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Home , Disgrace, Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries, West Coast Gold Rush, Wolf Hall

Ilha do Desterro: A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies E-ISSN: 2175-8026 [email protected] Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina Brasil

Scheckter, John : A D—NED FINE TALE, BUT OF WHAT? Ilha do Desterro: A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies, vol. 70, núm. 1, enero-abril, 2017, pp. 123-134 Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina Florianópolis, Brasil

Available in: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=478355266012

How to cite Complete issue Scientific Information System More information about this article Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal Journal's homepage in redalyc.org Non-profit academic project, developed under the open access initiative DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2017v70n1p123

THE LUMINARIES: A D—NED FINE TALE, BUT OF WHAT?

John Scheckter* Long Island University Brookville, US Abstract he Luminaries (2013), ’s of nineteenth-century , has won wide international acclaim, including the Man . Yet many readers ind the work exasperating to read—a “nightmare,” to use a term Catton herself suggests. In large measure, this response emerges from Catton’s use of heavy structuring devices, particularly and mathematics, that pertain to the time period of her iction. hese frameworks tend to make totalizing claims, oten through causal or linear progression, and to support modernist and realistic protocols of reading. As this essay demonstrates, Catton undercuts those claims, and frustrates such readings, by emphasizing multiple paths of comprehension and multiple voices of narration. he Luminaries embraces its multiple structural mechanisms, but is not dominated by any of them. Keywords: New Zealand; ; Australasia/Southern Hemisphere heory; Commodity Circulation; Postmodern Structure

he characteristics that make he Luminaries (2013) upon, nineteenth-century structures of understanding such a good book are the same things that frustrate or that almost succeed at totalizing vision, but fall just annoy many readers. Certainly, the accolades came short of certainty. hat is, he Luminaries succeeds quickly. he Luminaries, Eleanor Catton’s second novel, through its manipulation of paradox, its calculated and brought her the Man Booker Prize at age twenty-eight. It incremental failure. he novel is framed by a heavy won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction armature of astrology that suggests visible intrusion in Canada, where she was born, and it brought her wide and thorough predetermination, but actually encloses acclaim in New Zealand, where she lives, including free-loating demonstrations of randomness and an honorary doctorate from Victoria University of confusion that the structure cannot resolve. Moreover, Wellington. As Nicholas Birns says, he Luminaries several systems of meaning—, allegory, “carried all before it, making news in a way that no irony, scientiic method, legal process—contend for book from the antipodes had since ’s early the power to identify and control both the characters’ days” (221). Catton is frequently matched with Carey, perception and the readers’ apprehension. Numerous a writer of similarly diicult, antipodean metaiction— codes of language, not only authorial references to but also seventeen years older than Catton when he nineteenth-century literary convention but also shiting irst won the Booker Prize. Critical recognition and awareness among the characters of their own diction, public acclaim, however, do not settle the matter of similarly complicate internal and external desires for what makes he Luminaries good, but rather highlight critical certainty—as do untranslated passages in Maori the fragile and tenuous success of its historical and Cantonese. Any of these structures, modes, and narration: its establishment of, and apparent reliance voices might produce a solid, tight novel, and in he

* Professor at Long Island University. Dr. Scheckter has written articles and conference papers on American, Australian, Canadian, African and South Asian literatures, including , short iction and autobiography. His research interests are: Post-Colonial Literature, American Literature, Australian Literature, Cultural Studies, Literature and Art, Literature and Material Culture. His email address is [email protected]

Esta obra tem licença Creative Commons 124 John Scheckter, he Luminaries: A D—ned Fine Tale, but of What?

Luminaries each of them loudly claims precedence, reviewers need to categorize their subjects quickly, totality, and duration, and each comes teasingly close to and may fall back upon a generalization that comprehensive explanation before it ultimately fails. As historical iction is most authentic when it reproduces a result, all of these elements overlap, with none gaining conventions of historiography: thus, many discussions domination and many speaking at the same time, thus of he Luminaries echo Kirsty Gunn’s conclusion in the revealing their contentious and ineicient mutual Guardian that the work is “a massive shaggy dog story; dependence. What is good about he Luminaries, then, a great empty bag; an enormous, wicked, gleeful cheat.” comes from its steady management of ongoing conlict: he New Zealand writer C. K. Stead complains in the it highlights irreducible uncertainty within systems that “that it doesn’t allow me to forget, even loudly proclaim their totality. for a moment, that this is iction—the novel as game.” In her acceptance speech for the Man Booker Prize, High levels of manipulation and prominent narrative Catton called he Luminaries “a publisher’s nightmare.” intrusion are nothing unfamiliar in the contemporary She referred to matters of production, as we will see, novel—Stead also compares Catton to Carey, disdaining but many reviewers quickly pounced on that phrase, both—but the reader’s exasperation may be increased by so that the diiculty of categorizing the book quickly Catton’s use of nineteenth-century narrative styles and became a measure of readers’ frustration. he New vocabularies that are generally associated with ictional York Times reviewer Janet Maslin, for example, found realism. Stead, a champion of modernism, inds this that “by and large, it’s a critic’s nightmare. Consider anachronism not only retrograde but politically the reviewing eforts of those seeking to explain, revanchist: “he history of iction in the 20th century recommend and applaud this book: raving abounds, was a struggle, never entirely successful, to escape this but so do clutches at thin air.” Catton’s style, she says, kind of writing. … It is, you might say, Virginia Woolf’s is “verbosely Victorian,” full of “endless reiteration and nightmare of how many steps back a woman might take precious little ampliication”; the dualities of theme, the form if given her head and a room of her own.”2 as she calls them, are let unresolved. For Maslin, the In efect, however, he Luminaries employs realistic cardinal sin of he Luminaries seems to be that it is styles that originally projected transparency, and ofers not , the Booker awardee for 2009: Hilary narrative intrusions that formerly suggested common Mantel’s magniicent novel is just as long, just as dense values held by reader and author alike (using the as Catton’s, but is notably more linear in its plotting euphemistic “d—ned” for example), in order to produce and more direct in its characterization of Henry VIII, the opposite efects: these strategies in fact distance the homas Cromwell, , and other familiar reader from the characters’ consciousness and suggest igures.1 he complexities of Wolf Hall can be followed continually that much is hidden. Certainly, a game is in expected ways, with clear resolutions (and we afoot, but we do not know what game it is. In fact, there already know the plot, ater all). Usefully, then, Maslin’s may be several games afoot, since Catton’s nineteenth- nightmarish encounter with he Luminaries suggests a century voice has many registers; particularly in dialogue greater appreciation to be found in a less hurried, less and internalized description, characters’ vocabularies conventional reading, one that in fact can accommodate and thought-patterns shit suddenly and widely, and its nightmare—not by waking up and straightening it some of these seem so stilted, so theatrical or sermonic, out, but by directing its uncanny recognitions toward that the reader, feeling put-upon already, may forget that a better appreciation of the grand conversations that such phrasing once facilitated the attempts of real people underlie the book in all its diiculty. to express themselves in honest and revealing ways. hus Maslin’s discomfort with modal shit and Catton seems to invite the reviewers’ consternation, irresolution in he Luminaries points to a larger anticipating Gunn’s worry that, however brilliantly characteristic of Catton’s work and a greater contrast presented, “nothing in this enormous book, with its with Wolf Hall. Working with narrow deadlines, exotic and varied cast of characters whose lives all afect Ilha do Desterro v. 70, nº1, p. 123-134, Florianópolis, jan/abr 2017 125

each other and whose fates are intricately entwined, the strategy highlights he Luminaries as a physical book amounts to anything like the moral and emotional and not an electronic ile: as with Mark Z. Danielewski’s weight one would expect of it.” Catton seems fully House of Leaves (2000) and Tom Phillips’s A Humument conscious that her stylistic complexity may obscure the (1987), he Luminaries shows great concern for mise- “moral and emotional weight” of her narrative—which en-page, spread, and layout in producing the experience is considerable, as we will see. Taking that risk, however, of an object in hand. More than that, it marks the turn is a calculated tactic, part of a design to undermine that Stead locates accurately (but decries), a shit from assumptions of certainty and totality, the comforting modernist pretenses of transparency and narrative resolutions that “one would expect.” detachment, toward postmodernist engagement with While allegations of the reader’s or critic’s a world where multiple narratives are always under nightmare measure Catton’s relationship with her construction and obvious interventions demand audience, the actual phrase from her Man Booker continuing critical interpretation. As N. Katherine acceptance speech identiies the structural riskiness Hayles says of these self-consciously physical artifacts, of the novel’s production, its very existence as an their “focusing on materiality allows us to see the artifact. “From the beginning, a publisher’s nightmare,” dynamic interactivity through which a literary work Catton says of he Luminaries, a phrase that points to mobilizes its physical embodiment in conjunction with complex technical matters, rather than to the reader’s its verbal signiiers to construct meanings in ways that discomfort: “the shape and form of the book,” she says, implicitly construct the user/reader as well” (130-31). “made certain kinds of editorial suggestions not only We watch ourselves turn the pages while our bookmark mathematically impossible, but even more egregious, bravely soldiers on. astrologically impossible.” She refers here to meta- As Catton describes the progress of her structures of mathematics and astrology which are so composition, the early desire “to write an adventure precisely applied and foregrounded to the extent that mystery of some kind” coincided with a self-challenge the physical text of he Luminaries, the book we hold to describe a speciic setting: in hand, demands continual attention. Mathematically, the twelve chapter divisions function as an exponential I wanted to know whether I was up to the regression: each chapter is half the length of the challenge of writing a story irmly located in time and space. he west coast of the one before, so that the source of Stead’s unavoidable middle 1860s presented itself quite naturally: awareness, then, “that this is iction” can be charted in a the west coast is a part of New Zealand I know virtually Cartesian sense. fairly well, and a gold rush seemed a ine theatre To work this gambit in an 830-page novel, the range in which to play out an adventure story. (“How She Wrote”) of numbers must be huge. Catton’s irst chapter is 360 pages long, which is outrageous, and the inal chapter is two, which is equally outrageous. We might not remain hese two determinants appear as writerly challenges mindful, early on, that there are divisions at all, since to herself to produce a certain type of story in a the irst chapter is longer than many entire novels; by particular kind of location—an adventure in a speciic the end, we may be pressured by the opposite, as the setting. With this commitment in mind, the next steps mechanisms of chapter division intrude upon content. seem straightforward: “I started reading, beginning Separately from the reader’s perceived nightmare, this with gold-rush history, which led me to the nature of mathematical pattern induces Catton’s production wealth, which led me to conidence tricks and scams, nightmare: a book that cannot be edited by shiting which led me to fortune telling, which led me to the material from one chapter to another, by dropping a stars.” Longest to shortest, each of the twelve chapters paragraph or adding a page, deleting a line or anything focuses on a single day, ranging over a year, although else that would alter the typeset page count. At the least, the sections are not presented in chronological order: 126 John Scheckter, he Luminaries: A D—ned Fine Tale, but of What?

the earliest date, 27 April 1865, appears in the heading over.” Even if we suspend such judgments, noting and of Part IV, beginning on page 625. he title page of appreciating Catton’s narrative structures, we may say “so each chapter displays an astrological chart, locating far, so good,” but even so we have to ask “so far, so what?” dominant inluences on that date, adjusted for the Overdetermined, totalizing structures can location of the gold rush town of , a real place ofer impressive mechanisms for interpretation and on the west coast of the of New Zealand. classroom presentation, because they allow us to Each zodiac division is additionally labeled with the locate consistent meaning in a particular passage and name of a character; for example, the opening page to coordinate its contexts and references. In exchange, of Part I, dated 27 January 1866, shows the and these frameworks demand hard concessions: we in , the in , and , must agree to view them as static and unchanging, , and in . hese coordinates and accept that they can deliver on their claims to are respectively ascribed to the characters Gascoigne, provide suicient meaning. his submission makes Frost, and Balfour, and constitute our introduction general interpretation easier, and a busy newspaper to them. he charts that head the eleven chapters to reviewer such as Janet Maslen would like those claims follow describe similar inluences in diferent houses, to work. Maslen’s clear preference is that each of the presumably coordinating traits of other characters twelve characters assigned to a zodiac igure should named in those segments. remain “stereotypical to an .” Indeed, Catton’s explanation of her writing process nicely Catton pays strict attention to the system, so that, as emphasizes the steady hard work of the professional Julian Novitz says, “each of the major characters is writer, and alludes to some of the serendipitous leaps aligned with an astronomical concept, either the signs that can occur when the basis of research is so solid: of the Zodiac (Stellar) or one of the seven heavenly bodies known to the ancients (Planetary); all are I found a programme online that could set in symmetry with the (Terra Firma).” A track the movement of the planets through character chart at the front of the volume clariies these the constellations of the zodiac. I typed in relationships. However, Catton had already anticipated the co-ordinates of the Hokitika gold ields, dialled the clock back to 1864, when gold and resisted conventional assignment of characteristics was irst discovered in the region, and began to by the time she began “wondering how I could turn the watch the skies revolve. Over the next four years archetypes of the zodiac into human characters.” he (of gold-ields time), I tracked the movements of the seven bodies visible to the naked eye astrological locations suggest that we ought to be able over Hokitika’s skies, wondering how I could to predict the characters’ behavior, thus reinforcing turn the archetypes of the zodiac into human the conventional reader’s expectation of consistent characters and a sequence of horoscopes into a development and resolution—even while the localized story. (“How She Wrote”) narrative highlights the converse, the problematic nature of anticipation. At the same time, Catton quietly evades the Interpretive systems approach totality by reducing question of content implied by the structure: as readers the number of variables they consider, and by suppressing in the twenty-irst century, are we expected to take or discrediting the possibilities of uncertainty within astrology seriously?3 hat is to say, the mathematical and their asserted patterns; totalizing, then, is generally self- astrological frameworks may be brilliant, but do they proclaimed within the system itself, revealing perhaps have value beyond Catton’s gymnastic performance on a wish for comprehensive order rather than a proof of them? Certainly, this is a towering risk for an author its existence. Dante’s Divine Comedy, for instance, may to take. Stead, for one, is annoyed enough to dismiss be the most heavily overdertermined narration we Catton’s efort in a single acid line: “there is also an have, but, in the fourth canto of the Paradiso, Beatrice astrological structure that I have allowed myself to pass describes how tenuous the claims of structural totality Ilha do Desterro v. 70, nº1, p. 123-134, Florianópolis, jan/abr 2017 127

can be. As Dante’s advocate in heaven, she apprehends that we participate in that order, but the fellowship is the actual cosmic plan and explains that what Dante misleading: we are, in fact, rarely better of than the observes—that is, the universally admired structure of characters who notably stumble and grope through he his massive poem—has been reduced to the limitations Luminaries. Peter Carey’s historical settings in Oscar of human understanding. Così parlar, she says, it is and Lucinda (1988) and Jack Maggs (1998) do much necessary to speak this way: the same, raising expectations of nineteenth-century formal completion and then stopping just short: thus, Such signs are suited to your mind, since from the structures’ claims, that they provide solid footings the senses only can it apprehend for interpretation, turn into their precise opposites, what then becomes it for the intellect. points of instability and uncertainty. However, while And this is why the Bible condescends to human powers, assigning feet and hands systems of astrology and mathematics are denied the to God, but meaning something else instead. very totality they are set up to assert, they are not completely discredited; when reduced to functionality, Beatrice asserts that there is a cosmic reality, but they become actually useful. kindly suggests that its manifestation in the sublunary Taken on its own, the decreasing algorithm of realm can only be a series of constructed images. In chapter lengths may seem like a narrative parlor trick, the modern world, where faith is only one mode of but in conjunction with other tropes it reminds us understanding, such a system—should it exist at all— powerfully that pace and duration afect the low and would involve such complexity that its many factors coherence of information. Likewise, the framework of would appear on earth as ininite variables, and a astrology turns out not to determine events that are sequence of events within it would seem so very close inevitable, but instead describes behavioral tendencies to randomness that the guiding hand would remain that are irreducible: birth in the house of may or invisible. Beatrice does well here to remind us that heavy may not specify a personality dominated by ego and structuring works better if we accept it as a reader’s physical activity, or birth in Taurus induce materialism, nightmare, a hermeneutic crisis of cosmic proportions: or in , friendship, but the system works as the great igures do not function as containment vessels, well as others to remind us that such traits are always holding all meaning, but rather as sculptural armatures, around, parts of a volatile psychological mix that we supporting more than the material. Dante’s simplify at our peril. Better yet, when freed from the allegory, in this sense, apprehends structure, but does expectation of totality, partial or tentative systems not mistake structure for truth itself; he Luminaries, may ofer useful terms for collating and evaluating likewise, does not propose a central enclosure, some information. Incompletion can be a virtue in itself, nineteenth-century crystal palace railway station opening vistas of other patterns, so that meaning can where trains of thought predictably arrive and depart. emerge through accumulation and exchange, rather Instead, Catton suggests an Eifel Tower, a framework than by imposition: at any point in he Luminaries, for elevated observation, whose obvious hollowness is three or four such systems of meaning may be at one of its strongest features. work, lowering the certainty of any particular path By merely invoking totalized structures in the of interpretation but conversing usefully with others twenty-irst century, Catton tempts us to respond (Scheckter 237). conventionally, to see the work as a satire that allows Catton sets in motion the interplay of claimed us to ind more coherence than the characters can, as certainty and functional uncertainty by locating the it emphasizes their myopia and misunderstanding. We story at Hokitika, on the west coast of the South Island sense that we have in hand a controlled, redacted work of New Zealand. We may think we know where that is. of authorship, whose closure implies an orderly larger he location, to be sure, has coordinates of longitude world. he narrator’s irst-person plural likewise suggests and latitude, its time and tides are recorded in known 128 John Scheckter, he Luminaries: A D—ned Fine Tale, but of What?

scales, and its harbor, as Catton shows, connects the from a wide variety of origins—like the Tabard Inn for colony (in several stages) with Australia, China, and Chaucer or the Pequod for Melville. . hus, Hokitika, with the Blue Ensign alot Birns’s reference to Northern skies ofers a key to on its civic lagpole, is situated on a familiar globe of the function of systems throughout he Luminaries. As continuous information.4 Catton invites this global Raewyn Connell describes their spread to the Southern positioning by echoing the universal advice to young Hemisphere, European social orders and theories of writers, to write what they know, as she reminds us that social order were propounded throughout the imperial “the west coast is a part of New Zealand I know fairly world as signal embodiments and deining principles well.” At the same time, however, she enforces distance: of modern civilization: “models constructed on that for the vast majority of Catton’s readers, the west coast lie, such as … modernisation theory and neoclassical of the South Island is remote and diicult to visit, a economics, were then exported to the rest of the world topography of the imagination like Peter Jackson’s with all the authority of the most advanced knowledge, New Zealand setting of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. and all the weight of First World wealth and power” Accomplished readers know how to draw it outward, (x). Fundamental to this globalization of Euro- to coordinate Catton’s Hokitika with more familiar speciic understanding is the local acceptance of “a extrapolations of landscape, but the astrological system metropolitan vision of what society was and how we also draws powerfully inward, toward speciic acts of should talk about it. ‘Australian society’ was simply location that demand close attention. presumed to be the same kind of thing, for which the he sensitivity of astrological charts is dependent same conceptual categories were unproblematically upon exact location, and the computer application appropriate” (82: emphasis in original). Obviously, the Catton used in citing archetypal traits of personality success of colonizing power on all scales from global also required her to enter the exact global coordinates to local depends upon the imposition of standard for Hokitika, latitude 43° South and longitude 171° and standardizing terms, together with the denial or East.5 he more literally these igures are followed, suppression of potentially competing vocabularies; however, the more they undermine their claims to local acceptance is predicated upon a perception that direct representation: “of course, the entire scheme other models are less rewarding, both socially and is built around the Northern Hemisphere sky and personally. In this way, conceptual frameworks and seasons; by setting the novel in New Zealand, Catton practical methodologies—say, for Hokitika, laws of critiques and redeploys these norms. he stars are economics and rules of banking—beneit from mutual not the same everywhere” (Birns 233). Further, the reinforcement. he law in this hegemony, as Connell characters’ horoscopes are determined both by where sees it, emerges from the very success of its spread: far they were born and by where they ind themselves. from their Northern origins, where perhaps they make he assignment of traits within charts cast for Hokitika better sense, systems imported to Southern lands are always acknowledges multiple points of origin. All of asked to do too much. Using the same “metropolitan the characters are displaced from their birthplaces, methods and topics” both to report back to the imperial and many acknowledge an antipodean estrangement, center and “to address a local audience about local so that their charts must relect multiple polarities. versions of social problems” (81) introduces dissonance In addition, the Chinese and Maori characters, who and uncertainty in all directions. Gaps appear, and in are well developed beyond stereotype, would have those gaps particular, site-responsive explanations their own horoscopes, determined within systems of emerge. hese alternatives appear in local forms that celestial observation far removed from the European. more readily accept those destabilizing elements and hus, Hokitika functions less as a set of coordinates ind in them both material and expression—a type of knowable within ixed global or astral systems, and narration that “recuperates the vitality of the novel as a more as a dynamic nexus of everything that has arrived genre by recovering, through the processes of remediation Ilha do Desterro v. 70, nº1, p. 123-134, Florianópolis, jan/abr 2017 129

themselves, subjectivities coherent enough to become the start, uncertainty pressurizes our conidence in the foci of the sustained narration that remains the narrative stability and internal coherence. Local eforts hallmark of the print novel” (Hayles 112: emphasis at consistent sense-making appear to be wishful or in original). hus, he Luminaries both instantiates performative, rather than to relect larger patterns of and demolishes principles of organization that would order. At the end of the very long irst chapter, chaos dominate the narration, if only they could. intrudes mightily, when the ship on which Moody has From the beginning, Catton’s setting demonstrates arrived slips its mooring within the comparative safety the diiculty of maintaining standardization in all of the harbor. A servant assigned to keep watch outside registers. On the global scale, Hokitika has an established the tavern dashes in, breathless: position in coastal and long-distance shipping routes, a location that supports values of regulation and “It’s the Godspeed,” the boy managed. ascertainment. On the local level, however, every ship All of a sudden the room was very still. “he Godspeed?” Mannering barked, his eyes approaching or leaving Hokitika must cross a dangerous bulging. “What about it? Talk, you idiot!” bar at the mouth of its harbor, so that uncertainty and “he nav lights on the spit,” the boy said. “hey high risk must be acknowledged as constant factors of went out—in the wind, and—the tide—” movement. hus, the arrival of Walter Moody, our irst “What happened?” “Godspeed’s run aground,” the boy said. viewpoint character, shows how the trait of Reason, “Foundered on the bar—she rolled, not ten assigned to his Planetary nature by Catton’s prefatory minutes ago.” He drew a raggedy breath. chart, may be easily unseated: “Her mainmast cracked—and then she rolled again—and then the surf came through the hatches and pulled her down. She’s a goner, sir. He had known the voyage to West Canterbury She’s a goner. She’s wrecked.” (360) would be fatal at worst, an endless rolling trough of white water and spume that ended So far, the characters have revealed their positions in the on the shattered graveyard of the Hokitika bar, but he had not been prepared for the particular tableau, their backgrounds and relationships, and their horrors of the journey, of which he was still talk has initiated numerous lines of plot and subplot. incapable of speaking, even to himself. (4) Catton has suggested that the 500 pages to follow might be quite complicated, but might also develop in We do not yet know the “particular horrors” of the familiar and gratifying manner of her nineteenth- Moody’s voyage, but the general ones ofered by local century sources. his will not happen. So much of topography are suicient to direct our attention to this exposition intersects with the Godspeed that the inluences of chance and unreason. he interplay of comforts of assumed direction and development—the small and large scales luctuates widely in that opening safe channels marked by navigation lights—“all of a scene, when Moody, newly arrived and still shaking, sudden” go dark. enters a tavern on a dark and stormy night. Such an Hokitika’s reason for being is gold, which is establishment can be found anywhere; Robert Louis why the characters are willing to take such risks Stevenson’s pirates, homas Hardy’s farmers, and to get there. Birns calls it “an improvised town, a Joseph Conrad’s self-exiles would all be at home there. community generated at short notice and with little In this immediate place, however, Moody appears advance planning. It is a kind of dress rehearsal, or to intrude on a strange tableau vivant, where twelve a performance with a great deal of spontaneity” gathered characters pretend to act naturally despite (225-26). An ugly scar on the edge of wilderness, it their obvious anxiety. In something resembling orderly resembles every other mining, lumber, or cattle town form, the narrator introduces each of them in terms that grew too quickly, including an early settlement of their zodiac traits, but each portrait also comments described by Daphne Marlatt in Ana Historic (1988): on the character’s particular self-doubt: thus, from 130 John Scheckter, he Luminaries: A D—ned Fine Tale, but of What?

legible, easily read: the rawness of new wood, the brashness of cleared land, of hastily built New Zealand, Victoria, or Alaska—any gold is houses, outhouses, leantos. And beyond them, like all gold, with its value determined by arbitrary the endless green of woods, a green so green and abstract consensus, and without linkage to other it outgreened itself, hill ater hill. When she scales of social or moral value. If astrology suggests the turned she could see the mountains behind her hanging close, close and yet aloof. Beautiful, she enactment of prior determinations, gold, by taking the thought, or perilous. But not pretty. (15-16). shape of whatever molds it, permits ongoing personal and communal development in a plastic, unixed Hokitika is easily read in its infancy, but like Marlatt’s environment. he circulation of gold moves in exactly Vancouver, Canada, it also exists in visions of its the opposite direction from astrology; leaving Hokitika, potential future—an Empire town of more substantial the characters would lose whatever individuality they establishment, yet representative, too. Already, the had acquired there through risk and efort. In the Reserve Bank branch and miners’ hotels have opened, Southern setting of he Luminaries, further, going prostitutes and a newspaper have appeared, a prison Home might not seem so necessary, or attractive. Local is under construction, and the Chinese have been identities do indicate social and moral values, and so excluded. So far, it its our expectations of nineteenth- are desirably linked to gold by a diferent sense of its century order. Yet the focal purpose of Hokitika, the value, its immediate purchasing power, or ability to convergence of the categories and speciic location of transmute into other objects and actions. hus, the the astrological framework, is blurred by the nature suggestion by Chris Bohjalian, the Washington Post of the gold discovered there. In the many functions reviewer, that “the key to following the story is to try to and circulations that attempt to situate its value, gold follow the money,” is correct, as it always is. However, itself produces an alternate structure to the ixed the recognition that several scales of signiication, determinations ofered by astrology and algorithms. global to local, may operate at any particular time, and One extended plot arc of he Luminaries concerns that on local levels each character sees the money in a a fortune in gold worth £4000. Conservatively, that diferent way, fractures the notion of “the story” into amount would send the possessor back to England, multiple directions of action and pathways of desire. Europe, or China with a decent establishment, but Some characters want security, some want release, none of the characters even mentions that possibility. some want information; on the ground in Hokitika, Despite the lure of greater status, they decline reentry their money variously buys bread, clothing, building into the global economy whose margins they have materials, time with prostitutes, political favors, and sought: they reject, that is, re-placement in the judicial verdicts. Multiple systems of analysis and more rigid social structures of Home, in favor of the evaluation sometimes reinforce common values, but unhoused rawness and thrill of the new place. On more oten jam one another and produce a strange the gold frontier, the power of that £4000, and all uncertainty that directly refutes claims of totality. he the other gold found and unfound, instigates strange result is a visceral feeling that the characters are in the behavior, including tax evasion and thet many grip of massive and competing forces not only outside times over, blackmail, drug addiction, gunplay, and their control but beyond their comprehension— declarations of love. he metal itself is melted and re- and ours as well. Whatever advantage we readers poured numerous times, which deprives it of concrete might claim by knowing about the larger structures presence—makes it inadmissible as legal evidence, for of narration eventually turns to disquiet, because the example, in an important turn of plot. As a fungible values of ironic detachment are no more reliable than commodity, it is without distinction; once gold anything the characters believe. enters the global circulation of capital, the “placeless If the simultaneous operation of multiple systems universal market” (Connell 208), it loses any sign of in he Luminaries discredits attempts at totalization, an origin in Hokitika or Ballarat or Dawson City. temporal structures prove to be destabilizing as well. Ilha do Desterro v. 70, nº1, p. 123-134, Florianópolis, jan/abr 2017 131

I cannot recall my phrasing but I do recall that Prolepsis, beloved of modernism, is nearly useless here, in my last address I styled myself your brother since the underlying circumstances of any particular & perhaps that caused you grief. […] I assure efect are so numerous and contingent that an efort to you that as a whoreson I am not unaccustomed attribute causality ends up looking like another literary to the beggar’s life but to beg a man a second time is shame indeed. Nonetheless I write in card trick. he resolution of plot issues, especially desperation. You are a man of means the cost of involving mysteries such as the whereabouts of that a third-class ticket is all I ask & thenceforth you £4000, seems boringly literal. Catton, in fact, gives up needn’t hear of me again. (471) the chase in several key places: some leads go cold, some causes of death are never determined. More to Walter Moody discovers the letters in a wrongly delivered the point, the desire of some characters to envision a trunk, and we read them over his shoulder, but Moody sense-making linear chronology proves self-defeating, does nothing with them. By the time Lauderback inally because cause-and-efect requires a reductionist loyalty visits the isolated cabin of Crosbie Wells, he discovers to a particular version of the past. Characters who him already dead; Birns says Lauderback’s regret then heavily draw identity from family history, for example, “provides, if not the actuality or the sentimentality of succumb to a special nightmare, because ancestral reconciliation, at least a conceptual airmation of such” pride does not necessarily produce social value on the (231), but the gesture is late and there is, in fact, nothing gold frontier. One of those is Walter Moody, whose to be done. No one can be helped or harmed by the journey to New Zealand is motivated by his father’s information the letters reveal, and they have no efect abandonment of his mother, a to his sense of whatever. he poor man’s pain only deepens our sense gentility that he feels must be redressed—and never of the past, and highlights the personal histories that is. he actual result is that Moody is so disturbed by the characters have brought to Hokitika—astrological his late-blooming recognition of social hypocrisy that in predisposition, perhaps, but inluenced even more by that he misconstrues many of the relationships around their social and economic situations in the present. him in Hokitika. Likewise, Sook Yongsheng’s attempt hose who wear their histories more lightly, it to avenge his father’s dishonor turns self-destructive, would seem, are better of. he antipodean isolation because only white people are allowed to speak about of Hokitika ofers the opportunity for the new arrivals such things in Hokitika, and it is harder to listen in he Luminaries to construct new identities. Even to a troublesome Chinaman, or recognize his legal more, they may set aside the Northern preference for rights, than it is simply to shoot him. he reclusive categories based on birthplace and ailiation, with “its Crosbie Wells tells the most heartbreaking story in he tendency to reify such mobile distinctions into hard- Luminaries in a series of fourteen letters written to his edged groups—the bands, hordes, clans, moieties, half-brother, the prominent regional politician Alasdair totemic descent groups and so forth” (Connell 200).6 Lauderback. Quoted in full, italicized as if they are real Erasure and new opportunity have limits, to be sure, as inserted documents, the letters describe the pathetic full detachment from a nasty past reduces the present life of a castaway Victorian child, illegitimate and to another nightmare, a world of unanticipated, free- unwanted. Lauderback goes so far as to preserve the loating menace. he sweet prostitute, Anna Wetherill, letters, but Wells’s words match nothing of value in his and her goofy lover, Emery Staines, are rendered nearly quid pro quo world. he letters ofer no blackmail threat defenseless by their inability to comprehend intent; or demand for patronage, only a plea for recognition these two have diiculty even with basic registers of and the hope that Lauderback will buy him the cheapest suspicion and self-preservation. hey rely upon the passage back to England. openness of the settlement to make their identities, but their vaudeville-quality fecklessness emphasizes Sir six months have passed since I irst wrote & that some level of self-awareness, and some extension I fear by your silence that I have ofended you. of context beyond immediate experience, would be 132 John Scheckter, he Luminaries: A D—ned Fine Tale, but of What?

“Some things are never done,” said the chaplain. more beneicial. On the same hand, the more successful “We do not forget those whom we have loved. characters are able to remake themselves that way, using We cannot forget them.” the past lightly, and allowing them to negotiate social and Shepard glanced at him. “You speak as though moral orientations that neither debilitate them through from experience.” memory nor leave them defenseless. his group includes survivors of historical trauma: the newspaperman Devlin did not answer at once. Ater a pause Benjamin Löwenthal, whose family in Germany was he said, “If I have learned one thing from experience, it is this: never underestimate how murdered for being Jewish, and the stone-carver Te Rau extraordinarily diicult it is to understand a Tauwhare, who has sufered the loss of Maori sovereignty, situation from another person’s point of view” culture, and land (and was Crosbie Wells’s only true (622). friend). heir survival of broad, cultural violence produces and supports exacting, precise awareness of If we take this seriously, if we see Devlin less as a the present. In a conversation between the Maori and with Venus in his house than as a complex igure who the Chinese miner Sook Yongsheng, for instance, new plumbs the depths of self-doubt and social anxiety identities that permit articulation—that bring together in order to produce an ethical present, we may ind such a pair in any event—speak directly through a that information, like gold, is a fungible commodity. recognized basis of dislocation, not in spite of it: Information in he Luminaries means little until it is brought into present efect, and veracity in an absolute (Tauwhare spoke slowly, and with much sense is oten less functional than consensual values that gesticulation; he was evidently well used are negotiated and then performed as if true. Catton’s to communicating with his hands and his irst novel, he Rehearsal (2008), likewise revolves expressions, and paused ater every clause to make sure he was accurately understood. around issues of social and artistic performance—of Ah Sook found that he could understand his fraught adolescence, of friendship, of sexuality that is meaning very clearly, though English was never as assured as it would like. Settings of high school neither man’s native tongue. He whispered the names to himself: Arahura Valley, Te Rau counseling, private music lessons, and drama school Tauwhare, Crosbie Wells.) (265) exercises are described in passages that irst appear to be exposition and dialogue but emerge as scenes To what end, though, should the remaking of the characterized by subjectivity and role playing; characters’ self be directed? Can new identity lead to systematic fantasies intersect with real actions, and both modes of understanding? Can it overcome loss? Can it prevent performance have powerful efects upon self-conception. nightmares? As one drama teacher says, however cynically, Systems of material arrangement, temporal progression, and social exchange in he Luminaries “‘real’ is a useless word. ‘Real’ describes nothing reveal uncertainty too quickly to be usefully sustained. onstage. he stage only cares if something looks real. If it looks real, then whether it is real or not Uncertainty itself, however, once it is admitted as an is immaterial. It doesn’t matter.” (129) inluential factor in all forms of understanding, may help organize information. Speaking of the sharpest incident of violence in the book, his cold-blooded shooting of In that sense, the frontier settlement of Hokitika Ah Sook, the blustering constable George Shepard links functions like a stage setting—isolated, limsy, the killing to the death of his brother, and too quickly heterotopic—and the characters’ performances within draws a line under both events: “What’s done is done.” unstable structures matter more than their conirmation His listener, the minister Cowell Devlin, responds with inside lasting systems. surprising power that the past is not closed at all: he focus on ethical performance answers the opening question: this is what makes he Luminaries Ilha do Desterro v. 70, nº1, p. 123-134, Florianópolis, jan/abr 2017 133

insignia were placed in the blue ield over the next such a good book. Late in the novel, long ater satire has few years, the results were known as “defaced ensigns.” given way to empathy, backstories of coincidence and Eventually, some of these became national lags— desire are performed in tragic mode. As we have seen, and matters of ongoing controversy. In Australia, we learn the truth about important plot elements too alternatives to the defaced ensign are frequently proposed and debated, while New Zealand, in a 2015- late for it to matter, and for the most part we can only 2016 referendum, voted to reject other designs and watch events already unfolded, consequences already retain the existing lag. determined. he twelth section, the last and shortest, 5. More precisely, 42.7167° S latitude and 170.9667° is also the quietest and most intimate of stagings; E longitude. he numbers to four decimal places chronologically, it refers to a very early moment, with were found with the simplest Google search. Again, a determination made very easily with twenty-irst Anna and Emery in bed, in love, the only two people century resources emphasizes the distinctions between in Hokitika who actually listen to each other. heir current access to information and the means available dialogue is unattributed: love has brought them that at the time of Catton’s iction. extraordinarily diicult understanding of another 6. Connell’s passage here speciically addresses the person. One says, “I feel—more than myself,” and the complaint by Nancy Williams that tactics of hard categorization have been mistakenly and forcibly other says, “I feel—as though a new chamber of my applied to anthropological studies of indigenous heart has opened” (830). In the cold logic of linear Australians, and, as Connell says, “have been the stock- time, these two have no idea how roughly the world will in-trade of Australian ethnography for a hundred treat them in only a few hours. But here, in the sprung years” (200). Such practices, however, developed as the disciplinary codiication of European social chronology of he Luminaries, in the smallest compass divisions that were already centuries old—a set of of performance, Catton ofers the great generosity of preferences, of course, that inluences the very notions redemption: the present moment. Surely, this is what of specialization and disciplinarity from the outset. Beatrice meant by giving feet and hands to God, as the characters search for words to tell one another of the References vastness of being and the depth of love. Birns, Nicholas. Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead. Sydney: Sydney University Press, Notes 2015. 1. Novitz’s review-essay similarly compares Wolf Hall and Bohjalian, Chris. “Booker Winner: ‘he Luminaries,’ by he Luminaries, in more detail. Eleanor Catton.” Washington Post 15 Oct. 2013. Online. 15 Feb. 2016. Reviewhttps://www.washingtonpost. 2. Birns (231-32) discusses Stead’s modernist insistence com/entertainment/ books/booker-winner-the- in some detail. luminaries-by-eleanor-catton/2013/10/15/c069da62- 3. Countervailing the anachronistic nineteen-century 35dd-11e3-8a0e-4e2cf80831fc_story.html. diction, the computer-assisted design conirms he Carey, Peter. Jack Maggs. New York: Knopf, 1998. Print. Luminaries as a twenty-irst century artifact. he mathematical pattern of chapter length could be ______. . New York: Harper & Row, determined with pencil and paper—beginning at 1988. the end, shortest chapter, and merely doubling the Catton, Eleanor. “Eleanor Catton on How She Wrote page-count forward—but itting the text into the he Luminaries.” Guardian 11 April 2013. Online. determined space requires layout programming 10 February 2016. http://www.theguardian.com/ during composition, well in advance of the publisher’s books/2014/apr/11/eleanor-catton-luminaries-how- typesetting phase. he astrological generator Catton she-wrote-booker-prize. describes is a more complex application; it not only performs functions that would be depressingly time- ______. he Luminaries. New York: Little, Brown, 2013. consuming if performed by hand, but it also can be Print. easily calibrated for the exact dates and global positions ______. Man Booker Prize Acceptance Speech. New of the story. Zealand Herald 16 Oct. 2013. Online. 9 Feb. 2016. 4. he Blue Ensign of the Royal Navy lew over imperial http://www.nzherald.co.nz/ lifestyle/news/article. outposts at the time of the iction; when colonial cfm?c_id=6&objectid=11140777 134 John Scheckter, he Luminaries: A D—ned Fine Tale, but of What?

Connell, Raewyn. Southern heory: he Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2007. Print. Danielewski, Mark Z. (“Zampanò”). House of Leaves. 2nd ed. New York: Pantheon, 2000. Print. Dante [Dante Alighieri]. Paradiso. Trans. Allan Mandelbaum. Digital Dante, Columbia U. Online. 11 February 2016. http://digitaldante.columbia.edu/ dante/divine-comedy/paradiso/paradiso-4/ Gunn, Kirsty. “he Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton.” Guardian 11 Sept. 2013. Online. 30 Jan. 2016. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/11/ luminaries-eleanor-catton-review. Hayles, N. Katherine. Writing Machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2002. Print. Marlatt, Daphne. Ana Historic. 1988. Concord, ON: Anansi, 1997. Print. Maslin, Janet. “Following the Stars in a Rush to Riches.” New York Times 23 Oct. 2013. Online. 29 Jan. 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/24/books/eleanor- cattons-luminaries-man-booker-prize-winner.html?_ r=2&&mtrref=undefined&gwh=14D45DC3D13 7C169 A570F82ACFC8AFB5&gwt=pay. Novitz, Julian. “As Above, So Below.” Review of he Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton. Sydney Review of Books 1 Nov. 2013. Online. 29 Jan. 2016. http://www. sydneyreviewobooks .com Phillips, Tom. A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel. 1980. 2nd Rev. Ed. [3rd Ed.] : hames and Hudson, 1997. Scheckter, John. “he Pleasures of Structural Uncertainty.” Review of he Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton. Antipodes 28.1 (2014): 237. Stead, C. K. “he Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton.” Financial Times 6 Sept. 2013. Online. 30 Jan. 2016. http://www. ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/c465775c-109e-11e3-b291- 0144feabdc0.html#axzz 2f62AMQsR. Williams, Nancy M. he Yolngu and heir Land: A System of Land Tenure and the Fight for Its Recognition. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1986. Print. Recebido em: 22/02/2016 Aceito em: 30/03/2016