Faculty of Linguistics, Literature and Cultural Studies Institute of English and American Studies Chair of English Literary Studies Dissertation Storytellers, Dreamers, Rebels: The Concept of Agency in Selected Novels by Peter Carey by Sebastian Jansen A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Stefan Horlacher, Prof. Dr. Thomas Kühn, Prof. Dr. Bill Ashcroft Technische Universität Dresden, Faculty of Linguistics, Literature and Cultural Studies 29 July 2016 Table of Contents 1. Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 4 2. Literary Overview of Carey’s Writing ................................................................................................ 18 3. Agency in Carey’s Writing: Three ‘Carey Themes’ ............................................................................ 29 4. Agency ............................................................................................................................................... 49 4.1. Important Terminology .............................................................................................................. 49 4.2. Agency: A New Phenomenon? .................................................................................................... 53 4.3. The Ancient Sources of Agency ................................................................................................... 62 4.4. The Agency Game: The Sociological Concept of Agency ............................................................ 67 4.5. Agency, Nature, and Metaphysics .............................................................................................. 76 4.6. The Problem of Normativity ....................................................................................................... 84 4.7. Getting the Moral Framework Back into the Picture ................................................................. 89 4.8. Getting Intrinsic Capacity Back into the Picture ......................................................................... 95 4.9. The Whole Picture .................................................................................................................... 100 5. My Life as a Fake ............................................................................................................................. 109 5.1. The Story ................................................................................................................................... 109 5.2. The Central Conflict: Apollo and Dionysus Caught in a ‘Deathlock’ ......................................... 112 5.3. My Life as a Fake and the Struggle for Authenticity ................................................................. 125 5.4. Chubb and McCorkle Revisited: Authenticity and the Social Arena ......................................... 132 5.5. Conclusion................................................................................................................................. 138 6. Illywhacker ....................................................................................................................................... 141 6.1. Lies and control ........................................................................................................................ 148 6.1.1. Book I ................................................................................................................................. 149 6.1.2. Book II ................................................................................................................................ 156 6.1.3. Book III ............................................................................................................................... 164 6.2. Compulsive Visions and Compelled Selves................................................................................ 171 6.2.1. The McGraths: Molly and Jack .......................................................................................... 185 6.2.2. The Young Compulsive Mistresses ..................................................................................... 190 6.3. Peter Carey’s Entrapped Dreamers .......................................................................................... 199 6.4. From the Aircraft Factory to the Museum: Baudrillard in Australia......................................... 204 6.4.1. The Three-Tiered Advance of Australia Fair ...................................................................... 205 6.4.2. Agency in the Hyperreal Condition .................................................................................... 214 6.4.3. Illywhacker and the Western World: Anti-Depressants .................................................... 217 6.5. Final Remarks on Illywhacker ................................................................................................... 221 7. Tristan Smith.................................................................................................................................... 224 7.1. Tristan as Narrative Voice and as Character inside his Story ................................................... 228 7.2. Tristan’s Bildung: A Study in two Mirror Phases ...................................................................... 231 7.2.1. Initial Conceit ..................................................................................................................... 232 7.2.2. The Gaze of the Other........................................................................................................ 236 7.2.3. The First Mirror Stage ........................................................................................................ 241 7.2.4. Interlude ............................................................................................................................ 246 7.2.5. The Voyage ........................................................................................................................ 249 7.2.6. The Second Mirror Stage ................................................................................................... 252 7.3. Tristan’s Subversiveness: “Bodies […] out of Control” .............................................................. 258 7.3.1. Postcolonial Approaches and External Reality .................................................................. 259 7.3.2. Cultural Simulation: Ghostdorps and Ghost Lights............................................................ 264 7.3.3. Confronting Simulations: Tristan and Peggy ..................................................................... 270 7.3.4. Not Escaping the Now: Felicity .......................................................................................... 275 7.3.5. Jacqui: From Self-Realisation to Escapism and Back to the Now ...................................... 280 7.4. The Radical’s Conceit: Peter Carey’s Political Activists ............................................................. 287 8. Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................... 292 9. Bibliography ..................................................................................................................................... 303 10. Appendix ........................................................................................................................................ 314 10.1. Publishing Carey: The Emergence of an Author ..................................................................... 314 10.2. Peter Carey and the New Nationalism ................................................................................... 320 10.3. Biographical Notes on Peter Carey’s Writing ......................................................................... 330 1. Introduction Peter Carey is “[w]ithout question the pre-eminent literary voice of post-colonial Australia”, writes Nicholas Wroe in the British Guardian.1 Robert McCrum, also writing for the Guardian, calls him “the dominant Australian writer of his generation”, who “arrived exuberantly on the international literary scene […] with Illywhacker, his second novel, in 1985” – counting Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang amongst the “100 greatest English-language novels of all time” (albeit at place 100).2 So, while Australian literature may have the air of something exotic in the field of Anglophone literary studies, Peter Carey, with all his high international acclaim, does not. He has won the Man Booker Prize twice – Oscar and Lucinda (1988), True History of the Kelly Gang (2001)3 – and he is so well established in academia that Andreas Gaile’s extensive bibliography on Carey amounts to almost fifty pages, even though it only reaches until the year 2003.4 Quite a few doctoral theses have of course also been published by now.5 In fact, Carey is so popular that there are articles solely devoted to discussing his fame.6 Considering all this fame and all these academical discussions, one might think that there is little left to say about his work and therefore little need for this additional thesis. However, when we look at Gaile’s assessment of almost 30 years of scholarship, then there is something that should grasp our attention. Gaile writes: “Regardless of disciplinary affiliations of Carey’s academic commentators […], the vast majority of Carey scholars