Multiple Pasts and Possible Selves

MULTIPLE PASTS AND POSSIBLE SELVES NEGOTIATING UNCERTAINTY IN THE ACTUALIST HISTORICAL NOVEL PHILIPPA CLAIRE SMITH Doctor of Creative Arts Writing and Society Research Group Western Sydney University 2016 STATEMENT OF AUTHENTICATION Te work presented in this thesis is, to the best of my knowledge and belief, original except as acknowledged in the text. I hereby declare that I have not submitted this material, either in full or in part, for a degree at this or any other institution. _______ ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Sincere thanks are due to my supervisors Ivor Indyk, Chris Andrews and Sara Knox for their guidance, especially in knowing when to curtail my exploration of infnite possibilities; to my partner, René Christen, and parents, Ross and Sally Smith, for their patience and support; to Tom Watson for making quantum physics as understandable as it can be; to Chad Parkh- ill for his sharp eye for detail and indefatigable engagement with the task at hand; to Peter Doyle, Nerida Campbell and all at the Justice and Police Museum for the fresh insights on Sydney’s history that were brought to light in the City of Shadows exhibition, which provoked my initial interest in Falleni’s story in 2008; to Suzanne Falkiner, Mark Tedeschi, and Lach- lan Philpott for their rigorous contributions to research on Falleni’s life. And lastly and most importantly, to Eugenia Falleni, Annie Crawford, and all who have sufered trying to live and love in ways that don’t ft. My hope is that our imaginative visions will evolve to accommodate more possible ways of being. A NOTE ON REFERENCING STYLE I have used the Chicago system of referencing throughout this thesis but, in passages of extended analysis requiring a large number of citations of the one text, I have chosen to use in-text citations in order to create a smoother reading experience. In the novel (pages 235 to 255) I have chosen a more relaxed referencing style that communi- cates the most essential information for the reader at this given point. TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ii NEGOTIATING UNCERTAINTY IN THE ACTUALIST HISTORICAL 1 NOVEL INTRODUCTION: THE INFLUENCE OF THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE IN 2 TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE PART ONE: OSCILLATING BETWEEN METAFICTION AND REALISM 15 PART TWO: EUGENIA FALLENI 36 CONCLUSION: NEGOTIATING UNCERTAINTY IN THE WRITING OF HALF-WILD 75 WORKS CITED 78 HALF-WILD 82 TALLY HO 84 HARRY CRAWFORD 142 NINA FALLENI 201 THE MAN-WOMAN 219 JEAN FORD 260 i ABSTRACT Tis thesis is composed of two parts: an exegesis, which examines how uncertainty, multiplic- ity and paradox have been negotiated in works of ‘actualist’ historical fction, and a creative component, the novel Half-Wild, which explores the multiple identities and contradictory accounts at play in the various lives of the historical fgure Eugenia Falleni (1875–1938). Te exegesis opens with an examination of the infuence that ‘uncertainty’, as described by the ‘new physics’, has had on the twentieth-century literary imagination. It focuses in particular on the relationship between Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg’s interpretation of quantum physics and the troubling of history, gender and identity in narrative fction. Su- san Strehle’s defnition of ‘actualist’ fction—positioned between realism and metafction—is introduced in order to discuss works of historical fction that engage with uncertain, dynamic pasts, as opposed to a fxed, fact-focused past. Te argument continues with a close reading of Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety and Tomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, two novels engaged in ‘actual’ history which oscil- late between realism and metafction in order to destabilise the received versions of their referent subjects and events. Tese novels are selected as examples of how historical fction’s emphasis is not now on the determining of fact, but on the engagement with history as an act or process—a writing through fact and interaction with sources, a combining, recombin- ing and troubling of possible ways things were, without eschewing the integrity of the facts themselves. Te exegesis concludes with an extended analysis of the sources pertaining to the life, trial for murder, and death of the historical fgure Eugenia Falleni, and how these sources have been used, ignored, or interacted with by other authors who have narrativised her life. I continue the argument by applying the principles of Strehle’s actualist fction in my own novel, Half-Wild. Te novel explores themes of indeterminacy, possibility, and paradox within representations of Falleni’s life by allowing contradictory versions of her story to co-exist in the same narrative. It makes use of collage and the juxtaposition of documentary materials, such as newspaper reports and court transcripts, as well as frst-person narration and free indirect style to perform an ‘inhabitation’ of multiple, ofen contradictory, points of view. ii Te novel is divided into fve parts, each focusing on a diferent persona of Falleni’s: as tomboy Tally Ho growing up in Wellington, New Zealand; as the adult called both Harry and Jack Crawford in Sydney; as the cross-dressing Italian woman Nina Falleni; as the ‘man-woman’ convicted by the judiciary and Australian tabloid press of murdering her frst wife, Annie; and as Jean Ford, a woman lying in a coma at Sydney Hospital afer being struck by a car on Oxford St, Paddington, eight years afer her release from prison. For a writer in 2016, it is difcult to afect a naïve obliviousness to how narrative frameworks manipulate the aspects of the past being described, or to how that past is itself linguistic, fctive, and performative in nature. With Falleni’s story refracted into fve parts, each part destabilises the others: any reference to one ‘authentic’ self underpinning her various personae is avoided, allowing con- tradiction to inform the multiple expressions of her fuid identity, and, at the same time, the parts to operate as their own complete, immersive fction-worlds, each contextualising one of the many ‘authentic’ selves. iii NEGOTIATING UNCERTAINTY IN THE ACTUALIST HISTORICAL NOVEL 2 INTRODUCTION THE INFLUENCE OF THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE ON TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE In Fiction in the Quantum Universe, literary critic Susan Strehle claims that “the new physics has reimagined reality. While other terms could be added, the new reality may be described as relative, discontinuous, energetic, statistical, subjective, and uncertain.”1 In a world that is still grappling with the perspective-rattling discoveries of quantum physics, authors of novels based on actual events are faced with a paradox: they must fnd a way of acknowledging that history is slippery, the reliability of its facts prone to being destabilised at any given moment, while at the same time permit themselves to invent with the convic- tion and imaginative vivacity of one who ‘knows’. In part one of this exegesis I will compare how two very diferent writers of ‘actual’ people and events—Hilary Mantel and Tomas Pynchon—have negotiated this paradox, and how the anxiety of ‘not knowing’ has shaped their works, both stylistically and conceptually. In part two I will explore how uncertainty has problematised the researching of an indeterminate identity, Eugenia Falleni. But frst, by way of introduction, I would like to take a closer look at the concept of uncertainty in literature, as defned by the twentieth-century physicist Werner Heisenberg, and what his defnition of uncertainty has come to mean for writers who engage with facts in the twentieth and twenty-frst centuries. GALILEO AND UNCERTAINTY IN LITERATURE In Science and Imagination, Marjorie Hope Nicolson shows how the poetic imagination of the seventeenth century was “not only infuenced, but actually changed” by the “new astronomy” brought about by the telescope and Galileo’s subsequent discoveries: 1. Susan Strehle, Fiction in the Quantum Universe (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 13. 3 Te century was aware less of the position of the world than of the immensity of the universe, and the possibility of a plurality of worlds. It is this which troubles and enthrals; the solid earth shrinks to minute proportions as man surveys the new cosmos.2 Tis new awareness of universal scale and possible multiple worlds led to exultation in some poetry and drama of the time, while other poets wrote of destabilisation, uncertainty and fragmentation—themes ofen considered intrinsic to modernist literature of the early twentieth century.3 As Nicolson points out, Donne engages with the new discoveries of Galileo and his contemporaries frst with scepticism and doubt, such as when he writes, “And new Philos- ophy calls all in doubt … ’Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone.”4 Also present in the poetry of the seventeenth century are the typically ‘modernist’ feelings of inconstancy; the feeling that the world as it was known has been ‘inverted’, and may yet be again. Here, Nicholson quotes Lovelace: Nor be too confdent, fx’d on the shore, For even that too borrows from the store Of her rich Neighbour, since now wisest know, (And this to Galileo’s judgement ow) Te palsie Earth it self is every jot As frail, inconstant, wavering as that blot We lay upon the Deep.5 Nicolson does acknowledge that the new themes emerging in seventeenth century literature had “little to do with the problem of the relative position of the earth and sun,” which had already been established by Copernicus, or even “the consequence of man’s knowledge that his earth is not a special creation of God’s, the centre of the universe”.6 And yet afer the introduction of the ‘perspective glass’, Nicolson notes an emerging appreciation of ‘frame’ and ‘perspective’ as ways of seeing which can be adopted, exchanged or distorted—laying the imaginative groundwork for Einstein’s theories of general and special relativity three centuries later.7 While the experience of uncertainty can be found in the writing of any era during which major paradigm-shifing discoveries are made, it could be argued that with the wavering im- portance of the church, the destabilising discoveries made by physicists in the early twentieth century were more acutely felt throughout the collective consciousness of the time.

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