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Overview
Australia is the planet’s sole island continent. This book argues that the uniqueness of this geography has shaped Australian history and culture, including its literature. Further, it shows how the fluctuating definition of the island continent throws new light on the relationship between islands and continents in the mapping of modernity. The book links the historical and geographical conditions of islands with their potent role in the imaginaries of European colonisation. It prises apart the tangled web of geography, fantasy, desire and writing that has framed the Western understanding of islands, both their real and material conditions and their symbolic power, from antiquity into globalised modernity. The book also traces how this spatial imaginary has shaped the modern 'man' who is imagined as being the island's mirror. The inter-relationship of the island fantasy, colonial expansion, and the literary construction of place and history, created a new 'man': the dislocated and alienated subject of post-colonial modernity.
This book looks at the contradictory images of islands, from the allure of the desert island as a paradise where the world can be made anew to their roles as prisons, as these ideas are made concrete at moments of British colonialism. It also considers alternatives to viewing islands as objects of possession in the archipelagic visions of island theorists and writers.
It compares the European understandings of the first and last of the new worlds, the Caribbean archipelago and the Australian island continent, to calibrate the different ways these disparate geographies unifed and fractured the concept of the planetary globe. In particular it examines the role of the island in this process, specifically its capacity to figure a 'graspable globe' in the mind.
The book draws on the colonial archive and ranges across Australian literature from the first novel written and published in Australia (by a convict on the island of Tasmania) to both the ancient dreaming and the burgeoning literature of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in the twenty-first century. It discusses Australian literature in an international context, drawing on the long traditions of literary islands across a range of cultures. The book's approach is theoretical and engages with contemporary philosophy, which uses the island and the archipleago as a key metaphor. It is also historicist and includes considerable original historical research.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783085361 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Anthem Press |
| Publication date: | 07/09/2016 |
| Series: | Anthem Studies in Australian Literature and Culture |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 312 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Elizabeth McMahon is Associate Professor in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales.
Read an Excerpt
Islands, Identity and the Literary Imagination
By Elizabeth McMahon
Wimbledon Publishing Company
Copyright © 2016 Elizabeth McMahonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78308-536-1
CHAPTER 1
WHAT'S IN A METAPHOR: 'NO MAN IS AN ISLAND'
One thing is clear, the island, if it is to give us the satisfaction we want, must be small enough for us to grasp as a whole.
Nettie Palmer, Green Island Diary (28 April 1932) (Jordan 2010, 150)
John Donne's famous pronouncement 'No man is an island' has proven to be a key coordinate in the map of modernity, particularly regarding the relationship between geography and identity. Donne's claim, first made in 1623, is poised on the brink of a new cartography of islands and continents taking form in his time and continuing to unfold into ours. As Donne's statement suggests, islands have a particular role in this map as both literal and imaginary locations: they were perceived as ideal colonies for primary production, especially given the difficulty of overland transportation until the nineteenth century, and as ideal prisons, as with Norfolk Island, Van Diemen's Land and Palm Island. Inseparable from these historical events is the powerful charge of the island in the Western imagination. As Yi-Fu Tuan has famously observed: 'The island seems to have a tenacious hold on the human [...] But it is in the imagination of the Western world that the island has taken strongest hold' (1998, 118). Gilles Deleuze's meditation on islands also identifies the lure of the island for the human imagination and its specific hold on the modern Western psyche, which resides in the island's capacity to represent the (illusory) possibility of a perfect harmony between man and space, where ego and geography appear to be perfectly aligned (2004, 10–11).
The ensuing discussion seeks to unravel the compacted set of meanings that attach to the man–island metaphor to show how and why this relationship assumed significance in the modern period and identify some of its implications in both history and representation. The chapter will investigate a range of ways the map of colonial modernity maps the modern man who is its proper and preferred subject. It argues that the island offers a figure of re-creation or rebirth which aligns with modern conceptions of identity formation – and the self-made colonial in particular. Through a study of both literature and history, I will show multiple ways this man-island takes shape according to racialized, gendered and literary formulations.
Early Modern to Late Modern: Donne's Warning against Insularity
Two directives from Donne's Meditation XVII in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1623) became part of popular parlance in the twentieth century, though they are not always linked. One is the memento mori, 'never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee', popularized by Ernest Hemingway's novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), much of which he wrote on the island of Cuba. The other, 'No man is an island', stands as a defining axiom of identity for Western modernity in its paradoxical capacity to refuse yet define the fantasy of self-origination and autonomy (Donne 1967, 100–101). The resonance of this man-island metaphor ranges across both its meaningful and ironic connotations. For while Donne cautions against this act of misrecognition – of mistaking oneself for an island – the metaphor of man and island nonetheless stands. The negative image shadows the statement. In her consideration of Donne's metaphor, Gillian Beer directs us to the psychic operations of language, specifically to Freud's claim that the unconscious mind knows no negative but can only structure desires in the affirmative: I want, I hate, I am. Accordingly, the reader's unconscious erases the negative cast of the metaphor, ironically affirming that man is indeed an island at the same time as their conscious mind registers that he is not (Beer 1997, 43). In this interrelation, the reader experiences both the positive impulse and the prescription against it. Furthermore, and as is conventional of metaphor, the two associated terms, man and island, flicker between their reference to material reality and their figurative nationality, crisscrossing to produce numerous permutations of the real and imaginary subject of man and the real and imaginary object of the island. Lisa Gorton identifies a further and profound contradiction in Donne's use of space, which, she argues, simultaneously presents 'old and new ways of imagining the cosmos' so that man and space are located within both cosmographic and cartographic systems of ways of imagining the world, as incompatible as these may be (1998, 1).
The contradictory valence of Donne's metaphor – its paradoxical interrelation of presence and absence, the material and the notional, cosmography and cartography – charts the lineaments of an anthropomorphized map that sutures man and geography in modernity. It identifies the man of Donne's statement to be a gendered melancholic subject in the process of internalizing the loss of a passing sense of connectedness with the continental main, while looking forward to an imagined future autonomy as an island, anticipating both its freedom and its alienation. The internalization of loss and the projection of autonomy find a figure in island insularity, as this is variously understood: sanctuary, containment, separateness, incarceration, autonomy, solipsism. As we will see, the island is both the site and the means by which this new modern self is mapped at a defining moment of its constitution. This modern self is an overdetermined figure of melancholy, for the island will always disappoint the subject's desire for self-containment, for a perfect alignment of subject and object, of the human subject and space. Ultimately, as Deleuze has famously observed, the Western island imaginary seeks unity with the élan of the island's desertedness but is necessarily rejected by the island, which retains its perfection in separation (2004, 2, 10–11).
The mapping of this island-man in this discussion will first turn to Donne's subject, man, and then locate him in and through the associated term island. This approach is informed by the spatial turn in the humanities, now sometimes termed the geohumanities, by which real and imaginary geographies become a vital category of analysis, and are as contested and synthetic as the fields of history and society are now widely understood, rather than background setting or context. Related in part to this geographical focus, this study is also motivated by the new interdisciplinary field of Island Studies, which analyses the materiality, experience and representation of small islands, including their changing status in the history of European imperialism and in the newly globalized economies and geographies of the present. Studies by non-European islanders show a range of vastly different perceptions concerning space and inhabitation, highlighting, inter alia, the very particular, circumscribed spatiality of the island in the Western imaginary. These ideas will be canvassed for their challenges to Western thought, as original formulations of intrinsic value, and for the ways they overlay the globalized map with alternative relations, scales and dynamics.
Tom Conley claims, no doubt correctly, that '[t]he geographic imagination of early modern writing is marked by the wonder and enigma of the Columbian discoveries' (2007, 402). Donne's pronouncement about man and islands, uttered into the echo of the tolling bell of shared mortality, is so marked. Yet while Donne's metaphor reads as definitive of the modern condition, Beer has noted the long silence between the initial publication of Meditation XVII in 1624 and the twentieth century, when it was popularized by Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and when the two cautionary directives quickly became commonplaces (Beer 1997, 47). The 'rediscovery' of Donne by T. S. Eliot and the Modernists, and the publication of For Whom the Bell Tolls very specifically, ensured the currency of his work throughout the twentieth century and into ours, and has brought what John Gillis terms the two 'great eras of globalization', the Age of Discovery and our own, into a relation of ongoing becoming (2004, 38). Accordingly, consideration of Donne's man-island requires a stereoscopic lens that moves between early modern and late modern contexts to consider the timeliness of Donne's spatial vision at these two historical moments. This comparison picks up from the suggestive insights of Beer's conclusion regarding the clichéd operations of 'No man is an island' from the twentieth century. Beer writes that cliché is a way of 'neutralising dreads and yearnings held within a community' and covers over matters that 'won't bear too analytical a scrutiny' (1997, 47). However, when these 'underground communal experiences cannot be contained or become the property of a different group, cliché retains the capacity to awaken as insight, perhaps as warning: No man is an island' (Beer 1997, 47). The task of unpacking what has become the cliché of 'No man is an island' is, then, a process of uncovering those matters that resist or deny analysis and how its redeployment from the mid-twentieth century has reawakened insight. Ultimately, this analysis addresses the possible warning issued by Donne's 'Devotion' to the mid-twentieth century as it re-emerges from the midst of two world wars.
The investigation also proceeds on the understanding that such an inquiry is invited by Donne's text itself, though its use of imperatives appears to forestall argument. The instruction 'do not send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee' is a commandment along Old Testament lines. However, the unequivocal injunction of the commandment can also be read as an invitation to speculation and debate rather than its refusal. Following Walter Benjamin's account of divine commandments in his 'Critique of Violence' and the subsequent engagements with this work by numerous influential thinkers (1978, 277–300), the discussion here will read Donne's proscriptive imperative as an opening rather than a closure. For Benjamin, the divine commandment of the Bible, as distinct from the mythical law of Greek antiquity, cannot be used as a mode of judgement in instances of its transgression. He writes:
The commandment exists not as a criterion of judgment, but as a guideline for the action of people and communities, who have to wrestle with it in solitude, and, in exceptional cases, to take on themselves the responsibility for ignoring it. (Benjamin 1978, 298)
For Benjamin the divine commandment – that is, for instance, Thou shalt not kill – precedes lived experience yet holds within itself the implication that transgressions will occur in that domain. He writes: 'The commandment precedes the deed just as God was preventing the deed' but 'the injunction becomes inapplicable, incommensurable once the deed is done' (Benjamin 1978, 298). In Benjamin's formulation, the temporalities of precedence and the present correspond with the domains of injunction and experience.
Donne's two statements also precede their (inevitable) transgression and indeed hold those transgressions within themselves, at the very level of figure and syntax, for, as indicated previously, the axiomatic wisdom is shadowed by empirical knowledge. In terms of historical precedence, we can also see how Donne's claim about the nature of man, yoked to an injunction regarding shared mortality, has played out in Western modernity in multiple ways since the time of its utterance in 1623. Accordingly, the interrogation of the operations and effects of Donne's metaphor 'No man is an island', undertaken here, views this claim to natural law and the attendant commandment not to heed the ringing bell of shared mortality as 'guideline[s]' we continue to 'wrestle with', not only in solitude but also with a new self-consciousness on the condition of solitude itself created by the contemplation of the man-island.
The Piece of Work That Is Man
In a seminar on Robinson Crusoe, Jacques Derrida asked repeatedly: 'What is an island?' (2009, 3). We will come to that too, but heeding Derrida's attention to the basic terms of an inquiry we will begin with the subject of Donne's metaphor to ask 'What is ("No) man?"' For this (No) man is not universal, though he appears to be so by dint of his centrality in a statement of natural law and embedded in the certainty of its syntax and cadence. Rather, (No) man is culturally specific. Early modern writers furnish us with many definitions and doubts, including Hamlet's exclamation, 'What a piece of work is man' (Shakespeare ca.1600, 2.2.303) and George Herbert's poem 'Man' (1633) in which it is declared that 'Man is ev'rything' (2007, 332–33). As Leonard Barkan sets out in his detailed study on the topic of early modern man, man and the human body in particular are little worlds, microcosms and models of symmetry (1975, 1–2). In a similar vein, Andrew Gordon and Bernard Klein attest to the way that in 'cosmographical thought the world has always been imagined in terms of the human body, and the conceptual identity between cartographers and anatomists is one of the founding tropes of mapping' (2001, 7). This understanding of man as located and dislocated between cosmographical and cartographical understandings of the world is augmented by contemporary theories of space and subjectivity of the late modern era to which Donne's metaphor clearly resonates (see Figure 1.1).
First and foremost, Donne's man needs to be understood as a gendered term rather than designating the putatively inclusive understanding of man as humanity. Especially in its association with an island, (No) man is gender exclusive, for the identification of the self with an island is a fantasy and condition of the masculine subject. From Prospero and Donne to Robinson Crusoe and the industry of Robinsonades that ensued, there are very few texts, if any, in which women align their subjectivity with an island. There are a small number of projections of female characters by male authors, such as J. M. Coetzee's postcolonial Robinsonade Foe (1986), and there are feminist utopias, that operate quite differently. In their respective discussions of the female Robinsonade The Female American (1767), by the pseudonymous Unca Eliza Whitfield, both Hans Turley and Michelle Burnham point to key differences between this novel and its predecessor by Defoe, including, most significantly the fact that the female castaway is not alone: a hermit has preceded her to the island, there is a community of indigenous inhabitants and the novel ends in marriage (Turley 2004; Burnham 2001). Jeannine Blackwell's study 'An Island of Her Own: Heroines of the German Robinsonades from 1720 to 1800' sets out similar distinctions along gender lines and points to the profound difference in the notion of self-generation in these texts according to the hierarchy of gender (1985). Derrida, too, stresses the gender specificity of the Crusoe figure:
[T]his man is a man, a human and a male human (not woman) let's never forget it; nothing equivalent or similar or analogous was ever to my knowledge (and I may be wrong) written about a woman alone: an island in an island. (2009, 2)
Despite numerous similarities in narrative structure and colonizing imperatives, woman is not 'an island in an island'. Unlike the masculine subject she is not aligned or commensurate with the island.
In his fable Tale of the Unknown Island (1997, 1999), 1998 Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago stages the gendered nature of the island aspiration as a dialogue between the main male and female characters. The pair has recently united in a plan to sail to the Unknown Island, or, more precisely, the woman has realized there are possibilities in attaching herself to the plan, which is of the man's conception. His is the first statement in the following dialogue where the first three commas indicate a change of speaker:
I want to find out who I am when I'm there on that island, Don't you know, If you don't step outside yourself, you'll never know who you are, The King's philosopher, when he had nothing to do, would come and sit beside me and watch me darning the pages' socks, and sometimes he would say that each man is an island, but since that had nothing to do with me, being a woman, I paid no attention to him. (Saramago 1999, 32)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Islands, Identity and the Literary Imagination by Elizabeth McMahon. Copyright © 2016 Elizabeth McMahon. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations, vii,Acknowledgements, ix,
Section 1. Islands Real and Imaginary,
Introduction, 3,
Chapter 1. What's in a Metaphor: 'No Man Is an Island', 19,
Section 2. Islands: Making the Planet, World, Globe,
Chapter 2. The First and Last of New Worlds: The Caribbean and Australia, 47,
Chapter 3. Insular and Continental Interiors: The Shifting Map of Literary Universalism after the War, 87,
Section 3. Dreams and Nightmares,
Chapter 4. Accidents of Empire: Shipwrecks and Castaways, 133,
Chapter 5. The Best and Worst of Times: Utopias, Dystopias, Archipelagos, 177,
Appendix. Colonial Ties between the West Indies and Australia, 205,
Notes, 253,
Works Cited, 261,
Index, 289,
What People are Saying About This
‘In this magisterial work are the stories and imaginaries, along with their gripping critical analyses, that prove how “utterly compelling, beautiful and devastating” island experiences are.’ —Godfrey Baldacchino, Pro-Rector, University of Malta and President, International Small Islands Studies Association.
‘This elegant and inspiring book transforms our understanding of Australian literature in light of the shifting cartographies of global modernity.’ —Robert Dixon, Professor of Australian Literature, University of Sydney.
"This is a ravishing book, exciting, enervating, from one of the leading voices in Australian criticism. Attractive and accessible in its language, it revels in the intellectual demands occasioned by deep awareness of the island continent, and provides access for our own revelations about the interplay of topography, lived experience, and the imagination. [It] beautifully illustrates the exceptionalism of Australia as a space. —Dr. Ian Henderson, King’s College London