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Peter Carey's Short Stories DIPLOMARBEIT Titel der Diplomarbeit “Peter Carey’s Short Stories” Verfasserin Lisa Klauser angestrebter akademischer Grad Magistra der Philosophie (Mag.phil.) Wien, im Mai 2011 Studienkennzahl lt. Studienblatt: A 343 Studienrichtung lt. Studienblatt: Anglistik und Amerikanistik Betreuerin: o. Univ.-Prof. Dr. Margarete Rubik To my mother and father, with love and gratitude Thanks to Prof. Rubik for her inspiration, guidance and patience during the process of writing this thesis. Thank you, Mark, Sabine, Gretl, Katharina and Kyle, for your care, encouragement, great help and love. Table of Contents 1 INTRODUCTION..................................................................................... 1 2 RECURRING THEMES IN COLLECTED STORIES .............................. 5 2.1 TRAPPED IN COLONIALIST AND CAPITALIST STRUCTURES ........................ 5 2.2 BLURRED BOUNDARIES – GENDER IN CAREY ’S SHORT STORIES ............ 17 2.3 “T RUE ” REALITY AND ALTERNATE REALITIES ........................................ 25 3 NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE IN CAREY’S SHORT FICTION................. 35 3.1 SETTING : TIME , PLACE AND ATMOSPHERE IN COLLECTED STORIES ...... 35 3.2 SUSPENSE AND CHRONOLOGY .......................................................... 41 3.3 NARRATIVE VOICES .......................................................................... 46 3.4 NARRATIVE MODE AND GENRE IN CAREY ’S SHORT STORIES ................ 53 3.4.1 An attempt to categorise............................................................. 57 4 THE UNSETTLING AND DISCONCERTING QUALITIES OF PETER CAREY’S SHORT FICTION – A COGNITIVE APPROACH........................ 61 4.1 SHARED COGNITIVE ELEMENTS IN THE SEMI -ABSURD AND IMAGINARY STORIES ..................................................................................................... 61 4.1.1 Mental sets, scripts and schemata – plot expectations in Carey’s Collected Stories................................................................................... 61 4.1.2 Deictic shift theory and metalepsis ............................................. 73 4.2 THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE IMAGINARY AND THE SEMI -ABSURD STORIES .................................................................................................. 82 4.2.1 What makes the imaginary stories disturbing and confusing?.... 82 4.2.2 Why are the semi-absurd stories so unsettling?......................... 90 4.3 CONCLUDING WITH A HAUNTING LACK OF CLOSURE.............................. 99 5 REFERENCES.................................................................................... 103 5.1 PRIMARY LITERATURE ..................................................................... 103 5.2 OTHER REFERENCES ...................................................................... 103 6 INDEX ................................................................................................. 107 7 GERMAN ABSTRACT ....................................................................... 109 8 CURRICULUM VITAE ........................................................................ 111 1 1 Introduction Peter Carey is one of the best-known Australian writers of our times and the second of only two authors who have won the prestigious Man Booker Prize twice 1. The very first books he published were two volumes of short stories and although they are less renowned than Carey’s longer fiction they are not entirely fameless and their artistic quality is by no means inferior to that of his later novels. The Fat Man in History , published in 1974, “won him an enthusiastic public and something of a cult following” (Hassall 3). The second of the two collections, War Crimes , was published in 1979 and Carey was awarded the New South Wales Premier’s Award for it in the following year. Since the publication of his first novel Bliss in 1981, Carey has become a successful novelist and his days of short story writing seem to be over, although some of his critics are of the opinion that short fiction is where his true talent lies (cf. Woodcock 37 and Rubik 169). The stories in The Fat Man in History and War Crimes , published together in Collected Stories in 1995, share several distinct qualities, which will be fleshed out in the three main chapters of this thesis. The goal of the first major section (chapter 2) will be to determine the socio-political issues Carey raises in his short stories. Although “his short fictions are generally resistant to simple allegorical readings,” (Bennett 195) a certain concern about social ills can be identified. Having absorbed the hippy ethos of the 1960s and 70s, Carey was apparently most alarmed about the kind of future to which the roads of capitalism and globalisation might be leading. The hippy movement fought against authoritarian social systems repressing the individual and denying self-determination. The “hellish worlds” (Hassall 5) created in Carey’s stories seem to portray an exaggerated status quo of the era or perhaps an outlook into a possible future, should the goal of social realignment not be achieved. To shatter seemingly hard and fast social 1 Carey was awarded this prize for his novels Oscar and Lucinda in 1988 and True History of the Kelly Gang in 2001. The other novelist referred to here is the South African writer J.M. Coetzee, who has won this award for Life & Times of Michael K in 1983 and Disgrace in 1999. 2 norms was the zeitgeist of the 1960s and 70s and to break with traditional categories of identity was the agenda. Second wave feminism was at its climax when Carey first published his short fiction and the rigid social roles assigned to the two sexes slowly began to soften. The availability of television had gradually spread during the 1960s and developed great impact on the consumers. Artificially constructed notions of reality, conveyed by Hollywood movies, could now be consumed on a daily basis at home and the fictional world of movie characters started to seep into reality and thereby made the concept of reality itself vulnerable. Thus, to establish how Carey manages to integrate the social issues in his stories shall be the focus of this first main chapter. The second of the three main sections (chapter 3), will deal with the narrative technique in Carey’s short stories. The remarkable vagueness of his settings, never revealing when and where exactly the post-modern stories are set is equally absorbing as the high degree of suspense Carey manages to create. The invariably unreliable narrators keep the reader in the dark about the essential meaning or truth of the narratives, not supposing that there is such a thing as an essential meaning in these post-modern stories. This chapter will also examine why Carey’s stories are so difficult to categorise when it comes to defining the genre. Science fiction, fantasy and even fable creep into some of Carey’s realistic settings adding strangely unfamiliar elements to otherwise well-known worlds. Although I am aware that such a classification can only be made provisionally, the last sub-section of this chapter will nevertheless establish three categories among Carey’s stories, dividing them into imaginary , semi-absurd and realistic . The first of these three groups comprises all the stories featuring elements of the popular and saleable genres outside realistic grounds and will be subject to close examination in the last chapter. The second group, the semi-absurd, also comprises stories the reader cannot fully contain in a mental representation of his or her perceived reality, but here different mechanisms are at work, which will, too, be explored in the last chapter. As they lack the Carey-esque reverberating effect, the six stories labelled as realistic in this chapter, will be treated in much less detail, but will be covered nevertheless for reasons of integrity. 3 In the last and concluding section of this study (chapter 4), an attempt will be made to analyse the semi-absurd and the imaginary stories through a cognitive poetics lens. This fairly new theoretical approach to literary works offers new insight into how narratives are processed in the reader’s mind. Fundamental and subconscious psychological mechanisms are involved in both the perception of real-life situations and literary experience. The two ostensibly disparate experiences are processed in similar ways by our brains and the same systems of concepts and according reactions are activated. Innate survival strategies, like mental sets, as well as experientially and socially learned scripts and schemata can be conjured up by literature, although they have initially been developed to deal with real life threat and pleasure. This theory, however, also accounts for how the human mind is able to blend mental spaces, or frames, in order to be able to extract meaning from otherwise inconsistent information. This theory is applied to Carey’s stories in an attempt to single out the unique unsettling and convulsive qualities that make his short fiction so “provocative and unforgettable” (Rubik 169). What I expect to prove with this thesis, is that cognitive poetics can be a very useful tool for examining the “haunting aftertaste which makes [Carey’s stories] lodge in the imagination long after the reader has put the book down” (Rubik 169). Cognitive poetics does not provide any deeper insight or revelation about the pending meaning of the texts in Collected Stories . Yet, this theoretical framework can be a means of elucidating how Carey conjures up such strong and often conflicting emotions in the reader, leaving him or
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