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The Treatment of History in the Novels of Peter Carey and David Malouf

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The Treatment of History in the Novels of Peter Carey and David Malouf 1.t(,ol THE PROBLEM OF THE PAST: THE TREATMENT OF HISTORY IN THE NOVELS OF PETER CAREY AND DAVID MALOUF. TREVOR BYRNE ADELAIDE UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH MARCH 2001. CONTENTS Introduction. 1 SECTION ONE: The Problem of Form: Ambivalence in Malouf's early novels and Carey's short stories. Chapter l: Johnno 11 Chapter 2: honic Structures: Carey's Short Stories' 25 Chapter 3: The Insufficiency of Language: An Imaginary Life 40 SECTION TWO: Stories and History Chapter 1: Changing Stories: B/iss and Harland's Half Acre. 5l Chapter 2: Stories for Sale: Illywhacker. 77 Chapter 3: Reality and Myth: Child's Play and FIy away Peter' 93 Chapter 4: Historiographic Metafiction'. Oscar and Lucinda. 131 Chapter 5: The Essential Thread: The Great World t63 Chapter 6: Poised between Two Worlds: Remembering Babylon t73 Chapter 7: Complaint as Convention: True History of the Kelly Gang t93 Conclusion 214 End Notes 22r Bibliography 225 ABSTRACT The intention of this thesis is to examine the novels of Peter Carey and David Malouf and analyse their treatment of history as a theme. I seek to locate their novels in the critical context which encouraged their problematisation of history and explore the political and philosophical influences which led to this problematisation. I argue that scepticism about realism as a literary form was extended to historical narrative in Carey's case and that Malouf's scepticism springs from his more radical doubts about the capacity of language to adequately represent the world. The treatment of history in the work of these novelists is analysed as a process which varies according to specific novels and which becomes a less important emphasis as strategies for casting doubt on history's truth claims become conventional in themselves. This work contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degreee or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution and, to the best of my knowledge and belief, contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference has been made in the text. I give consent to this copy of my thesis, when deposited in the University Library, being available for loan and photocopying PREf,'ACE terms frequently 'History', 'historicisnt', 'anti-historicism' and heo-historicisnt' are used in this thesis to describe certain modes of discourse in a broadly generalised fashion There are two conceptualisations to which I refer as 'history', one being the conventional discipline which records and interprets events of the past involving people. The other is a more abstract ideat of the past as an unattainable yet profoundly desirable hyper-realistic grail which is perceived to be, often paradoxically, diminished by textual attempts to replicate it. In the novels I will analyse, this idealised perception of the past is frequently portrayed as being traduced by the limitations of textual history. It is this continual emphasis on the inevitable shortcomings of conventional history and the concomitant idealisation of the intrinsicalþ elusive nature of the past to which I refer throughout the thesis with the term'anti-historicisnt'. There is in these novels a sense of opposition to a formal discipline which has failed to firlly represent the minutiae of people's e4perience and often wildly distorted the truth of past events because of its reliance on falsifiable documentation and its commitment to a contentious objectivity. Occasionally I will use the term 'neo-historicism' when I consider the problematisation of history within the novels to be less combative and more constructive in implying that there are new strategies emerging for the portrayal of history' The term is used by peter Pierce n l9g4 to describe recent historical novels by Peter Carey, Robert Drewe, Rodney Hall and David Malouf in which they provide "a useful context for opening up discussion of curent ways of writifig historyl through 'fiction' whereby both terms are held up for scrutiny and revision."(Pierce 7994a:304) INTRODUCTION In the early seventies Craig Munro was commissioned to put together the first prose he fiction list for the University of Queensland Press. Prophetically, the first three writers chose were David Malouf, Peter Carey and Rodney Hall (Giese 18)- Not only did Carey and Malouf go on to become the best known and most feted Australian literary writers of their generation, but all three went on to win the Miles Franklin award for historical novels: peter Carey for Oscar and Lucinda , David Malouf for The Great World and Rodney Hall for The Grisly Wife . Rodney Hall is certainly well known and not without influence, but if any individual writers can be said to have shaped the perceptions of the Australian literary community, Carey and Malouf would have to be pre-eminent among them. My interest in these writers centres on their treatment of history and the effect that it the has had on the way we perceive both it as a discipline and all other representations of past. None of these novels are uncomplicated reconstructions of the past such as Thomas Keneally's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksntith andschindler's Ark- Even though these to novels confuse matters by having heroes who are hardly moral paragons, it is impossible judge avoid extracting a moral from the stories that Keneally creates. We are invited to the just historical milieu that forms Jimmie and condemn its oppressive social practices as we The are very clearly meant to revile the Nazi regime as represented in Schindler's Ark- most striking difference in the way Carey and Malouf treat the past is that they are much more ambivalent about the purpose of historical depiction. In their novels, history tends judgement. not to be treated in such a way as to encourage something as decisive as moral The main reason for this is not that they lack any moral intention, but that their scepticism about the very possibility of accurately representing the past obviates this intention. 1 Both Carey and Malouf exemplify the postmodern paradox of recognising the insufficiency of language to fully represent reality by expressing this concept in language. Malouf, especially in An Imnginary Lfe, wúte.s about the desire to attain a state beyond language, but is forced to do so in language. This paradoxical tension is intensified by Maloufs use of elegant and meticulously structured prose. Like Carey, he is not unambiguously celebrating form and pattern and offering ír as the purpose of literature in the way that an aesthete like Nabokov does, but using it in a way that is in a sense provisional. Malouf is not fully committed to form as the sine qua non of his art; he deploys it because it is necessary and valuable but the content of his novels operates to undermine any notion of its primacy. Form, it is implied, can structure intimations of the emotional intensity of the lived moment, but its poignancy owes at least as much to the insufficiency of prose to fully realise the complexity of actual experience as to its capacity to suggest it. At the heart of both Malouf and Caley is a radical ambivalence which tinges all aspects of their work with a sense that the meaning their work generates is endlessly provisional and contingent. Their intention, it is implied, cannot be conveyed pristinely; the slippage between sign and signified blurs their original conception which itself has to be translated into the distorting pattern of metaphor and narrative of which a novel consists. This is the abiding ambivalence which permeates virtually all the themes that they treat. They relish metaphor, revel in narrative invention and are deeply fascinated by language while at the same time highlighting the insufhciency of all these strategies. Carey's early stories illustrate this beautifully. Their form resembles parable, which tantalises the reader with the expectation that their odd images must add up to some discernible symbolic pattern of meaning. However, the stories resist any attempt to discover a consistent pattern and actually operate as anti-parables. Realistic touches are used to ironise realism and the tension between the form and the content of the stories creates a delicate balancing act between coherence and nonsense. 'Life and Death in the South Side Pavilion' has precisely this dream-like quality which both invites interpretation and resists it. What immediately strikes us as a satire of 2 as an corporate capitalism is too surreal to sustain such a neat summing up of the story, and explanation cannot encompass very convincingly oddities such as the narrator's impotence arising out of his desperate conclusion that "EVERY TIME I FUCK MARIE I KILL A HORSE', (54). The strangeness of the idea that someone should be employed simply to keep horses from falling into a swimming pool immediately suggests that the story is 'about' futility, but if we are to take this 'message' seriously, then we would have to this question why, in the face of such futility, the story is worth writing. The point is that ù story, like so many others by Carey, is opposed to and experiments with this sort of reductive attitude. The stories are designed to be as open to as many interpretations as possible without (and this is the site of continuing ambivalence) becoming vacuous or merely absurd. There has to be some core of meaning, however vaguely apprehended, to sustain the reader's interest or to make the story explicable. What Carey is reacting to is the rigidity of the conception that the meaning of a story can be perceived in the mind of a hypothetically perfect reader and is an unchangeable essence that can be 'missed' if the reader is in the wrong mood or lacks the intelpretive training to notice crucial nuances.
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