Poetics and Politics of Relationality in Contemporary Australian Aboriginal Fiction

Dorothee Klein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000464894
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This is the first sustained study of the formal particularities of works by Bruce Pascoe, Kim Scott, Tara June Winch, and Alexis Wright. Drawing on a rich theoretical framework that includes approaches to relationality by Aboriginal thinkers, Edouard Glissant, and Jean-Luc Nancy, and recent work in New Formalism and narrative theory, the book illustrates how they use a broad range of narrative techniques to mediate, negotiate, and temporarily create networks of relations that interlink all elements of the universe. Through this focus on relationality, Aboriginal writing gains both local and global significance. Locally, these narratives assert Indigenous sovereignty by staging an unbroken interrelatedness of people and their land. Globally, they intervene into current discourses about humanity's relationship with the natural environment, urging readers to acknowledge our interrelatedness with and dependence on the land that sustains us.

1 Non-Human (Narrative) Authority in Bruce Pascoe’s Earth

DOI: 10.4324/9781003129882-2

Kombu-merri and Waka Waka Elder Mary Graham breaks down Aboriginal understandings of the relationship between humans and the environment into two axioms: (1) “The Land is the Law” and (2) “You are not alone in the world” (105). As humans depend on the environment for their wellbeing, she argues that “all meaning comes from the land” (106). Similarly, Indigenous legal scholar C.F. Black, a descendant of the Kombumerri and Munaljahlai peoples, challenges the view that the land is simply an object or a property and instead maintains that “Land – rather than humans and their customs – is the source of the Law” (25). The roots of legal authority, in other words, are “beyond humankind and their individual concerns” (Black 50). How can narrative translate this significance of relationality into a formal make-up that mirrors both the constitutive role of connections and the authoritative role of the land?

Bruce Pascoe’s novel Earth (2001) seems to be a particularly apt candidate for analysis in this context. The narrative is written entirely in dialogue and the interlocutors include human beings, both Aboriginal and white people, ancestral spirits, and Earth or Da herself.¹ This purely dialogic structure invites readings that investigate how form functions as a way of knowing in the sense of projecting a relational worldview in which interaction is not limited to the human sphere but interrelates all elements of the cosmos. As this chapter demonstrates, however, the narrative’s politics of form are much more ambivalent than they appear at first sight. At the heart of Pascoe’s novel is a seeming paradox. On the one hand, the dialogic form foregrounds relationality in the sense of non-hierarchical networks of relations. As Pascoe himself has explained, he “chose to write the novel entirely in dialogue because [he] didn’t want the authorial voice to intrude. […] [He] wanted the reader to speak only to Aboriginal people with no grand master pulling the strings” (qtd. in Birk, AlterNative 215). At the same time, however, the narrative introduces a non-human authority through the back door by ascribing quasi-narratorial functions to the ancestors and especially Earth. This paradoxical relationship between (non-hierarchical) relationality and (hierarchical) authority also extends to the reader’s position, in that the text relegates non-Aboriginal readers to the margins as passive listeners, yet also engages them through its use of humour. Earth not only moves towards an inscription of relationality at the level of form, but even more conspicuously it exhibits a reversal of power relations and enacts a redefinition of narrative authority away from human agency to the non-human and especially the land. In this regard, the novel gives form to Graham’s and Black’s claims that “the Land is the Law” (Graham 105; Black 167) in that it is literally the land, or Earth, that functions as a knowing and guiding agent.

While Pascoe is well-known for his non-fiction work, especially his influential Dark Emu (2014), critics and scholars have paid less attention to his fictional oeuvre, in particular his novel Earth. The novel is set in Wathaurong Country in the Geelong area of southern Victoria in around 1890, so at a time when Aboriginal people were faced with widespread violence, dispossession, racial conflicts, and discriminatory legislation. It tells the story of Frank Palmer (Parwung), a labourer who is married to the well-respected Anglo-Australian midwife Claudie, and who slowly remembers and engages with his Aboriginal heritage. While the Palmer family, including Frank and Claudie’s grandson Alf (Golkawil), their daughter Cecily (Toortna) and their foster child Augustus (Woorer Woorer), are slowly being integrated into the Aboriginal community, growing hostility towards Aboriginal people, fuelled by the activities of radical nationalist settlers, makes life for the Palmer family increasingly difficult. These two processes culminate in the burning down of Frank’s house by nationalist settlers and the full acceptance of Frank and his family into the Aboriginal community.

In its depiction of colonial violence and the process of re-discovering an Aboriginal identity, Earth has much in common with a great deal of Aboriginal prose writing since the 1980s.² What has intrigued the few critics who have commented on this novel to date, however, is not so much the critique of white Australia or the question of identity but the dialogic structure used to inscribe an Aboriginal worldview, in particular the notion of Country as a sentient being (Birk, AlterNative, “[P]ulling”; Fonteyn), and an understanding of storytelling marked by polyphony, in the sense of many interlinking, disembodied voices that are not subjected to one authoritative narrating instance (Le Guellec-Minel 144). Such readings, however, do not do justice to the complex form of Earth. A close analysis reveals that the ancestors and Earth are actually endowed with quasi-narratorial functions, which reintroduces narrative authority and subverts the idea of an all-encompassing and non-hierarchical interrelatedness, which the dialogic form suggests.

In order to substantiate the claim that the ancestors and Earth exhibit characteristics that are often associated with authorial narrators, such as omniscience and omnipresence, this chapter brings Graham’s and Black’s comments regarding the land as the source of the Law into dialogue with narratological work on narrative authority, especially Paul Dawson’s contextual approach in The Return of the Omniscient Narrator and Susan Lanser’s remarks on “extra-representational acts” in Fictions of Authority. While I do not agree with Dawson’s equation of the authorial narrator with the real author, his argument that omniscient narration needs to be seen in the wider context of public authority and has to be “sensitive to historical and cultural contexts” (17) nevertheless provides a fruitful starting point from which to address the issue of non-human narrative authority in Earth. To be clear, this novel does not have an overt teller figure, given that it is written entirely in dialogue, and thus cannot be analysed strictly speaking as an example of ‘omniscient narration’, a term that is also much disputed among narratologists.³ What is of interest for the following analysis is Dawson’s suggestion to “approach omniscience as the rhetorical performance of narrative authority which simultaneously invokes and projects a historically specific figure of authorship” (19). The ancestors and Earth constitute such a “performance of narrative authority” in that they represent and mediate a culturally specific figure of non-literary, non-human authority. Earth’s intrusive comments in particular pose the question how her display of absolute, ultimate authority links to “other extraliterary claims to knowledge or expertise” (Dawson 12), especially Aboriginal ecological knowledge (e.g., Pascoe, Dark Emu; Steffensen). This extension into the non-literary sphere happens primarily through what Lanser calls “extra-representational acts”, which are, among others, “reflections, judgements, generalizations about the world ‘beyond’ the fiction, direct addresses to the narratee” (16). Such extra-representational acts “allow the writer to engage, from ‘within’ the fiction, in a culture’s literary, social, and intellectual debates” (17).

Drawing attention to the ways in which the authoritative comments by Earth, but also by the ancestors, break with the illusion of the all-encompassing relationality implied in the purely dialogic form helps to explain the political work this novel performs through its seemingly contradictory poetics of representation. Ultimately, Earth’s politics of form ties in with the larger objective of Pascoe’s non-fictional oeuvre, such as Convincing Ground (2007) and Dark Emu (2014), namely to challenge non-Aboriginal people with a decidedly Indigenous perspective on historical and social issues to lay the ground for a joint way forward. It points towards the possibility of an all-encompassing relationality, especially to the land, while highlighting that actualising this potentiality paradoxically requires a rethinking of Western ideas of (narrative) authority.

Dialogue and Relationality

At first glance, Earth seems to inscribe an Aboriginal worldview in a straightforward way through the use of dialogue that includes non-human interlocutors such as ancestral spirits and Earth herself. While Hanne Birk and David Fonteyn attribute this dialogic structure to the central role the earth plays in Aboriginal cosmologies, it can also be seen as an attempt to narratively represent, at the level of form, the underlying philosophy which places relationality at the heart of Aboriginal Spirituality, as Goenpul academic Aileen Moreton-Robinson explains: “Indigenous spirituality encompasses the inter-substantiation of ancestral beings, humans and physiography” (Talkin’ 19). The novel is characterised by a poetics of relational storytelling in that narrative mediation happens only through dialogue and the interrelations thus established – relations that explicitly extend to the non-human realm.

Earth is written entirely in dialogue with the only exception being a few passages that render sounds, for instance “Chut chut chut chut chut” (1), and the replication of four letters, which are also set apart from the surrounding text by means of a different font (131–32, 142–43, 163–67, 179–80). Both exceptions, however, are incorporated without an introduction or comment. This presentation of a story without an observable narrative instance has made it difficult for critics to categorise the text. It has been described, for instance, as being situated in between prose and drama (Birk, AlterNative 249) or as a mixture of genres (Le Guellec-Minel 141). As Birk succinctly summarises, “the text consists almost completely of dialogues in direct speech, so that in a strict narratological sense no narrative situation can be identified and the permeability of genre distinctions comes to the fore” (“[P]ulling” 215). This difficulty of classifying Earth does not merely highlight the problematic nature of applying Western (genre) categorisations to Indigenous literatures. If we conceive of form as a way of knowing, then the text, from the very beginning, draws our attention to the fact that it is informed by an unfamiliar epistemology, one that necessitates a reconsideration of widely accepted analytical categories and, from a broader perspective, a rethinking of who or what has (narrative) authority.

The various dialogues (and monologues), which are neither prefaced by the so-called inquit formula, such as ‘he/she/it says’, nor by the characters’ names, are set apart via asterisks, and the speakers consist of human beings, ancestral spirits, and Earth herself. Dialect or sociolect and an Aboriginal language, Wathaurong, are used to distinguish the different voices from one another and to indicate who is speaking to whom. The Aboriginal characters, for example, “speak mission talk”, as they belong to different language groups – “Kolginon, Kirrae Wurrung”, “Yorta Yorta an’ Wemba Wemba” (25) – and thus use a pidgin variety of English to communicate. Their speech exhibits several markers that linguists have identified as characteristic of Aboriginal English.⁴ These include a lack of inflections, as in “He be eagle” (26), wh-questions without auxiliary fronting, for instance “What you speak” (25), and the use of bin to mark past tense, for example “we bin call” (26). The non-Aboriginal characters, in contrast, speak either Standard English, or a sociolect to reveal differences in social standing. Thus, whereas the judge or Captain Reginald Hindsmith speak Standard English without any noticeable deviation (e.g., 61–62), the labourers speak a sociolect containing marked features such as ‘h’-dropping (e.g., “’as come in”; 65), ‘ya’ instead of ‘you’ (e.g., “How are ya?”; 122), ‘g’-dropping as in, for example, “smellin’” (49), contractions such as “yer been” for ‘you have been’ (126), deletion of ‘th’ (e.g., “’em” instead of ‘them’; 1), final ‘d’ dropping in the word ‘and’ (e.g., 2), or shortenings such as “fore” instead of ‘before’ (124). While these features can certainly be seen as markers of what Paul Goetsch has termed “fingierte Mündlichkeit” (pseudo-orality) (see also Birk, AlterNative 250), it is worth noting that they are not used for all characters (e.g., all the white women speak a variety close to Standard English). The rendering of different speech varieties thus serves to characterise people (Le Guellec-Minel 145) and to indicate in particular race, class and, to some extent, gender.

Two “characters” are worth looking at in more detail, namely the ancestors and Earth. The ancestors’ utterances present us with the most extensive rendering of Aboriginal English and their remarks bristle with Wathaurong words, especially when they whisper “the secrets of our country”:

‘Bunjil [name of a spirit], ’e fly, all over da ’e fly, see ’is shadow now, look ’e goes now, over bura bura [ranges], over yalook [creek], windin’, windin’ down to ol’ warri [sea], oh my warri, oh my korraiyn [salt water].

(79)

Without the glossary provided at the end of the book, any non-Wathaurong speaker would clearly be at a loss here. In passages like this one, Wathaurong language is used to convey the significance of cultural traditions and Country. The preponderance of Wathaurong words referring to the landscape and the life forms in it – “wiidji [crayfish], kooderoo [abalone], kuwiyn [fish], warrener [periwinkle], kawarren [echidna], wordel [crab], bar wor [grass, roots]” (79) – attests to the importance of the land as that which nurtures and sustains life. Also noteworthy is the communal nature of the speaker’s voice. Although this passage is narrated by one of the ancestors, “Listen, […], I whisper this to you now” (79; emphasis added), the use of the first-person plural pronoun ‘we’ as in “we breathe” (79) makes explicit a sense of collectivity, which foregrounds the importance of interrelations. Susan Lanser terms this mode “communal voice”, which she defines as “a spectrum of practices that articulate either a collective voice or a collective of voices that share narrative authority” (21). Through their very use of language, the ancestors are presented as a collective authority.

Whereas the distinctiveness of the ancestors is conveyed through the extensive use of Aboriginal English and in particular Wathaurong words, the character of Earth or Da stands out linguistically because of the abusive language she uses, such as “bloody” (133, 134, 135, 229), “shit” (134), “damn” (134), “bullshit” (135), “you bastards” (135), and “now piss off” (136, 231). To some extent, Earth’s speech resembles that of Frank and other workers, who also use “bloody” quite often, both as an intensifier and a swear word (e.g., 1, 2, 4, 6).⁵ While in the latter case the frequent use of slang words such as “bloody” can be seen as a marker of class, in the former it serves to highlight Earth’s cranky nature and adds an offensive quality to her comments. Moreover, it is notable that Earth hardly uses any Wathaurong words and then only in her conversation with Frank (“moon moon meet” [wind], “yallock” [river], “toll” [stone], “nubiyt” [water]; 237), but not in her general comments. Earth is linguistically not presented as particularly ‘Aboriginal’ but, as both Birk and Fonteyn maintain, as universal. While such a universal quality can certainly be attributed to Earth’s comments with regard to the language variety used, to some extent it needs to be qualified concerning the addressee of her critique, as I will explain below.

This brief linguistic analysis of the different voices in Earth seems to confirm Anne Le Guellec-Minel’s analysis of the novel as a multi-voiced narrative (144) in that the characters speak for themselves and in their own voices. However, contrary to her argument, this multi-voicedness does not necessarily entail the absence of one focusing lens through which the narrative is presented. Although the novel tries to work without a narrating instance by presenting us with mere dialogue, it does not simply actualise the ideal of a plethora of equal voices. Rather, it endows some of the characters with quasi-narratorial, authoritative functions, thus ultimately establishing a dominating perspective: that of the land.

Non-Human Narrative Authority

While the exclusive use of dialogue seems to imply an inscription of relationality at the level of form, the text does not in fact present us with egalitarian interactions between human beings, ancestral spirits, and Earth, which would unambiguously reflect or mediate the notion of a non-hierarchical and inclusive interconnectedness. When taking a closer look at the dialogic structure, two aspects stand out that oppose the idea of a rhizomatic network of relations: the quasi-narratorial functions of the ancestors and Earth, and the limited dialogic interaction across boundaries.

The communicative structure of the novel makes it difficult to read as a straightforward example of relationality as an inclusive and all-encompassing practice since direct dialogue between the various Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal characters, the ancestors, and Earth is ve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Non-Human (Narrative) Authority in Bruce Pascoe’s Earth
• 2 Place-Based Storytelling in Kim Scott’s Benang and That Deadman Dance
• 3 Precarious Relations in Tara June Winch’s Swallow the Air
• 4 Non-Egocentric Relations and Ambiguity in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria
• 5 Travelling Narratives and Community in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book
• 6 Stories, Language, and Sharing in Kim Scott’s Taboo
• Conclusion
• Index