“Shakespeare was wrong”: counter-discursive intertextuality in Gail Jones’s Sorry

In what is presented as a moment of truth in Gail Jones’s novel Sorry, the narrator’s brief statement that “Shakespeare was wrong” appears to call into question the English dramatist’s literary and epistemological supremacy. Starting from this unsettling premise, this article seeks to define Jones’s counter-discursive use of Shakespearean intertextuality. While it has, for decades, proved a risky task for both historians and novelists to write about the delicate issue of silence in Australia without risking the appropriation of an Aboriginal voice, the article examines how Jones exploits defamiliarizing techniques in order to undermine the dominant European discourse (as encoded in the Shakespearean text) without assuming an Aboriginal perspective. Her aim is to facilitate the emergence of an incipient, tentatively-defined counter-discourse sufficiently attuned to the specific realities of Australia. The article argues that by adopting an Australian cultural perspective designed to decentre Shakespeare Jones hopes to reconcile history and writing, but also the divided aspects of White Australia’s twofold identity at a time of profound national changes.