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Travel, Identity, Mortality in the Work of Robert Dessaix

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Travel, Identity, Mortality in the Work of Robert Dessaix This Mortal Coil: Travel, Identity, Mortality in the Work of Robert Dessaix By Adam Ouston BA (Hons) Tasmania Submitted in Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Tasmania January 2014 Declaration of Originality This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for a degree or diploma by the University or any other institution, except by way of background information and duly acknowledged in the thesis, and to the best of my knowledge and belief no material previously published or written by another person except where due acknowledgement is made in the text of the thesis, nor does the thesis contain any material that infringes copyright. Signed, Adam Ouston Authority of Access This thesis may be made available for loan and limited copying and communication in accordance with the Copyright Act 1968. Signed, Adam Ouston ii Table of Contents Note on Abbreviation of Titles v Abstract vi Acknowledgements viii Introduction. “The Diver”: Somewhere between Life and Death 1 Other Voices: Career, Style and Reception 5 Dessaix’s Travel Performances in Context 12 Absence 17 Placelessness 21 Mortality 27 PART ONE: ABSENCE 1. The Absent Centre: Dessaix’s Will to Essentialism Introduction 40 A Shaft of Silence: Essentialism versus Anti-Essentialism 42 “Some things are surely given”: The Quest for Essence 45 “My spiralling moment”: Dessaix’s Essential Absence 58 With Nothing at its Core: Pure Land and Adopting “Dessaix” 67 2. Vanishing Acts: A Journey Through “A Landscape of Forgetting” Introduction 79 The Homoerotics of Orientalism 81 Dessaix’s Gide and the “Landscape of Forgetting” 85 Cliché, Silence and the Self-in-Crisis 100 Humanising the Orient 115 PART TWO: PLACELESSNESS 3. “I could have been anywhere”: Barbarism, Civilisation and the Death of History in Twilight of Love Introduction 120 Belonging Somewhere Else: A Civilised Homecoming 122 Civilised Barbarians: Dessaix and Turgenev 125 “Stranded in the middle of nowhere”: Dessaix’s Europe as Non-Place 139 4. The Absence of Authenticity and the Authenticity of Absence in Twilight of Love Introduction 156 Authenticity and the Tourist Gaze 158 Lifeless: Tourism and the Absence of Authenticity 162 Commemorating Nothing: The Post-Tourist 171 Les Frênes: Journeys Through What Isn’t 173 “There was indeed nothing there”: Courtavenel and the iii Authenticity of Absence 179 PART THREE: MORTALITY 5. The Horror of Home: Repetition and Uncanny Returns in Night Letters Introduction 186 The Silent Annunciation 188 “A childish fantasy”: Getting Lost 192 “I was feeling trapped”: Death at Every (Re)Turn 195 “I had wandered off from the straight path”: Professor Eschenbaum’s Straying and Retribution 204 Death as Home: Stillness and Wandering 215 6. “A delicate instrument in a stony place”: Homecoming in Corfu Introduction 220 The Art of “fuck[ing] off”: An Island Escape 222 “I was trapped” ... again: The Threat of the Familiar 231 “The tottering ride into oblivion”: Coming Home 240 Conclusion: Being Here 243 Works Cited 251 iv Note on Abbreviations of Titles For style and convenience, I will abbreviate in-text citations of the following primary sources as: A Mother’s Disgrace: MD Night Letters: NL Twilight of Love: TL v Abstract: “This Mortal Coil: Travel, Identity, Mortality in the Work of Robert Dessaix” Robert Dessaix is a prominent figure in Australian literary culture, known initially for hosting ABC Radio’s Books and Writing programme (1985–95) and subsequently for his books, essays and reviews. His major publications include: A Mother’s Disgrace (1994), Night Letters: A Journey through Switzerland and Italy (1996), Corfu: A Novel (2001), Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev (2004) and Arabesques: A Tale of Double Lives (2008). In each of these texts, Dessaix interrogates traditional tropes of travel literature in order to articulate a nuanced and revised understanding of concepts such as the self, authenticity and home. This thesis examines the ways in which identity and homecoming are represented in Dessaix’s travel writing. It shows that these concepts are structured around an inescapable awareness of mortality. Although the journeys of Dessaix’s narrators seem to be made “in the face of death,” or as a resistance to death, it is through an awareness of being subject to death that they find their voices; travel is not in this case a flight from death and the accompanying emotions of anxiety and fear, but a means of affirming life and identity. The central argument of this study is that despite defining his narrators as “placeless,” cosmopolitan travellers, reminders of their mortality interrupt the journeys / writings of these figures and serve to inform a “placed,” bound and human experience of the world. Of central concern to the project is the way Dessaix’s preoccupation with the mortal condition constitutes a simultaneous crisis / affirmation of identity. vi Dessaix’s narrators affirm their identities only when contemplating not being; it is only when exploring the silence of the grave, giving voice to the threat of death, that they find their own voices. Hence a constant play between presence and absence throughout his work. In this way, Dessaix’s textual personae manifest themselves via an “aesthetic of absence” that revolves around three main phenomena: the absence of a central, “grand” narrative of the life of Dessaix’s narrators; the absence of “place” in his definition of home; and the absence of the literary figures (and their epochs) in whose footsteps his narrators travel. These absences represent an underlying awareness of mortality and an anxiety toward the finitude of life; together with a rhetoric of unity and wholeness, they work to define a uniform, centred textual persona across Dessaix’s body of work. Although this kind of self-certainty has been disparaged in certain fields—especially postcolonial studies—by defining themselves through absence Dessaix’s narrators comprise a textual identity that is open to difference and is thus one that denotes a positive elaboration of essentialism free of the oppressive binaries that tend to characterise much travel literature. vii Acknowledgements This thesis has amassed many debts of gratitude. Firstly, I would like to thank Dr Lisa Fletcher and Dr Robert Clarke for their insight, energy and feedback. Their individual expertise helped deepen this analysis and their supervisory skills meant that the project was well managed and Dessaix’s dark hallways well-lit. In the early stages of the development of my ideas, Associate Professor Anna Johnston’s intelligence and encouragement were instrumental and her confidence contagious. I am also immensely grateful to the rest of the staff in the (former) School of English, Journalism and European Languages who always took an interest in the progress of the thesis. Thanks too to Dr Dominic Lennard for sharing anecdotes of his recent Ph.D. experience and strategic advice. Writing anything in long-form is a solitary process, and I am indebted to my fellow postgraduate students for keeping the air alive with conversation and for their shared support and sustained faith in the study of literature: Ryan Burley, Britta Hartmann, Claire Konkes, Anna Lucas, Alessandro Sheedy and Zack Eaves. I am indebted to Professor Jeff Malpas for his advice and for his work on the subject of place. Thanks also to Professor Keith Jacobs whose knowledge of and sensitivities towards literature, migration and home has been an inspiration, as have our discussions on everything from film to Manchester in the early ‘80s. A project such as this is, in the end, more than academic, and throughout the three years it took to complete, my remarkable family and friends made the experience bearable. In particular, my family has backed me viii stoically and reiterated time and again the importance of what I was doing. My bandmates, Dreamboat, Peter and Sarah, reminded me there was more to life than work. Teddy and Rae Rae supplied many laughs, much serious support and a place to stay when in Melbourne for conferences; Benny Walter and Robbie Arnott kept alive the notion that the best literary discussion takes place at the pub. My dear friends, Antonia Thiel and Ulla Heher, not only put me up when I went journeying in Dessaix’s footsteps, but ferried me to my various destinations and ignored their own protestations: “Who’d want to go to Baden- Baden?!” Imagine my surprise at finding myself being driven into Baden-Baden by two very cosmopolitan young ladies and discussing at length literature, Dessaix and Australia’s place in the world. Talk about uncanny! My sincerest thanks to Robert Dessaix, whose openness, generosity and spirited conversation left me more assured not only of the possibility of positive textual representations of the inner life, but also of his own expertise in the form. Above all, my greatest debt of gratitude is to my wife, Emily; what follows would have been impossible without her support, her intelligence and her insight into my character. Her positivity, self-possession and grace inspired this project at every stage. It is dedicated lovingly to her. ix You are the one who writes and the one who is written. – Edmond Jabès The Book of Questions (i) x Introduction “The Diver”: Somewhere between Life and Death The final chapter of Arabesques, “So Be It,” begins with a discussion of “The Tomb of the Diver,” an Ancient Greek sarcophagus displayed at Paestum near Naples. On the lid of the coffin, amid a medley of scenes depicting, presumably, “the dead man who was buried inside this coffin [...] carousing with his friends,” there is the figure of “The Diver”: He’s been caught, this young man (or so they tell us), plummeting from life into the sea of death [...] On second thoughts, he’s not plunging so much as hanging.
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