"Contestations of Authority: Richard Flanagan's Australian Biofictions"

• Main Author: Delrez, Marc
• Other Authors: CEREP - Centre d'Enseignement et de Recherche en Études Postcoloniales - ULiège
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Sydney University Press 2018
• Subjects: Richard Flanagan; Biofiction; Australian literature; Arts & humanities; Literature; Arts & sciences humaines; Littérature; Northwest passage
• Online Access: https://orbi.uliege.be/handle/2268/245131

peer reviewed In view of the often unapologetically political orientation of the genre of "biofiction," which frequently flouts historical facts in order to gesture towards a ‘more substantive truth’ (Lackey 2017: 10) inseparable from a possibly anachronistic, contemporary perspective on the past, it was perhaps inevitable that, in Australia, the mode of biographical fiction would become embroiled in the discursive turmoil of the History Wars. On thinks of the controversy surrounding the publication in 2005 of Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, in which the novelist investigates the biography of her own great-great-great grandfather Solomon Wiseman as an attempt to re-create a sense of the socioeconomic and psycho-political conditions which informed, and facilitated, frontier violence at the time of the British settlement of Australia. This led to vigorous interventions by a number of academic historians, prominent among them Mark McKenna and Inga Clendinnen, who insisted that an epistemological ‘ravine’ really separates the novelist from the historian as the latter bears a responsibility to fact making anathema any manipulation of the archive around biased present-day preoccupations or political sensibilities. Arguably the value of the heated public debates about these questions lies above all in what they reveal about the contested, slippery quality of Australia’s national past(s). This is the fraught context in which an established novelist such as Richard Flanagan, too, chose to espouse the genre of ‘biofiction’. After Gould’s Book of Fish (2001), which had already invented an alternative, imaginative life for the Van Diemonian convict and naturalist painter James Buelow Gould, Wanting (2008) revolves around the role played in Van Diemen’s Land by the celebrated explorer and Governor of the island, Sir John Franklin, and by his wife Lady Jane who, after her husband’s disappearance in the course of his quest for the fabled Northwest Passage, will turn for help towards Charles Dickens. Finally, The Narrow ...