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4POST-COLONIAL TRAUMA IN PETER CAREY'S "JACK MAGGS"
The article's relevance is determined by the necessity to critically reconsider the foundations of traditional Post-Colonial studies with regard to the text produced by modern Neo-Victorian writers stemming from the countries where colonialism, on the one hand, serves as a nationhood foundation, and, on the other hands, proves to be source of trauma both for the colonizers and the colonized. The article's aim is to explore Peter Carey's "Jack Maggs" (a critical rewriting of Charles Dickens's "Great Expectations" from the point of view of an outlaw expelled to Australia) as a sample of a specific generic modification of a traditional post-colonial novel, resulting from the Neo-Victorian fiction's ambiguous attitude to the Imperial heritage of the Victorian age. The methodological framework of the article comprises both the traditional methods of Post-Colonial criticism (E. Said, H. Bhabha, G. Spivak) and the approaches established within the Neo-Victorian studies. The results of the research show the role the Victorian cultural legacy's reinterpretation plays in overcoming the Australian "bastard complex". The article thus highlights the political and cultural contexts behind the Neo-Victorian literary projects and could be of use for literary scholars, Culture Studies scholars and students of Humanities.
Keywords
Post-Colonial studies, Neo-Victorian fiction, neocolonialism, intertextuality, bastard complex
AUTHOR
Olena V. Tupakhina,
Associate Prof., PhD Zaporizhzhya National University, 66, st. Zhukovsky, Zaporizhzhya, 69600, Ukraine tupakhina@gmail.com
1. Introduction
Despite the obvious importance the concept of Imperialism acquires in the process of shaping semantic field of the notion "Victorianism" in public conscience, the postcolonial revision of Victorian heritage that had started as early as 1964 by Jean Rhys's notorious novel "Wide Sargasso Sea" seemed to play minor role in the fiction of the so -called Victorian Revival until the very end of the last century. Represented in literary discourse of 1950 - 80ies by J.Farrel's "The Siege of Krishnapur" (1973), R.Drewe's "The Savage Crows" (1976) and the renovated tradition of American slavery tale (Heilmann, Llewellyn 2010, p. 67 - 68), at the turn of the XX century post-colonial reinterpretations of Victorian past have become one of the prominent tendencies in Neo-Victorian fiction. Starting from the 1990-ies, various aspects of colonial trauma have been explored in Jane Rogers's «Promised Lands» (1995), Andrea Barrett's «The Voyage of the Narhwal» (1998), Matthew Kneal's «English Passengers» (2000), Daniel Mason's «The Piano Turner» (2002), Rose Tremaine's «The Colour» (2003), Julian Barnes's «Arthur and George» (2005) etc.
The reason behind that rapid outburst of interest towards Victorian colonial heritage might be seen in vivid public discussion around the reconstruction of "colonial mentality" in presumably de-colonized modern world (Simon Gikandi, Anne McClintock, Rey Chow) (Ho 2014, p. 10) partially provoked by the so called New Imperial Historians (Catherine Hall, Sonya Rose, Cathleen Wilson) critically revising the works of the famous post-colonial triumvirate (Edward
Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha) (Brantlinger 2009, p. 56). In her seminal monograph entitled «At the Heart of Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late Victorian Britain», Antoinette Burton calls for critical reconsideration of the very term "nation" by means of overcoming the well-established dichotomies of centre vs periphery, local vs imperial historical narrative and unifying them w'thin the frames of common analytical paradigm (Burton 1998). Kathleen Wilson in her study «A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1600-1840» strongly opposes the traditional postcolonial isolationism toward the "common history" of the colonies and metropolis and coins a term "Atlantic interculture" to stress the overarching unity of historical narratives produced both by the colonizers and the colonized (Wilson 2004, p. 196-198).
In their attempts to position the Imperial past as a common background for everyone involved in the colonization process - be it victims or impostors, - the New Imperial History supporters often blame the traditional Post-Colonial studies for their biased and narrow approaches towards the colonial past. As John McKenzy points out, such monolithic and binary vision of the past could not but harm the very intercultural ties the founders of Post-Colonial criticism proclaimed vitally important for building up a common future based on mutual respect and equality (quot. ex Brantlinger 2009, p. 56). David Parker finds in dangerous for the future of the world to overtly simplify the controversial and paradoxical picture of the Imperial past by hyperbolizing its negative features and promoting dogmatic attitudes to its legacy (Parker 2014).
In terms of the Neo-Victorian project, as Mari-Louise Cohlke points out, such approach would result in a reversionary "orientalization" of Victorian era "as Western culture's mysterious, eroticized and exotic Other" (cit. ex Heilmann, Llewellyn 2010, p. 68). Modern Neo-Victorian writers tend to move away from Edvard Said's canonical postcolonial readings of the Victorian legacy as such that promotes slavery and Imperialism ("Culture and Imperialism"). Instead, they highlight the complexity and ambiguity of the colonization process by either searching for its distant consequences in the modern contexts or projecting modern concerns in the historical past.
As a result, in a number of countries that treat colonization as a groundwork of nation building process (Australia, Canada, Hong Cong etc.), discussions about "proper" or "improper" forms of colonialism (Ho 2014, p. 14) stimulate the so-called second wave of post-colonial literature, «a phase in which writers from former imperial colonies view the work of English masters as part of a literary commonwealth, not to be necessarily subverted or struck down but to be celebrated» (Martiny 2011, p. 49).
2. Methodological Framework
The article's relevance is therefore determined by the necessity to critically reconsider the foundations of traditional Post-Colonial studies with regard to the text produced by modern Neo-Victorian writers stemming from the countries where colonialism, on the one hand, serves as a nationhood foundation, and, on the other hands, proves to be source of trauma both for the colonizers and the colonized. The article's aim is to explore Peter Carey's "Jack Maggs" (a critical rewriting of Charles Dickens's "Great Expectations" from the point of view of an outlaw expelled to Australia) as a sample of a specific generic modification of a traditional post-colonial novel, resulting from the Neo-Victorian fiction's ambiguous attitude to the Imperial heritage of the Victorian age. To tasks determined by the goal comprise investigating the specificity of Australian attitude towards the national past, marking out the features of the white Australian identity driving back to colonial stigma, positioning Carey's novel within the contexts of Australian convict fiction and postcolonial fiction and defining the role Dickens's "Great Expectations" play in shaping out the colonial trauma in the derivative narrative. The methodological framework of the article comprises both the traditional methods of Post-Colonial criticism (E. Said, H. Bhabha, G. Spivak) and the approaches established within the Neo-Victorian studies.
3. Results
In the late XX century, the so-called Imperial melancholy (defined by Paul Gilroy as the former metropolis's reluctance to reflect over the feelings of guilt and shame provoked by its colonial past (Gilroy)) results in the "active forgetfulness" strategy aimed at reconsidering the colonial legacy as equally influential, equally beneficial and equally traumatizing for both sides of the process. In Australia, marked by colonial stigma at the state- and nation-building level (for its white founders were at the same time treated as exiles and outcasts by the metropolis), this strategy produces a whole range of a second wave postcolonial texts defined by Giles Foden as "duplicated" or even "multiplex" in scope. The best postcolonial novels, Foden states, do not necessarily emphasize the brutal colonial exotic; neither do they attempt to "write back to the Empire" from the marginalized colonized subject's point of view. Instead, they try to engage the colonial experience in the wider context, which is equal to political and cultural globalism (Foden).
Peter Carey's "Jack Maggs", written in the very midst of an arduous polemics around Australian identity and national politics (marked, on the one hand, by Paul Keating's "Redfern Address" and, on the other hand, by Paulin Hanson's aggressive rhetoric in defense of Australia's Anglo-Celtic cultural tradition), looks like a direct response to the "New Imperial" revisionism. The idea of the novel, as Carey himself would confess, comes from the fact that "Australians do not like to celebrate this moment when the nation is born... We carry a great deal of safe-hatred, denial, grief and anger, all unresolved" (cit. ex Ho 2014, p. 118).
What makes the representation of the Imperial narrative so challenging for the post-Victorian fiction is the immanent intention (subtly represented through the very term "post-Victorian") of the latter to reestablish the Empire as a center of literary canon (which, in its turn, could result in restoring "Imperial normativity" (Ghikandi). Even the most subversive post-colonial reinterpretations of the Victorian novels (such as Jean Rhys's "Wide Sargasso Sea") still position the Victorian text as an unattainable aesthetical paragon, thus falling back into center vs periphery frame typical for neo-colonial discourse.
Carey's choice of Dickens's "Great Expectations" as a source text for "Jack Maggs" seems to be quite obvious with regard to the role of this text in post-colonial critical discourse since Edward Said's classical interpretation; on the other hand, as Mary Hammond would suggest, "Great Expectations" is a "crisis novel" being constantly reinterpreted and recontextualized in times of great social and political disturbances (Hammond 2015, p. 8). Another reason for turning to Dickens's classics might be the fact that it provides an iconic sample of a naïve narrator - a strategy constantly applied as a counter-discursive practice, for, as Michel Foucault points out, «naïve knowledges located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity» (cit. ex Clayton 2006, p. 146) can effectively overthrow the dominant metanarrative.
The aforementioned function works perfectly for Peter Carey's novel, where naïve narrator (impersonated by Jack Maggs, a convict banished from Great Britain to Australia) is but one of several narrative instances producing various versions of Maggs' story; eventually, Maggs' personal take on his own life effectively overcomes its "professional" interpretation created by young and aspiring writer Tobias Outs for commercial purposes. The latest aspects comes in line with Carey's own emotional explanation of his choice of pretext: «Then one day, contemplating the figure of Magwitch, the convict in Charles Dickens's "Great Expectations", I suddenly thought THIS MAN IS MY ANCESTOR. And then: THIS IS UNFAIR!» (cit. ex Ho 2014, p. 118).
As Elizabeth Ho aptly points out in her seminal study "Neo-Victorianism and the Memory of Empire", the white Australian identity feels split by the fact that its bearers are, on the one hand, victims, and, on the other hand, beneficiaries of the British Empire's colonization project. Consequently, white Australians feel deprived of home both in past and present, in Australia and overseas (Ho 2014, p. 154). In his numerous interviews, Carey ponders over this unique and deeply traumatizing experience that involved the former victims of social violence
in the acts of racial violence and resulted in a complicated feeling of guilt, safe-hatred, rage and sorrow yet to be reconsidered, worked over and resolved (Kucata 2012, p. 118). Bruce Woodcock, in his turn, admits that the blaze of the conv'ct so many families in Australia felt marked with is the thing modern white Australian identity tries hard to get rid of; it is only the matter of the last decades that the attitude to those shameful pages of family history is gradually getting better (Woodcock 2003, p.119). As if trying to rehabilitate itself, the Australian convict literature rising from Marcus Clarke's «His Natural Life» (1885) and consequently developed by Thomas Kinilly («Bring Larks and Heroes» (1967), «Playmaker» (1987)), Patrick White («A Fringe of Leaves» (1976)) and Richard Flanaghan («Gould's Book of Fish» (2001)), is stuffed full of the images of heroic, brave and overtly masculine victims of the Imperial injustice, their natural vitality and power prodding a striking contrast with the soulless, fruitless and mechanical nature of the regime.
Yet another reason behind Carey's turning to "Great Expectation" might be, as John Thiem suggests, the peculiar attitude of the Australian post-colonial writers to Charles Dickens under the influence of the white Australians' "bastard complex" (Hodge, Mishra 1992) that tends to be revealed through numerous depictions of abusive relationship between cruel, indifferent parents and their lost, unwanted children. In his deeply analytical study "Post-Colonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon", Thiem ponders over the idea that the famous Victorian writer is firmly positioned as a father figure within the Australian literary tradition, starting from one of its founders, Henry Lawson, who not only was directly influenced by Dickens's writing but also felt a sort of filial love towards his great predecessor (Thiem 2002, p. 103). Hence that, Peter Careys overtly emotional, controversial love-hatred towards Dickens (and his textual substitute).
It is deeply symbolical that, in his struggle for justice, Peter Carey seems to pay no attention to the problem of Australian aboriginals rooted out of their lands by the colonizers; instead, he is totally focused on British-Australian relationship metaphorically conceptualized as those of cruel parents and unwanted children (an image typical for Australian literature, as Peter Pierce's «The Country of Lost Children» decisively demonstrates). Jack Maggs is an orphan, a foundling kept and fed by calculating abortionist Ma Britten (a telling name itself) only because of his exceptional talent in theft; Jack's firstborn from Ma Britten's daughter is brutally killed in utero; Maggs himself neglects and abandons his Australian-born sons overseas to travel back to England and to recover his legitimacy through his cherished stepson Henry Phipps, who, in his turn, forswears such an embarrassing relationship and even tries to murder his benefactor.
Alongside with the novel's dominant motive of restoring one's social status and parentage, repeatedly implied images of orphans, neglected or aborted children contribute to what Hodge and Mishra call "the Australian bastard complex" - a trauma in the very heart of white Australian identity caused by barbarous depopulation of aboriginals and rooted in «a continuous need to generate new forms of the foundation myth, which exists to annul, defuse, displace and negate the intractable conditions of the foundation event» (Hodge, Mishra 1992, p. 26).
Jack Maggs' initial obsession with legitimacy, his eventual disappointment in his thought-to-be motherland and subsequent decision to return back to Australia to father his own abandoned bastard sons and to become a flourishing patriarch of a big family works out as a Freudistic practice of Nachtraglichkeit for an Australian writer deeply concerned by his country's problematic relationship with colonial heritage. As Carey himself would point out, "Australia kept on being Victorian long after the British stopped being Victorian. People arriving in Australia many years after the Victorian era well and truly ended would see its vestiges there. In the outposts of the Empire these exiled people were still keeping up the standards, unaware that they were no longer the standards. Things like that happen when people feel they are exiled from where the center is, or from where home is" (cit. ex Ho, p. 131). The same sentiment can be found in another piece of Neo-Victorian fiction from Australia, John Harwood's Gothic novel "The Ghost Writer", where the Australian-
born protagonist suffers from feeling expelled from "home" (idyllic metropolitan paradise) he has never lived in personally; it takes him almost thirty years and a fire to set free from the fake heritage he had deliberately sacrificed his life to.
4. Conclusion
Thus, the main idea behind Carey's "Jack Maggs" as a second-wave postcolonial novel (typical for the countries positioning colonization as a foundational myth within the nationbuilding process) is erasing Australian stigma of collaterality and cultural dependance from the metropolis. By critically reconsidering the Victorian masterpiece that famously positions Australia at the margins of the civilized world, Carey tends both to get rid from the writer's anxiety of influence and to reconceptualize his native country as a new and true home for those expelled from metropolis. By appointing a marginalized Victorian character as a main hero of his novel and sending him back to Australia Carey does not only follow Neo-Victorian tradition of recovering silenced voices from the past, but also contributes to the complex process of overcoming Anglo-Australian colonial trauma and reestablishing Australia in its own national mythology as home rather than a penal colony. He pays specific attention to overcoming the Australian "bastard complex" by critical deconstruction of true vs false family dichotomy. Jack's fanatical desire to restore his "Englishness", his subsequent disappointment in his former motherland and his decision to go back to Australia to acknowledge his sons left there and to become a founder of a big and prosperous family serves as a means to reveal problematic matter of self-identification still quite painful for the white Australian identity. At the same time, applying the Victorian text as a source linking past and present, Carey creates a chronological distance effective enough to activate the retroactive memory mechanism necessary to deal with the traumatizing experience.
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