Literature at the frontier of our commonwealth

Abstract

Taking as its starting point the most recent, failed Australian referendum, this essay considers the efficacy of the Commonwealth of Nations — of the attendant ideological principles and values upon which the political association is based and to which its member states subscribe. Tracing the colonial histories and legacies of two current member states, Australia and South Africa — nations whose genesis in settler colonialism follow somewhat similar contours — the essay explores, in their canonical literature, the evolution of a kind of whitewashed nationalism that is not just racially exclusory but also registers, inversely, the anxieties of the self in relation to the “imagined community” (Anderson, 1983) endorsed in ideologies of nationhood. In a comparative, transnational reading of Patrick White’s Voss and J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands, this essay probes how this settler-colonial literary tradition simultaneously underwrites and complicates (continued) white imperialism and black un-belonging in ways that both suggest and test the conceptual prospects and limits of a universal, egalitarian “commonwealth”.

Our commonwealth: A shared inheritance and burden

The result of the most recent (2023) Australian referendum was not just disappointing; given the nation’s European settler colonial history and the failure of previous formal attempts at integrating the minority Indigenous population into the national Constitution, that majority Australians would, in the twenty-first century, vote overwhelmingly against the conferral of greater political and civil rights to First Nations — Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander — peoples was both predictable and telling. ¹ Formally established as a British penal colony in the eighteenth century, modern Australia was first recognized by a referendum in 1901 as a federation of colonies which cemented its allegiance to the British Empire and guaranteed its position as a member state in the (British) Commonwealth of Nations from the early twentieth century. So, while the 2023 referendum was rejected for varied and complex reasons by both minority, Indigenous and majority, white Australians, what has contributed to this impasse has been, as June Oscar, the Australian Human Rights Commission’s head of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice programme underscores, First Nation people’s historic “exclusion in the development of the nation state” (Zhuang, 2023).

Described as “the Voice” and initially proposed in 2017 as part of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, a document created by Indigenous leaders as part of reconciliatory efforts to foster the constitutional recognition in Parliament of First Nations people, the most recent referendum sought the provision of Indigenous perspectives in the form of non-binding advice to government on policy and legislative aspects of national significance in order to improve their quality of life. Entrenched, systemic socio-economic disadvantage is evidenced in statistics which show that, although the situation is more severe in remote rural communities, “life expectancy for Aboriginal people is eight years below the general population, while rates of suicide and incarceration are far higher than the national average” (Zhuang, 2023). But, with this evidence largely dismissed as racially pathological, the reluctance to afford an historically othered minority population a representative “voice” underwrites the somewhat mythical/mystical peripherality that characterizes their representation in the mainstream, white national imaginary. ²

Albeit downplayed by some conservative and liberal political commentators as primarily a symbolic gesture, the 2023 referendum asserts, as Anne Twomey explains, the priority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders,

to have their views heard in relation to the making of laws and policies that affect their lives. This ranks above the insertion of formal words of recognition in a preamble and the removal of discriminatory clauses from the Constitution. It is not historic recognition by written words that is sought, but active and ongoing recognition of indigenous voice, allowing them to be heard in the corridors of power. (McKay, 2017)

Quite apart from the formal practice of legislative redress, to afford the Indigenous population the opportunity to be heard presumes an inclusive national culture that does not just recognize the existence of First Nations peoples in relation to that of majority, white Australia but transforms this recognition into an agential, politically embodied act. Resistance, then, to recognizing “the voice” of First Nations people is a dismissal of the (polyvocal) diversity of Australia’s cultural heritage. Mirroring instead the historical composition of an association that continues to uphold, attitudinally and in practice, the hierarchized tenets of imperialism, the result of the 2023 Australian referendum can be read as a pointed refusal by majority (white) Australians to perceive of the “commonwealth” as a shared inheritance and burden that considers locally and materially the libertarian values and ideals upon which the Commonwealth was founded. ³

Interestingly, across the Indian Ocean, it was a prioritization of its national sovereignty that precisely informed the decision to hold a referendum in 1960 on whether the Union of South Africa, established in 1910, should leave the Commonwealth and become a republic. Restricted to white voters and consolidating white (Afrikaner) interests and power at the expense of the majority black population, the referendum, constituted in 1961, helped to entrench the formalized exercise of white racial segregation and supremacy enacted through the institution of Apartheid by the governing Afrikaner National Party in 1948. But where the exclusion of a majority black voice here underwrote “the brute, unmediated legislation of human inferiority” that characterized Apartheid (Crapanzano, 1986: 23), it also fuelled the growth of black political mobilization and militarization. Succeeded by various states of emergency in the 1980s as well as growing international censure and pressure, this necessitated another referendum on abolishing Apartheid in 1992 which again excluded black participation. While this referendum resulted in the establishment of a democratically elected black government — the African National Congress (ANC) — in 1994 which was followed by the reparatory and reconciliatory imperatives of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), socio-political interest and investment continued to favour and centralize the white minority population. ⁴ Despite heady claims of a non-racial “rainbow nation” premised on “unity in diversity”, the country’s socio-economic inequalities, which largely manifest along racial lines, have persistently worsened. In 2014, the findings of a South African Reconciliation Barometer Report by the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation revealed that “white South Africans indicate high levels of denial of past injustice, low levels of responsibility for past injustice, and low levels of support for redress” required by those who suffered from Apartheid’s implementation (Wale, 2014: 9). In Whites and Democracy in South Africa, Roger Southall pointedly questions the extent to which contemporary white South Africans are “genuinely willing participants in ‘non-racial democracy’”; to what extent, he asks, are they “willing to forgo the racial privileges of the past and to make the sacrifices which may be demanded of them?” (2022: 2). Evidently, and not unlike their Australian counterparts, white South Africans have shown little appetite for meaningful, substantive redress and reconciliation. This is evidenced in the settler-colonial literary tradition of both nations which, shaped by the ideological legacies and situated at the racial/cultural frontier of empire, provides apt means for testing the conceptual prospects and limits of a representatively inclusive and egalitarian “commonwealth”.

Literature and the critique of empire

In Inventing Australia, Richard White (1981: 65) notes that in nineteenth-century Australian ideology, the “new national type was given not only physical and racial characteristics, but also moral, social and psychological identity”. White’s analysis aligns with Bruce Bennett’s assessment of the development of Australian writing from 2001, at the Centenary of Federation of six Australian colonies into a nation. Noting the accompanying Immigration Restriction Act which encoded the “White Australia” policy, Bennett (2001: 2), who describes the 1901 Australian Federation as a “white invention, based on American national movements, modified for Australian conditions”, remarks that, historically, “Australian artists, writers and filmmakers have been primary shapers of a ‘deep’ Australian consciousness”. It is a consciousness whose transcendental and spiritual experience of and interconnectedness with the land represents a metaphysical “coming of age” — the awakening and formation of a normatively masculine and patriarchal, white national identity and subjectivity.

The pervasiveness of this kind of white Australian consciousness is both demonstrated and critiqued in 1973 Nobel Laureate Patrick White’s canonical modernist text, Voss. Published in 1957 and informed by the historical figure and records of Prussian explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, the novel is about an enigmatic German explorer whose exploits in the Australian outback — the colony of New South Wales — in the nineteenth century eventuate in delirium and death. As a foreign pioneer and representative of settler colonialism, the titular Voss’s encounter with the landscape is initially defined appropriately in terms of achievement and (self-) mastery: “I will cross the continent from one end to the other. I have every intention to know it with my heart” (1960: 33). Venturing further into the interior and converting spiritually into a kind of ontological dreamscape that is facilitated through the “‘deep’ consciousness” of supernatural visions, he is increasingly depicted as intimately connected to the vast, mystically impenetrable desert landscape. Adamantine “in the nature of a second monolith, of more friable stone, of nervous splinters, of dark mineral deposits, the purposes of which were not easily assessed”, the self-possessed Voss’s isolation and intellectual alienation necessitate “complete freedom […] His soul must experience, as by some spiritual droit de seigneur, the excruciating passage into the interior” (White, 1960: 136, 137). His own “pattern of self-imaging” mirrors historically an Australian nationalism that is “largely pre-occupied with this specific anxiety of inventing a cultural myth that would explain the intrinsic patterns of identity formations” (Bandopadhyay, 2009: 125).

Bolstered by the novel’s epic form and authoritative narrative voice, the protagonist of Voss is couched increasingly in religious symbolism in which his material existence is (variously) transfigured into a supernatural divinity whose mastery of terra nullius is underwritten by a largely unspeaking, muted Indigenous black population. In line with the stereotypical imaging of Aboriginal people as a mystical and jejune “race”, his encounter with his native guides is telling. Voss’s anthropological reading of the elder Dugald’s wrinkled, flaccid flesh viewed alongside the youthful Jackie’s largely naked delicate, effeminate skin (170) renders them a representative study in primordial black indigeneity. Performing here the “work of affective and social excavation” (Rooney, 2010: 15), the accent on their material bodily surfaces is not just a preoccupation with racial hue but indicates a deeper, ingrained prejudice. Voss’s epidermal focus unveils an almost objectifying purview characteristic of the settler-colonial narrative which sustains the supremacy of white identity and subjectivity. In this oppositional, white “gaze”, the skin of the Indigenous “[b]lackfeller” (190) comes to symbolize the “difference between inside and outside. It is a boundary that guarantees separation” (Ahmed 2000: 45) and reinforces distance between civilized and primitive, human and sub-human species.

This is reinforced in Voss’s description of the two blacks’ reactions to being gifted a token brass button from a military tunic. Moving between a wooden “thinking stick” and an animal life “giggling and gulping”, Dugald and Jackie become more mystery than fact, less human than creature (1960: 170–171). In a pervasively white episteme that renders them both unfathomable and unintelligible, they are situated at the border outside of the “cognitive ecology” of full human subjectivity (Morrison, 1997: 8). Segueing into anthropological bias, Voss’s essentializing white cartography of being finally rejects as incompatible and deficient its originary (existential) black coordinates. Sojourning into a brutal, indifferent landscape that affords him the opportunity to discover his infiniteness, he becomes constituted as that “ontological as well as an epistemological category of humanity” that affirms the “ordinariness of whiteness” (Russo, 2011: 12).

And yet, delineated as undergoing a “perpetual struggle, in becoming” (White, 1960: 271), Voss’s self-assuredness is tempered by a metaphysical probing that is aligned with and reflects Australia’s anxious sense of national evolution. Reflecting that Australian literature has “long imagined itself as a European project with the ambition above all to be recognised as European”, author Richard Flanagan (2023: n.p.) concludes in his essay for The Monthly that

[o]ur stories too often, our literature for too long, has frequently defined Australia through bizarre inversions, an invented and inexplicable violence, a negative image of inexplicable absences and losses. It has led to an alienating strangeness in our stories that feels somehow false. (2023: n.p.)

In foregrounding the phantasmic, metaphysical anxieties of the white colonizer against the backdrop of an interchangeably mythological and muted black, Indigenous body and landscape, the novel is suggestive of the falsity of those bizarre inversions that qualify the negative dualism of settler-colonial imagination. In his dealings with Dugald and Jackie, Voss intuits that he “would have liked to talk to these creatures. Alone, he and the blacks would have communicated with one another by skin and silence” (170). Figured also as a site of suture that does not just signal the prospect of racial solidarity/community, skin evokes a sensual spirituality or spiritual sensuality achieved in silence; it gestures at the possibility of an intimacy — a “commune” — that transcends race borders. But, as Voss cautions and the novel’s ambiguous conclusion intimates, such relations can only occur in an alternative spatio-temporality, in other, ideal conditions. Reverting to “an alienating strangeness” in which Voss is, at death, memorialized in the annals of history as a mythical, pioneering legend, Voss appears to recentre whiteness infinitely (169) and to finally uphold, even as it challenges, the racial/cultural mythologies upon which its eponymous protagonist and the nation depend.

To this extent, Voss exemplifies the ways is which Australian settler-colonial literature follows the contours of the South African plaasroman, a literary genre that, “in so far as it is generated by the concerns of people no longer European, yet not African”, can be delineated as “white writing” (Coetzee, 1998: 11). Derivative of the English farm novel and typically dealing with anxieties of place and belonging, the plaasroman invokes nostalgia for the rural idyll associated with South African, Afrikaner settler colonialism. In this fiction is the romantic appropriation of a harsh African landscape as a symbol of subjective progress and civilization where none presumably exists. In White Writing: On the Culture of Letters, J. M. Coetzee (1998: 6, 4) describes this pastoral genre as “essentially conservative” in its mythical elaboration of a “dream topography”, of the garden-farm “as bastion of trusted feudal values or cradle of a transindividual familial/tribal form of consciousness”. But despite its intimations at communitarian values and a communal sense of belonging, in so far as it is used to “buttress Afrikaner patriarchalism” and deliberately occludes the presence of the native inhabitants (Coetzee, 1998: 83), it is demonstrably a categorical “literature of failure”, a “failure of the historical imagination […] to imagine a peopled landscape” (Coetzee, 1998: 9).

This failure has haunted the white political South African imagination since the country’s inception as a settler colony marked by the arrival at the Cape of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in 1652. Successive skirmishes between Indigenous and (Dutch-descendant Boer and British) settler groupings reveal “an uneasy xenophobia” which indicate a displaced and unsettled “European” frontier mentality and evince the aesthetic and ideological “pressures at work” also within South Africa’s national literature (Gray 1997: 38). More so than in White’s text, these tensions are illustrated and confronted in the work of that other Nobel prize-winning canonical writer, J. M. Coetzee, whose own un/settled positionality is exhibited in a complex, enigmatic writing style which can be read as a metatextual “criticism-as-fiction or fiction-as-criticism” (Dovey, 1988: 2). ⁵

Published in 1974 and entitled Dusklands, Coetzee’s two-part debut novel teases, spatiotemporally, the transnational frontiers of colonial imperialism. Eugene Dawn’s mythographical narrative in Part 1, “The Vietnam Project”, reflects on the role and presence of the United States in Vietnam, while “The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee” in Part 2 recounts the expeditions of the titular elephant-hunting explorer into the (Western) Cape interior. In a postcolonial text utilizing a decidedly modernist, metafictional approach, Jacobus Coetzee’s eighteenth-century settler-colonial narrative in particular is presented as a parodic, self-reflexive reading of and commentary on South Africa’s violent founding narrative that anticipates the establishment of white (Afrikaner) nationalism. Reminiscent of Voss’s pioneering explorer, Jacobus Coetzee’s journey into the heart of Namaqualand is marked by a penetration and mastery of the land which, synonymous with mastery of the self, reinforces the self-assured omnipresence of whiteness. He muses:

I become a spherical reflecting eye moving through the wilderness and ingesting it. Destroyer of the wilderness, I move through the land cutting a devouring path from horizon to horizon. There is nothing from which my eye turns. I am all that I see […] What is there that is not me? (1998: 79)

Burdened by “Hottentots” who apparently see him as “their father” and “would have died without” him (64), Jacobus Coetzee’s treatment of them mirrors Voss’s in its phallocentrism and paternalism. ⁶ Adorned ironically in the language of hospitality, his altruism betrays a fundamentally arrogant concern with an equally “sufficient” self whose reductive perception of the native population as a species on par with his oxen (64) reinforces their serviceability and infantile dependency while affirming his white, patriarchal superiority.

Discursively reminiscent of but also exceeding the Hegelian master–slave dichotomy, Jacobus Coetzee’s racially hierarchical “I” morphs, as does Voss’s, into a deific figure whose perception of the black native is facilitated by an epistemological omniscience. Sceptical of the limited and superficial impact of civilization on the “Hottentot”, Jacobus Coetzee resorts to the discourse of naturalism to explain, as Voss does with his “blackfeller”, the innate and preferred boundary between a full(er) and a subhuman species. Privy to the accoutrements of civilization but not quite able to achieve them through a postcolonial parodic disruption and subversion of the colonial master narrative (Bhabha, 1984), the native “becomes a false creature […] Whereas a wild Hottentot, the kind of Hottentot that met us that day, one who has lived all his life in a state of nature, has his Hottentot integrity” (1998: 65). As with Voss’s reading of Dugald and Jackie, Jacobus Coetzee’s ethnological imperative segues, in a voice both admiring and condescending, into anthropological bias which precludes the native inhabitant from the (prospect of the) full achievement of civilization. Couched in the language of (self-)mastery and dominance — “I had not died, therefore I had won” (92) — his discursive imperialism is fuelled by a Cartesian dualism that allows him to declare his separateness from savagery — “I am among you but not of you (92) — despite his own savage, even sadistic, violence throughout the narrative. In the definition of white agential subjecthood against a kind of black passive animism is the realization of a “failed dialectic” (Watson, 1986: 382) that typifies, in J. M. Coetzee’s delineation and critique of “white writing”, the asymmetrical character of the settler colonial world and vision.

And yet, in a narratorial voice less searching than mocking and a personality more indicative of the intellectual and moral paucity of the colonial enterprise than Voss’s protagonist, the shift in Jacobus Coetzee’s authorial subjectivity from “the ascribed, filiative framework of colonialism and its attendant discourse” (Attwell, 1991: 7) registers a similarly intuitive and even more embodied disquiet with the underlying falsity of South Africa’s founding, settler-colonial narrative. This is illustrated in Dusklands’ descent into a consideration of the base materiality of being, notably highlighted in Jacobus Coetzee’s examination of his carbuncle. Assaulted by the “Hottentots” who physically revolt against his domineering presence, and musing on his vulnerable, putrefying body-in-pain, he reflects:

They had violated my privacy, all my privacies, from the privacy of my property to the privacy of my body. They had introduced poison into me. Yet could I be sure I had been poisoned? Had I not perhaps been sickening for a long time […?] (1998: 97)

Trying to make sense of the mutiny and coming to terms with his own complicity and embeddedness in a savage colonial system, Jacobus Coetzee, wrestling with his conscience, enters the realm of enquiring self-consciousness. His omniscient and omnipresent eye/I is called into question, so that the asymmetrical, “failed dialectic” of the settler colonial arrangement makes way to a more democratizing dialogic; what J. M. Coetzee elsewhere delineates as an “awakening [of] the countervoices in oneself and embarking upon speech with them” (1992: 65). Registering a white alterity that is facilitated by defamiliarizing encounters with black alterity, Jacobus Coetzee’s exploration of the inhospitable and indifferent interior also necessitates an “exploration of the Hottentots, trying to find a place for them in [his] history” (1998: 97). Physically displaced and subjectively decentred, his relationship with the native population is, quite differently to Voss’s relationships, which are characterized more by mysticism and distance, premised on material entanglement. Albeit imagined as interpellated into “his” history, the native presence is both heard and felt, challenging Jacobus Coetzee’s self-imposition. His “deep” consciousness of the white self is thus enabled by an inexorably experiential consciousness of the black other which registers their universal alterity and destabilizes a normative narrative of settler colonialism. Just as it signals for the native inhabitants of Namaqualand a “necessary loss of innocence” (1998: 110), Jacobus Coetzee’s experience of settler colonialism reduces him to the recognition that, as a representative of this violent enterprise, he too is simply “a tool in the hand of history” (1988: 106).

* * *

In a transnational discussion of the political failures of two of its current member states, Australia and South Africa, this essay has looked to their settler-colonial literary traditions as a means of evaluating the conceptual efficacy of the founding principles of the Commonwealth of Nations. Shaped by the ideological legacies of imperialism and situated at the frontier of empire, Patrick White’s Voss and J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands provide comparatively apt examples for assessing the conceptual prospects and limits of a representatively inclusive and egalitarian “commonwealth”. Demarcating the frontiers of these nation states characterized by white imperialism and black un/belonging, both texts unveil an uneasy relationship between the prejudicial ideologies and practices that inform settler colonialism and influence modern nationhood and nationalism. Rendered illusory, and finally impossible in Voss, and premised on a brute, interdependent existentialism in Dusklands, the commonwealth illustrated in these texts is challenged for its limited, hierarchical, and exclusive purview. In line with this journal’s renewed outlook, both texts are united in showcasing and probing the ways in which the pervasive influence and permutations of colonial imperialism and empire delimit the commonwealth’s full potential.