essential to his quest and metonymic of his bigger search for meaning and his attempt to gain an education about life. The philosophers and poets consulted by Will provide authoritative discourses which constitute a secular alternative to the authority of the “religious dogma” highlighted by Bakhtin

(1981, 343) in his account of authoritative discourse. According to Bakhtin’s concept of an individual’s ideological becoming, Will assimilates the various pre-existing authoritative discourses, tempered by the ideas and voices of other people with his own life experiences and development of ideas. As opposed to “reciting by heart” which is characteristic of authoritative discourse, Bakhtin likens internally persuasive discourse to “retelling in one's own words” and claims that it is thus “half-ours and half-someone else's” (1981, 341-345). This paradigm is demonstrated in Will’s attempt to integrate the views of philosophers, poets, friends and acquaintances with his own ideas.

While much of Will’s quest might be viewed as philosophical or existential rather than spiritual - although such broad and contestable frameworks inevitably interrelate and overlap - he does explore specifically spiritual questions, particularly the possibility of life after death. When asked by a girl he meets at Federation Square whether he is “looking for something”, Will responds rather surprisingly:

'Oh, no, I was...um, wondering...’ ‘Yes?’ Well...if life ends with death?' (original ellipsis) to which the girl responds that her boyfriend had died six months ago in a climbing accident. She elaborates,

'You know something weird,' she says. 'I used to think it was a shame my grandma never got to meet Sam, but now I imagine that they're both together, sort of watching over me...So, I guess, I believe life doesn't end with death.' (70-71, my ellipsis)

The words initially used by the girl to signify her cognitive deliberations – “think” and “imagine” – emerge hesitantly from her, implying her tentativeness about the subject, as does her expression

“sort of watching over me”. However, once the idea is articulated, she becomes more definite in her response, affirming with greater conviction that “I believe life doesn’t end with death”. The girl’s voice thus becomes one of many that contribute to the development of Will’s internally persuasive discourse concerning this metaphysical matter. Despite his staunchly secular upbringing, Will begins to contemplate the existence of God while in a traditional Melbourne church that he had once visited with his mother:

Across the road, in St Paul's Cathedral, people are taking photos of the stained glass windows by the entrance...Mum brought me in here once when we were in the city, to listen to the choir. It's the only time, apart from now, I've been in a church....Who knows, if I sit here long enough, with these elevated ceilings and gold mosaics, even I will hear the voice of God. (72, my ellipsis)

Although never actually hearing “the voice of God”, Will listens to the voices of dead philosophers and poets and finally takes the more personal approach of appealing to his dead mother to provide answers ‘from the other side’ as he speaks at her graveside:

'I've also been thinking about whether there might be a God...You could give me some insights into that.' I smile and remember a line from Wittgenstein - If a lion could talk, we could not understand him. If the dead could speak, would we understand them? 'Maybe it's because now I get what it might be like to feel a presence. Is it you, or something to do with being in love?' (244, my ellipsis)

This one-sided dialogue occurs close to the novel’s conclusion and again the verbs expressing his cognitive state progress from tentative pondering towards firmer conviction as he continues to contemplate the nature of belief in a reality that transcends the physical.

The gravediggers are taking a break amongst the headstones; they must see plenty of people confessing to the dead. 'On this show I watched, they said we're hardwired to believe in something that's not there.' I raise my head out of my jacket. What I'm hoping for right now is a sign - a ray of light, some voice in my head. I have this desire in me for something beyond logic. I need to believe. Or maybe what I want is for a book with all the answers to land at my feet. The book of Everything. Except, I don't. Not unless it's got a few blank pages in it where I can write all about this. My chapter. Life according to Will. (244)

Will’s musings here progress from the earthiness of the gravediggers among the headstones to a sense of transcendence and “something beyond logic”, before returning to the physicality of a book with blank pages that he can fill, a metaphor for his developing agency. His mental shift from wanting “a book with all the answers” to one in which he can participate continues to evoke the idea of a struggle between authoritative and internally persuasive discourses and the ongoing process of ideological becoming – in this case manifested as a chapter on “life according to Will”.

In each of the spiritual quest novels discussed here, the protagonists experience epiphanies or turning points leading them to some form of resolution. Stephens (1992, 286) notes that “There is always a risk that such epiphanic moments in children’s literature will dissolve into sentimentality, and that is a risk writers take in attempting to render experiences as moments of profound insight and emotion”. Will’s numerous epiphanic moments, including the episode at his mother’s grave, are rescued from excessive sentimentality through the humour that he often brings to his quest, despite his overhanging grief. When he retreats to the bush for a few days, for example, hoping to find answers away from the distractions of his normal environment, he is unprepared for some of the physical discomforts but responds with flippancy:

This is not what I expected, but, considering the sum total of five minutes I spent thinking about it before leaving, I shouldn't be surprised. One should plan for spiritual enlightenment. At least bring a torch. (210)

The first person present tense narration of Will’s psychological journey follows a conventionally linear temporal pattern and achieves its portrayal of his emotional turmoil through the realistic representation of his private thoughts and intersubjective connections. Vigil (Wheatley 2000), the focus novel of the next section, is a more stylistically complex novel, with multiple switches of tense and person, reinforcing the impression of the protagonist’s confused and meandering mind during his psychological journey.

Fragmented minds

Like The Beginners’ Guide to Living, Vigil opens with a funeral – in fact two funerals – with twenty-one year old Nathan attending the separate funerals of two friends from his earlier adolescence. Dean and Tim died together overdosing on heroin, although they were unlikely partners coming from opposite ends of the socio-economic spectrum as well as being temperamentally mismatched. Such themes as drug abuse and class conflict are common in YA realist fiction and could be considered synecdochic of a widespread view of contemporary youth culture. Within the realist mode of Vigil, Wheatley makes abundant use of metaphoric allusions.

The narrative is essentially an exploration of Nathan's tormented consciousness as he meanders around his home town during the days following the funerals, trying to make sense of Tim and

Dean's final united act. The plot is gradually assembled through his disjointed memories.

In contrast to the consistent first person present tense narration of The Beginner’s Guide to

Living, Wheatley constructs Nathan's mental and spiritual tension by switching fitfully between past and present tense, and between first, second and third person narration. This device offers readers the possibility of distancing themselves from the subjectivities of the main characters, in order to take up subject positions of their own, a technique which is a characteristic of realistic fictions for children (Bradford 1997, 1). It becomes evident that Nathan's grief-stricken, fragmented mind is struggling within itself to avoid thinking about the place where Tim and Dean died and his

own role in the circumstances that led to their deaths. The tension is conveyed in broken staccato sentences:

Finding himself starting to think about - the place he doesn't want to think about - Nathan pulls himself back to that afternoon (13) and he pulls the reader with him, but then creates distance with the use of third person narration in these lines, following the preceding first person narration. This strategy reinforces the sense of uncertainty and mental fragmentation that Nathan experiences. Although his own quest dominates the novel, the drug abuse by Tim and Dean suggests their own spiritual abysses. Materialistically pampered and overprotected, Tim had been expected to follow a pre-ordained path to a professional career but explained to Nathan the mystical lure of heroin, using intermingled and conflicting religious images of God, angels, devils, life and death:

'. . . it's just this kind of alluring thing that seems to take away all your pain and tells you it doesn't matter if you don't do anything with your life - it doesn't even matter if you die...' 'If I believed in God,' you told me, 'I'd say heroin was the devil'...'I mean - I know it's evil, it's death,' you said. 'But it's so angelic.' (319, my ellipses)

The fusion of first and second person narration, in which Nathan retrospectively recalls this intimate discussion between himself and Tim, invites the reader to participate vicariously in the dialogue remembered in Nathan’s mind and to closely identify with him in his anguished memories.

Metaphors of darkness and light flicker across the text. A transition from darkness to dawn occurs as Nathan's meanderings become more directed when he visits the houses where he, Tim and Dean had each lived with their families. Finally he visits the abandoned old house where his friends died, in order to confront his guilt, grief and spiritual anguish. Although he is the one who survived, Nathan feels increasingly disconnected from his own life, like an insubstantial spectre wandering the town, realising that

something has been happening to him - as if, while his ghost has been walking around the sites of his childhood, something inside him has been growing older and older (178)

The third person narration in this section again creates distance and positions the reader to feel the disconnectedness that Nathan is experiencing. His peak epiphanic moment occurs when he confronts his guilt about not having been there to save Tim and Dean from overdosing. At this moment he wants to be dead as well and calls to a personified spectre of death “Here I am!...Come and take me!” (333, original ellipsis), followed by an outburst of anger and sorrow in which “the tears finally start to wash that burning feeling out of his brain” (340. A positive turning point follows, encompassing his rejection of death: “Nathan knows that when you hear that old skeleton coming, you've got to slam the door right in his smug fucking face! Life is for grabbing with both hands” (341). His darkest hour is followed metaphorically and literally by sunrise, as the next chapter begins “Morning breaks earlier in the world outside the scullery than in the darkness of memory. Yet eventually, even in here, the light begins to filter through the broken window” (343), signalling a growing sense of clarity and connectedness beginning to pervade the ‘broken window’ of his mind.

Throughout Vigil, the ideals of social responsibility and the connectedness of all life is framed by the line “No man is an Island” from John Donne’s Meditation XVII, which intersperses the narrative. Reinforcing the realism of the novel, references to Amnesty International vigils with their images of candles illuminating the darkness, horrific Holocaust stories and Aboriginal massacres (both acknowledged and unacknowledged) occur throughout the text, connect the fictional world to the actual world. These provide a larger canvas to complement the story of

Nathan's personal grief and are integrated with his spiritual reconciliation after confronting his personal demons. His acknowledgement of the transgression towards the Aboriginal people who had been massacred on nearby Black Mountain follows with an apology:

'I'm sorry,' Nathan says to the traditional owners of the mountain. He seems to remember wanting to say that once before ... But this time he says it out loud. (344, my ellipsis)

Vigil was published during a period of Australian history which saw considerable political agitation around the issue of an apology for the past mistreatment of Indigenous Australians. The political activity included escalating appeals by the Australian public to an obstinate Prime Minister and the

establishment in 1998 of an annual Sorry Day. In 1997 the Bringing Them Home report (Wilson

1997) was tabled in the Australian parliament. This document resulted from an inquiry by the

Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission into the removal of Aboriginal and Torres

Strait Islander children from their families. An official apology by the Australian Government occurred eight years after the publication of Vigil.8 Along with the intended ideological message of

Vigil, Nathan’s ideological becoming evolves from the assimilation and resolution of his inner mental and emotional struggles and is paralleled in the national psyche, with this move towards reconciliation between the original and current inhabitants of Australia.

Without shifting into fantasy or magical realism, Vigil closes in a rather mystical tone, with intimations of eternity and the ascendancy of the spiritual over the material as Nathan plants a tree for Tim and Dean in the Avenue of Honour alongside plaques commemorating soldiers who had died overseas. The third person omniscient narration of the final chapter again distances readers from the intimacy of Nathan’s inner mental processes which had been experienced throughout the text, taking them to a more universal vantage point in the closing lines:

And in the evenings, Nathan imagines, when the tourists have gone home, the memories of Tim and Dean will come out, along with all the others who are honoured in the Avenue: each one unique, special in some way; important as a Prime Minister; part of the continent. (357)

These final words complete the narrative circle with an allusion to the Donne quotation with which the novel opened: “every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main” (2, original italics).

This sense of connectedness provides an optimistic and satisfying thematic and textual closure which is repeated in each of these realistic spiritual quest novels.

Realism in multiple chronotopes

Similar notions concerning quests to comprehend the interconnectedness of people, places and times are expressed in the third realist novel. As in The Beginner’s Guide to Living and Vigil,

8 On the 13 February 2008, the Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, tabled a motion in parliament apologising to Australia's Indigenous peoples, particularly the Stolen Generations and their families and communities, for laws and policies which had 'inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians'. (http://www.australia.gov.au/about-australia/australian-story/sorry-day-stolen-generations)

tension is developed through an aura of premature and senseless death which looms over Boys of

Blood and Bone (Metzenthen 2003) but this novel moves out from the local to the global domain of world war. Yet the event which initiates the spiritual quest this time is not a death but the more mundane breakdown of Henry's car on the way to a beach holiday with friends prior to starting a new era of his life at university. The protagonist is again at the momentous and liminal life stage that comes at the end of his schooldays, just before venturing into the adult world. The notion of materialistic values is established early in the text, constructing a tension between these and the quest for something of deeper significance, which Henry finds himself pursuing through his involvement in the lives of present and past residents of Strattford, the country town where he becomes stranded. Boys of Blood and Bone employs a parallel plot structure and, again like The

Beginner's Guide to Living and Vigil, uses close focalisation strategies, narrated mostly in third person this time, to portray the inner mental processes of Henry living in the early twenty-first century and Andy, eighty-five years earlier during World War One.

The concept of the chronotope - “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (Bakhtin 1981, 84) - is overtly exploited here, creating an interrelationship between past and present events and characters who occupy the same physical spaces when Henry visits Andy’s home town in Australia and later the place of his death in France. This underlying chronotopic tension and its potential resolution are foreshadowed in the novel's opening, where the idea of past as a ‘trace’ on the landscape is suggested:

If Henry Lyon was able to see back down the road for, say, eighty-five years rather than just a kilometre or so, he might've seen Andrew Lansell in person, rather than just a memorial elm tree with Andy's name on it. But seen or unseen, it's possible for our paths to cross with those who have lived before - and sometimes we meet them, in a way... (Prologue)

Henry's receptiveness to challenge the materiality of his comfortable life is suggested in his embarrassed self-consciousness about his car: “It was bad enough to be driving Mummy's Volvo...”

(10). The Volvo operates metonymically to signify Henry’s safe and conservative middle-class upbringing and its authoritative power in his ideological development to date. His rescuer's car

provides a blatant contrast, as Graham Trotter (Trot) is introduced sitting in his robust and flashy vehicle:

[Henry's] thoughts were swept away as a grey and blue Commodore pulled up - V-8 spitting, gold mag wheels like stars. A big guy about Henry's age, sitting in the Holden as comfortably as Buddha in his temple, checked Henry out. (2)

Despite the potential threat of the “big guy” in a ‘muscly’ car checking Henry out, there is a paradoxical implication of spiritual peace as Trot’s evident contentment with his life is conveyed through the spiritually imbued image of him sitting like “Buddha in his temple”.

Further oppositional tension, like that evoked by the contrasts between Henry’s and Trot’s lives, is uncovered in Andy’s story, eighty-five years earlier. As a soldier fighting in World War

One France, Andy contemplates the ethical incongruity between the condoned act of killing as a soldier compared with the forbidden act of creating life through his 'indiscretion' as a private citizen before leaving Australia:

It was strange; he had been brought over here to kill people. In fact, they were going to pay him six bob a day to do it ... but to father a baby at home to a girl he wasn’t married to, was a foul and despicable crime. (74, my ellipsis)

Andy’s private thoughts and emotions are expressed poignantly through the colloquial language of this third person narration, positioning the reader to share his moral quandary more intimately than the pithy first person diary entries in which he records daily life events but reveals little emotion, perhaps anticipating that they will be read by others. Yet it is through the diary which had been returned to his fiancé in Australia, and eventually read by Henry, that the sadness of Andy's misfortune in World War One is revealed, inducing Henry to reflect on the sanctity of life beyond the predictability and comfortable materiality of his middle-class existence. His psychological and spiritual transitions are prompted by a number of simultaneous developments: his deteriorating relationship with his girlfriend, Marcelle; the broadening of his outlook through encounters with people outside his insular social sphere; his increasing wisdom about serious hardship and the precariousness of life through reading Andy's diary and through the death of Trot in a car crash.

For both Henry and Andy, these tensions initiate their struggles against the various authoritative

discourses in their lives and their progress towards the development of their own values, beliefs and internally persuasive discourses.

The journeys of the two young men towards a deeper appreciation of humanity are constructed in parallel through the portrayal of their inner mental processes. This analogous transition of two characters separated by time signifies their connectedness and the parity of their spiritual quests, although the outcome for Andy is infinitely worse than for Henry. A feeling of connectedness with soldiers who have died far away from home is central to Henry's ideological becoming. Boys of Blood and Bone assumes a mystical tone similar to that evoked in Vigil, as

Henry's spiritual quest culminates with his visit to Andy's memorial in France and he experiences an uncanny sense of eternity and a transcendent reality:

In the quietness, surrounded by the reality of what had happened, Henry could still not come to terms with the immensity of the thing ... there was only this place, the wind stirring, and time passing on, and the silent fields. (289, my ellipsis)

The novel's underlying ideologies emphasise the supremacy of enduring love and friendship over transient materiality, as well as the value of individual self-determination in a world where the authoritative discourses of duty and conformity can dictate a person's destiny. It is clear that

Henry's quest has facilitated his ideological becoming when he decides, against his parents’ wishes, to undertake the almost sacred pilgrimage to France:

What he wanted was for people to realise that sometimes he might not want to do what they thought he should do. You did, after all, owe allegiance to yourself and your ideas. That only made sense. In fact, it might be the one thought in the world that did. (228)

The switch to second person narration invites the reader into the narrative in order to identity with

Henry and to share his point of view.

Again in a similar way to Vigil, the epilogue closes the story's circle with a sense of the quester’s return to where he began, with Henry checking the temperature gauge of the Volvo as he drives back into Strattford. His position back in his mother's Volvo, that blatant symbol of conservative materialistic values, could be viewed as a reversion in his spiritual development.

Another interpretation, however, is that at the end of his quest he has achieved a balance between living pragmatically as a twenty-first century middle-class young Australian while maintaining his

awareness of some transcendent meaning in his life. On this return journey to Strattford, a more mature Henry ponders his expanded perspective:

There weren't too many places, he thought, where you could actually see where the past, the present, and perhaps your future met, but this was one. There was no explaining it really. There were just the things that happened and how you reacted to them. That was it. That was your life...And there was what you were going to do with your life from now on. Which was plenty, he hoped. Plenty. (292, my ellipsis)

This repeated reversion to second person narration in the conclusion draws the reader into Henry’s ideological consciousness as he contemplates his life’s direction and meaning.

Blending linguistic and cultural discourses

The fourth realist spiritual quest narrative discussed in this chapter, Njunjul the Sun (McDonald and

Pryor 2002), is a collaboration by an Indigenous Australian man (Boori Monty Pryor) and a white

Australian woman (Meme McDonald), providing the potential for a novel constructed dialogically in terms of gender and cultural background, where various discourses can interconnect.

Accordingly, the first person narration is reproduced in the protagonist’s speech style and

Aboriginal language from the text is followed by the bracketed English translation. These devices of blending two discourses contribute to the construction of a text that hybridises languages and cultural discourses as it depicts a young man’s spiritual journey in a heteroglottic framework, as described by Bakhtin (1981). The inclusion of photographs throughout the novel, as in The

Beginner’s Guide to Living, provides a further discursive element that complements and enriches the verbal text. Bradford (1997, 1) notes that the novel “traces Njunjul's sense of ‘becoming

Aboriginal’” and in this way his ideological becoming is part of a transcendent cultural becoming.

Njunjul the Sun is the final book of a trilogy featuring a young Aboriginal man growing from childhood to young adulthood, following My Girragundji (1998) and The Binna Binna Man

(1999). The young man is unnamed throughout the trilogy, until the last page of the third novel when he reaches a point of ideological becoming that allows him to claim his name, Njunjul. The reader becomes acquainted with Njunjul through his first-person present tense narration, as he boards a bus on a journey from his north Queensland home to Sydney, to stay with his Uncle Garth

and migaloo [white person]9 wife, Aunty Emma. His family saved the money for the bus ticket, after Njunjul was assaulted by some policemen in his hometown, the incident which triggered his journey away from the trouble. The novel is an account of his exploits and search for identity and meaning through his new life in Sydney. At the start of his quest, Njunjul views himself as a “no- good blackfulla. Garbage dumped on the edge of town” (27). Yet he ventures out optimistically, wanting to escape the various authoritative discourses of his local community, to have his own experiences and develop his own beliefs and ideologies:

First time I'm headed out on m'own, down the highway to the big city...Going south...I lost my taste for knowing the old ways. I'm wanting what's new. What's exciting, what's out there on the other side of town. That's what got me on this bus. I gotta get out, see. This is my chance. My chance to do something. (11-14, my ellipsis)

Njunjul eventually advocates the value of learning and integrating “the old ways” however, with a message about respecting the teachings of the elders in order to find one's identity, purpose and meaning as part of the ongoing process of ideological becoming. After arriving in “the big smoke” of Sydney (14), Njunjul tries to establish himself by playing basketball and having a sexual relationship with a white neighbour but he becomes overwhelmed by a sense of meaninglessness and inadequacy in the anonymity of the big city. Despair leads him to contemplate suicide by jumping in front of a train, but his brush with death is averted by his Aunty Emma, along with his own instinct to live.

In a discussion of postcolonial encounters in Australian texts, Bradford (2003, 198) claims that the framing narrative of Njunjul the Sun “draws on Western models of the psychological development of the individual, and specifically on the Bildungsroman narrative that traces a character's progress from adolescence to adulthood”. In this model, Njunjul progresses from “a state of alienation and depression to a more positive and enabled mode of being”. As well as representing the Western Bildungsroman genre, Njunjul the Sun incorporates classic motifs of the hero's quest, most notably that of the warrior-hero who ventures out and then returns home.

Accordingly, before Njunjul left home, Aunty Milly had counselled him

9 Words in the Kunggandji language are translated in a glossary at the end of the novel. The translations appear here in square parentheses.

'You one of our warriors, young fulla. You remember that. We need you. But first you go some place else, till you strong enough for back here.' (29)

Njunjul embraces the idea of his inner warrior, as shown at the start of his journey when a fellow bus passenger denigrates Aboriginal people, particularly targeting Njunjul’s hero, boxer and former rugby player Anthony Mundine (a real world person). Njunjul’s unspoken mental response is:

I'm wanting to argue back, to stick up for 'The Man' Mundine and the rest of us. I'm trying to find that warrior in me to stand up and be counted. I can't shape m'words or find the space between his, but. I'm feeling beaten and hopeless before I even get started. (18)

Following an epiphanic moment later in the book, however, Njunjul finds his “inner warrior”, develops an appreciation of “the old ways” and joins his uncle at work, presenting Indigenous stories and dances to school children. At this final stage of his quest he has assimilated the authoritative discourses of his culture with his own experiences, beliefs and internally persuasive discourses, leading towards his ongoing ideological becoming. As Michaels (2002, 8) claims,

“Njunjul has to learn to listen to his inner voice, and sort out the many competing voices inside his head”, a description that dovetails with Bakhtin’s account of ideological becoming.

In his lifeworld, Njunjul adopts the religious discourses of both the colonising culture and of his own people, as displayed in the humorous story he relates of a past encounter with the police, when Aunty calls on the Christian God:

But then these bulleymen [police] pull up beside us. We're gone, Aunty's thinking. She been using a couple of stronger words than that under her breath. She's praying too. I heard her. 'Dear Lord, shine down upon us today. For a wretched soul like me. Please, God?' (30)

However, when the “bullymen” prove helpful rather than harmful, her gratitude also encompasses other gods:

I reckon she's thinking God been on her side so she should make the most of it...Aunty was praising the Lord the whole way. And our mob's great Creators as well. (31, my ellipsis)

Although such excerpts indicate the interfaith religious influences, Njunjul is more focussed on making his way in the tangible secular world than on distant otherworldly possibilities:

Me, I'm wondering why us Murri-fullas, us blackfullas, always talking about the next life. Waiting to die till we can find a place to be happy. I'm all for getting some of that happiness happening now. Right here, right now, like fully. Not in some way off maybe heaven. (11)

Njunjul’s musings on gratification in the here-and-now position adolescent readers to identify with his impatience concerning the visions of the older people.

His epiphanic moment comes during a period of despair and hopelessness following two distressing incidents. The first is hard, raw and literal as he overhears his uncle and aunt arguing about his apparent aimlessness. The second more symbolic incident occurs when he intervenes to help a struggling butterfly hatch itself from its cocoon, resulting in the “could-have been- butterfly’s” death:

I’m watching the poor little fulla, that chrysalis there, busting his guts to get out of that hard shell… slowly, lightly, with my finger and thumb, I try to open out the hole where he’s pushing the most. I’m feel that little fulla struggle, then give up, struggle some more, then go quiet…I’m feeling sorry. Real sorry. For that little fulla. For my clumsy hands. For not knowing which way to go, or where I am, or what I can do. Sorry for me, whoever that may be. We’re laying here, me and that dead could-have-been butterfly. The sun gone out on both of us (126-127, my ellipsis)

His repetition of “little fulla” conveys his empathy for and identification with the butterfly as

Njunjul himself struggles to free himself from the confinements of his circumstances. This incident leads him to connect with another creature, “my girragundji”, the inner voice of his childhood frog totem which tells him “It’s only you can save you” as he resolves “might be I can choose to climb back up” (128). After this revelation of his potential to achieve agency, he consciously takes advantage of the opportunities offered by his new life, asks his uncle to initiate him into the school performances and is able to assimilate his past and recent experience, his cultural heritage with his newly found warrior self, with full ceremonial paint.

As he learns from his uncle to connect to the sacred earth at the culmination of his spiritual quest, Njunjul explains to the reader

M'uncle takes the dry, powdery rock, the white ochre, and wets a bit on the lid of the container. 'This here, that's your mother.' He takes two of his fingers, drawing the wet paint over my skin. I shiver. Not from the cold. From the power of it, but. 'Mother earth from up home.' (139)

In the dance ritual, Njunjul articulates the knowledge he has acquired as he acknowledges the

“could-have-been-butterfly” as his brother and understands the value of the struggle in developing strength and autonomy:

He paints big butterfly wings in circles on m'thighs. Us fullas, Kunggandji mob, when we dance we shake our legs like imbala, the butterfly. I'm thinking of m'brother, that could- have-been butterfly, dying on the cement. He needed that struggle to make him strong enough to live. I didn't know that then. (139)

Within the protection of his family and his connectedness to the natural environment, Njunjul’s ideological becoming is felt as an assimilation of the authoritative voices of his uncle, “the old fullas” and “his mother earth” with his own inner discourses, creating a new sense of selfhood:

'Soon, you'll learn your own design from the old fullas up home. For now, you use this one here like mine.' I'm trying to get a look at the new me in the tiny square of mirror. The fulla I see peering back out looks like he got a few thousand years of clothes on him. He's not naked no more. His mother earth is keeping him warm, shielding and protecting his spirit. (140)

Bradford notes that “the closure of the narrative, when Njunjul looks forward to returning to...visit his family, marks the end of a psychological journey and is thus consonant with the Bildungsroman schema” (1997, 199, my ellipsis). However, she claims that his journey is also traced in a way that locates it within an Aboriginal narrative tradition in which his progress toward self-realisation is plotted through his relationships with characters in various settings. The novel thus works dialogically “as a hybrid text promoting the ideal of an Australia transformed by new forms of relationships between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people” (199), in other words, as a personal, national and cultural spiritual quest.

Conclusion Texts that present as realistic actually present “a set of conventions for constructing typical story existents which readers learn to perceive as ‘realistically’ offering ‘real-life’ subject positions”

(Stephens 1992, 249). The four realist novels considered in this chapter construct story existents within the contexts of the quest or Bildungsroman in a recognisable lifeworld, as a vehicle for positioning readers to enter the protagonists’ minds in their searches for identity, purpose and meaning. The concept of ideological becoming provides a useful framework for understanding the psychological process undertaken by the protagonists in each novel as a struggle between authoritative and internally persuasive discourses. In Boys of Blood and Bone, the contrasting but partially overlapping chronotopes framing the individual stories of Henry and Andy evoke a sense of the differences in the lives of the two young men living eighty-five years apart, but also of the universality of their emotional and ideological responses to existentialist issues of mortality, freedom of choice and responsibility. Equally momentous issues confront Nathan in Vigil as he undertakes a physical and spiritual journey to the town where he grew up, in an attempt to make sense of the deaths of his friends and to find some peace and connectedness within his fraught and fractured psyche. Njunjul has the added challenge of living between two cultures and feeling alienated by each of them, like a stranger in a strange land, until he resolves his quest for identity and meaning through an assimilation of the many voices struggling inside him. In The Beginners’

Guide to Living, Will’s quest for transcendent meaning after his mother’s death is framed within the structure of the Bildungsroman, as he strives to educate himself with philosophy and lived experience to facilitate his transition into the adult world.

As all fiction is an imaginative construction, the notion that a realist novel can authentically reflect reality is untenable (James 2009, 74). However, it is possible for fictions to create subject positions where truths, if not realities, can be discerned. According to Stephens

(1992, 265), the idea of ‘truth’ as the ultimate referent, or “a transcendental signified” (Derrida

[1967] 2013, 49), is variously present in both fantastic and realistic texts. Stephens claims that “the conceptualising of this signified is the most important ideological factor in children’s literature” and is characteristically constructed differently in each genre in that “the discourse of fantasy is

underpinned by assumptions of innate, indissoluble and immanent significance, whereas the discourse of realism represents significance as frail, contingent, and constructed within social practice” However, he points out that there are intermediate texts “which are fantasies but seem to countenance, if not embrace, the ‘realistic’ ideology”. The following chapter continues the exploration of spiritual quests and the search for transcendent meaning in fantasy novels and in those with narrative structures which fall into the intermediate zones between fantasy and realism.

In particular, it examines those narrative modes which, unlike realistic novels, use strategies to foreground their literariness and considers how these strategies facilitate the narrative construction of the spiritual quest.

CHAPTER 4

THE REALM OF THE MARVELLOUS: SPIRITUAL QUESTS IN SPECULATIVE YA FICTION

The realm of phantasy depends for its effect on the fact that its content is not submitted to reality-testing. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’

I searched for the answer to a question. I sailed the world trying to find it, and eventually I did. But some answers don’t finish a quest - they merely start it. Sonya Hartnett, The Ghost’s Child

'I've been thinking'...that this sunrise might be the very last one of its kind... we're all gonna have to start lookin' at things a whole different way from now on.’ Catherine Jinks, The Rapture

The previous chapter considered the representation of spiritual quests in contemporary Australian

YA realist fiction written in various narrative styles. Spiritual quests were defined in association with the mythic hero’s quest described by Joseph Campbell ([1949] 1991) and the concept of the

Bildungsroman, leading to an ongoing process of ideological becoming (Bakhtin 1981, 342-348).

Realist fiction can be restrictive however, particularly in its capacity to explore such otherworldly issues as spirituality. Interrogation of what it means to be human, and particularly what it means to be a spiritual human being, is often better conveyed in fantastic fiction than in realism, as is demonstrated in some of the texts considered here. Todorov (1980) denotes the fantastic as a situation in which readers cannot be sure whether fictional events have a natural or a supernatural explanation and they may remain uncertain about this, even after reaching the end of the fiction. He claims that if a natural explanation is forthcoming, the fantastic gives way to the uncanny; if supernatural explanations are explicitly required, then we are in the realm of the marvellous

(Todorov 1980, 41-57).

Proceeding beyond realistic representations, this chapter focuses on spiritual quests portrayed in fantasy and other modes along the realism-fantasy spectrum. These liminal modes include magical realism, metafiction, fables, allegories and other less neatly categorised forms that nudge the borders of consensus reality with the inclusion of elements of the fantastic, the uncanny and the marvellous. For Stephens (1992, 265), such intermediate texts are fantasies that “seem to

countenance, if not embrace, the ‘realistic’ ideology”. The term ‘speculative fiction’ is used here as an umbrella description to cover such a range of non-realist modes. Margaret Atwood (2004, 513) refers to her own speculative writing as a beast that “has at least nine heads [including fantasy and science fiction], and the ability to eat all other fictional forms in sight, and turn them into its own substance”. A major aim of this chapter is to demonstrate the diversity of speculative modes that are found in Australian YA spiritual quest narratives, in support of my claim that a postsecular dialogic expression of spirituality is well represented in contemporary Australian YA novels.

Spiritual quests in speculative fiction Todorov’s account of the fantastic asserts that its essence lies in “that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event” (1980,

25). According to Todorov, hesitation by the reader is the first condition of the fantastic, with the hesitation of the characters being of secondary importance or possibly absent. Such uncertainty by characters, through which hesitant reader positions are constructed, is apparent in a number of the focus texts discussed in this chapter. For example, in Nightpeople (Eaton 2005), the main character’s ability to “reach” into other minds is a source of hesitation; The Blue Feather (1997) leaves both the reader and characters uncertain about the existence of a mystical giant bird; and the plot of The Rapture (Jinks 2001) pivots around whether certain marvelous genetic processes are real or illusory. There is a vast range of literary scholarship concerning fantasy and speculative fiction in general and a significant number of references to fantasy’s distinctive potential to evoke a sense of spirituality. All fiction is, of course, at least one remove from reality, according to

Stephens (1992, 242) and “fantasy is presumably at least twice removed, in that it is a representation of something which does not exist in the actual world”. He notes (1992, 265) that defenders of fantasy writing claim that it is “a search for a deeper reality and eternal truth…which may carry the implication that ‘realist’ writing is restricted to surfaces” and that common stylistic conventions found in fantasy are its “innate, indissoluble and immanent significance”, giving substance to its potential to evoke spiritual themes. This view is supported by Jobling (2010, 8) who contends that while fantasy texts are often charged with being escapist and irrelevant, they

“offer a sense of meaning, purpose and value which accords with spiritual concerns, anxieties and desires”. The previous chapter drew on Stephens’ arguments concerning the distinction between fantasy and realism in children’s and YA fiction, an essential difference being that fantasy leans towards metaphor while realism is a more metonymic mode. Further, while realistic fiction encodes themes of language and power through conversational encounters and allusions to social practice, fantasy encodes that theme through mythic representations of transcendent meaning (Stephens

1992, 7). Mythic underpinnings are sometimes also apparent in realist quest narratives, particularly through intertextual references as demonstrated in the previous chapter.

Several authors and critics have observed the nexus between fantasy fiction and spirituality. Australian fantasy writer, Isobel Carmody comments that fantasy writing allows her “to dip into the rich store of symbol and myth underpinning our cultures” (Matthews 1998, 23). She claims that using symbols and myths allows her to tap into the unconscious minds of her audience and “to touch upon unspoken longings and unawakened desires”. As those symbols are always manipulated, Carmody believes that they force readers to delve into their own knowledge of the myths in an attempt to understand why the writer’s version differs from theirs and this can only be done “by looking inward” (Matthews 1998, 23). Similarly, Jobling (2010, 190) comments that “the tendency of fantastic literature to make use of mythic tropes…encourages the reading of fantastic heroes in a spiritual key, for myths typically evoke a transcendent dimension” (my ellipsis).

Nikolajeva (2012, 60) claims that fantasy allows writers “to deal with important psychological, ethical, and existential questions in a slightly detached manner, which frequently proves more effective with young readers than straightforward realism”, allowing the spiritual growth of the protagonist to be presented “more tangibly when depicted in terms of struggle with external magic forces rather than in terms of inner tension.” In line with the mythic nature of speculative quest narratives, McKenna and Pearce (1999, 221) assert that “in quest sagas, figures customarily appear as guides, marking a new period, stage or episode in the life of the hero” and “these archetypes show the way for the hero’s redemption as they propel the human spirit forward to its eventual triumph”. Spiritual quest sagas with Jungian archetypal guides, as described by Joseph Campbell,

are thus particularly suited to speculative fiction because such symbolic and mythic characters are more often found in these narratives than in fictions that attempt to reflect consensus reality.

On the distinction between the concepts of religion and spirituality, Pinsent (2006, 49) argues that in the past the prevailing emphasis in children’s and YA literature was to explicitly promote religion in a didactic way, mostly in realist texts. However, “in tandem with contemporary developments…there is an increasing tendency for the spiritual to be more frequently expressed within the genre of fantasy, while in the past, ‘religious’ children’s literature was very often written in a realistic mode” (my ellipsis). She claims that the term ‘fantasy’ has inevitably been subject to nearly as many diverse interpretations as religion and spirituality but prefers a broad definition,

“meaning any literature involving a departure from consensus reality”. While realistic genres have commonly been associated with sociological or historical perspectives, the departure towards fantasy “often favours an exploration of the deeper meaning of life, whether philosophical, theological or psychological”. Spiritual quests portrayed in speculative modes inevitably share many features with realist quest narratives, but there is an added level of flexibility. According to

Jaspers (cited in Deszcz-Tryhubczak 2006, xix), fantasy enables a break with the inherited traditions of realism “which are often simply subtle forms of coercion” to create a “vision of society beyond the impossible demands of post-modernity, and the economic and cultural traps of twentieth-century ideologies”. Discussing her progression from writing realistic to fantasy novels,

Australian author Melina Marchetta (2008) comments that fantasy allows authors the freedom to explore big issues, while also requiring them to set boundaries for their narratives. Similarly,

Isobelle Carmody (Matthews 1998, 22) contends that “realism, for me, is a way of looking at how things are…Fantasy or imaginative writing, in all its various forms, is about finding a vision” (my ellipsis). This view of fantasy writing suitably complements the idea of the spiritual quest.

For Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Oziewicz (2006, xii) “it is not surprising that the two most obvious contexts for the use of the word ‘quest’ are a spiritual quest and a quest in fantasy” and the idea that fantasy literature may “be linked with spirituality, ethics, morality and the moral imagination is, by now, almost a cliché”. Although a number of monographs on fantasy have addressed these issues, there were no critical collections focussed on the spiritual and moral

dimensions of fantasy prior to Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Oziewica’s book. The editors posit that one reason for this paucity may be “the lack of agreement on what spirituality is and the general difficulty of confronting the subject in literary-critical discourse”, hence the difficulty in achieving a cohesive collection of articles. Among earlier monographs that addressed the issue, Manlove’s scholarship is notable regarding the religious and moral dimensions of fantasy, particularly in several major works. Manlove expressed concern in Modern Fantasy: Five Studies (1975) that “the distance between real worlds and fantastic realms creates an aesthetic and moral problem for the reader from a secularised world that lacks belief in supernatural forces” (Waller 2010, 20). In

Christian Fantasy: from 12000 to the present (1992), however, Manlove provides an analysis of stories of the Christian supernatural that depict imagined forms of such Christian motifs as heaven, hell, angels and devils. The Impulse of Fantasy (1983) takes a broader view of fantasy and identifies the genre as “a fiction evoking wonder and containing a substantial and irreducible element of supernatural or impossible worlds, beings or objects” (Manlove 1983, ix). This characterisation resonates in varying degrees with the focus texts of this chapter.

Spiritual themes, regardless of the limited scholarship on the subject, occupy a prominent position in some canonical fantasy literature of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, most overtly in works by George Macdonald, C S Lewis and Philip Pullman. A number of critics

(for example, Denis Gray (2002); William Gray (2008); Emily McAvan (2010; 2012)) also consider that Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Rowling’s Harry Potter series invite spiritual readings, even if heretical. Nikolajeva (2003, 140) asserts that rather than ending in marriage and enthronement, the goal in “contemporary philosophical and ethical fantasy…is mainly a matter of spiritual maturation” (my ellipsis). Fantasy author, Ursula Le Guin (1982, 68) agrees that fantasy is the natural and appropriate language for the “recounting of the spiritual journey and the struggle of good and evil in the soul”. Continuing the notion of journey and quest metaphors, Armitt (2005, 8) claims that as the various modes of fantasy “deal in the unknowableness of life” and “fantasy sets up worlds that genuinely exist beyond the horizon, as opposed to those parts of our own world that are located beyond that line of sight but to which we might travel, given sufficient means”.

Speculative fiction thus provides a useful mechanism for constructing spiritual and psychological

quests and “just as God and the unconscious present us with the possibility that here is another, unseen side to life – a storehouse of fears and possibilities, an unknown world beyond the senses – then literary fantasy offers a shape for those fears and possibilities that cannot be captured in any other way” (Armitt 2005, 33).

Mythopoeic spiritual quests The novels discussed in the previous chapter exemplify the idea of the spiritual quest in contemporary realist Australian YA fiction with focalisation by male characters. This suggests the stubborn persistence of the masculine quest paradigm in this genre, even though three of the five authors of the novels are women. Some departure from traditional models is provided by the character constructions of the male questers as ‘sensitive guys’ rather than ‘iron men’ (McCallum and Stephens, 2000, 343-344). Diverging further from the masculine quest pattern, Shaedow

Master (D’ath 2003) and Nightpeople (Eaton 2005) centre on young women embarking on heroic spiritual quests. The female protagonists of these two fantasy novels, Saria in Nightpeople and Ora in Shaedow Master, more closely resemble traditional self-sacrifiicing heroes than the rather narcissistic male questers of the realist novels discussed in Chapter 3. Where such solipsism may be metonymic of young Australians’ quests for meaning and connectedness in the twenty-first century, the futuristic dystopian worlds of Nightpeople and Shaedow Master present a more metaphoric construction. Both novels invite postcolonial and ecofeminist readings, along with an insight into the way authoritative discourses can be integrated with internally persuasive discourses in the process of the ideological becoming of the protagonists.

Nightpeople, the first novel of the futuristic dystopian fantasy Darklands trilogy, is set hundreds of years after the current era, in a post-nuclear civilisation. The plot revolves around Saria who is the final child to be born in the Darklands, a quarantined region of contaminated Australian desert. As the last one of her kind (61), Saria was “spirited away at her birth” to save her from the prowling flying vehicles of the Nightpeople who aim to remove any child born to the desert tribe.

Her removal is widely viewed by critics as a metaphor for the Stolen Generations of Australian

Indigenous children, which involved the forcible separation of Aboriginal children from their

families from the 1880s to the 1960s (Read 1982).10 Recurring references to this practice, both implicit and metaphoric, occur in several of the YA novels discussed in this thesis, suggesting that it may be embedded as a mark of shame on the Australian national psyche. The title ‘Dreamer’ which is used for the elders in Nightpeople also suggests Australian Indigenous spirituality, evoking reference to The Dreaming and its stories that “are linked to the creation process and spiritual ancestors, and [are] still around today”11.

Beginning on the night of Saria’s birth, Nightpeople plunges the reader into a setting immediately identifiable as an unknown fantasy world by its content, style and epic register:

It had been so many years since the last birthing, that there were few who could remember the rituals: the boiling of water, the tearing of rags. Dreamer Wanji, summoned by the poor girl’s screams, hurried towards the hut…which…was like all the others, iron and tin scrounged from times before. (3, my ellipses)

Following the prologue, the epic style gives way to a more demotic register, in which the reader is given close access to Saria’s mental processes in the third person narration that is characteristic of fantasy fictions. Now in her early teens, Saria possesses a psychic ability to ‘reach' into the minds of other sentient beings, connecting with them and viewing the world from their perspective. In the

Darklands, this ability is seen as the exclusive domain of the Dreamers, the all-male governing council, and its possession is disapproved of in women or girls, to the point of not being acknowledged. Such an ideology echoes the attitude of many religious authorities in the real-world of the reader, even in twenty-first century Western cultures. Until she meets Dreamer Gaardi, Saria had only reached into the minds of animals, and not humans. Her carefree existence is disrupted in the first chapter when two men - Dariand and Dreamer Gaardi - arrive at her home to take her on a journey to her birthplace at Woormra, telling her she has a destiny to fulfil. They provide no further details however, insisting that Dreamer Wanji will explain everything to her when they meet him.

10 A full account of The Stolen Generations is found in the report to parliament, Bringing Them Home (Wilson 1997) and online at http://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/politics/stolen-generations- timeline [accessed 3 June 2015]. The annual commemoration of Sorry Day is also relevant in its elucidation of community attitudes and information is available at www.australia.gov.au/about-australia/sorry-day- stolen-generations.

11Source: http://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/spirituality/what-is-the-dreamtime-or-the- dreaming#ixzz3c4pR8mSu [accessed 3 June 2015]

With great reluctance, Saria accompanies Dariand and Dreamer Gaardi into the desert and, in a familiar narrative formula, learns gradually from them and others along the way about her importance and destiny as the last child born to her people. In this way, Nightpeople follows the conventional quest model of departure-initiation-return, but with the return deferred in anticipation of further action in the following two novels of the trilogy.

The spiritual nature of Saria’s quest is implied through a number of plot elements, most explicitly the supernatural abilities that enable her to enter into the consciousness of other human and non-human agents, as well as into the life-force of the earth mother. Implicit Biblical allusions and references to Indigenous spiritual beliefs also permeate the novel. The council of Dreamers, a gathering of old men who meaninglessly recite oaths and words (177-178), can be viewed as a metaphor for organised patriarchal religion and its dogmatic authoritative discourse. Although a number of Dreamers acknowledge Saria’s potential, she struggles against the majority of members of this conservative authority, who defend their behaviour with such banal excuses as:

'That's the way it's always been done. We haven't survived this long by ignoring our laws and traditions.' (265)

Again this attitude is reminiscent of many contemporary authoritative institutions. In contrast to the self-focussed male questers in Chapter 3 of this thesis, Saria represents a female saviour for her community. A conversation between Dariand and Gan, an old woman of the tribe, indicates Saria’s messianic nature, with a feminist inference:

'I never really believed any of Dreamer Wanji's stories. Not till recently…Till I actually saw her. I thought like a lot of people that she was just the last of them, and Dreamer Wanji was throwin' all his dreams onto this final kid. But now, I dunno. When Dreamer Baanti carried her into our huntin' camp from the desert, it was kinda strange. I just got this sudden feelin' that everything was starting to come into place, right?'... 'I didn't think you believed in any of that sort of stuff, Gan.' 'I didn't. But then, I didn't believe women could be Dreamers, either.' (161-162, my ellipsis)

The emergence of prophets from the desert evokes Biblical allusions but also has a particularly

Australian flavour. ‘Desert Spirituality’ generally privileges a masculine view of spirituality

(Lindsay 2000, x-xvii) but its transference to a young girl reinforces Saria’s significance as a female saviour.

The council of Dreamers contributed much of the authoritative discourse which Saria absorbed throughout her childhood, in anticipation of her assimilation of other discourses to fabricate her path to ideological becoming. Like Joseph Campbell’s archetypal reluctant hero, Saria finds herself in the role of an unwilling saviour and after a series of events, during which she becomes aware of her extraordinary potential, her internally persuasive discourses begin to develop, as indicated in a dialogue between her and Dariand:

'...I'm not reaching again. Ever…Back in the valley I used to love it. When I was reaching into a lizard or something it was just like...I dunno...like the only time I was really alive. It's not like that any more.…Every time I do it someone gets hurt. Dreamer Baanti, the dog. I nearly hurt you, back at that waterhole.' 'You didn't know what you were doing.' 'I do now. And I know what can happen because of it.' (271, my ellipses)

Shortly after this conversation, Saria discovers that Dariand is her father, in an episode linking the story with other hero narratives, such as when Darth Vader’s revelation that he is Luke

Skywalker’s father in Star Wars which was influenced by Joseph Campbell’s writing (Larsen,

541). Intertextual connections to modern hero narratives, such as the Harry Potter series, are also evident as Saria, who survived an attempted abduction at birth, could be described as ‘the girl who lived’ just as Harry is ‘the boy who lived’ (Rowling 1997, 18). As Nightpeople closes, Saria’s maturation from the barefooted child at the start of the novel parallels her spiritual growth and ideological becoming, preparing the way for her descendants to continue the quest in the following books of the trilogy.

While Saria begins her quest reluctant to leave a carefree childhood, the hero in Shaedow

Master (D’ath 2003) lives a more regimented life as a member of royalty. Like Nightpeople,

Shaedow Master alludes to Australian postcolonial issues of the conquest of Indigenous people and the natural environment. Unlike Nightpeople however, which could be read as a possible distant future world, Shaedow Master is set in a distinctly imaginary secondary world. The novel utilises rich mythical, Biblical and Romantic literary imagery in its construction of the imaginary world of

Folavia, a country previously inhabited by the fair skinned, blue eyed Guests prior to colonisation by the darker skinned, brown eyed Folavians just over two hundred years before the story begins.

This is of course an inversion of the distinguishing physical features found in most real-world colonised populations, achieving a defamiliarising effect in relation to Australian history. However, a postcolonial reading reveals clear parallels with the European colonisation of Australia, which was previously populated only by dark skinned people. Shaedow Master thematically embraces issues of the subjugation of colonised people and the environmental damage generated by the colonisers on the sacred land which, as in Nightpeople, is personified as a nurturing mother or possibly a deity. Also as in Nightpeople, the hero/saviour character in Shaedow Master is a young woman with supernatural abilities and a spiritual connectedness with the earth.

In customary fantasy fiction style, Shaedow Master is narrated in third person past tense and focalised by Ora, the fourteen year old hero. Ora’s comfortable life is disrupted when she strays from the protection of her carers and meets a skiffer boy (the Folavian name for the

Indigenous Guests) who provides a glimpse of a neighbouring community that was previously alien to her. This meeting stimulates Ora’s curiosity and initiates a series of events which result in an identity crisis, firstly when she discovers that she is half skiffer and later when she discovers the deception that had been practiced by her ostensibly dark-haired brown-eyed mother, Qualina, who concealed her racial identity by dying her naturally blond hair and wearing brown lenses over her blue irises. The revelation of her heritage triggers Ora’s quest to uncover the truth about herself, her family, her community, the history of Folavia and the mystery of the Dalfen, believed by the

Guests to inhabit the toxic Quickwater lake. Ora’s parents and carers have concealed the truth about all these things in the common parental guise of protecting her, while concealing their own unethical conduct. Ora is assisted in her quest by the Guest boy, Tasman, whose narrative function is to provide the alternative version of Folavia’s history while educating Ora about it. This history has been concealed from Ora in a manner that evokes the real-world practice of excluding

Indigenous perspectives from recent Australian histories.

In addition to the Indigenous Guests and the colonising Folavians, other beings inhabit the secondary world of Shaedow Master. The Outworlders introduce a science fictional tone to the

novel – “Tall, silent, formidable, they might not have been human” (194). Yet recognisable qualities in the Outworlder soldiers suggest that they represent English Crusaders, particularly their chainmail armour with an iron breastplate painted in the red and white colours of the Outworlder flag (195), suggesting the cross of St George. At the other end of the character spectrum are the enigmatic and mystical creatures of nature, notably the shaedows and the Dalfen. Intermingled with the collage of speculative modes within Shaedow Master – myth, science fiction, ghost story, dystopian fiction, posthumanism – are references to real-world beliefs and rituals such as church attendance and an attitude of reverence towards the country’s pioneers. In church at the King’s funeral, “Ora counted the panels in the huge stained-glass window above the altar showing Adamo the Wanderer calling for blessings on the newly discovered Folavia” (123). This brief extract is dense with implicit meaning - Ora is unimpressed by the depersonalised funeral service so she counts the window panels and observes the portrayal of Adamo the Wanderer, evoking a composite image that merges the Biblical Adam wandering in the Garden of Eden with the invading colonisers of Folavia, imposing their power in the guise of blessings on the conquered land. Ora was clearly distressed by the King’s death but unable to show her grief in a conventional way.

Struggling against her ambivalence, she complies with the standards that have dictated her behaviour throughout her childhood, and “dragging her gaze from the stained-glass window, Ora lowered her stinging eyes and said a prayer for the repose of the King’s soul” (124). With her discovery of the truth about her background and the history of her country however, the authoritative discourses imposed by Ora’s carers begin to assimilate with other discourses and perspectives as she progresses towards ideological becoming and, like Saria in Nightpeople, the realisation of her destiny as a saviour of the land and its earlier inhabitants.

The destruction of sacred nature is depicted most saliently in Ora’s encounters with the

Cloudtouchers, the old growth trees that she later discovers her father has been trading to the

Outworlders for gold, in a misguided attempt to repay a guilty debt incurred when he was a young man. He had accidentally killed a young Guest who was his friend, while attempting to spear the

Dalfen in the lake. Compared with her maid’s insipid and fearful response to their first vision of the sublime Cloudtouchers, Ora’s sense of awe establishes her spiritual sensitivity:

All she noticed was the Cloudtouchers. When she emerged from the chasm, she was again struck dumb by their size and grandeur, by their sheer beauty; they simply left no room in her consciousness to take in anything else (171)

She realises that her response to the Cloudtouchers is less akin to the colonising Folavians than to that of the Indigenous Guests, whose reverence prohibits them from even raising their eyes to the trees – as Tasman tells her “Thim’s too holy” (173). Portrayed in a mythic and mystical style, the environment is personified in a concept suggestive of the Gaia hypothesis12. Following the realisation that her people had plundered and violated the sacred environment of the Guests, Ora offers an apology:

‘I’m sorry,’ Ora said, not just to Tasman but to her mother, to Solqua-Darvid and to every other Guest in the Land. But, gazing up through her tears at a patch of blue sky among the impossibly high treetops, she wondered if it was too late for apologies. (173)

Again, this is suggestive of the relationship of contemporary non-Indigenous Australians to the

Indigenous inhabitants, with an allusion to the Australian Government’s long-awaited apology to the Stolen Generations.

Along with a growing reverence for the Land (signified now by capitalisation of the word), the mythopoeic narrative becomes increasingly saturated with Biblical, mythic and Romantic symbols. The harpooning of the Dalfen recalls the albatross in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient

Mariner; a rainbow signifying peace between god and earth (265) suggests the Biblical story of

Noah’s ark; and Ora’s final departure in a long, slim canoe “that slid silently shorewards as if propelled from beneath” (264) evokes Celtic and Arthurian mythology as

A hush fell over them as the long low canoe, with its small golden-haired passenger, slipped away towards the centre of the lake and disappeared into the rain. (265).

Ora’s progress towards ideological becoming includes her assumption of the role of a Christ-like saviour, atoning for the original sins of her race through her sacrifice to the deity of the lake:

12 The Gaia hypothesis proposes that the entire Earth functions as a single living super-organism, a self- regulating entity with the capacity to keep our planet healthy by controlling the chemical and physical environment (Lovelock 1979)

They were no longer Guests, they were Lakelanders. They belonged here. Unlike the Lakelanders of two thousand years ago, they had no sins to atone for. The lake didn’t want them. There was only one person it wanted. (264)

Following this incident, Ora transcends her human status to become the Shaedow Master in the form of the Dalfen. Bradford et al (2008, 100-101) note that “by transforming Aqua-Ora into a semi-mythic, nonhuman, but transcendentally sentient entity the novel also transforms the natural world into an ecotopia, offering a fantastic version of how our own world might be transformed” and it provides “an expression of hope that the relationship of human subjects with the Earth and with their ‘others’ might be creatively transformed”. Ora’s quest culminates with her ideological and spiritual becoming as she relinquishes her selfhood to achieve the universal connectedness of the earth and its diverse inhabitants.

Futuristic science fiction quests In addition to these high fantasy narratives, spiritual quests are represented in other forms of speculative Australian YA fiction, some of which are less obviously fantastic at their openings but move into the realm of the marvellous as the narratives progress. The Rapture (Jinks 2001) portrays quests undertaken by two very different young men and departs stylistically in several ways from conventions that constitute the archetypal spiritual quest fantasies in the secondary worlds of

Nightpeople and Shaedow Master. Although a futuristic fantasy novel, much of The Rapture is set in a primary world not too far removed from the consensus reality of many readers, at least in the streams narrated by the two main protagonists, Aldo Frewin and Joseph Peek. The Rapture is the one novel discussed in this chapter that utilises a form of time-slip, a popular convention in speculative fiction genres. In these respects the narrative mode of this novel (like The Blue Feather discussed in the next section) possesses qualities of the fantastic mode elucidated by Rosemary

Jackson (1995, 20) in which the means of “establishing its ‘reality’ are initially mimetic (‘realistic’, presenting an ‘object’ world ‘objectively’) but then move into another mode which would seem to be marvellous (‘unrealistic’, representing apparent impossibilities), were it not for its initial grounding in the ‘real’”.

The Rapture also departs from the conventional fantasy tendency towards third person narration noted by Stephens (1992, 251) who claims that “the most pervasive strategy for effecting the illusion of realism in modern children’s literature is first-person narration, where narrator and principal focalizer are the same…it remains rare in fantasy, and so constitutes a significant discoursal discrimination between the two modes” (my ellipsis). Rather than conforming to this usual fantasy convention, The Rapture makes effective use of polyfocalisation through multiple first person narration in a multistranded plot structure. The novel presents three distinct forms of chronotope, described by Bakhtin (1981, 84) as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature”. These form interconnected narrative strands in which there is a dialogic convergence between different times and places – past and present, Australia and USA, urban and rural - as well as between science and religion, the known and the unknowable. Written in epistolary style, alternate chapters in The Rapture are headed “from the Journal of Jarom” and “from the Working Notes of Aldo Frewin”. The two main strands are interspersed with chapters focalised by a third protagonist, Joseph Peek, written in the form of word processed documents and emails with fictional internet links. The epistolary strategy sometimes feels contrived and unconvincing, particularly at times when Jarom is facing an immediate physical crisis and unlikely to be scribbling journal entries. However, the device provides a vehicle for narrating the subjective experiences and thoughts of the characters as an alternative to using conventional first person narration, as in the realist texts discussed earlier.

The novel’s title refers to the concept in Christian eschatology in which believers, both dead and alive, will be raised up to the clouds to meet Christ at his second coming while unbelievers will be left behind. In the rather complex plot of The Rapture, Jarom Woodruf is a young man living in an isolated breakaway Mormon community (Nauvoo) somewhere near Cradle

Mountain, Tasmania in the year 2087. The community is awaiting the occurrence of The Rapture and is ruled by Heber Woodruff, known as Our Father to community members and viewed by many, particularly the children, to be divine, as his appellation suggests. However, among other failings Heber is misogynistic, racist and violent, justifying his values and behaviour with quotes from the Book of Mormon and Biblical prophecies. The main alternate focalisation in The Rapture

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is by Aldo Frewin, a young man living contemporaneously in suburban Salt Lake City, which he designates Mormon Central, the global headquarters of the Mormon church as it is in the real world. Although Aldo is not a practising Mormon, this setting establishes a link with Jarom's world. Aldo lives in mainstream urban American society, yet his existence is similarly insular to

Jarom’s due to his introverted dependence on virtual reality. To his mother's consternation, he prefers to engage with the world through the sophisticated social networking of 2087 (recognisably similar to early 21st century technologies) than to meet people face to face.

A third minor but textually significant strand is focalised by Joseph H Peek, a young man living in Salt Lake City eighty years earlier and also suffering social alienation. This strand of the plot transcends notions of time and space with its fantastic proposition but is linked to the others through a science fictional plot mechanism involving genetic research undertaken in 2087 by

Aldo's Uncle Mike. Mike is a lapsed Mormon who had turned to science in his quest for knowledge and truth but who eventually acknowledges that there are mysteries and marvels beyond the scope of either science or religion. The science fictional mechanism by which Joseph in 2006 actually turns into Jarom in 2087 is explained in complex scientific terms spanning sixteen pages of text

(37-52), which require some grasp of the human genetics for understanding, as well as an ability to suspend disbelief. While conducting cutting-edge experiments on the DNA which had been stored for scientific purposes in a hospital genobank, Uncle Mike transfers a cell from the DNA of Joseph, born in 1989, to the cells of a baby born in 2071 and still living in 2087, namely Jarom. Medical records for Joseph indicate that he had undergone a mysterious transformation in 2004 at the age of fifteen - “His hair had changed colour. His voice had changed, his complexion had changed, his behaviour had changed….his family said…he was a ‘different person’” (47-48, my ellipses). Uncle

Mike suspects that he has discovered a previously unknown scientific principle – genetic time travel in which unique genetic material from one time can be transferred to the DNA of a person in another time. This narrative strand contributes a scientific facet to the novel’s heteroglottic composition combined with a suggestion of fantastic possibilities lying beyond present human knowledge. It also entwines the lives of Joseph, Jarom and Aldo as it provides the reason for Uncle

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Mike and Aldo to travel from Salt Lake City to Tasmania in order to locate Jarom and verify their hypotheses.

Intertextual quotations from the Bible and the Book of Mormon add religious dimensions to the heteroglossia of the novel, as do the distinctly different voices and registers in which each character narrates his part of the story. For Foster et al (2005, 100), the interweaving of the quests for knowledge by Jarom ‘the faithful zealot’, Aldo ‘the addict to virtual reality’ and Uncle Mike

‘the formerly religious but now doubting scientist’, underscore the different ways in which “people construct truths and the consequent limitations of each”. The various voices evoke Bakhtin’s references to ‘religious dogma’ and ‘acknowledged scientific truth’ as prime examples of authoritative discourses that are available for assimilation with other perspectives in the construction of the characters’ internally persuasive discourses, leading to their ideological becoming. Joseph Peek’s 2006 worldview and delusional beliefs invite comparison with the beliefs of Jarom’s religious community:

The Lann [Joseph’s fantasy kingdom] is the quest and the goal of a Great Truth, a Truth that has something…to do with the whole phenomenon of the Net…The Net has an existence, or a meaning, beyond the purely physical…we, the True Lann, must separate ourselves from those Lann who are purely concerned with power games…they’re accusing me of being a religious maniac – mentally incompetent in other words… (360, my ellipses)

Joseph’s imaginings present a convergence of the ideologies of the two main protagonists - Jarom’s community-sanctioned religious beliefs and Aldo’s anti-social computer-dependent Virtual Mode

(VM) lifestyle. Their separate existences and perspectives merge progressively throughout the plot towards the climactic point where they eventually interact on a remote Tasmanian mountaintop where Jarom is expecting The Rapture to occur. By this stage Jarom has genetically merged with his ancestor Joseph Peek in the mysterious and bizarre scientific procedure outlined earlier.

Through the dramatic experiences on the mountain, the two boys are forced out of their individual insular existences. Jarom’s ideological becoming is more painful than Aldo’s as he emerges from a religious community which has sought to protect its members from the purported evils of the modern 2087 world. As well as the culture shock he experiences on entering mainstream society, his whole belief system and trust in Our Father have become shattered progressively throughout the

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narrative. At the beginning he displays adolescent naivety in his excessive adoration, expressed in a characteristically religious tenor – “By the grace of God he is perfect in Christ – holy, and without spot. May the Lord abide in him forever” (10). His eventual disenchantment with Our Father is expressed equally fervent religious terms although his dialogue becomes informal and curtly emotional as doubts begin to invade his religious worldview:

I've accepted that Heber Woodruff was a liar and a murderer, and deserved to die. I hate him. I abhor his works. He was a false prophet, and will burn in the bottomless pit, with the other false prophets - if, indeed, there is a bottomless pit. (410)

Despite the childlike emotional intensity of Jarom's assertions, his awakening scepticism about the religious dogma of his youth indicates his potential to develop an autonomous belief system. His aptitude to cultivate internally persuasive discourses, assimilating the authoritative voices he has absorbed with his new experiences and perspectives, is expressed in an increasingly demotic speech register, in the major underlying ideological message of the novel:

Mike Frewin says that there's more than one way of reading the Bible, which isn't necessarily as straightforward as it might appear...He says that I'm a text, and that I should learn to read me better. That way, he says, I won't be misled by the interpretation of others, when I look into my heart. (410)

This somewhat hackneyed notion of looking into one’s heart to discover existential truths is not uncommon in psychological and philosophical discourses throughout human history and is also reflected in Bakhtin’s ideas of retelling in one’s own words (internally persuasive discourse) rather than reciting by heart (authoritative discourse).

The intersubjective construction of multiple perspectives in The Rapture is achieved partly through the use of overlapping first-person observations of the same event, which begins half way through the novel. Both Aldo and Jarom are unreliable narrators and the construction of their different viewpoints invites readers to develop an independent assessment of the events and ideologies presented. The overlapping perspectives are introduced into the narrative when Aldo and

Jarom first sight one another and the convergent process intensifies from there. In their first encounter, Jarom's version of his Uncle Janan’s dialogue is narrated in the hieratic register which represents his religious view of the world and indicates the speech patterns of his community:

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...then I saw the two men...The younger was very young and he was dressed like Satan...Most of [his hair] was fair, but there were black streaks through it, as if a demon had dragged its claws through the blond strands, and scorched them...'Uncle Mike!' The demon jogged his companion's arm, and pointed. Pointed at me. They both stared...'What do you want?' Janan demanded... (192, my ellipses)

Aldo's version of this event in the following chapter presents a different view, expressed in more colloquial language indicating his perception of Janan's speech:

We settled right outside the big, wooden entrance gate...There was something about that place; it looked spooky. Like the landscape. Everything had a grim, grimy, menacing air about it. I almost expected some medieval plague victims to come staggering into the yard...All at once, a kid stumbled into view. He came out of one of the buildings, closely followed by a stocky guy in the most bizarre collection of clothes I've ever seen...They both stopped, and stared...'Whaddayew want?' said the man...(208, my ellipses)

For the first time, the reader is provided here with a vision of the unrefined nature of the Nauvoo community, in contrast to the insular view from inside which has been presented through Jarom's eyes.

At the novel’s opening, the protagonists inhabit environments separated both geographically and culturally. A dialogic tension is facilitated by the heteroglottic construction of the two settings and escalates throughout The Rapture, from Jarom's and Aldo's independent narration of their separate lives before they meet, through to the development of a relationship between them. Initially they are two young men living in the same chronological year but culturally centuries apart. However, their common humanity becomes evident as their individual quests for self-identity broaden beyond their initial solipsism into shared quests for a greater sense of truth and meaning. Despite the contrast between Aldo's modern urban existence in a computer- dominated world and Jarom's archaic rural lifestyle in a remote community, both young men struggle with normal social engagement in their own real worlds. Jarom’s progress, represented in his journal entries cited above about learning to read himself as a text, is paralleled by Aldo’s ideological development in his resolution to engage personally with people rather than living an introverted VM social life. He concedes that he has been “living in a fantasy” (414), just as Jarom has been living the religious fantasy that he would be taken up in The Rapture, and Joseph Peek had lived in the computer-generated fantasy world of the Lann.

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Uncle Mike, whose actions and views are conveyed only through the focalisation of Aldo and Jarom, is on another quest, of both a scientific and existential nature, and he occupies the opposite ideological position from Our Father’s authoritative stance. Mike’s advice to Jarom that he should learn to read himself better by looking into his heart (410) recalls Bakhtin’s account of ideological becoming as a process involving an “intense struggle within us for hegemony among various available verbal and ideological points of view, approaches, directions and values” which is not finite but open and “able to reveal ever newer ways to mean” (346). Mike, the late 21st century scientist who has rejected his religious Mormon upbringing, remains compassionate and open- minded about life's mysteries. When Jarom asks “You don’t believe in God?”, Mike responds

“Well, now – I wouldn’t go that far…There are more things in heaven and on earth…”’, evoking an intertextual allusion to Hamlet (Act 1, Scene 5, 166), another anguished young man on a quest for truth. In this way, Mike provides a further perspective from which to consider the options presented and the novel closes with his own existential musings that mirror Jarom's revelation that there is more than one way of reading the Bible. When Mike reveals to Aldo, in the final pages of the novel, that he has discovered two identical genotype samples taken from Jarom and Joseph who lived 80 years apart, Aldo records Mike’s comments in his “working notes”, reinforcing the novel’s ideological stance that cautions against accepting the authority of either religious and scientific dogma:

'I've been thinking'...that this sunrise might be the very last one of its kind...we're all gonna have to start lookin' at things a whole different way from now on.’ (416)

This existential sentiment is reiterated The Ghost’s Child, discussed below and in Chapter 8, as the protagonist Matilda reflects that “some answers don’t finish a quest, they merely start it” (Hartnett

2006, 14).

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Magical realist fantasies13 A particular feature of the spiritual quest fantasies considered above is their inclination to present readers with philosophical ‘big questions’ to contemplate, as inferred in the critical commentaries in the introductory section. The following novels extend the range of speculative writing forms and could be viewed as “intermediate texts…which are fantasies but seem to countenance, if not embrace, the ‘realistic’ ideology” as they negotiate the spaces between the discourse of fantasy which “is underpinned by assumptions of innate, indissoluble and immanent significance” and the discourse of realism that “represents significance as frail, contingent, and constructed within social practice” (Stephens 1992, 265). Among the various non-realist narrative modes which fit this categorisation, magical realist conventions are particularly well suited to the construction of spiritual subjectivities and quests in young adult fiction. Lodge (1992, 114) provides a very concise description of magical realism – “when marvellous and impossible events occur in what otherwise purports to be a realistic narrative” – and elaborates that prominent magical realist writers have usually “lived through great historical convulsions and wrenching personal upheavals, which they feel cannot be adequately represented in a discourse of undisturbed realism”, although the mode has also been enthusiastically embraced by others with weighty messages to convey.

Some other narrative modes closely aligned with magical realism can also be observed in the YA novels discussed below. Waller (2009, 21) extends Jackson’s 1981 account of fantastic realism, distinguishing it as a mode where “the protagonist does not expect the impossible to happen and when it does it is beyond their ordinary lived experience”. On the contrary, Waller claims that in magical realism, “those impossible happenings are incorporated into a worldview that the characters – if not the reader – find natural or acceptable”. According to this definition, the novels discussed below oscillate between fantastic and magical realism as the protagonists come to accept existents that had previously seemed impossible in their realist worlds. Surrealism is another fantastic form which Lodge claims is not quite the same as magical realism but notes obvious affinities between them. “In magic realism there is always a tense connection between the real and

13 Scholarly literature refers variously to magic realism and magical realism (see Bowers 2004, 131 for discussion of the terminology). I use the term ‘magical realism’ except in direct quotations that refer to ‘magic realism’.

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the fantastic: the impossible event is a kind of metaphor for the extreme paradoxes of modern history. In surrealism, metaphors become the real, effacing the world of reason and common sense”

(Lodge 1992, 175). Elements of fantastic realism, magical realism and surrealism thus pervade the novels discussed in this chapter, with the metaphors frequently becoming part of the protagonist’s reality.

Faris (2004, 63) refers to “the presence of spirit” in magical realism and claims that

perhaps the factual uncertainty in magical realism, the defocalization (as well as the difficulty of defining the term) not only point toward the general modern and postmodern condition of indeterminacy but also suggest, in a very general way, the existence of a mysterious realm of the spirit, even a hidden presence of the sacred within the profane, which inhabits the narrative space of the ineffable in-between.

She argues (2004, 43) that focalisation is indeterminate in magical realism and refers, instead, to

“defocalisation”, an effect which arises from the narrative seeming to “come from two radically different perspectives at once”. Faris further contends (2004, 63) that magical realism constitutes “a latent tendency to include a spirit-based element within contemporary literature – a possible remystification of narrative in the West” and cites Salman Rushdie’s comments that art might be

“the third principle that mediates between the material and spiritual worlds” offering readers “a secular definition of transcendence”. Such a concept dovetails with notions of postsecularism which frame this thesis.

According to Bowers (2004, 29), considerable confusion and many “problems of definition

[of magical realism and related forms] arise because of the frequent difficulty of placing texts into narrowly defined genres and categories”. She argues that, as magical realism does not belong to one specific era, it is not related to a particular critical approach but has been influenced by numerous theories including heteroglossia, cross-culturalism, postmodernism and postcolonialism

(Bowers 2004, 66). Perhaps as a consequence of this theoretical interaction, magical realism is considered by some critics to be “a tolerant and accepting type of fiction” (Bowers 2004, 4). This idea is supported by Chanady (1985, 30) who claims that such a narrative point of view relies on an

“absence of obvious judgements about the veracity of the events and the authenticity of the world expressed by characters in the text”. In this regard, Bowers claims that magical realism invites the

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reader “to follow the example of the narrator in accepting both realistic and magical perspectives of reality on the same level… no matter how different this perspective may be to the reader’s non- reading opinions and judgements” (2004, 4, my ellipsis). From a postcolonialist perspective,

Cooper (1998, 22) agrees that magical realism “opposes fundamentalism and purity; it is at odds with racism, ethnicity and the quest for tap roots, origins and homogeneity”. Again, this approach accords with the most liberal aspects of the postsecular hypothesis in relation to the novels analysed in this study.

The focus texts discussed in this section each open in realist worlds recognisable to readers, but progress towards uncanny spaces as the plots evolve. The notion of defocalisation, coined by Faris, is evident in much of Gary Crew’s work, in contrast to the close focalisation and access to protagonists’ mental processes that is characteristic of most texts in this study. The Blue

Feather (Crew and O’Hara 1997) begins as a gritty YA realist novel, introducing the main protagonist, Simon, as a cynical 16 year old antisocial boy whose counsellors attempt a rehabilitation program by having him work at a sanctuary for injured birds. Motifs of birds and flight permeate the novel, as well as sight, vision and perspective. The use of these symbols dovetails with Rushdie’s definition of secular transcendence as “that flight of the human spirit which all of us, secular or religious, experience on at least a few occasions” (cited in Faris 2004,

65). The novel opens with a quote from Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a thousand faces, preparing the reader for a mythical quest narrative. The quote includes a line that signifies that the quest is a spiritual as well as physical journey: “where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the centre of our own existence” (Campbell [1949] 1991, 18). McKenna and Pearce (1999, 229) view the novel as firmly attached “to the formula of the quest, albeit with three questers rather than the conventional one”. A sense of the uncanny, as described by Freud (Freud and McLintock [1919]

2003) and utilised by Todorov (1980) in his account of fantastic literature, develops in Simon’s awareness that he is undergoing a psychological change and does not recognise some aspects of his own fragmented subjectivity. This process is demonstrated in many references to his bewilderment as he observes his own behaviour, such as

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At each cage he had carefully followed the routine that Muir had established. He thought about this. That he had taken the trouble vaguely unsettled him, left him strangely unfamiliar with himself’ (43).

Simon’s immanent quest for self occurs in a realistic mode, but his parallel transcendent quest for a giant bird extends beyond consensus reality, taking the narrative into a magical realist mode.

The plot of The Blue Feather revolves around the search for a mythical giant bird which becomes a spiritual journey for the three questers. Simon, the sixteen year old who has been a delinquent outsider since he lost an eye as a child, is offered work with Greg Muir, the owner of a bird sanctuary. The injured birds are an obvious metaphor for Simon’s own physical and psychological damage and his frequently thwarted desire to escape. As part of the challenge to rehabilitate Simon, Greg takes him on an expedition with photo-journalist, Mala Glass, in search of the Wazo (a corruption of the French word for bird, l’oiseau), a mythical bird rumoured to be colour of the ocean and to have a wing span of eight meters. The novel thus considers the nature of belief in the absence of scientific evidence. On the quest, Simon and Mala, and to a lesser extent

Greg, experience psychological transformations that disrupt their belief systems and ideological outlooks. Mala’s characterisation as the sceptical scientist who had spurned the irrational spirituality of her Hindu background incorporates her belief that it is her scientific duty (in Richard

Dawkins fashion14) to prove the non-existence of the Wazo, thereby conquering superstitious thinking as she explains:

I’ve known what it’s like to be ruled by ignorance and superstition. My parents didn’t leave India only to get away from the pollution and over-crowding, but also so their children would be able to grow up without all the superstition...And my grandmother, she’s a sweet old thing, but her whole life is ruled by superstition and she won’t make a decision without consulting her astrology. She’s got a little altar by her bed…of an eagle carrying two people...This trio is supposed to represent the gods of continued existence... (21, my ellipses)

The allusion to the eagle carrying people is, of course, reminiscent of the Wazo myths that she is determined to expose as fantasy. Although Greg is also a professional scientist, he is more inclined

14 Professor Richard Dawkins is perhaps the most prominent of the New Atheists who assert that religion should not simply be tolerated along with secularism but should be countered, criticised, and exposed by rational argument wherever its influence arises (Hooper, unpaged). Dawkins’ argument was most famously expounded in The God Delusion (2006).

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to believe in mystical existents, while Simon represents a middle perspective, neither believing nor caring about the bird’s existence or non-existence, at least initially.

Along their way, the three questers encounter a number of archetypal wise characters or spiritual guides: Dr Gwen, a woman revered by the group of women volunteers at the local museum; McTaggart, an old loner living in the desert with his dog; and most importantly Atman, a camel driver who wanders in the Western Australian desert gathering rare flowers. A recognisably realist world dominates the plot well into the novel, until Simon’s first encounter with Atman (79) at which point the narrative tone and content begins to shift towards a fantastic realm with increasing use of symbolic and mythical elements:

…the sound of tinkling bells came again and just as suddenly parrots swooped low over his head. He ducked instinctively and when he looked up he saw a man with three camels in train watching him from the edge of the circle, at the gap where it had not been closed. For a moment he thought this was a vision… ‘Tell me,’ the boy pleaded. ‘Tell me what you want…’ In answer the man looked up, catching Simon’s eye, penetrating his armour of self as no- one had ever done, and the boy was filled with fear. (80-81, my ellipses)

The shift in focalisation from Simon to the omniscient narrator in this section corresponds with the change of register from demotic to almost hieratic (Stephens and McCallum 1998, 11), constructing the feeling of disorientation experienced by Simon during this scene. The three camels, the suggestion of a vision, the desert quest and the hieratic tone of “the boy was filled with fear” evoke Biblical resonances. Combined with the Hindu and Buddhist concepts of Atman, this creates a heteroglottic effect suggesting the convergence of different spiritual understandings.

These collected spiritual perspectives are represented in numerous metaphors, motifs and intertextual allusions throughout the narrative. In Sanskrit, Atman’s name means “one with the self” (McKenna and Pearce 1999, 222) and Simon encounters Atman at significant junctures in the plot as he progresses towards self-understanding and ideological becoming. After their first meeting, Simon runs away; at the second, he listens to Atman’s advice but is not ready to commit to the quest; and at the third meeting he demonstrates his attainment of understanding (222). As well as being a common folktale motif, the recurrence of the number three - displayed in the three questers, Atman’s three camels and Simon’s three meetings with Atman - also evokes Biblical

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images of the holy trinity, the three wise men and numerous other allusions. Simon’s name is suggestive of the disciple Simon Peter, who denied Christ three times during the crucifixion story.

The Blue Feather is further endowed with a rich range of imagery from Eastern and Western religions including the Buddhist/Hindu names Mala and Atman, and desert quests and the Needle’s

Eye from Judeo-Christian sources. Given Crew and O’Hara’s professed shared interests in spiritual and environmental issues (Crew and O’Hara, peritext), there are undoubtedly many more that erudite readers would recognise.

The motifs of sight and blindness, vision and perspective that permeate The Blue Feather evoke ‘the presence of spirit’ described by Faris (2004, 63-74) in her account of the magical realist mode. Greg accuses Mala of seeing the world through her own confining lens (157), alluding to her work as a photographer as well as her restricted materialist ontological perspective. This highlights a major premise of the novel, shared by several other texts discussed in this thesis, concerning the value of remaining open to different perspectives, a central precept of the postsecularism. Atman, the archetypical wise man, counsels Simon that

It is only fair to admit that sight is one of life’s greatest gifts. One of the greatest senses. One of the key means by which we read our world. It is true that to be blind would be a great loss. But you are not blind. You can read the world and all its colours. Better yet, having one eye only, the body has compensated. For you there is the greater possibility of looking not only out, but in – and the gift of inward seeing is the greatest gift of all…’ (166)

This echoes the somewhat platitudinous edict in The Rapture expressed by Jarom to “look into my heart”. Also like The Rapture, this novel uses a contrived epistolary narrative device in some sections, whereby Mala sends taped dispatches to Shane, the editor of Rare Earth journal in which she details the events of her day and includes philosophical reveries about Greg’s gullibility concerning the existence of the Wazo. These first person segments were written by O’Hara

(McKenna and Pearce, 204) and are more closely focalised than the text which was written in third person by Crew which distances the reader from the inner minds of the characters. This effect is reinforced by the frequent references to Simon as ‘the boy’ and to Greg as ‘the man’, evoking depersonalised mythic connotations. These defocalising techniques, as Faris notes, position the

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reader at an objective and analytical distance from which to judge the story and its significance, rather than inviting close identification with the characters.

The Blue Feather exemplifies an Australian YA spiritual quest narrative with an overarching theme of the importance of finding oneself and realising the existence of many perspectives and many truths. McKenna and Pearce (1999, 206) reiterate that “on one level The

Blue Feather contains accurate portrayals of late twentieth-century Australian life, but it also uses the framework of the magic quest and associated fantastic elements to develop an argument for a more caring, more spiritually aware society”. However, in the second half of the novel such arguments are sometimes laboured with the result that “some readers may find the book too didactic” as “the action becomes weighed down by what may be seen as the repetitious discoveries of the main characters” (McKenna and Pearce 1999, 229). This hackneyed didacticism is evident in proclamations such as Greg’s lecture to Mala that,

There’s something that you need to understand: ‘the truth’, as you call it, isn’t something that comes in a nice tidy package, all done up in plastic like a loaf of sliced bread. There are as many truths as there are people in the world’ (139)

This is recapped later in Mala’s revelation, dictated onto tape for her editor, ensuring the reader has not missed the message. In this, Mala reiterates that she and her grandmother had “grown up in different cultures” and “acquired different stories”, called science in Mala’s case and myth in her grandmother’s. She admits, however, that following her experiences in the desert and quest for the truth about the Wazo, she is uncertain whether scientific stories are any more truthful than myths as

“science is also forever changing and developing its stories” and “both are ways of explaining our lives” that inspire us to act. Mala finally concedes that

it seems to me, only myth offers the dream of what could be…I’m coming to realise that finding the truth behind a ‘fact’ is OK, but not as rewarding as finding the truth within ourselves (231, my ellipsis)

again echoing the focal point of Jarom’s epiphany in The Rapture.

A more subtle rendering of the notion of ‘looking within ourselves’ is conveyed in The

Ghost's Child (Hartnett 2007) which has been described as “a fable-like tale but without a moral

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resonance” (Bantick , 27). The novel similarly blends realism and fantasy but is less skewed less towards the didactic and more towards the visionary and imaginative. Reinforcing this impression, fairytale motifs and references occur throughout the novel but with a firm acknowledgement of a co-existent concrete world, as is evident when the main character, Matilda or Maddy, enigmatically professes:

I knew I wouldn't live a fairytale life. And for that very reason I had to have faith in myself, just as does a princess in a fairytale. (42)

Like The Blue Feather, The Ghost’s Child evokes a sense of the ethereal and the uncanny, starting with its opening lines which interweave poetic and mundane language and images:

One damp silvery afternoon an old lady came home from walking her dog and found a boy sitting in her lounge room on the floral settee. The boy hadn't been invited, so the old lady was surprised to see him. (1)

Yet Matilda's first words to the boy, on noticing that he looked cold, were “You should have lit the fire” rather than more predictable reactions, such as “who are you?” or “what are you doing here?”.

Hence, the reader anticipates a novel that will not follow realistic conventions. The Ghost’s Child shifts between omniscient third person narration in the present-day sections in Matilda’s house and a more subjective limited third person narration with Matilda as sole focaliser as she relates her life story to her guest. The listening boy intermittently interrupts the flow of the closely focalised narrative with a question or comment, usually as an abrupt intrusion just as the reader has become ensconced in the story, thereby foregrounding the fictionality of the novel and distancing the reader from Matilda’s consciousness. Dialogic relationships develop between Matilda and the child with his questions and comments, as well as between the seventy-five year old storyteller, Matilda, and her younger self, Maddy, as she relives her life's events and her quests for answers to the big mysteries. This dialogic device, operating on multiple levels, enables the construction of various perspectives from which to explore truth and meaning.

Maddy embarks on two major external quests in her life. The first, with her father, is a quest to uncover the nature of “the world’s most beautiful thing”. This journey takes place in a

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more or less realistic world with descriptions of natural and constructed wonders about which

Maddy experiences a sense of transcendence and sublimity:

She felt such admiration for humankind's artistry and nature's glory that she was frequently speechless, and close to tears. The whole world was a ravishing marvel, there was nothing that wasn't fabulous to her (34)

In such excerpts, although narrated in third person, the reader is given close access to her cognitive and affective processes through descriptions of her emotional responses – “she felt such admiration”, “was frequently speechless, and close to tears”. At the end of this first quest, Maddy’s father presents her with a small mirror in which she sees her own image and realises that he believes she herself had become the world’s most beautiful thing:

Her courage and defiance made her father proud of her – it made her beautiful. Gazing into the mirror at her ordinary face, her ordinary nose and mouth, Maddy knew she wasn’t a fairy princess and that she wouldn’t live a fairytale life; but she would find her own way, and she would be all right. (38)

Regarding mirrors as motifs to represent self-reflection and understanding, Stephens comments that

“[I]n fantastic discourse, mirrors often function as gateways to other realms of experience, other modes of understanding” (1992, 286). Maddy’s ability to view herself realistically and accept that her life was not a fairytale is an important aspect of her ongoing ideological becoming throughout her life.

After her first quest, Maddy meets Feather, the wild and mysterious young man whom she marries. After the miscarriage of their unborn child, Feather and Maddy separate and she embarks on her second quest, alone on the huge ocean in her small boat, The Albatross – another Romantic allusion to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, as in Shaedow Master. Her solo voyage evokes a sense of the vulnerability of human life and its interconnectedness with the natural world as Maddy transcends the realist world to enter a mythical, dream-like realm where she communicates in her own language with non-human creatures. Despite her pragmatic acknowledgement that “she wouldn’t live a fairytale life”, the narrative moves into fairytale mode where Maddy witnesses a battle between a mythical Kraken and a Leviathan, meets the underwater spirits of drowned young women, talks with flying fish and is guided by Zephyrus, the anthropomorphised West Wind.

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Maddy's mystical lover, Feather, is so closely connected to nature and wild things that he appears part human and part bird and also like a fairytale character. Yet, elements of real-world authenticity are interspersed throughout the fantasy, creating the same disruptive effect as the child's random interruptions of Maddy’s story. In one instance, after Maddy returns home from her second major quest, she tells her parents that she wants to go to the war. This adventurous idea evokes a reaction from the listening boy, who had almost faded from the narrative until he suddenly exclaims –

“War? What war?” and Matilda's answer alludes to the reality of World War One:

While I'd been gone, such a foolish thing had happened. Someone had fired a gun and killed an heir to a throne, and all the countries surrounding the street corner where the heir died had used his death as a reason to pounce into war. (158)

Intertextual literary references also create links to a world outside the text. As well as the allusions to well-known fairytales, Maddy's imaginary childhood confidant is the nargun, a creature in

Australian Indigenous mythology most notably popularised in The Nargun and the Stars

(Wrightson 1973). In a further allusion to classic Australian children’s literature, Maddy lived along a “pure white coastline” (16), reminiscent of Thiele’s Storm Boy (1963) with its images of a wild coastline inhabited by abundant birdlife including Mr Percival, the pelican and Fingerbone

Bill, the reclusive Aboriginal outcast. Like Feather, Storm Boy is conflicted by his urge to live freely in the natural world and the externally enforced requirements of authoritarian society. The importance of the Indigenous facets in these intertexts provides an implicit link to Aboriginal mythologies in The Ghost’s Child, and although it is not explicated, these tacit links support a postcolonial reading of the novel which views Feather as a character representing Indigenous spiritualities (Clark 2014)15

After she has finished her youthful questing, accepted the loss of her lover, Feather and of her unborn child, the adult Matilda settles into life as an eye doctor. As in The Blue Feather, motifs of birds, flight, sight and vision permeate the text, symbolising the importance of different perspectives in the quest for self and the truth. The idea of ‘looking into your heart’ – the quest within – is again a significant message but is expressed more tacitly than in the previous novels.

15 Clark’s postcolonial interpretation is discussed more fully in Chapter 8 of this thesis.

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After exploring the outer world to find the world’s most beautiful thing, Maddy’s father presents the mirror, with the words “Perhaps you need to look more closely at what is right under your nose” (37), a more imaginative means of expressing the maxim of looking within. Matilda continues to make annual sea journeys throughout her life, suggesting that she has never completely satisfied her need to explore, to seek and to learn. This idea of the never-ending quest is conveyed early in the novel when she confides to the mysterious boy visitor (who is, of course, the spirit of her unborn child), “I searched for the answer to a question. I sailed the world trying to find it, and eventually I did. But some answers don’t finish a quest - they merely start it” (14). This notion reflects Bakhtin’s idea of ideological becoming as an ongoing struggle between authoritative and internally persuasive discourses.

Conclusion This chapter has examined the construction of spiritual quests in a number of postsecular

Australian YA novels written in fantastic and intermediate modes. The narrative styles of these texts range from the high fantasy mythopoeic style of Nightpeople and Shaedow Master, the futuristic science fictional The Rapture and the magical realist portrayals of The Blue Feather and

The Ghost’s Child. The range of thematic and stylistic approaches provides a contrast with those of the realist novels considered in the previous chapter, in which the protagonists’ spiritual quests tended towards rather solipsistic views compared with the more noble and heroic quests of the speculative fiction. The speculative portrayals in this chapter, while also questing towards an inward-looking spirituality as in the realist novels, are simultaneously transcendent and altruistic as advocated by Joseph Campbell: “The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others” (Campbell and Moyers1988, xv).

Speculative fictional modes thus provide a useful vehicle for the construction of spiritual subjectivities in YA fiction. However, some less verbal narrative forms also offer valuable ways to express intangible concepts that inhabit the “ineffable in-between” of magical realism (Faris 2004,

63). The next chapter considers this concept in relation to the way more sparsely-worded, multimodal narrative forms work to evoke a sense of spirituality.

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CHAPTER 5

THE INEFFABLE IN-BETWEEN: SPIRITUAL QUESTS IN MULTIMODAL TEXTS

The brain inevitably finds its own poetry in disparate things because that’s what we’re good at as humans, is making sense of juxtaposition and sometimes it’s nonsense and doesn’t go anywhere, sometimes it’s too transparent, it’s just so obvious that it’s boring but there’s this interesting in-between point where there’s a certain amount of obscurity that taps into actually deeper meaning rather than nonsense. Shaun Tan, 2010

Until recently illustrated books were commonly perceived as the domain of young children, particularly pre-literate and emergent readers, or to a lesser extent older readers struggling with literacy. In the past few decades there has been an increase in the publication of picturebooks, graphic novels and other multimodal texts for adult and young adult readers, sometimes creating confusion among book sellers and librarians about appropriate placement of the texts. Following the previous chapters’ consideration of realistic and speculative representations in traditionally structured narrative forms of YA fiction, this chapter considers the way Australian authors use alternative multimodal forms to explore spiritual quests. According to Nikolajeva and Scott (2001,

173-174), picturebooks convey the apprehension of reality in intricate ways “without resorting to the rather artificial division of narratives into fantasy and realism”. Rather, “the word-image interaction creates a significantly broader spectrum than this binary” in a form where the distinction between fantasy and realism becomes less clearly defined. Narrative forms that integrate images, words and other media thus enhance the potential to express intangible concepts that occupy the

“ineffable in-between” of spiritual spaces. Faris (2004, 63-68) uses this term in relation to magical realist narratives which suggest “the existence of a mysterious realm of the spirit, even a hidden presence of the sacred within the profane, which inhabits the narrative space of the ineffable in- between” and open up an area “that accommodates the camouflaged presence of the spirit amid material reality”. Magical realist narratives have the capacity to create a dialogic space between consensus reality and speculative fantasy where ineffable in-between resides. This chapter argues

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that multimodal texts use similar devices to open up spaces that transcend the meaning-making capacities of more conventionally structured YA novels that use words alone to construct the discourses, stories and significances that comprise fictions (Stephens 1992, 12). The focus texts in this chapter utilise pictures and words, with the inclusion of a musical component in Requiem for a

Beast (Ottley 2007).

The convergence of different media highlights the distinct semiotic functions of linguistic and visual sign systems. Unlike ‘illustrated’ books, the visual images do not simply reinforce the ideas conveyed by the words; rather words and pictures interact dialogically to convey meaning(s), often by capitalising on the gap between signifier and signified, the sign and referent, characterised by both media. Those gaps between signs and meanings in multimodal texts create spaces for more intangible and ineffable meanings, and hence enable the articulation of the otherwise inexpressible or ineffable in-between of spiritual spaces. Although a reader’s initial response is usually to connect with the literal sense, according to Moebius (1986, 146), the “best picturebooks can and do portray the intangible and invisible, ideas and concepts such as love, responsibility, a truth beyond the individual, ideas that escape easy definition in pictures or words”. Such intangible concepts connect with the spiritual perceptions of characters and, by association, of readers.

The narrative space of the ineffable in-between also evokes and interrogates the notion of a binary opposition between secular and religious discourses. Wend-Walker (2013, 143) perceives a

“complicity between secular power and institutional religion in the repression of individualised spirituality”, again reflecting the idea of the struggle between authoritative and internally persuasive discourses. As noted at the beginning of this study, spirituality is treated phenomenologically as an aspect of subjectivity rather than as an ontological investigation of the existence of a spiritual realm and the textual analysis thus focusses on the narrative construction of the spiritual subjectivities of fictional characters. This approach has led to the adoption of a secular definition of spirituality (outlined in the introductory chapter), as “the experience of conscious involvement in the project of life-integration through self-transcendence toward the ultimate value one perceives” (Schneiders 165). This account complements the definition developed in response to insights gained from appraising the primary texts for this thesis, namely the ongoing

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development of beliefs, values and a sense of connectedness that transcends materiality. These concise summations of the complex concept of spirituality converge on points of life-integration, a sense of transcendence and connectedness, as well as on the more cognitive aspects of spirituality involving the formation of beliefs and values. My claim in this chapter is that multimodal narrative formats offer enhanced potential to explore spirituality as defined here, by opening heterotopic spaces16 in between the narrative formats utilised.

Spirituality, ideological becoming and dialogical self theory To reiterate the theoretical framework of this study, ideological becoming (Bakhtin 1981, 342-348) is a subjective struggle between two forms of discourse - the authoritative discourse of pre-existing hegemonic influences on a character’s life (such as family, school, religion and science) and the internally persuasive discourses that develop through the integration of authoritative and individualised voices within a subject. Bakhtin explains the ideological becoming of a human as

“the process of selectively assimilating the words of others” which progresses from metaphorically

“reciting by heart” to “retelling in one’s own words”. The textual analyses in this chapter also draw on dialogical self theory (DST), a concept developed in the 1990s (Hermans and Kempen 1993) and inspired by two theoretical earlier frameworks: William James’ psychological theories of the extended self (1890) and Bakhtin’s ideas about the polyphonic novel (1984).

The tenets of DST – which was developed within the discipline of psychology and continues to apply mainly in psychotherapy - involve the interplay between multivoiced selves and cultures. In DST, self and culture are conceived of in terms of a multiplicity of positions among which dialogical relationships can develop (Hermans 2001) and its premises thus operate at the intersection of Bakhtin’s dialogism - particularly regarding the multivoiced nature of the polyphonic novel - and James’ theory of the extended, multivoiced self which expresses the distinction between multiple I-positions17. These are encompassed by the I (the self-as-knower) and the Me (the self-as-known). The self-as-knower is characterised by a sense of personal identity

16 Foucault (1986) developed the idea of heterotopias as places and spaces of otherness, that can be simultaneously physical and mental. 17 The term ‘i-position’ is used interchangeably here with ‘subject position’ which is the more conventional term in literary analysis.

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which includes continuity, distinctness from others and personal volition that is reflected in “the continuous appropriation and rejection of thoughts by which the self-as knower proves itself as an active processor of experience” (Hermans 2001, 244). This idea echoes Bakhtin’s concept of a struggle between authoritative and internally persuasive discourse in the process of ideological becoming, integrating elements normally considered separate from the self but which play a role in identity development. These elements may include a person’s family, friends and colleagues, the various roles performed by a person and elements of the culture to which the person belongs.

In contrast to the Cartesian self as an isolated bounded sovereign entity which is distinct from the other (Klages 46), James perceived the self-as-known as extending into the environment.

The composite notion “dialogical self” goes beyond the Cartesian self-other dichotomy by infusing the external to the internal and, in reverse, by introducing the internal into the external to construct a distributed, multivoiced self (Hermans 2001, 245). James’ concept of the multiplicity of the self invokes a literary vocabulary as he uses the term “character” to denote the different components of the self and thus “his reasoning is well in agreement with the multitude of characters implied in

Bakhtin’s notion of the polyphonic novel” (Hermans 2001, 247). The points of intersection between DST and ideological becoming are germane to an analysis of the representation of spiritual development in multimodal YA texts, with regard to their enhanced potential to express multivoicedness and the interrelationship of internal and external understandings of the self as they utilise media beyond words alone to access the ineffable spaces between the material and spiritual aspects of constructed subjectivities.

Multimodal texts for older readers Age appropriateness of children’s and young adult literature is an internationally contested issue among parents, teachers, librarians, publishers and others involved in the production and distribution of such literature. When considering illustrated texts, which have traditionally been associated, in the popular perception at least, with pre-literate and emergent readers, the challenge of selecting texts that are suitable and relevant for YA readers intensifies. Scholarly work on picturebooks for adolescent and adult readers is frequently limited to issues surrounding

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‘struggling’ or ‘reluctant’ readers, even in studies of postmodern picturebooks that are enjoyed by multi-age audiences. Perusal of the Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) Awards lists indicates increasing acknowledgement in recent decades that picturebooks can appeal to a broad readership and that many picturebooks are, in fact, not suitable for younger readers. Australian picturebooks that express a sense of spirituality and self transcendence include a range of multi-age texts that are rich in sophisticated verbal text as well as complex pictorial vocabularies and grammars18. There are numerous predominantly visual picturebooks that appeal to a broad range of readers, due to their sophisticated metaphysical themes and narrative styles. Much of Shaun Tan’s work falls into this category and consequently occupies a significant position in this chapter. Tan’s insightful critical commentary also informs much of the discussion of the way illustrated texts explore the interplay of words and images.

A salient example of a text with broad-ranging appeal is The Arrival (Tan 2006). This text aroused widespread discussion as a wordless text and won a number of literary awards in both adult and children’s categories (Johnston 2012, 423). Tan points out that The Arrival is not actually wordless but includes images of words written in an unknown language, unintelligible to all readers, but which heighten the sense of incomprehensibility and alienation experienced by migrants on arrival in foreign countries with unfamiliar languages and customs. In addition to several film adaptations, some multi-age picturebooks and graphic novels have been rather paradoxically published in audiobook format, requiring the audience to rely solely on the words of the text without any pictures. Two such texts are The Amber Amulet (Silvey 2012), a heavily worded picturebook/graphic novel which has also been adapted as a play and a short film, and the more sparsely-worded The Lost Thing (Tan 2000), in which the spoken words of the audiobook are supported by sound effects. Audiobook adaptation would however be impossible with The Arrival, as was evidenced by the confusion aroused when Tan was asked to read from the wordless book at

18Several scholars analyse picturebooks in terms of grammar. Nodelman (1988, 211) refers to “interpreting visual information in verbal terms” as “the grammar of pictures”. Anstey and Bull (2000, 179-186) identify the elements of this grammar as being colour, texture, line, shape and form, balance and layout, all of which cue the reader to respond and interpret in culturally determined ways (2000, 179-186). Kress and Van Leeuwan (2006) use systemic functional grammar to analyse text/image interaction in various text types, including picturebooks.

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the ceremony where it won New South Wales Premier’s Book of the Year award (Johnston 2012,

423).

A comprehensive critique of the role and significance of contemporary illustrated texts, including issues of the distinctions between picturebooks, graphic novels and comics, is beyond the scope of this study and is extensively explored elsewhere19. Instead, the discussion will address specific aspects of illustrated multi-age texts which have the potential to evoke a sense of spirituality and the “presence of the sacred within the profane” (Faris 2004, 63), in particular the use of multimodal representation to open spaces and interrogate meanings residing in the ineffable in-between. The notion of ineffability seems incongruous with texts that have the explicit function of expressing ideas and concepts, including the most abstract notions. Yet many abstract concepts are difficult to articulate satisfactorily through words alone due to the instability of meanings and the frequent inadequacy of verbal language. Moebius (1986, 146) observes that in recognising the value of the unseen over the seen, characters and readers progress “from dependence on the plain and literal to the development of a sense of independence in the face of individually discovered yet intangible meanings” and from “the various ‘realisms’ to the recognition of symbol”. This progression echoes the development of internally persuasive discourses and ideological becoming.

Shaun Tan (2009, 3), who has illustrated his own and other authors’ texts, comments that picture books seem “especially good at presenting a reader with complex questions in a concise way, largely through the imaginative play that can exist between words and pictures, outside of any simple or direct visual-verbal relationship”. The use of pictures in addition to words (or instead of words, as in The Arrival) provides a vehicle for exploring multiple subject positions from unfamiliar and unusual perspectives that transcend rational and objective understandings.

Multimodal narratives contribute additional voices beyond words that may be perceived through senses other than the aural and thus provide extra layers of meaning and understanding. This process operates through a mechanism in which “neither text nor image explain each other fully, and the reader must fill in the gap of meaning with their own theories, based largely on an

19 For a recent forum on the topic, see Hatfield and Svonkin, Why Comics Are and Are Not Picture Books: Introduction. Children's Literature Association Quarterly 37 (4):429-435

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emotional reaction – fear, curiosity, amusement, bewilderment” (Tan 2010b, 2). Such a process educes the development of Bakhtin’s concept of internally persuasive discourse in the process of ideological becoming. Macintyre (2011, 354) contends that picturebooks are “often highly constructed, complex interactions between verbal text and visual semiotics that are capable of supporting varied interpretations and multiple readings”, giving them a dialogic, polyphonic quality. Echoing Tan’s views, she continues that due to the aesthetic, literary and narrative pleasure of picturebooks, “our initial response to them is invariably affective” and “there are powerful, unsettling images of inhumanity, cruelty, indifference and subjugation that are not easily captured by our minds, in thought, but that are well understood by our emotions and our senses” (358). This affective response facilitates the expression of the ineffable qualities of spirituality that lie beyond rational verbalisation.

Unlike predominantly verbal texts, picturebooks also demand slower reading to facilitate close examination of visual images that are less familiar than written words and require more careful contemplation and cognitive processing. Tan (2006b, 6) points to “the power of the silent narrative, not only in removing the distraction of words, but slowing down the reader so that they might meditate on each small object and action, as well as reflect in many different ways on the story as a whole”. Such slowing of the reading process is conducive to evoking a sense of the eternal, the mysterious and the spiritual. Further, Macintyre (2011, 355) considers that “the best picture books open up meanings rather than present straightforward messages” and Lewis (2001,

34), in support of this point, believes that “words and images provide different kinds of information that the reader must make some effort to reconcile and integrate”. Multimodal texts provide an ideal format for expressing a sense of the multiplicity of the self and the interplay between self and culture, as proposed by DST, as they facilitate the opening of readers’ perception of subjectivities presented through a variety of modes.

Picturing young adult spirituality A survey of contemporary Australian multimodal books with explicit spiritual themes reveals few that specifically target a young adult audience. This section consequently presents an overview of

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some recent Australian texts that defy age categorisation but might appeal to a broad range of readers from pre-literate to adult. These books tend to rely more on images than on verbal text.

Following this overview, a more detailed analysis of a selection of richly worded YA picturebooks demonstrates the emergence of a postsecular dialogical discourse in Australian YA fiction, as posited in this study. The texts discussed here suggest a developing interest in the exploration of subjective spirituality, particularly as it encompasses the development of beliefs, values and a sense of connectedness and self-transcendence. Broad themes emerging in these multimodal texts include the uncovering of forgotten or lost things and the achievement of reconciliation as manifested in ideological becoming as an outcome of the spiritual quests constructed in each book, facilitating the spiritual and ideological becoming of the protagonists.

Shaun Tan’s work dominates this discussion, as his utilisation of multiple modes offers one of the more profound expressions of intrinsic spirituality among contemporary Australian texts. In addition to the hard copy picturebook formats, many of his works have been produced in video format with musical and sometimes spoken accompaniments20. Three of his texts that warrant attention in this overview - The Arrival (2006), The Red Tree (2002) and The Lost Thing (2000) - are situated closer to the secular humanist than to the mystical end of the spirituality spectrum but all express a sense of connectedness that transcends materiality. The Arrival is a wordless portrayal of the simultaneously physical and spiritual journey of a man who leaves his threatened homeland, seeking a safe life for himself and his family in a foreign country. The sepia-toned images are portrayed in the style of a family album, some resembling realistic photographs and others presenting surrealistic drawings or perhaps a fusion of the two styles (Figure 1). The use of picture images in this text is a “reversion to roots…a long heritage of written signs being used to convey meaning” in the form of graphic symbols (Johnston 2012, 424, my ellipsis). This primal form of communication has the capacity to bypass rational faculties and evoke a sense of the spiritual, inhabiting the ineffable in-between space that is inaccessible to conscious awareness.

20 Many of these videos are readily available electronically on YouTube.

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Figure 1

The Red Tree is described on Tan’s website as “a series of distinct imaginary worlds as self-contained images which invite readers to draw their own meaning in the absence of any written explanation” (Tan 2015b, under ‘The Red Tree’). It has often been interpreted as a book about psychological depression experienced by the young girl protagonist who is unsure of who she is meant to be (Figure 2). It can likewise be read as a quest for self-transcendence and ideological becoming, concluding with an image of an epiphanic moment symbolised by the girl opening her door to find a tiny red seedling which rapidly grows into a red-leafed tree exuding a sense of positivity. The verbal text consists of 118 words in an unpunctuated emotional stream of consciousness which is nevertheless syntactically and narratively highly structured; the pictures are more disconnected, although the repeated images of the leaf and the young girl provide a degree of connectivity. Each page, however, can ‘stand alone’ as a self-contained artwork. Tan comments that the use of images in preference to words in this non-sequential narrative facilitates the expression of feeling “because it is outside of verbal language, as many emotions can be hard to articulate in words” (Tan 2015b, under ‘Comments on The Red Tree’).

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Figure 2

The journey of the young girl in The Red Tree shares a sense of self-searching with the adolescent boy in The Lost Thing. Unlike the girl however, the boy loses his spiritual connectedness as he ages. While spending a day at the beach engaged in his prosaic hobby of collecting bottle tops, the narrating boy encounters an alien-looking being which is surprisingly unnoticed by other beach goers, despite its large bulk and extraordinary appearance. Realising that the thing is lost, the boy feels compassion and attempts to find a place where it might belong. In his quest to place the thing it becomes apparent that the bureaucrats he approaches for help, as well as the boy’s parents, live in a world of materialism and triviality, alienated from the sense of otherworldly enchantment that is silently suggested by the mysterious lost thing which can be interpreted as a sense of spirituality. The book’s sparse verbal text tells a story which, according to the unassuming narrator, lacks profundity or meaning:

Well, that’s it. That’s the story. Not especially profound, I know, but I never said it was. And don’t ask me what the moral is. (Tan 2000, unpaginated)

Despite the narrator’s unreliable viewpoint and dismissal of the insightfulness of the story, Tan

(2009, 6) suggests otherwise, claiming that “every illustrated scene frames a question for the reader: how might we deal with things that are outside of language, or lack any clear meaning?”.

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Each scene thus positions the reader to consider the story’s significance constructed through the interplay of images and words. Referring to The Lost Thing and The Rabbits (Marsden and Tan,

1998), Tan asserts that the visual story “reveals more meaning than the written one, and the real philosophical questions are delivered in silence” (Tan 2010b, 3). Further, he contends that the characters’ appearance, reactions, environment, the framing of action and overall design of the books represent ideas that could only be expressed visually. The young boy in The Lost Thing displays belief in and connectedness to this out-of-place being that represents a worldview often overlooked by his society. However, his slightly older self who narrates the story in past tense admits that he has since lost these naïve benevolent qualities and his ideological development has become dominated by the authoritative discourses of the mediocre and materialistic adult world he lives in. He concludes his story with words of detachment and indifference:

I see that sort of thing less and less these days though. Maybe there aren’t many lost things around anymore. Or maybe I’ve just stopped noticing them. Too busy doing other stuff, I guess. (Tan 2000, unpaginated)

A similar portrayal of the inattentive adult world towards the loss of innocent enchantment and spiritual perception is encapsulated in Tohby Riddle’s Unforgotten (2012). The centrality of the fallen angel in the text positions it within the corpus of spiritually-themed Australian picturebooks. The verbal text consists of only 45 lines (repeated as a single page poem at the end of the book) and provides a lyrical accompaniment to the 128 pages of illustrations which are constructed as collages of paintings and photographs. The text is discursively similar to much of

Tan’s work (notably The Lost Thing and The Arrival) with its multiple integrated artforms and its intertextual suggestions of other enigmatic ‘fallen angel’ narratives such as David Almond’s Skellig

(1998). It is likewise visually reminiscent of Wings of Desire (Wenders, 1987)21, a film about angels who roam around Berlin, only visible to children, until one chooses mortality so that he can experience human life. Like the collages in Unforgotten, it is filmed in muted tones of sepia and grey, with some incursions of colour. Unforgotten tells of hosts of guardian angels circling the

21 Like Tan’s work, the multimodality of Unforgotten is enhanced by a YouTube video, which is accompanied by an ethereally evocative musical component.

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earth – “nobody knows where they come from, but they come, impossible birds of the night” - beginning with a broad ranging ‘god’s eye view’ and gradually telescoping towards earth and a city landscape, where one fatigued angel sinks to the ground. The guardian angel thus becomes a fallen angel, experiencing a human-like existential crisis and a need to be guarded from earthly dangers, particularly the human curiosity which swiftly turns to indifference and an inclination to eradicate such an inexplicable disruption of everyday life.

Figure 3

Unforgotten is a story of the way we perceive our surroundings and particularly “what and who we notice and what we don’t” (Mayor-Cox, 17). The narrative is thematically similar to The

Lost Thing in this respect and in its positioning of typically unheroic characters in the roles of everyday heroes through their small acts of kindness – a recurring theme in children’s and YA literature and in many of the text discussed in this thesis. The fallen angel’s saviours in Unforgotten are a small band consisting of two children, a clown, a pantomime donkey, a puppy and a pigeon, who offer consolation and healing. All from a typically childlike world, these unspeaking characters demonstrate their silent belief in the angel and a sense of connectedness to a worldview that transcends mundane reality. The anachronistic pictures and photographs (Figure 3) suggest a sense of timelessness and placelessness that resides in the ineffable in-between that exists beyond everyday perception. The interplay of the complex images and simple words in these sparsely

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worded texts facilitates the exploration of liminal spaces and produces an impression that is more profound than the sum of the parts.

Wordy picturebooks While the image-focused texts discussed above are composed mostly of pictures and words in relatively traditional formats, there is greater stylistic diversity in some more heavily worded YA picturebooks. The interplay of words and pictures (with music as well in Requiem for a Beast) is maximised as each text extends towards the ineffable in-between, where the hidden sense of the sacred is found amid the material reality of the profane. Each of the following picturebooks - The

Amber Amulet (Silvey 2012), Tales from Outer Suburbia (Tan 2008) and Requiem for a Beast

(Ottley 2007) - uses a range of styles and techniques in both its verbal and pictorial text. Each book also takes a different approach to positioning the reader to explore the spiritual realm, particularly through differing focalisation techniques and multiple subject positions, as expounded in dialogical self theory.

The Amber Amulet and Tales from Outer Suburbia are both set in seemingly soulless suburban environments where the action is essentially and intimately domestic, occurring at street level and inside suburban houses. But mundane suburbia in these picturebooks is transformed into a place where the reader might encounter the hidden presence of the sacred within the profane, as

Faris suggests. Although The Amber Amulet22 was marketed in Australia for an adult audience, the novel’s concerns are characteristically young adult - the search for identity, social and family relationships, and ideological development. With a story that takes place over just a few days, it is a temporally condensed Bildungsroman with a naive adolescent boy as its main protagonist. Like many authors of crossover fiction, Silvey (2012) stresses that he does not target a particular readership but writes books that he himself would like to read. The verbal text of this short novel is interspersed with a series of montages by illustrator Sonia Martinez, comprising photographs, textbook clippings, maps, handwritten notes and typed letters. The physical shape of the book

22 Supplementing its multimodality, the verbal text is available as an audiobook and was produced as a stage play in 2011 and a short film (22 minutes) in 2013. A movie trailer can be viewed online at amberamuletmovie.com

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resembles a low-cost 1950’s crime paperback with a worn cover (Figure 4), introducing the reader to the fantasy world that exists in the protagonist’s mind and suggesting that he might have some problems relating to contemporary external reality.

Figure 4

Unlike many picturebooks or graphic novels, The Amber Amulet never depicts its main character in the images. Even in the verbal text, only a partial view of Liam’s life is revealed so that the reader must construct a mental portrait of him through the colourful illustrations of the artefacts that surround his life. Notable among these are photographs of gemstones and superheroes and handwritten notes from the Masked Avenger offering advice to various neighbours. The gaps in the details provided by the words enhance the notion that, like Liam, we all have only partial knowledge of the world around us, constructed from disconnected words, images and other sensory input.

The verbal text opens with a stylised description of the nocturnal activities of the Masked

Avenger who patrols his suburban neighbourhood of Franklin Street – the micro-world where the entire story takes place - protecting the citizens from chaos, mayhem and evil. At least, this is life

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viewed through the third person present tense narration which represents the imaginative inner world of twelve-year-old Liam McKenzie, the sole focalising character of the book. Through the persona of the Masked Avenger, he is presented as a boy with strong faith in the power of cosmic energy which he absorbs from his collection of gems and minerals, enabling him to perform superhuman feats. But in the daytime world, Liam is a well-intentioned but emotionally vulnerable young person who undergoes considerable spiritual growth during the brief timespan of the story, indicating his potential for ideological becoming and self-transcendence beyond the constraints of his fractured life. Liam’s unreliable narration is conveyed in the voice of a schoolboy who is familiar with superhero discourse but underpinned with the ironic tone of the ‘knowing’ adult author which is characteristic of such narration:

The Masked Avenger derives his powers by harnessing the dormant energy that lies within objects that citizens overlook. He believes in energy. He’s convinced the world is positively and negatively charged, that it’s imbued with the properties of Good and Evil. (2, original italics)

In dialogical self theory, the construction of the self encompasses William James’ concept (1890,

309) of the “rivalry and conflict of different selves”. In his development of beliefs and values and his progress towards ideological becoming, Liam experiences rivalry and conflict between his daytime self and his imagined other self, the Masked Avenger. The extent of his psychological conflict is evident in passages such as:

Thing is, Liam finds it harder to be a normal citizen than a Superhero. He navigates his nocturnal world with more comfort than his daily travails, which has led him to conclude that his true identity is the one he keeps hidden from view. That’s the real secret of the vigilante: his face is his mask and his mask is his face. He is the Masked Avenger. Liam McKenzie is his act. (28, original italics)

This is the first time the reader is explicitly alerted to the gravity of Liam’s need to believe in his fantasy world, particularly signified by the italicised emphasis of the words true and is which reinforce his naïve desperation. The validity of this belief is destabilised by the word ‘act’, confirming the illusory nature of the world he inhabits mentally and emotionally.

Unfortunately, the ideologies of his imaginary life as the Masked Avenger clash with his real life when he attempts to help Joan, a neighbour trapped in an unhappy marriage like an insect

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trapped in amber, the framing metaphor of the book. Wanting to help, Liam gives Joan his mother’s highly valued amber amulet from which he believes she will absorb the power to transcend her despair. The conflict climaxes when his distraught mother confronts him with the loss of her treasured jewellery and Liam denies all knowledge of its disappearance. Liam’s conflicted thought processes shift from confidence about the nobility of the Masked Avenger’s actions to uncertainty and awareness of the real world consequences – “Liam McKenzie must again skirt the border of Trouble and betray his principles” (44). The words “betray his principles” signify his spiritual and ethical dilemma and his developing consciousness of real-world morality is indicated soon after:

In trying to enact one Right, he has invited a whole cluster of Wrongs. He has tried to cure a citizen’s unhappiness with a potent piece of amber and its absence from its rightful place has caused untold misery. (47)

The capitalisation of Trouble, Right and Wrongs reveal his recognition of the magnitude of the ethical principles he is confronting. Yet the lure of reverting to the comfort his invincible fantasy self is enticing, as he lapses again into the epic register of the superhero narrative:

The Masked Avenger has his work cut out. This is his sternest test, his hour of reckoning. It will test his loyalty, his courage and his mettle. He has no choice: he must retrieve the Amber Amulet! (47)

The presenting subject positions manifested in the personas of Liam McKenzie and the Masked

Avenger are overt, but more implicit I-positions, as outlined in dialogical self theory, are constructed in other aspects of Liam’s subjectivity. Among these multiple subject positions are

Liam as the son of a single mother - making him “the Man of the House” (28); the unhappy schoolboy who “would love to show his powers” to his colleagues (27); the devoted owner of his canine partner, Richie the Powerbeagle; and the caring superhero who earnestly wants to create a better world for his neighbours. These selves increasingly extend outwards the community as

Liam’s ideological becoming develops. Initially, Liam the bullied schoolboy and the Masked

Avenger have little dialogue with one another, but as the unfortunate consequences of his intended heroic actions encroach on his inner life, the two dominant selves enter a dialogic relationship, as

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demonstrated in Liam’s thought processes cited above. While the verbal text has the potential to stand alone - as demonstrated by the production of an audiobook that adequately conveys the story’s plot and meaning - the complementary visual text of The Amber Amulet enhances the main significance of the book in which lies the sincerity of the main character’s belief in his imaginary superhero world.

The insular suburban street setting of The Amber Amulet extends outwards to the surrounding neighbourhood and beyond in Tales from Outer Suburbia. Like a number of Tan’s works, this text delivers a move away from the distinctly personal spiritual quest to a more universal spiritual experience that evokes the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious. Yet these experiences occur in mundane suburban landscapes that function narratively as constructions of spaces where many ordinary people live. The populace is not always evident from Tan’s illustrations though, as they often depict scenes that are sparsely populated by humans. Non-human characters, particularly crows, are recurring motifs in Tan’s pictorial vocabulary, although rarely part of his verbal vocabulary. Winged creatures in literature are often a metaphor for the spiritual and Tan’s ubiquitous crows, as the sole inhabitants of many desolate suburban landscapes, suggest the persistent presence of life forces even in apparently soulless environments. Tan writes that

“‘Outer Suburbia’ might refer both to a state of mind as well as a place: somewhere close and familiar but also on the edge of consciousness” (Tan 2015a, under ‘Comments on Tales from Outer

Suburbia’). This proposition evokes the “hidden presence of the sacred within the profane” (Faris

2004, 63), as well as Freud’s ‘uncanny’ or Unheimlich, and each of the fifteen tales from outer suburbia becomes a universal spiritual quest for the characters and consequently for readers, resonating with the sense of a hidden non-material realm coexisting with our perceived mundane reality. In this way, “Tan’s characters transcend their material situation and remake the world”

(Macintyre 2011, 365).

Many of Tan’s stories are ambiguously focalised with no clearly individuated characters, but often focussed on inanimate objects or nameless protagonists who represent prototypes rather than discretely constructed or individuated subjectivities. When narrator-focalisation is employed in a number of the tales from outer suburbia, the mode establishes a gap between the implied reader

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and the characters and thus does not accommodate theories of the individual dialogical self or ideological becoming as comfortably as does The Amber Amulet, for example. Rather, the sacred realm constructed in these tales is more collective than personal in its exploration of the

“camouflaged presence of the spirit amid material reality” and a sense of enduring values emerges amid the transience of daily life. The multimodal and multivoiced nature of the tales and the multiple subject positions create tensions in their meanings. Tan himself considers that the connection between the stories and the pictures “is not often perfect” and “the tone of the stories and the tone of the pictures is often quite different as they come from separate voices”, one conveyed visually and one verbally (Phillips 2008, 6). Further, as in Requiem for a Beast discussed below, these tales operate in a more circular than linear direction and some, according to Tan, begin with an ending (Tan 2015, under ‘Our Expedition’). In most of the stories, the narrative ending points towards an ambiguous, but usually uplifting, conclusion.

From the fifteen tales, each infused with the camouflaged presence of the spirit amid the material reality of suburban spaces, there are four stories that most profoundly explore a sacred realm. The collection significantly opens with ‘The Water Buffalo’, the tale of a creature that communicates silently and, like the bull in Requiem for a Beast, enigmatically represents conflicting attributes and meanings. It is massive, powerful and therefore potentially threatening while also exuding a mystical ethereal quality, sitting like a serene Buddha. The great creature had once mysteriously occupied a vacant block of land between suburban houses - inferring the ineffable in-between - and when passers-by asked for advice “he would come up to us slowly, raise his left hoof and literally point us in the right direction” (6). The complementary words and images portray an animal pointing its left hoof while a child stands beseechingly before it (Figure 5).

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Figure 5

The picture conveys many spatial details not present in the verbal text, including two of Tan’s omnipresent birds perched on the water buffalo’s head, an open box in the child’s hands and a hazy painted background, details and meanings of which can be contemplated by the viewer. The words supply a temporal perspective that is missing from the pictures, as indicated in the word “slowly” in the extract above. Although the water buffalo’s slow silent directions always “surprised, relieved and delighted”, this form of communication was anachronistic in a modern suburban environment where “a straightforward and immediate solution” was required, so the water buffalo eventually

“went away”. The first words of the tale indicate that the water buffalo was around “when I was a kid” and the narrative evokes a sense that much spiritual receptivity becomes lost as one grows up and stops “consulting the buffalo”. A similar sense of spirituality lost with the innocence of childhood is perceived in Tan’s The Lost Thing and Riddle’s Unforgotten, reflecting the Romantic tradition shaping literature for children and modern concepts of childhood. An implicit reference to a neglected or forgotten spiritual realm, existing silently between the conscious and unconscious mind, underlies each of the fifteen tales in the collection. This opening tale establishes the tone and,

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with its magical realist tentativeness, positions the reader to explore the spiritual spaces constructed in the ineffable in-between of subsequent tales.

Like ‘The Water Buffalo’, there are no clearly identifiable focalising characters in ‘Distant rain’. This approach again challenges reader/viewer’s expectations, problematizing any analysis of the construction of self identity, subject positions, ideological becoming or the positioning of the reader in this tale. The author-narrated tale is addressed to an implied reader, opening with “Have you ever wondered what happens to all the poems people write?” printed in upper-case letters on a scrap of lined paper as an anonymous letter might be. From this second person opening directed personally to the reader, the tale moves into a more distant third-person narration. The suppressed energy and emotions in the hidden poetry manifest themselves at night as a huge ball hovering over the sleeping town – a substantial but unacknowledged aspect of the community’s collective subjectivity. Dispersed by a storm, fragments of the ball are deposited on everybody’s front lawns, the people discover “faded words … barely visible, but undeniably present” (35, my ellipsis) and

To each reader they will whisper something different, something joyful, something sad, truthful, absurd, hilarious, profound and perfect. No one will be able to explain the strange feeling of weightlessness or the private smile that remains long after the street sweepers have come and gone (35).

This omniscient zero focalised segment is multi-voiced in its visual portrayal, written in numerous forms and colours of handwriting or typing, on different coloured scraps of paper. The personal poetry represents a spiritual energy, the shy secret essence of the unidentified human poet who created each fragment. The giant ball into which the written scraps converge is akin to Derrida’s transcendent signified, a god-like centre of meaning denoting ultimate truth as well as a communal spirituality.

Another tale that evokes a similar sense of a universal spirituality that transcends humanist limits, ‘No other country’ also begins with a focus on an inanimate object, “the green painted concrete out the front of the house” (56) rather than on people. The tale progresses to become more oriented towards humans as it describes the disillusionment of a migrant family who experience hardship and alienation in their new country instead of the better life they had anticipated. Words signifying lethargy and death dominate at the start, with anthropomorphised descriptions of

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inanimate items: “The hot water came reluctantly….without conviction” and the dying fruit trees were “left like grave-markers … a small cemetery of disappointment.” (56-57, my ellipses).

Humans are introduced tentatively into the story but the use of impersonal nouns positions the reader at a detached distance from the nameless characters: “The children said very little that wasn’t a complaint” and “’You kids have to do more to help your mother,’ their father kept saying”. This dismal opening scene suggests that improvement is the only viable narrative option, signifying a shift from the oppressive authority of the family’s circumstances towards the opportunity to progress to ideological becoming in a surprising place. Ironically, the positive turn occurs following a disaster when their cheap plastic Christmas tree melts in the heat of its storage place in the roof space. There the children discover an opening into another magical space in their dreary suburban realism – “an impossible room, somewhere between the others” (57). This narrative construction can be viewed in terms of Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, “spaces that exist and operate outside the established order of things. They are ‘real’ spaces that act as counter- sites, and are to be differentiated from utopias, which are ‘sites with no real place’ (Foucault 24)”

(Macintyre 2011, 363).

The covert in-betweenness of the space is visually displayed as the page of text appears to be opening onto an image hidden behind it, revealed in the double-page spread that follows, showing a Florentine courtyard with tall European trees, among which a washing line is suspended.

Illustrations of ancient cave art and religious pictures mingle with Australian aboriginal art and a typically Australian suburban house with a plane flying overhead. These diverse images evoke a mystical otherworldly effect, of which traces bleed onto the next double-page spread of verbal text surrounded by a sprinkling of icons. The narrator explains that the family came to call the place

“the inner courtyard” and “it became their special sanctuary” (60), a sacred space that

“accommodates the camouflaged presence of the spirit amid material reality” (Faris 2004, 68). The final double-page spread (Figure 6) further mingles the sacred and the profane, Australianness and universality, with a fresco containing an array of images containing a Madonna and baby, an angel, wild Australian birds, a fruit-picker and domestic items including an archetypical Australian Hills hoist clothesline on the top right-hand side.

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Figure 6

The tale of ‘our expedition’ situates two protagonists on a quest across a physical and psychological landscape that demonstrates Tan’s view of the scale of suburbia, “not just its size, but its relentless repetition of ideas – housing styles, parks, shopping squares, and identical roads that seemed to have no end” (Tan 2015, under ‘Our Expedition’). He claims that in a confined lifestyle where everything is locally available “it can be hard to imagine other places or ways of living – the whole world becomes small and shrink-wrapped.” The quest begins as a $20 bet between two adolescent brothers, triggered by an argument about whether the family’s street directory, which finishes at page 268, is literally correct in its implication that the real landscape also “faded off into nothing” (84). Tan identifies the siblings as being modelled on himself and his brother and this tale is consequently more personal and closely focalised than others in the collection. The images present the boys as pilgrims walking along a track with their backpacks and walking sticks, tiny figures against the vast suburban landscape, sketched with pastel crayons in bold colours. A winged symbol of spirituality, the ubiquitous lone crow, watches beside the path in each framed picture. In the final double-page spread, the crow flies into the mysterious void as the boys sit with their legs dangling over the huge cliff they discover at the edge of outer suburbia.

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While the words imply the momentous nature of their quest – “an official scientific expedition to the mysterious outer suburbs” (87) – the start of their journey on the local number 441 bus reduces its magnitude to the domestic scale. This impression is reinforced by a mixture of the grand and the trivial in the description of “all the necessities for such a journey: chocolate, orange juice, little boxes of sultanas and, of course, the contentious street directory” (87). The little boxes of sultanas evoke a comic reference to the familiar contents of Australian children’s school lunchboxes, further locating this heroic quest at the domestic level.

As the boys forge further into a suburban landscape that borders on the surreal, with a giant chicken advertising Pollo Inferno, the verbal text enters the realm of the ineffable in-between, mingling the languages of the heroic and the ordinary: “Armed with sticks we hacked our way through slightly overgrown alleys, followed our compass along endless footpaths, scaled multi- level car parks for a better view and made careful notes in an exercise book” (89). The words

“sticks”, “slightly”, “footpaths”, “car parks” and “exercise books” reduce the grandeur of the adventure to a parody of the heroic quest. The monotony of their voyage reflects Tan’s view of the

“relentless repetition of ideas”: “The further we ventured, the more everything looked the same, as if each new street, park or shopping mall was simply another version of our own, made from the same giant assembly kit” (89). Visions of the sacred seem unlikely in the mediocrity of this landscape, portrayed in both pictures and words. When they suddenly encounter the mysterious unknown at the edge of the map, their laconic reaction is surprisingly indifferent:

‘I guess I owe you twenty bucks,’ I said. ‘Yup,’ he said. One annoying thing I forgot to mention about my brother: he is almost always right. (89)

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Figure 7

The crayon-drawn double-page picture (Figure 7) that concludes this tale is typically enigmatic.

The boys are depicted as tiny figures dangling their legs over the large cliff that falls away beyond the edge of the known world. Because of the scale and their indistinct faces, the reader could interpret them as either blasé or awestruck as they gaze into infinity. The ending might signify the real danger of suburban life which, according to Tan, is complacency. He believes “it’s easy to forget that our lifestyle of consumption and expansion is linked directly to vast industries and the toll they extract on the habitats of other animals” (Tan 2015a, under ‘Night of the Turtle Rescue’).

Throughout Tales from Outer Suburbia, he questions how we might recognise and respond to the sense of disconnection that arises from this lifestyle.

Moving away from suburbia, Requiem for a Beast (Ottley 2007) takes the reader to a remote landscape in outback Australia dominated by the natural environment. It is an ambitious and complex text that aroused some unfavourable criticism in the media when it was awarded the

CBCA Picturebook of the Year in 2008. Ottley commented that Requiem had

notoriously become the most complained about book for young people in Australian history! That’s because it contains one graphic illustration of a bloodied axe, as well as two vague references to suicide and five incidences of the “f” word. What a lot of commentators didn’t seem to take on board when the book first came to public notice, is that this is a picture book for young adults, not for little children.(Coughlan 2009, 3)

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The censorious responses generally ignored the text’s enlightening points about matters of personal and family conflict, and the larger political contexts that can affect young people, including issues of racism, sexism, cultural hegemony and an awareness of the potential violence inherent in some images of national identity. However, through its insightful subject matter, its multimodal format and its polyphonic narrative style, Requiem for a Beast invites a sophisticated reading that provides young adult readers with a provocative but constructive catalyst for developing an understanding of significant issues of private and public conflict and resolution. Jan Ormerod (2008, 41) comments that with this genre crossover work, Ottley “anticipates and deserves a high level of reader participation”, which takes the reading experience beyond mere storytelling while avoiding overt didacticism. The text also has the potential to connect readers to a realm where the sacred is found

“amid material reality” in a similar way to that uncovered in the Tales from Outer Suburbia.

As its title indicates, Requiem for a Beast: a work for image, word and music, is a multimodal production that “draws a multi-layered concept into a cohesive whole” (Ormerod 41). The verbal text is complemented by varied styles of illustration as well as music included on an accompanying CD, all written, painted and composed by Matt Ottley, apart from some traditional

Aboriginal Bundjalung songs and one contemporary piece composed in a traditional Aboriginal form. Two main narrative strands are supplemented with interconnected sub-plots as stories and memories become a recurring motif throughout the text – the stories that comprise the multiple plots, stories from the past that fill the protagonist’s mind, a story that haunts his father and stories told and sung by the Aboriginal Elders. The struggles between authoritative stories and internally persuasive stories facilitate the protagonist’s spiritual and ideological becoming. The book’s first narrative is a relatively spare present tense story of a nameless young man who, against his parents’ wishes, follows his father’s example and travels to outback northern Australia to work as a stockman on a vast cattle station. This narrative relates his arrival at the property and his participation in a cattle muster, during which he becomes separated from his colleagues and encounters a legendary wild bull that he pursues into the wilderness. In a dramatic physical struggle with the bull, the boy loses consciousness after he and the beast topple over an embankment. On waking, he discovers that the bull has become disabled by a broken pelvis and will suffer a

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lingering painful death, so he slaughters it with his knife in an act merging violence with compassion. Walking towards the camp afterwards, he is met by Pete, an Indigenous stockman who has been searching for him. In discussion with the normally taciturn Pete, the boy determines to resolve some personal and family issues that also have broader cultural significance. In dialogical self theory, culture and self are conceived of in terms of a multiplicity of positions among which dialogical relationships can develop. This view allows for the study of the self as

“culture-inclusive” and of culture as “self-inclusive” (Hermans 2001, 243) and provides a useful vehicle for thematic analysis of incidents such as the protagonist’s resolution in Requiem for a

Beast, where reconciliation within the self merges with cultural reconciliation.

The main story is interwoven with several sub-plots concerning the boy’s dreams, portrayed largely through surrealist visual images, as well as emotionally evocative memories of dreams and waking events conveyed as hand-written diary entries and often displayed in graphic novel format. The second major narrative strand involves the recounting of the childhood experiences of an Aboriginal Elder who was forcibly separated from her family during the episode of Australian history known as The Stolen Generations. As outlined in earlier chapters, this was a time of government assimilation policies, when many children of Aboriginal or Torres Strait

Islander decent were removed from their families by Australian government agencies and church missions, under Federal and State acts of parliament. This major thematic issue was neglected in the sensationalist attacks on the book, yet an explicit intertextual link is created through the resemblance between the photograph (Figure 8) on the cover of a government report on the Stolen

Generations (Read 1982) and a painted image of a photograph (Figure 9) from Requiem for a Beast

(41).

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Figure 8 Figure 9

The photograph from the government report and that depicted in Requiem for a Beast feature a young girl (in the centre with hands held in front of her) whose image appears throughout the text, presumably representing the Aboriginal Elder as a child. The Elder tells the story of her childhood at a public meeting in a country town and is heard by the boy while he waits for his new employer to collect him. A sub-plot that crucially connects the two main narrative strands is conveyed as one of the boy’s memories of a story told by his father and also inadvertently overheard by him, recalling an incident that happened to the father as a younger man. This event involved the drowning of a young Aboriginal man who was pushed off a bridge by an aggressive stockman while watched by a group of others, including the boy’s father, without any attempt to intervene or report the incident. While the boy in the present tense narrative is working as a stockman, he is haunted by the two separate but thematically related stories of the Aboriginal woman’s removal from her family and subsequent maltreatment by her supposed carers, and his father’s complicity in the young Aboriginal man’s apparent murder.

According to Ottley (2008, 18), the bull or beast plays a multi-metaphoric role, simultaneously and paradoxically symbolising the European view of Indigenous Australians, the

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violence inherent in some images of national identity and personal demons in individual selves.

When the boy kills the bull, he acts partly out of compassion to relieve its suffering but he also plays the role of its conqueror. The conflicting subject positions constructed here and the dual significances of the boy’s actions evoke a sense of moral tension that pervades the entire book.

Ottley (2008, 2) describes the boy’s struggle with the bull as “a powerful spiritual experience”, from which he emerges subdued but determined to reconcile himself with his family. He also resolves to bring closure to his father’s story by contacting the drowned boy’s family and revealing the truth behind the mystery of their son’s death, about which they have grieved and wondered for many years. Reconciliation and resolution are important themes merging each of the book’s voices and its verbal, pictorial and musical components.

The intricate format of the book requires a high level of reader participation, with the reward of a satisfying and illuminating experience. The book’s central plot, involving the boy’s time as a stockman and his encounter with the bull, progresses verbally and pictorially in a linear realistic style, supplemented by mental flashbacks, surrealistic dreams and layered storytelling as a device to inform readers of the protagonist’s background and his reasons for becoming a stockman.

The visual text comprises a diverse mixture of realist and surrealist paintings including some photographic images, sometimes arranged in graphic novel layout and sometimes in picturebook format. The use of “pictures within pictures” (as in The Arrival) creates a compound form of non- verbal communication (Tan 2010b, 5), a representation within a representation that evokes a deep sense of ineffable spiritual perception as the reader is taken ever farther from the tangible corporeal world into a dreamlike imagination. The painted photographs depicting fragments of the boy’s family history mingle colour with black and white images scattered among a few objects – a knife, an unburnt matchstick and a spur (Figure 10) – that suggest a potential for violence overlying the family memories (Ottley 2007, 20).

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Figure 10

While the boy’s story is portrayed with a blending of words and pictures, the Aboriginal Elder’s story is narrated in first person predominantly through italicised verbal text with few pictures. The words, however, are displayed in an unusual format with some paragraphs separated by large gaps and others outdented as hanging paragraphs. Ottley (2008, 3) comments that “the breaking up of word text sections visually like this also suggests that collectively the words themselves are

‘illustrations’, that their layout is as important as the design of the illustrative sequences”. This effect is enhanced by the superimposition of the English language words over a shadowed image

(Figure 11) of the words of the Bundjalung song that tells the story of a “day of wrath” for

Aboriginal people, when their lives were changed forever as they first encountered European people mounted on horses. The dominance of the English language text over the faintly visible

Bundjalung words, like a palimpsest revealing ghostly traces of the original words beneath the overriding text, suggests the cultural hegemony which is thematically important in the book.

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Figure 11

The day of wrath, or Dies Irae, refers to the first part of the Requiem, an anonymous iconic

Christian text from the European Middle Ages on which Ottley (2008, 2) claims to have modelled the book’s form. It is the first item of the musical component of the book, which blends contemporary Western classical music with traditional Aboriginal music and spoken words. The libretto, setting down the words of each of the musical pieces, is included at the end of the book and features both the Bundjalung and Latin poems with English translations. Ottley (2008, 19) comments that “in the setting of Aboriginal songs next to their Latin texts there is an exploration of both the similarities of spiritual outlook, and the ironies inherent in such comparisons”. There is a direct reference to the music in one of the boy’s particularly climactic diary entries, when he writes about hearing the Elder’s story followed by a song from an old Aboriginal man:

It was menacing, and haunting, and incredibly sad at the same time. He said the song was about the first time his ancestors saw a white man. That day, he said, was his people’s day of reckoning, when the world changed for them. They saw a man on a horse, a ‘two headed ghost.’ ‘Be careful’ the words in the song said, ‘the ghost will come to take you away.’ (21)

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This diary entry connects the verbal text of the book to the old man’s songs and spoken storytelling which are heard on the CD, integrating the words, pictures and music as fundamental parts of the whole work.

Although there is a general forward chronological progression in the main narrative strand involving the boy, the other storylines interweave non-chronologically with it, creating “a circular pattern that reflects both the musical and poetic writing style of the European Middle Ages, from which the text of the Requiem comes, and also the traditional story telling style of some Aboriginal cultures” (Ottley 2008, 2). There is no reference to any form of transcendent religious authority or deity but the book’s segmented structure accentuates its spiritual significance through allusion to

Christian spirituality in the setting out of the text and the music in sections equating to the structure of a Requiem Mass. Requiem for a Beast utilises the allusion to authoritative religious discourses to facilitate the evolution of the boy’s internal dialogue, leading to his ideological and spiritual becoming. Ottley chose the Requiem as a model for the form of the book because of its central theme of reconciliation and resolution (Ottley 2008, 2) .

The book’s structural integration of verbal, picturebook and graphic novel formats, enhances its polysemic complexity. Part One opens with a double page spread of an oil painting depicting an unpeopled rural landscape, dominated by gathering storm clouds and containing only five prescient words: “It’s our memories that make us”. These words are later revealed as the opening line of the Aboriginal Elder’s speech in the community hall, retelling her traumatic childhood story (42). The six verbally sparse opening pages are followed by two pages of unillustrated dense verbal text. The first page contains a single sentence centred on the page, “The rain will soon be here”, reiterating Ottley’s view that the verbal text is also pictorial. This is followed by a full page of conventionally displayed text describing the boy’s prophetic dream of an encounter with the legendary bull. Another sparsely worded dream segment follows, depicted in a filmic or graphic novel format, with a series of frames chronologically ordered to construct a visual narrative of the boy riding his grey mare across an outback landscape towards a small school house, dismounting and climbing the stairs to open the door. This segment is visually focalised by the boy, portraying the scene as he would view it mounted on his horse. The words and pictures at

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the top of the page intertwine, as the typed sentence cascades into a sign indicating the church-like school house that signifies the infiltration of the religion of the colonising settlers in the landscape.

The intertext of the Latin Requiem contributes to the dialogic construction of the boy’s subjectivity in the context of his membership of the colonising white culture. Other intertextual references underscore this Western cultural dimension, particularly the recurring images and verbal references to the Centaur and the Minotaur of ancient Greek mythology, both of which are half man/half beast creatures, thematically supporting ideas about the brutal potential of people.

Allusions to more recent white Australian bush legends appear in the form of the romanticised image of the stockman, recalling the iconic Australian poem The Man from Snowy River, and a visual allusion blending this and bushranger Ned Kelly’s armour (12-13) with an image of the

Minatoar. The merging of men and beasts reaches a climax as the boy and his horse follow the bull and the verbal text reads:

The boy and his horse have become one, and together, by an invisible chord, have joined with the bull. They are all the one creature. (32)

Traditional Bundjalung songs and Stolen Generation narratives, told by an Indigenous woman, confer a facet of Othering in opposition to the hegemonic Australian masculine colonial perspective. Supporting this view, McCallum (1997, 114) identified a developing dialogue in

Australian picturebooks since the 1970s, noting the intersection of recurring images, symbols, myths, and ideologies in the books and the larger cultural forces that reflect shifting discourses about nationalism and multiculturalism. She claims (1997, 102) that “the development of intersubjectivity within a specific social and natural setting enacts a search for identity narrative which is shaped by broader cultural and ideological conceptions of a preferred national identity”.

The book’s use of intertextuality with hybridised imagery facilitates the development of the dialogic interplay, thematically and narratively, of secular and sacred mythical discourses in the boy’s quest for self, truth and reconciliation, both within himself and with the natural and human environment in which he lives. This interplay elicits the idea of movement between inner and extended selves as they are articulated in dialogical self theory and the development of a subject’s ideological becoming.

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This intricately constructed YA picturebook comprises ninety pages, with a fusion of hybrid styles, modes, voices, languages and formats, evoking a sense of the personal, political and spiritual significance underlying the multi-layered and polyphonic narrative. The realist oil painting

(80-81) that closes the narrative mirrors the opening pages, again suggesting a circular rather than linear story, but leaving the reader with an optimistic prospect taken from the closing words of the

Aboriginal Elder’s story: “But the storm is also a nurturing thing, a thing that allows the land and the people to grow again. We all have to stand in the rain, however long it lasts.” An added feature in the concluding image (Figure 12) is the iconic Australian eucalyptus tree growing beyond the top of the page, bleeding a stream of red sap reminiscent of the tears of blood often associated with

Christian art and visions, signifying pain and sacrifice but leading to reconciliation and regeneration, as eucalypts are a species which will regenerate following fire or felling.

Figure 12

Shaun Tan (2010a) claims that artists who construct works with different, intersecting media draw on “a well of intuitive ideas that ultimately exist without language, and language is a way of bringing them up”. The languages intersect, he believes, because they are all shared by and intersect in humans. Of relevance to Requiem for a Beast and other works that incorporate multiple

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media, Tan continues that “music, writing, painting, they’re not separate little compartments that we visit and then leave. They’re all part of the same train station and all talking to each other. I think it’s like a synaesthetic thing.” Although it is the work of a single creator, Requiem for a Beast displays such a synaesthetic and mystical effect and evokes a strong sense of the sacred and the

“camouflaged presence of the spirit amid material reality”. In commending the book to young adults, Ormerod (2008, 42) asserts that “the reader must allow the words, images and music to inform and speak to them. It is a story that is challenging and confronting, but it is a story that has great value in its telling, great value in its reading and even greater value in its understanding”. As

Matt Ottley believes, the simple sharing of stories can be a powerful starting place for reconciliation at many levels (2008, 19).

Conclusion Reflecting on the interplay of multiple modes, Tan (2010b, 2) comments that

I often like to think of words and images as opposite points on a battery, creating a potential voltage through a ‘gap’ between telling and showing. It requires the reader’s imagination to complete the circuit, their thoughts and feelings being the current that fills the silent space, without prescription.

This idea resonates with Faris’s concept regarding the construction of the ineffable in-between which is evoked through the polyphonic format of the multimodal texts discussed in this chapter, most notably in Tales from Outer Suburbia and Requiem for a Beast. These postmodern picturebooks reveal the development of a postsecular dialogic discourse in contemporary

Australian YA literature, through their multimodal construction of multivoiced narratives that have the potential to facilitate a respectful dialogue between disparate cultural interests. The notion of the ineffable in-between applies not only to the intangible perceptions residing in the interplay of words, pictures and music, but also to the postsecular space opening in contemporary dialogue between sacred and secular discourses. Such dialogue is "at once critical of secular constructions of reality and of dogmatic religiosity" (McClure 2007, ix), inviting a progressive and positive approach.

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Following the consideration in Chapters 3, 4 and 5 of realist, speculative and multimodal representations that portray spiritual quests and highlight the presence of the sacred in Australian

YA fiction, the following chapters investigate specific themes that emerged in reading a broad range of texts and which regularly inhabit conversations about spirituality in a secular or postsecular society.

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CHAPTER 6

CROSSING THRESHOLDS: DEATH AND AFTERLIFE BELIEFS IN YA FICTION

Time was that the dead went to Heaven or to Hell, but I am not so certain anymore. Now it seems that they are doomed to remain with us forever – at least in one form or another. Gary Crew, The Diviner’s Son

What's the difference between an angel and a ghost? They're both dead, they should be somewhere else and they're both still here. Irini Savvides, Sky Legs

Belief in an afterlife or some form of continuing existence of the self after the death of the physical body is a basic precept of most organised religions, as well as for many individualised and even secular spiritualties. Diverse articulations of such beliefs are scattered throughout contemporary

Australian YA fiction, as demonstrated in the above selection of quotations which are only a few of the many afterlife allusions appearing in the literature. In their recent study of the spirituality of young Australians, Mason et al (2007, 49) affirm that “most religions have their grand narrative(s), and deal with the great Transcendences: God, the spiritual world, life, death and afterlife, and the mysteries through which humans participate in this supernatural realm”. The ontological question concerning life after death has been contemplated and debated for millennia by philosophers, theologians, psychologists, sociologists and other scholars as well as lay people. Yet, the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas wrote that “in the end language can only be related to what is experienced here, and given that the hereafter is not here, we can only infer” (Bragg 2005).

Although human language is constrained by experience, this has not stopped “an outpouring of artistic, theological and literary representations of heaven” (Bragg 2005). A comprehensive scholarly analysis of this nebulous metaphysical topic is clearly beyond the scope of this study

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which includes only those contributions to the discourse that are relevant to the representation of afterlife beliefs in contemporary YA literature.

Philosophical, psychological and literary afterlives A distinction can be made between the concepts of immortality and afterlife, although the two concepts often merge in popular parlance. Immortality is generally concerned with the infinite extension of corporeal life and in literature it is likely to be represented in speculative modes, particularly science fiction and posthumanist narratives. Such renderings of immortality do not necessarily encompass spirituality. Afterlife on the other hand usually refers to the survival of some aspect of the self or soul after the death of the physical body, imagined variously as an individual identity in a spiritual realm, a reincarnation, a resurrection or by integration into a universal cosmic consciousness23. This chapter considers afterlife beliefs rather than immortality scenarios, whether considered a realistic ontological possibility or a psychological delusion. Representations of the afterlife in the focus novels vary greatly in content and style, sometimes approached solemnly, sometimes with humour, but always with a sense of wonder as the authors utilise multiple narrative strategies to encourage contemplation by readers, even when they are positing scepticism as a rational response.

As noted, afterlife beliefs are well represented in visual art, music and literature. While earlier representations were inclined towards religious visions, a more secular turn over the last couple of centuries locates recent portrayals within fantasy, mystery and horror genres. However, given that a considerable proportion of the Australian young adult population professes belief in the reality of a spiritual afterlife (Singleton 2012, 456), the distinction between speculative and realistic modes becomes blurred in fictions concerning life after death. The afterlife is a fiction according to

Bennett (2012, 1) because “it imagines a world other than our own”, positioning it in the fantasy genre. Fantasy fiction and films concerned with the paranormal often embrace orthodox religious paradigms, yet gothic conceptions of afterlife entities, such as ghosts, are generally disdained in orthodox religious productions. Warnings of ‘supernatural themes’ are rarely ascribed to religiously

23 The notion of a universal cosmic consciousness has been explored in numerous arenas, including Buddhism, Hegel’s absolute idealism, Jung’s universal unconscious mind and New Age thinking. 154

oriented productions because “not many people would classify their beliefs in God or heaven as

‘supernatural,’ even though that's precisely what they are” (Bering 2006, 142). Thus for some readers (and authors), afterlife fictions fall within the bounds of possible reality while others would interpret them as speculative or perhaps as psychological mysteries.

Stephens and McCallum (2001, 175) note that “[p]aranormal phenomena are commonly exploited in fiction and film for the frisson of fear they produce” and although many of the phenomena manifested in the focus texts are found in mystery, horror, psychological thriller and ghost story genres, the authors of the selected texts generally avoid the “frisson of fear” that characterises those genres (with a few exceptions, notably by Gary Crew, whose work is often described as ‘macabre’). Rather, authors utilise narrative techniques that invite serious introspection by readers, facilitated by optimistic closures and the achievement of agency by the protagonists. In contemplating such esoteric views of life, death and afterlife possibilities, the protagonists and by implication the readers are encouraged to critically interrogate notions of post- mortem survival and immortality, in both spiritual and more worldly forms such as enduring memories, the legacy of creations or relics of the deceased and the perpetuity of an individual through his or her descendants. In this regard, Hallam et al (1999, 164) discuss the ambiguous and diverse beliefs that occur in contemporary Western culture about “ghosts, apparitions and occult phenomena” and draw attention to the ways in which “dominant Western belief systems differentiate between life as represented by material embodiment and death as represented, variously, by disembodied survival in a spirit world or disembodied immortality through ‘great works’ or family reminiscences”.

Australian afterlives Australian society is frequently perceived as “a thoroughly unreligious, if not anti-religious, materialist and brashly grounded society with no place for spirituality” (Ashcroft et al 2005, 141) yet spirituality is more present in Australian culture and literature than is often alleged. Despite this perceived secularity, The Spirit of Generation Y study (Mason et al 2007, 70) found that over half of the young Australians surveyed believe in life after death, even though the majority “have

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little interest in the spiritual trajectory of their lives” (Mason et al 2007, 96). The proportion of afterlife believers is predictably higher among those with some form of religious identification

(around 70%) than among those with none (42%). This degree of afterlife belief among religious identifiers seems surprising low, suggesting that many of the respondents in the survey held ambivalent views about the doctrines of their faith or perhaps considered their religious affiliations similarly to membership of a political, sporting, social or other clubs which also foster a sense of belonging and meaning, rather than as a belief system. At the same time, Singleton (2012, 456) conducted a further survey of 13-24 year old Australians specifically focussed on afterlife beliefs of young Australians and found that 56% of Australian youth “have some kind of firm belief in the afterlife”, which is “higher than the proportion who ‘definitely’ believe in God” (51% of those surveyed). Anecdotal extracts from interviews in these surveys indicate a strong tendency to believe in some form of afterlife (whether heaven, reincarnation or an eclectic blend) because of a need for comfort in the event of the death of a loved one.

This tendency to shape beliefs to fit emotional needs is reflected in some focus texts of this chapter and in some other Australian YA novels not discussed in detail. For instance, in response to a question about whether she believes in heaven, Riley Rose, the atheist protagonist of Everything

Beautiful (Howell 2008), professes

I want to. I don’t like to think of everything just stopping …. But, I feel like if I go along with the idea of Heaven I have to go along with everything else. (222, my ellipsis)

Unlike Riley, the young people interviewed for The Spirit of Generation Y largely subscribed to the

‘spiritual marketplace’ principle (Roof 1999), in which “consumers could ‘mix and match’ components of spirituality from a wide range of sources, rather than having to ‘buy’ one complete

‘package’” (Mason et al 2007, 37). Although the survey tended to view Christian beliefs as normative (Cusack 2011, 414), the diverse afterlife beliefs of the young Australians surveyed included traditional religious views of heaven and hell, reincarnation, the existence of angels and ghosts, spiritualist communication with the dead and more. Singleton (2012, 453) notes that

“afterlife belief among Australian youth is idiosyncratic and self-directed, with few looking to an external authority for guidance in formulating belief”. The portrayal of such eclectic beliefs in 156

contemporary Australian YA fiction, along with some more esoteric considerations, suggests that it is reflecting the prevailing socio-cultural condition as well as attempting to influence the views of young Australian readers.

Recent scholarship on afterlife in fiction In arguing that life after death is itself an imaginative fiction, Bennett (2012, 1) further claims that the afterlife “finds its most pervasive and diverse manifestations in the forms of narrative fiction”.

In a comprehensive study of afterlife and contemporary narratives, she outlines the historical shifts in Western views of the afterlife since the mid-nineteenth century, particularly views about the existence of purgatory and the advent of Eastern notions of reincarnation (Bennett 2012, 12). Such perspectives are reflected in fiction and have consequently shaped further thinking about the afterlife, moving from “explicit, external punishment and reward to a concept of being punished or rewarded by sinfulness or virtue in themselves: a distinction between being punished for sin and being punished by sin” (Bennett 2012, 13, original italics). Although I found little representation in

Australian YA fiction of the moral concepts of reward and punishment in the afterlife, Bennett’s assertion about punishment by sin can be perceived in portrayals such as Crew’s The Diviner’s Son, the one focus text that alludes explicitly to the notion of moral judgement and hell, in earthly life as well as after death. Bennett (2012, 20) highlights the analogous relationship that can be perceived in the boundaries between real and fictional worlds, and between this life and the afterlife. The portrayal of the boundaries separating the domains of reality from fiction and life from afterlife is facilitated by the construction of ‘threshold’ metaphors in the focus novels. Ultimately, “post- realist narrative experimentation” is connected with “postmodern anxiety about a single truth” and

“post-religious choice-inflected secularism” (Bennett 2012, 21), an association demonstrated in the focus texts and the narrative devices employed to explore afterlife possibilities. The proposition posited here supports the argument in this thesis that current sociocultural trends towards postsecularism are both reflected in recent Australian YA fiction and operate to shape readers’ views, even when authors are cautious about appearing to proselytise.

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Although analyses of afterlife portrayals in contemporary fiction are uncommon in recent literary scholarship, the broader theme of death in YA fiction has been more extensively explored, but with little attention to afterlife notions. In a study of death, gender and sexuality, Kathryn

James (2009) examines representations of death from the perspective of carnality and its limits, and as such avoids more spiritual aspects of disembodied post-mortem survival. Because of its certainty, James asserts that death is one of the few topics of true universal concern and has historically had a major impact on the ways in which we order and give meaning to our lives, as well as playing a significant role in religious beliefs and practices, mythology, art, literature, science and philosophy. Trites (2000, xii) similarly stresses the inherent interrelatedness of death, sex, authority and power and their thematic importance in adolescent literature in which she perceives death’s intrinsic “great discursive presence”. Like James, Trites (2000, 122) makes a particular connection between the carnality of sex and death as dualistic forces, arguing that “sex exists as a biological antidote to death”. Along with the tendency to test limits in the drive towards identity formation and independence, adolescents typically have a tenuous cognitive and emotional comprehension of their own mortality, a trait often considered a major contributor to their notorious risk-taking behaviours. In other words, they have a limited capacity to personally incorporate the memento mori principle (“remember that you will die”) elaborated in Heidegger’s concept of Being-towards-death ([1927] 1962, 128). Yet Trites contends that, along with the dominant YA literature discourses on identity formation and the exploration of sexuality, death in multiple forms is a recurring YA fictional theme – death of a loved one, death by suicide, by accident, from illness and even the impending death of focalising characters.

Death is in fact “perhaps, even more powerful in the human mind than sexuality, for although in theory some individuals can live asexually, no one avoids death” (Trites 2000, 117). In adolescent literature, cognisance of death often represents a pivotal point of maturation when the protagonist “accepts herself as Being-towards-death” (117). In this regard, Trites (2000 119-141) analyses a number of YA texts from the perspective of being-towards-death and the protagonists’ maturation towards acknowledgement and acceptance of mortality. She claims that while

“understanding Being-towards-death leads adolescent characters into a loss of innocence that

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seems, at least initially, tragic”, protagonists who reconcile themselves to grief target an important emotional need of adolescents (135). There is also ambivalence inherent in such reconciliation, with the possibility that the knowledge of death could be “both more repressive and more empowering to adolescents than are discursive interactions with socially constructed institutions, authority figures, or sexuality” (141). She concludes that many novelists for young adults

“intuitively understand the power and repression that Being-towards-death creates for humans”.

This simultaneous power and repression can be viewed in relation to the protagonists’ ideological becoming, being the struggle between authoritative and internally persuasive discourses.

Despite the “great discursive presence” of death in YA literature, explicit thematisation of life after death is rare in Australian YA fiction. For example, although The Book Thief (Zusak

2005) may be distinguished among death-focussed novels by its personified Death as the narrator, there is little attention to possible afterlives of the novel’s characters once Death has taken their souls. In this regard, Trites (2000, 118) claims that only a few adolescent novels use life cycle imagery (found in books like Tuck Everlasting and Charlotte’s Web) because “the Bildungsroman formula mandates a plot determined by the concept of growth as linear: death is the endpoint of that line”. More recent novels such as The Lovely Bones (Sebold 2002) might signify a postsecular turn towards such concepts as spiritual afterlife.

Chronotope of the threshold The current analysis examines the theme of death as not necessarily an endpoint but as a threshold between life and afterlife, a concept that links with Bakhtin’s chronotope of the threshold. In his account of chronotopes as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature”, Bakhtin (1981, 248) specifies the chronotope of the threshold as being “connected with the breaking point of a life, the moment of crisis, the decision that changes a life (or the indecisiveness that fails to change a life, the fear to step over the threshold)”. He describes the chronotope of the threshold only sketchily (Johnston 2012, 435), citing texts of

Dostoevsky that are pervaded by conventional thresholds such as front doors and halls to illustrate his claim that “in literature, the chronotope of the threshold is always metaphorical and symbolic,

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sometimes openly but more often implicitly” (Bakhtin 1981, 248). Further, the portrayal of the chronotope of the threshold is “highly charged with emotion and value” (248) and has as its most fundamental characteristic a “crisis and break in life” (248). The threshold and related chronotopes are “places where crisis events occur, the falls, resurrections, renewals, epiphanies, decisions that determine the whole life of a man” (248), evoking spiritual allusions and notions of heroic quests and Bildungsroman narratives.

Similarly, Joseph Campbell’s portrayal of the hero’s quest involves crossing of thresholds both on the journey out and the return home. Such thresholds signify important stages of life, often symbolised in rituals, the purpose and effect of which “was to conduct people across those difficult thresholds of transformation that demand a change in the patterns not only of conscious but also of unconscious life” (Campbell [1949] 1993, 8). As such, crossing thresholds can be likened to the protagonist’s ideological becoming, achieved through the subjective struggle between authoritative and internally persuasive discourses. Bakhtin (1981, 249) elaborates that the moments of decision that occur at the threshold “become part of the great all-embracing chronotopes of mystery and carnival time” (original emphasis). As such, the chronotope of the threshold is pertinent to a consideration of the mystery and carnivalesque inversion of everyday life embodied in perceptions of death and afterlife beliefs that are portrayed in fiction. Death may be perceived as a threshold crossed by the character who dies, but can play a similar role for the surviving characters who experience the death of others. For them, the threshold presents an opportunity for ideological becoming. If the concept of a threshold is an essential marker towards growth and maturation, the idea of death as a threshold suggests a stage of growth beyond the death itself that might operate as a threshold for the surviving characters as well as the dead. The notion of the chronotope of the threshold thus provides a useful framework for analysing representations of afterlife in YA novels, with respect to both the characters who have ‘crossed-over’ the threshold of death and those left behind in the mortal world. The chronotope of the threshold inhabits an ineffable in-between zone of time and space, and as such it is most often represented in magical realistic narratives as outlined in Chapter 5. Faris (2004, 1) summarises the magical realist mode as one that “combines realism

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and the fantastic so that the marvellous seems to grow organically within the ordinary, blurring the distinction between them”.

Afterlife beliefs in Australian YA texts Bennett’s contention that representations of life after death imagine a world other than our own invites a speculative portrayal of the topic. In the focus texts discussed here, the afterlife is frequently expressed with an attitude of ontological uncertainty. Such tentativeness might reflect reluctance by some authors to commit to a definite stance about their beliefs, perhaps due to the perceived secularity of Australian society or possible adverse reactions from believers of various persuasions, spanning the spectrum from theism to atheism. Rather than appearing to proselytise, the authors generally take an approach that invites readers to consider afterlife issues with an impartial but inquisitive mind. The diverse representations of post-mortem survival range from supernatural to natural interpretations, the latter often expressed in the form of memories, material legacies or their descendants.

The three novels selected for particular focus in this chapter – Gilbert’s Ghost Train

(Metzenthen 1997), The Diviner’s Son (Crew 2002) and Sky Legs (Savvides 2003) – explore the afterlife quite explicitly. Before discussing these texts, I will briefly review some other recent

Australian YA novels that allude to, but do not explicitly thematise, afterlife issues. These novels demonstrate a range of narrative techniques, including chronotopic variety, multivoicedness and multistrandedness, which position readers to consider different perspectives and possibilities of life after death, even when only peripherally explored. Allusions to souls crossing the threshold of physical death to enter an otherworldly existence are particularly apparent in Boys of Blood and

Bone (Metzenthen 2003), Fireshadow (Eaton 2004) and The Full Story (Caswell and Chiem 2002).

Each of these predominantly realist novels diverges fleetingly into the fantastic realm as it portrays the continuation of consciousness of characters who die; in other words they move into magical realist mode when imagining life after death. A sense of the eternal interconnectedness of times, places and human lives is introduced on the first page of Boys of Blood and Bone24:

24 Discussed more extensively in Chapter 3 161

But seen or unseen, it’s possible for our paths to cross with those who have lived before – and sometimes we meet them, in a way. And the people who once lived, who were as real as we are now, have much to tell to those who listen. (Prologue)

This opening suggests a connection between the living and dead and a perception of continuity between the two states of being. Boys of Blood and Bone is a multivoiced, multistranded text, shifting chronologically between the past and the present and narrated alternately in first and third person, including an epistolary element in the excerpts from the diary of Andy Lansell, a soldier killed in World War One. The plot switches between time zones from Andy’s 1917 account to the twenty-first century world of Henry Lyon, establishing a sense of the fluidity of time in the construction of interconnectedness between Andy’s and Henry’s lives and the times and places they inhabit.

The most striking and poignant inkling of the afterlife comes in the third person closely focalised account of Andy’s death in a hospital tent on a French battleground, in which the familiar death metaphor of returning home is utilised:

When Andy looked again, the nurse was gone, and the canvas roof of the tent had changed into the hills around Strattford, the trees mere puffs of colour, more blue than green, the sky silver, his house shining like a white beacon at the end of the track, him walking toward it, through the farm, the horses by the fence as he headed for home. (286)

While this paragraph can be interpreted as a description of Andy crossing the threshold into a supernatural afterlife, Kathryn James (2009, 60) reads it as a natural end-of-life psychological event, describing Andy’s final cognitive processes with snapshot images of his life running randomly through his mind, “and then, in his thoughts, he begins heading for home and the hills around Strattford” (my italics). Considering Metzenthen’s interest in spiritual themes, demonstrated in some other novels such as Gilbert’s Ghost Train (discussed below), I contend that his intent here is to evoke an image of a spiritual afterlife and not merely a psychological effect. The “white beacon at the end of the track” recalls subjective reports of near-death experiences in which people claim to have experienced a white light beckoning from the end of a tunnel. This effect, however, is generally dismissed in scientific scholarship as electrical activity in the dying brain rather than anything supernatural (Borgijin et al, 14432).

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Along with this hint of an otherworldly afterlife, the text constructs images of more worldly forms of post-death survival, manifested in Andy’s ongoing presence in the present world in the form of other characters’ memories of him, his diary and other artefacts and especially in the existence of Janine, his illegitimate great grand-daughter “with the blue Lansell eyes” (222). This sense of Andy’s continuing existence is expressed by Henry as he reads the diary as a ‘never- ending story’:

Andy’s story was a strange one, because although he, Henry, was reading toward an end he already knew, it was pretty obvious that the end wasn’t quite the end at all. Otherwise Janine, Miss Hainsworth, and he, and Trot even, would not still be talking about it eighty- five years later. (65)

In such reflections, Henry unintentionally prepares himself to embark on a literal and metaphoric journey, venturing outside of his comfortable existence on a pilgrimage to visit Andy’s grave in

France in his progression towards maturity and ideological becoming. Although Henry is hardly a traditional hero, his journey incorporates elements of the hero’s venturing out and returning home to confront “the decision that changes a life” which is characterised by Bakhtin as the chronotope of the threshold.

A comparable portrayal of supernatural afterlife is found in Fireshadow, another novel structured with parallel plots and characters who interconnect in different times and places. As in

Boys of Blood and Bone, this novel prepares the reader for a tale of otherworldliness with its opening lines: “Old spirits walked here. Ghosts as old as time” (Eaton 2004, 3). Fireshadow likewise mingles chronotopes, connecting twenty first century Australia with World War Two

Europe in the stories of Vinnie, struggling with his guilt about his sister’s death in a burning car, and Erich, a young German soldier who finds himself in Western Australia as a prisoner of war in

1943. Again there are motifs of journeys and pilgrimages and the unplanned birth of an illegitimate daughter whose existence links the different narrative strands. The correspondences between the structures of the Metzenthen and Eaton novels, published contemporaneously, suggest that these are fitting plot devices used by each author to elicit current notions of parallel existential realms before and after death.

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The section in Fireshadow that particularly evokes a spiritual afterlife occurs with the death during childbirth of Alice, Erich’s Australian lover in the wartime strand of the novel (Erich also returns as an old man in the contemporary chronotope). From the tragedy of Alice’s death comes the life of her daughter, Matilda – a significant name in Australian culture with allusions to

‘Waltzing Matilda’, a song often designated the unofficial Australian national anthem. The cultural connection is extended by the name’s German origin, highlighted in the naming of Erich’s sister,

Mathilde, to enhance the theme of cross-cultural interconnectedness. Alice crosses the threshold of death into the afterlife while she is giving birth on a hospital bed surrounded by her parents, her grandfather and the doctor. The metaphors employed to denote the chronotope of the threshold are constructed around opposing binary sensations commonly associated with life and death - coldness and warmth, darkness and light - with mortal life portrayed as cold and dark, while the afterlife is warm and light. The moment of death is marked by the closing and reopening of Alice’s eyes:

She is so cold, even with all these blankets on. And the room is dark. Why doesn’t someone turn on a light? For a moment Alice closes her eyes. Just for a moment. When she opens them again, there are new people in the room. Strangers. (274)

The switching narrative voice in the first line, from third person indirect to first person direct discourse in “Why doesn’t someone turn on a light”, suggests a shift between Alice’s narrated and experienced consciousness as she crosses the threshold. She intuits that the strangers in the room are familiar to her – “She has never met them, but she knows them” – as she disengages from her mortal existence and anxiety about her newborn motherless baby while her spirit-world grandmother assures her “Don’t worry…you’ll be able to watch her, see?”. Alice looks behind her to a darkening scene where her parents and grandfather stand crying and then, with another narrative shift from her experienced consciousness to a more distanced third person discourse, she moves on – “It is much warmer here. With a last, lingering look behind, Alice follows…” (274, original ellipsis).

The reality of Alice’s afterlife is expressed more explicitly than Andy’s deathbed ruminations in Boys of Blood and Bone and thus a purely psychological interpretation would be

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difficult to posit here. Numerous recurring religious motifs throughout Fireshadow, including fire, water, bushes and wilderness, reinforce its tacit ineffable spiritual orientation. Further, feathered creatures such as birds function as spiritual symbols in many cultures and are particularly prevalent in Australian literature and other artforms. Bird motifs pervade Fireshadow, most notably the iconic Australian black cockatoo. When Erich and his fellow soldiers rescue a baby cockatoo, its subsequent death has a profound emotional impact on him (173) forming a connection to the numerous appearances of the black cockatoos throughout the novel. In the closing lines “a single black cockatoo wheeled twice in the warm breeze, high above, before gliding effortlessly away towards its home” (335), signifying a sense of resurrection, eternity and the circularity of time. This allusion enhances the novel’s optimistic conclusion, with the prospect of reconciliation between individual characters as well as between racial and cultural groups. Further, a sense of the impassive eternity of the natural world is expressed along with the familiar metaphor of returning home, as posited in Campbell’s monomyth (Campbell [1949] 1991, 30).

Along with the sense of eternity and interconnectedness conveyed through the changing chronotopes of its multistranded plot structure, Fireshadow encompasses themes of interracial and intercultural conflict and reconciliation which enhance the sense of a meeting between different existential domains. A similar sense of cultural reconciliation and connectedness is expressed in

The Full Story (a companion novel to Only the Heart (Caswell and Chiem 1997) which traces the lives of a family of Vietnamese refugees to create a new, but unremittingly troubled, life in

Australia). The Full Story focusses on the relationships of Andy (Anh in his native Vietnamese), his widowed father, Chau, and Andy’s girlfriend, Libby. Hints of a hidden parallel reality occur throughout the novel, culminating in a revelation in the epilogue that Andy’s dead mother and other ancestors have been guiding his life, just as Alice’s ancestors in Fireshadow watched over her mortal life from the other side of the threshold. Ancestors are particularly significant in the Chinese and Vietnamese cultures portrayed in Caswell and Chiem’s novel, where only spiritual ancestors can comprehend “the full story” of the mortal characters’ lives. Only at the novel’s conclusion do its enigmatic opening and numerous other mystical references acquire their full meaning when the reader realises that Nguyet, the focalising character “drifting above the room” (2) in the prologue,

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is the spirit of Andy’s dead mother. Her approval of the Caucasian girl sleeping with her son shows that she is a benevolent and conciliatory ancestor.

Creative artists, particularly writers, are portrayed in The Full Story as having a special connection to eternal spiritual matters, suggesting that the authors view themselves in this light and are well positioned to explore these themes. This connection is made in portraying Anh/Andy as a writer and the idea is voiced by the sensitive and spiritually responsive Libby who reflects that

Perhaps the real truth is that an artist's soul is a borrowed one. A composite of all possible souls. Of all the roads not taken. Of all the potential souls we might create if only we knew the whole truth. (183)

As well as alluding to ‘The Road Not Taken’ (Robert Frost 1916) with its notions of the unknown and unknowable, these poetic musings posit the idea of the continuity of human souls and their place in some kind of nebulous cosmic community. The reader might reasonably abandon any attempt to rationalise the meaning of this passage which performs the function of intensifying the overall ethereal tone of the novel. The metaphors for the afterlife constructed in The Full Story are again roads and journeys, climaxing in the final section entitled ‘Epilogue for the Journey’ as

Nguyet’s spirit watches her son for the last time, assured of his self-sufficiency and ideological becoming, before leaving him to move on, just as Alice did in Fireshadow:

She counts her son’s heartbeats, as once he counted hers, and feels the motion of his pulse. She traces the curves of his face with her mind. A memory to carry with her on the journey. Then she turns towards the open door. Towards the blinding light beyond. And takes a step towards eternity... (208, original ellipsis and italics)

While afterlife themes are not overtly centralised across the entirety of these texts, at their conclusions the reader may well be left with a sense of curiosity concerning post-mortem survival, when all narrative parts have consolidated into a whole. This is particularly the case with The Full

Story, as its title suggests. The Ghost’s Child (Hartnett 2007) also hedges clarity in deferring the identity of the eponymous ghost until the final paragraphs when Matilda, the main focalising character, sails away from the world of the living in a wooden boat, revealing that she herself is the ghost and her mysterious visitor is the unborn child she had miscarried. The mostly linear plot is an 166

autobiographical memoir of Matilda’s earlier life25, recounted by her elderly self to a young boy who inexplicably appears in her house one evening. Although the child has come to escort her to the afterlife, there is no terror in this wistful ghost story; rather it is a poetic and mystical quest for the multiple meanings of life, death, love and loss. The journey metaphor is evoked again in

Matilda’s travel across the threshold of death, as she and the child “looked at each other, and smiled with the nervous excitement of travellers beginning a journey” (178). The novel’s interrogative tone is embodied in Matilda’s assertion to the boy that “some answers don’t finish a quest, they merely start it” (14). Unanswerable questions are a recurring motif throughout The

Ghost’s Child, especially in her two major quests: the first with her father to find out “What is the world’s most beautiful thing?” (27) and the second to beseech her lost lover, Feather, “How can you know love, and lose it, and go on living without it, and not feel the loss for ever?” (150). In posing such unanswerable questions, the novel positions the reader to ponder the proposition that some things must remain unknown, particularly with regard to aesthetics, eternity and consequently life after death.

After returning from her youthful voyages to confront the unanswerable questions, the maturing Maddy becomes an eye doctor. In addition to her expertise in the field of physical vision,

Maddy’s patients seek her insight and wisdom in metaphysical matters such as the possibility of an afterlife. As her life experiences have taught her, she answers with a question (albeit somewhat rhetorical):

When they wondered if there was a Heaven, Maddy said she supposed there could be. So many fabulous things existed – krakens and waterfalls, the sunny smell of wheat – why shouldn’t there be a Heaven as well? (166)

At the death of her own censorious mother, with whom she had had a difficult relationship,

Maddy’s ironic reaction is benevolently forgiving as she “hoped there really was a Heaven where

Mama could go, some exclusive resort where wealthy ladies found plenty of faults about which to satisfyingly complain” (167). Notions of the afterlife in The Ghost’s Child are thus presented as wide-ranging, imaginative and often whimsical.

25 Discussed more extensively in Chapters 4 and 8 of this thesis. 167

Readers may consider it fanciful to interpret Ursula Dubosarky’s Abyssinia as an afterlife narrative but I claim that such a reading is justifiable. Abyssinia is described by its publisher as a psychological thriller, a classification supported by inclusions such as the Freudian Dr Fleet who is treating family members after the death of their child, Mary. The death is inferred but never actually explicated, adding to the ethereal mystique of the novel. Sheahan-Bright (2003, 16) contends that “this complex psychological narrative” merely “deals with Grace’s reaction to the loss of her older sister” but another possibility is suggested by Hillel (2003, 40), who asks “could it be that the dolls house is a parallel world where the missing child goes?”. As with the afterlife scene in Boys of Blood and Bone, this latter view opens the possibility of interpreting the two worlds portrayed as metaphors for mortal life and the afterlife. The novel’s opening supports this view, with an allusion to the Pythagorean concept of post-mortem existence:

‘Pythagoras believed that when a person died, their soul did not go to heaven, but travelled into another being, a person or an animal. Perhaps even other things. On and on, for ever.’ ‘So you never die?’ said Grace. ‘No,’ said Miss Lothian. ‘Pythagoras called it “the transmigration of the soul”.’ (1)

The narrative traverses different realms, imaginary and real, crossing multiple thresholds, including death. While there is little evidence of authorial intent to write Abyssinia as an afterlife narrative,

Dubosarsky reflected that “I liked the idea that you don't really know which is the dolls' house and which is the real house. I wanted that line to be blurry” (Chryssides 2003, 8a). This strategy results in the construction of an intricately and multi-layered narrative that places readers in a mystified state. The dolls house of Part One is located in a house on a rural property named Abyssinia, which is the setting of Part Two, creating a world within a world. The focalisation switches from Sarah in

Part One - the young girl (or possibly a doll) who inexplicably finds herself in a strange house with a strange family (the dolls house and the dolls) - to focalisation in Part Two by the sisters, Mary and Grace. The text is also interwoven with focalisation by an authorial narrator but I hesitate to use the term omniscient narrator here, as a recurring theme in the novel is the impossibility and perhaps undesirability of omniscience, favouring the inevitability of existential uncertainty. This stance is reinforced by the younger sister, Grace, who contends, ‘Anyway, you’re not supposed to

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know too many things…God doesn’t want you to know too much. It’s in the Bible” (79), accentuating the spiritual inferences that pervade Abyssinia. Such coded and sometimes more explicit references to spiritual afterlives are discernible in many contemporary Australian YA texts and the above discussion covers just a small sample.

Spirits in a material world Afterlife beliefs are represented tangentially in the texts briefly analysed above and I now turn to the three focus novels in which the topic is approached more directly. Several of David

Metzenthen’s novels tackle protagonists’ thoughts about what might happen to the self after death.

In Johnny Hart’s Heroes (1996), the protagonist Lal, after a discussion about spirits and the ghost world, writes in her diary: “If being alive is weird – like where do we come from and why are we here – then I guess there’s a big chance that when we die it’s just as weird…Look, what I’m saying is that maybe a person doesn’t entirely disappear when they die” (62, my ellipsis). Gilbert’s Ghost

Train (1997) is another early work by Metzenthen that overtly interrogates afterlife beliefs. The novel lacks the stylistic sophistication of some of his later novels, frequently employing self- consciously naive vocabulary, and it sometimes seems laboured in conveying its thematic concerns with afterlife beliefs. However, the novel was well-received and honoured in the older readers’ category of the 1998 CBCA awards. Gilbert’s Ghost Train is included in the current analysis as a rare contemporary Australian YA novel with explicit thematisation of afterlife beliefs, regardless of the frequent lack of subtlety. In magical realist mode, the narrative suggests that the eponymous

Gilbert is the ghost of a railway worker and soldier who had died in the early twentieth century. It seems to have been the author’s intention to utilise a hackneyed narrative style to construct

Gilbert’s character as old-fashioned and out of place, frequently making utterances in currently unfashionable rhyming slang, like “Now for me scratches” (17), signifying matches. As with Boys of Blood and Bone, James (2009, 54-55) proposes an alternative reading of this novel as a psychological narrative in which supernatural possibilities exist only in the protagonist’s mind but I would again argue that the notion of a spiritual afterlife is a recurring topic in Metzenthen’s novels and is expressed most strongly in Gilbert’s Ghost Train, even if not conclusively.

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Evoking Bakhtin’s definition of the chronotope as the “intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships”, Gilbert’s Ghost Train depicts a connectedness between times, places and people, both “this-worldly” as implied by the physicality of the chronotope and otherworldly in its suggestions of the existence of a ghostly realm. The opening and closing chapters are set in the present, bookending the main story which takes place a year earlier but is retold in present tense to evoke a sense of close proximity. Fifteen-year-old Martin Dean's younger brother Dally is in an advanced stage of leukemia and confined to bed except on rare days when he is well enough to be taken out in a wheelchair. His subsequent death is disclosed by Martin at the beginning of the novel

– “My brother Dallas is buried in the Triggerton cemetery” (1) – dispelling any sense of narrative suspense about the outcome. During the week leading up to Dally’s death, a stranger dressed in out-dated clothes and using quaint language appears walking along a disused railway line running through the Deans’ farm. The stranger introduces himself as Gilbert Cutler, a former railway worker and a steam train enthusiast. Each afternoon that week, Gilbert visits the Deans’ home to entertain the dying Dally with heroic stories about steam trains and the Great War. His yarns and comforting presence help Dally face his impending death bravely, as the heroes of Gilbert’s stories had done. The merit of courage when facing death is reinforced, sometimes rather didactically and sentimentally, as when Martin tells him “I know you’re not scared, kid…because you’re a hero,

Frog, that’s why. You bloody are.” (133, my ellipsis). Martin suspects that Gilbert is actually the ghost of a man who died in World War One and throughout the week in which the novel takes place, he attempts to confirm his fanciful speculations, at the same time as questioning Gilbert and other authoritative adults about what happens to people after they die - and particularly what will happen to Dally.

Nobody can provide answers, of course, and much of the novel encompasses Martin’s internal dialogue on the subject, as when he recalls:

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The blackness reminds me of space and space reminds me of heaven. And that reminds me of Sunday School. And even though I only went to Sunday School twice, I can remember this painting they had there of heaven. This painting showed a big green park with all sorts of people and animals together. There was a river, seats, swings and slides, and it all looked very nice - but I'm not convinced. Sure, I guess heaven could be like that, but no-one really knows, do they? A big park for heaven would be fine, I guess. If it didn’t rain, and there was a snack bar and a bike track! But the idea of heaven confuses me. I'd really like to believe in it, but I'm not sure that I do. And at the moment I'm too scared to ask anybody, in case they give me an answer I don't want to hear. (36)

This passage performs several narrative functions, particularly the representation of Martin’s thought processes as internally dialogic in a text that often favours a monologic discourse. His perplexed mind entwines heavenly metaphors of an unimaginable spiritual realm (blackness and space) with a familiar desirable locus (a big park with a snack bar and a bike track). Like Riley

Rose in Everything Beautiful, cited earlier, Martin admits that he would like to believe in heaven but has reservations and fears about uncovering the whole truth. The first paragraph suggests that, as Martin had attended Sunday School only twice, his upbringing was not overtly religious but neither was it completely devoid of traditional religious influences and consideration of the afterlife. His confusion and ambivalence towards conventional religion is further expressed in his attitude to prayer in a later episode:

Kidding yourself is a waste of time. And praying seems to be not much better. I do pray, though. I offer things to God. I tell him that if Dally gets well I'll give all my money, if I ever have any, to poor people. I tell God I'll go in a wheelchair. Once I said to God he could let Carl [the dog] die instead. I say lots of stupid things…I think I’ll give it away, save myself the time and effort. (84, my ellipsis)

Challenging Bennett’s claim – that “[w]riting about the afterlife invokes debates about the processes of writing about life and shifts their grounds to a new location that is never of this world, but is both uncannily and comfortingly familiar” (2012, 2, my italics) - Martin’s image of heaven is completely worldly as well as comfortingly familiar, in the same way that Gilbert is portrayed as a very physical, tobacco-smoking ghost with a ‘thick and muscly’ handshake (16) and several wardrobe changes. Although Martin reiterates his persistent question - “but no-one really knows, do they?” - he seems impelled to embellish rather than dismiss the Sunday School portrayal with

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further earthly attributes that would appeal to an adolescent boy - the snack bar and bike track. At the same time, he frankly acknowledges his confusion and fear about afterlife possibilities.

Martin’s development of internally persuasive discourse is displayed in this excerpt, preparing the way for his eventual spiritual maturation and ideological becoming as depicted at the novel’s conclusion, set a year after Dally’s death.

The chronotope of the threshold is “connected with the breaking point of a life, the moment of crisis” (Bakhtin 1981, 248) and these moments “become part of the great all-embracing chronotopes of mystery” (original emphasis). Bakhtin (1981, 248-249) asserts that “[i]n literature, the chronotope of the threshold is always metaphorical and symbolic, sometimes openly but more often implicitly.” The metaphoric threshold in Gilbert’s Ghost Train is most obviously manifested in the image of the railway line that runs through the family property and becomes the threshold that Dally finally crosses to enter the afterlife. The narrative does not resolve the matter of whether

Dally’s departure with Gilbert on the train really occurs or is just dreamt by Martin, who wonders

Perhaps I talked myself into seeing what I wanted to see? I mean, if Dally was with Gil, he’d always be in safe hands, I know that for sure. Maybe I simply did dream up that train as an answer to some of those big, big questions? Or maybe I didn’t.…Maybe – maybe, that’s all I can say. (169, original ellipsis)

Throughout the novel the railway line signifies a threshold between past and present as well as between the material and spiritual realms, as the ghost train travels along it with its passengers, like the ferry on the River Styx. This symbolism is explicated by Gilbert as he comforts Martin with the idea that “There might even be a train to take us true Railway Fans over there” (94). Despite the spiritual implication of the railway and the train, the novel is permeated with overt physicality evoked by constant references to measurements, clothing, food and other manifestations of the terrestrial realm, suggesting the parallel existence of material and spiritual chronotopes as in the following quotation:

Our trainline is only the shadow of a trainline really…the rails and sleepers have been gone for years. Still, you can see the line stretching away over kilometres of paddock. (11, my ellipses)

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Other Metzenthen noels are similarly preoccupied with such suggestions of otherworldliness as a palimpsest revealing ethereal traces of a hidden reality and the chronotopic interconnectedness of the past, present and future. The idea is echoed in Boys of Blood and Bone, when Henry gazes along the road outside Strattford and imagines he can see Andrew Lansell in person “rather than just a memorial elm tree with Andy’s name on it” (Prologue).

Fiction often utilises narrative gaps to invite readers to consider existential themes, with implication operating more powerfully than explication. Gilbert’s Ghost Train, however, takes an explicit approach. Although the title and cover illustration suggest the ghost story genre, suspense and fear are averted in favour of philosophical contemplation through various strategies. Firstly,

Dally’s eventual death, around which the story revolves, is revealed on the first page. Secondly, the ghost of the story is rather angelic rather than ghoulish, with noble intentions never doubted by the characters nor, consequently, by the reader. Along with Gilbert’s altruism, virtually all characters in the novel – Martin’s parents, teachers, school colleagues and medical workers - are portrayed as kind, rational and strong even when confronting the lingering illness and stress-inducing death of a young boy. In this way, the novel takes no risks with readers’ responses by presenting aberrant behaviour by any characters. Martin’s understandable anger about his brother’s impending death is the most forceful emotion depicted and, like his nervous curiosity about the afterlife, its description is often laboured rather than affording the reader the autonomy to interpret the narrative. With its simple narrative style and single focaliser presenting a limited view of events, Gilbert’s Ghost

Train tends towards a monologic textual construction. The perspectives of Martin’s level-headed family and friends and other characters such as Dally’s doctor - and even Gilbert - are generally concealed from the reader. The multi-strandedness and multi-focalisation of Boys of Blood and

Bone, published five years later, provides a more effective platform for the reader to contemplate afterlife beliefs from several viewpoints, although the topic occupies a minor place in that text compared with its major thematic position in Gilbert’s Ghost Train. However, this novel excels in some moments when Martin’s fear and grief are expressed without the sentimentality that pervades much of the text. The following staccato sentences convey Martin’s dread with little room for maudlin insincerity:

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What’s it going to be like for Dally . . . if he does die? What happens at the very end? And after the end? And how scary is it? Does it hurt? And how scary will it be for me? I mean, man, I’m scared already. (55, original ellipses)

The authenticity of Dally’s death scene and the responses of his attending family members (160-

161) is likewise powerful and poignant, surpassing much of the writing in this novel in its attempt to evoke a sense of wonder about “those big, big questions” while accepting their unanswerability – a conclusion which is posited in most texts in this study.

A view from both sides In character with his usual style, Gary Crew is bolder than Metzenthen in imagining the reality of an afterlife in The Diviner’s Son. Moving away from Metzenthen’s tragic but gentle story of the cancer death of a young boy surrounded by his loving family, The Diviner’s Son enters a more sinister arena of murder and explores the darker side of human nature through intrigues and suspicions as well as through social transgressions such as alcoholism, adultery, charlatanism, child abuse and even slavery. Unlike the ambivalent magical realism of Gilbert’s Ghost Train, The

Diviner’s Son creates a darker gothic mood in terms of subject matter, historic setting and style

(Smith 2007, 137) and suggests more overtly that an individual consciousness can continue to exist after death. The novel’s consideration of Spiritualism is rare among Australian YA fiction26. The terms ‘spirituality’ and ‘spiritualism’ are sometimes confused with one another. Spiritualism is a particular belief system that flourished in the late nineteenth century and survives to the present time, with a discernible increase in Australian adherents in the early twenty-first century (Bouma

2006, 59) – perhaps a sign of the postsecular turn. It is chiefly concerned with communication between living and dead individuals, usually through a medium or at a séance. Although not a branch of Christianity, Spiritualism developed in Christian North America dating from 1848 when the Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York produced knocking sounds that were alleged to be messages from a spirit (BBC Religion 2014), an episode alluded to throughout The Diviner’s Son.

26 Judith Clarke’s Starry Nights (2001) and Robin Klein’s Games (1986) incorporate séances and spirits in their plots, but more to facilitate the construction of suspense than to explore a form of spirituality 174

With its mature themes and an adult protagonist as the main focalising character

(Christopher Mansel), The Diviner’s Son is not a distinctively YA text. Focalisation is more aloof than in many of the focus novels discussed here, where considerable intimacy is established between the characters and the reader through portrayal of their cognitive and affective processes.

Crew distances his protagonists from the reader by denying close access to the entirety of his characters’ mental processes, despite the multiple first person narrators, and by using a doubly remote chronotope of an isolated town on an island location at a somewhat distant time. However, there is sufficient access to the mental processes of the middle-aged Christopher Mansel for the reader to appreciate his ideological becoming throughout the novel, a process which is more often characteristic of YA fiction. Ironically, it is the adolescent diviner’s son whose mature wisdom triggers Mansel’s painful journey to self-awareness. The authoritative discourse of Mansel’s elitist and sceptical prejudices struggles with his developing internally persuasive discourses, as events compel him to construct different perceptions of people and of spiritual possibilities. The temporally linear but multi-voiced plot mingles omniscient narration with Christopher Mansel’s first person voice, as well as using an epistolary style in the letters between Mansel’s housekeeper,

Mabel Allcott and her daughter, Lucy. The reliability of all these narrating characters is questionable. The novel is further interspersed with extratextual features comprising authentic documents from 1848 concerning the infamous Fox sisters who alerted their parents to mysterious rappings on their bedroom wall, claiming they emanated from the spirit of a man who had been murdered in their house five years earlier. Although the sisters subsequently admitted that the rappings were a hoax, they are widely considered to be the founders of American Spiritualism

(Grimes 2011, 1). The inclusion of these historical records provides a context for Mansel’s

Spiritualist temptations (Wootton, 29) and a realistic underpinning to augment the magical realist mode of The Diviner’s Son in its exploration of afterlife beliefs as manifested in the possibility of communicating with the dead.

The novel draws on elements of the American Southern Gothic genre – in its macabre plot, the damaged characters and references to slavery witnessed during Mansel’s voyage to America – transported to the small town of Ross in rural Tasmania, known as Van Diemen’s Land at the time

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when the novel was set in the mid-nineteenth century. According to Anna Smith, the novel “goes some way to consolidating a local Australian version of a Gothic landscape and more importantly, to encouraging a new generation of writers to tell the truth of their own scary stories” (137). The

Gothic, she claims, is reproduced “as an unsolved murder and the troubling figure of the diviner’s son who channels voices from the spirit world”. Christopher Mansel is introduced as a wealthy

Tasmanian horse breeder who recounts his initial encounter with the diviner’s ‘son’, Abel

Hawkings. Abel claims to have been summoned by the spirits of Mansel’s dead wife and daughter to contact him and while Mansel is naturally sceptical about Abel’s claims, his inner turmoil prompts him to listen. He learns later that Abel had been abducted by Henry ‘The Divine’ Jones, a charlatan fairground healer, who recognised Abel’s startling ability to communicate with spirits, a talent which could provide a lucrative addition to the diviner’s otherwise fraudulent repertoire.

Resonances with Southern Gothic style are strengthened by Mansel’s reference to inhumane practices in the American South when he notices Abel’s ankle:

…it was the wound at his ankle that arrested me. Having been in the South, I knew that wound well. It was the mark of a slave, the injury made by an iron shackle. There were no slaves in this country. (3)

A sinister tone is thus set at the start of the novel, reinforced as the reader learns that Mansel is grieving for his wife and daughter who were murdered violently in their home a year earlier. No criminal conviction has been made but obvious suspects are the two men who appeared first at the crime scene - Virgil Morrisey, a young stable hand from America’s south (further enhancing the

Southern Gothic tone), and Mansel himself, who was drunk on the night of the murders and is uncertain about his own role. This rather contrived plot device of drunkenness overcomes the problem of having a first person narrator who is ignorant of his own past actions. When he first encounters the diviner’s son, Mansel is suffering considerable mental and emotional anguish over the loss of his wife and daughter as well as private terror at the possibility of his guilt. Much of the plot detail concerning the murders and Mansel’s subsequent behaviour is revealed in letters between the housekeeper, Mrs Mabel Allcott and her daughter, Miss Lucy Allcott, who lives on a

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neighbouring property. Their letters are delivered on horseback by Virgil, providing the opportunity for him and Lucy to become amorously involved.

The stereotypical Victorian domestic drama which evolves from these events is interwoven with a more original main plot concerning Mansel’s association with the diviner’s son and the novel’s exploration of Spiritualist beliefs. Abel psychically detects Mansel’s inner torment, as he perceives that “someone was seeking him. They might not know it, but they were” for “the boy’s senses rarely failed him” (6). Mansel’s scepticism makes him unlikely to seek psychic help, as he professes scornfully that he “had come to pride [himself] on the strictly rational management of those spiritual and emotional foibles which so commonly afflict the human race”, as well as having

“inquired into the possibility of communicating with the dead, and come to consider that a travesty” (7). Hence Mansel initially resists the mysterious psychic pull that he feels to consult the boy but gradually submits to Abel’s spiritual powers and develops a fatherly concern for him, wanting to rescue him from his bondage to the diviner and even to make Abel his heir, in a mutually beneficial relationship. The eventual revelation of Mansel’s and Virgil’s innocence in the murders is predictably constructed in crime fiction style but the outcome liberates Mansel to offer protection to the boy – only to find that Abel has literally and mysteriously vanished, having only a tenuous connection to the corporeal world. The plot implies that he has willingly gone to join

Mansel’s murdered daughter, Nettie, in the spirit world, although there is no indication that he has died in any conventional way. The spiritual coupling of Abel and Nettie is a rather bizarre plot element, mirrored by the more conventionally earthly courtship of Virgil Morrissey and Lucy

Allcott, who become Mansel’s heirs in the absence of Abel. The inclusion of the bizarre twist enhances the novel’s overall uncanniness.

Mansel meets Abel, who is chained like a slave inside a fairground tent, by passing through a threshold manifested by a curtain, in a similar way to the staircases, halls and corridors described by Bakhtin (1981, 248). Such thresholds are “places where crisis events occur, the falls, resurrections, renewals, epiphanies, decisions that determine the whole life of man”, occurrences that aptly denote stages along Mansel’s path towards ideological becoming. Moments of crisis and decision also become “part of the great all-embracing chronotopes of mystery and carnival time”

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(Bakhtin 1981, 249, original italics), a notion that is particularly relevant to the pervasive mystery of The Diviner’s Son and its inclusion of the literal carnival business of travelling shows where the diviner and other purported healers practice. The concept similarly applies to the Fox sisters’

Spiritualist activities which permeate the text with a reference to real world events. In addition to the obvious chronotopic thresholds like the tent curtain, the narrative includes the crossing of multiple thresholds between binary concepts - life and death, corporeality and spirituality, body and mind, rationality and emotion, waking and dreaming, truth and deception. The threshold between life and death is manifested implicitly but significantly in the character of Abel, who acts as a conduit between the human and the spirit worlds and exists in an almost extra-human world, as suggested by his final mystical disappearance when he leaves his hellish worldly life behind.

The interrogation of afterlife beliefs is further developed through an examination of the nature of faith and scepticism, of both conventional and alternative belief systems. Mansel’s initial scepticism turns to acknowledgement that there could be a form of existence beyond the material world. An overt tension is constructed between orthodox Christian beliefs, expressed rather boorishly by Mabel and Lucy Allcott, and the alternative Spiritualist beliefs and practices. As a narrative strategy to provide some background to Mansel’s interest in Spiritualism after the death of his infant son, Mabel writes to Lucy,

Do you remember how he got like this when Madam lost that dear baby? If my memory serves me right…that was the last time he got out the same clippings [about Spiritualism]. It seems that they are a solace to him, but why the Lord Jesus is not, I cannot understand. (108)

During bereavement, such tensions between mainstream religious beliefs and unorthodox behaviour may be witnessed, and “contact with the dead is not unusual among bereaved people” for whom it may be “achieved through the services of informal ritual specialists such as clairvoyants”

(Hallam et al 1999, 143-144). However, this practice is at odds with orthodox Christian doctrine

“which also represent[s] a belief in ‘life’ beyond embodiment, but one which creates clear sets of distances between the living and the dead and indeed discourages individualised communication between them” (Hallam et al,144). The Diviner’s Son is one of few Australian YA novels that delve

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into mystery and horror in an exploratory way, rather than merely as a plot element of fantasy. It thus presents an unusual interrogation of belief in life after death.

Angels, ghosts and other traces While contact with disembodied souls through Spiritualism is rarely thematised in YA fiction, representations of angels in their various manifestations are plentiful and may involve unlikely physical embodiments of a spiritual consciousness, like Gilbert in Metzenthen’s novel. A discussion of angels in contemporary Australian YA fiction would be incomplete without reference to the Heaven and Earth trilogy (Harland 2000-2003), although these novels are thematically located more within the sphere of satirical social commentary on the culture wars and the battle between religion and science or technology (Bradford et al 2008, 166) than a philosophical consideration of afterlife beliefs. The futuristic trilogy is set in a post-apocalyptic world in the year three thousand, where posthuman beings (Humen) have achieved supremacy over humans

(Residuals). The threshold that once separated heaven and earth has been crossed like a frontier, with heaven opened up to earth-dwellers through scientific developments which began with a series of events where

The gaps between life and death became so narrow that it was hardly possible to say where life ended and death began…they finally reanimated the brain of a corpse…When the brain was reanimated, the particular soul belonging to that brain was summoned back to its original owner…It just vanished out of Heaven. It returned to the body of the patient in the laboratory. And when the doctors interrogated the patient, they discovered that there really was a Heaven and an afterlife.’ (Harland 2000, 237, my ellipses)

Heaven is subsequently characterised as a vast authoritarian bureaucracy in conflict with the irreverent citizens of earth, both human and posthuman. As Bradford et al (2008, 166-170) observe,

Ferren and the Angel (the first book of the trilogy) considers the afterlife insofar as it “seeks a dialogical relationship between spirit and flesh, as the angel of the novel’s title, Miriael takes on the physical being and concerns of humanity” (166), yet the depiction of heaven is that “of the Old

Testament, intent on moral justice” (168). This tenor contextualises the novel as socio-cultural commentary rather than an interrogation of the possibility of a spiritual afterlife.

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Angels and the afterlife are likewise treated with a blend of humour and solemnity in Sky

Legs (Savvides 2003) which is amenable to notions of a spiritual afterlife and the existence of guardian angels. Located in Byron Bay on the north coast of New South Wales and the Blue

Mountains west of Sydney, Sky Legs is a magical realist text which introduces angels and ghosts into an otherwise realistic plot that confronts social justice issues of alienation associated with racism, homophobia and bullying. While there is considerable critical scholarship about these latter themes in the novel, there is an absence of commentary on the spiritual aspects of the novel. In fact,

Sky Legs is included in an article on the realistic turn in recent Australian YA fiction (Michaels

2004, 53) that focusses on the centrality of social issues to the texts cited. Michaels does comment, however, on the “most interesting manifestation of the mentor character” in the form of guardian

Angels who “are not idealised angelic beings, but exhibit the same kinds of foibles and follies as human beings”. Some way into the plot, it is revealed by means of analepsis that Eleni’s mother has recently died but posthumously left her a sixteenth birthday present in the form of an enrolment at the Byron Bay clowning school. The novel opens with Eleni’s week at the school, a transcendent interlude in her grief-stricken life, in which she bonds with like-minded new friends (including an incognito angel, Mihali) before moving with her father to the Blue Mountains to start a new life without the mother. After having lived in a bohemian inner city suburb, Eleni is startled by the insular conservatism of her new rural environment where she feels conspicuous and victimised as one of the few students of non-Anglo background at her school. After confronting mixed reactions to her ‘difference’, ranging from ostracism to support from both teachers and fellow students, Eleni is predictably befriended by another misfit, Pete, who enjoys the forbidden pleasures of sewing and wearing female clothes.

The multi-stranded, multi-voiced structure of Sky Legs demonstrates skilful fluidity in its ability to switch between the third person and first person narration by Eleni, Pete and Mihali, and between several places and times. While the narrator’s name is indicated at the start of each section, the reader might be confused in attempting to determine which literal chronotope is operative, as the narrative moves backwards and forwards in time and between the locations of

Byron Bay, the Blue Mountains, Newtown and even the heavenly realm. This playful narrative

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positioning facilitates an interrogative approach to the novel’s social and ontological concerns about truth-seeking and the search for identity. The imaginative discourse of social alterity in Sky

Legs contrasts with the clichéd portrayals of the afterlife, angels and ghosts that occur in the novel.

However, these hackneyed supernatural images offer a satirical reading, for example, when Eleni befriends a group of young people at clowning school who introduce themselves as members of a performance troupe called Four Flying whose actions are described in terms like “[h]e flapped his arms like wings and put his hands together in mock prayer...Her golden harp necklace twinkled in the sunlight” (10, my ellipses). These hyperbolic clichés enhance the sense of playfulness that complements the novel’s more sombre themes. Focalisation by Mihali provides a further comic portrayal of the celestial realm, such as when he proclaims

I knew I was in trouble when I saw Gabriel looking out over the mountains. This wasn’t my friend Gabi, this was Chief Angel Trainer 54! He never came to earth, not unless something big was on. (215)

The afterlife characters, particularly the angels, function as guides in Eleni’s journey towards ideological becoming and development of the autonomy she needs as a sixteen year old girl without a mother in a social and physical environment very different from that of her earlier life.

Eleni’s crossing from one kind of life to another, from city to country, from daughter to motherless young adult, constitutes a less explicit threshold metaphor than the overt symbols of train lines in

Gilbert’s Ghost Train and curtains in The Diviner’s Son. As afterlife characters manifested as angels and ghosts guide Eleni across the threshold between her old and new lives, the progression symbolises the death of her old self-image and her rebirth as a mature and self-actualised young woman.

Along with the novel’s exploration of afterlife beliefs through the magical realist intrusion of angels and ghosts, Eleni’s ongoing relationship with her dead mother – whether read as imagined or real - presents another interrogation of what happens after death, the “big, big question” posed more explicitly in Gilbert’s Ghost Train. According to sociologist Bloch (1971, cited in Howarth 2007, 219), for some societies the relationship between life and death is a continuum, rather than the binary opposition perceived in modern Western societies. Although

Eleni wryly claims that she tries “not to think about my mum, whether she can see the clouds

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where she is, or get a macchiato” (106), she feels a continuing relationship with her, to the extent of writing letters and even fancifully attempting to phone her:

I picked it up and dialled G-O-D. Then M-U-M. I started speaking into the phone, saying stuff I'd never said before…'Mum. I know that you're listening somewhere out there. Dad seems to think it's out where the cliffs are - and he may be right. You're probably using your wings to hand-glide down the valley, or knowing you, you've taken your wings off altogether and made them into a mini-dress, and you're practising bungy-jumping.' (242, my ellipsis)

Sky Legs thus evokes a sense of connectedness between Eleni and her mother’s spirit, as she imagines her mother retaining her earthly interests and behaviours, just as Martin in Gilbert’s

Ghost Train imagined a very physical heaven that would appeal to an adolescent boy. Bennett

(2012, 2-3) claims that “the afterlife continues to have an emotional urgency and cultural resonance, which is shaped by tradition, but has been transformed by the qualities of modern experience”. Writing to her mother about her transcendent experience of gazing out at the mountains, Eleni articulates her abiding spiritual inquiries regarding her mother and the afterlife, as well as the larger concern with spirituality in her present life:

Dad tried to explain that if you stared at a holy image long enough God would enter your soul. I don't think it's that easy but there was something that drew me back to this spot. It's so still and silent, cut off from everything that's going on in the world. ..I can feel something settle deep inside me as I look out across the skyline, breathing in these endless sacred cliffs. Ageless. Eternal. (93-94, my ellipsis)

Eleni’s sense of breathing in the endlessness of the sacred rocks evokes ideas of meditative breathing practices, and the notion of God entering her soul this way reinforces a perception of the sublime, the holy and the spirituality which has been neglected in critical scholarship about Sky

Legs. Amid the humour that accompanies the characterisation of the angels, Eleni further poses candid questions about popular imaginings of life after death:

We make stupid jokes about them [angels] and even dumber movies. And there's another one: "ghost". What's the difference between an angel and a ghost? They're both dead, they should be somewhere else and they're both still here. (190)

Such discourses that ponder the nature of death, the afterlife and spiritual beings are pivotal to Sky

Legs, adding a perspective that augments and goes beyond the worldly social issues that comprise other analyses of the novel, positioning it among Australian YA afterlife narratives. 182

Conclusion The Australian YA novels considered in this chapter portray paranormal phenomena designed to arouse readers’ curiosity about death and what, if anything, might happen to the post-mortem self.

However, they avoid the production of “a frisson of fear” (Stephens and McCallum 2001, 175) to evoke the suspense that is intrinsic to mystery and horror genres. Rather, each of these novels is thematically open-ended with an optimistic narrative closure, inviting inquisitive contemplation.

Unlike much didactic children’s fiction of earlier eras, there is an absence of moral judgement in the traditional religious form of heaven, hell or purgatory. Most of these texts depict the afterlife, at least in the imaginations of the protagonists who contemplate it, as a continuing state similar to their earthly life, reflecting Singleton’s findings (2012, 460) that most young believers imagined the afterlife in this way. In Gilbert’s Ghost Train, the ghost is very human-like and the afterlife to which Dally travels is akin to a boy’s own adventure. Similarly, Eleni in Sky Legs imagines her mother drinking macchiatos, wearing mini-dresses, hang-gliding and bungy-jumping in heaven.

Although the spirits of Mansel’s mother and daughter in The Diviner’s Son reside in a shadowy and less emotionally comforting place, there is no suggestion that they have gone to either eternal paradise or damnation. Conversely, the diviner’s son asserts that his earthly life is a Hell (Crew

2002, 22), an unhappy state that he presumably transcends in his final mystical departure.

According to Bennett (2012, 7), heaven and hell as places of judgement have become dematerialised into metaphors which are constructed, in these contemporary texts, as the crossing from life to the afterlife in chronotopes of the threshold.

Afterlife metaphors are evident in many other recent Australian YA novels of which this chapter has explored just a sample of those which are most explicit. Other portrayals include

‘Under Hell, Over Heaven’ (Lanagan 2006) and ‘Ferryman’ (Lanagan 2011), two short stories that vividly portray visions of purgatory, heaven and hell; the imagined ghosts in Dreaming of Amelia

(Moriarty 2009) and Love, Ghosts and Nosehair (Herrick 1996); a near-death out-of-body experience in Peeling the Onion (Orr 1996); the Aboriginal spirit who takes people to their death in

The Binna Binna Man (McDonald and Pryor 1999); the graveside dialogue Will has with his dead

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mother in The Beginner’s Guide to Living (Hills 2009); the ethereal sense of the presence of a dead friend in Max (Hyde 2000); and undoubtedly numerous others that are missed here. Revisiting the thoughts of Thomas Aquinas (‘Heaven’, BBC 2004), cited earlier, it is evident that “in the end language can only be related to what is experienced here, and given that the hereafter is not here, we can only infer”. This proposition is borne out in the depictions of the afterlife in the Australian

YA novels considered above, which represent the idea of life after death in the only way living humans can readily imagine it, as similar to life that is experienced and known before the threshold of death has been crossed. Subsequent to this exploration of the occult and ethereal world of the afterlife in fiction, the next chapter is grounded in a more tangible physical realm with an exploration of the interrelationship between spirituality, science and the natural environment.

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CHAPTER 7

NATURE AND SUPERNATURE: SCIENCE, FAITH, NATURE AND CULTURE IN YA FICTION

Just as we should cultivate gentle and peaceful relations with our fellow human beings, we should also extend that same kind of attitude towards the natural environment. Morally speaking, we should be concerned for our whole environment. The Dalai Lama, 1996

The smaller one comes to feel compared to the mountain, the nearer one comes to sharing in its greatness. I do not know why this is so. Arne Naess, 1973

There is a widespread perception that the “relationship between self and landscape is central to

Australian experience” (Webb 2000, 80). Australian literature is often said to be characterised by images of space and the natural landscape, notions that can be romantic and nostalgic given the highly urbanised demographic character of Australia’s population.27 This environmental construct engages first with the physical world but has subsequent cognitive, emotional and spiritual nuances. This investigation of representations of spirituality in contemporary Australian YA fiction largely validates this perception of Australian literature. There are recurrent examples of the abiding passion for the landscape and a consciousness of the sublimity of the natural environment, with both its nurturing and destructive qualities, expressed in the cliché that inhabits the Australian psyche concerning “her beauty and her terror” (Mackellar 1971, 4). In contrast to the European concept, the Australian sublimity is often a “horizonal sublime” according to Ashcroft et al (2005), as the awe-inspiring mountain peaks of European sublimity are replaced by the vast horizon of the ancient levelled Australian landscape. Literary representations of this environment are frequently portrayed as the locus of conflict between culture and nature, and sometimes between scientific and religious discourses. The previous chapter focused on afterlife beliefs, representations of which were consciously sought in my reading of the primary texts, as the notion is inherent in most traditional spiritual beliefs. The current chapter results from a different research process as it

27Nearly 90% of Australians live in urban areas (cities or towns of more than 1,000 people), and another 3% live in smaller towns or localites (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2013) 185

addresses a topic not explicitly anticipated while reading the novels, but which nevertheless emerged conspicuously in many texts. Unlike the afterlife fictions that naturally inhabit ethereal chronotopes and encompass spatial and temporal thresholds between reality and imagination, the environmental or ecological fictions discussed in this chapter articulate a more present and embodied form of spirituality that connects with the material world in a ‘here and now’ chronotope, wherever and whenever the narrative setting might be.

The concept of ‘connectedness’ is intrinsic to the definition of spirituality used in this study, summarised as a subject’s ongoing development of beliefs, values and a sense of connectedness that transcends materiality. It suggests a fluid rather than a fixed sense of the essential self or soul and dovetails with the notion of ideological becoming (Bakhtin 1981, 342-

348). Such connectedness might be experienced within the self, with other people or with the nonhuman environment, the cosmos or even with the manufactured environment. This chapter thematically embraces notions of connectedness between the natural and the supernatural, incorporating two main strands that emerge from a reading of the primary texts. The first strand investigates the relationship between scientific and spiritual beliefs, often conflictive but sometimes concordant, and extends into the relationship between culture and nature. This theme articulates into the second strand which takes an ecocritical approach to a number of YA novels that express a sense of spiritual connectedness with the natural environment in both a transcendent and an immanent sense. The discussion draws on the ideas of seventeenth century Dutch philosopher,

Baruch Spinoza and his pantheistic beliefs about the equivalence of ‘God, or Nature’ (Deus, sive

Natura) (Nadler 2011, 4).28 The analysis is further guided by theories of deep ecology that subsequently developed in the mid to late twentieth century (Naess 1973, Sessions 1995, Devall

1995) and the Gaia hypothesis (Lovelock 1987, 2006). The latter thematic strand considers texts in terms of their approaches to the natural environment, whether they incorporate an anthropocentric

‘shallow ecology’ that values the natural environment only for its usefulness to humans, or alternatively a more ecocentric ideology that accords with the principles of deep ecology (Naess

28 Following Steven Nadler (2011, 2013), ‘Nature’ is capitalised when the natural environment is ascribed with sacredness; more mundane usage of the term is in lower case. 186

1973). These principles acknowledge the interdependence of all ecosystems and the essential value of the nonhuman world regardless of its value to humans.

Two of the focus texts –The Rage of Sheep (Cooper 2007) and The Blue Feather (Crew and

O’Hara 1997) - explicitly invoke the science-religion conflict narrative. While The Rage of Sheep is a firmly realist text that engenders a cognitive reading of the main protagonist’s ideological becoming through her social interactions and changing religious beliefs, The Blue Feather enters a mystical arena to interrogate the relationship between science and spirituality, introducing magical realist, mythic and ecospiritual facets. The other focus novels interrogate apparent tensions between culture and nature and between empirical and spiritual approaches to reality. Stripes of the Sidestep

Wolf (Hartnett 1999) is a realistic novel with hints of environmental enchantment existing on the periphery of everyday perceptions of reality. The fantasy novel Shaedow Master (D’Ath 2003) conveys overt environmental messages that take the reader into an allegorical realm through an ecocritical reading of its mythic, Romantic and religious allusions. These novels thus provide readers with opportunities for readings of diversely constructed texts that present ethical challenges regarding current social and environmental issues.

Faith and reason, nature and culture In his explanation of ideological becoming, Bakhtin (1981, 343) exemplifies the authority of both

“religious dogma” and “acknowledged scientific truth” as major forms of authoritative discourse that interact with internally persuasive discourses to reveal “ever newer ways to mean”. While this suggests an associative relationship, these two authoritative discourses of religion and science are commonly viewed as dichotomous. With the enormous variations encompassed within both science and religion, the relationship between the multiple concepts and discourses involved is infinitely complex. Yet the discursive relationship between the two fields is often viewed simply as a battleground, incorporating diametrically opposed positions in such aspects as creationism versus evolution, established churches versus New Atheists, orthodox religion versus secularism, and so on. Representations of such binary viewpoints are frequently revealed in the YA texts considered in this chapter.

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According to Thomas Dixon (2008, 13), science and religion are “two cultural enterprises which encounter each other both in the mind of the individual and in the political domain” as well as in the academic field of ‘science and religion’ which has developed as a discrete discipline due to the high level of interplay between the two discourses. According to a popular metaphor, God was imagined “as an author of two books – the book of nature and the book of scripture…[and] the ultimate source of knowledge was God and…humans had to adopt certain techniques to acquire that knowledge” (20, my ellipses). Such techniques include observation of the physical universe

(principally scientific) and the investigation of the unobservable (principally religious) but both disciplines share a concern with the relationship between these two viewpoints (Dixon 2008, 35).

Regarding another apparent dichotomy that is evident in the current study - that of spiritual immanence opposed to transcendence - nineteenth century theologian, Henry Drummond (1898,

334) argued against the idea of the ‘god of the gaps’29 and asserted that “the idea of an immanent

God, which is the God of Evolution, is infinitely grander than the occasional wonder-worker, who is the God of an old theology”. This notion of the superior grandeur of an immanent god destabilises the authority of a transcendent god. This in turn supports the argument that the representation of spirituality in contemporary Australian YA fiction resonates with the internalised concept of ideological becoming.

Prominent religious leaders, as well as academic scholars, have expressed views about the science-religion dialogue and their own faith’s attitude towards the natural environment. Buddhist spiritual leader the Dalai Lama recently published a monograph entitled The universe in a single atom: the convergence of science and spirituality (2005) in which he asserts that

as in science so in Buddhism, understanding the nature of reality is pursued by means of critical investigation: if scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims. (Dalai Lama 2005, 2-3)

He further states that his monograph “is not an attempt to unite science and spirituality” but “an effort to examine two important human disciplines for the purpose of developing a more holistic

29 ‘God of the gaps’ is a theological perspective in which gaps in scientific knowledge are taken to be evidence of God's existence due to lack of other explanations. 188

and integrated way of understanding the world around us” (2005, 4). Such an understanding explores “the seen and the unseen, through the discovery of evidence bolstered by reason” and thus

“spirituality and science are different but complementary investigative approaches with the same greater goal, of seeking the truth” (4). This impartiality is echoed by the sceptical scientific character, Mala in The Blue Feather, who, after completing a quest for a mythical giant bird, acknowledges that while her religious grandmother’s stories “are mainly myths” and her own stories “are called ‘science’”, she “can’t say if they’re any more truthful than myth” (Crew and

O’Hara 1997, 231).

In an edict that resonates with the essence of deep ecology (outlined below), the Dalai

Lama concludes that

The central question – central for the survival and well-being of our world – is how we can make the wonderful developments of science into something that offers altruistic and compassionate service for the needs of humanity and other sentient beings with whom we share this earth. (Dalai Lama 2005, 10)

He does, however, espouse the common view among religious believers that the possibility of a meaningful life is incompatible with the notion of a materialist or physicalist philosophy that denies the dualism of separate substances comprising body and mind or spirit. This belief varies from the idea of substance monism posited by Baruch Spinoza who argued that the universe is comprised of only one substance which is ‘God, or Nature’ (Nadler 2011, 13). Yet the protection of nature is clearly an issue of concern for the Dalai Lama as he again expresses an affinity with deep ecological principles as he writes

Likewise for Christianity, in his first year of his papacy, Pope Francis expressed concern for the environment, despairing that

the thirst for power and possessions knows no limits. In this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenceless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule. (Francis 2013, 9)

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More recently in his controversial 2015 encyclical, the Pope issued an “urgent challenge to protect our common home” from the “excessive anthropomorphism” that has marked modernity (Francis

2015).

Nature religions, ecospirituality and deep ecology

Proceeding from the concerns expressed by traditional religious leaders to the beliefs and practices of less mainstream spiritual communities, Bouma (2006, 61) notes that in Australia, “‘nature religions’ draw their strength and inspiration from aspects of the natural environment and include animism, naturism, paganism, pantheism, witchcraft (or Wicca), shamanism, voodoo and a host of other new religious movements and spiritualities”. In Australian census data, these religions are included in the ‘Other’ category, of which nature religions account for “about a quarter, enjoying a

130 per cent growth in the five years between 1996 and 2001. Witchcraft alone grew by 373.5 per cent” (Bouma 2006, 61). Despite their apparently increasing popularity in the real world, there are few overt portrayals of nature religions in Australian young adult fiction (Austlit 2014) although there is considerable representation of ecological spirituality embedded within the broader area of environmentalism. Bouma (2006, 162) refers to “spiritual innovation and creativity” outside the existing organisational forms of religious life, including “the growth of meditation and spirituality centres”. These ‘New Age’ forms of spirituality are “often inspired by paganisms and find awesome power that demands respect in the forces and beauty of nature” (162).

While the term “ecocriticism” has become increasingly prevalent in literary studies since its introduction a few decades ago (Barry 2009, 240), references to ‘ecospirituality’ are uncommon in Australian scholarship and, when located, are frequently embedded within popular culture or in somewhat facile New Age contexts. Tacey (2003, 176) claims that Australian youth spirituality

“points to the future integration of spiritual and ecological revolutions”. From personal observation with university students, he believes that “ecospirituality looms large for young people”, that

Nature is being experienced intensely and passionately and in literary terms “it seems that a movement close to Wordsworthian romanticism is upon us” (Tacey 2003, 181). In keeping with notions of deep ecology, Tacey reports that his students often express the view that “if one relates 190

to the world as an extension of oneself, as a field animated with life and meaning along the lines of the Gaia hypothesis, then one lives with profound sensitivity, care and concern” (Tacey 2000, 188).

Thus “a kind of cosmic religious awareness becomes virtually synonymous with the ecological revolution” and “this is not romantic escapism but sensible ecopolitics”.

Conceptions of ecospirituality or the sacredness of the natural environment are far from unique to the current era. Romantic notions of the Sublime have been present in literary, artistic and socio-cultural scholarship over the past two centuries, as alluded to by Tacey, with a more recent turn towards ecocritical approaches to literature that accompanies the awareness of environmental vulnerability in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Interwoven with ideas of Romanticism and the Sublime, the doctrine of Pantheism “asserts that the universe is God and, conversely, that there is no god apart from the substance, forces, and laws manifested in the universe” (‘Pantheism’, Merriam-Webster). Many Eastern religions have embraced Pantheistic beliefs and numerous ancient Greek philosophers contributed to the foundations of Western

Pantheism, followed in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance by Neoplatonism and Judeo-Christian mysticism. In the seventeenth century, Baruch Spinoza “formulated the most thoroughly pantheistic philosophical system” (Merriam-Webster), arguing that God and Nature are two names that signify one reality. In 1656, Spinoza was excommunicated from Judaism for reasons that are not historically clear but quite likely for “giving utterance to just those ideas that would soon appear in his philosophical treatises” (Nadler 2013, unpaginated). His denial of the immortality of the soul, rejection of belief in a transcendent providential God and his critique of Cartesian dualism in favour of universal ‘substance monism’ contravened the authoritative orthodoxy of his former religion. Consequently, according to Beth Lord (2010, 4), Spinoza “is indeed an ‘atheist’ insofar as he denies the existence of the God of theism – an anthropomorphic, intentional God to be feared, worshipped and obeyed…However, it is clear that Spinoza believes very strongly in God in a different sense: a God that is identical with nature”. Spinozan philosophy was embraced in artistic and literary domains, as “first German, and then English, Romanticism found Spinoza's pantheism in keeping with the striving and unorthodox spirit of their age” (Garrett 1996, 10). In the twentieth century, Spinoza’s views became were championed in environmental ideologies such as those

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developed by Arne Naess, the Norwegian philosopher attributed with coining the term ‘deep ecology’ (Naess 1973) and with related propositions that obfuscate the boundaries between the natural and the supernatural, the profane and the sacred, merging such apparent dualisms in an embodied and inclusive spirituality.

Deep ecology is concerned with “developing an egalitarian attitude on the part of humans not only toward all members of the ecosphere, but even toward all identifiable entities or forms in the ecosphere” (Sessions 1995, 270). Sessions asserts that this egalitarianism is intended to include

“such entities (or forms) as rivers, landscapes, and even species and social systems considered in their own right”. A number of the focus novels in this chapter epitomise such an approach and, in

Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf, even surpass it to confer anthropomorphic consciousness and egalitarian respect to manufactured entities such as vehicles, roads and houses. The deep ecology precepts of Naess (1973) distinguish between “nature-centred (‘deep’) ecology, which aspires to alter the norms of modernity’s anthropocentrism, and human-centred (‘shallow’) environmentalism, which aims to change socioeconomic practices without changing the anthropocentric premises of modernity” (Bradford et al 2008, 91). In 1984, Naess and Sessions

“summarized fifteen years of thinking on the principles of deep ecology” in eight basic principles:

1. The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: intrinsic value, inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes. 2. Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realization of these values and are also values in themselves. 3. Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital human needs. 4. The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease. 5. Present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening. 6. Policies must therefore be changed. These policies affect basic economic, technological, and ideological structures. The resulting state of affairs will be deeply different from the present. 7. The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent value) rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living. There will be a profound awareness of the difference between big and great. 8. Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation directly or indirectly to try to implement the necessary changes. (Sessions and Devall 1985, 70)

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While the premises of deep ecology may seem instinctively and superficially idyllic, there is a potentially disquieting angle when they are viewed from a purely human perspective, expressed in the fourth principle that “the flourishing of nonhuman life requires a smaller human population”.

This principle has understandably been subject to considerable controversy and anxiety, particularly when the natural world is viewed from an anthropomorphic perspective as Other

(Curry 2013, 160, 190-191) and deep ecology is characterised as a misanthropic ideology.

However, little attention is given to this facet in the focus texts of this chapter.

Literary perspectives Ecocritical analysis of YA fiction appears to be a growing trend both internationally and in

Australian texts, reflecting the escalation of environmental concern expressed in the public arena.

Massey and Bradford’s literature review (2011) of major arguments in the historical development of ecocriticism summarises the diverse positions taken by scholars and paradigmatic shifts that have characterised the development of ecocriticism since the middle of the twentieth century.

According to Love (1996, 228, cited in Bradford et al 2008), literature is an activity “which adapts us better to the world”, and it has the potential to play a role in “the welfare and survival of mankind” through the “insight it offers into human relationships with other species and with the world around us”. In addition to ethical perspectives, the inherent spiritual facets of ecocritical discourses are conspicuous. In Australian literature, ‘the bush’ – an all-encompassing term that refers to any setting that is not urban – assumes an awe-inspiring “spiritual dimension that is sensed and deferred to but not completely understood” (Foster et al 2005, 56). In a study of environmental crisis in YA fiction, Alice Curry (2013, 129-159) also highlights the spiritual attributes inherent in an ecofeminist reading of contemporary YA texts. She notes that the novels less likely to engender eco-consciousness in their young readers are those that “employ discourses of spiritual transcendence in place of ecological immanence” and those more likely to succeed in this way

“envision intimate and empathetic interaction between humans and the earth, often through allusions to Indigenous notions of holistic ecological sanctity” (Curry 2013, 129). This view of the relationship between transcendent and immanent discourses dovetails with Bakhtin’s theories of

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authoritative and internally persuasive discourses and the role of each mode in the development of a subject’s ideological becoming, which is aligned throughout this thesis with spiritual development.

Some critics have noted the challenges encountered by authors in constructing narratives that attempt to avoid the adoption of an anthropocentric perspective. On the notion of the ecological sublime, Rooney (2013, 56, citing Buell 1995, 7-8) notes that in ecocritical studies “the question of how to write, think and read ‘non-anthropocentrically’ has spurred interest in the workings of an environmental imagination, in texts that implicate human history in natural history, that decenter human frames, and that pursue an ethics of accountability to the nonhuman world”.

Many environmental dystopian YA texts are expressed in distinctly anthropocentric discourse in that “[P]roblems are caused by human greed and disregard for the natural world, and are solved by human intervention” and it can be difficult to achieve a more ecocentric perspective as such texts often “remain constrained by the intrinsic commitment to maturation narratives” which “tends to ensure than any environmental literature remains anthropocentric in emphasis’ (Bradford et al

2008, 90-91). Likewise, Stephens (2006, 41) notes that literature that “assumes and often promotes a concern for environmental issues…still positions humans as outside of nature and as the source of value and meaning” (my ellipses), a position favouring a shallow ecological outlook. However, he also notes the difficulties faced by children’s and young adult authors as “a represented landscape must include either humans to perceive it, or animals attributed with often anthropomorphic perception; a landscape must be the site for some kind of narrative; and human participants will grow and develop through contact with nature”. Sounding an inspiring note about the possibility of creating egalitarian ecological perspectives, Rigby (2004, 440) analyses works of art that succeed in this venture and invites authors “to redouble our endeavours to attune ourselves to the earth, lending our own human voices to its polyphonic song”.

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Faith and science conflicts Rational reflection

Two of my focus texts, The Rage of Sheep (Cooper 2007) and The Blue Feather (Crew and O’Hara

1997), overtly explore the relationship between modern scientific and religious discourses, manifested as more conflictive than concordant. While The Blue Feather moves from realism into a mystical mode, The Rage of Sheep remains firmly within the realistic genre in its pragmatic exploration of several contentious issues that pervade contemporary Australian youth culture, notably racism, homophobia, bullying and the isolation of rural youth as well as divisive religious beliefs. Cooper’s stated objective in writing The Rage of Sheep30 was to raise the neglected issue of religious conflict in Australian young adult literature in response to questions from her students after the 9/11 terrorist attacks (Haley 2008, 7). She achieves this aim with a first-person narrated realistic novel that affords a cognitive reading - as well as ecocritical and postsecular interpretations - through close focalisation by the main character and access to her mental processes. In the discussion of organised religion in Chapter 2, I asserted that The Rage of Sheep epitomises Bakhtin’s exemplification of the authoritative discourses of science, religion and popular culture with its metonymic utilisation of the momentous debate between creationism and evolution amid mundane adolescent concerns about popularity and fashion at a small-town

Australian high school. Echoing Bakhtin’s (1981, 342-343) identification of “the authority of religious dogma, or acknowledged scientific truth, or a currently fashionable book” as primary examples of authoritative discourse, all of these manifestations trouble the main protagonist, Hester

Jones.

The setting of The Rage of Sheep is a rural Australian town inhabited by a parochial community in the year 1984, utilising an intertextual reference to George Orwell’s futuristic dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty Four that embodies the struggle between social conformity and personal autonomy. This theme likewise permeates Cooper’s novel and parallels Bakhtin’s delineation of the struggle between authoritative and internally persuasive discourses in the development of ideological becoming. Over the period of a year, the novel chronologically traces

30 Discussed in Chapter 2. 195

the daily life of fifteen-year-old Hester, a ‘nerdy’ Christian Anglo-Indian girl whose only school friend has moved to another town, leaving Hester to negotiate schoolyard conventions that evoke feelings of alienation and otherness in her. Conveyed largely in comedic style, Hester’s unsuccessful attempts to tolerate her ‘embarrassing’ parents and to conform to the norms imposed by a dominant and narrow-minded group of students – the metaphoric sheep of the title - prompt her to question their actual relevance to her life, concurrently with an interrogation of her religious beliefs.

In customary Bildungsroman style, Hester transitions from dependence on her school colleagues’ approval to psychological self-sufficiency and ideological becoming. Throughout the year, she concurrently relinquishes her dependence on God and Biblical guidance but retains her appreciation of science. Where she would once have asked herself “what would Jesus do” when confronted with a dilemma, the more mature Hester acquires confident autonomy like the free- thinking goats maligned in Biblical parables and valorised by her gay English teacher, Mr Everett, in contrast to unthinking conformist sheep. The intertextual Bible reference supports the novel’s underlying theme of interrogation of religious authority. The concept of intellectual conflict is augmented by the contrast between Mr Everett, the liberal-minded but jaded English teacher and the dogmatically enthusiastic science teacher, ‘Colonel’ Saunders. This contrast is partially saved from the cliché of hard science versus soft humanities by strategies such as the inclusion of the tolerant and perceptive maths teacher, Ms Olivier, who aligns herself with the English teacher, thereby offsetting the binary oppositions that could have transpired. The characterisation of Hester herself, with her well-rounded embodiment of religious faith, scientific rationality, scholarly ability and compassion, enables her to achieve an immanent confidence and transcend the prejudices of the authoritative discourses that surround her.

The creationism-evolution debate is most patently manifested in a school research project on the renowned Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925. The legal trial arose from the actions of a science teacher, John Scopes, who defied the law of the State of Tennessee by teaching the theory of evolution in a state-funded school. As a gifted science student and a Christian, Hester can readily integrate the empirical evidence of evolutionary theory with the symbolism of Biblical accounts of

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creation. She claims that “it's possible to be a Christian and still think logically and scientifically…There are lots of scientists who believe in God and evolution. You can believe that

God created the world gradually through evolution” (106-107, my ellipses). However, her science partner and potential love-interest, Joshua Mason, espouses a literal interpretation of the Bible.

Although claiming to favour creationism merely on the grounds of his faith, he expresses eagerness about the possible scientific verification of the Noah’s Ark legend, exposing a lack of intrinsic confidence in his professed beliefs. Joshua’s need to believe the truth of the Bible reinforces

Spinoza’s view that religion is a useful fictional construct that humans use to maintain order and authority in an irrational world (Lord 2011).

The novel leans towards an ultimate triumph of scientific rationalism over supernatural belief as Hester moves towards agnosticism. Early in the narrative (9-10), she had responded automatically to Colonel Saunders’ question about what constitutes science with the ingrained mantra, “the study of the physical universe, based on observation, experiment and measurement” but simultaneously reproached herself as “a very wimpy Christian” for her lack of courage to publicly defend her religious beliefs. By the novel’s conclusion (245), Hester has progressed psychologically to the confession that Doubting Thomas had always been her favourite disciple because, like a scientist, he demanded empirical evidence to support his belief. Emulating

Spinoza’s philosophy, Hester eventually dispenses with her belief in a personal god, although not quite to the point of atheism. Although her modified beliefs are not articulated, she has transitioned from the need for a transcendent authoritative god towards a more immanent and internally persuasive spirituality that encompasses self-actualisation and ideological becoming.

Mystical exploration

Far removed from the small-town schoolyard events in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, the settings for Crew and O’Hara’s spiritual quest narrative, The Blue Feather31, are the wild and isolated landscapes of the Western Australian desert and southern coast. There is little depiction of the built or domestic environment apart from cursory references to the town of Esperance and its

31 Discussed in Chapter 4. 197

museum filled with artefacts and curiosities that embody memories of human endeavours. These manufactured objects prompt the scientific photojournalist, Mala Glass, to remark portentously that

“in all our attempts to conquer the world, every scheme has fallen victim to the powers of nature”

(52), pre-empting a significant premise of the novel. The removal of the events from the human- made environment and a lack of specific chronological markers create an ambiguous chronotope in which science and spirituality, the natural and the supernatural, are liberated from the restrictive practicalities of everyday life, facilitating an unfettered dialogic reconciliation between the apparent polarities of reason and faith. Webb (2000, 80) observes that the quest of the three main protagonists, Mala, Greg and Simon, “moves them out of the known environs of civilisation into the bush where anxieties and fears can be nakedly confronted” and “the conflict between spirituality and contemporary ‘civilised’ culture is played out in the defining environment of

Australia itself”. The exploration of the science-religion conflict is thus framed by the natural environment, enabling an ecocritical reading. Despite the anxieties, fears and existential conflicts portrayed, Mills (1998, 31) claims that of Crew’s longer fictional works, this is the most consoling and the least ambiguous, an effect attributed partly to its collaborative authorship with O’Hara. She further contends (33) that this fantasy quest “is a relief that Crew rarely affords his readers”, in contrast with the usual “confused and doubtful arena” that his writing inhabits. I suggest that this attribute of the novel also constitutes a weakness that is largely engendered through an overtly didactic approach that denies agency to the reader in interpreting the existential meaning of the text. McKenna and Pearce (1999, 204) agree with Mills that The Blue Feather is Crew’s “most optimistic book to date” and that it is “distinguished by its interweaving of environmental and spiritual issues”, thus ratifying its pertinence in the current discussion.

While The Rage of Sheep confines itself to a realistic cognitive exploration of the science- religion conflict with little attention to ecological issues, The Blue Feather is replete with symbolism and mythical allusions in its mystical approach to environmentalism. The two main settings - the desert wilderness and a remote coastal stretch - are natural environments that have been particularly associated with spirituality in Australian fiction as well as being key settings for defining national identity. In a study of Australian women’s spirituality, Lindsay (2000, x) claims

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that ‘Desert Spirituality’ is the “most popular paradigm of Australian Spirituality”, arguing that it is a particularly male paradigm, “constructed from biblical sources and a variety of male texts and male experiences”. Tim Winton (1993, 21), a writer who is often considered to epitomise both spirituality and environmentalism in Australian literature, expresses a sense of connectedness with

“the wild shores of Western Australia where desert meets sea” and ponders that “Australians are surrounded by ocean and ambushed from behind by desert – a war of mystery on two fronts” but concedes that “the desert is a spiritual place, we vaguely understand, and the sea the mere playground of our hedonism” (Winton 1993, 36). These are the landscapes that encompass The

Blue Feather, providing evocative backgrounds for the portrayal of spiritual quests and contests between the natural and the supernatural.

The ostensible objective of the novel’s quest is to prove or disprove the existence of a giant bird, the Wazo, a purportedly marvellous creature which functions symbolically in the text in that the “bird myth is a fusing device, a way of bringing together disparate elements so that they can share a narrative of experience, a reality” (Webb 2000, 80). As with most mythical and supernatural entities, folk rumours about sightings of and encounters with the bird are erratic and defy identification with known species, creating a dilemma for any potential scientific investigation of its existence. The novel thus considers the nature of belief in the absence of scientific evidence and the quest for the giant bird in this way suggests an attempt to prove the existence of mystifying concepts and ideas such as God and the numinous. In the quest, each of the main characters

“confronts the complex ecosystems of their natural, social and spiritual worlds” (Austlit, The Blue

Feather,) inviting ecocritical and ecospiritual readings. Of the book’s secondary characters, the most significant are the three spiritual guides: the solitary old sapphire miner, McTaggart; the

Esperance Museum’s Dr Gwen; and most significantly, Atman, the camel driver and collector of rare desert flowers. Atman’s name, which roughly translates to ‘essential self’ or ‘soul’, overtly denotes his symbolic role in the novel. Devall (1995, 104) notes that the ecological self “is not an entity or a thing, it is an opening to discovering what some call the Absolute or in Sanskrit, atman”.

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Mala, the rational scientific photojournalist, can be likened to Doubting Thomas (Mills

1998, 32), in that she requires physical evidence in order to believe in the existence of the giant bird. In a similar sense, a Biblical allusion to Thomas is used in The Rage of Sheep. Birds are common metaphors for spirituality, as noted earlier in this thesis regarding the symbolism of various kinds of winged creatures. The giant bird is a bringer of “spiritual rebirth as well as psychological healing and initiation” (Mills 1998, 32), reinforcing its significance as a divine saviour of the questers. Along with the recurrent religious and Jungian symbolism (Jung and Von

Franz 1964) of winged creatures, water and desert in The Blue Feather, the motifs of sight, vision and perspective permeate the novel suggesting different ways of comprehending ‘the truth’, particularly from apparently conflicting scientific and spiritual perspectives. Raised in India with her “ignorant and superstitious” grandmother (21), Mala initially exhibits a dogmatic scientific attitude often witnessed among New Atheists who tend to “exhibit an unusually high level of confidence in their views” (Taylor 2010, unpaginated). Yet she is unable to recognise her own biases as she views the world through her “own confining lens” (157), despite her contention that

“I’m forcing myself to be a good scientist, Shane, and trying to keep my mind open to all possibilities” (119). This pronouncement immediately follows her derision of credulous people -

“The more I talk to people, the more I realise how easily they can be fooled. They want to believe in the rumour of the Wazo, so they talk themselves into seeing it” (118). However, after her personal encounter with the giant bird, she reiterates, in a rather laboured fashion that reflects the novel’s general didacticism, her newfound acceptance of the ‘different cultures’ and acquisition of

‘different stories’ in the myths of her superstitious grandmother and her own scientific facts. Mala had already begun to realise that she was relinquishing her scientific dogmatism in favour of other ways of knowing: “Thinking back, I realise that my usual logic had disappeared and it was as though I was in another mind state” (211). Thus the conflictive relationship between science and religion finds a point of accord in the mutual desire to discover ‘truth’ by different methods.

As Dixon (2008, 22) argues, “debates about science and religion virtually always involve disagreements about the relative authority of different sources of knowledge”. This assertion again recalls Bakhtin’s account (1981, 342) of the authoritative discourses of “religious dogma, or

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acknowledged scientific truth” and implies a transcendent authority. Yet the quest for knowledge in

The Blue Feather more fittingly invokes the words of Joseph Campbell ([1949] 1993, 18) quoted in the novel’s peritext - “where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the centre of our own existence”. This view is echoed in the text when Atman counsels fifteen-year-old Simon regarding his diminished vision due to having lost an eye as a child: “For you there is the greater possibility of looking not only out, but in – and the gift of inward seeing is the greatest gift of all…” (166). Transcendent or external sources of knowledge, such as scientific evidence, thus defer to more immanent ways of knowing and discovering meaning in The Blue Feather. As the bird sanctuary manager, Greg expresses it as, “there are certain things that you just know. Certain things that defy scientific proof. And I know that bird is out there” (138), again inferring a belief in mystical or spiritual entities in the absence of evidence. Elsewhere, Greg articulates his experience of transcendent perceptions succumbing to immanent knowledge:

Out here, away from everyone, you learn that it’s the landscape itself that’s your best teacher. The solitude. The space. The ways of the desert and the mountains and the heat. The elements that throw you back on yourself. That force you to look in.” (202)

External authoritative discourses thus defer to internally persuasive discourses in the process of the subject’s ideological becoming.

Where The Rage of Sheep interrogates the hegemonic Christian beliefs that would have been customary in an Australian rural town in the 1980s, The Blue Feather introduces a broader spectrum of religious views, all set against a background of mystical natural wilderness. Judeo-

Christian Biblical allusions coexist with Eastern spiritual traditions, signified by Hindu and

Buddhist character names (Atman and Mala), as well as Jungian symbolism (Jung 1964, 151) and the mysticism inherent in the hero’s quest delineated by Joseph Campbell. Mills (1998, 32) perceives aspects of the hero myth in Simon’s quest, noting that he “crosses a threshold from the normal everyday world into a symbolic landscape” with Biblical and classical allusions to resurrection. His quest is fulfilled in his epiphanic encounter with the giant bird, the bringer of spiritual rebirth, and its chicks. Simon’s epiphany heralds his process of ideological becoming as he looks to the birds “acknowledging their presence – their beauty” and proclaims “I am Simon

Meekam. And I will be. I will be…OK?” (222). The final question mark casts some doubt over

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Simon’s confidence about his future, supporting Mills’ claim (1998, 25) that “almost all Crews’ works of fiction are characterised by doubt”, including The Blue Feather despite its relative optimism. Towards its conclusion, the novel verges towards banal sentimentality with its excessive and clichéd symbolism, compounded by its didactic tenor. The risk of sentimentalism is weakened, however, through the text’s “toughness”, demonstrated by the mystical bird’s aggressively carnivorous behaviour towards humans (Mills 1998, 32). This aspect demonstrates a realistic earthly attribute to balance the laboured spiritual symbolism. A further reprieve from sentimentality is achieved through the open-ended conclusion in which each of the questers retains unresolved challenges at the book’s ‘happy ending’ and the birds themselves are at risk of destruction through human greed and curiosity, should their existence be revealed. This dilemma remains a matter of doubt at the end, providing the reader with an ethical question for consideration and the ending “is not altogether consoling, nor does it offer complete narrative closure” (Mills 1998, 32).

Although it has been argued that most of Crew’s fiction is characterised by doubt, the exploration of the science-religion conflict in The Blue Feather lauds the supremacy of supernatural ways of knowing, particularly as expressed by Mala, the converted former atheist, who finally concedes that she “can’t say” whether the stories she calls science are “any more truthful than myth” (231). The novel leans towards the authority of spiritual belief in its positive portrayal of the shamanistic Atman and in the existence of the mystical giant bird, evidenced by its sighting by the two most sceptical characters. Unlike in The Rage of Sheep, agnostic doubt is given little credence. The reader might sense that the authors are on more familiar and favoured territory with religious rather than scientific discourses. This is not surprisingly, as O’Hara spent some time as a Buddhist monk and Crew, who was raised in a Christadelphian family, is renowned for his exploration of the uncanny and the mysterious (McKenna and Pearce 1999, 206). McKenna and

Pearce contend that the novel aims to “develop an argument for a more caring, more spiritually aware society” and I suggest that it equally upholds the principles of deep ecology, as expressed at the conclusion by Mala:

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But what strikes me as crucial is that we humans don’t exist in isolation. I’m realising more and more that we live in an ecosystem that is complex and diverse and all its components play a part in some way. The more species that die off, the weaker the system becomes. (233)

Yet, Lovelock and others perceive a retaliatory anthropomorphic ecosystem that responds angrily to environmental destruction (Lovelock 2006, Hamilton 2014), as glimpsed in this novel and in

Shaedow Master, discussed below. Revisiting Mala’s portentous comment about human-made objects in the museum, The Blue Feather confirms that in the Australian landscape portrayed here,

“all our attempts to conquer the world…[have] fallen victim to the powers of nature” (52, my ellipses). The novel is thus saved to some extent from its pervasive didacticism by the ambivalent conclusion, particularly as scientific Mala remains undecided about whether or not to expose the astounding discovery of the giant bird and thereby threaten it with extinction. She acknowledges an

Australian precedent in the case of the (extinct) thylacine as she laments, “I’m told that each time there’s a reported sighting of a Tasmanian Tiger, hundreds of people gather, some to look but some with rifles ready!” (233). Such dilemmas are further explored in The Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf

(Hartnett 1999).

Nature and culture conflicts Almost realism

The next two focus novels share with The Blue Feather motifs of endangered, and almost mythic, nonhuman beings that embody sacred Nature - the extinct thylacine in the realistic Stripes of the

Sidestep Wolf and the fictitious Dalfen in the fantasy Shaedow Master. Sonya Hartnett’s Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf (hereafter referred to as Stripes) departs from the science-religion debate addressed explicitly in the previous two novels to explore the demarcation between nature and culture which, according to Garrard (179), is the essence of ecocriticism. In the cultural domain, the novel aligns idiosyncrasies of religious belief with mental delusion, even madness, juxtaposed with the coherence that inhabits Nature. The dichotomous elements in Stripes involve a further struggle between self-interest and altruism, played out in an ecocentric setting of the natural environment and its nonhuman inhabitants. The novel overtly investigates spirituality through the 203

family’s churchgoing practice and the father’s deluded religiosity, enhanced by explicit Biblical language and nuances in concepts such as atonement and redemption, as well as a more subtle infusion of the nonhuman world with spiritual energies. In contrast to its conventional religious constructs, the novel expresses a strong sense of deep ecology through the main protagonist,

Satchel’s immersion in and affinity with Nature. Another main focaliser, the thylacine or

Tasmanian tiger32, is an animal believed to have been hunted to extinction but it takes on a sacred significance for those who believe in its ongoing existence, continue to search for it and report numerous sightings. The rediscovery of the thylacine might be seen as akin to a religious resurgence in the postsecular era.

The novel is focalised primarily by twenty-three year old Satchel O’Rye who lives with his parents in a dying rural town in a mountainous region of south eastern Australia. The setting is identified by Hartnett (2010, unpaginated) as being in “the mists of Hanging Rock” in Victoria, providing an intertextual link to another mystical Australian novel, the iconic Picnic at Hanging

Rock (Lindsay 1967) although this link and the location are not explicated in Stripes. The novel opens with focalisation by a secondary but significant nonhuman character, the thylacine or eponymous ‘sidestep wolf’, referred to only as ‘the animal’ throughout the third person narration of the book. Connectedness between Satchel and the animal is constructed through the narrative technique of shifting focalisation between the two, with alternating and overlapping articulations of their perceptions, suggesting a spiritual affinity. The first brief mountain-top encounter between

Satchel and the animal is divulged to “the local pariah”, Chelsea, who recognises a thylacine in

Satchel’s description of the animal and urges him to capture it, initially with noble intentions of

‘redeeming’ humanity from its sin of environmental destruction (74). But Chelsea’s idealism quickly turns to avarice with her vision of being “rich and famous” as a result of the capture (135).

Satchel’s family has struggled financially for several years since his father, William, closed his service station, declaring that “God will provide” and that he must stop working in order to demonstrate his faith in God’s promise. William has since occupied himself by painting miniature

32 The thylacine was commonly known as the Tasmanian tiger and the Tasmanian wolf. At one time the animal was found throughout continental Australia, extending north to New Guinea and south to Tasmania. In recent times it was confined to Tasmania where its presence has not been established conclusively for more than seventy years. Source: http://australianmuseum.net.au/the-thylacine. 204

‘holy family’ portraits with Jesus and Joseph resembling Satchel and himself. To earn money for the family’s survival, Laura, the submissive mother, works arduous night shifts as a nurse while

Satchel takes short-term jobs as a carpenter, evoking an allusion to Christ which is reinforced by his later decision to move to the coast and become a fisherman.

Out of loyalty to his dysfunctional family, and perhaps fear of the wider world, Satchel rejects two opportunities to escape his dismal life in the oppressive small town. One lucrative offer from his former employer, Gosling, involves a carpentry job “up the coast” in “a land of cyclones and sea” (179) but Satchel’s procrastination costs him the job. He is jolted into action only when his beloved dog, Moke – another sign of Satchel’s affinity with the nonhuman world - needs an expensive operation after being injured when accidentally hit by Satchel’s car. In anguish and despair, Satchel physically assaults his father and storms out of home, escaping to the sanctuary of the mountain that looms over the town. On the mountain-top, in a parody of his deluded father’s faith that “God will provide”, Satchel:

prayed to the God of his mother, who was merciful and pitying, and he prayed to the God of his father, who commanded thunderbolts and could twist the world off its axis….Give me another way, he prayed: provide. (186, my ellipses)

Immediately, as he opens his eyes he encounters ‘the animal’ for a second time, now with an infant thylacine, and Satchel is aware how easily he could reach out, take the pup and be rewarded for this astonishing discovery of a purportedly extinct creature, thereby alleviating his debilitating poverty.

This seems to be the answer to his prayer but, beyond this, he ponders that if he found a thylacine

“people could forgive themselves for some of the things they’d done. They would look at a caged creature and see in it redemption for themselves” (189). However, his mental image of a caged thylacine makes him realise “that was not the way for a survivor to live” (189). Rather than turn the animal into a Christ-like sacrificial offering to redeem human sin, Satchel’s epiphany that “[i]n the end, the only thing that would help him would be something he already owned” (190) leads to his achievement of personal autonomy and ideological becoming.

Although the plot events involving the discovery of a lost species could have been rendered artificial, such an outcome is avoided by the skilfully crafted storytelling and the thought-

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provoking conclusion with Satchel taking action that could be considered foolish in light of his material needs. His decision to reject the opportunity to profit at the expense of the thylacine expresses a deep ecological morality which results in Satchel’s spiritually gratifying ideological becoming. Regarding the ambiguities of the thylacine’s existence in this novel, Macintyre (1999,

40) asks “it is a sign or a symbol but of what?”, highlighting the novel’s deliberately challenging and unstable meanings as its “interpretations are as tantalising as the almost mystical tiger” (40).

Following Satchel’s moral decision to transcend his avaricious impulses and leave the miraculous creature untouched on the sacred mountain:

He felt dazed by what had happened, and beneath that he felt a tremendous, soaring joy. His mind had ceased its awful whirling and he felt alive and unafraid. He discovered he was smiling, that he was churned with exultation and he wanted to laugh and yell. He would describe the feeling to William and tell his father that he was not wrong: sometimes, something god-like did provide. He would go to the ocean and throw his fate into the sea. (190-191)

Both human and nonhuman entities in Stripes possess consciousness and are imbued with a spiritual life-force in a way often observed in Indigenous spiritualities. Hawkes (2001, 67) claims that in non-Indigenous Australian literature, it is commonly found that portrayals of “[t]he environment and all the nonhuman creatures that inhabit it are set up as being in opposition to the human”. She argues that Hartnett has been successful in dismantling the divisive “human versus nonhuman” binaries and this is manifestly demonstrated in Stripes. The interrelationship between apparent binary oppositions of human and animal is particularly evident in Satchel’s relationship with his dog, Moke, who he “hardly registered” as a dog but thinks of her more like a soul-mate:

Hers was the face he saw on waking: she was the one who wanted to be with him, the one who watched and waited for him, who felt his absence badly. She was a clown when he needed cheering, the ears for his thoughts and plans. She had given him reason to get up in the morning (152-153)

Complementing this affinity are the overlapping focalisations by Satchel and the thylacine that occur between section ends and beginnings. For example, one section finishes with “[The animal] flopped, then, onto its side, its legs stretching stiffly before curling up to its chest, and fell soundly asleep”, followed immediately by the next section commencing with “Satchel woke at dawn, his face against the mattress” (138-139), mystically connecting the human and animal.

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The idea of the interconnectedness of all forms of existence is reinforced throughout the novel by the anthropomorphisation of inanimate entities, both natural and manufactured. Satchel’s car “was cranky in the morning” (83), the school bus “didn’t like being driven fast and it could hold a grudge for days” (146) and the highway “always reminded [Satchel] of something young and harebrained, something aware of its size but not of its strength” (25). Conscious agency is similarly bestowed on abstract concepts, such as when Satchel perceives that “events rearranged his existence before his eyes” (178). The deep ecological principles extend from domestic and wild animals to the deified mountain that overshadows the town:

The mountain was a benign ruler now, but what a different landscape it must have been when the volcano was active, a scorching despot that drooled fire when it spoke, and spat blazingly. (176)

A parallel could be drawn between the mountain as it is described here and the pervasive influence of religion in the life of the community.

Although expressed in humanist language, the anthropocentric worldview succumbs to a pantheistic realm of sacred energies, suggesting a dialogic connectedness between the natural world and humans, exemplified in Satchel’s rejection of the opportunity to benefit materially at the expense of the thylacine. The novel thus concludes, somewhat uncharacteristically for Hartnett, with an uplifting and joyful outcome in which the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman dissolve. According to Hawkes (2011, 70), “Hartnett writes with a green consciousness, almost a posthumanist approach, that decentres the human’s perspective as the most important or only perspective”. She does not believe, though, that Hartnett intentionally writes ecocrically “but rather that environmental concerns are embedded within her writing” and that, as described above,

“she highlights that there are other consciousnesses at work” (Hawkes 2011, 70). Referring to The

Midnight Zoo (Hartnett 2010), Hawkes notes that the protagonist’s point of maturity is aligned with

“the point at which he questions his human-centric focus. He realises that there are alternative consciousnesses”. Similarly, in Stripes Satchel intuitively perceives alternative consciousnesses and his worldview is removed from the human-centredness that is normative in his culture. In his development of ideological becoming and “ever newer ways to mean” Bakhtin (1981, 346), Satchel

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displays tremendous empathy towards the nonhuman world and a sensitivity to its spirituality. His final vow to “go to the ocean and throw his fate into the sea” is consistent with his deep ecological sensibilities and affinity with Nature.

Apparently disparate belief systems are portrayed in Stripes. The parents’ divergent versions of traditional Catholicism are contrasted with Satchel’s unarticulated view of a pantheistic natural world which seems antagonistic towards human religion and displays its wrath when the family are in church:

Outside it was raining, the wind battering the drops against the stained windows angrily as if some natural force despised what the congregation was doing, shut away and murmuring. (121)

Satchel’s immanent spirituality is dominated by his connectedness to animals and to the deified volcano that accords with Spinoza’s convergent concept of “God, or Nature”. Satchel perceives the mountain as “a benign ruler now” noting “what a different landscape it must have been when the volcano was active” (176). When climbing it, he feels that he is trespassing on holy ground as “he expected the mountain to throw him off at any moment, shaking him away like a beast that feels the feet of a fly tickling a sensitive spot” but “[h]e told the volcano that he had nothing better to do”

(173). The spiritual significance of mountains to human cultures, as perceived by Satchel, was noted by Arne Naess, the ‘father of deep ecology’ as well as being a mountaineer and academic philosopher, who asserted that

I know no culture [that has] looked at the mountain as minerals. On the contrary they have always looked at very strong symbols, for instance the contact between the earthly life and heaven, and gods are very rarely thought of to live anywhere. They live in heaven or they live on top of the mountains, or higher mountains. Some mountains are holy in many cultures and you speak to them, you ask them for good advice, and so on. (Naess 2009)

The seeming disparity between Satchel’s and his father’s belief systems is finally bridged when

Satchel resolves to tell William about his epiphanic moment on the mountain, knowing that he would understand (191). William’s literal interpretation of the Biblical promise, however, is shallow and egocentric compared with Satchel’s altruistic self-actualisation. Perhaps it is because he lives in a family that is dysfunctional by normative standards, with a deluded father and a mother defeated by her life’s circumstances, that Satchel has such a strong affinity with the 208

nonhuman world. His empathy prepares him for the final sacrificial act which becomes an expression of respect for the principles of deep ecology and embraces Spinoza’s concept of the divinity of nature. In protecting the thylacine from exposure to the materialism of human society,

Satchel achieves spiritual redemption for himself. In contrast to the overtly pedagogical approach of The Blue Feather, Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf bestows autonomy on the reader to ponder and evaluate the wisdom and morality of Satchel’s actions.

Otherworldly fantasy

Departing from the ‘almost realism’ of Stripes, the speculative secondary world fantasy Shaedow

Master (D’ath 2003)33 probes social and ecological issues of readers’ primary worlds as it thematises anthropocentric destruction of the environment. While a sacred dolphin-like creature, the Dalfen, functions as a metonym for the threatened sanctity of the earth, the novel also includes wildlife, vegetation, natural resources and Indigenous people on its endangered list. The novel metaphorically embraces postcolonial Indigenous issues more obviously than in the other focus novels discussed throughout this thesis. Shaedow Master is set at an unspecified time in an imaginary country, Folavia, that in many ways mirrors cultural aspects of modern Australia particularly with regard to its Indigenous population, the Guests, and a colonial ruling culture, the

Folavians. These two groups are derogatively denoted by each other as Skiffers and Squatters respectively. Another powerful group of characters, the almost posthuman Outworlders, have a trading relationship with the Folavians and manifest attributes that suggest real-world Englishness, such as the red and white crosses on their armour, thus evoking notions of cultural hegemony.

Before the Guests arrived, Folavia (known as Lakeland to the Guests) was inhabited by the original

Lakelanders, who at the time of the novel exist only in the form of spirits or shaedows. The shaedows reside in Quickwater Lake which became contaminated through the actions of the current

King of Folavia.

Apart from some oblique remarks in Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf, Shaedow Master is the one focus novel of this chapter that overtly evokes allusions to Australian Indigenous spirituality,

33 Discussed in Chapter 4. 209

with its explicit references to the Guests’ beliefs and their explanations of the history of the land – stories that are disparaged by the Folavians as superstitions or fairytales. The reader learns early in the plot that the main focalising character, Lady Ora Bellarius, is the only living being to have survived falling into Quickwater Lake, bestowing on her a messianic aura. As the event occurred when she was a baby, Ora knows the story only through hearing contradictory versions of retellings. The Folavians maintain that her survival was the lucky result of floating to the lake’s edge on a wooden lifesaver ring but the Guests’ mythology attributes it not to luck but to the intervention of the sacred Dalfen. The latter story is concealed from Ora until, just before her fifteenth birthday when she is due to ascend to the throne of Folavia, she inadvertently hears it from

Tasman, a Guest boy who befriends her. Ora sceptically suspects it is merely part of the Guests’ naïve superstitious belief system, echoing real-world attitudes to Indigenous spiritual stories in many cultures. Through the authoritative discourse of her schooling, Ora had been taught that

“shaedows were mysteries of Nature, like rainbows and flying stars; nobody knew what they were” and she had not believed Tasman’s explanation of his people’s belief that shaedows were lake spirits, “controlled by a mysterious person called the Shaedow Master, who lived in the lake and looked after the health of the whole kingdom – or ‘the Land’, as Tasman called it” (44). The

Guests’ signification of “the Land” again reverberates with Australian Indigenous views of the interrelationship between themselves and the earth.

The third person narrative with close focalisation by Ora grants the reader close access to her experiences, thoughts and emotions, supplemented by plot events and dialogues with other characters that arouse doubts about the reliability of Ora’s perceptions, doubts that she experiences herself regarding the colonial version of history that she has been raised on. It is gradually revealed through analepsis that King Raoul is remorseful that, in his youth, he had intentionally slain the unique Dalfen – like the albatross of Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’ – and in in the process had accidentally killed his Indigenous friend Skiff. In an attempted atonement and rectification of the consequences of his act, he allowed the Outworlders to harvest the sacred Cloudtoucher trees in exchange for gold with which he hoped to appease the spirits in the contaminated lake. One of

Raoul’s many misunderstandings of Nature is that the lake spirits were not demanding the metal

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gold, but his daughter Ora, whose name means gold. His misguided behaviour of course exacerbates his moral debt by interfering with the ecosystem which produces rain, threatening the land with drought and environmental crisis. Enraged about Raoul’s sacrilege, the Shaedow Master had driven the shaedows from the lake and turned it to quickwater which drowned any creature that entered it. The shaedows had then become “homeless wraiths that flitted to and fro across the lake’s surface awaiting the day when their master would call them back” (45). These stories, as well as evoking pantheistic and Romantic images, resonate with Judeo-Christian religious beliefs about the return of a messiah. In the ecofeminist rendering of the novel, Ora is eventually revealed to be the predestined Shaedow Master as she heroically accepts her calling, as Aqua-Ora, and disappears into the ecologically regenerated lake. In surrendering her human self to become the

Shaedow Master, Ora merges with the natural ecosystem and acknowledges that “[I]t was all connected, and at the centre of everything was the Dalfen” (265) who represents sacred Nature, recalling Spinoza’s monistic concept of ‘God, or Nature’. In his distressed awareness of his transgressions, Raoul had proclaimed to Ora that “Nothing in nature is evil, Princess…It is only men who are evil” (21, my ellipses), highlighting the essence of the nature-culture relationship in the novel.

Folavia is accordingly portrayed as a country threatened by water shortages, environmental contamination and the extinction of wildlife, apparently resulting from anthropogenic causes – a scenario familiar to contemporary Australians. According to Bradford et al (2008, 82), Shaedow

Master is a fantasy about nature-culture reweaving and is “arguably the first novel for YA readers to achieve a highly successful combination of ecological and postcolonial perspectives” which

“strives to decentre the human actant through a unique transformation of the maturation narrative”

(100). Such nature-culture reweaving permeates the narrative, beginning with the indication in the first chapter of Ora’s compassionate and innate connectedness to the nonhuman natural world when she risks her safety to rescue a duckling in danger of drowning in Quickwater Lake – “Ora’s only thoughts were for the duckling” (7). However, although Nature is vulnerable to the greed and technological expertise of humans, it is not a submissive victim. The lake demonstrates that it can be a violent agential force that devours any creature that enters it, particularly when it swells up and

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destroys Ora’s lifeboat, attempting to reclaim her (61-62). This violent behaviour evokes notions of

“the revenge of Gaia” postulated by Lovelock (2006) and the “angry beast that we’ve awoken” which “still demands our respect, but it is a respect founded on trepidation rather than love”

(Hamilton 2014, unpaginated). Hamilton believes the Earth should be regarded “not as the all- loving, all-nurturing Mother Earth of the romantics, but more like the half-crazed, bloodthirsty and vindictive goddess of the original Greek tales”. Although this view neglects the trepidation and awe experienced in the Romantic concept of the Sublime, the perception of the earth’s autonomous agency is well represented in Shaedow Master. As Curry (2013, 154) asserts about the novel’s ecological significance, “if the earth is to be regarded as an entity with intrinsic value it must be acknowledged to have its own individual agency and to be capable – at some level – of influencing the course of events”. The principles of deep ecology and Spinoza’s belief that Nature is equivalent to God are thus evoked by this proposition.

Ora’s process of ideological becoming develops throughout the novel as she integrates the rigid authoritative discourses absorbed in her childhood with the more fluid allegorical epistemologies of the Guests, along with the internally persuasive discourses that grow from her experiences and her perceptions of Nature. In other words, “Ora’s understanding of the intrinsic, rather than instrumental, value of the earth takes shape through her parallel understanding of the earth as an agential ethical agent” (Curry 2013, 154). Aqua-Ora comes to embody the reconciliation and dismantling of boundaries between the natural and the supernatural, culture and nature, the colonisers and the colonised. As the child of a racially mixed relationship between a

Folavian and a Guest – with the despised fair hair and blue eyes of the Guests, in an inversion of racial stereotypes - she bridges the division between the two opposing cultures, being a member of both. In privileging the fate of the natural environment over the brutality and greed of her human culture, she reconciles culture and nature and in her acceptance of the role of Shaedow Master, she unites the natural and the supernatural. In each of these apparently oppositional dichotomies she becomes “a hybrid who might speak for both” (Bradford et al 2008, 101). A sense of the ‘holiness’ of the natural environment recurs throughout the text – “they didn’t realise until too late that every part of the countryside was holy: every creature, every plant, every blade of grass” (243). With her

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increasing consciousness of this pervasive holiness, Ora’s ideological becoming is framed in an ecospiritual narrative that integrates discourses “in a way not commonly found in YA fantasy”

(Bradford et al 2008, 100). Shaedow Master thus provides a broad-ranging portrayal of the nature- culture relationship that invites a sophisticated ecospiritual reading and the novel’s ecological sanctity is accompanied by a discourse of spiritual awakening (Curry 2013, 154-155).

Conclusion Children’s and YA environmental texts “reflect shifting global agendas and predict future possibilities” (Massey and Bradford 2011, 109) that have the potential to engender a sense of ecocitizenship in their readers. As well as alerting the reader to ecological issues in realistic or fantasy settings, as well as in hybrid modes that obscure the boundaries between genres, the texts considered here facilitate the integration of apparently oppositional dichotomies to stimulate fresh perspectives and reveal “ever newer ways to mean”. Rather than valorising science over religion or culture over nature, or the inverse of these often hierarchical categories, the most effective of the texts reject the urge to maintain a sense of opposition, in favour of dissolving the boundaries and merging the concepts, resulting in a sense of embodied spirituality. Readers are positioned to respond to this through such strategies as shifting focalisation and narrative perspective and through interrogative rather than didactic approaches that encourage the development of internally persuasive discourses.

The two novels that overtly address conflicts between science and spiritual belief - The

Rage of Sheep and The Blue Feather - take a somewhat reductive approach that reinforces ideas of conflict and competition between opposing perspectives, when compared with the more subtle and complex explorations of Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf and Shaedow Master. It is worth noting that although the latter two novels present an ecocentric perspective in sympathy with the principles of deep ecology, Nature is not presented as a benign or idyllic concept but as an agential entity with the potential to influence its own future by demanding cooperation rather than exploitation from humans. Rather than Othering all nonhuman existence, these novels reflect the idea that “‘Nature’ flips from referring to all that stands outside the human, all that is other to the human in the

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environing world, to everything most deeply human, all that runs through and governs humanity as species” (Rooney 2013, 55). Consequently, these ecological YA novels express sense of contemporary morality that is relevant to young Australians in the twenty-first century. When considered within a framework of ecocriticism, ecospirituality and deep ecology, the apparent dichotomies that divide the natural and the supernatural, religion and science, culture and nature, cannot be viewed as discrete and opposing concepts, but rather as interweaving and overlapping constructs, lacking clear boundaries, beginnings or endings and evoking images of an Escherian stairwell, where paths lead reflexively into one other.

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CHAPTER 8

GENDERED BODIES, GENDERED SOULS?

God is not something you talk about, certainly not to your mates James Moloney, Lost Property

If Buddha loved me, he would not have made me like the smell of Crystal’s shirt Doug Macleod, Tumble Turn

It’s good to hear the dead called ‘love’, thinks Clementine. You feel the word might reach them and lay a calm, gentle touch on their souls Judith Clarke, The Winds of Heaven

Two decades ago, John Stephens (1996, 17) observed that the representation of gendered participants and behaviours in children’s literature was “an issue of perennial concern” and more recently Victoria Flanagan (2010, 37) has affirmed that gender remains “one of the issues most frequently addressed in children’s texts”. Embarking on research for this chapter, I was conscious of the abundant contemporary scholarship regarding the construction of gendered identities, yet the subject of gendered spiritualities has been largely neglected. My aim, therefore, is to question whether there are differences in the portrayals of male and female spiritual identities, or of other alternatives along a gender spectrum that includes lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered

(LGBT)34 characters and behaviours. Of the six focus novels selected for analysis, I have classified three as ‘feminine’, with female focalising characters constructed by women authors, and three as

‘masculine’, where male authors have created male focalisers. Authorial roles are largely decentred throughout this thesis, particularly in terms of authors’ personal attributes. However, this chapter makes a concession to the potential influence of the author’s sex in an attempt to minimise complications that might arise in analysing the construction of protagonists byauthors of opposite sexs. The novels designated ‘feminine’ are The Winds of Heaven (Clarke 2009), The Golden Day

34 LGBT is currently a widely used initialism among a number of variants of this contested terminology. Others options extend the spectrum to include options such as transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, ally, pansexual (LGBTTQQIAAP). 215

(Dubosarsky 2011) and The Ghost’s Child (Hartnett 2007) and the ‘masculine’ novels are Lost

Property (Moloney 2005), Tumble Turn (MacLeod 2003) and The Messenger (Zusak 2002). My central argument in relation to these six novels is that gender differences are discernible in the construction of the characters’ spiritualities although there is some fluidity and overlap between masculine and feminine behaviours, attitudes and values from which the characters’ spiritualities evolve. The most notable gender difference is that the masculine spiritualities are predominantly concrete, active, certain and external in contrast to the intangible, contemplative, tentative and internalised feminine spiritualities.

The sparse academic scholarship that exists on gendered spiritualities in adult fiction - noted in Chapter 1 - is often predisposed towards specific religious beliefs, mostly Christian in

English language texts, to the exclusion of other forms of spirituality. My approach encompasses a broader view of spirituality, with a focus on secular outlooks about which there is a paucity of critical discussion. Throughout this thesis spirituality is defined as the ongoing development of beliefs, values and a sense of connectedness that transcends materiality. Such connectedness might be experienced within the self, with other people, the environment or the divine. Further to this and of relevance to gender interrelationships, the discussion is framed by the premise that subjectivities are constructed through dialogic interactions within the characters’ bodies, minds and souls as well as with those of other characters and with their environments. While not privileging a pluralistic ontology, suggesting the separation of body, mind and soul over a physicalist or idealist account, it is useful for the purpose of this discussion to infer a rudimentary distinction between various facets of a character’s multifactorial and mutable identity. These facets are characterised as the physical body, the cognitive-affective mind and the moral soul. This latter concept, which invokes the notion of morality, is highlighted and explored in some of the focus novels as “the good inside us”

(Moloney 2005a, 256). Of course, the soul might also encompass more negative aspects of morality which are also represented in these novels. The investigation into whether gender differences extend beyond characters’ physical and cognitive performances into the spiritual facets of their identities acquires considerable complexity in its consideration of the interrelationship between two complex and constantly shifting concepts, namely gender and spirituality.

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Well-established theories of gender, such as those that address distinctions between biological sex and social gender and hierarchical assumptions inherent in male-female, gay-straight and other associated binary concepts, will not be reiterated here although I will refer to some pertinent hypotheses. Butler’s theory of gender performativity and Connell’s theory of hegemonic masculinity are particularly relevant as well as de Beauvoir’s ideas about the transcendence- immanence dichotomy. The terms “transcendence” and “immanence” are are also associated with conceptions of spirituality. The constraints of perceiving gender as a rigid binary concept have been amply debated in academic discourses as well as receiving attention in mainstream popular culture. The gender spectrum concept was recently highlighted in a widely publicised speech by young British actor and UN Women’s Goodwill Ambassador, Emma Watson, who advocated a view that

Both men and women should feel free to be sensitive. Both men and women should feel free to be strong. It is time that we all perceive gender on a spectrum, instead of two sets of opposing ideals. (Watson 2014, unpaginated)

Yet the polarised masculine-feminine binary perspective, which would normatively ascribe sensitivity to women and strength to men in the above statement, continues to permeate much popular culture, fiction and critical literature, even while incongruities inherent in the hierarchical assumptions that valorise one element over the other in binary pairs are recognised. Bean and

Harper (2007, 12) have recently argued that both research and the local news remind us that

“masculinity and femininity have been so strongly named and normalized as polarized and hierarchical opposites, and so deeply conflated with sexual identity, that there are serious repercussions for those who might resist or transgress gendered and/or sexual norms”. Further, in a study of male sexuality and masculine spirituality, James Nelson (1988, 21) acknowledges the unstable borders between masculinity and femininity but asserts that men and boys do have distinctive experiences because of their male bodies and the same is true for girls and women and

“while these body-grounded experiences never fully determine one’s spiritual contours, they do exercise considerable influence” (original emphasis).

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The Australian YA novels that form the primary corpus of this chapter are predominantly concerned with heteronormative behaviours that defer to masculine and feminine categorisation.

These narratives portray protagonists who demonstrate typical heterosexual behaviours with little or no reference to alternative orientations. The notable exception is Tumble Turn, an overtly

LGBT-themed novel which humorously interrogates notions of masculinity and, to a lesser degree, femininity. Many of the male characters of the focus texts display virile heterosexual interests, especially Ed in The Messenger, Josh in Lost Property, and even Dominic in Tumble Turn, although at the age of twelve, he is sometimes uncertain about his sexual orientation. The female protagonists similarly perform heterosexual behaviours but with less vigour. Although Maddy’s passion for her wild lover, Feather, is narratively and thematically central to The Ghost’s Child, sexual liaisons are less important to her than to Ed, Josh and Dominic. Clementine in The Winds of

Heaven similarly exhibits ambivalence in her sexual relationships and for the ‘little girls’ in The

Golden Day, sexuality is somewhat irrelevant apart from their prepubescent titillation about their teacher kissing the gardener. Amorous affairs lose their appeal for Clementine and

Maddy/Matilda35 as they mature and both novels close with the focal characters as older, autonomous women whose relationship status is assigned no importance. Because of the heterosexual orientations of most characters in the novels, the texts initially examine the construction of gendered identities from a perspective of dichotomised discourses of masculinity and femininity, proceeding to the interplay and fluidity of these positions, manifest in the construction of some rather androgynous spiritualities. The theoretical framework of ideological becoming (Bakhtin 1981, 341-348) is again relevant to this chapter’s focus on the ongoing struggle between monologic authoritative discourses and dialogic internally persuasive discourses that leads to the ideological becoming of the characters. Authoritative discourse in the current context is juxtaposed not, as might be expected, with a stance of subjugation and submission but with an empowering internally persuasive discourse that facilitates the ideological and spiritual maturation of both male and female subjects.

35 Following the nomenclature of the novel, I use the name Maddy when referring to the young character and Matilda when referring to the older self who tells her life story. 218

Social and literary contexts

The spirituality of young Australians

Recent empirical findings from The Spirit of Generation Y survey (Mason et al 2007a) of the spirituality of young Australians provide an indication of the way the fiction reflects readers’ real worlds. YA literature often performs the dual role of representing the world – realistically or speculatively – as well as attempting to guide adolescent readers in their ideological development.

The Spirit of Generation Y project identified several types of spirituality prevalent among young

Australians in the twenty-first century, which the researchers classified as:

 Traditional Christian and other world religions (55% of respondents) - grounded in the

tradition of a major world religion - predominantly Christian with a small proportion

belonging to other religions including Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism

 New Age (17%) – following non-traditional religious or spiritual paths

 Secular (28%) - based on human experience and human reason, rejecting both Traditional

religions and New Age spirituality (Mason et al, 69)36

Among the Traditional spirituality types, the results indicated no significant influence of gender on spiritual orientation. However, New Agers were significantly more likely to be female than male and the Secular path appealed more strongly to males (Mason et al 2007a, 249). The study investigated gender differences in relation to “civic values” including compassion, altruism, generosity, and volunteering, in other words, “other-regardingness” as opposed to “self- regardingness” (Romøren and Stephens 2002). Predictably, according to gender stereotypes, women in the survey ranked higher than males in terms of other-regardingness but the researchers concluded that “there has been some evening-out of gender differences in social roles, and a degree of ‘masculinisation’ of society” although there were still “strong gender differences on nearly all our measures of social concern, women scoring considerably higher than men” (Mason et al 2007a,

309).

36 A potential bias in the interpretation of the data should be noted, in that two of the researchers in the Spirit of Generation Y study were affiliated with Christian institutions and Christianity is presented as normative in the discussion (Cusack 2011, 414) 219

A North American study of gender differences in spiritual development during the college years identified a number of apparent differences in the spiritual qualities of college students, notably “the connection between men’s spirituality and religious identity; the negative influence of academic forces, particularly science involvement, on men’s spirituality; and women’s spiritual growth in conjunction with their friendships to religious peers” (Bryant 2007, 845). Bryant concluded, however, that “these questions will be best examined qualitatively” as “quantitative analyses tell part of the story for a large group of individuals, but fall short of unravelling the multifaceted strands of meaning that constitute spirituality in the lives of women and men” (845).

YA fiction provides a useful vehicle to facilitate such a search for multifaceted strands of meaning that is often central to the ideological becoming of young people and of fictional characters constructed to represent them. Spirituality can function as a metonym for identity-formation and fluidity in the gendering of characters plays a significant role in the construction of their ideological subjectivities and meaning-making. While the main protagonists in all of the focus novels are searching for multifaceted strands of meaning, I claim it is most profoundly expressed in

The Ghost’s Child and The Messenger, which are also the two novels that express the greatest gender fluidity.

To some extent, the novels reflect the social hypotheses posited by Mason et al but there are also indications of the authors’ attempts to influence their readers’ worldviews by constructing plots that interrogate traditional religions, alternative spiritualities and secular views. In accordance with my argument that the masculine novels present a more concrete, action-oriented and externalised articulation of spirituality, there are explicit references to organised religions in Lost

Property, Tumble Turn and The Messenger. James Moloney (2005b) declared that a major reason for writing Lost Property37 was to address the absence of religious discourse in Australian YA fiction and the novel’s main protagonist, Josh, undertakes mindful soul-searching that leads him away from traditional religion towards secular humanism and clarification of his ethical values and beliefs. Traditional religion also plays a significant role in Tumble Turn with Dominic’s exploration of Buddhism interspersed with comic allusions to Christianity, and more subtly in The Messenger

37 Discussed in Chapter 2. 220

with recurring references to churchgoing and prayer. The feminine novels on the other hand allude to religion more covertly, if at all, but each of them strongly suggests the possibility of a spiritual domain co-existing with the known world. This kind of transmundane supposition might be encompassed by people in the New Age category of the Spirit of Generation Y survey but, as claimed by Bryant, is often outside of the analytical compass of sociological research. The masculine novels thus present spirituality as a more clearly-defined concrete concept when contrasted with the amorphous and internalised notions of meaning-making and identity formation that are expressed in the feminine novels.

Sociocultural views of gender and spirituality

While spirituality is little explored as a discrete topic in the social sciences, theories of gender are abundant and are widely applied in literary scholarship as well as in studies of religion and spirituality. From the mid nineteenth century the concept of ‘muscular Christianity’ was associated with masculinity in literature, notably in the work of Charles Kingsley. Muscular Christianity envisaged “an association between physical strength, religious certainty, and the ability to shape and control the world around oneself” (Hall 1994, 7). Such notions are still evident in many literary constructions of masculinity. Among the most cited recent theories of gender that inform my arguments in this chapter are Butler’s theory of gender performativity and Connell’s theory of hegemonic masculinity. While both Butler’s and Connell’s ideas began to evolve in the late twentieth century, each theory has distinctive areas of focus. In her account of gender performativity, Butler (2011, 234) suggests that the formation of a gendered identity is largely unconscious in that it is the “reiteration of norms which precede, constrain and exceed the performer and in that sense cannot be taken as the fabrication of the performer’s ‘will’ or ‘choice’”.

In other words, “rather than being natural or innate, gender is actually a series of stylized acts and behaviours that are repeated until they give the illusion of authenticity” (Flanagan 2010, 32). In association with the performative construction of a gendered identity, hierarchical assumptions of dominance and subordination tend to inhere in the relationship between males and females. Connell

(2005, 77) defined the evolving concept of hegemonic masculinity as “the configuration of gender

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practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women”. Such a configuration influences the operation of most organised religions which are notable in their adherence to patriarchal practices, such as formally denying women the right to occupy the most senior positions of power and other opportunities for self- determination. The focus texts here, however, are more concerned with individualised spiritualities than with hegemonic power imposed by authoritative institutional religions.

In her pivotal feminist text The Second Sex ([1949]1997, 29), Simone de Beauvoir posited ideas of the hierarchical interplay between masculine transcendence and feminine immanence, whereby immanence was associated with the physical body and nature, resulting in an inferior subjugated role in contrast to the intellectualism, culture and transcendence which bestows freedom on men. Although she does not endorse the historical association of “immanence” with the feminine that she identifies, De Beauvoir’s ideas reflect Platonic and Aristotelean philosophy and

“it was frequently argued that women were more inclined towards the bodily aspects of their nature, while men were more inclined towards reason” (Colebrook 2004, 20). Concerning gender differences in spiritualities, “Soul was the animating principle, the ineffable and immaterial life that determined each being’s position in the cosmos. Women’s souls, it was often argued, were less refined than men’s, less capable of clear and distinct reason” (20). However, the transcendence- immanence labels can be misleading with regard to spirituality; as Kasulis (2004, 165-166) claims, even in monotheistic religions where “there is a belief in a transcendent God who created and continues in some way to sustain the world, close examination often shows that the actual spirituality is experienced immanently as well as transcendently” and that “God may be metaphysically transcendent to the world but experientially known primarily in and through the world”. Kasulis suggests that “a better point of focus might be to ask whether the connectedness to the sacred is an external or internal relation” in terms of a subject’s spiritual identity. This terminology seems appropriate to the current discussion and will be used interchangeably with

‘transcendence’ and ‘immanence’ to support this chapter’s argument that in the selected YA texts,

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masculine spiritualities are constructed as external and transcendent while feminine spiritualities are more immanent and internalised.

Literary contexts

Although gender is an area of children’s and YA literature that is already well-theorised, the concept of spirituality adds another dimension to existing critical discussions. Within YA literature,

“ideologies of adolescence are heavily gendered, with rebellious schemas usually gendered male and maturational schemas usually gendered female” (McCallum 2006, 217). Confrontation, more than rebellion, is a key element of male characters’ engagement with spirituality in the current focus texts, while the more subtle self-actualisation expressed in the feminine novels suggests maturational schemas. This position diverges in some ways from the view that masculinity is historically associated with transcendent rationality and culture in opposition to femininity’s association with embodiment, physicality and nature. Maturational schemas typically suggest the triumph of intellect over the physical impulses often associated with rebellious schemas. The novels reveal that purportedly feminine qualities display more subtle, complex and internalised spiritual maturation compared with the concrete externalised spiritualities constructed in the masculine texts. However, within the texts discussed in this chapter there is also a considerable amount of boundary-crossing in terms of the way in which spiritualities are gendered. An analogous trend has been noted by Nikolajeva (1996, 125-126) with regard to gendered chronotopes in children’s and YA literature. She argues that male chronotopes differ significantly from female chronotopes, particular in terms of time which is interpreted as linear for males and circular for females. “Linear male time is a product of enlightenment and is the spirit of action and progress” while in female chronotopes “development occurs in inner space and affects the spiritual maturity of the protagonist” (126). However, Nikolajeva acknowledges “a merging of male and female, a disintegration of the epic chronotope, and some bold innovations” (126) in recent decades. Such merging and disintegration accords with the boundary-crossing in the construction of male and female spiritualities noted above.

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Discourses of Masculinity

Each of the masculine texts discussed here portrays a spiritual quest in which weighty existential issues are considered from straight, queer and intermediate perspectives, although not all of these in each text. Several common themes emerge, including interrogation of masculine stereotypes, father-son relationships and the exploration of human ‘goodness’ or morality through the development of tangible, externalised and action-oriented spiritualities. Addressing portrayals of hegemonic masculinity in Australian YA fiction, Troy Potter (2007, 228) outlines a “range of masculinities available for men and boys to adopt, including macho, sensitive, straight, gay and

New Age, to name a few”. Representations of macho and sensitive masculinity in the focus texts encompass characteristics of the hegemonic masculinity schema (HMS) and sensitive new man schema (SNMS) outlined by Romøren and Stephens (2002, 228). In a pioneering collection of essays on masculinity in children’s literature and film, Stephens (2002) identifies the “New Age

Boy” as a third category that breaks the dichotomy between manly/masculine and unmanly/unmasculine. These traditional distinctions have been blurred by “the rise of the New Age

Man” (Buchbinder 1994, 2) who is “supposedly gentler and less aggressive” than his conservative predecessor, and ”more in harmony with the earth and with nature, less convinced of the authority and rightness of traditional male logic, and more amenable to alternative ways of thinking”. The

New Age Man is willing to make himself emotionally vulnerable to others, as demonstrated in the focus texts. Although used in a different context here, the term ‘new age’ is frequently associated with spirituality, as noted by Mason et al (2007a) in their categorisation of spirituality “types”.

The younger counterpart, the New Age Boy identified by Stephens (2002, 44), characteristically

reads for pleasure and may aspire to become a writer himself, and this endows him with a mastery over discourse which is germane to subjective agency; his relationships with his peers are other-regarding…he tends to lack physical prowess and physical courage, though his moral courage and other-regardingness will prompt him to act courageously. (my ellipses)

This depiction corresponds with portrayals of the protagonists of the masculine novels: Ed in The

Messenger is an unfit, unambitious taxi driver who views himself as a “deadbeat” but reads literary 224

classics and becomes a local hero quite unintentionally; Josh in Lost Property is a musician and academic high achiever who reconciles the divisive tensions in his sporty family; and Dominic in

Tumble Turn is an overweight, artistic young Buddhist who also facilitates his dysfunctional family’s healing. Although the New Age category identified by Mason et al (2007a, 69) in the

Spirit of Generation Y survey has a purportedly feminine inclination, the construction of these characters as New Age Boys suggests a blurring of the borders between conventional masculinities and femininities. Through these characterisations, the revelation of spiritual sensibilities is used to reconstruct masculine subject positions in ways that interrogate patriarchal ideologies.

Traditional and alternative masculinities Lost Property is a pivotal novel that prompted research for this study in response to James

Moloney’s disclosure (2005b, 6) that he wrote the novel to address a perceived absence of the religion or spirituality in Australian YA fiction – “Australian society only ever whispers the word

God, preferably in private and between consenting adults” even though “up to a third of Australia’s young people are educated in schools professing a religious base”. As outlined in Chapter 2, the first person narrative focalised by senior schoolboy, Josh Tambling, relates events that occur during and after his summer holiday job in the Sydney railways lost property office where he meets Clive, a widowed man who unwittingly becomes his spiritual mentor. One item handed in to the office is a set of photographs that reveal the whereabouts of Josh’s wayward brother Michael who left home after a family dispute. When his job finishes, Josh resolves to reunite his fractured family by secretly travelling to north Queensland, find Michael and bring him home. Concurrently with this heroic quest, Josh confronts conflicts with his mates and girlfriend, as well as the loss of his religious faith. Intertextual Biblical allusions to the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan invert the Christian parables, with Josh being rescued by his ‘prodigal’ brother following his rejection of assistance from strangers when he is assaulted on his journey. The inversion of traditional religious texts reflects Josh’s spiritual journey from Catholicism to secular humanism.

In contrast to the seriousness of Lost Property, the two other masculine novels liberally utilise humour which functions as a form of bravado enabling the discussion of awkward issues

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such as emotional vulnerability, development of spiritual beliefs and the display of compassion and empathy, without surrendering too much masculine toughness. Tumble Turn is significant because it thematises LGBT issues and non-Western spirituality, positioning readers to consider perspectives outside the orthodoxy of the dominant white heterosexual culture which is portrayed in Lost Property and The Messenger. Dominic Dear lives in a traditional nuclear family which manifests a different dysfunctionality from that in Lost Property. The narrative is structured around email correspondence between Dominic and his mother’s estranged brother, Uncle Peri, who provides the support and guidance lacking in Dominic’s relationship with his parents. The dual- focalisation by a younger and older person facilitates the construction of Dominic’s maturation process in contrast to the more singular focalisation of Lost Property and The Messenger. Uncle

Peri gradually divulges the details of his own life as a geologist and science teacher living in an

Australian country town after the death of his partner, ‘Aunty’ Lu, who is eventually revealed to have been a man. The intertexts underpinning Tumble Turn – Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince and fragments of Buddhist wisdom - are introduced by Uncle Peri and distinguish him as a voice of reason, compassion and tolerance in a conservative but maladaptive social environment.

The third masculine novel, The Messenger, is a tightly structured metafictive text narrated in first person by nineteen year old taxi driver Ed Kennedy. A turning point occurs in Ed’s mundane life when he thwarts a gunman attempting to rob the local bank. After his accidental heroism, he starts receiving mysterious playing cards in the mail – a series of Aces inscribed with cryptic messages that he instinctively understands he must decipher in order to reveal the addresses hidden in their clues and deliver ‘messages’ that will help the occupants. This mission becomes a spiritual quest requiring him to perform random acts of kindness - some of which paradoxically entail considerable violence - for strangers and friends and, through these actions, to transcend the ordinariness and unworthiness of the life he has been living as “a dead man” (Zusak 2002, 41;

379). The Messenger connects intertextually to the world outside the text through references to numerous novels and films which assist in the construction of Ed’s spiritual identity as an androgynous fusion of masculine and feminine traits, as many of the intertexts are heavily gender stereotyped, such as Wuthering Heights and Roman Holiday with feminine appeal (both are

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partially told from a female perspective and are, generically speaking, romances) and Cool Hand

Luke with masculine. Each of the masculine texts thus makes considerable use of intertextual allusions to frame the transcendent significance of the stories which are each closely focalised by the first person narrating protagonist. The external intertexts connect to worlds beyond the text in the three novels which are further linked stylistically by the forward linear progressions over the brief and confined time periods of the protagonists’ quests. The confident and optimistic endings of the three novels construct a more positive and solid view of masculine spiritualities than the ambivalent openness at the closures of the three novels which portray feminine spiritualities. The openness in the latter novels evokes a sense of circular time and inconclusiveness.

In a study of masculinities in Norwegian and Australian YA fiction, Romøren and

Stephens (2002, 228) note a common concern regarding the deeply scored divisions in masculine subjectivities between friends and girls. This distinction is apparent in Lost Property and Tumble

Turn but is disrupted in The Messenger, where Ed is “in nervous-love” (49) with his closest friend,

Audrey. Ed and Audrey are equal in most respects regardless of their different sexes. Their leisure time is spent playing cards and watching movies and both work as taxi drivers, an occupation into which Audrey enticed Ed. While Ed remains celibate throughout the novel, Audrey has “plenty of sex with plenty of people” (23) but, with a stereotypically masculine attitude, resists emotional attachment. Conversely, Ed reacts in a characteristically feminine way, thinking “I can smell the sex on her, and my only hope is that she can smell the love on me” (363). Their eventual sexual consummation is initiated by Audrey as their individual sexualities represent an inversion of conventional masculine-feminine behaviours. Ed’s sensitivity towards Audrey metonymically underlies his propensity for spiritual growth in contrast with the more traditional masculine spiritualities of the other male focalisers, Josh and Dominic. Although Ed’s spirituality is similarly nurtured through action-oriented performances, he integrates masculine transcendence and feminine immanence. Flanagan (2008, 159) argues that qualities such as compassion and empathy are commonly construed as ‘feminine’ values and “the association of such attributes with femininity reinforces traditional gender values, as well as promoting conventional gender binarism through the inference that these character traits are not naturally masculine”. Ed’s spirituality, by

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contrast, is quite androgynous as his compassion progresses from externality in helping strangers towards his immanent connection with family and close friends. He thus resists the impetus to perform only hegemonic masculine acts but instead integrates masculine and feminine qualities in his journey to spiritual maturity and ideological becoming. In this way, The Messenger represents a potential for male characters to inhabit more intersubjective identities than is sometimes portrayed through their spiritual maturation.

The psychological segregation between friends and girls is overt in Lost Property, a very

‘straight’ novel focalised by an educated middle-class white male with little concession to alternative ways of being. This transition aligns with Bakhtin’s conception of the struggle between authoritative and internally persuasive discourses in the process of ideological becoming. Josh is mystified about the mental processes of the girls in his life and seems most comfortable in the company of males, but in his ‘crisis of faith’ he proclaims that “God is not something you talk about, certainly not to your mates” (53). Yet he is able to ponder existential questions with his mate’s sister. Admitting that “Gemma was the only person I’d ever spoken to about these things…I was desperate to hear what she had to say” (142-143, my ellipses), Josh surrenders his macho image to reveal a vulnerable anxiety about this nebulous and taboo topic. However, his spiritual exploration is guided by male rationality, leading him away from the Catholicism that is “a matter of faith” for his unquestioning father who adheres to the authoritative spiritual doctrine of the

Catholic church which corresponds with Bakhtin’s (1981, 343) account of an authoritative discourse that “demands our unconditional allegiance”. Concurrently with his crisis of faith, Josh is influenced by an unlikely spiritual guru in Clive who performs acts of kindness in an externalised masculine manner, but with traces of a more immanent, characteristically feminine spirituality.

Explaining his desire to reunite train passengers with their sentimentally-imbued lost items, he modestly admits that it “warms my tired old soul”. Ironically though, Clive denies holding any supernatural beliefs: “Oh, the soul. Just an expression, Josh. No, I’m not one for any of that stuff”

(121). Clive’s unassuming compassion contributes to Josh’s eventual resolution concerning spirituality and morality.

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While Lost Property adheres to representations of heteronormative sexualities, gender identities and conventional spiritualities, MacLeod’s Tumble Turn embraces queer ideologies across a range of issues, notably gender and religious belief. It is a comic novel aimed at a younger teenage readership and focalised mostly by Dominic Dear, an overweight twelve year old boy with an emotionally dysfunctional family. Dominic’s “hobbies are swimming, arts and crafts, TV and

Buddhism” (2), in preference to more traditionally masculine interests like cars and team sports.

Comparing himself to his friend, Christopher Ball, whom he calls Crystal, Dominic explains their differences in binary terms:

Some people think it’s weird that Crystal and I hang out together. Crystal barracks for the Demons. I barrack for Buddha. Crystal is good at sport. I’m good at art.” (13)

In this way Tumble Turn portrays "oppositions between hegemonic masculinity and subordinated and marginalized masculinities” which indicate that patriarchy is not a “homogeneous structure”

(Connell cited in Pennell, 70). Through his emails, Uncle Peri reveals himself to be well versed in

Buddhism and therefore able to provide spiritual mentorship to Dominic. Tumble Turn is perhaps unique among Australian YA novels in its inclusion of Westernised Buddhism thematically interwoven with an interrogation of masculinity and sexuality. In contrast to the patriarchal forms of masculinity that are often endorsed by the conservative religious discourses of the dominant culture, the representation of a subordinate faith group can be associated with non-normative expressions of gender. Dominic confides his sense of abnormality to Uncle Peri:

I’ve decided I’m not normal. I don’t think I’m even a Buddhist. If Buddha loved me, he would not have made me like the smell of Crystal’s shirt (98)

His confession reveals anxiety about his sexuality mingled with confused spiritual beliefs, but his confusion is conveyed comically, indicating his lack of awareness that Buddha is not viewed as an omnipotent deity like those of the orthodox Abrahamic religions. Dominic’s uncertainties, however, are expressed in sensate and concrete terms with no suggestion of the otherworldliness that is evident in the feminine spiritualities discussed later.

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The novel parodically interrogates gender norms along with traditional religious practices, particularly through the dialogue reported by Dominic between his parents, Odette and Archibald, who offer commentary on appropriate behaviours for males and females with frequent repetition of the imperative ‘should’. For example,

Mum: Why don’t you take Dominic to the car show to look at cars? Dad: He doesn’t like cars. Mum: He should. Boys like cars. Dad: I don’t particularly like cars either. Mum: It’s something a father and son should do together. (20)

Odette harangues Archy with pleas like, “I wish you would play football with Dominic” (39), as she fears that Dominic could ‘become gay’. Football operates as “a ready metonym for Australian

HMS behaviour”, according to Romøren and Stephens (2002, 229) and cars function similarly here.

Archy’s own sense of masculinity is constantly undermined by his wife, triggering his extramarital affair with Dominic’s adored teacher, Ms Havercroft, who inspired an interest in Buddhism in both

Dominic and Archy. Ironically, this affords the opportunity for father-son bonding but Archy was never destined to be Dominic’s spiritual mentor and his brush with Buddhism fades with his love affair. Just as Josh in Lost Property is inspired by Clive, Dominic’s spiritual guidance comes from a father substitute in Uncle Peri, integrating the spiritual and LGBT themes of the novel.

As with some other Australian YA texts that concurrently thematise spirituality and social inclusiveness (for example, Savvides Sky Legs and Cooper’s The Rage of Sheep), critical analysis of Tumble Turn tends to bypass the explicit spirituality in favour of more topical issues such as racism, homophobia, bullying and social isolation. This neglect supports Moloney’s claim about the paucity of spiritual themes in Australian YA novels, as well as the gaps in critical scholarship even when spirituality is foregrounded in the novels. This lack of attention perhaps suggests that

Australian authors and critics are uncomfortable with this intensely personal and taboo subject. Just as Tumble Turn broaches a spectrum view of gender and sexuality, Dominic’s attraction to

Buddhism encompasses subordinated spirituality in contrast to the dominant religious culture that

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also features in the novel38. His sexual uncertainty “reflects the fundamental tenets of queer: that sexuality is never fixed but rather is fluid, and open to change” (McInally 2008, unpaginated).

Religious belief is similarly presented, linking the fluid concepts of gender and spirituality in this novel.

Beyond the ‘straightness’ of Lost Property and the ‘queerness’ of Tumble Turn, The

Messenger provides an alternative space for the construction of masculine spiritualities. Ed perceives the deficiencies in his masculine image but his anxieties differ from those of Josh and

Dominic, as he expresses a sense of spiritual fragility and disconnectedness in stark contrast to the humorous register of Tumble Turn, as well as the more comic sections of The Messenger, for example:

I don’t move because my cowardice tramples me, even as I try to lift my spirit from its knees. It only keels over. It sways off to the side and hits the earth with a silent, beaten thud. (83)

Ed’s sense of fragmentation is expressed powerfully through this image of his subjectivity being divided into his bullying cowardice and his subjugated spirit. Through this metaphor, both facets of his selfhood assume individual human embodiments that possess feet to trample, knees to fall onto and a form which sways and falls with an intense physical impact. Just as Josh feels that “God is not something you talk about” to your mates, Ed is sadly reluctant to bare his soul to male friends.

Emotional intimacy is easier with Audrey, although he is still reticent about revealing his inner self to her. Like the strangers that he is destined to help, each of Ed’s friends harbours a sense of alienation within contemporary Australian society and “everyday concerns of employment and day-to-day survival are framed by a pervading sense of people lacking direction and self-esteem and with no real sense of true independence” (Eaton 2007, 45). After his brush with heroism following the bank robbery, Ed intuits a personal call to action, evoking Campbell’s classic hero’s quest ([1949]1993, 41):

38 Although Buddhism is quantitatively the second largest religion practised in Australia, it accounts for only 2.5% of the population and is greatly overshadowed by Christianity with 61% of Australians reporting Christian affiliations (Department of Immigration and Border Protection. The People of Australia. Statistics from the 2011 Census) 231

There’s an aura to this card, and it’s been given to me. Not to Dickhead Ed. To me – the real Ed Kennedy. The future Ed Kennedy. No longer simply a cab-driving hopeless case. What will I do with it? Who will I be? (59)

The brief verbless sentences of the first paragraph evoke a sense of hopeful anticipation and the pithy questioning mode in the next two lines positions readers in a dialogic relationship with the narrator, inviting their involvement in Ed’s quest.

The words ‘hero’ and ‘saint’ pervade the novel, and although Ed repeatedly denies entitlement to either label, these words evoke ideas of hegemonic masculinity. Heroism, according to Connell (2005, 234), is “tightly bound into the construct of hegemonic masculinity”. Ed’s ambivalence regarding his masculinity is underscored as he meanders from ‘messages’ demanding physical brutality, to others requiring gentle sensitivity and thus he demonstrates both HMS and

SNMS traits. Ed finally develops a degree of emotional intimacy with his male friends, particularly in delivering the message that reveals Marv’s painful secret of an illegitimate child he has never met. When the emotional barrier between them is dismantled, Ed expresses his amazement with the words, “I can’t believe Marv and I are talking like this. Usually we argue to show our friendship”

(345). After reuniting Marv, his former girlfriend and their child, Ed is further elated when “My friend Marvin Harris hugs me. He hugs me so hard that I can smell him, and taste the joy that leaks from inside him” (358)39. Like the other male protagonists, his existential joy is expressed in concrete terms: ‘hard’, ‘smell’, ‘taste’ and ‘leaks’. In Tumble Turn, Dominic displays acute sensory perceptions, sometimes to his shame as he admits to enjoying the smell of Chris/Chrystal’s shirt.

Also as in Tumble Turn, The Messenger conveys a serious message with humour to overcome the characteristic masculine reticence surrounding emotional and spiritual issues. The text can be read as “a richly spiritual journey masquerading as a mystery novel, with a lot of levity thrown in to further disguise its serious intent” (Sheahan-Bright, 2) as it “seems to veer a precarious course between reality and telling a surreal moral fable” (9). Although Tumble Turn, as the one LGBT-

39 Zusak was possibly playing with the name of anthropologist Marvin Harris who introduced the concept of cultural materialism (not to be confused with Raymond Williams’ literary concept of the same name) which proposes that “human social life is a response to the practical problems of earthly existence" (Harris 2001, xv) 232

themed novel in this chapter, might be expected to instantiate a greater affinity with less gendered characteristics in the construction of male characters, the integration of masculine and feminine spiritualities is more successful in Ed’s characterisation than in the protagonists in Tumble Turn and Lost Property.

Fathers and sons

Parent-child relationships are often important in children’s and YA fiction and father-child dynamics are particularly central to identity development in the primary corpus of this chapter.

Bakhtin specifies “the word of the fathers” (1981, 342) as a significant form of authoritative discourse and paternal relationships are often viewed as symbolic of relationships between humans and god who is designated as a heavenly father in many theologies, reinforcing the patriarchal attitudes found in many organised religions. In Lost Property, Josh’s father, Phil, exemplifies godlike status despite being a ‘football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars’40 type of man. As a retired professional footballer, he is often described as 'a legend' in the sacred game of rugby league, often considered an Australian secular religious practice. The novel connects to the real world of the reader by naming actual footballers with whom the fictional Phil played. His unquestioning belief in the authoritative word of God is articulated simply when challenged by his son: “it’s a matter of faith” (256). Despite his dogmatic views, Phil is a good man who is highly regarded by his community and his family, with the exception of his wayward elder son, Michael.

Although the obedient son, Josh, respects his father’s religious views, he is more influenced by

Clive’s compassionate humanism which he eventually articulates to Phil:

All that thinking I did in church left me empty. I was worried that there wasn’t anything of me left, that if I didn’t believe in God then I mustn’t have a soul either. But that’s wrong, Dad, so wrong…I’ve worked out what the soul is, you see. It’s the good inside us. God or no God, the soul’s a human thing. (257, my ellipses)

In this important revelation, where Josh addresses his earthly father, he may also be confronting the heavenly father he no longer believes in. He expresses feelings of emptiness and worry following

40 These words are from a well-known 1970s Australian advertising jingle, derived from the American Chevrolet campaign, 'baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet’. 233

his loss of religious faith but stresses that his new belief in the humanist soul as “the good inside us” with the repetition of “wrong…so wrong” with regard to restricting his spirituality to one authoritative belief system. The options implied in his words “God or no God” open a postsecular dialogical conceptualisation of spirituality, either religious or secular, and an ideological development constructed through the assimilation of internally persuasive discourses. As Bakhtin

(1981, 346) argued, the semantic structure of such discourses “is not finite, it is open” and “in each of the new contexts that dialogize it, this discourse is able to reveal ever newer ways to mean”

(italics in original). Josh’s shift from traditional Catholicism to secular humanism is a gradual process of serious, intellectual contemplation that is affected by his relationship with his father

(Macintyre, 7). He admits that he attends church only so as not to disappoint Phil (Moloney 2005b,

55) but his rationality presents hurdles when his initial sense of spiritual freedom is replaced by emptiness: “that freedom had taken me further, into the open, and out here there were no walls and nothing to hang on to” (Moloney 2005a, 72). Like the other male protagonists, Josh expresses his existential struggles here through tangible, action-oriented imagery.

Gender relationships continue to shift in contemporary society and Mallan (2009, 2) claims that “the new battle-of-the-sexes rhetoric of popular culture and other media-driven outlets now spins on the dialectic of lost boys and empowered girls”. Tumble Turn portrays a variety of

‘masculinities under pressure’ (Connell cited in Romøren and Stephens, 219) that relate to idealised masculinity and paternal roles. In contrast to Phil in Lost Property, Dominic’s father is no demigod, yet he is a kind and witty parent whose own masculinity is under pressure from his forceful but neurotic wife. After a climactic family crisis, Archy leaves to live alone and write “a lot of poetry”

(153), in accord with SNM characteristics. Dominic finds in Uncle Peri a father substitute who shares his values and interests, particularly his attraction to Buddhism and a sense of difference from other people. Ironically, the traditional father-son relationship idealised by Dominic’s mother is achieved with her rejected gay Buddhist brother. Peri’s spirituality provides him with comfort and direction that enables him to guide Dominic in his adolescent explorations of friendship,

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sexuality and spirituality. The alternate father figures in both Tumble Turn and Lost Property thus favour subordinated spiritualities in Peri’s Buddhism and Clive’s secular humanism41.

A father-child relationship also underlies Ed’s mysterious quest in The Messenger and functions to promote his spiritual maturation and ideological becoming. Ed’s unnamed alcoholic father has died six months prior to the start of the narrative and, like Archy, he was the antithesis of the god-like role model presented by Josh’s authoritative, upright and sober father. Where Josh and

Dominic find father substitutes in Clive and Uncle Peri, Ed’s solitary mission compels him be self- guiding in an attempt to avoid becoming a “dead man” like his father. Yet despite his father’s deficiencies, Ed felt great affection for him – “a lonely, kind, quiet, hard-drinking deadbeat” (20) who “never had a bad word for anybody, or a true act of unkindness” (300) – and was pained that his life ended with a “forlorn and empty” funeral (301). The humour that pervades the narrative understates Ed’s deep sadness and grief over his father’s life and death, along with fears about the potential futility of his own life. Again the comic approach evokes a masculine bravado to ease the confrontation with emotional issues. Through his ongoing presence in Ed’s psyche, the absent dead father in The Messenger plays an equally significant role as the living fathers in the other texts.

Action-oriented morality

The rebellious schema that often characterises masculine ideologies of adolescence (McCallum

2006, 217) manifests in these novels more as active confrontation than as rebellion. The heroic quest narratives constructed In Lost Property and The Messenger parallel a male career pattern, following a structure of anxiety, doubt, conflict, challenge, temporary setback, then final success and triumph (Stephens 1996, 19). Paradoxically though, the masculine quests are more domestically centred than those in the feminine novels, especially The Ghost’s Child, implying

SNMS trajectories within a traditional feminine domain. Nevertheless, the ideological and spiritual development of the male characters still assumes a tangible, action-oriented approach to spiritual morality, demonstrated through the performance of tangible acts of kindness and contemplation of

41 While Christianity accounts for 61% of Australians’ stated religious affiliations in the 2011 Census, those claiming “no religion”, accounted for a significant 24.4%, considerably more than the 2.5% claiming Buddhism, as the second largest organised religious affiliation. 235

what it means to lead a ‘good’ and worthwhile life. McIntyre (2005, 2) views Lost Property as

“perhaps a book of, and for our times” in that we are “an affluent society, which has come to measure individual, corporate and political success in terms of material wealth and power, and which admires individualism rather than collective responsibility”. She argues that the novel invites readers to consider alternative values, such as what makes people good. Its Christian allusions to the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, fishermen, carpenters and major plot events occurring around Christmas and Easter, are inverted in differing ways, inviting the reader to contemplate alternative perspectives of spirituality and morality.

Lost Property interrogates spirituality and belief through intellectual reasoning, underpinned by the Biblical allusions that enhance the author’s illumination of a topic he considers neglected. When questioned by Josh about whether her belief in God impacts on her daily life, considering that “religions don’t have a monopoly on judging right from wrong”, his confidante

Gemma attempts to clarify:

‘Forget right and wrong. I was talking about things being good. More important than that, it’s how I know that I’m a good person. If I didn’t have a sense of God in my head, I’d lose that.’ (143).

The intellectualisation of personal beliefs is supported by contemplation of morality and performance of altruistic acts, notably by the atheist Clive who represents the essential goodness recognised by Josh as existing in people without a religious faith (MacIntyre 2005, 5). Clive’s empathy and sensitivity conform to the SNM schema, being expressed as a “feel for things” that people would value. Clive explains that the motivation for his altruism is that “I don’t feel like I’m alive unless I’m doing some good in the world” (119). His rejection of materialism is further expressed in his desire to remain living in the house he had shared with his wife and which he bemoans is worth too much money, as he is constantly badgered by real estate agents to sell it. As with the items turned in to the lost property office, Clive feels a spiritual connection to his house where, ten years after his wife’s death from asthma, he can “still hear her dry cough in the hallway”

(34).

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Traditional male-constructed theism “has perceived God as autonomous and unrelated.

Transcendent. Wholly other. Sovereign in “His” absolute power” (Nelson, 45). The influence of this idea of a transcendent and distant god is evident in the externalised and omnipotent outlook of the masculine spiritualities in the novels examined in this chapter. As Ed pronounces,

Maybe I truly am shedding the old Ed Kennedy, for this new person who’s full of purpose rather than incompetence. Maybe one morning I’ll wake up and step outside of myself, to look back at the old me, lying dead amongst the sheets. (Zusak, 250)

The metaphoric shedding of the skin, like a snake, proffers a tangible and embodied image of Ed’s sense of a new person emerging from his old ‘deadbeat’ persona. The metaphor also contains a suggestion of resurrection, both physical and spiritual, evoking Christian allusions of Christ rising from his death shroud. Ed’s previously fragmented sense of identity shifts towards a more integrated perception of himself, similar to the way Josh and Dominic view themselves at the conclusions of the other masculine novels. The progress of the males is quite different from the concepts of identity construction in the feminine novels discussed below, which remain in a state of flux even when viewed by the protagonists from older age. Along with such external perspectives, the tangibility of masculine spirituality is instantiated in The Messenger through metaphor and anthropomorphism, which construct concrete and highly visual images of abstract entities:

A hatred is wound up and let go in me. It hacks at my spirit and brings it to its knees, next to me. It coughs and suffocates as my own hatred for myself becomes overwhelming. (83)

As before, Ed articulates a very embodied image of his subjugated spirit brought to its knees this time by a tense “wound up” hatred that is released in him. The violence inherent in the word

“hacks”, in relation to his fragmented self and his spirit, anticipates his subsequent brutality as he confronts a rapist husband with a gun and literally brings him to the ground in an act that interweaves violence with compassion for the man’s suffering wife and daughter (95).

Similarly, the literal ‘lost property’ in the novel of that name functions metaphorically to suggest spiritual dispossession. Josh simultaneously loses his Catholic faith and embarks on a quest for something less determinate that he feels he has lost. Moloney affirms that “Josh’s creation of himself as a human being has been built more solidly on his spirituality than he realises” but the loss manifests in the form of a vague awareness of “feeling empty at his core” and his “need to

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replace that sense of the spiritual with something that means just as much lies at the heart of this novel” (2005b, 6). Although concrete action is central to Ed’s ideological becoming, The

Messenger is perhaps the most ethereal of the three masculine novels in its spiritual questing. When

Josh speaks of God and Dominic speaks of Buddha and Jesus, they are signified quite literally and traditionally. However, although Ed also speaks of God, occasionally prays and helps a Catholic priest to populate his church, the transcendent deity is elusive and is replaced by an immanent sense of spirituality nurtured through his own actions:

Again, at 3am, I’m on the main street of town, this time scrubbing the paint off the road. ‘Why me?’ I ask God. God says nothing. I laugh and the stars watch. It’s good to be alive. (177)

This device matches the metafictive structure of the novel and its interrogation of external reality and philosophical issues of free will and determinism, as it is revealed toward the close of the novel that Ed is a character in a fiction and that the playing cards have been delivered by his fictional

‘author’. The idea of god becomes metonymic, representing an aspect of an individualised spiritual quest rather than the more commonly understood concept of a deity. This expression of immanent spirituality takes Ed further into the feminine domain and destabilises the separation of male and female spiritualities in The Messenger. Zusak (2006, 2) commented that “Ed delivers people from one spiritual place and sense of self to another” and Ed's final confrontation is with his creator, ‘the author’, who espouses the novel's framing ideology:

‘I ... got you to do all those things you thought you couldn’t….because you are the epitome of ordinariness, Ed…And if a guy like you can stand up and do what you did for all those people, well maybe everyone can. Maybe everyone can live beyond what they’re capable of.’ (381-382, my ellipses)

Ultimately, The Messenger is dominated by a similarly tangible call to action as the construction of concrete, external and action-oriented masculine spiritualities in Lost Property and Tumble Turn, yet Ed’s spirituality more patently blends masculine transcendence with feminine immanence.

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Discourses of Femininity The female spiritualities that are constructed in the novels exhibit more ethereal qualities than the masculine spiritualities yet the former are paradoxically internalised: centred on emotions, close relationships and a long-range view of the women’s lives. Unlike the rational, concrete and action- oriented focus of the masculine portrayals, the feminine novels evoke hazy notions of spiritual realms co-existing alongside the concrete world. Encapsulating characteristics of femininity in fictive discourse, Stephens and McCallum (1999, 131) contend that:

patriarchal practices and assumptions play major roles in orienting female subjectivities toward a ‘feminine’ discourse centered on submission to authority (the voice of the father), conformity to codes for appearance and behaviour that define the self as feminine, complicity with restricted career choices determined by others, and subordination of the self in romantic love relationships.

These qualities are evident in the spiritualities constructed in the three feminine texts, although the main protagonists of each novel – Clementine, Maddy and Cubby – resist these constraints in their psychological and spiritual development. Other characters, particularly Clementine’s cousin Fan, are subjected to social discourses that suppress their freedom and self-determination. Echoing

Bakhtin’s concept of ideological becoming, Stephens and McCallum (1999, 135) claim that in fiction directed at adolescent female readers “the most pertinent discourses bear on the experience of being a daughter, a student, a lover, and a young adult in a state of becoming”. The struggle between external authoritative discourses and internally persuasive discourses available to the fictional young women is conveyed in their progress towards ideological becoming, as each novel affirms “the individuality of its main female character and her right to self-determination free from social and textual discourses of femininity” (Stephens and McCallum 1999, 133).

The Winds of Heaven and The Golden Day are set in the mid twentieth century, a time of turbulent social change with second wave feminism accelerating opportunities for young women to transcend traditional women’s roles in the domestic, professional and political arenas. This temporal setting evokes “a moment at which a paradigm shift was taking place” and women strove

“to sustain that shift and assist another generation of young women to become aware of how textual and social discourses keep inscribing disadvantageous versions of femininity” (Stephens and

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McCallum 1999, 137). Such discourses are powerfully instantiated in The Winds of Heaven as two cousins, Clementine from suburban Sydney and Fan from isolated Lake Conapaira, meet only a few times but develop an otherworldly connectedness that “lasts beyond a lifetime” (Mauger 2010,

34). Although Fan is a high-spirited girl of imaginative intelligence, she is the victim of circumstances that restrict her life choices. Clementine’s portrayal presents an alternative vision of how a girl might flourish given appropriate opportunities. Between the prologue and epilogue, both set in 2009, the third person narrative switches between the two focalisers over a ten year period from 1952 to 1962, recounting their growth from girlhood to early adulthood. Serious, studious, anxious Clementine is awed by the vitality, boldness and intrinsic kindness of her slightly older cousin Fan, who retells exotic Aboriginal Dreaming stories learned from her miyan 42, a sagacious old man who lives beside the lake. Fan feels he is the one person who really cares for her, providing spiritual guidance and the potential to resolve the existential alienation she increasingly feels. The cousins’ life directions diverge, as scholarly Clementine endures the social challenges of suburban school life on her path to become the first girl in her district to go to university, while Fan attempts to escape from her unhappy home life through teenage marriage and parenthood, tragically reinforcing the cycle of impoverishment and lost opportunities. Her final escape through suicide is motivated by a self-sacrificing intention to save her own children from perpetuating the cycle.

Set slightly later in 1967 and 1975, The Golden Day depicts two snapshot periods in the lives of eleven ‘little girls’ who comprise a class at a small private school in Sydney. The novel pivots around the disappearance of their teacher during an art excursion on 3 February 1967, a historically momentous day when the last hanging execution occurred in Australia. The plot traces the impact of Miss Renshaw’s disappearance in the days and weeks following, focussing on Cubby and her friend, Icara. In the final section, Cubby, Icara and two other girls re-encounter Miss

Renshaw – or her ghost – on their final school day, 11 November 1975, another significant date in

Australian history when the reformist Whitlam Government was dismissed from office by the

Governor General. The appearance of Miss Renshaw, wearing the same dress as when last seen

42 The Winds of Heaven is interspersed with words in the language of the Wiradjuri, an Australian Aboriginal group living in western New South Wales. 240

eight years earlier, prompts an ontological interrogation by Cubby of the notion of death and the mystifying nature of human existence. Although there are some notable male characters, The

Golden Day is a female-centred novel that depicts the lives of relatively affluent Australian girls during a period of progressive social movements, including second wave feminism. The two novels just nudge the boundaries of realism with their intimations of alternative realms.

The magical realist narrative mode is particularly appropriate to representations of spirituality as it is capable of opening up an area “that accommodates the camouflaged presence of the spirit amid material reality” (Faris 2004, 68). The magical realist plot of The Ghost’s Child, 43 meanders between realistic and imaginative worlds in the years leading up to World War One, the era of first wave feminism when women’s opportunities for self-determination were more restricted than in the first two feminine novels set half a century later. Yet the novel’s main protagonist is often less constrained by gender than those in the later timeframe. Like Clementine, Matilda is an old woman when the novel opens “one damp silvery afternoon” (1) – a highly sensory description that establishes a mystical tone – and unexpectedly finds in her house a young boy to whom she tells her life story. This involves two global quests, both seeking answers to existential questions.

At the end of the first quest with her father to discover what is “the world’s most beautiful thing”,

Papa presents her with a small mirror suggesting that the answer lies within herself – an expression of spiritual immanence. Soon afterwards, Maddy becomes enchanted with and marries Feather, a wild young man she meets on the beach44. There follows a pregnancy, a miscarriage, a suicide attempt and finally a separation from Feather as he leaves Maddy’s cultured world to live on an

“Island of Stillness” (137) where his “nature is comforted” (148). This is sometimes interpreted as his death (Clark 2014) but alternatively might signify Feather’s contemplative immanent spirituality and his connectedness to the natural world, traits that are usually considered feminine.

Tortured by grief over her lost baby and lost love, Maddy undertakes another quest, alone in her small boat, the Albatross, one of numerous intertextual references to Romantic and Classical

43 Discussed in Chapters 4 and 6. 44 As discussed in Chapter 4, this plot element evokes reference to Colin Thiele’s Storm Boy (1963), a classic Australian children’s novel about a boy and his father living in a remote coastal setting and the boy’s relationships with a pelican and an Aboriginal man. Like The Ghost’s Child, Storm Boy thematises conflicts between nature and culture. 241

literature that evoke other existential and spiritual quests, as in Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient

Mariner’. Maddy searches the oceans and crosses the horizon to confront Feather with “a question bigger than the world”, namely “How can you know love, and lose it, and go on living without it, and not feel the loss forever?”(150). After receiving Feather’s answer that “You can’t” but that eventually some of her sorrow would change into joy, Maddy returns home to the next phase of her life. She trains to be an eye doctor so she can learn about sight and “give it back to blind men”

(162), a symbolically significant act of empowerment through performance of altruistic work.

Traditional and alternative femininities

Traditional versions of both femininity and masculinity frequently portray submission to authority as the voice of the father, recalling Bakhtin’s inclusion of the “word of the fathers” in his account of authoritative discourse. In each of the feminine novels, the patriarchal voice that constrains the female protagonists is instantiated in father-daughter relationships and sometimes moderated by fathers’ SNM qualities. Clementine’s sensitive father in The Winds of Heaven is habitually supportive of her desires to transcend conventional gender assumptions that might restrict her life choices as a young woman in the 1950s. On terminating her engagement to a chauvinistic young man, Clementine realises her mother will be disappointed but “knew she could count on Dad” to say there was “plenty of time yet” and that “he’d say the same thing if she was pushing seventy”

(235). For cousin Fan however, fathers and husbands prove unreliable, unsupportive and even cruel, unlike her Aboriginal miyan who is “like…a sort of uncle” (28). In The Golden Day, Icara’s widowed father is attuned to his daughter’s grief and feeling of difference as a motherless child. He worries about Icara for whom, he confides in Cubby, “it’s been very hard” (122), inadvertently revealing that Icara’s mother was dead and not living in Los Angeles as Icara had alleged.

Maddy in The Ghost’s Child experiences two fathers in the one person. The first father is the Iron Man who exhibits hegemonic masculine qualities and with whom she feels the inferiority of her sex as “she wasn’t a boy, someone who could stand in the iron man’s shadow and learn to be frightening like him” (21). Conversely the second father is perceptive, loving and adventurous and becomes her best friend during their expedition to find the world’s most beautiful thing. This father

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hints that the answer resides in the symbolic mirror, showing his awareness of her immanent spirituality. After their quest, Maddy “longed to call him back to her, to have a few final moments with the father alongside whom she had criss-crossed the globe” (37) before he turned back into the

Iron Man, as in a fairytale. Later in life, at the news of her father’s death, Maddy “wept so fiercely she thought she would crinkle like a leaf and blow away” (164), yet she “didn’t weep fiercely at the news of her mother’s death, feeling only a sense of regret for what might have been” (167).

Patriarchal voices, usually signifying authority and sometimes religious dogma, are thus more complex and diverse than mothers’ voices in these texts.

Codes for feminine appearance and behaviour within the texts accompany the gender stereotyping that influences career choices for the young women and focus attention on their corporeality rather than inner attributes. This stereotyping is destabilised when, for example, on returning from her second quest Maddy informs her parents that she intends to go to the war (158).

This unexpected twist in her story sparks the interest of her ghostly young listener who had scoffed boyishly at the amorous and therefore feminine tone of Maddy’s tale. To his disappointment, though, going to war did not entail being a soldier. Rather, “the men who were so wantonly slaughtering one another were still gentlemen enough to believe that a battlefield was not a nice place for a lady” but women could replace men at home “driving the trucks, running the factories, harvesting the fields…manufacturing the ammunition” (159, my ellipses) as well as fulfilling the more feminine role of “caring for the soldiers who were sent home broken” (159). But as a step further into the masculine world, Maddy’s decision to become a doctor is a bold aspiration for a woman in her patriarchal environment. This move also marks the beginning of her tangible acts of kindness, signifying a moral and spiritual trajectory similar to the masculine protagonists. Yet, although her path mirrors the male heroes’ quests, at the end of her life she lacks the male sense of moral certainty, telling her visitor “I searched for the answer to a question. I sailed the world trying to find it, and eventually I did. But some answers don’t finish a quest - they merely start it...” (14).

Unlike the masculine chronotopes in which time is perceived as linear, Maddy’s view here suggests that the ideological construction of feminine identity is circular, occurring in inner space and affecting the spiritual maturity of the protagonist (Nikolajeva 1996, 126).

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Vocational choices largely determine the divergent life courses of Clementine and Fan in

The Winds of Heaven. Each cousin occupies a subject position that exemplifies the polarities of opportunities for girls in post-World War Two Australia. Fan, in her isolated rural life, with incongruity between her original way of thinking and her schooling, views marriage and motherhood as her best option, while Clementine pursues education and a profession, with dreams of romantic love being secondary. Yet in many ways Fan displays more inherent potential for spiritual growth through her friendship with her miyan, her connectedness with the lake, the clouds, the stars and the mystical blue hills, her intense love for her children and her later yearning for an education that will free her from the ‘tomb’ of her life. This yearning is activated by her memory of a fragment of poetry glimpsed in Clementine’s anthology:

If a star were confin’d into a Tomb Her captive flames must needs burn there; But when the hand that lockt her up, gives room, She’ll shine through all the sphere. (264)

The fragment comes from a meditation on death and the afterlife, ‘They are all gone into the world of light’ by seventeenth century metaphysical poet, Henry Vaughan. The stanza implies that if the soul (star) is confined in a body (tomb), its vitality (flame) will be stifled. It is significant that Fan, to her anguish, cannot recall the final two liberating lines which suggest that given adequate space, she would shine. A few years later, when Clementine encounters the poem in her English Honours examination, she becomes highly emotional even though she is unaware of the significance of the lines to Fan. This incident infers a spiritual connection between the two girls which would be apparent to the reader, even if unknown to Clementine. While Fan’s spirit had been confined by the tomb of her social circumstances, Clementine is granted the autonomy to shine and choose her life’s direction. She matures into a woman of compassion and sensitivity, developing some of Fan’s spiritual connectedness as she ponders, “It’s good to hear the dead called ‘love’…You feel the word might reach them and lay a calm, gentle touch on their souls” (259, my ellipses)

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Otherworldliness

Unlike the here-and-now spiritualities portrayed in the masculine novels, the feminine texts posit notions of an unearthly realm, a parallel spiritual plane sensed ‘through a glass darkly’45. This view is facilitated by the magical realist setting of The Ghost’s Child but also within the realism of

The Winds of Heaven and The Golden Day there are hints of another realm, quite unlike the solid textual worlds of Lost Property, Tumble Turn and even The Messenger (regardless of its mysterious events and metafictive conclusion that questions the singularity of reality). While The

Winds of Heaven and The Golden Day are located in real-world settings, the novels suggest the existence of another realm where people’s spirits can travel during sleep and a dead teacher can reappear. Otherworldly visions are sensed by readers, and sometimes by characters, throughout The

Golden Day in recurring allusions to death and ghosts, the concealed caves where the little girls encounter the ancient artwork of a suppressed culture, Miss Renshaw’s inexplicable return and the mystery and secrets that pervade the story. Although the novel is infused with binary oppositions - seen/unseen, earthly/mystical, realists/dreamers, adults/children, authority/subordination, beginnings/ endings, life/death – the traditional hierarchies inherent in these pairs are destabilised by the wavering borders between the concepts. As its title suggests, The Ghost’s Child constructs otherworldly images as it meanders between reality and fantastic allegory with allusions to fairy tales, legendary monsters and anthropomorphic creatures and elements like Zephyrus, the west wind. The prologue of The Winds of Heaven opens with the assertion that “These days Clementine has visions. There’s nothing exotic or heavenly about them” (1), evoking the heavenly visions she and Fan imagine in their childhoods, now “lost and gone forever” as sung in the American folk ballad from which Clementine’s name derives46. Fifty years earlier, Fan had alluded to visions of a heavenly realm when she confided that “Sometimes I feel like I didn’t get through into the world properly, like other people. That I left a bit behind, up there….Some really important bit of me, and

I’m no good without it’ (193, my ellipses). Fan’s insightful articulation of her sense of deficiency

45 Many cultural allusions to this phrase originate from the Biblical reference “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”, 1 Corinthians 13:12 46 The well-known song ‘Oh My Darling, Clementine’ is a folk song from the American gold rush (Clarke 2009, Acknowledgements) 245

highlights the construction of her as a fractured and fragile character caught in an otherworldly in- between space.

In a similar way, Maddy “seemed not-quite-right for the world, as if she’d been raised by monkeys or wolves” (22). Otherworldliness also infuses The Ghost’s Child through Feather who is the spiritual antithesis of Maddy’s materialistic parents. Feather’s unknown origins are “probably magical” and “Maddy tried to suppress anything magical, such as her mythical companion, the nargun, in a desperate attempt to validate her relationship with Feather to the outside world” (Kerr, unpaginated), signifying the struggle within Maddy’s conflicting inner discourses. In her attempt to deny Feather’s otherworldliness, “Maddy stopped confiding in the nargun, because she had no time for anything that wasn’t necessary and real” (81). The nargun functions as an intertextual link to a world beyond the text in an Aboriginal myth about a large creature who lives in a cave behind a waterfall 47 and was portrayed in the classic Australian children’s novel, The Nargun and the Stars

(Wrightson 1973). This mystical view establishes a spiritual dialogue between Maddy’s rational worldview and a transmundane reality and interestingly it is a male character, Feather, whose pantheistic connectedness provides a channel to the ethereal realm. Recalling the interchangeability between nature/culture and masculine/feminine characteristics (Stephens 1996, 18-19), it is the male in this case who is aligned with nature in opposition to Maddy’s more cultured world.

Along with Fan’s and Maddy’s ‘out-of-place in this world’ perceptions, Cubby’s upside- down view as she bends to tie her shoe lace early in The Golden Day (9), similarly suggests an unconventional worldview. With prescient acumen she ponders the likelihood of invisible existents: “Maybe there are ghosts, thought Cubby. Maybe they’re like the feet of the ducks.

They’re there underneath, there in the dark, and we just can’t see them” (26). Ghostly notions permeate the novel, from the first paragraph:

But every year people die and their ghosts roam in the public gardens, hiding behind the grey, dark statues like wild cats, their tiny footsteps and secret breathing muffled by the sound of falling water in the fountains and the quiet ponds (3)

47 The Den of Nargan is a place of great cultural significance to the Gunaikurnai people of south eastern Victoria, Australia. Information is available online at http://batalukculturaltrail.com.au/den_of_nargun.php 246

Icara professes too much rationality to believe such things – “Icara is a realist, said Miss Renshaw, but the world needs dreamers, not realists” (241) – but Cubby and the reader later learn of Icara’s denial of the reality of her mother’s death (123). Such ideas about veiled realities contribute to the development of the individualised spiritualities of the girls in the feminine novels. The aura of otherworldliness is further enhanced by retrospective views of their lives when the focalisers have become other older selves. Clementine and Maddy recount their stories as elderly women but

Cubby also reviews her childhood as a young woman on the cusp of the adult world.

Indigenous spirituality in the feminine novels provides another domain of otherworldliness that is absent from the masculine texts although, paradoxically, is portrayed in each novel through male characters. The Aboriginal cave paintings in The Golden Day are revealed to Miss Renshaw and the little girls by Morgan, the gardener. Their subterranean location suggests the suppression of

Aboriginal culture and spirituality in 1960s Australia but also of its ongoing existence as a trace or palimpsest which was obscured by the colonising culture. In a postcolonial reading of The Ghost’s

Child (Clark 2014), Feather represents an Indigenous culture which is subjugated by the dominant colonising culture. Maddy implicitly recognises the richness of his spirituality as she laments that, compared with Feather, “she must not have a spirit - or that, if she did, it was a boorish thing”

(148). While affirming her characteristically feminine self-deprecation at a personal level, this acknowledgement also hints at a spiritual emptiness in white Australian culture, a concept implicitly addressed by each of the novels in this chapter. Both The Winds of Heaven and The

Ghost’s Child thus present a powerful, albeit clichéd, Indigenous spirituality through masculine connectedness to nature, while the weaker spirituality of the cultured colonising society is manifested through females.

Like the covert otherworldliness they suggest, Indigenous voices are stifled in these novels.

In The Ghost’s Child the only voice that invites an Indigenous interpretation is suppressed as

Feather’s limited speaking role is mediated by Matilda (Clark 2014, unpaginated). Despite the crucial role of Fan’s miyan in The Winds of Heaven, this sole Indigenous character has no direct speaking part as his words are also mediated through a young white woman. “The old black man” appears only once when Fan takes Clementine to visit him and, finding him asleep, she is careful

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not to wake him as she believes that, like a shaman, “He’s a magic man. Sometimes when he’s asleep his spirit goes out walking” (41) and might not return if he is woken. Just before her suicide,

Fan wistfully recalls some enchanted words learned from the old man:

'Yirigaa', she says. And 'gadhaang,' and 'birrima'. Morning star and happiness and a place far away...all the words come back to her; she hasn't forgotten one, and it seems to her they are more beautiful than any poetry and carry the very sound of the earth. (248)

According to her miyan, Fan is Yirigaa, the morning star, a notion that resonates mystically with the English poem cited above. Like the poetry, the exotic Wiradjuri words promised another world sensed by Fan as she ruminated about not having “got through into the world properly” and leaving

“a bit behind, up there” with the stars and the sky. Images of clouds, stars, winds and dreams pervade the novel, reinforcing those otherworldly notions. Fan had also hoped a better world was nearer to her, in the “blue hills” glimpsed from her impoverished childhood home and where finally, aged nineteen, she steps off a cliff to end her life.

Intertextual reference to worlds beyond the texts further aid the depiction of a peripheral reality. The intertexts in the feminine novels support feminist and postmodern reading positions that are prompted by the interrogation of the informing pre-texts (Stephens and McCallum 1999,

141). In The Winds of Heaven, Wiradjuri language and Indigenous stories integrate with English poetry and American folk music to evoke worlds beyond the parochial lives of the two cousins, particularly for Fan trapped by the restrictions of her isolation. The fairytale world that Matilda invokes in telling her life story is realised in her own adventurous life and reinforced with references to fairytale motifs and magical, mysterious characters from Australian children’s books

(The Nargun and the Stars and Storm Boy) and from English poetry (such as Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner). The Golden Day interweaves the fictive world and the known worlds of readers with explicit and implicit historic and literary references. It opens in 1967, the year

Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock was published with themes of schoolgirls, secrets, disappearances and hints of another realm. Significant historic events of the story’s era included the hanging of Ronald Ryan, the drowning of Prime Minister Holt, the Vietnam War and the dismissal of the Whitlam Government, although these momentous events would have seemed more remote

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than fiction to the little girls. An element of Christian intertextuality, indicative of the social culture of the 1960s, is introduced through a potentially frightening Bible reading at Miss Renshaw’s memorial service:

Lo! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable. (115-116)

As well as its religious connotations, the verse evokes mystery, change and the raising of the dead, all pivotal narrative elements in The Golden Day. Despite these religious and spiritual inferences, however, the feminine novels are less expressive of the morality that is manifest in the masculine novels.

The moral soul

While the masculine books have tangible ethical underpinnings expressed through actions, the feminine books are more tentative and contemplative in their conceptions of “the good inside us” as Josh expresses his understanding of the soul in Lost Property. The Ghost’s Child has been described as “a fable-like tale but without a moral resonance” (Bantick , 27), an assessment that could likewise apply to the other feminine novels. Conceptions of goodness recur throughout The

Winds of Heaven, for example when Clementine insists that Fan is intrinsically ‘good’ - a kind, loving and understanding person without “a streak of meanness in her” (Clarke 2009, 172) - despite being labelled ‘bad’ by other people. Clementine herself, however, performs dishonourably when compelled by a malicious teacher to name a sacrificial boy to be punished on her behalf.

Shamefully aware of the impact of her action with “all grace and kindness rushing out from her”

(88), she suffers psychologically, thus instigating her spiritual redemption. Fan’s kindness, on the other hand, is expressed even in her suicide, intended as an altruistic act to save her children from replicating her life. Her symbolic resurrection in the life of her son’s daughter (also named Fan), embodies a vision of Fan’s unrealised potential and suggests a sense of eternity and circular rather than linear time, prompting Clementine’s final expression of thankfulness that “there are great good things” in life after all (268).

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Like Fan, Maddy initially seeks meaning through romantic love but the disillusionment of loss directs her towards a more externalised spiritual morality as she engages in altruistic actions, like Josh, Dominic and Ed in the masculine texts. In this undertaking, Maddy crosses the border into male territory, an action unwelcomed by her male colleagues “who thought doctoring was best left to boys” (163). Having faced greater obstacles in her life, Maddy persists in her pursuit of opportunities normally reserved for men, taking it “as her feminist project to embrace transcendence despite sexism and oppression” (Larson 2014, 84). In her chosen profession she successfully blends masculinity and femininity, utilising the wisdom and kindness nurtured through her quests and life experiences, as

she didn’t tell her patients to accept their blindness manfully, but let them howl and curse over the damage done to them. She understood that grief can live on long after it’s ceased to be spoken of, and she encouraged her patients to speak to her (165)

Maddy moves from the internalised female spiritual domain of personal relationships to a more masculine trajectory where she finds spiritual fulfilment through acts of kindness, while encouraging the men to expose their feminine sensitivities. Like Ed Kennedy in The Messenger,

Maddy thus blends masculine and feminine qualities to develop an androgynous spiritual identity.

Conclusion These six YA novels offer diverse constructions of the subjectivities of male and female characters in their journeys towards spiritual maturity and ideological becoming. The active, concrete and sometimes comic constructions in the masculine novels is realised more externally than in the feminine novels where spiritualities are intangible, contemplative and immanent. While de Beauvoir associated immanence with subjugation, these texts present a positive appraisal of an internally expressed spirituality, neither inferior nor superior to the masculine souls. All of the constructions accentuate quests for self identity, but the masculine spiritualities embody stronger social morality achieved through actions that both derive from and shape the characters’ beliefs and values. Acts of kindness portrayed in Lost Property and The Messenger align with an appeal for empathic tolerance of difference advocated in Tumble Turn. The more inwardly focussed feminine

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spiritualities epitomise a contemplative and personal connectedness to friends, family, children, lovers and the self.

Loss and grief are central themes in each of the novels, even in the overtly comic Tumble

Turn where the humour eases the discomfort of surrendering preconceived but cherished beliefs and values. In the positive outcomes of each masculine novel, the protagonists and their loved ones are either joyfully reconciled or, at worst, achieve the promise of a happy resolution of their conflicts. In contrast, each of the three feminine novels concludes with a more ambivalent wistful acceptance by the protagonists of life’s diverse offerings. Clementine’s final conception of “some rare and lovely truth of life” (Clarke 2009, 268) is reified in the ‘resurrection’ of Fan in the life of her granddaughter. Although The Ghost’s Child concludes with Matilda’s death, she leaves her earthly life peacefully as she embarks on her afterlife journey with her lost child and beloved dog.

Not least, Cubby, as a young woman entering the adult world, acknowledges life’s uncertainties and changes as she:

...realised she was not going to turn into the person she had thought she would become. There was something inside her head now that would make her a different person, although she scarcely understood what it was. (148)

The characters’ spiritualities are thus differently gendered like their bodies and minds. The males, Josh, Ed and Dominic, progress towards spiritual and ideological becoming through the rational development of beliefs and the performance of altruistic acts. Clementine, Fan, Matilda and Cubby, however, develop more internalised and less tangible forms of spirituality. While all characters clearly self-identify as either male or female, each of the texts exhibits some disruption of the binary perspective. Tumble Turn overtly interrogates gender and heteronormative assumptions with alternative sexual and spiritual paths taken by males who defy such culturally authoritative limitations. Lost Property presents a heteronormative worldview but with increasingly SNM and feminine qualities developed by Josh. In The Golden Day and The Winds of

Heaven, the young women pursue gender equality in opportunities to facilitate their ideological becoming. The characters constructed with the greatest fusion of masculine and feminine traits, however, are those who most effectively demonstrate the separation of the performance of a

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gendered identity from the biological sex of the performer (Bean and Harper, 26) and such androgynous spiritualities are most effectively portrayed in Ed in The Messenger and Matilda in

The Ghost’s Child.

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CHAPTER 9

CONCLUSION: A SHY HOPE IN THE HEART

As we find ourselves in a twenty-first-century postmodern and secular world where spiritualities are rife and religious diversity is an accepted feature of a seriously multicultural society, it is time once again to consider the nature of Australian religion and spirituality. One piece of evidence supporting the reality of the change in religion and spirituality is that it is now possible to speak of Australian religion without facing glum stares or peals of laughter. Gary Bouma, Australian Soul 2006

As this study was nearing completion, a monograph entitled Spirituality in Young Adult Literature: the Last Taboo (Campbell and Rowe 2015) was published in the United States. Although written from a Christian theistic perspective, the work incorporates a pluralist view of spirituality in YA literature in the postsecular era. Campbell (2015, xiii) argues that while previously vetoed topics - notably “homo- and heterosexual love, bloody violence, cruelty to animals and even incest” - have become acceptable topics for YA literature, the one subject area that writers and publishers continue to avoid is “faith and belief in God”. Other critics including Trousdale (2005), Cart (2009) and Auguste (2013) support this claim, affirming the dearth of religious or spiritually-themed YA novels even in the United States, a country considered more overtly religious than Australia. Their arguments are more inclined towards organised religious discourses while my analyses of the texts considered in this thesis seeks a more tacit and private form of spirituality. Echoing James

Moloney’s assertion (2005b, 6) that “Australian society only ever whispers the word ‘God’, preferably in private”, Auguste (2013, 38) claims that if religion is ever spoken about in YA literature contexts, “it’s done only in hushed voices, making it truly a topic that’s very much taboo”. She speculates that mainstream publishers are “hesitant to alienate potential readers with books that either preach too much or don’t adhere closely enough to religious doctrine.”

Paradoxically, around the time these views were being aired, religious interests entered the

YA literature arena in New Zealand, Australia’s close neighbour, with the placing of a temporary restriction order on the award-winning novel Into the River (Dawe, 2014) in response to objections

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from the Christian Family First group about the novel’s “detailed descriptions of sex acts, coarse language and scenes of drug-taking” (McCroskie 2015). These objections, which led to the first such restriction imposed in New Zealand in 22 years, seemed to disregard the Maori spirituality represented in the book which follows the life of a young man who is dragged into a river by a giant eel and emerges a different person, having “brushed against the spirit world” (Dawe 2014, peritext). Such censorship is indicative of the potential hegemonic influence of authoritative religious voices on the reading behaviour of young adults, despite the neglect in the fiction and critical analyses of both orthodox and alternative spiritualities. In the Australian context, my research project has been, among other things, a response to Moloney’s claim that religious and spiritual themes are absent from contemporary Australian YA literature, a belief compatible with those of the international critics. I have sought to investigate representations of orthodox religious beliefs and, more significantly, to uncover manifestations of spirituality that are expressed in less tangible forms in this postsecular era. Such implicit representations - as well as the ongoing censorship of sexually explicit books - evoke Manning Clark’s assertion (1985, 77) that “the puritan morality on questions of sexual behaviour lingered on in Australia as in America, New

Zealand and Canada long after the faith that first defined that morality had dropped to a whisper in the mind and a shy hope in the heart” (my italics).

The abstract and ethereal concept of spirituality is notoriously difficult to encapsulate but for the purpose of lucidity in this thesis, it is defined as the ongoing development of beliefs, values and a sense of connectedness to the self, other people, the universe and perhaps conceptions of the divine. Like the notion of spirituality, the theory of postsecularism is also contested and difficult to outline definitively. Influenced by Habermas' recent theorisation (2006), postsecularism can be understood as a current sociocultural phase in which religion and atheism are both in a state of constant flux between the public and private spheres (Stephenson et al 2010, 324). The respectful dialogue between spiritual and secular interests which is advocated by adherents of postsecularism complements the ideas underlying Bakhtin’s theory of ideological becoming as an ongoing struggle between authoritative and internally persuasive discourses. Ideological becoming has thus provided

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a valuable framework in this thesis for the exploration of spirituality in contemporary Australian

YA literature.

The focus texts of the study position readers to contemplate and interrogate the neglected and perhaps ‘taboo’ subjects of religion, spirituality, existential questions and the personal construction of meaning leading to the spiritual development or ideological becoming of the characters. The novels utilise a range of devices to facilitate the characters’ existential explorations, including diverse narrative modes and tones, focalisation strategies that present a range of perspectives and intertextuality that draws on sacred and secular texts. Chapter 2 surveyed a range of novels in which traditional religious beliefs were explicitly thematised and some alternative spiritual conceptions were envisaged. The selected novels were predominantly grounded in realism, with a move into magical realism in That Eye The Sky (Winton 1986) which is the earliest novel included in this thesis. While fantasy is considered by many critics (for example, Armitt 2005, 8;

Jobling 2010, 1) to be the natural and most appropriate mode for exploring a broader vision of spirituality, the preference for the realistic mode to investigate organised religion suggests that the authors of the selected Australian texts are cautiously conservative about this subject, even when a humorous tone is used to facilitate the consideration of a solemn topic. In each of these novels, first person narration facilitates close focalisation by a single protagonist, allowing readers close access to their mental and emotional processes as the characters explore various manifestations of spirituality. Although a wide range of belief options is presented, more varied focalisation techniques might enrich reader positions created by the texts. In some of the novels, however, blatantly unreliable narration positions the readers to question the single narrator’s point of view.

Following the overt representation of traditional religion in Chapter 2, a more tacit expression of spirituality is explored in the focus texts which occupy the larger part of the thesis.

Children’s and YA literature is saturated with quest motifs and the extension of the conventional quest narrative to incorporate spiritual facets is a coherent progression. In Chapters 3,

4 and 5 the focus shifted from authoritative organised religion to more personal pursuits by the protagonists to answer self-initiated questions in the form. These chapters explored the portrayal of spiritual quests in realistic, speculative and multimodal narrative forms and analysed the capacities

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of each mode to represent spiritualities that are conveyed implicitly. As noted above, fantasy is often viewed as the natural medium of spiritual quest narratives as it imagines worlds other than our own and thus dovetails with otherworldly conceptions of existence. However, it was argued in

Chapter 3 that spiritual quests are effectively portrayed in a number of realistic Australian YA texts through the utilisation of multistranded plot structures and multifocalised narrative techniques to construct quest narratives in real world settings recognizable to readers as similar to their own. James (2009, 74) contends that, as all fiction is an imaginative construction, it is untenable to assert that a realist novel can authentically reflect reality. However, these multifarious narrative devices facilitate the creation of fictions in which truths, if not realities, can be discerned through the integration of diverse points of view mostly achieved through shifting focalisation.

In Chapter 4 there was a move away from realism to consider a number of speculative modes including mythopoeic high fantasy, futuristic science fiction and magical realism. While the protagonists in the realist novels of Chapter 3 tended towards inward-looking solipsistic spiritual quests for self-identity, the speculative fictions presented more self-sacrificing protagonists engaged in noble and heroic quests. These novels thus illustrate Joseph Campbell’s contention that

“the ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others” (Campbell and Moyers 1988, xiv). The analysis of spiritual quests continued in Chapter 5 which considered multimodal texts that integrate visual, verbal and even musical formats to explore the “gap between telling and showing” (Tan 2010b, 2) that constitutes

“the ineffable in-between” identified by Faris (2004, 45) as particularly characteristic of magical realism. The polyphonic structure of the texts examined in Chapter 5 reveals the development of a postsecular dialogic discourse in contemporary Australian YA literature and the potential to develop a respectful dialogue between disparate sociocultural interests through the construction of multivoiced narratives. These representations reflect the postsecular spaces that are opening up between sacred and secular discourses in contemporary social dialogues which is “at once critical of secular constructions of reality and of dogmatic religiosity” (McClure 2007, ix).

In addition to the depiction of spiritual quests in different narrative modes, a number of discrete spiritually-themed topics emerged conspicuously in my reading of the corpus of Australian

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YA texts surveyed. Eternity and afterlife beliefs are significant matters in most religious faiths and

Chapter 6 reviews a selection of novels that invite readers to ponder the possibility of post-mortem existence in one form or another. The selected novels avoid moral judgements in the traditional understandings of heaven, hell or purgatory which, according to Bennett (2012, 7), have become

“dematerialized into metaphors” in contemporary fiction, evoking notions of crossing the threshold from life to an afterlife. The metaphoric border crossings are often constructed around earthly artefacts such as railway lines and doorways that lead to places inhabited by human-like ghosts and angels, in the attempt to envisage forms of post-mortem survival of the self that are imaginable to human minds. Other more worldly conceptions of afterlife are depicted in the form of memories, artistic creations and the lives of descendants.

In more earthly settings, Chapter 7 considered the embodied concepts inherent in the interrelationship between the natural and the supernatural which emerged very distinctly from my reading of the novels, confirming the prominence of environmental interests in contemporary YA literature. The ecological themes express a sense of contemporary morality and notions of ecocitizenship that is particularly relevant to young Australians in the twenty-first century. Rather than privileging either component of the binary concepts of science-religion or nature-culture, the most effective focus texts rejected the urge to maintain a sense of opposition in favour of dissolving the boundaries to create a sense of embodied spirituality in the human and non-human characters.

Readers were positioned to respond to this construction through strategies such as shifting focalization and narrative perspective and an interrogative rather than a pedagogic approach. The analysis was predicated on the view of spirituality as the development of beliefs, values and a sense of connectedness to a living earth and all its inhabitants.

The enigmatic notion of gendered spiritualities was considered in Chapter 8 in which it was argued that masculine spiritualities are constructed as active, concrete and externalised compared with the more intangible, contemplative and immanent portrayals of feminine spiritualities. While the male characters are seen to embody stronger social morality achieved through their concrete acts of kindness, the female characters epitomise a contemplative and personal connectedness to friends, family, children, lovers, themselves and the earth. The

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characterisations thus differ on an existential or spiritual level in a similar way that the bodies and minds of the protagonists are constructed. While all characters in these novels clearly self- identified as either male or female, each of the texts exhibits some disruption of the binary gender perspective. The most effective portrayals demonstrate a degree of blending of masculine and feminine qualities and resistance to self-identification in terms of traditional gendering.

In any study such as this which attempts to survey a specific issue in a broad range of literature, there will be many omissions which could provide a stimulus for future research. In terms of narrative modes and strategies, a further study might analyse the way spirituality is evoked in YA verse novels and poetry. Australian YA verse novelist, Steven Herrick (2015), comments that “the notion of the spiritual versus the material is something that informs a lot of my writing”.

This suggests that a focus on his work would provide valuable insights into the relationship between spirituality and Australian YA verse novels. Such condensed forms of writing are conducive to the portrayal of ineffable concepts such as spirituality in the same way that the sparsely-worded picture books considered in Chapter 5 elicit a sense of the profundity concealed in the spaces between the words and the visual images. Equally, while a number of magical realist texts were considered throughout this study, this is another narrative mode that warrants specific focus because, like many understandings of spirituality, it presents the intrusion of fantastic elements into views of existence that accord with consensus reality. The inherent introspective emphasis of texts that embrace spiritual and existential themes also invites the application of more focussed cognitive literary analyses.

In addition to further research to address some of these narrative strategies and styles that have received only scant attention in this thesis, there are a number of content-focussed topics that dovetail with concepts of religious belief and spirituality which could prove rewarding for future study. It is rather clichéd to suggest that spirituality is more patently manifested in Indigenous than in non-Indigenous literature and art. However, an exploration of Aboriginal spirituality in contemporary YA fiction might reveal unique insights not found in the non-Indigenous literature.

Although the current study includes only one Aboriginal-authored novel explicitly focussed on

Indigenous issues – Njunjul the Sun (McDonald and Pryor 2002) - several of the focus texts allude

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to current Indigenous concerns. References to the Stolen Generations appear metaphorically in

Nightpeople (Eaton 2005), in keeping with the fantasy mode of that novel, and more literally in

Requiem for a Beast (Ottley 2007). The Australian Government’s apology to Aboriginal people for past treatment, occurred in 2008 during the very early stage of this research. However, the Apology had been anticipated for many years and prescient allusions occur in Vigil (Wheatley 2000) and

Shaedow Master (D’Ath 2003) with the explicit utterance of the word ‘sorry’ both to Indigenous people in the texts and to the land they nurtured for many millennia. The recurrence of such

Indigenous themes throughout Australian literature, whether explicit or implicit, suggests a deep awareness within the Australian psyche or spirit of past and present frictions in the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. This perception, with a focus on spiritual aspects, would thus be an appropriate focus for further research, beyond its current inclusion in a number of scholarly papers and monographs, such as Reading Race (Bradford 2001).

As with Indigenous spiritualities, multicultural spiritual beliefs and practices are often inextricably entwined with holistic cultural concepts. As argued in Chapter 2, novels which directly address ethnic religious issues, such as Does My Head Look Big in This? (Abdel-Fattah 2005), tend to evade the numinous facets of spirituality in preference for more tangible sociocultural aspects of religious identity, such as the prejudice and discrimination that often confront Australians of non- mainstream religious communities. While it is often claimed that traditional religion is declining within the dominant Western cultural groups in multicultural societies like Australia, Jakubowicz

(2005) contends that “[R]eligion has become the central arena of dispute for Australian multiculturalism, the arena most fraught with anxious hostilities.” With this in mind, it would be pertinent in the post-9/11 era to explore the fictional representation of diverse belief systems and communities, including those with atheistic, agnostic and secular outlooks, as well as the emergence of growing socio-religious tensions such as the incidence of Islamophobia. A current survey of the Austlit database indicates that there are still few Australian YA novels that explore

Islamic spiritualities. However, basic keyword classifications used in such databases frequently miss subtle thematic references to embedded issues and there are undoubtedly many relevant references that are discernible only on a close reading and interpretation of the texts. The recent

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commemoration of the centenary of the 1915 Anzac landing at Gallipoli, for example, has inspired the publication of numerous literary works that contemplate and interrogate the contemporary significance of the Anzac legend, including some that offer Turkish viewpoints which embody

Islamic perspectives. There are a number of such texts for younger readers, such as the poignant picturebook, One Minute’s Silence (Metzenthen and Camilleri, 2014) and although there seem to be fewer in the YA area, a study of such phenomena might uncover further diverse representations of spirituality.

Beyond the opportunities presented for intercultural understandings, the Anzac legend occupies a unique position as a sacred concept in Australian culture which has engendered a substantial mythology surrounding it. Stevens (2015) claims that the “Anzac spirit is actually a spirituality. It might be called a Digger Spirituality.48 It enshrines recognisable values that are meaningful to almost all Australians.” Many Australians embrace the Anzac legend “as our creation story” and have transformed Anzac Day “into a quasi-sacred myth” (Bates 2013, 34). With the recent Anzac centenary commemoration there was renewed discussion about Anzac as a secular religion. Among the reasons to support claims that Anzac is a sacred concept are the ubiquitous references to ‘the Anzac spirit’, the associated reverence, the shrines of remembrance, the solemn dawn service rituals accompanied by profane and carnivalesque episodes of beer-drinking and gambling in the traditional Anzac game of ‘two-up’ with its symbolic links to soldiers playing it in the trenches. So sacrosanct is the Anzac mystique in Australian culture that in 2015 an Australian journalist was dismissed from employment with SBS, the media beacon of Australian multiculturalism, for privately making comments interrogating the Anzac myth that were considered to be “inappropriate and disrespectful” and possibly even “blasphemous” (Carland

2015). However, while the recent commemoration has evoked strong interest in, and dispute about, the significance of Anzac in Australian culture, the original legend emerged at a time when the development of Australian nationalism and identity was vigorous but grounded in the country’s

British heritage. Australia in 2015 is more conscious of its cultural diversity and although the

48 The term ‘digger’ is military slang used to refer to Australian and New Zealand soldiers, originating in World War One.

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Anzac spirit is embraced by Australians from varied cultural backgrounds, a more relevant research approach would encompass a broader multicultural and spiritual perspective.

In her recent monograph on Spirituality in Young Adult Literature, Campbell (2015, 167) concludes with a proposition that seems to valorise external authoritative discourses as she argues that “regarding the self as the ultimate authority is the dominion of childhood, precluding growth toward maturity” and young adult novels “must end with the young person still growing, albeit with new energy and direction, still seeking answers for the Godsearch”. While my thesis agrees with Campbell regarding the value of continued growth throughout life, it questions the inference that ultimate authority resides in an external domain. Rather, this study favours an integration of authoritative and internally persuasive discourses as posited by Bakhtin, leading to the ongoing spiritual development and ideological becoming of the protagonists and, by association, the readers. The authoritative discourse of organised religion, the “word of a father” (Bakhtin 1981,

342), blends with and succumbs to the internally persuasive discourses of more personal, individualised and implicitly expressed spiritualities. The focus texts discussed in the thesis suggest that this process prevails in contemporary Australian YA fiction and so the final words belong to some prominent characters in the texts who are well advanced in their ideological becoming. After a profound spiritual quest in Lost Property, Josh concluded “I’ve worked out what the soul is, you see. It’s the good inside us. God or no God, the soul’s a human thing” (Moloney 2005a, 257). And, more tentatively but most pertinently with regard to the quest for spirituality, Matilda in The

Ghost’s Child wisely concedes that “some answers don’t finish a quest - they merely start it”

(Hartnett 2007, 14). So it is with the ongoing exploration of postsecular spirituality in Australian young adult fiction.

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