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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
In his novels and stories of the Australian frontier, Xavier Herbert distances himself from anthropologists whom he resents because they have professional licence to act as looters of the Dreamings. Yet, as 'artist', Herbert is unable to admit the extent to which his own story-forms are taken from Aboriginal productions. In those writings completed after Capricornia and before he finally turns to compose Poorfellow My Country, he keeps much of his borrowing secret and his deceptions lead both to a guilty preoccupation with looting as a theme and to the production of stories with missing middles. (Interventions of the Dreamings are left out of the printed versions.) While he acts as cultural broker, honest broking is impeded by Herbert's Romantic self-vision (portrait of the 'creative artist' as a young dog) and by the universalisation that denies cultural difference spuriously to assert the unity of human artistic experience in its stead. I show how Herbert's authorial practise makes him the very semblance of the anthropologist. He, likewise, is a looter of the Dreamings. - Author's abstract
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Intertexts of Capricornia
2012
single work
criticism
— Appears in: The Shadow of the Precursor 2012; (p. 62-73) 'This chapter explores some of the many illuminating literary as well as film intertexts of Xavier Herbert's "vast" 1938 novel Capricornia, looking backwards and forwards in time. It considers both "vertical and "horizontal" types of intertextuality. Thus, some relationships begin with reference to another literary text ("horizontal"), while others work across modes, from novel to film or vice versa ("vertical"). Locating the novel in terms of a global system of intertexts, the chapter offers a balance to readings that attempt to objectify and limit the novel's "reality," especially by narrowly nation-focused explanations. The effect is expansive, moving between conventional literary codes of meaning and into mythic, cartographic and astrological realms of apprehension. What emerges is a text just as impure as the novel's own social idealism - a creole text to embody the Creole Nation. (62)
-
Intertexts of Capricornia
2012
single work
criticism
— Appears in: The Shadow of the Precursor 2012; (p. 62-73) 'This chapter explores some of the many illuminating literary as well as film intertexts of Xavier Herbert's "vast" 1938 novel Capricornia, looking backwards and forwards in time. It considers both "vertical and "horizontal" types of intertextuality. Thus, some relationships begin with reference to another literary text ("horizontal"), while others work across modes, from novel to film or vice versa ("vertical"). Locating the novel in terms of a global system of intertexts, the chapter offers a balance to readings that attempt to objectify and limit the novel's "reality," especially by narrowly nation-focused explanations. The effect is expansive, moving between conventional literary codes of meaning and into mythic, cartographic and astrological realms of apprehension. What emerges is a text just as impure as the novel's own social idealism - a creole text to embody the Creole Nation. (62)
Last amended 29 Jun 2011 15:08:38
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