Set Adrift: Identity and the Postcolonial Present
in Gould's
Book of Fish
We usually say that the fascinating presence of a
thing obscures its meaning;
here, the opposite is true:
the meaning obscures
the terrifying impact of its presence.
— Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology
A book at turns both terrifying and cathartic, Richard Flanagan's Gould's Book of Fish (2001) relies on reader participation, intimately involving the reader in the process of meaning formation through carefully constructed traps of misrecognition and misunderstanding. Set in the British penal colony of Van Diemen's Land, Flanagan's novel examines the brutality and relative absurdity of Tasmania's origins as an antipodean dumping ground for Irish and lower class British undesirables. As told from the perspective of William Buelow Gould, a convict well versed in the horrors of penal colony life, Flanagan's novel brings Tasmania's colonial past into direct contact with the postcolonial present, a temporality both representing the sociohistorical context within which Flanagan writes and the frame within which his audience reads. From Sid Hammet's frame narration, an existential crisis in the reading present, to the confines of Sarah Island's past — a hellish place where "every man could be trusted to be his own gaoler" (Flanagan 195) — escape remains elusive. Not only do Flanagan's characters probe the perimeters of their textual and historical confinement, but likewise the reader meets a similar fate, one where the reprieve comes late and not without effort and engagement.
Though the gritty realism of William Buelow Gould's narrative constantly flirts with the magical and fantastical, a simple dismissal of this technique as flashy postmodern pastiche or derivative magical realism misses not only the boat, but the entire sea. In both congratulatory and dismissive assessments of the novel, critics commit an unwitting mistake when they catch William Buelow Gould's story just to release it back into critical overgeneralization and metaphoric association. Spectator critic D.J. Taylor commits such a folly when he argues, "we have been here before. Repeatedly" (52). Even if "we have been here before" — an assertion that superficially challenges the sustained immediacy of metafictional writing — Flanagan provides both William Buelow Gould and the careful reader the space in which to escape from Sarah Island, the horrors of the penal colony and, arguably, critical ennui under the cover of his carefully crafted narrative. Gould's Book of Fish insistently purveys a marked disjunct between the Word and World; the Name and the Named; the Real and the Symbolic. In this space, Flanagan develops a strikingly unified and urgent postcolonial critique amidst the fragmented narratives of Tasmania's past and future; unreliable William Buelow Gould becomes the collective postcolonial present, constantly forged anew, but never silenced.
* * *
Punctuated with metafictional moments, Gould's Book of Fish relies on two major, simultaneous plotlines: Sid Hammet discovers, studies, misplaces and then rewrites the story of William Buelow Gould; and William Buelow Gould tells a story, a fantastical and grotesque account of a convict's experience of life within the Sarah Island penal colony, which takes place in the colonial past. However, Flanagan continually blurs lines of temporality and narration.
In orienting the reader with the textual artifact of Gould's Book of Fish — supposedly different than the one corresponding to the same name in the novel, but perhaps the same — Flanagan constructs a framing story outside William Buelow Gould's narrative, though such a boundary serves as little more than an example of its own futility as the novel progresses. Sid Hammet has discovered the Book of Fish, illustrated by William Buelow Gould, in the Tasmanian present, amongst junk he acquires to then "further distress with every insult conceivable" for tourists who purchase, "buying what they mistakenly thought to be flotsam of the romantic past, rather than what they were, evidence of a rotten present" (4-5). Yet, such an observation of the postcolonial situation, clearly conflating the "romantic past" with economic opportunities in the present, does not provide the main framework for Flanagan's critique. Oddly enough, the framing story and William Buelow Gould's narrative consistently and necessarily overlap, rubbing against one another and creating a necessary tension for the reader as he or she attempts to situate the novel with respect to the convoluted plot at hand. Though Jesse Shipway argues that "configurations of temporality...articulate a desire that precedes and exceeds the work [itself]" (43), focusing strictly on a distinct separation between the past and future as they position Gould's Book of Fish risks missing the modality most essential to Flanagan's art: the postcolonial present.
Following Sid Hammet's interesting inverse anthropomorphism into a weedy sea dragon, as if this event did not resound in its defiance of reality, the narrative jumps to William Buelow Gould's arrival in Van Diemen's Land, "as we then knew it — Tasmania as its native-born now prefer it, shameful of the stories of the type I tell" (41). With this digression, Flanagan sets the tone for the convoluted narrative to follow. From where and when does Billy Gould speak? Though Hammet informs the reader that he has recreated Billy Gould's narrative "from memories, good and bad, reliable and unreliable; by using bad transcriptions that [he] had made, some of complete sections, others only brief notes describing lengthy tracts of the book" (28), such a disclaimer does not necessarily reconcile the discrepancy between William Buelow Gould's knowledge of Van Diemen's Land upon his arrival in the late 1820s and his naming of the island as Tasmania; the latter appends to the island in a future to which Gould seemingly should have no access. With this confusion in not only temporality, but also arguably identity, Flanagan launches into the story of Billy Gould; yet, such an unresolved tension gains clearer definition and expression as the novel progresses.
* * *
As narrator, William Buelow Gould introduces the reader to the colorful and well-developed cast of Van Diemen's Land's denizens and figures of colonial authority. From his jailer Pobjoy to the Commandant, Gould surveys the power relations present in the penal colony for the reader, though these relations(hips) tend to evade strict definition or delineation. Even without the presence of such a colorful and well-developed cast of characters, Gould himself eludes strict labeling: "I am William Buelow Gould — convicted murderer, painter & numerous other unimportant things" (53). Even though the list remains incomplete, ending with "numerous other unimportant things," Gould continually searches for new labels in his attempt to situate himself within his own narrative account, as his proper name apparently fails to suffice. Soon after arriving at Van Diemen's Land, Billy Gould takes up his position as a painter of scientific illustrations, a fate intrinsically bound to his relation to both self and others. Though his position as painter for Mr. Lempriere, ‘the Surgeon,' brought Gould relative freedom with regard to the day-to-day work of the convict, he reviews the appointment with mixed feelings: "Claiming to be an Artist...made me look like something other than the common criminal I was, & that is the only forgery I was until then ever guilty of — forging myself anew as an Artist" (65). Though Gould confesses as much in retrospect, his painting and artwork constitute the key point of access for Flanagan to subvert strict conceptions of identity, and it also provides the necessary space to examine the amorphous nature of postcolonial guilt.
Through his work as a painter, Gould forges relationships with numerous major characters, which serves to drive the novel along its fragmented plot. Among these characters, the most visible include: Mr. Lempriere (the Surgeon), the Commandant, Capois Death, Jorgen Jorgenson (the King), and Pobjoy. Each character moves to capitalize on Gould's artistic abilities at some point in the novel, from the Surgeon or Commandant's interest in scientific representation to Capois Death's request for a bar sign; Gould's fortune melds into those of his associates, in much the same manner in which his paintings of the local fish "to [his] horror...merge[d] into the outline of [his] own face" (54). Billy Gould acknowledges the conflation of his fate with his position as painter: "I could not then have known how such madness, this job of painting fish to further another man's reputation in another country, would come to overwhelm my life to such an extent that it would become my life — that I would, as I am now, be seeking to tell a story of fish using fish to tell it in every way" (127). "Seeking to tell a story of fish using fish," Gould brings into question the efficacy of such an endeavor, a point central to Flanagan's examination of postcolonial identity, since he seeks to tell a story of a people using people; a story of a world using words contained only therein; a story of the Tasmanian postcolonial situation using art. However unsettling, the results continue to inundate the reader with their apparent irreconcilability and relative opacity.
Flanagan cleverly manipulates the slipping and sliding of relationships between the novel's characters, until Gould has no clear understanding of the division between one character and the next, between men and fish; and, arguably, the reader fares no better in trying to make similar determinations and delineations. Though the novel contains many such metafictional moments, several situations clearly demonstrate the disturbingly fluid nature of individual identity with respect to the novel's most prominent characters. Early within the narrative, Billy Gould's fate curiously overlaps with that of Capois Death:
an order [...] commanded that myself and Mr Capois Death, whose complicity seemed to lie only in his folly of keeping me company on the tread wheel, were to be transported to Sarah Island for seven years, he upon several new charges of sedition, me — an escapee who had been at large for twenty years, for having conspired to prevent the course of justice through the use of a false name. (78)
Which false name? Why would Governor Arthur charge Capois Death with sedition, given that Gould painted the sign that hinted at Arthur's cuckolding by prominently portraying his wife with a mixed-race, bastard son? Flanagan does not provide the answers to such questions, but does not discourage the reader from noting the paucity of detail and corroborative evidence. Perhaps such irrational treatment and sentencing function to represent the absurdity of penal colony power; yet, perhaps Flanagan attempts to create another effect entirely.
Arguably the most hyperbolic of the outlandish characters within Gould's Book of Fish, the Commandant — with his smiling gold mask and seemingly absurd cultural and economic ambitions — enjoys a large portion of Gould's attention as narrator. As Gould remarks, the Commandant represented the visible manifestation of power and progress on the island; when the Commandant spoke, "anything & everything became possible...this offered us a purpose, a meaning, something that meant we weren't convicts" (103). Though forthright in representing the Commandant's greatest follies, Gould nonetheless aligns himself and his fate with the Commandant, since it "offered [him] a purpose, a meaning." And yet, though it would appear that Gould remains in a position of powerlessness with respect to the Commandant, he nonetheless empathizes with him in a manner that provokes questions concerning the exact nature of their relationship. As he narrates the Commandant's thoughts during the fiery destruction of the penal colony, Gould states,
He thought — don't exasperate me by asking how Billy Gould knew what he thought, for if it isn't obvious by now that he knew much more than he ever let on, it never will be — he thought several banal things, which I reproduce in no particular order. (372)
Not only does Gould have complete access to the Commandant's thoughts, he additionally knows the relative weighting of such thoughts, as he takes care to reproduce them "in no particular order." How does Billy Gould know the internal thoughts of the Commandant? Gould instructs the reader not to ask, but with such a conspicuous digression, Flanagan forces the reader to recognize the possibility of such a question. Flanagan employs such metafictional devices not only to call into question Billy Gould's reliability as narrator of the Book of Fish, but also to highlight the complexity of his larger fictional construction: the reader's copy of the novel, Gould's Book of Fish.
As a representative of the material power of written documents and official history, Jorgen Jorgensen likewise maintains a significant, even if indeterminate, relationship with Billy Gould, not to mention the Commandant. Not only does Jorgensen keep the records for the penal colony in the mysterious "Registry," but he also appears as the character most distanced from reality, perhaps because of his reliance upon the written word. For example, Gould notes,
It may be well that Jorgen Jorgensen saw the necessity of ingratiating himself with the new Commandant with his tales, but perhaps also — that day long ago he was commissioned to keep the records of the island — he found in the Commandant a mirror to his own long repressed desires to betray the world in a more fundamental way, as he felt the world had once betrayed him by not being a book. (254)
A similar betrayal appears to affect Billy Gould, irreconcilable even after he helps to facilitate Jorgen Jorgensen's death: even in death — now as the King — the "Old Dane" floats alongside Gould in his cell. Reflecting upon this, Billy Gould muses,
But then the Word was made flesh & dwelt among us as part of our darkness, & it comprehended not our darkness; for its flesh was [...] floating flotsam-like around my cell [...] to avoid the sensation of sinking forever into the primeval Word, it became my life's most sacred desire to expose that the Word & the World were no longer what they seemed that they were no longer One. (309)
Interestingly, Jorgen Jorgensen remains in continual contact with Billy Gould, even if only briefly while "floating flotsam-like" beside him in his cell. Flanagan again forces the reader to see how such relationships between characters do not exist along comfortable binaries such as life and death or representation and reality. This "floating" example of the disjunct between the "Word and World" — in the form of Jorgen Jorgensen — has no comfortably stable referent, a point that Flanagan brings to the forefront throughout the novel. Few character relationships exist without such a backdrop of possible plurality, creating interesting effects while asking questions about the stability of postcolonial identity.
As evidenced by the seemingly fluid boundaries separating the Word from the World and, importantly, between the characters within Gould's Book of Fish, Flanagan's focus appears to expand with the increasing ambiguity and problematic attempt to relate a collective Tasmanian postcolonial identity. Identity, as it pertains to the novel's characters — and, arguably, to the larger Tasmanian postcolonial situation — does not develop from the authority directly associated with proper names nor the process of naming in any strict relational sense. Rather, identity moves fluidly through the signifying network of proper names, which, as with all such signifiers, comprise the larger sea of language. From the name alone, identity does not exist. Only in relationship with other names does a particular name take on signification; yet, signification does not directly correlate with identity in any consistently meaningful manner. Flanagan makes this point explicit in the novel's afterword. An actual archive, the entry From the Colonial Secretary's correspondence file, 5 April 1831 of the Archives Office of Tasmania, lists the following aliases for William Buelow Gould: Sid Hammet, ‘the Surgeon,' Jorgen Jorgensen, Capois Death, Pobjoy, ‘the Commandant' (404). How does the reader reconcile such a list after completing the novel Gould's Book of Fish, participating in a novel that, in the words of Umberto Eco, functions as a "parasite of the real world" (83)? What does Flanagan reveal about postcolonial conceptions of identity if the characters he creates share a common signifier in the name of "William Buelow Gould"? These questions have no direct answers, but can lead to interesting theoretical approaches useful in illuminating the elusive nature of postcolonial identity in the present.
* * *
Throughout Gould's Book of Fish, Flanagan drops hints concerning the complicity of both the reader and the novel's characters, as both have a participatory role in the development of his postcolonial critique. Early in the novel, the narrator Gould remarks, "That's the good thing about an island prison colony...we are all in this shit together, all the turnkeys & redcoats & even the Commandant himself" (45). In fact, scatological references throughout the text imply Flanagan's interest in the idea of collectivity through heterogeneity, including Gould's return to an excremental theme near the end of the novel:
I now set down the final hours of both the settlement & myself in the convict's true ink, his poor man's umber that he uses to smear his protest, his rage and hate and fear of this shitty world, with shitty hands in shitty washes over cell walls in the hope he hopes not forlorn — that love will still at this last bid find him if he can but dig deep enough into his own decay. (383-384)
Georges Bataille makes explicit the unification resulting from the heterogeneous products of society when he writes, "the ‘heterogeneous' world includes everything resulting from ‘unproductive expenditure'...everything rejected by ‘homogenous' society as waste...Included are the waste products of the human body, persons, words...different types of violent individuals or at least those who refuse the rule" (142). Just as Gould announces the Surgeon's death with, "It was a turd. It was enormous" (236), words, characters — perhaps even identity — reach a similarly uniform, yet unflattering end. However unflattering, the forced heterogeneity forges a type of collective identity, as Gould notes: "I was a vile piece of cell-shit. I smelt the breath of my fellows. I tasted the sour stench of their rotten lives...I was Australia...I was untranslatable and unknowable even to myself" (261). However, "untranslatable and unknowable," Billy Gould continually forces the reader to acknowledge his attempt to translate and thereby make sense of his absurd experience. He forces the reader to consider the need for interpretation and translation, both of which must take place in the postcolonial present. Such a crisis of subjectivity — as it stems from the fundamental instability of postcolonial identity — receives much attention and exploration in Gould's Book of Fish; importantly, however, Flanagan insists on the collective nature of such a crisis.
The theme of collective postcolonial identity functions well to describe the apparently intentional sliding of signifiers throughout Gould's Book of Fish, highlighted by the inability of proper names to append successfully to any functional referent. Considering the importance of proper names as they function within language, Lacan notes, "the subject, too, if he can appear to be the slave of language is all the more so of a discourse in the universal moment in which his place is already inscribed at birth, if only by virtue of his proper name" (148). Likewise, the Commandant, the Surgeon, Jorgen Jorgensen, Capois Death and Pobjoy appear to encroach upon the sanctity of the name "William Buelow Gould" with a blurring of concrete lines of character and identity that occurs at what Lacan refers to as the mirror stage. Lacan writes, "the mirror-image would seem to be the threshold of the visible world...if we observe the role of the mirror apparatus in the appearances of the ‘double,' in which psychical realities, however heterogeneous, are manifested" (3). In such a manner, the heterogeneous elements of identity — in this case, the identities falling under the proper name "William Buelow Gould" — come into a collective within the larger framework of Flanagan's postcolonial discourse. Each proper name could, potentially, serve as a metonym for the larger construction of postcolonial identity within the novel: according to Lacan such a "signifying game between metonymy and metaphor [...] links [the subject's] fate to the question of [the subject's] destiny [...] played until the match is called, there where [the subject is] not, because [the subject] cannot situate [itself] there" (166). Throughout Gould's Book of Fish Flanagan consistently erects such a signifying edifice, which remains both within and outside of the desires acted out by the characters of the novel, situating the Real of Tasmanian postcolonial identity where no single proper name can reach. In this manner, the formation of identity — as produced through the Lacanian mirror stage — appears to follow a slightly different progression when taking place in an already fragmented postcolonial setting. This identity, however, does not simply occupy the imaginary or a particular space in the postcolonial imagination; rather, it remains Real in a strict Lacanian sense, never attainable through representation in language, a fundamentally unstable medium. Arguably, the idea of subjectivity functions differently within Gould's Book of Fish in order to highlight the impossibility of seamless integration, both by Gould as narrator and reader as interpreter.
Is "William Buelow Gould," the proper name, a symbol by which Flanagan can venture larger claims about postcolonial Tasmania? The sliding of the signifier throughout the plot, never tied to a single direct referent, resembles the Lacanian symptom. As Jean-Michel Rabaté notes, "the symptom is first described as a metaphor (the creative crossing at the bar of repression separating the signified from the signifier) then as an ego: the subject of literature, the writing and written subject will ultimately become a myth for culture" (19). The proper name, "William Buelow Gould," serves such a function for Flanagan within the space of literature, giving both name and voice to the underlying psychical tensions of postcolonial identity. Rabaté summarizes the definition of Lacan's "last word" as such: "a word that functions as a name, so as to let the proper name emerge within the symptom, or the symptom as a proper name" (183). Given its location within the book, the afterword positions the name "William Buelow Gould" at the end of Flanagan's novel, and, intentionally so. Regardless of whether the reader understands the afterword to constitute a fundamental part of the novel, reading the "last word" within the larger fictional framework, the listed aliases force the reader to question how so many proper names can effectively collapse under the sign of one name in particular.
However, not only the proper name "William Buelow Gould" circulates among Flanagan's characters within Gould's Book of Fish, but also the paintings attributed to such a name. A somewhat grim pronouncement for the potential of transcendence through aesthetic creation, Flanagan's narrative no more privileges William Buelow Gould's paintings than the words circulating within the novel. As the name "William Buelow Gould" remains bound to his artistic production, the effect closely resembles what Slavoj Žižek views as the conflation of art and artistic object. Even though the titles of Gould's paintings remain descriptive only in sensu stricto, Žižek argues that such an artistic object can have a much different effect upon the viewer, even if the object visibly portrayed appears to have little, if any, relationship with the title or the circumstances of its production. In this sense, both the title and the name/identity of the artist responsible for the work's creation become fundamentally bound with the reception of the artistic object itself. Succinctly relating this point, Žižek writes, "that is why something must fall (out) from the picture: not its title, but the object which is replaced by the title" (159). In the interpretation of art, not only the ostensible object plays into the viewer's attempt; context and subtext likewise permeate meaning. The name "William Buelow Gould," in a strict Lacanian sense, remains the object of the scientific illustrations. Though visually lacking in the field depicted, the name "William Buelow Gould" appears in another manner within the symbolic order: in a convict's paintings of Science and Progress. Flanagan's invocation of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying in the epigraph makes the point explicit: "My mother is a fish." The fish, as painted by the character Billy Gould, continually serve a maternal function, including and insisting upon the name "William Buelow Gould" as it circulates constantly within the symbolic framework of Flanagan's novel, not limited to verbal representation.
Billy Gould, the character in the novel, exhibits similar skepticism concerning the ability of his artwork to achieve any type of pragmatic transcendence. Not only do the pictures have a dubious association with their theme of scientific progress and the necessary death of the subject; they likewise represent a terror entirely their own: impotence with respect to the temporal order. The paintings exist in the space Emmanuel Levinas refers to as the "meanwhile." As Levinas argues, the life of the painting "will never have completed its task at present, as though reality withdrew from its own reality and left it powerless. In this situation the present can assume nothing, can take on nothing, and thus is an impersonal and anonymous instant" (123). The past and future exist for the subject of the painting; yet, the present remains illusory, a terrifying condition of the postcolonial present for Flanagan and a marked tension throughout the novel. Billy Gould makes much the same point, when he describes the "Freshwater Crayfish" within the chapter of the same title: "like the crayfish leaping backwards into the water after abandoning its shell, I prepared to abandon the shell of who & what I was, & metamorphose into something else" (382). Yet, the metaphor remains shrouded in its representation of impotence in the present: the carapace, an inanimate and powerless shell, remains in the present; the only space left for the crayfish exists in retreat, "leaping backwards." The carapace, in much the same manner as the name and the subject of the painting proper, has no functional value in the present; it remains damned to its role in perpetuating the past, if only in the guise of the future.
Within the text, the example of the "freshwater crayfish" functions to challenge and probe the connection/disjunct between Word and World in yet another manner: the historical William Buelow Gould, or at least the name as it appears in the real world archives, enters into a parasitic relation to the animal — the species of freshwater crayfish in question — represented in Gould's painting. Interestingly, the animal itself bears the name "William Buelow Gould," at least in Linnaean parlance, in the real world. In his historical work, The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes writes, "The river had big eels in it, and a giant freshwater crayfish (Astacopsis gouldii, named after the convict artist William Buelow Gould, who was the first to draw and describe one), and mud crabs with fifteen-inch claws" (375). The proper name persists, in this sense evidentially, in the real world, unable to completely shed the carapace of "William Buelow Gould" and the heterogeneity represented by the label. Though all of the paintings reproduced in Flanagan's novel represent artifacts in the real world, this example in particular highlights the extent to which the name "William Buelow Gould" has no single referent, locked in the historical past and destined for propagation in the future. As long as the scientific name continues to taxonomically describe the animal in the real world, taking as its root the proper name of "Gould," the name "William Buelow Gould" exists in an impotent postcolonial present, destined to retain essential connections to the Tasmanian colonial past, constantly influencing the name's associative meaning in the future. In a postcolonial present in which Tasmanians attempt to ignore the explanatory power of genealogy, a name can quickly betray convict and immigrant origins; in direct contestation of such a practice, Flanagan insists upon the ascendancy of the name "William Buelow Gould," which emerges from the past to challenge the present.
* * *
Richard Flanagan's concern with the collectivity of identity in the postcolonial reading and writing present does not represent a fundamental break from variants of postcolonial critiques preceding Gould's Book of Fish. Since identity formation in the postcolonial Tasmanian reading present stems from a collapsing of the Hegelian master/slave dialectic, it remains inextricably bound in a tension with the colonial past to the detriment of future action. Frantz Fanon articulates such a collective crisis of identity in Black Skin, White Masks, when he comments upon the collapsing of the master/slave distinction: "If I close the circuit, if I prevent the accomplishment of movement in two directions, I keep the other within himself. Ultimately, I deprive [the other, the colonized, the imprisoned] even of this being-for-itself" (217). Once the distinction between convict and gaoler no longer exists in any functional sense, the core of collective identity in the present is open to the existential dangers of complete heterogeneity; Flanagan illustrates such a danger as he demonstrates the problematic ability of the proper name "William Buelow Gould" to latch onto a single referent within the text. Albert Memmi has employed psychoanalytic analysis to arrive at a similar conjecture: in his study, The Colonizer and the Colonized, he writes, "So goes the drama of the man who is a product and victim of colonization. He almost never succeeds in corresponding with himself" (140). In Gould's Book of Fish, Flanagan locates the symptom linguistically, adding a certain nuance to such a drama.
Flanagan's examination of the power of naming does not represent a new concern for Australian postcolonial studies, as several critics have commented upon such a phenomenon. In his essay "Naming Place," which details the variety of Australian conceptions of postcolonial identity, Paul Carter writes, "It was the names themselves that brought history into being, that invented the spatial and conceptual coordinates within which history could occur" (405). Though focusing on the natural world, Carter's concern with the direct correspondence between proper names and the reality they purport to represent is a pervasive theme in Gould's Book of Fish.
Both the penal system and the label of "convict," as each functioned to form Australian postcolonial identity, receive thorough treatment in Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra's essay "Crimes and Punishments." Hodge and Mishra argue that the colonial past has created a collective fragmentation of identity in the Australian postcolonial present, noting, "...characteristic of [Australian postcolonial] consciousness [... is] the construction of doublets, that is, images and values which appear simultaneously in two opposed and incompatible forms. The image of convicts and bushrangers alike as both heroes and scum is a case in point" (335). So, the linguistic effect created by Flanagan in the inability of the proper name "William Buelow Gould" to achieve definitive signification, only further highlights the poverty of labeling and the definitively circumscribing of Australian postcolonial identity under a single signifier. Taken by itself, Flanagan's artful observation represents a somewhat grim pronouncement, one that offers little in the way of catharsis or facile stabilization of identity in the postcolonial present. However, despite the horrific nature of the aggressions described in Gould's account of the penal colony and the unsettling sadness of experiencing/participating in Flanagan's performance, the reader, and thus postcolonial Tasmania, is left with an effective manner by which to break from a potentially impotent and unfruitful examination of his or her colonial past: Flanagan insists upon the space of the postcolonial present.[1]
* * *
To sound a note of hope, in an Aristotelian move of sorts, Flanagan does reveal the potential of catharsis in certain passages throughout the novel, manipulating the prose in both a performative and instructive manner. As Aristotle writes in his Poetics,
Tragedy [...] by means of language enriched with all kinds of ornament [...] represents men in action and does not use narrative, and through pity and fear it effects relief to these and similar emotions. By "language enriched" I mean that which has rhythm and tune, i.e. song, and by "the kinds separately" I mean that some effects are produced by verse alone and some again by song. (VI. 2-6, 23)
Catharsis, according to Aristotle, comes through "rhythm and tune, i.e. song," which interestingly takes place in the present, as per the nature of performance. Julia Kristeva, in her essay, "Approaching Abjection," reaches a similar conclusion when examining the role of silence and pause, as she writes, "silence [...] shatters verbal communication [...] by means of a device that mimics terror, enthusiasm or orgy, and is more closely related to rhythm and song than it is to the World" (30). Flanagan exhibits an intimate knowledge of the power of song and silence in his prose. Blending elements from both Aristotelian and Kristevan catharsis, he breaks open a space in the present for some form of reconciliation with the collective nature of postcolonial Tasmanian identity.
Flanagan's distinct focus on rhythm and musicality in his prose repeatedly allows a postcolonial voice to emerge from the constraints enforced by the symptomatic sliding of proper names. One such passage, a digression by Sid Hammet, exemplifies this poetic technique as it differs from the nature of strict narrative prose. Hammet states,
it sometimes seems so elusive, this book, a series of veils, each of which must be lifted and parted to reveal only another of its kind, to arrive finally at emptiness, a lack of words, the sound of the sea, [...] of the great Indian Ocean through which I see in my mind's eye Gould now advancing towards Sarah Island, now receding, that sound, that sight, slowly pulsing in and out, in and out. (Flanagan 32)
The rhythm of such prose, following Hammet's stated disenchantment with the ability of words to correspond to anything but "emptiness," effectively represents and endorses Aristotelian ideals of poetics and the function of song. Flanagan intersperses such instructive moments throughout his narrative, allowing the present postcolonial reader to participate in cathartic pronouncements as the plot unfolds.
The final lines of Billy Gould's narrative, loaded with consonance and alliteration, demonstrate and reinforce Flanagan's insistence upon staking claim on a postcolonial present. William Buelow Gould provides the final answer and the reader performs: "I am William Buelow Gould & my name is a song which will be sung, click-clack—rat-a-tat-a-tat, a penny a painting, silly Billy Gould riding a seahorse to Banbury Cross" (403). As the reader follows the words on the written page, the word choice and arrangement insists upon an internal rhyme, accentuating Gould's conflation of his name with song. By involving the reader in the creation of such an effect, Flanagan has developed a break in the narrative by which the proper name "William Buelow Gould" can leave the uncertainties and seemingly uninterrupted flow of symbolic and representational language. The desired effect, as it correlates with the nature of performance, necessarily takes place in the present, a postcolonial present that has liberated itself from the deleterious symbolic order of the colonial past with the effect of opening the possibility of an unbounded future. Insofar as Gould's Book of Fish probes the fault lines and disjuncts situating the Real with respect to its linguistic representation, Flanagan makes a persuasive argument for such reclamation of the postcolonial present, a place where heterogeneity may tempt reconciliation and collective postcolonial identity find a cathartic release.
Notes
Though necessarily distanced from many of the issues of Tasmanian postcolonial identity, American and British readers arguably experience certain aspects of such irreparable and ever-present fragmentation. If only by attempting to order and make sense of Billy Gould's idiosyncratic narrative, Flanagan produces an aesthetic experience that both mimics and reifies issues of fragmented postcolonial identity. |
Works Cited
Aristotle. The Poetics. Trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe. London: Harvard UP, 1965.
Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl Lovitt and Donald Leslie, Jr. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P., 1985.
Carter, Paul. "Naming Place." The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft, et al. New York: Routledge, 1997. 402-406.
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