To Speak, or Not to Speak: That Is the Question. Contrapuntal Shakespearean Intertextuality in Gail Jones's Sorry

In Alev Adil’s words, Australian novelist and essayist Gail Jones has chosen “to speak of silence, not of the silenced. [Her novel Sorry (2007)] is careful not to ventriloquize Aboriginal histories. The elegiac and occluded nature of [its] narrative is an ethical as much as aesthetic choice” (qtd. in Herrero 2011, 287). Ironically perhaps, the novel starts by immediately inviting the reader to be silent and to perk up his or her ears in order to listen to this story “that can only be told in a whisper” (3). This, I argue, functions as a kind of warning for readers, that throughout their reading they need to be attentive to, and perhaps search for, the hushed tone which this story demands and which suggests the existence of some deeper, underlying truth. In an article tackling the issue of writing and justice in the Australian context, Jones vindicates this form of obliquity, confessing that Sorry has “a political-allegorical aspect – as one would expect, claiming such a title”, yet that “it is not centrally concerned with representing the Stolen Generations. As a white Australian, it would be presumptuous to do so and it would risk appropriation of others’ painful experience” (2008, 84). She also contends that non-Indigenous writers who wish “to engage with ‘stolen’ matters must write from another perspective and perhaps use forms of indirection that will signal a refusal to ‘claim’ the experience of others” (79). Interacting with Russell West-Pavlov’s view of the Shakespearean intertext in Sorry as a “self-critical element of White usurping culture but also, possibly, as a collaborator in a coalition against the ongoing oppression of the Indigenous population which characterizes contemporary Australia” (2015, 391), my paper will examine 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 paper 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.

Works Cited

Belleflamme, Valérie-Anne. 2015. “‘Shakespeare was wrong’: counter-discursive intertextuality in Gail Jones’s Sorry.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 51 (6): 661-671.

Herrero, Dolores. 2011. “The Australian Apology and Postcolonial Defamiliarization: Gail
Jones’s Sorry.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47 (3): 283-295.

Jones, Gail. 2007. Sorry. London: Harvill Secker.

Jones, Gail. 2008. “Speaking Shadows: Justice and the Poetic.” In Just Words?: Australian
Authors Writing for Justice, edited by Bernadette Brennan, 76-86. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.

West-Pavlov, Russell. 2015. “Shakekspeare Among the Nyoongar: Post-Colonial Texts,
Colonial Intertexts and their Imbrications – Macbeth in Gail Jones’s Sorry.” Zeitschrift fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik 63 (4): 391-410.