Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang and the
Kelly Legend in Australia: A Historiographic Metafictional Reading
Anjan Saikia is Assistant Professor, Department of English, Kamargaon College, Golaghat, Assam. He completed his M.Phil and is currently pursuing his Ph.D from the Department of English, Dibrugarh University.
Anjan Saikia is Assistant Professor, Department of English, Kamargaon College, Golaghat, Assam. He completed his M.Phil and is currently pursuing his Ph.D from the Department of English, Dibrugarh University.
Abstract
Peter Carey is one of the most popular and significant names in
contemporary Australian writing in English. Carey, one could argue, is
Australia’s most widely recognized writer in English and the popularity and
critical appreciations from reviewers have made him a literary heavyweight. Carey
can, indeed, be claimed to be the legitimate heir to Patrick White’s standing
in the world of Australian literature. The basic objective of the study is to examine
the Kelly legend in Australia and scrutinize the presentation of the same in
the form of a fiction titled True History
of the Kelly Gang. The text may be meaningfully engaged with through the
framework of historiographic metafiction as pronounced eminently by Linda
Hutcheon. The article looks into the issues and complexities involved in the
meeting of both history and fiction, and thus, it would delve deep into the
exploration of the crucial aspects of authenticity/inauthencity, objectivity
and the notion of absolute truth in history through the basic understanding of
the chosen text for study.
Keywords: Peter
Carey, Metafiction, History, Postmodernism.
The relationship of literature and history has been the
subject of multiple scrutiny and interpretations at various stages of the
evolution of human history especially from the 19th century onwards
in a robust manner. In the 19th century, both history and literature
were considered as the branches of the same tree of learning which sought to
interpret experience for guiding and elevating man. In the modern era, a
crucial reversal took place resulting in the separation of both history and
literature and the consequent emergence of two distinct and formidable branches
of learning. In the postmodern approaches of studying literature and history,
this very separation of the discourses has been challenged heavily and thus has
been focused more upon identifying what the these modes of writing share than
on how they differ from each other.
The meeting of metafiction and historiography has
unambiguously produced a new kind of experimental writing in postmodernism, and
quite significantly, this fusion and the resultant emergence of the new kind of
writing has brought into fore one of Postmodernism’s unresolved contradictions.
Linda Hutcheon, the propagator of this theory of historiographic metafiction,
has sought to redefine the relationship of history and literature in the
postmodern era by challenging and problematizing the separability of the two
discourses. In historiographic metafiction, the readers are usually poised in a
double consciousness regarding the real historical events and its fictionality.
The novel of sort is of quite importance considering the fact that it contests
and redefines the assumptions of realist novel and narrative history by
questioning both the absolute knowledge of the past and the ideological
implications of historical representations irrespective of past and present.
Peter Carey is one of the most popular and significant
names in contemporary Australian writing in English. Carey, one could argue, is
Australia’s most widely recognized writer in English and the popularity and
critical appreciations from reviewers have made him a literary heavyweight. Carey
can, indeed, be claimed to be the legitimate heir to Patrick White’s standing
in the world of Australian literature. Interestingly, Carey has bagged almost
every major fiction award in Australia including the Miles Franklin award,
three times – for Bliss in 1981, Oscar and Lucinda in 1989, and for Jack Maggs in 1998, and such major
international prizes as the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Jack Maggs in 1998, and the Booker prize which he even won twice for Oscar and Lucinda in 1988 and True History of the Kelly Gang in 2001
respectively. Significantly, the two Booker prizes that Carey bagged have also
greatly enhanced the reading public’s awareness of Australian literature in an
extensive manner. In short, Carey has firmly settled in the canon of
contemporary fiction in English, and today, he is one of the most widely
commented-on living Australian authors.
The basic objective of the article is to study the
Kelly legend in Australia and scrutinize the presentation of the same in the
form of a fiction titled True History of
the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey, using the tools of historiographic
metafiction as pronounced eminently by Linda Hutcheon. The article looks into
the issues and complexities involved in the meeting of both history and fiction,
and thus, it would delve deep into the exploration of the crucial aspects of authenticity/inauthencity,
objectivity and the notion of absolute truth in history through the basic
understanding of the chosen text for study. In the paper, analytical method is
applied to study the text True History of
the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey from the points of historiographic metafiction
and postmodern approaches. In this context, the article takes into account the
theoretical aspects on both history and literature especially of Linda Hutcheon
in the postmodern era and then proceeds to penetrate the elements of
historiographic metafiction meticulously in the context of the Kelly legend in Australia
and the treatment of it in the novel. The secondary sources are comprised of
the books including edited ones, the articles and the essays taken from diverse
sources.
The debate around history evokes responses of many of
the theoreticians and thinkers in the postmodern era including Nietzsche. In
the book On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, Friedrich Nietzsche rejects
vehemently the individuality and particularity of history and potentially
argues for a critical theory that brings the past both to the bar of judgment
and remorseless critical investigation and scrutiny. The explanation of the
past, to Nietzsche, heavily or completely depends upon what is powerful in the
present. Thus, history and historiography are discourses which are largely
dependant on the textualization in the present. This comes near to the
theoretical formulations of Michel Foucault’s New History which creates the
version that history is not about the history of things; rather this is a
discourse of terms, categories and techniques which make certain things the
focus of a whole configuration of discussion and procedure at certain times. The
name of Hayden White also comes into fore in this context since he appears to
be another major voice who lays bare the ordering and sense giving principle of
historiography. To him, the historians of today are not facing the question
“what are the facts?”, rather they are facing the question and the challenge
how the facts are to be described in order to sanction one mode of explaining
the facts over the other.
The writings of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra in
the Postmodern era are marred with this skepticism and suspicion about the
writing of history where they significantly question the conventions of
narrative in history writing and the adaptability of the references, the
inscription of subjectivity, objectivity, identity and textuality, and
ideological implications. This skepticism dismantles either partly or fully the
empiricism and the epistemologies of positivism, and eventually establishes it
as a defining paradox of postmodern discourses. Both History and fiction are
filled with notoriety in terms of content, representation, and textuality, and
such notoriety and overlapping of both the genres has turned them into
unresolving and problematic discourses. Historiographic metafiction foregrounds
and undermines the authority and objectivity of historical sources and explanations
by posing a stance towards the point that till its creation by the historian,
the facts of history do not exist for any historian and therefore, the
historians represent the past by making selections of whatever they intend. It,
thus, foregrounds predominantly and obsessively the “very difference between
events (which have no meaning in themselves) and facts (which are given
meaning)” (Hutcheon, 122). While discussing historiographic metafiction, Linda
Hutcheon writes in A Poetics of
Postmodernism: History, Theory,
Fiction:
Historiographic
metafiction refutes the natural or common sense methods of distinguishing
between historical fact and fiction. It refuses the view that only history has
a truth claim, both by questioning the ground of that claim in historiography
and by asserting that both history and fiction are discourses, human
constructs, signifying systems, and both derive their major claim to truth from
that identity. (93)
Both the genres are human constructs because they textualise the past
only. The past, indeed, exists prior to its entextualisation into history or
fiction. Thus, historiographic metafiction reinstalls history in direct
opposition to absolute autonomy and neutrality.
Again Hutcheon says in A Poetics
of Postmodernism: History, Theory,
Fiction:
Historiographic
metafiction self-consciously reminds us that, while events did occur in the
real past, we name and constitute those events as historical facts, by
selection and narrative positioning. And, even more basically, we only know of
those past events through their discursive inscription, through their traces in
the past. (97)
Hence, it asserts that in the conventional narratives, the storyteller
can certainly silence, exclude and absent certain events and it is in this
context the aspects of objectivity and absolute knowledge comes under the
scanner. Similarly, the choices made while presenting historical events and
references in fiction are also definitely marred with lies and fabrications.
In short, historiographic metafiction is highly obsessed with the
aspects of the factiousness and mendaciousness of stories. Moreover, the
intertextuality of both the genres has made it possible the fictive meeting of
cultural and historical contexts at different levels and extents.
Peter `Carey is an Australian novelist in English who
has made use of narratives, stories, characterization and themes to retell and
recount certain events of the past centering round the land of down under. In
the 1988 book, Liars: Australian New
Novelists, Helen Daniel sees Carey as one of a number of Australian fiction
writers to stump readers with the Cretan Liar paradox, which precludes adequate
response to an admitted liar’s admission that he is, in fact or in truth, lying.
In another context, Daniel significantly comments that in all the works of
Carey, one can only find stories which are themselves fabricated and filled
with appeals to dislodge the crucial aspects of authenticity/inauthenticity. Discussing
about the stories circulated commonly regarding the land of Australia, Carolyn
Bliss writes in the essay “Lies and Silences: Cultural Masterplots and
Existential Authenticity in Peter Carey’s True
History of the Kelly Gang”:
…Australia as the
Lucky Country or the Workingman’s Paradise; Australia as a place ‘down under’
everybody else on the globe and so far away that its very remoteness exercises
what Geoffrey Blainley, in his famous 1966 book by the same name, called a
‘tyranny of distance’ over its inhabitants; the imperative of mateship in a
bush existence which somehow manages to be both superior to and infinitely more
grueling than the city life which more than three –fourths of the country
actually experiences; the hostile landscape; the Cultural Cringe of Australians
unsure of the relative worth of their own cultural products when compared to
those of their series of literal and cultural colonizers, the doomed heroism of
the Diggers… (Bliss, 278)
Apart from the prevalence of all such stories, it is also
an established fact that the Kelly Gang in Australia is a real historical
phenomenon of the 19th century and it played a crucial role in
shaping the future of the nation. This novel problematises the calling of this
small band of literal and figurative brothers as a ‘gang’ and thus questions
the very practice in history and also the constricting categories of judgment
and evaluation. Questioning the very categorization of a four man group as a
gang, Bliss pertinently writes in the essay “Lies and Silences: Cultural
Masterplots and Existential Authenticity in Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang”:
In fact, the gang was
made up of four young men-Kelly, his brother Dan, Joe Byrne, and Steve
Hart-whose fabled exploits begin with the shooting of the trooper Fitzpatrick
in 1878 (an incident in which at least two of the four were not even involved),
and continue through the Stringybark Creek killings of three policemen in
October of that year and the holdups of banks in December 1878 and February
1879. This last robbery was also the occasion for the composition of the famous
“Jerilderie Letter”, which formed the Jamesian germ of the novel and in which
Ned Kelly attempts a sort of vindication of what some saw as the gang’s
murderous rampage. The end of the gang came in June 1880, in the ferocious
firefight at Glenrowan with which Carey opens his novel, and the end came for
Ned, who barely survived the shootout, by hanging on November 11 of that year. Purportedly,
his last words on the gallows were “Such a life.” (Bliss, 290)
The story of the Kelly gang inspired and fascinated
the Australians from the beginning not just because this is a story of outrage,
but also because of the fact that it is a story of the end of bushranging era
in Australia. With the passage of time, the story has been revivified in various
forms and expanded its meaning beyond the outrage, and thus the story has
started representing multiple areas of interests including its status as “the
story of oppressed Irish convicts, emancipists, and currency lads cheated,
harassed, robbed, and generally abused by the Anglo power structure ; the
related story of small selectors hounded by the prosperous squattocracy; the
story of the bravery and superb bushmanship conveyed in the colloquial simile
“as game as Ned Kelly”; the story of unswerving mateship maintained in the face
of overwhelming odds; and the story of the charming larrikin whose misdeeds are
more mischief than malice” (290, Bliss). Thus, the Kelly legend in Australia
has an epic dimension, and according to the estimate of Andreas Gaile, more
than 1200 books have been written on Kelly and his part in the bushranging
phenomenon besides the presence of popular ballads, poems, and stories, as well
as the Sidney Nolan series of paintings and a spate of dramatic treatments in
plays, films, and television programmes.
In the novel True
History of the Kelly Gang, the protagonist Ned Kelly projects his own
version of the self; and this self-conscious charge in the process makes it a
postmodern novel having paradoxical meanings. While undertaking a daring task
of reinventing the Kelly legend in the novel, Carey brings into fore through
the mouth of Ned in the very first paragraph of the novel the context of
authenticity/inauthenticity, and compels readers to enter into a problematic
zone in finding out the truthfulness and the fakery in the story. Ned the
protagonist speaks in the very first paragraph of the novel:
I lost my own father
at 12 yr. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences my dear
daughter you are presently too young to understand a word I write but this
history is for you and will contain no single lie may I burn in Hell if I speak
false. (7)
The words “lies” and “silences” in this paragraph force the readers to
ponder over the predetermined patterns absorbed in history and the very
possibilities of omitting and adding crucial facts and events in the Kelly
legend and in the lives of the characters to suit the purpose in presenting it
in a first person narrative. Such a deliberate assertion in the novel in the
very beginning plunges readers into the world of truth, authenticity/inauthenticity
in history and historiography. The growth and self-discovery of the characters
in the novel especially Ned is built around choices and selections made out of the
Ned Kelly legend in Australia.
Moreover, historiographic metafiction problematizes
the verifiable facts of history and the veracity of fiction in their
conventional modes of narration. While scrutinizing, it makes it clear that
both history and fiction depend largely on conventions of narrative, language
and ideology in order to present an account of what really happened. Discussing
on the issues of verification of history and the veracity of fiction, Hutcheon
writes in A Poetics of Postmodernism
that “both history and fiction are cultural sign systems, ideological
constructions whose ideology includes their appearance of being autonomous and
self-contained” (112, Hutcheon). In other words, both these genres can be
considered as “textual constructs, narratives which are both non-originiary in
their reliance on past intertexts and unavoidably ideologically laden” (112,
Hutcheon). Besides, as espoused by Hutcheon, “the protagonists of historical
metafiction are types: they are the ex-centrics, the marzinalized, the
peripheral figures of fictional history-the Coalhouse Walkers (in Ragtime), the Saleem Sinais (in Midnight Children), the Fevvers (in Nights at the Circus)” (114, Hutcheon).
The title of the novel itself is a problematic and
questioning one since the title of the novel perturbs the readers with a double
conundrum. Book like The Oxford Companion
to Australian Literature contains no separate entry on the gang, and thus,
just treats on Kelly. Now the question comes into one’s mind why the novel is
drafted as the history of the gang and not of Ned Kellly himself, who in
popular consciousness is so fully equivalent to the group. The answer might be
that what Kelly wrote originally has gone editing many times and the text of
today which is on the hands of the onlookers has no sense of self apart from
the gang. He is Kelly because he is the leader of the group, and that‘s why, he
is so much prominent in the group. Thus, the verisimilitude of history in this
context ensures the readers entry into a problematic foray, and this is what a
historiographic metafiction like Carey’s True
History of the Kelly Gang offers to the readers regarding history and
fiction.
Historiographic metafiction problematizes and
questions the historical knowledge and epistemology, and the extent of objectivity
in both history writing and fiction by distinctly keeping the auto
representation and historical contexts of fiction. Hence it has two fronts of
detailing and looking into history and literature. On one hand, it investigates
the paradoxes of fictive/ historical representation, the particular/the general
and the past/present, and on the other hand, it simultaneously refuses to
recuperate or dissolve either side of the dichotomy. This peculiar stance of
historiographic metafiction makes it clear that it seeks to exploit both the
genres and their modes of writing. Again, the epithet “true” in the title of
the novel is itself contradictory and problematic. If the novel is based on a
legend who is so much important and famous in the history and popular culture
of Australia, then why is the necessity to the addition of words like “True
History” in the title and the very mention of such negative words as “lies”, “hell”
etc. in the beginning of the novel. This is definitely an area to be looked
into which Carey employs deliberately to attract the attention of the readers
towards the Kelly legend. The novel is a true history because through this true
history, Ned searches his own identity amidst many versions, and ironically, his
attempt to find the truth, the heart, the authenticity in his life and to
preserve it as the only inheritance he can offer to his daughter proved as a
futile one. The telling of the truth here is part of a salvation required for
recognizing an authentic self.
Historiographic metafiction also explores “the issues
surrounding the nature of identity and subjectivity; the question of reference
and representation; the intertextual nature of the past; and the ideological
implications of writing about history” (117, Hutcheon). It problematizes the
entire notion of subjectivity and finds that the subject is not confident of
his/her ability to know the past with any certainty. This questions the
inscription of subjectivity into history in an extensive manner. Since both
history and fiction share social, cultural and ideological contexts within the
structured, coherent and teleological narratives, therefore historiographic
metafiction questions the shared conventions of both and fiction and
problematizes the nature of historical knowledge. This questioning makes the
impression at certain point that history and literature have no definite
existence in actuality and this was also once advocated strongly a theoretician
named Jacques Ehrmann. It is in such contexts that some questions loom large:
do the writers of both fiction and history create their own future, culture,
socio-political stance and ideological implication upon their existence while
writing the vents of the past? Do they re-live and re-write the buried objects
of the past with this aim? These questions in literature and history need to be
studied in a serious manner and this is what historic metafiction does at every
level of understanding the texts based on events of the past.
The truth is seen in this novel through the eyes of
Ned. But the point is that his version is immediately problematized, not only
by the many departures from historical facts including the spectacular
invention of his lover Mary Hearn and their daughter, but also by the series of
narrative frames with which Carey surrounds and incarcerates Ned’s narrative. Besides,
the opening of the novel recounts part of the battle at Glenrowan in which all
the members of the gang except Kelly succumbed to death. This account in the
opening is attributed to an “undated, unsigned, handwritten account in the
collection of the (nonexistent) Melbourne Public Library (V. L. 10453) (4). The
context such an “undated” and “unsigned” narrative brings the readers into a
platform great perplexity regarding fakery, reliability and truthfulness of
events portrayed on the pages of the novel and the consequent inconclusiveness and
prejudices.
In another diversion in
the novel from historical facts, readers are introduced to pedantic and
strangely irrelevant notes of Thomas Curnow, who introduces each of the
thirteen “parcels” of documents that constitute the body of the text. Curnow’s
prefatory notes to the thirteen “parcels” concentrate largely on the physical
state of these documents which are themselves torn, stained, hurriedly written and
on papers often stolen and improvised. He presents all these as wholly genuine
in content and unadulterated. This is itself questionable and the reliability
of the presence of Curnow in accentuating the self-assertions of Ned in the
novel problematizes the very facts in history and the presents of those in
fictions. Besides, the mysterious presence of S. C. (Curnow’s son or grandson,
perhaps) who pens the third person narrative of “The Siege at Glenrowan” that
precedes the description of Ned’s hanging is also not convincing. S. C. once
speaks about the undated and unsigned manuscript of the Kelly narrative in the
novel:
The evidence provided
by the manuscript suggests that in the years after the Siege of Glenrowan he
continued to labour obsessively over the construction of the dead man’s
sentences, and it was he who made those small grey pencil marks with which the
original manuscript is decorated. (419)
All these signify that the story of Ned might have
been substantially edited to an indeterminable degree even before its presentation
and treatment by Carey in the novel.
The fictional presence of Ned’s daughter and the direct address of Ned to
his daughter decipher that Ned perhaps hopes for an exoneration of him in the
eyes of the daughter whom he has never seen in real life. This clear distortion
from historical facts might be because of the fact that Ned perhaps wishes to
write directly and boldly about his own character, and for Ned, that would be
possible only if he addresses everything to his daughter in a more comfortable
and less formal way along with the warmth of a filial relationship. In short,
by addressing the narrative to his daughter who is wholly fictional, Ned is
meant to convey and locate the meaning of his life and identity that he fervently
seeks throughout the novel. The novel carries lot more such instances of
distortions, modifications and editing of historical facts at a greater level. The
manuscripts on Ned Kelly are edited and amended by the character in the novel Ned
himself while some others are privately edited by Mary Hearn to reflect her
version of events. A further deferral of authority comes in Parcel 8, which is
introduced with a note from Curnow claiming that “pages describing the shooting
of Constable Fitzpatrick are much revised by a second hand reliably presumed to
be that of Joe Byrne” (230). Since all the parcels were handed over to Curnow
before his death, it is really hard to imagining how that rewriting could have
happened. This evokes a question on the authenticity of the documents and thus
place readers in a realm of great perplexity.
All these editings,
revisions and omissions suggest that there is no such thing as uninflected historical
accuracy as advocated and investigated by historiographic metafiction. Since different
characters including Mary, to whom Ned must be a knight errant, Curnow to whom
Ned is a dastardly villain, for some of the reporters to whom Ned is a savage
beast who must be brought to bay, for many of his compatriots to whom he is a
kind of hounded Robin Hood and so on present various versions of Ned in the
novel, therefore it is no wonder here that the “true” Ned Kelly must have struggled
to emerge out of the rubble. The novel also carries instances of persistent
refrains of unfairness which is reflected on Ned’s statement regarding his
mother’s imprisonment and its link to other historical injustices:
And here is the thing
about them they was Australians they knew full well the terror of the unyielding
law the historic memory of UNFAIRNESS were in their blood and a man might be a
bank clerk or an overseer he might never have been lagged for nothing but still
he knew in his heart what it were to be forced to wear the white hood in prison
he knew what it were to be lashed for looking a warder in the eye and (…) the
knowledge of unfairness were deep in his bone and marrow. (360)
The passage simply makes it clear that the knowledge of experience of
injustices is imagined as almost genetically transmitted of the afflicted. However,
Ned in the novel immediately adds that “I seen proof that if a man could tell
his true history to Australians he might be believed” (360).
All such statements in the mouth of Ned in the novel
problematize and question the very authenticity and fairness of history and thus
towards all aspects including the narratives. It may be said here that Carey
might have been aware of the various versions of the Kelly legend, and
therefore, in writing the story of Ned, Carey wishes to create the necessary
awareness among the readers that he is, indeed, writing the true one, and
ironically, this very claim and impression is itself paradoxical, contentious
and inconclusive. Thus Ned keeps his faith intact throughout the novel in the
power of his own narrative in the attempt to portrait truly the unfairness,
injustices, his actions, history and identity as well. In other words, it means
Ned’s endorsement in his belief in the potency of narrative.
In all these stories and statements, Ned is engaged in
a process of making the sense of himself and of his life. Such an engagement of
Ned in establishing his identity and justifying his actions through the first
person narrative brings into forth the core issues of reliability,
acceptability, fakery, authenticity and truthfulness of actions. Again, the
addition of two other narrative frames, one coming very early in the text and
the other near its close puts readers into a difficult zone for demarcating
inauthenticity from the real story. They are the stories of “A Certain Man” who
turns to be Ned’s father and of a tortured horse, a narrative which both
glosses and deconstructs Ned’s father’s practice of sometimes wearing a women’s
dress.
In the first story, Ned learns that his father was transported to Van
Diemen’s land as part of a plea bargain which saved him from the gallows. The
bnbame of Ned’s father was engrossed in controversies such as the murdering of
a landlord, slaughtering his wife and children and so on. Ned rightly reads the
episode as a shameful one, but interestingly Ned gives a different colour to it,
and in opposition to the stories listened by the listeners, Ned relives it and
projects him as the adult voice for the poor and the oppressed. The other story
is told by Mary Hearn, in part of a way of clearing up a mystery on the question
why the grown men viz. Sons of Sieve (Ned’s father and later be Steve Hart and
Ned’s brother Dan) sometimes ride around the country side dressed as women. There
are different versions of the same telling in which some term those as acts of
cowardice and self-serving while others call that as pointless terrorism and so
on and so forth. In the essay, “Dead White Male Heroes: True History of the Kelly Gang and Ned Kelly in Australian Fictions”,
Susan K. Martin writes in this context:
His sexuality has
likewise been identified as ambiguous, most notably in an argument in the late
1960s conducted between the linguist Sidney J. Baker and the artist Norman
Lindsay. Baker identified Kelly and his gang as homosexual because they wore
perfume, sometimes dressed as women, danced with men, and embraced. Lindsay
disputed this, arguing that his own father used perfume, and men danced with
each other in those days because sometimes were sometimes “not to be had” (303).
Discussing on the ambiguity
regarding the sexuality of the father of Ned and his wearing of women’s
dresses, another critic Ian Jones identifies him as a “sodomite”.
The novel is filled with lots of other instances where
Ned himself is suspicious of their veracity and one such story is the telling of
Harry Power, the bushranger, to young Ned, regarding the meeting the Devil on
the Melbourne road. Again, Ned’s defiant declaration to his gang is important
in which he says that “we would write our damned history from here on” (245). His
repeated assertion of the same invites readers’ attention and points that Ned
is highly self-conscious and wishes the true representation of everything as
the title suggests unlike the other representations in which narratives, as
suggested by Ned symbolically on various occasions, often belie and
misrepresent. Moreover, the novel makes many departures from historical
narratives which Carey allows deliberately and most spectacularly. The
invention of his lover Mary Hearn and their daughter and many other such
narratives within the ambit of the novel have poised the novel in a very
problematic domain for the readers.
Carey deliberately
makes use of less or no punctuation marks and grammatical errors in the
utterances of different characters including the protagonist Ned. Those are
strategies to tell the tale from the mouths of real like characters. Such an
attempt raises the pertinent question viz. did the other versions of the Kelly
legend, prior t Carey, could not satiate the readers’ minds and just remain
epitomes of story-telling without much reality and authenticity to believe? Interestingly,
it is amidst this question the importance of Ned’s first person narrative comes
to the light. Such intentional tactics in the narrative pattern bring the
earlier representations of the Kelly legend into question. However, the
distortions pointed above and the evidences of multiple editing of the Kelly
story paradoxically question how much reliable and authentic this version of
the true history of the Kelly legend in the form of fiction by Carey from the
point of Australian cultural heritage and the land of terra nullius. The passages quoted above on various accounts to
substantiate the arguments can themselves potentially reflect this deliberate,
yet problematic tactic adopted by Carey to bring the true version of the Kelly
legend in Australian for the readers. Hence, the questions of authenticity/inauthenticity,
reliability, factiousness, fakery and misrepresentation remain unsolved and
ambiguous, and interestingly, this is what historiographic metafiction
potentially and strongly foregrounds and argues.
Incorporating the complex issues of both history and
literature and investigating the same in a meticulous manner, historiographic
metafiction, thus, looks into the effects of provisionality and indeterminacy
in both history and fiction and subsequently opens up the possibility that the past
events can be altered depending upon the changing reality and the world as
evident from the reading of the novel True
History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey. All these alterations might be
the result of the context that history is more or less identical to fiction or
vice versa. The close reading of the Kelly legend in Australia and the
treatment of the same by Carey in the novel also makes it clear that the
aspects of authenticity, truthfulness, fakery, historical references, and
artistic originality in both history and literature have always remained problematic
issues filled with indeterminacy and inconclusiveness. In fact, the rewriting
and re-presenting the past in both fiction and history actually opens these to
the present and prevents these from being conclusive and teleological as
manifested from the historiographic metafictional reading of Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang.
Works Cited
Bliss, Carolyn. “Lies and Silences: Cultural Masterplots and Existential
Authenticity in
Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang”. Fabulating Beauty: Perspectives on the
Fiction of Peter Carey. Ed. Andreas Gaile. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. Print.
Carey, Peter. True History of the
Kelly Gang. Brisbane: The University of Queensland
Press, 2000. Print.
Carey, Peter. An Interview with Peter Carey. Chicago Review, Vol. 43, No. -2 (Spring,
1997), pp-76-89. Print.
Carey, Peter. The Voice of the Teller: A Conversation with Peter Carey. Antipodes, Vol.
16, No. 2 (December, 2002), pp-164-167. Print.
Clendinnen, Inga. Dancing with
Strangers: Europeans and Australians at First Contact.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Print.
Daniel, Helen. Liars: Australian
New Novelists. Victoria: Penguin, 1988. Print.
Goodwin, Ken. A History of
Australian Literature. Hampshire: Macmillan Education, 1988.
Print.
Goodwin, Ken, and Alan Lawson. The
Macmillan Anthology of Australian Literature.
South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1990. Print.
Gaile, Andreas, ed. Fabulating
Beauty: Perspectives on the Fiction of Peter Carey.
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. Print.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of
Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York:
Routledge, 2004. Print.
Katz, Adam. Postmodernism and the
Politics of “Culture”. Colorado: Westview Press,
2000. Print.
LaCapra, Dominick. History and
Reading: Tocqueville, Foucault, French Studies.
Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2000. Print.
Martin, Susan K. “Dead White Male Heroes: True History of the Kelly Gang and Ned
Kelly in Australian Fictions”. Fabulating Beauty: Perspectives on the Fiction of
Peter Carey. Ed. Andreas Gaile. Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2004. Print.
McHale, Brian. Postmodernist
Fiction. London: Routledge, 2004. Print.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Use
and Abuse of History for Life. Trans. Ian C. Johnston.
Nanaimo: Malaspina University-College, 1998. Print.
Pierce, Peter. ed. The Cambridge
History of Australian Literature. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2009. Print.
Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Peter
Carey: A Literary Companion. London: McFarland &
Company, 2009. Print.
West, Barabara A., and Frances T. Murphy. A Brief History of Australia. New York:
Facts on File, 2010. Print.
Webby, Elizabeth. ed. The
Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2000. Print.
White, Hayden. The Practical Past.
Illinois: Northwestern UP. 2014. Print.
Wilde, William H., Joy Hooton, and Barry Andrews, eds. The Oxford Companion to
Australian Literature.
Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1985. Print.
Woodcock, Bruce. Peter Carey:
Contemporary World Writers. Manchester: Manchester
UP, 2003. Print.