“The planet is always half night” in Gail Jones’s “Desolation” and A Guide to Berlin

“The planet is always half night”: Globalisation or the Shadow(s) of Colonisation in Gail Jones’s “Desolation” and A Guide to Berlin
In her essay “Speaking Shadows: Justice and the Poetic,” Gail Jones argues that “writerly elaboration,” “naming the past, speaking of it, offering an account – is one of our forms of negotiation”. However, the writer should not “succumb to luxurious – that is to say, debilitating – melancholy,” which is “too close to political quiescence”; quite the reverse, “there must be a way of entertaining the darknesses that is not pathological but somehow creative and intrinsically resistant”. This, I believe, is what Jones does in her literary oeuvre more generally and in her short story “Desolation” and her novel A Guide in Berlin more particularly.
In “Desolation” (2003), a story narrating the encounter of two strangers in Paris, Jones entertains the darknesses of colonisation in a “creative and intrinsically resistant” way through the musicality of her writing. It is my contention that the latter echoes on a discursive level what Jones calls ‘melancholy seriousness,’ a look that “settles on the faces of people attending a concert” and that travels “like vibrations,” “so mysteriously – not like the Metro at all, not regular and entrammelled – but fanning open, invisibly, like vibrations in the body, into all the glories and desolations of a black city night” (17).
In A Guide to Berlin (2015), a novel that brings together six foreign travellers in Berlin, Jones literally maps the city’s buried past and forgotten places precisely through her symbolic and poetic use of Berlin’s metropolitan train system, that shapes the city into a constellation “netted and webbed by the rails” and where the trains are “haphazardly communal,” offering a corridor “to walk against the direction we’re moving in” (2016, 3).
Thus, bringing together eight strangers in two Australian narratives set in two European capital cities, my paper will seek to investigate how Jones’s writing offers new ways of thinking and engaging with cross-cultural encounters through her artful writing of the darknesses of globalisation.

Works Cited
Jones, Gail. 2003. “Desolation.” The Kenyon Review 25 (1): 9-17.
Jones, Gail. 2008. “Speaking Shadows: Justice and the Poetic.” Just Words? Australian Authors Writing for Justice. By Bernadette Brennan. St Lucia, Qld.: University of Queensland, 76-86.
Jones, Gail. 2015. A Guide to Berlin. Sydney: Vintage Australia.