The Writings of Thomas King and Mudrooroo
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Blurring Representation: the Writings of Thomas King and Mudrooroo Clare Archer-Lean B.A. (First Class Hons) School of Humanities and Social Sciences Centre for Community and Cross-cultural Studies Queensland University of Technology Submitted in full requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2002 ii Abstract This thesis explores the issues of representation and identity through an examination of the writings of Thomas King and Mudrooroo. The particular focus of the dissertation is on the similar yet distinctive ways these authors explore past and present possibilities for representing Indigenous peoples in fiction. This discussion has a largely Canadian-Australian cross-cultural comparison because of the national milieux in which each author writes. The research question, then, addresses the authors’ common approaches to Indigenous, colonial and postcolonial themes and the similar textual attitudes to the act of representation of identity in writing. In order to explore these ideas the chapters in the thesis do not each focus on a particular author or even on a specific text. Each chapter examines the writings of both authors comparatively, and reads the novels of both Thomas King and Mudrooroo thematically. The themes unifying each chapter occur in four major movements. Firstly, the Preface and Chapter One are primarily concerned with the methodology of the thesis. This methodology can be summarised as a combination of general postcolonial assumptions about the impact of colonial texts on representations of Indigenous peoples; ideas of reading practice coming from North American and Australian Indigenous writing communities and cultural studies theories on race. A movement in argument then occurs in Chapters Two and Three, which focus upon how the authors interact with colonising narratives from the past. Chapter Four shifts from this focus on past images and explores how the authors commonly re-imagine the present. In Chapters Five and Six the dissertation progresses from charting the authors’ common responses to colonising narratives — past and present — and iii engages in the writings in terms of the authors’ explications of Indigenous themes and their celebrations of Indigenous presence. These chapters analyse the ways in which King and Mudrooroo similarly re-envisage narrative process, time and space. Overall, the thesis is not interested in authorisations of Thomas King and Mudrooroo as ‘Indigenous writers’. Rather, it argues that these authors on either side of the world use very similar techniques to reject previous representations of Indigenous people, and, importantly, attempt to change the meaning of and approach to representation. In so doing this thesis finds that the novels of both authors respond to colonising semiotic fields, as well as reducing the importance of such fields by incorporating them within a larger framework of repeated and multiple evocations of Indigenous identity. The writings of both Thomas King and Mudrooroo share a self- conscious textuality. The same tales and emblems are repeated within each author’s entire oeuvre in order to reinforce their thematic trope of re-presentation as a constantly evolving process. Finally, the thesis concludes that a significant common effect of this similar approach to re-presentation is an emphasis on the community over the individual, and a community that can be best described as pan-Indigenous rather than specific. iv Table of Contents Abstract ii Table of Contents iv Statement of Original Authorship vii Acknowledgments viii Preface Representations and Re-presentations x (i) Some Definitions and Limitations xi (ii) Methodology and what has gone before? xix a) ‘Postcolonialism’ and ‘Race’ as reading categories xix b) ‘Indigenous writing’ as a category? xxvii c) Work specifically on King and Mudrooroo xxxvi (iii) Why choose and compare Thomas King and Mudrooroo? xxxviii (iv) Authorial controversies xl (v) Chapter outlines xliv Chapter One Reading Thomas King and Mudrooroo 1 Chapter Two ‘Getting it Straight’: Deconstructing Colonial Texts 36 (i) Shifting genres 38 v (ii) Empire’s ‘others’ 43 (iii) Shipwrecks and captivity narratives 50 (iv) Sexual ‘frontiers’ 59 (v) Myths of dying races 72 (vi) Native/non-Native partnerships 81 (vii) History, fiction and the constructed subject 86 Chapter Three Gothicism and Christianity: Different uses of satire and incorporation 95 (i) Christianity and Gothicism: textualising the colonised 96 (ii) Appropriation and satire: Mudrooroo and Gothicism 105 (iii) The Satire in Textualisation: King and Christianity 118 (iv) The intersections between Gothicism and Christianity 128 (v) Incorporation as a creative strategy 130 Chapter Four Re-inscribing Loss: ‘An Indian in the Twentieth Century’? 145 (i) The Lost Men 146 (ii) The Land of the ‘Lost Men’ 151 (iii) Textualising the Lost Men 156 (iv) Positioning the father 161 (v) Questing and multiplicity: evading the stereotype and reimaging loss 176 (vi) Positioning the woman 187 Chapter Five Trickster’s Role 197 (i) The tradition of the trickster 198 vi (ii) Bringing the trickster into a timeless now 202 (iii) Trickster repetitions: King’s Buffalo Bill and John Wayne versus Mudrooroo’s Dracula and the missionary 212 (iv) Fluidity and the emblem of water 222 (v) Non-sequential ‘progress’ in supra-textual movement 229 Chapter Six ‘Rethinking Tactics’: Reinterpreting Place 242 (i) Magic Realism: re-imagining place 243 (ii) Non-specific places: patchworking a pan-Indigenous place 258 (iii) Pan-Indigeneity and the specific politics of land rights 278 Conclusion/s 289 (i) Writing as protest 292 (ii) Writing through inversion 295 (iii) Writing beyond ‘conflict’ and ‘correction’ 296 (iv) Centralising Indigenous presence 299 (v) Re-presentation: escaping the fixed semiotic field? 302 (vi) Future directions 304 Bibliography 309 vii Statement of Original Authorship The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted for a degree or diploma at any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief the thesis contains no material published or written by another person except where due reference is made. Signed:……………………………………….. Date: ………………………………………… viii Acknowledgments I am extremely grateful to a number people for the completion of this arduous project. First and foremost I would like to thank my supervisors. Professor Adam Shoemaker was my principal supervisor for the main duration of this thesis. I would like to send him prodigious thanks for his patience, support and advice. I would also like to sincerely thank Dr Sharyn Pearce who replaced Dr Shoemaker after his move to ANU for her commitment and support so late in my candidature. Dr Shirley Tucker provided invaluable critical perspective as my associate supervisor and I thank her unequivocally. I would also like to thank Dr Joanne Tompkins, Associate Professor Russell McDougall, Professor Terry Goldie, and Professor Julia Emberley for their advice and comments early on in my project. The School and Centre at QUT must be acknowledged for financially supporting the research trip to Canada. I would like to thank all my interviewees in Canada, as well as those in Australia. I would particularly like to thank Mudrooroo and Thomas King who both provided me with opportunities to interview them and assisted my accumulation of research materials. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the personal support of my great friends and loving family. I could not have survived without the collegial support of my fellow postgraduate students at QUT, Carseldine. I would like to thank all my seven siblings and particularly, my parents, Shirley and Keith Lean and Jeff Archer and Su Woodward for their interested engagement in my work as well as unconditional emotional (and occasional financial) support. My partner Ant McKenna and my ix stepdaughter, Beth, are both thanked with love for theirs. Lastly, I would like to thank my just born daughter, Grace-Emily Archer-Lean McKenna, for all the calming pregnancy hormones! x Preface Representations and Re-presentations. This thesis examines ways of presenting identity through the cross-cultural comparison of specific Canadian and Australian writings. Terry Goldie has drawn attention to similarities in the representation of Indigenous people by non-Indigenous authors in Australia and Canada,1 but a lengthy cross-cultural comparison of some of the literary responses to this image of the indigene remains largely undeveloped. This thesis explores the literature of Thomas King and Mudrooroo, authors writing in the Canadian and Australian context respectively, who do respond to the traditional representations Goldie discusses. These authors have been selected, in part, due to a common ambiguous speaking position in terms of their strictly locatable geographical and cultural identity. More importantly, they have been selected because of the similarly complex ways in which both authors use fiction to focus on stories told and past images created about culture and identity. Questions of how to discuss and focus upon representation and images elicit tangled webs of both politics and semantics. This thesis begins by introducing some of the methodological options available for discussing the writing of Thomas King and Mudrooroo in terms of theories of identity and postcoloniality and, importantly, notions of ‘Indigenous’ based theoretical reading practice. The dissertation then explores some of King’s and Mudrooroo’s postcolonial responses to colonial imaging of the indigene.