Universitt zu Kln Englisches Seminar HS Recent Developments in Australian Literature WS 2011/2012 Dozent: Prof. Dr.

Heinz Antor Referent: Martina Matuschik

23.01.2012

Andrew McGahan's The White Earth (2004) / Bill Ashcroft: "The Horizonal Sublime"
Australia as a secular society Early convicts (mostly Irish) were religious, but the (free) English settlers claimed religion for themselves Based on the myth of the 'Australian national type': horse-riding, harsh, unintellectual, unspiritual. Designed to oppose the colonial; "to 'other' the colonial as culturally inferior" (Ashcroft, p. 141) Spirituality and the idea of the sacred took a different shape in the Australian imagination, mainly through literary traditions To the early settlers, the Australian nature, vegetation and landscape appeared strange, incomprehensible, awesome, but also threatening - the 'language of the sublime' offers the vocabulary necessary to describe this encounter. The 'Sublime'

An antique idea brought forward by philosopher Longinus and reformulated in the 18th century by
Joseph Addison ('The Spectator'), Edmond Burke ('A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful'), Immanuel Kant ('Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime') Kant subdivided the sublime into three kinds: The terrifying sublime is sometimes accompanied by melancholia or a feeling of dread. The feeling of the noble sublime is quiet wonder. The splendid sublime feeling is combined with beauty Burke, as opposed to Kant, puts emphasis on the subject's realization of his physical limitations rather than any supposed sense of moral or spiritual transcendence The sublime is a concept derived from colonial landscape painting; mostly mountains and gorges, views that involved height. The mostly flat, horizontal lanscape of the Australian continent does not correspond to this European Romantic idea. Connection between the 'Sacred' and the 'Sublime' There are two major features of the Sacred-Sublime: It is unrepresentable and it is closely connected to the notion of offering/sacrifice The sacred is unrepresentable: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing hat is in heaven or on earth, of unter the earth etc." (Critique of Judgement, cited in LacoueLabarthe Part 1.6) "...the sublime offering is the unpresentable presentation of presentation, which takes place without taking (a) place...sublime excess astonishes by tracing the edge of all form where no-thing appears." (Taylor: 607-8) The Australian landscape offers a "plentitude of space", but this in itself causes an uncanny feeling, a 'not-at-home-ness', and the horizon is the border to the unrepresentable. 'too much place' effects a feeling of displacement; the vast land promised freedom but at the same time posed a potential threat, both a liberating and terrifying experience

Universitt zu Kln Englisches Seminar HS Recent Developments in Australian Literature WS 2011/2012 Dozent: Prof. Dr. Heinz Antor Referent: Martina Matuschik

23.01.2012

The 'Sacred' and Aboriginality Aboriginal society has, in Australian culture and art, become the only personified link to the 'sacred sublime'. This is a Romantization and Commodification of Aboriginality, which is at the same time clearly distinguished from and opposed to (or 'othered' by) secular white Australian society. Aboriginal experience of the land is different from that of white Australian settlers: it is not panoramic, but embodied; not representational but metonymic. The way we perceive the land is due to inherited ways of seeing The White Earth Two moments in the novel are connected with the sublime:

The dream of the burning man (recurring motif, from Williams father to the vision which turns out to be a prophetic vision of John McIvor's death in the fire, burning in his own house while trying to burn evidence of the massacre (p. 367) This is a scene of pure gothic, inbetween the sublime and the terrible The encounter with the spirit of an Aboriginal sacred site William experiences the spirit of the place, and it is Aboriginal (a bunyip) (p. 315 ff.)

Ashcroft, Bill: "The Horizonal Sublime". Antipodes 19:2 (December 2005), pp. 141-151. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe: "Sublime Truth". Trans David Kuchta. Part 1, Clutural Critique 18 (1991): 5-31; Part 2, Cultural Critique 20 (1991-1992): 207-29. McGahan, Andrew: "The White Earth". Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2004. Taylor, Mark C.: "Denegating God". Critical Inquiry 20.4 (1994): 592-610.