From Solidity to Fluidity: on the theme of identity in Thomas Keneally's Fiction

Abstract

Abstract

Born into an Irish Catholic family in Sydney, Thomas Keneally published his first novel, The Place at Whitton, in 1964, four years after he abandoned his study for priesthood. The success of that gothic horror set in a seminary triggered a successful writing career of over forty years, in which he produced 25 novels, while making frequent and fruitful incursions into the world of nonfiction.
Today Keneally is Australia’s best-known writer and Australia’s living treasure. Although Spielberg’s Schindler’s List became a media event and a household word in the 1990s, it hardly qualified Keneally as an overnight sensation. By that time, Keneally was already a widely acclaimed writer in Britain and America, truly “international”, as the Australians would like to put it, since he had publishers on both sides of the Atlantic and had won the 1982 Booker Prize.
Despite discernible changes in his earlier and later works, it’s almost impossible, even as a critical expediency, to divide Keneally’s writing career into clearly marked stages. Writing on both “Australian” and “international” themes, and constantly shifting between past and present, Keneally failed to follow the normal path of arrival, growth and maturity, much to the disappointment of some Australian critics, who eagerly delighted in anticipating the destination of his literary journey.
Given that Keneally criticism, as is shown in the first chapter, leaves much to be desired, the primary task of the dissertation is to discuss the theme of identity in Keneally’s novels, on the understanding that his fictions, protean though they are in setting and subject matter, are not unrelated. My argument is that Keneally’s works, however diverse and different they may be, constitute a thematically integral whole. Both Keneally’s fiction and Australian critical reception of Keneally represent, each in its different way, the Australian national identity, a standing issue that has been troubling the Australian imagination for centuries and has, since the latter half of the last century, gained more currency as well as controversy due to the impact of globalization.
The thematic concern of identity runs through his major novels, providing not only a supporting framework for his inventiveness and imagination, but also a unity that embraces his works about Australia and those about other cultures. Identity is also the key word in the cultural and critical ambience in which these novels were produced and received. For this reason, in the historical and literary heritage of Australia, Keneally is an important link in that he alone treats all the important stages and key issues in Australia’s centuries-long pursuit of identity. He not only represents and re-interprets past identities of Australia, but also explores identity in the contemporary context of globalization and multiculturalism.
Many works of his are, more or less, the result of the interaction between Keneally’s creative capacity and the general concern of Australians for a national identity. As a consciously topical writer, Keneally deals with identity in almost all its forms, tackling such inherent subjects of identity as racism, history, convictism, nationalism, tribal culture, landscape, the British Empire and globalization. This dissertation proposes to discuss Keneally’s representation of identity, both national and personal, in four parts.
The first chapter is a meticulous review and discussion of the critical responses to Keneally’s works. The emphases, changes, predilections and prejudices in criticism on Keneally are outlined, compared and analyzed. The achievements and major deficiencies in Keneally criticism are summarized. On the understanding that criticism on Keneally reveals as much about Keneally’s works as about the cultural climate of Australia, the dissertation argues that Australian criticism on Keneally evidences the anxiety for and ambivalence toward a national identity in Australia, which, ironically, is the very theme that unifies Keneally works.
Chapter two deals with Keneally’s portrayal of Australian land, in the past and the present alike, and the setting of Keneally’s novels in general. The shaping force of geography in culture was first felt by the early settlers, and then by the pioneers, drovers, squatters and gold-diggers, and now by most Australians either when they stay in the outback or when they travel overseas. Academic and literary reaction to the land has a tradition as long as the Australian pursuit of identity itself, dating back to earliest documents catering for European taste, to the bush life hailed by nationalist writings, and to recent representations of town life and suburbia. Different from the Lawsonian and Patersonian traditions, often labeled as the realistic and the romantic, Keneally’s portrayal of Australian landscape is characterized by its involvement in human relations and psychology, and in the shaping of a sense of identity and purpose. Two novels set in colonial Australia, The Playmaker and Bring Larks and Heroes, are examined to show how distance creates a harassing sense of homelessness and frustration, and how closer knowledge of the land and disheartened conquering efforts incurs the sense of displacement among soldiers and convicts. A River Town and Woman of the Inner Sea are studied to show how man-land relations underwent a decisive change in Australian outback and inland towns and how it becomes possible for Australians to secure a self-sufficient sense of self from the land and it’s own traditions, one that is “suffused with global consciousness but unsullied by nationalism.”
The third chapter examines the sense of the past, as an inherent part of national identity, especially so in Australia. The past is the subject matter in at least one third of Keneally’s novels. As a “historical novelist”, he doesn’t always try to be objective, though his historical novels are well known for their minute details and touching vividness. His representation of Australian history is palpably shaped by his own concern for Australian identity in particular, and by the whole society’s changing attitudes toward nationality in general. The interaction between past and present is always highlighted, and the past is always viewed as a human construct, seldom free from present concerns and perspectives. The Playmaker is closely read to show that on the one hand, the past led to identity anxiety of the convicts, while on the other, it also helps them construct a temporary identity in relation with the Empire. Their past guilt is both stealthily subversive and obliquely constructive. The playmaking plot that runs through the novel, manifests the efforts to re-create and re-evaluate the past for the present’s sake, and represents a compromise between past memories and present demands, between who one was and who he needs to be. The chapter then analyzes Keneally’s 2000 novel, Bettany’s Book, to show that how Australians of the later generations are eager to re-interpret their ancestral guilt in different and sometimes polarizing ways and to exorcise the past crimes and wrongs of the land. How the sense of imagined guilt (in comparison to the inherited one) cripples the individual sense of certainty is illustrated in the novel The Survivor, which is read as a complicated and concealed metaphor of Australian history and of Australian attitudes and interpretations of history. Finally, the characteristics of Keneally’s historical writing are summed up and his perspective on history highlighted, to prove how his synchronic view of the past helps him establish an adequate fictional form for the handling of Australian historical and social themes.
Chapter four discusses ethnicity, as a distinctive form of collective identity, significant both in Australian history and in the globalized contemporary world as well. In defining Australian national identity, two issues of major concern are simply inevitable. One is Australian’s link with the British Empire and British culture; the other is the relation of the white people with other ethnicities, particularly with the Australian aborigines. Both issues have played significant and even decisive roles in Australian national history, and both throw shadows over the contemporary Australian mind. Discussion of Aboriginal history should not be restricted to its own ethnic culture, tradition and identity alone; instead, it should include as a necessary part of its concern how the aborigines have helped define white identity in history and how they have found their way into the Australian consciousness. Other ethnical minorities have problems in their relation with the white as well. Although they are not so eye-catching as the Aboriginal issue, they become part of Keneally’s overall representation of Australian ethnicity. The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith is studied at length in this chapter and efforts are made to tie up the loose ends which critics have left unattended.
The Conclusion puts Keneally in the long tradition of Australian search for identity. Keneally refreshes that tradition in both cultural and literary senses. His contribution to Australian identity lies in two aspects. He has written a large number of literary works, which provide an almost encyclopedic portrayal of the pursuit of Australian identity, at all historical stages, in all representational forms, and with all the definitive issues. In addition, he breaks free, at least partly, from the essentialist view of identity that has dominated the pursuit of Australian identity. In this sense, we may find in the sequence of Keneally’s novels the ending of one chapter and the opening of an entirely new one.