社会变迁与身份认同——《忆起了巴比伦》中杰米形象的文化解读

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Contents

中文摘要

ABSTRACT

I. Introduction ..........................................................................................1

II. The Significance of Gemmy Fairley’s Image ....................................... 5

III. Gemmy Fairley as a Mirror for Social Representation .........................8

3.1 Archetype of European Immigrants ...........................................................9

3.2 Societal Development amid Changes ...................................................... 10

3.3 The Author’s Reminiscence ..................................................................... 11

3.4 Different Attitudes toward Land .............................................................. 12

3.5 Discussion about Mateship ...................................................................... 14

3.6 The Aboriginal Legacy ............................................................................ 16

3.7 Alienation and Motif of the Edge ............................................................ 19

IV. Gemmy Fairley as a Bridge between Jerusalem and Babylon .......... 21

4.1 Physical and Mental Distance ..................................................................21

4.2 Gemmy’s Positive Roles ..........................................................................24

4.3 Gemmy’s In-between Position .................................................................26

4.4 Malouf’s Writing Style ............................................................................ 28

4.5 National Identity and Australian Values .................................................. 30

V. Conclusion .........................................................................................38

Bibliography ................................................................................................... 40

Acknowledgements ........................................................................................42

上海理工大学硕士学位论文

I. Introduction

Among a collection of great works by Australian authors, I chose David

Malouf’s Remembering Babylon as the target of research in my M.A. dissertation.

There are several reasons accounting for my decision. First of all, Malouf is a

well-known author the world over. He has won global recognition for his poetic

talents as well as for his ambitious novels.

Secondly, the story is intriguing. A picture is vividly presented by Malouf’s

lyrical depiction: British settlers, struggling to make a life for themselves in Australia,

meet up with a young man, Gemmy Fairley, who has been living with the Aborigines

for sixteen years. The settlers are not sure what to make of this strange person.

Obviously the scenario occurred during the early time of Australia, but I presume the

clashes between lifestyles can be lasting.

Thirdly, the place triggers my sweet memory. In this novel, Malouf typically uses

his native Queensland as the locale of an exotic story. I write this dissertation partly to

commemorate Ms. Harrington, one of my English teachers in senior high school, who

had come all the way to teach from Brisbane, the capital city of Queensland.

Last but equally important, I’m substantially interested in the theme of this novel.

The idea of being an exile, of having to struggle to mold a coherent identity, has been

a recurrent theme in Malouf’s works. And specifically in Remembering Babylon,

Malouf has assembled wondrous and frightening glimpses of what change can do to

and for the human spirit. He even extends his observation to the whole society.

My approach is to focus on Gemmy, the protagonist, dividing this dissertation

into five chapters: in Chapter Two I would briefly discuss the significance of Gemmy

Fairley’s image and try to answer the question: “What lessons has Gemmy learned?”.

In the next two chapters I would like to emphasize both representative and

communicative roles that Gemmy has played. Here, the word “communicative” is

rather important, which means though living under awkward circumstances, Gemmy

is by no means a mere passive receiver, he also casts influences on other people.

By such arrangement I would maintain that via years of struggle and integration,

today’s Australia has become a kaleidoscopic country which pays due attention to the

balance between preservation and advancement. The headways such society has made

well resemble a boy’s growing up. Australia nowadays has reached its maturity that

gets rid of the physical tie to its mother country (Britain) and takes great leaps onto

the global stage. Moreover, the set of Gemmy demonstrates the importance of

Social Transition and Identity Recognition--A Cultural Approach to Remembering Babylon

communication. It is through dialogue that ice is broken between any parties.

Frankly speaking, Remembering Babylon is a novel deserving and inviting

hundred times of reading, for each time I read through the pages, new ideas and

original perspectives may strike my head. In this sense, the book is an ideal company

for meditation and surely a gateway towards better appreciation of life. Profundity is

determined by the point of view. For a better analysis of this novel, I presume

sufficient knowledge in the field of Post-colonialism is duly required.

Post-colonial theory deals with the reading and writing of literature written in

previously or currently colonized countries, or literature written in colonizing

countries which deals with colonization or colonized peoples. It focuses particularly

on the way in which literature by the colonizing culture distorts the experience and

realities, and inscribes the inferiority, of the colonized people. It also concentrates on

literature by colonized people which attempts to articulate their identity and reclaim

their past in the face of that past's inevitable otherness.

It is built in large part around the concept of otherness. The term includes

doubleness, both identity and difference, so that every other, every different than and

excluded by is dialectically created and includes the values and meaning of the

colonizing culture even as it rejects its power to define.

The theory is also built around the concept of resistance, as subversion, or

opposition, or mimicry -- but with the haunting problem that resistance always

inscribes the resisted into the texture of the resisting: it is a two-edged sword. As well,

the concept of resistance carries with it or can carry with it ideas about human

freedom, liberty, identity, individuality, etc., which ideas may not have been held, or

held in the same way, in the colonized culture's view of humankind.

Being a branch of humanities, Post-colonialism, often termed as Postcolonial

Studies, denotes a collection of “theoretical and critical strategies used to examine the

culture (literary, politics, history) of former colonies of the European empires, and

their relation to the rest of the world.” “This suggests that dialogues between the

imperial culture and the complex of indigenous cultural practices existed as soon as

the imperial culture ‘found itself appropriated in projects of counter-colonial

resistance…to defy, erode and sometimes supplant the prodigious power of imperial

cultural knowledge.’” (Zhu 284)

To apply theory in this context, I would argue that though European (principally

British) culture takes predominant position in Australian society, it is by no means the

上海理工大学硕士学位论文

monopoly. The dialogues between Aboriginal culture and European practice are

conducted in a subtle way, slowly but steadily.

Hereby, I would refer to Fictions of (In)Betweenness, a doctorate dissertation by

Claudia Egerer from Göteborg University. The author seeks to show how both

fictional and theoretical texts engage in worrying the lines between conceptions of

home and exile, who analyzes the ways in which home and exile are problematized in

novels by Louise Erdrich, J. M. Coetzee, David Malouf, and brings them into contact

and collision with similar reconceptualizations in the writings of Edward Said,

Jacques Derrida, and Homi Bhabha. Egerer sees the texts discussed as participating in

the rethinking of such issues as centre/margin and self/other that we have come to

associate with theories of postmodernism and postcolonialism. These texts position

themselves as texts of (in)betweenness in that they are all engaged in “thinking the

between” of (binary) oppositions. The author argues that in their attempt to think

against and across categories, articulations of (in)betweenness in the texts discussed

cannot be fixed in either a postmodern or postcolonial space. Rather, (in)betweenness

is a mode of thinking that is dependent on what Egerer calls a postcolonial awareness.

Mae G. Henderson stresses the importance of boundary as an indicator of

position and identity, “Forever on the periphery of the possible, the border, the

boundary, and the frame are always at issue—and their location and status inevitably

raise the problematic of inside and outside and how to distinguish one from the other.”

(Egerer 11)

However, the term “boundary” itself is hard to define. According to Martin

Heidegger, “A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks

recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its essential

unfolding.” (Egerer 11) In that sense, the set of border implies varied awareness.

Homi K. Bhabha is a scholar we must pay attention and tribute to, who brilliantly

summarized on the complex issue of representation and meaning: “Culture as a

strategy of survival is both transnational and translational. It is transnational because

contemporary postcolonial discourses are rooted in specific histories of cultural

displacement, whether they are the middle passage of slaver and indenture, the voyage

out of the civilizing mission, the fraught accommodation of Third World migration to

the West after the Second World War, or the traffic of economic and political refugees

within and outside the Third World. Culture is translational because such spatial

histories of displacement -- now accompanied by the territorial ambitions of global

Social Transition and Identity Recognition--A Cultural Approach to Remembering Babylon

media technologies -- make the question of how culture signifies, or what is signified

by culture, a rather complex issue. It becomes crucial to distinguish between the

semblance and similitude of the symbols across diverse cultural experiences --

literature, art, music, ritual, life, death -- and the social specificity of each of these

productions of meaning as they circulate as signs within specific contextual locations

and social systems of value. The transnational dimension of cultural transformation --

migration, diaspora, displacement, relocation -- makes the process of cultural

translation a complex form of signification. the natural(ized), unifying discourse of

nation, peoples, or authentic folk tradition, those embedded myths of cultures

particularity, cannot be readily referenced. The great, though unsettling, advantage of

this position is that it makes you increasingly aware of the construction of culture and

the invention of tradition.” (Redrawing the Boundaries)

Homi Bhabha’s mode of postcolonial criticism deploys a specifically

poststructuralist repertoire (Foucault, Derrida, Lacanian, and Kleinian psychoanalysis)

for his explorations of colonial discourse. “His primary interest is in the ‘experience

of social marginality’ as it emerges in non-canonical cultural forms or is produced or

legitimized within canonical cultural forms. For Bhabha, the ‘rich text’ of the

civilizing mission is remarkably split, fissured and flawed. The project of

domesticating and civilizing indigenous populations is founded on ideas of repetition,

imitation and resemblance. The obligation on the part of the colonized to mirror back

an image of the colonizer produces neither identity nor difference, only a version of a

‘presence’ that the colonized subject can only assume ‘partially’.” (Selden 228)

Specifically, Bhabha’s theory more caters to this study. He claims it is the

mechanical mimicry of the colonized resembling the colonizer that possibly produces

a fence-riding situation, or rather, an in-between position.

“Bhabha’s discussion of ‘unhomeliness’ takes place against the background of

world and nation, world and self, public and private. Bhabha’s examples of

‘unhomely’ moments in literature are taken from a wide range of texts.” (Egerer 129)

In next chapter we will take a close look at Gemmy, incarnation of unhomeliness.

In "The Commitment to Theory", an essay collected in The Location of Culture

(1994), Homi K. Bhabha foregrounds the unfortunate and perhaps false opposition of

theory and politics that some critics have framed in order to question the elitism and

Eurocentrism of prevailing postcolonial debates.

What's ironic is that Bhabha himself, perhaps more than any other leading

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摘要：

Contents中文摘要ABSTRACTI.Introduction..........................................................................................1II.TheSignificanceofGemmyFairley’sImage.......................................5III.GemmyFairleyasaMirrorforSocialRepresentation.........................83.1ArchetypeofEuropean...

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