Literary Form as Postcolonial Critique

Epic Proportions

Katharine Burkitt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409405993
• eBook ISBN: 9781317104612
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Focusing on works by Derek Walcott, Les Murray, Anne Carson, and Bernardine Evaristo, Katharine Burkitt investigates the relationship between literary form and textual politics in postcolonial narrative poems and verse-novels. Burkitt argues that these works disrupt and undermine the traditions of particular forms and genres, and most notably the expectations attached to the prose novel, poetry, and epic. This subversion of form, Burkitt argues, is an important aspect of the texts' postcoloniality as they locate themselves critically in relation to literary convention, and they are all concerned with matters of social, racial, and national identities in a world where these categories are inherently complicated. In addition, the awareness of epic tradition in these texts unites them as 'post-epics', in that as they reuse the myths and motifs of a variety of epics, they question the status of the form, demonstrate it to be inherently malleable, and regenerate its stories for the contemporary world. As she examines the ways in which postcolonial texts rewrite the traditions of classical epics for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Burkitt ties close textual analysis to a critical intervention in the politics of form.

Chapter 1
Narrative Histories and Postcolonial Perspectives in Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune

Fredy Neptune, Les Murray’s second verse-novel, was published in 1998 and is credited as the text that ‘brings together artistic preoccupations which have been present in Murray’s work from the beginning and amplifies them.’1 Fredy Neptune is post-epic in many ways, but particularly in its expansive scope which reiterates the global perspective of the form and propels a number of Murray’s career-long ‘artistic preoccupations’ into a context outside his Australian homeland. Another post-epic motif is the repetition of Fred’s ‘nostos’ which reflect onto his relationship with Australia. Murray’s portrait of Fred’s home is very specific and rooted within the rural New South Wales in which Fred - and Murray - grew up. It is an idealized version of rural Australia which celebrates its landscape and insists upon an unbreakable connection between the land and its people – aligning itself, not always unproblematically, with an Aboriginal Australian ethos.2 The conceptualization of a rural Australian home implicates itself into almost all aspects of Murray’s work, for instance, poems like ‘Noonday Axeman’ also celebrate the tranquil archaism of the Australian landscape and ‘Evening Alone at Bunyah’ is explicit in its declaration: ‘This country is my mind’3. Although Fred is frequently away from home, Fredy Neptune is marked by a series of Odyssean homecomings in which Fred, radically transformed by his experiences abroad, returns to imbue himself with an Australianess which can only be attained in the bush.

In this sense, Murray’s is an epic of rural Australia; it narrates worldwide events in a vernacular that acts as a reminder that despite being away from home, Fred is still umbilically attached to it. Like the Australian poet Banjo Paterson – who Fred meets early in Fredy Neptune (12) - Murray roots his sense of Australia within its landscape, juxtaposes it with the transnational scope of Fred’s adventures. As Martin Leer has identified, Murray’s home region is ‘his personal centre of the world and imago mundi’4, but it also contributes to a complex and sometimes contradictory perspective: ‘Murray, coming from a continent and a culture where “the Centre” is also the “Outback”, moreover wants to upset the clichéd colonial and postcolonial notion of the Centre and the Periphery.’5 There is an ongoing tension between insider and outsider in Murray’s work which informs his very particular view of postcolonialism. In Fredy Neptune, Fred is cast as ‘a foreigner wherever he goes’6. Thus, the poetic voice, borne of the rural landscape of New South Wales, is always self-consciously located on the margins, and Fred is allowed to witness, but rarely takes part in, some of the major global events of the twentieth century.

As an epic hero, Fred is lacking in agency in many ways, but perhaps most notably through the motif of somatic numbness which propels his adventures, and calls both his physicality and masculinity into question. Peter Alexander suggests that Fred’s mysterious numbness is more than a literary conceit. It has been identified by Murray as ‘macular anaesthesia’, and Alexander goes on to claim that the condition of Murray’s own autistic son lies ‘somewhere in the background of Murray’s description of Fredy Boettcher’s’.7 This link between autism and the hero’s numbness reiterates the way in which Fred is an outsider in all contexts, even within his own life story, which he cannot fully experience. Murray’s interest in, and insistence on, this position of ‘otherness’ recurs throughout his poetry, but is most fully articulated in Subhuman Redneck Poems– a volume of poetry published concurrently to Fredy Neptune. As a binary position, it was initially formulated in Murray’s discussions with Peter Porter, an ex-patriot Australian poet living in London and whose work Murray has identified as the antithesis of his own. His essay ‘On Sitting Back and Thinking about Porter’s Boeotia’, first published in 1978 in The Poet Mandarin, explicitly sets out Murray’s manifesto. Murray uses the dichotomy of ‘Athenian’ and ‘Boeotian’ art and in recalling an Ancient Greek context he is already using a post-epic paradigm for his postcolonial critique:

… it may be that poetry, of all but the dramatic sort is a Boeotian art. It often has that appearance, seen over against our modern, increasingly Athenian art. Conflict and resolution take the place in a crowded urban milieu, of the Boeotain interest in celebration and commemoration, modes that perennially appear in spacious, dignified cultures.8

In his opposition of ‘Boeotia’ and ‘Athens’, Murray is pointing towards a hierarchized relationship which is based upon a history of colonialization, but exceeds it. As a space of postcolonial critique, this binary relationship exceeds the colonial paradigm to articulate the manifold inequities of life in the twentieth century. In Murray’s work, these injustices are conceived of in various ways, including the split between urban and rural, insider and outsider, prose and poetry, the West and Australia. The marginality of Murray’s protagonist in Fredy Neptune reiterates this position and the text places him in a binary relationship with Europe and America, as he narrates some of the events that Murray identifies as characterizing the Western world:

It has taken the Second World War and the decolonization after that of much of the world to reveal the iniquities perpetrated by Western cultures, using these sorts of ideas (ie primitivism) as their cover and justification, on traditional cultures. We are beginning to be conscious of a nexus of thinking and of oppression here which extends all the way from personal to international relations, and goes far beyond the bounds of art. In terms of our polarity, Athens has recently oppressed Boeotia on a world scale, and has caused the creation all over the world of more or less Westernized native élites which often enthusiastically continue the oppression.9

Again, the shift between the ancient world and the twentieth-century is explicit here. In some ways, Murray’s metaphor reinforces the old binaries of postcolonial relations as he identifies ‘the iniquities perpetrated by Western cultures’ and raises specifically Modernist debates in relation to the role of ‘primitivism’ in the exploitation and fetishization of ‘traditional cultures’. These implications are easily transferred into the Australian Aboriginal context, but as Murray shows in Fredy Neptune might also be more widely applied as ‘Athens has recently oppressed Boeotia on a world scale’. As Fred becomes representative of Murray’s ‘Boeotia’, he articulates a subversive narrative rooted in rural Australia with the aim of addressing those ‘Athenian’ atrocities to which he bears witness.

In this sense, Fred becomes a post-epic hero. He is aligned with the victims of atrocity and is demonstrated to be subject those ‘Athenian’ forces, even when the outcome is not so extreme. In addition, Fred’s inherent Australianess is emphasized throughout and also becomes imbued with a sense of ‘Boeotian-ness’ - and a general ‘otherness’ - in line with his creator’s discussions:

I think there is a wisdom in Australia’s Boeotian-ness; it may be a good sheet anchor for us during the collapse of many of our parent cultures – I say many, because not all of our culture derives from Europe, just as not all Australians are of European descent. Some, the black Australians, have been here for tens of thousands of years, and their culture is a Boeotian resource of immeasurable value for us all.10

Thus, Fred’s voice, with its markedly Australian tone, comes to represent Murray’s ‘Boeotian’ standpoint. In so doing, it critiques those Western traditions normally associated with a settler colony as ‘not all Australians are of European descent’. However complex and ambiguous this notion might be in relation to Murray’s work, this quotation demonstrates that his own affinity is with non-Western cultures in an Australian context. His version of Australia is very specific, rooted in an Outback, and an Aboriginal, sensibility and aware of itself in direct competition with culture which ‘derives from Europe’. There is an idealism, arrogance, and confidence in casting Australia as the new domain where ancient poetic and philosophical debates might take place, and these characteristics are also present in the scope and ethos of Fredy Neptune, a text which provides a post-epic perspective on some of the major events of the twentieth-century in Fred’s, and Murray’s, strictly ‘Boeotian’ terms.

Murray’s rejection of the mainstays of Western culture in his claim to a ‘Boeotian’ sensibility also has implications for Fredy Neptune on a formal level. My discussion of the text as post-epic in this context seems incompatible with Murray’s rejection of Western traditions. However, there are many aspects of the verse-novel - another contentious term in Murray’s anti-Western framework - which have led to its discussion in epic terms. As Steven Matthews suggests, ‘Fredy Neptune is an epic of Australian working-class life in the early part of the twentieth century, one which takes its manner as well as its tone from the people it tells of’11. Matthews’s discussion highlights both the epic and ‘Boeotian’ aspects of Fredy Neptune. In this context, the text is a full-length engagement with Murray’s own ideological standpoint as well as a transformative piece which adapts the ancient tradition of epic. As Line Henriksen also suggests, Fredy Neptune’s engagement with epic ‘is primarily characterized by descent’12 as Murray adopts and adapts the generic conventions to formulate his own, ‘Boeotian’ epic. Fredy Neptune mirrors the scope of Homeric epic as its hero Fred Boettcher is cast adrift from his Australian homeland and forced to embark on a series of Odyssean journeys, and homecomings, in order to construct his own sense of self in relation to some of the most violent events of the early twentieth century. Initially, Fred loses his sense of touch as he witnesses the torture and murder of Armenian women by Turkish soldiers. From then on his numbness fluctuates in relation to the events he encounters, which include the First and Second World Wars, Prohibition and the Depression in the United States, the Black Flu. His numbness is finally relieved as he learns to acknowledge his own guilt and responsibility in relation to the events he has witnessed and those who have been oppressed by them. Although Fred’s numbness is the diegetic thrust of the text, Murray’s narrative is expansive in its exploration of a variety of issues that he has touched upon before and that are contingent to the construction of his world-view. These include (amongst many others) the performance of masculinity and sexuality, the role of religion in the contemporary world, the position of the social outsider and the relationship between history and fictional narratives. In Fredy Neptune, this discussion lasts for 255 pages, is split into five books, and is based on a loosely rhymed eight-line stanza form which is reminiscent of the ottava rima of Byron’s epic poem Don Juan. Murray updates Byron’s epic for a twentieth-century audience, and the tightly woven poetry of Byron’s work is replaced with a loose but regular pattern that accommodates Fred’s Australian vernacular.

Fredy Neptune is picaresque as it draws various historical events into relief and compares the ideologies that Murray suggests they are informed by; however, the text finally offers no coherent standpoint or discussion. As such, Fred operates in relation to a recognizable, historical past which might be factually recorded, yet his narrative perspective raises questions about the reliability of historiography. Fredy Neptune suggests a series of histories which are intertwined and related, but finally incoherent, singular and competing. These histories are always framed by Fred’s narrative voice, which draws attention to the constructed and subjective nature of writing history. The narrative is, for the most part, self-conscious in its own ideological positions, and negotiates between literary and historiographical forms. This metafictional element is reiterated throughout Fredy Neptune as Fred meets writers and texts that are brought into the context of his own narrative. Furthermore, through its post-epic form and particularly through allusions to Derek Walcott’s Omeros, the text engages with both classical mythology and recognizable history, and problematizes further what is an already unsteady narrative base.

This chapter will explore Fred’s representation of Western history, and the way in which it contributes to and impacts upon his specifically Australian, ‘Boeotian’ identity. His approach is shifting, antiteleological and not always arranged chronologically. In line with this, my reading of the text will avoid rigid chronological order, and the inevitable comparisons between reality and fiction that it brings; as such there is no contextualization of the events which Fred encounters, outside that provided by the text. The chapter is split into four sections. ‘Hybrid Narratives and Histories’ discusses the disjunctured approach to the past mirrored in Fred’s portrayal of his home and Australia in general as it subverts the norms that homogenize and falsely familiarize spatial locations. This incongruous homeland is a post-epic conceit that problematizes Fred’s Odyssean homecomings: they are provisional and he is alienated both outside and within Australia. This highlights one of the main contradictions in the text: the conflicted presentation of home and the seemingly coherent Australian identity alluded to through Fred’s colloquial language. The second section of the chapter, ‘Witnessing and the Authentic Self’, explores the way in which Murray’s text is actively involved in the memory of the historical events it documents. The vernacular nature of Fred’s account encourages a reading of the text as a form of autobiography or witness testimonial. As such, Fred’s position as outsider and observer is contested and requires a coming to terms with both the events he has witnessed as well as his own culpability and ideological standpoint. In this sense, the past is inherently connected to Fred’s present and the location from which he narrates; yet even in retrospect, there can be no coherence. This text suggests that postcolonialism is a failed historical project, full of discontinuous narratives and incoherent within the wider context. Fredy Neptune is an interlocution of these histories: it calls into question the politics of accumulating historical images and demonstrates the ways in which they become ideologically weighted.

The third part of the chapter, ‘Poetry and Responsibility’, explores the implications of this post-epic engagement with narrative histories. It is an approach common to Fredy Neptune and the other texts that this thesis considers, but Murray’s text is most specifically related to the postmodern histories of Walcott’s Omeros. The direct influence of Omeros is visible as Fred can be read as the postmodern equivalent to the bard Omeros as he weaves different epochs into context and draws spatial differences into relief. In both texts, this is a complex position which explores the responsibility of poetic representation, an aspect which is accentuated in Fredy Neptune as Fred’s first-person narration complicates his responsibility to the events he de...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Narrative Histories and Postcolonial Perspectives in Les Murray’s
• 2 Post-epic National identities in Bernardine Evaristo’s
• 3 Hero versus Monster: Post-epic Masculinity in Anne Carson’s
• Afterword: Post-Epics: Literary Form as Postcolonial Critique
• Works Cited
• Index