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Entrancing Objects: History, Place and Collecting

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Entrancing Objects: History, Place and Collecting ENTRANCING OBJECTS: HISTORY, PLACE AND COLLECTING in Brian Castro’s The Garden Book, Jillian Watkinson’s The Hanging Tree, Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth, Delia Falconer’s The Service of Clouds and Steven Carroll’s The Time We Have Taken by Freya Massée BA (Hons) Charles Sturt University A thesis submitted to Charles Sturt University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy January 2012 Entrancing Objects CONTENTS Introduction 1 Part I: Collecting and Hauntedness 15 1. Ghosts and Gardens: Collecting and the Unsettling Effects of the Uncanny 16 1.1 Collecting, Heritage, and Post-Colonial Representation 16 1.2 A Ghost Story: Collecting and an Uncanny Heritage 20 1.3 The Ghost in the Garden: Hauntedness, Collecting and the Unsettling of Place 22 1.4 The Trail of the Ghost: Benjaminian Collecting and Unsettling Times 25 2. The Wildness Beyond: Insiders, Outsiders and Collectors in Brian Castro’s The Garden Book 29 2.1 The Hungry Ghosts: Dispossession and Displacement 30 2.2 Collecting in the Garden 36 2.3 Inside and Outside: The Place/s of Collecting 46 2.4 Reading in the Garden 55 2.5 A Detour through Paradise: Collecting, Desire, and Australian Identity 64 2.6 Wildness: Collecting and Writing 74 3. Lines, Trees and Circles: Heritage, Collecting, Stories and Silences in Jillian Watkinson’s The Hanging Tree 83 3.1 Storylines and Lines of Silence 84 3. 2 Containment Lines: Keeping Hold of Heritage and Place 87 3.3 Trees and Shifting Circles: Storytelling, History-Keeping and Collecting 91 3.4 Ghostly Experience: Collecting and the Handing Down of History 96 4. Wild Things: Collecting and Exploring in Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth 107 4.1 Lodging Claims: Taking Hold of Country in Post-Colonial Australia 107 4.2 Relics and Ruins: Materiality, Collecting, and the Unhousedness of History 110 4.3 Haunting Landscapes 118 4.4 The Speaking Giant 120 4.5 Awful Things: Illegible Relics 129 4.6 Nature, History and Haunted Relics 134 Part II: Collecting and Enchantment 145 5. A Distant Country: Collecting, Enchantment, and the Shimmering of Time and Place 146 5.1 Enchantment, Proximity, Presence, and the Past in Post-Colonial Discourse 146 5.2 Entrance-ing Objects: Collecting, Enchanting Materiality, and Representations of Australia 152 ii Entrancing Objects 6. Liquid Possibility: The Entrance-ing Transformations of Collecting in Delia Falconer’s The Service of Clouds 159 6.1 The Failure to be Seen: Historical and Social Visibility, and the Role of Collecting 160 6.2 A Convenient Symmetry: Photography, Representation and Possession 164 6.3 The Souvenir: A Failed Magic? 182 6.4 The Cabinet and the Field: Collecting and Unsettling Knowledge 196 6.5 Transformations: Collecting and Liquid Possibility 208 7. The Days and the Distance: Collecting, Speed, Stillness, and History’s Visibility in Steven Carroll’s The Time We Have Taken 217 7.1 The Sublime and the Suburb 218 7.2 Speed and Stillness 221 7.3 Murals and Mosaics: Moments of Uncanny Interruption 225 7.4 Enchanting, Entrance-ing Possibilities 231 Conclusion 236 Works Cited 242 iii Entrancing Objects Certificate of Authorship I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge and belief, understand that it contains no material previously published or written by another person, nor material which to a substantial extent has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at Charles Sturt University or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by colleagues with whom I have worked at Charles Sturt University or elsewhere during my candidature is fully acknowledged. I agree that this thesis be accessible for the purpose of study and research in accordance with normal conditions established by the Executive Director, Library Services, Charles Sturt University or nominee, for the care, loan and reproduction of thesis, subject to confidentiality provisions as approved by the University. Name: Freya Massée Signature: Date: Entrancing Objects ABSTRACT In this thesis, I discuss the entrancing potentialities of the motif of collecting and examine its relationship with themes and motifs of hauntedness and enchantment in five recent Australian novels (Brian Castro’s The Garden Book (2005), Jillian Watkinson’s The Hanging Tree (2004), Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth (2004), Delia Falconer’s The Service of Clouds (1997), and Stephen Carroll’s The Time We Have Taken (2007)). My discussion of these novels focuses on the way that themes of historical representation and post-colonial dispossession, identity and belonging emerge through their depiction of a heritage of stories and material relics; and I identify the collecting motif in these texts as a site where the textual and the material intersect, revealing a haunting and sometimes enchanting past. I have chosen Castro’s, Watkinson’s, McGahan’s, Falconer’s and Carroll’s novels because they are stylistically diverse, yet, when considered together, they trace a cross-section through Australia’s contested geography and troubled past; and provide a small but significant sample of some Australian literary preoccupations during the last two decades. They offer opportunities to test the versatility of a collecting-based reading and explore its relevance to their shared themes and motifs, which indicate the importance of the uncanny as a trope of post-colonial destabilization and resistance, and also emphasize the potential value of tropes of materiality, proximity and presence in post- colonial historical writing. My thesis makes an original contribution to Australian literary studies by utilizing insights from European collecting theory, in conjunction with some aspects of material culture studies and Australian post-colonial criticism, to develop the notion of the entrancing or “entrance- ing” potentialities of collecting as a critical perspective and literary motif and to consider its possible contribution (as a trope of material presence) to post- Entrancing Objects colonial critiques and discourses which traditionally esteem ambiguity, hybridity and instability. In Part I, “Ghosts and Gardens”, I discuss collecting’s relationship with tropes of hauntedness in Castro’s, Watkinson’s, and McGahan’s novels, in which the effects of colonial and post-colonial dispossession and trauma haunt the novels’ protagonists, and the past is portrayed as uncomfortably close. I refer to Walter Benjamin’s seminal work on history, collecting and narrative; as well as aspects of post-structuralist, psychoanalytic and ecocritical theory, to explore collecting’s relationship with ghosts and hauntedness and argue that, in these novels, collecting offers alternatives as well as supplements to historical narratives which fail to take account of the ghosts (metaphorical or otherwise) of the past. I show how the collecting motif’s uncanny qualities emerge both literally and metaphorically, through allusions to ghosts, gardens, wilderness and certain forms or modes of materiality (fragmentation, detritus, contamination), creating a sense of temporal and spatial ambiguity which is analogous to hauntedness, and through which accepted concepts and perceptions of history and place are successfully destabilized. I argue that the collecting motif in these texts is used in ways that form an effective and entrance-ing strategy for unravelling the rhetoric that connects land, heritage and identity in post-colonial society. In Part II, “A Distant Country”, I focus on the sense of enchantment that permeates Falconer’s and Carroll’s novels, and consider its association with collecting and its role in their representations of a seemingly-distant past, recalled in terms of nostalgia, intimacy and desire. Referring to Jane Bennett’s concept of enchanted materialism and Bill Ashcroft, Frances Devlin-Glass and Lyn McCredden’s analysis of the Australian sublime, I argue that these novels convey a different mode of uncanny experience. In these novels, collecting’s enchanting and entrance-ing effects arise from experiences of presence, proximity, and attachment, which uncannily elicit a sense of transformation and perceptual and epistemological instability. In these novels, this is Entrancing Objects expressed through a complex interplay (or “shimmering”) of collecting-related metaphors, images and experiences of distance and proximity (physical, emotional, and temporal), which draws attention to the role of certain visual and spatial concepts and metaphors in establishing control of territory and shaping subjectivity. In conclusion, I contend that in Castro’s, Watkinson’s, McGahan’s, Falconer’s and Carroll’s novels, the collecting motif, in association with the tropes of hauntedness and enchantment, contributes significantly to these texts’ problematization of specific representations of Australian history and place, and provides “entrance” to the space in which new hi/stories may emerge. My analysis of these novels also suggests that a collecting-based reading, focused on tropes of material presence, may usefully augment current debates about Australian post-colonial writing and its approach to the risks and responsibilities of representing the past. Entrancing Objects INTRODUCTION In this thesis, I seek to demonstrate the potential of collecting as a literary motif and critical perspective on Australian post-colonial fiction. I reveal this hitherto overlooked potential by applying elements of European collecting theory, material culture studies and post-colonial
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