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- Title
Short Fiction Short Nation: The Ideologies of Australian Realism.
- Authors
Dunk, Jonathan
- Abstract
This paper examines the ways in which short stories have interacted with different national contexts throughout the history of modern Australia, endorsing and resisting what Fredric Jameson calls the symbolic resolution of narrative, and subsequently considers the processes by which certain critical trends and interpretive emphases can illuminate or obscure that interaction through comparative readings of texts by Henry Lawson and .John Kinsella. This essay pursues three mutually implied provocations in the relationship between nationalism and literaiy form in Australian histoiy. First, the concentration of a distinctly Australian literaiy identity during and subsequent to the hallowed Bulletin years of the 1890s can and should be read as an acceleration of late stage logics of colonial elimination as identified by the historian Patrick Wolfe (387). Second, the discursive elisions and contradictions within that desperately national textual body which have been symptomatically interpreted by a certain Freudian emphasis of post colonial criticism - as tremors of conscience within the settler mind - can and should be read as subsequent and more sophisticated functions of those colonial logics, and not as failures or limitations thereof. In other words, they should be read as what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang describe as 'a settler move to innocence' (11). Third, despite the anxious necessity of Australian literature to incorporate and articulate the literature of Aboriginal presence, the discipline critically lacks the mechanisms to do so. Franco Moretti argues that "forms are the abstract of social relationships"(28), building upon Raymond Williams's earlier concept of the structure of feeling as the organisation of affect and experience in a given social period (133). This relationship between textual form and political experience can be further clarified by Fredric Jameson's work on narrative as a means of symbolic resolution of the material conflicts and contradictions of capital. In this theory the structure and disposition of that resolution becomes the ideology of its form: 'the symbolic messages transmitted to us by the coexistence of various sign systems which are themselves traces or anticipations of modes of production' (Political Unconscious 56). In the context of Australian literary histoiy this relationship between literary and political structures is further tightened by the exigencies of the nascent settler state - the writers in journals like the Bulletin and the Antipodean had to augur and create the 'national type' they were tiying to reflect. The early periods of Australian literature were an unusually concentrated period of the discursive condition identified by Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) as a practise working to 'systematically form' the object of which it speaks (49). This essay focuses on the ways in which this process operates within short realist narrative as the ideal form of disseminated community in these publications, specifically in the work one of the period's most celebrated authors, Heniy Lawson. The influence of this legacy on contemporary writing will then be clarified in an examination of the attempts to ironise and exorcise this histoiy in the short fiction of John Kinsella.
- Subjects
AUSTRALIA; REALISM; JAMESON, Fredric, 1934-; ABORIGINAL Australian literature; YANG, K. Wayne
- Publication
Australian Literary Studies, 2018, Vol 33, Issue 3, p1
- ISSN
0004-9697
- Publication type
Article