"Peering into the Darkness": The Leper Colony in The Death of Noah Glass by Gail Jones

In her essay “Dark Places: The Movement of the Image”, Gail Jones takes Fra Angelico’s painting Pious Women at the Tomb (1440) as a starting point for her tribute to the work of her late friend and mentor Veronica Brady. The intriguing painting depicts four women peering down into Christ’s marble casket, looking for his absent body. However, they are all looking the wrong way, their gaze misdirected, and hence not seeing the apparition of the resurrected Christ floating above their heads. The painting, Jones concludes, “is essentially of mistake,” it is “of assuming emptiness and absence, and of missing meaning” (10, original emphasis).
Taking her cue from Bruno Latour’s recommendation that we should multiply mediators not only in our reading of paintings but also in our understandings, Jones then argues that we should consider the inclusion of “an ‘inferred’ dimension, generously and openly, in all forms of knowledge – in science, philosophy, art and social theory” (11). We should, she specifies, “consider movements of disembodiment and reembodiment,” “imagine competing vectors in the construction of meaning” and “admit the non-realist and inexact qualities in all things” (11).
This, I believe, is precisely what she aestheticises in her latest novel, The Death of Noah Glass (2018), namely through the spatial image of the leprosarium in the north of Western Australia and the bodily image of its Indigenous patients, with their “eroded faces and missing ears”, “sitting in the shadows” (41). Consequently, my paper will investigate how the leper colony and the leprous body trigger the “undoing of certainty, kenosis as a mode of knowing” and, as such, act as alter/native spaces in which “art speaks in oblique and multiple registers,” “peering into the darkness,” “intuiting, not seeing directly,” and therefore allowing the emergence of alter/native meanings and discourses (Jones, “Dark Places” 11).

Works Cited
Jones, Gail. “Dark Places: The Movement of the Image (Thoughts on the Work of Veronica Brady).” Coolabah, vol. 22, 2017, pp. 10–18.
---. The Death of Noah Glass. Text Publishing, 2018.
Latour, Bruno. “How to Be Iconophilic in Art, Science and Religion.” Picturing Science, Producing Art, edited by Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison, Routledge, 1998, pp. 418–30.