In fashioning his short story form Lawson made, as A. A. Phillips has noted in 'The Craftsmanship of Lawson' [in The Australian Tradition, 1958], considerable technical departures from the primarily narrative aims of the form at the time. Lawson kept the story or narrative element to a minimum but was nevertheless able to create, with great economy, sufficient framework to support his sketches without their becoming shapeless. The chief device of these frameworks is Lawson's narrator, and the diminution of the story element naturally casts the discourse element, the rhetoric of the narrator, into prominence. It will be argued in this essay that contrasts between the story and the narrator's discourse point to a problematic realism and a documentary intention on the narrator's part. Furthermore, the rhetoric of the narrator, particularly that of the "I' who masquerades as Lawson himself as distinct from other personae like Mitchell or Joe Wilson, invites comparison with the artistic aims of the author, the real Henry Lawson. The role of the narrator in a story like 'The Spooks of Long Gully', when viewed from this perspective, indicates that Lawson's aims may have been more complex than much modern criticism has allowed.

Colin Roderick is a modern critic who, in his essay 'Lawson's Mode and Style' [in Henry Lawson Criticism, ed. Colin Roderick, 1972], considers the technique of the fictitious Henry Lawson who sometimes acts as narrator in Lawson's stories. Roderick points out that this narrator impersonated Lawson so successfully that many of his attributes and experiences were ascribed to the real Lawson. Roderick's sample disentanglement of the fictional and factual in the narrator is intended to show how Lawson created a vivid, real, but imagined world. By contrast, the old Lawson criticism mistook the stories for factual reporting. The modern tendency, having the benefit of the facts established by the biographers, is to say the old criticism neglected the artistry of Lawson's 'fictive world'. But the old Lawson criticism was responding to the salient feature of Lawson's narrative technique, and the modern tendency leads attention away from it, away from the aesthetic standpoints implicit in the technique. By masquerading as the real Henry Lawson the narrator gains for the story the illusion of non-fiction. The technique also implies certain authorial convictions about literary artifice and its effect on the value or authenticity of the work. This is precisely the effect in the piece Roderick discusses in some detail, 'The Romance of the Swag'. Only a prodigious knowledge of Lawson's biography enables one to isolate the fictional elements. The more important effect is the sketch's implicit disclaimer of literary artifice. By masquerading as the personal memoir of the real Henry Lawson the piece purports not to be a story but a note on outback slang and customs which the author records in the spirit of a historian or folklorist.

This narrator is usually present even when the story is told by a character like Mitchell. A. A. Phillips wrote that Lawson's narrator was the 'prime character—especially if he is Mitchell—adding a perspective to the story'. But strictly, Mitchell is not the narrator in most of his stories—as Phillips seems aware when he refers to the technique as 'reported narrative'. Even when the story is almost entirely the direct speech of Mitchell it is mostly introduced by another narrator. 'Two Dogs and a Fence' begins with '"Nothing makes a dog madder", said Mitchell.' 'One-Eyed Dogs' opens with '"Knocking around the country," said Mitchell, in a sentimental mood'—here the narrator's part is significant though small for he is able to disclaim sentimentality while nevertheless reporting Mitchell's speech faithfully. 'The Bull-Run Style' begins 'One day I asked my mate Mitchell what the "bull-run" style of architecture was'. Here the 'I' is explicit, and he is both past auditor and present reporter of the story.

Such gestures on the narrator's part emphasise and objectify the two complementary aspects of any speech. All speech is both statement and enunciative act. Some linguists make a distinction between two modes of language—between sentences which contain references to the situation of enunciation and the subjectivity of the speaker and those that do not. For example, 'he entered the room' is impersonal. The simple past tense narrates the act stripped of its existential complexity. It is reduced to its essential elements. The perfect tense of 'he has entered the room' is, by contrast, an act of discourse. The perfect tense explicitly distinguishes the enunciation of the sentence in time from the event itself. It much more strongly implies the presence of a 'speaker'. The latter is discourse as opposed to narrative. The gestures of Lawson's narrator point to a similar internal distinction between the story and its manner of presentation, between the referents (the descriptions of characters and incidents) and the discourse (the rhetoric of a narrator). In the opening of 'One-Eyed Dogs' the narrator indicates that the reader should be wary of Mitchell's rhetoric, and the reader may infer the narrator's aesthetic standpoint that sentimentality is an inappropriate mood for story-telling. When, in 'The Union Buries Its Dead', the narrator tells us he has 'left out the wattle' and 'neglected to mention the heart-broken old mate', he is making a similar denunciation of sentimental rhetoric found in an inferior type of story and at the same time asserting the reality of his story. He is saying that the reader ought not to expect romantic conventions and sentimental idealisations from him. It is significant that his gesture occurs just after his own elaborate speculation that the sods falling on the coffin might well have evoked powerful sentimental responses in the most sensitive of those present. 'But do not be fooled', his subsequent gesture seems to be saying, 'my language is merely intended to make you refer to a reality.'

Perhaps the best example of this kind of manoeuvre occurs in 'Getting Back on Dave Regan' where Jimmy Nowlett begins his yarn with:

You might work this yarn up. I've often thought of doin' it meself, but I ain't got the words. I knowed a lot of funny an' rum yarns about the Bush, an' I often wished I had the gift o' writin'. I could tell a lot better yarns than the rot they put in books sometimes, but I never had no eddication. But you might be able to work this yarn up—as yer call it.

This brilliant opening is replete with implications. Firstly, the person being addressed is not the reader or auditor but the implicit narrator, Henry Lawson the story-writer. As in 'One-Eyed Dogs' the narrator's referent is an account of facts and events, not the facts and events themselves as in 'The Union' where the narrator was actually present. Secondly, the narrator appears to have been somewhat embarrassed by Jimmy's suggestion that he work the yarn up—a phrase which Jimmy ascribes to him. He has ignored Jimmy's suggestion—based on an unsophisticated admiration for literary artifice—and faithfully transcribed the yarn. So scrupulous is he that he even includes Jimmy's introductory remarks which contain damaging imputations about his integrity as a realist and an authentic recorder of the bush. Thus, thirdly, although the entire story is the faithfully recorded direct speech of Jimmy Nowlett, it is subtly framed by the narrator's 'negative' rhetoric. That is, the absence of authorial interference constitutes an implicit claim on the narrator's part for the scrupulous authenticity of the facts of his material.

The distinction between narrative and discourse also involves a temporal contrast between the past (the referential time-scale) and the present (the time-scale of the narrator's enunciation). The temporal situation of the narrator can usually be identified as being at considerable distance from that of the events described. The reader's impression, which is complementary to the narrator's standpoint of realism, is that the narrator is an experienced man looking back dispassionately on the past. The narrator's mode is more that of the historian than that of littêrateur. In the first examples this is only marginally suggested in the simple past tenses of ' . . . said Mitchell' or 'One day I asked Mitchell . . .' but in 'The Union Buries Its Dead' the perfect tense of the narrator's remarks about the wattle and the old mate explicitly refers to the time-scale of the telling of the story. When the narrator says "I have left out the wattle—because it wasn't there', his past tense ('wasn't') refers to the referential time-scale while his perfect tense refers to his telling of the story. He means 'In the above I have left out the wattle'; he is referring to the story up to that point. This temporal distinction is also apparent in Joe Wilson. In 'Water Them Geraniums' Joe narrates that 'Mary kept her head pretty well through the first months of loneliness' but then comments: 'Weeks rather, I should say .. .'. In a gesture similar to those of the realist narrator Joe checks an impulse to exaggerate the facts of his material—and this restraint occurs in the 'present'—as he is speaking. In short, as much as the narrator tries to employ the realistic and impersonal mode of the récit or narrative which uses a temporal system based on the aorist and designed to exclude the present of the speaker, he is continually lapsing into the mode of discourse which reveals his subjectivity and his different situation in time. The reader is continually reminded of the 'meta-drama' in the narrative frame: the struggle of the narrator to check those impulses which threaten to jeopardise his integrity as a realist and therefore the authenticity of the story.

The conspicuousness of the occasions when the narrator can be identified as being youthful testifies to the typicality of his usual role of experienced memoirist-historian. One such occasion occurs in 'They Wait On The Wharf in Black' in which both the narrator (the 'I') and Mitchell are auditors of Tom the digger's story. The narrator evinces a youthful sensitivity with 'I wish sometimes I didn't take so much notice of things' while his view of Mitchell is that the latter is an older hardened bushman 'who hadn't seemed to be noticing anything in particular'. His view that Mitchell was not noticing anything is an erroneous one as it turns out, but the present tense of his 'I wish . . .' indicates he is still, as he recounts the story, in that youthful state, whereas his other comments might have been taken as coming from the usual narrator distanced in time. In this story the narrator is more like the narrator in 'The Hero of Redclay'—a youthful 'apprentice' to Mitchell.

It is worth noting that in stories with a framed 'inner' narrative such as 'Getting Back On Dave Regan' and 'They Wait On The Wharf In Black' there are three time-scales. There is the 'present' in which the narrator speaks; there is the referential time-scale, the time in the past when the narrator was told the yarn (these first two are only implicit in 'Getting Back On Dave Regan', in Jimmy's introductory remarks); and, further back in the past, the time in which the framed story occurred. This multiplicity of time-scales is also a feature of 'The Spooks Of Long Gully'. Before moving on to 'The Spooks' it is also worth noting, in recapitulation, that the narrator's disclaimers of literary artifice and conventions of sentimentality such as the heart-broken old mate are directed at a particular kind of literary art. The narrator has a quarrel with its poetics. A more detailed discussion of this poetics and of Lawson's reasons for making his narrator criticise it is beyond the scope of these notes. Nevertheless, it seems clear that Lawson's narrator has allegiance to an 'opposing' poetics of realism or naturalism.

In 'The Spooks Of Long Gully' this narrator is faced with perhaps his most formidable problems. The situation is not as simple as in 'The Union Buries Its Dead' where he could unequivocally declare that the wattle and the old mate were not there. Strictly, none of the ghost yarns has any 'real' referent. The narrator is faced with the task of distinguishing the 'real' ghosts (the local folklore) from the 'fictional' ghosts (the yarns told from impure and ulterior motives). All the paraphernalia and attitudes of the realist are objectified in the narrator. He collects 'all the available information'; he scrupulously rejects 'unreliable' information; he even revisits the area of Long Gully to engage in 'field work'. In short, he seems to approach his task in the scientific spirit of the Zolaesque realist or the anthropologist. At the same time, however, those subjective impulses in the narrator which could cast doubt on his credibility are also present. In the introductory section the narrator explains the childish aspirations and superstitions which form the context of his first two memoirs of boyhood ghosts. The ambitions to become 'mounted troopers, bushrangers, and jockeys' and the naive beliefs in 'ghosts and fairies' are meant to contrast with the narrator's present scientific realism. But there is also his curious admission that as a boy he told 'stories' to avoid punishment 'even as we now do to avoid starving'. His play on the ambiguity of 'stories' compromises his present writing. It is implied that his motives might not be purely scientific. And ironically, it is the impurity of a personal motive, that of self-aggrandisement, which casts doubt on the authenticity of Jim Bullock's and Fred Dunn's ghosts in the two boyhood memoirs which follow.

The next section is the 'field work' section in which the narrator revisits the area to conduct interviews with locals reputed to have seen ghosts. The narrator's "I . . . collected all the available information concerning the spooks', "I interviewed Jim Block' or 'It was also reported that do little in their semblance of factual reporting to allay the reader's increasing doubts about the narrator's credibility. Some of the narrator's interviewees are even more scrupulous than he, and decline to elaborate on what they are uncertain of having seen or suggest to him that he might ask someone else. In view of his later rejection of the evidence of 'old Boozer Reid' on account of its lurid, artificial and exorbitant character, it is curious that the narrator seems not to notice the most obvious explanation for the spooks seen by Corny George who 'died in the delirium tremens a few weeks later'. He also seems contemptuous of the 'Local heathens' who insinuate that the Irishwoman's vision of the angel Gabriel is the result of 'Gin'. Similarly, the fact that some of the local children had been in the habit of teasing War Kee when he was alive is, for the narrator, the explanation for their subsequent dismay at his ghostly re-appearance. It does not seem to occur to him that their guilt might account for the appearance of the Chinaman's ghost itself.

The short final section purports to be a kind of 'author's note'. He begins by pompously attesting the validity of the information he has provided: 'I collected a great deal of evidence besides the above; but it is mostly unreliable, and so I refrain from publishing it.' He then goes on to explain his criteria of selection. His aim has been to record the local folklore, the 'respectable spooks of Long Gully'; he does not, of course, attempt to insist that even these spooks worthy of inclusion in his record were real. His scientific realism does not permit him to share in the superstitiousness of the outback community as he had done in his boyhood. On the contrary, he has rejected a considerable amount of evidence such as that of Boozer Reid not because its spooks were not real, but on the grounds of stylistic features in the yarns which suggest that they have been 'worked up'—to use Jimmy Nowlett's phrase. Boozer Reid's yarn was too 'disjointed and lurid, and so evidently overdrawn and exaggerated'. In the narrator's poetics an overly 'literary' style indicates a lack of sincerity in the informant. Those informants who have mastered a plain, realistic style have been included in the record. The story of the ghost seen by Ted Phipps, recounted by his brother Joe, is an example. But of course, the narrator has been obviously blind to 'extra-textual' indicators which also could call an informant's sincerity into question. Corny George, for example, is another boozer. And young Joe Phipps is clearly out to impress the visitor from the city: 'A young drover named Joe Phipps didn't see any ghost himself, but his brother Ted did.' The last phrase betrays a slight anxiety on Joe's part that he might be excluded from the visiting researcher's report unless he can come up with a ghost story. Ted, moreover, is away 'on the Lachlan', so his story cannot be tested.

The theoretical issues hinted at in Jimmy Nowlett's introductory remarks in 'Getting Back On Dave Regan', the questions of literary artifice and selectivity versus artistic truth and realism, are given in 'The Spooks' an extended and complex treatment by means of the satirical dismantling of the narrator's realist pose and his confusing application of its criteria. That the narrator masquerades in these, and in many other stories, as Lawson himself raises the question of the significance of realism and historical documentation in the real Lawson's artistic purposes. As Peter Quartermaine convincingly argues in his recent article 'The "Literary Photographs" of Henry Lawson' [in Australian Literary Studies, 1978], the evidence of Lawson's creative and other writings indicates that he would probably have welcomed those early critics who praised his work for its 'photographic' realism. That is, when those critics meant by such analogies that 'His writings are photographs hardly idealised at all', and not that his writings were photographs in the sense in which photography is often compared to painting, in the sense of mere mechanical reproduction. The narrator's sardonic reminder in 'The Union Buries Its Dead' that we can expect no sentimental idealisations from him, only a fidelity to the facts of his material, is typical of his realist standpoint. Among Lawson's other writings 'The Australian Cinematograph' and 'If I Could Paint' also indicate that Lawson himself was to a large extent convinced of the artistic value of realistic representation.

To emphasise such elements is to go against the current of much modern Lawson criticism. In the modern view such an emphasis would be to neglect Lawson's imaginative qualities and to display 'ignorance of his artistic purpose'. Yet if a documentary element is a significant part of those purposes then photographic representation and realism would be useful qualities. It has already been remarked that the role of Lawson's narrator often seems close to that of the historian, folklorist or even the social anthropologist. Such a role is consistent with the temporal situation of the narrator and is clearly dominant in 'The Romance of the Swag' and in 'The Spooks' where it is dramatised in the narrator's nostalgia for his boyhood in the bush 'when we were mostly true to each other' and his return to document the local ghost lore. A documentary intention is also evident in much of Lawson's other writings. For example, in 'The Golden Nineties' which first appeared in the Australian Star in 1899, Lawson wrote that 'The nineties—our nineties—are dying and, when they are dead, a hundred years of history will be deader for ever than the years of the histories of most other countries. History might repeat itself but never the first century of a new country. He clearly feels that, unless recorded, this history could soon be lost forever. The contemporary critics also valued the documentary element in Lawson's writings. The writer [in Henry Lawson Criticism] who admired his 'photographs' went on to say that they depicted 'a phase of Australian life . . . that is destined to pass away. In this respect they will be of immense value to the future historian of Australia.'

Truth, realism and historical accuracy are also essential to the moral-ideological aspect of Lawson's artistic purposes, his aim to bring the social conditions of the working classes to notice and thus to possible remedy. As Colin Roderick observes in his 'Introduction' to Henry Lawson Criticism, even those contemporary critics who had different political views recognised the function of Lawson's 'realism' in this respect: 'In many cases it is not literary criticism at all, but approval or disapproval of the social or political portrait which the writers believed was Lawson's attempt at a photographic representation of some aspect of actual Australian life.' Of course, the argument of such criticism is often that 'realism', by definition, ought not to exhibit so obvious a political or ideological partisanship. To be set against this, however, is the fact that from its beginning nineteenth-century realism was associated with egalitarian and socialistic ideology. In their 1864 Preface to Germinie Lacerteux the De Goncourts, hardly otherwise noted for their egalitarian sympathies, are compelled to speak of the 'right' of the 'low classes' to be represented in the novel. In that other famous expression of the realist's position, 'The Experimental Novel', Zola says [in The Experimental Novel and Other Essays, 1893], that the novelist's task is to document the social conditions and processes so that 'legislators and . . . men of affairs' can regulate 'these phenomena in such a way as to develop the good and reject the bad, from the point of view of their utility to man'. In a real sense, the conflict between the subjectivity of the author, his artistic selectivity and moral-ideological sympathies on the one hand, and the dictates of 'science' and 'realism' on the other has always been a problem for literary realism. The awareness of this conflict and the rigour of 'impersonality' needed to overcome it is raised to its highest degree in Flaubert.

A call such as Peter Quartermaine's for the reinstatement of 'photographic' realism and documentation to their rightful place in Lawson's artistic purposes is a timely correction of a tendency to neglect their significance in modern Lawson studies, but at the same time it threatens to obscure the contradictions in realism itself. The foregoing discussion of Lawson's narrator has, if anything, pointed to the presence in him of contradictory impulses rather than an uncomplicated allegiance to 'the facts' or 'truth'. His mode is always that of discourse rather than that of the narrative in which 'no one speaks'.

One other complicating factor in Lawson's narrative technique which might be noted in conclusion is the prevalence of the 'reported narrative'. In many cases the narrator is dealing not with the historical facts but with accounts or interpretations of the facts. In a sense, literature, unlike photography or painting, can have no real connection at all with the objective world. When a writer declares he is a realist we know he is choosing an inference from the physical, social or cultural world and making it the real; it almost goes without saying that in literature, which is never more than language, an entirely sociocultural system, realism or the real has absolutely no part. It is with accounts or interpretations of the world that the narrator is dealing in 'The Spooks' and, significantly, he sees realism not in terms of fidelity to the objective world—the subject of 'spooks' itself precludes this—but in terms of the manner or style of the interpretation which reflects the sincerity or truthfulness of the interpreter.