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GENRE and NATION in the CONTEMPORARY NOVEL Lynda Ng 2010

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GENRE and NATION in the CONTEMPORARY NOVEL Lynda Ng 2010 GENRE AND NATION IN THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL Remapping the Literary Landscape after Globalisation Lynda Ng 2010 This thesis is submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, University of New South Wales ABSTRACT The accelerated processes of globalisation, along with time-space compression and the arrival of the information age, mark our entry into what Robert Hassan calls the chronoscopic society. This is a society dominated by the instantaneous transmission of information and media, a networked culture that destabilises the former structures of imagined community such as the nation. The contemporary novel has responded to the chronoscopic society by reasserting its importance as a site in which the ambivalences generated by modernity can be documented and appraised. This response both absorbs and goes beyond the levels of the national, the international and even the global, towards a conceptual framework that has been theorised as the planetary. This thesis explores the ways in which certain contemporary novels provide a critique of the totalising nature of our period of late capitalism. The four works closely examined here are representative of the wider trends in which the literary novel absorbs and reworks the conventions of genre fiction. I argue that this contemporary utilisation of genre shows a development from postmodernist poetics, because these novelists are concerned not with the hybridisation of genres and bringing marginal concerns into the mainstream, but rather with providing a critique of the amorphous form of liquid modernity, which is the most visible signifier of late capitalism. Accordingly, I analyse the role of the gothic in Dead Europe by Christos Tsiolkas, magical realism in Alexis Wright's Carpentaria, the historical novel in English Passengers by Matthew Kneale, and, finally, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, which incorporates six distinct genres. These four writers employ specific genres as a stabilising framework, which allows them to acknowledge aspects of life as yet untouched by the otherwise-totalising forces of capitalism. They show how traditional folklore and local cultures persist and co-exist amongst the global, planetary flows of capital, information, media and people. 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work would not have been possible without the wisdom and guidance of my supervisor, Julian Murphet. I would like to thank him first and foremost for inspiring me with his reading recommendations, always demanding more from my work, and having steadfast confidence in my abilities, even when I harboured my own doubts. Thanks also go to Paul Dawson, John Golder, Bill Ashcroft and Anne Brewster for their invaluable advice, support and encouragement throughout the research process. Thank you also to Susan Prior for all her help with administrative matters, and to Bill Walker for the teaching opportunities that enhanced my intellectual and scholarly growth. I am also grateful to my friends and final proofreaders: Carla Dunn, Jacinta van den Berg, Theresia Wijaya and Kirsty Mawby. Their willingness to devote time to both my thesis and my emotional health has been enormously gratifying. Thanks must also be given to Simone Traidl and Lorraine Burdett; I couldn‘t have completed this project without their friendship and support. Thank you to my family and of course, thank you to Paul Sheehan for being there both emotionally and intellectually. 3 Contents Acknowledgments 3 Introduction 5 Chapter 1 Transnational Magical Realism in Carpentaria 62 Chapter 2 Dead Europe: Dirty Realism / Gothic Traces 117 Chapter 3 English Passengers and Polyphonic History 179 Chapter 4 Multiplying Genres in Cloud Atlas 231 Conclusion 284 Bibliography 293 4 INTRODUCTION 0.1 The Novel in the Global World – Nation, The Chronoscopic Society and the Individual Amongst other possibilities, the advent of the new millennium has prompted renewed reflection on the changed circumstances of modernity. The world, taken now as a global unity, would appear to have reached a crossroads in terms of the process of modernisation. While the trends towards global homogenisation can be seen in terms of technological advances in media and communications, and an increasing economic interdependence between nations and the dominant role of a totalising capitalist system, we have also become increasingly aware of a concurrent process of local fragmentation that occurs as a direct result of these global trends. Capitalism is, by its very nature, a polarising force that leads to wealth accumulation at one end of the spectrum and, by necessity, pushes people at the other end towards poverty. It is clear that modernity in the twenty-first century has come to assume a very different guise to what it was in the twentieth century. Whilst often a contested term, modernity in the twentieth century came to be broadly associated with certain facets of modern life. As Peter Childs observes, ‗Modernity describes the rise of capitalism, of social study and state regulation, of a belief in progress and productivity leading to mass systems of industry, institutionalisation, administration and surveillance… Modernity is also associated with the period of European global expansion, such that its universalising thrust has been concomitant with and dependent upon near-global systems of subjugation and navigation, despite its 5 Eurocentric focus.‘1 The process of modernity has traditionally been seen as originating in Europe, then carried to other regions of the world through the ‗civilising‘ mission of European imperialism. As Marshall Berman notes, the changes of early modernity can be observed in the period 1500-1800, but it is during the imperialist expansion of the 1800s that modernity takes hold and in the 1900s that modernity becomes a widespread global phenomenon.2 The accelerated processes of globalisation that can be observed in the twenty-first century present a double challenge – first to the traditional structure and function of the nation-state, and then to the basic tenets of modernity itself. With the geographical spread of technological research, production and utilisation, not to mention the increased movement of people and workers across national borders, the process of modernity can no longer be viewed as a specifically European phenomenon. Both the novel and the nation can be seen as expressions of modernity, emerging together as they did in the eighteenth century. The interrelationship between these two amorphous forms has been well documented over the course of the twentieth century by literary theorists and sociologists alike. The importance of the novel as a form of print- capitalism, which enabled people to begin to imagine an abstract community on the scale of the nation, is discussed by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities.3 Drawing on this concept, Franco Moretti traces the widening geographic scope of narratives within the novel, in Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900, and states plainly: ‗Well, the nation state…found the novel. And viceversa: the novel found the nation-state. And being the only symbolic form that could represent it, it became an 1 Peter Childs, Modernism (London; New York: Routledge, 2000), 16-17. 2 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York, N.Y.: Viking Penguin, 1988). 3 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, New York: Verso, 2006). 6 essential component of our modern culture.‘4 In 1957, well before Anderson and Moretti, in The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt established the integral relationship between the popularity of the novel and the rising middle-class generated by an industrialising society. For Watt, the novel becomes the prime symbol of a bourgeois society. The continued relationship between the novel and the nation, despite the changed circumstances of a globalised modernity, can be seen in the way that literary excellence continues to be tied closely to the nation-building process.5 The willingness of extra- literary bodies to align themselves with literature shows the wider role that authors and novels are seen to play within society. The utilisation of literary prizes to create national cultural capital, for example, can be seen in the debates that occur over the winners of international awards such as the Nobel Prize for Literature and the annual Booker Prize.6 And finally, Homi Bhabha‘s edited volume Nation and Narration shows the continued value of the novel as a medium in which to interrogate ideas about the nation.7 The flexible form of the novel made it particularly responsive to the changes in political organisation and cultural upheaval that took place during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Watt points out, the classical realist novel emerged in direct response to the processes of industrialisation, and the way in which it reoriented society. He writes that: We have already considered one aspect of the importance which the novel allots the time dimension: its break with the earlier literary tradition of using timeless stories to mirror the unchanging moral verities. The novel‘s plot is also 4 Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (London: Verso, 1998), 17. 5 Evidence for this can be seen by the establishment of the Prime Minister‘s Literary Award by Kevin Rudd‘s incoming government at the end of 2007. 6 See Nancy Armstrong, How Novels Think: The Limits of British Individualism from 1719-1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 7 See Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London; New York: Routledge, 1990). 7 distinguished from most previous fiction by its use of past experience as the cause of present action: a causal connection operating through time replaces the reliance of earlier narratives on disguises and coincidences, and this tends to give the novel a more cohesive structure.8 The linear structure of the novel, driven by cause and events, reflected the new, future- oriented perspective of an industrialising society, as opposed to the former, cyclical structure of agrarian society.
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