Reading the ‘Remembered World’: Carceral Architecture and Cultural Mnemonics in Peter Carey's Illywhacker
[In the following essay, Lobe examines the postcolonial nature of Australian architecture and cultural memory as portrayed in Illywhacker.]
Things are not universally correct in achitecture and universally incorrect in men.
—Theodor Adorno, “Functionalism Today”
Western architecture has always been close to memory. This proximity can be figured as two interrelated mnemonic modes: a systematizing of memory placement in which imagined built spaces (loci) are imposed upon an individual's memory in order to facilitate the recall of information, and a housing or dwelling in which memories of the past accumulate in architectural structures in the present. Such a subdivision of memory reflects two ways that architecture functions in the discourses of individual and cultural recall. The first of these is the technique of the ancient ars memoria, in which architecture is used as a trope of memory function to order—to arrange or train—individual memory: “We all know how, when groping in memory for a word or name, some quite absurd and random association, something which has ‘stuck’ in the memory, will help us to dredge it up. The classical art is systematizing that process” (Yates 29); the second, at the centre of my argument here, concerns locations where built spaces themselves become sites of commemoration and mnemonic signification: individual and cultural prostheses where the past is said to be inscribed in the present.
How does the past accumulate in built space? In what ways do buildings shape thinking and mediate memory? One way to begin thinking through these questions is to consider how architecture provides a sense of permanence and presence, of order and stability (foundation/structure/façade) for homo mnemonicus. This is the case when dematerialized built spaces are used as heuristics to aid learning, memory storage, and retrieval, as in the legend of the Greek poet Simonides Melicus of Ceos, which stages what Francis Yates calls the “art of memory” and Mary Carruthers names the “architectural mnemonic.” It is also the case when built spaces themselves become locations where the past is housed, where memories accumulate in the hermeneutic processes of representing and interpreting the past (Carruthers, Book 17-20). Particularly in the last two decades, as Andreas Huyssen writes, “architecture has become ever more interested in site-memory and in inscribing temporal dimension in spatial structures,” in grounding the ways that “we live structures of temporality in our culture” (Twilight 3-4). Indeed, the recent “memory boom” expresses the West's “need for temporal anchoring when in the wake of the information revolution, the relationship between past, present, and future is being transformed,” when “the territorial and spatial coordinates of our late-twentieth-century lives are blurred or even dissolved by increased mobility around the globe” (7). Buildings, in this view, are places where the past is maintained, where temporality is marked or anchored.
It is this last mode of memory—the ways memory materializes in architecture—that I want to consider in the context of Australian cultural mnemonics. To this end, I read the penal-colonial past of Australia and its persistence into the so-called post-colonial present in the carceral architecture of Peter Carey's 1985 novel Illywhacker. This deceptive temporality is encoded in the built spaces of Carey's novel, most obviously (and to anticipate my conclusion) in the bricks of the family-owned Pet Shop, bricks that are exposed during a renovation and in which the thumbprints of convicts are literally impressed (see Plate 16, colour section). These memory traces, these unsettling records of Australia's penal-colonial past, I suggest, are built into the architecture of Illywhacker as much as they are impressed, Carey implies, in the cultural memory of the imagined community of Australia. It is these records that Carey insists must be reread in the present as haunting inscriptions, as indelible texts from a remembered world.
My argument, then, is that a sense of how the past is translated into architecture in the settler-invader society of Australia helps us to read that nation's (dis)continuous temporalities, as John Frow names the slippage between historical events and how they are “generationally” remembered (“Penal” 1.1). Frow builds his argument about the paradoxical (hypomnesic and hypermnesic) mnemonic economy of Australia around a place that is central to both Australian history and “heritage tourism” (4.4): the infamous Port Arthur Penitentiary in Tasmania. Carey's fictional buildings, too, work as sites of memory: imagined places where the past architecturally persists into the present as disturbing memories in a novel that was published amid preparation for the commemoration of Australia's Bicentenary in 1988. That “larger social moment,” as Graeme Turner put it in 1994, remains as “a set of sites and processes” in which Australian nationalism reached its limits, in which many Australians recognized the need for more critical, and plural, “Australian identities” (Making 72). Echoing Ernest Renan's claim that “forgetting is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation” (11), Carey's novel foregrounds the need to reread Australia's amnesic national past, to remember unsettled questions about cultural identity, questions about what Carey, in an interview with David Sexton, has termed “the meaning of Australia and […] being an Australian” (Fletcher 12).
The imbrication of architecture and memory in Carey's novel is of a piece with a larger and more complex linkage between thinking and building in the West that exceeds the scope of this paper. In diverse ways, this discourse leads us to the question of how the past is housed in built spaces in the present: to the complex nexus of architectural forms, in-the-world buildings, and institutional locations that mediate memory, that “ground” or “place” the past in relation to more ephemeral human subjects. Architecture, the “last fortress of metaphysics” (Derrida 328), seems permanent, possessed of a temporality (origin/presence/telos), stability (ground/foundation/structure), and spacing (inside/outside) that recently invented “man” envies.
To think of built spaces housing the past—as sites where the force-of-memory is domesticated—is to acknowledge the cultural locations of memory, including the uses of architecture to conceal/reveal the past and to order/inhabit the present: the sacred purposes of “housing the dead and honouring them in memory” and the more secular tasks of “housing the living and sitting them down to dinner” (Brodsky 111). Memory, in other words, is especially at home in architecture because architecture places the cultural force to remember; it domesticates the past by creating spaces where memory can be gathered, to misuse Heidegger's evocative phrase, not as proof of presence or recovered essence but as material traces, as representations of events or thoughts. As Renate Lachmann suggests, “the primal scene of memory consists of bearing witness to anatrope, the plunge from life to death. It consists of the indexical act of pointing to the dead (the ancestors) and the iconographic act of transforming the dead into a concept of what they were as living people” (7). Memory, in this view, is a translation of “what was” into text: a “recollection of order” that “mobilizes a work of construction against destruction, even as this destruction marks the beginning of re-membering. What is past lies in ruins; the sole survivor and eyewitness restores the fragmented events of the past” (7). This rebuilding is the key to the formation of culture as commemoration, to a view of culture as the semiological work of mourning that “leads a culture, in the course of an enormous process of recasting, constantly to transform the knowledge it has about itself into representational signs that are deposited in a particular place and in a particular order” (21). Such signs, as Lachmann explains, must be read as texts: whether one figures memory as a “belated construction of that which has already slipped away” or believes that the past can be recovered, the “central concern is to reconstruct a world that was once living (but is now defunct) as a remembered world” (21, emph. mine).
By housing what is deemed to be worth remembering, buildings ground thinking and order thought. Buildings, we might say, help to locate the “extraordinarily complex discursive web” of “beliefs and values, rituals and institutions” through which we think the past (Huyssen, Twilight 249-50). Such a view links memory to the “cryptic” space of the tomb, as Mark Wigley's reading of Derrida's “taste” for architecture has shown (“Postmortem” 171). But it also connects memory to those no-less overdetermined built spaces occupied by the living, where we imagine, as Huyssen suggests, “memory become stone in architecture” (“Monumental” 191). Of course, as Carruthers notes, “memory does not inhere directly in objects” like buildings (Craft 40); rather, like the classical wax tablet or Freud's Mystic Writing Pad, memory operates according to a textual logic: “Like a well-censored dream, and subject perhaps to similar mechanisms, memory has the orderliness and the teleological drive of narrative. Its relation to the past is not that of truth but of desire” (Frow, Time 229).
It is this textual logic, Frow suggests, that best explains the force-of-memory in contrast to those “untenable” nostalgic modes of memory that operate, for example, in Pierre Nora's lieux de mémoire—“sites of memory” such as museums, archives, cemeteries, monuments, sanctuaries, and so forth, which seem immediate and organic, which promise an “auratic” presence and authenticity that Frow claims is immaterial—severed from the social processes that mediate all memory (Time 219-23). In such a paradigm, memory seems to stand in direct relation to objects or events as original and immediate (truthful) reproductions of the past, not signs or representations. But, as Frow points out, this is a troubling, if tempting, way to frame any memories of the past, particularly traumatic ones, whether personal/private or public/historical, for we compose the past in the present as much as we compose ourselves: “Recovered memories are recalled as much from the culture as from the archives of individual memory” (238).
Frow corrects this sacral tendency by insisting that we rethink memory not according to a (continuous) rhetoric of presence but rather as (discontinuous) social processes, ones written on and in all sorts of textual surfaces, including books, bodies, and, as I am suggesting, buildings: one must “speak of memory as tekhnè,” Frow insists, and “deny that it has an unmediated relation to experience” (Time 230), deny those paradigms of recall in which memory is “thought of as partaking of a spirituality independent of the materiality of the sign” or being “unstructured by social technologies of learning or recall.” Indeed, a secular (semiological) model of memory refuses to invoke a “continuity of passage between the living and the dead” (223) and instead provides ways to identify the deferred “social organization” and “‘technological’ underpinnings” of memory, to read the discontinuous “materiality of signs” and the contextual “representational forms by which memory is structured” (223-24). This model, Frow concludes, demonstrates how “the logic of textuality by which memory is structured has technological and institutional conditions of existence” (230) and forecloses upon a “premodern realm of spontaneous and natural memory” (“Penal” 4.1), opening the question of memory to technological practices of recall, including architectural modes of memory—to “housed” traces of the past that do not indicate presence/permanence but rather the opposite: the (hermeneutic) processes of inscription and interpretation, of arrangement and selection, of condensation and displacement. Buildings, in this view, are “machines” (Carruthers, Craft 22) that help us to remember, structures that “place what we think” (37).
How then, do buildings record desire? How does architecture place thinking? We can approach these questions in the fictional world of Illywhacker by noting that the novel's architecture is authoritative and amnesiac, that it becomes increasingly carceral as the narrative progresses. This is evinced as the picaresque narrator and protagonist, Herbert Badgery, builds homes for himself and his family, structures that culminate, near the end of the novel, in the towering “Best Pet Shop in the World” on Pitt Street in Sydney, an elaborate “human zoo” (Hassall 88), in which assorted types of Australians are willfully caged. This carceral architecture contradicts (functions as a counter-memory to) Badgery's textual self-invention, to his transcendent rhetoric, which becomes increasingly extravagant and disembodied as the novel unfolds, so much so that, at the end of this confessional narrative (which is its beginning, its “narrative now”). Badgery, who has been a salesman of one sort or another all his life, claims to be 139 years old, to be a self-taught author and architect, to be an hermaphrodite, and to be unable to die.
Perhaps Badgery's most challenging claim, however, is that he is a liar. He declares early in Illywhacker, “I am a terrible liar and I have always been a liar, I say that early on to set things straight. Caveat emptor. […] Lying is my main subject, my specialty, my skill” (11). Having unburdened himself thus, Badgery tells us that as an author/autobiographer he has finally found a new and acceptable use for his lying, one that cuts him loose from his past: writing. But Badgery's claims deserve careful scrutiny, not least because the term illywhacker is a colloquialism for con man and because Badgery himself has been ruthless, even violent, in his self-promotion, in his attempts to convince others of his “schemes” (547). This contradicts his declared intention for writing: his textual “scheme,” in which he attempts to represent (to rewrite) himself as a “kind man” (600). My claim is that the novel's built spaces—what Badgery calls his “usual type of structure” (158)—contradict this seemingly benign textual transformation, for these structures, I suggest, are carceral, linked in the novel to the memory problems of Australia's penal and colonial pasts and registered in other “deceptive” Australian buildings, whether they be bungalows or foreign-owned banks. In a conversation with his grandfather, Herbert Badgery, Hissao argues that “there was not yet an Australian architecture, only a colonial one with verandas tacked on” (586). Leah Goldstein, one of Badgery's lovers, makes a similar claim about Australian identity. She is, she says, “sick to death of trying to decide what it [means] to be Australian,” and argues with Hissao that “there never could be an Australian architecture […] because there was no such thing as Australia or if there was it was like an improperly fixed photograph that was already fading” (586).
Building against this insubstantial national imaginary, the patriot Badgery is convinced that his (acquisitive) vision of his country is superior and substantial. To this end, he asserts that “an architect,” like any good Australian salesman, “must have the ability to convince people that his schemes are worth it.” But the problem is that the European “architects” who built Australia failed; Australia, according to Badgery, is an unconvincing invention, a pale copy in which no one can believe. He cites Sydney as an example of a colonial city that is “full of trickery and deception. If you push against it too hard you will find yourself leaning against empty air. It is never, for all its brick and concrete, quite substantial.” Sydney's buildings, that is, are covered by veneers and facades behind which are “plain brick building[s]” that “lied about their height, their age, and most particularly their location. There was not one that did not pretend itself huddled in some European capital with weak sun in summer and ice in winter” (547).
Badgery's complaint conflates national identity with built space, staging the uneven relationship between metropolitan centre and colonial periphery as an example of how imperial values were encoded in colonial architecture, how, as Thomas R. Metcalf puts it, “political authority took shape in stone” (xi). This colonial order belies a cultural subordination that Badgery sees everywhere in his country, “created” as it has been in the image of Britain, as a shadowy copy of the “monumental structures” (2) upon which Western civilization is founded. For Badgery, this architectural mimicry is insubstantial, a screen for a penal-colonial inferiority, for an Australian dependence upon foreign capital or culture, whether British, American, or Japanese. Badgery believes he builds against this colonial dependency. Indeed, in the 139 or so years before he becomes an author, the propertyless Badgery confesses that he has been obsessed with making a place for himself in the world: “All I ever wanted,” he tells us, “was a fire and slippers” (538). “I did not doubt,” he professes, “that my passion for building was shared by everyone, that my ruling love was for human warmth, for people gathered in rooms, talking, laughing, sharing stews and puddings and talk” (198). Such a vision of domestic space, of community, sounds inviting, but caveat emptor: Badgery's oxymoronic “ruling love” covers over a lie that eats away at the archi/textual edifices he has constructed, a narrative of confinement and control that culminates in the dystopian Pet Shop (a space that at least a few Australians in the novel resent). What is especially ironic about Badgery's textual and architectural edifices, about his “deceptive constructions” (Edwards 39), is that his most substantial homes function as cages or prisons, as structures of confinement in which Badgery, his family, and eventually his countrymen and women are willingly confined.
Badgery's early homes are modest, makeshift, cage-like structures (usually mud and wire) where he tries to contain his wives and lovers: a “slab hut for the barmaid in Blackwood” (158) and then a squatter's shack built in 1919 near Baachus Marsh, “one of the nicest little houses I ever built” (24). Further, these homes tend to be built of stolen material (or material received on credit, credit that he never intends to honour) and on “stolen” land. This pattern is continued in 1923 at Maribyrnong River, near Melbourne, where Badgery appropriates a church hall from the Methodists and converts it into a house for his young wife, Phoebe. Badgery, we read, works on it “like a bower bird” (159), like a bricoleur, using whatever materials he finds at hand: the house “pushed out and grew—rows of cages [which] radiated like the spokes of a wheel” (201). Badgery appears to have enjoyed domesticating various “splendid guileless” (205) creatures there: his wife and children, rosellas and king parrots. Of course, Badgery the “warder” (205) has stolen this land, too, taken “possession of his necessary acre.” “I am proud to say,” he tells us, “I found my land, and took it, although its legal owners (the Church of England) were not aware of it at that time” (157). Carey's text thus articulates an (imperial) anxiety about “legal ownership” that undercuts Badgery's will to territorial possession, that remembers the (postcolonial) problem of indigenous land claims in settler-invader societies like Australia. Badgery, however, conveniently “forgets” that the “legal owners” of this piece of land have taken it from its previous inhabitants: Australian aboriginals. Badgery, instead, is preoccupied with his inability to contain Phoebe in his “poetic” home/cage. She writes herself out of his domestic fantasy and cannot understand how his vision of a home could be so restrictive: “I did not, even for a moment, guess that what he wanted was so ordinary: a fat wife with a dozen children and cabbage and stew every night” (190). Looking back, years later, the 139-year-old Badgery can only see himself “trapped in the heart of Phoebe's poem, teetering at the apex of [his] empire. […] [His] house was full. All rooms were occupied” (201).
The image evoked by Badgery's wire cages and radial cells is both imperial and disciplinary: a structure of control and confinement that recalls Lord Cromer's image of empire as a Eurocentric machine (Said 44) and, even more so, Michel Foucault's use of Bentham's Panopticon in his “prison book.” As a sinister emblem of modern discipline, the Panopticon needs no introduction; as Foucault claims in Discipline and Punish, it is a machine in which architecture itself is an instrument that works to reconstruct the incarcerated subject according to a secular and secular discipline that “proceeds from the distribution of individuals in space” (141). In the modern prison, which Foucault sees perfected in the radial architecture of Bentham's proposed Panopticon—“at the periphery, an annular building; at the center, a tower” (200)—architecture orients the body of the subject-criminal and makes him conscious of his visibility, of her position in built space, working primarily on the prisoner's mind or soul (disciplining his memory) by replacing physical torture with mental anguish, self-consciousness, and introspection. Such an analytic architecture, Frow suggests, “working passively and continuously to shape and control experience, invests power in places rather than people” (“Penal” 4.4).
Foucault notes that Bentham might have been at least partly inspired in his project by Le Vaux's menagerie at Versailles (203), and it would not be unfair to think of Badgery, at the end of the novel, as an omniscient author-narrator in his cell in the Pet Shop, as a “furtive” monarch surveying his own menagerie, a “cruel, ingenious cage” (205), as Foucault describes the Panopticon. Badgery has used such imperial and disciplinary language to describe himself, and his earliest houses read like crude blueprints for the panoptic Pet Shop: a “royal menagerie” where Badgery will eventually collect Australians for display. At Bendigo in 1931, for example, Badgery meets the woman who is to be his next lover, Leah Goldstein, and his thoughts turn once again to erecting edifices, to establishing empires. Waking up one morning, Badgery brags: “The urge to build was on me already and I looked at the world through imaginary windows and possible doorways” (304). But Leah, like Phoebe, his wife, does not share his passion for building; rather, she too exceeds Badgery's (carceral) structures, is another woman Badgery cannot “keep.” Nonetheless, the equivalence here between Leah's body and property—“the urge to build”—reveals Badgery's obsession with (confusion of) ownership, architecture, and sex, not to mention a rather paranoid need to order, to inhabit enclosed structures because of the perceived threat of unstructured colonial space. Leah recognizes this phallic claim immediately and states: “You sleep with me once and you think you own me.” Badgery replies: “No. […] Just making a place” (306). Leah's response is telling:
“This is not your place and can never be.”
“It's public land,” I said. “[…] I'm entitled to build a hut here […].”
“There you go, land-house, house-land, you can't help yourself, can you, Mr. Badgery? […] You think you can put up some shanty and that makes it your place, but you can't, and it never will be. […] The land is stolen. The whole country is stolen. The whole nation is based on a lie which is that it was not already occupied when the British came here. If it's anybody's place, it is the blacks'. Does it look like your place? Does it feel like your place? Can't you see, even the trees have nothing to do with you.”
(306-07)
This is one of the “cryptic” and deadly secrets that Badgery tries to build over/upon; this is the unstable foundation upon which the “edifice” of Australia has been erected. Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that the agoraphobic Badgery builds prison-like homes; Australians like him, Carey ironically suggests, unconsciously need to inhabit structures of confinement, or flee, in order to feel comfortable, in order to manage the threat of “stolen” colonial space in a landscape where transported British convicts were once forced to stay.
Hence, when his home at Bendigo falls apart, in 1937, Badgery resumes his architectural odyssey, travelling up to Grafton looking for work. In a brief dalliance at Nambucca, where he has met a widow, Shirl “The Girl for Fruit & Veg” (527), the fifty-one-year-old Badgery volunteers to renovate her milk bar, to “open that bloody coffin of a shop” (366). Badgery convinces the widow to put him up in exchange for his labour, in his mind establishing a place for himself sexually and architecturally. “By three o'clock” of the day he arrived, Badgery brags, “we'd made a mess of her clean sheets and I was lying on my back with her hair in my nose, thinking how much nicer the room would be if we could lift the roof like the latch on a ferret box” (530). Once again, Badgery conflates sex and property, thinks of cages as protective spaces in which human inhabitants become pets. This habit is especially obvious in Badgery's next “homes”: “Grafton Gaol” and “HM Prison, Rankin Downs” (375), where he spends a decade incarcerated for assaulting his foster father, Goon Tse Ying. In prison, Badgery re-invents himself as a literate “nice old man” (409) who uses “frailty and decency” (454) to get what he wants. Badgery, if we believe what he tells us, is particularly comfortable while incarcerated there, Indeed, Rankin Downs is a “place where there were no locks on the door and you could get an education” (410).
One way to think through the linkages between his “comfortable” incarceration, colonialism, and Australian identity is to follow Gillian Whitlock in “‘The Carceral Archipelago’: Marcus Clarke's His Natural Life and John Richardson's Wacousta.” Linking Frye's “garrison mentality” to Foucault's notion of modern discipline, Whitlock notes that the carceral is not uniquely Australian but a recognizable feature of other settler-invader societies. In fact, Whitlock observes that colonists in literature often counteract the threat of what is perceived to be unorganized, uncivilized space by building. Architecture, in other words, is activated as a trope of civilization, as a spacing that produces “stable” boundaries that manages alterity by ordering things in (colonial) taxonomies (house/land, inside/outside, us/them). This is especially the case, Whitlock writes, in settler-invader cultures where early architecture functioned as structures of defense: monuments not only to the ambitions and dreams of the settler-invaders but also (perhaps more so) to their anxieties and fears. Settler-invaders, Whitlock suggests, anxiously responded to the “formless” and “empty” spaces of the unsettled colony by importing from Europe a familiar (carceral) architecture that articulated a “tyrannical ideal of order and precision” (51), with its roots in capitalism, militarism, and industrialization.
In such colonial architecture—the penal colony in Australia, the garrison in Canada—an “idea of authoritarian control is worked out in buildings and in relationship to surrounding space” to such a degree that, as Whitlock continues, “the carceral cell has been perceived as a defining characteristic of the national literature” (51). This explains, in part, why Carey's contented “Australians” enthusiastically submit to their own confinement and exploitation, how they become subjects of a disciplinary logic that, in Illywhacker, is indistinguishable from its latest avatars: the museal and touristic gazes. This carceral mentality is so powerful, I suggest, that when Badgery is released from prison in 1949 he heads for Sydney to rejoin his family and take “a place […] inside that wonderful building of [his] son's” (516). But this is not a prodigal father's “celebration of freedom” (491). Leah Goldstein, for one, confronts him there: “‘You fool,’ she said. ‘You moron. You want to be a pet.’ […] ‘You are out of one prison, and making another one’” (537-38).
A towering edifice of galleries and cages, the Badgery family “Best Pet Shop in the World” is an architectural manifestation of the monumental lie: the lie-as-monument. Formerly “the old Stratford Arcade” (480), the Pet Shop evolves as a metaphor of Australia: first, under the ownership of Charles Badgery, Herbert's son, it contains Australian fauna such as cockatoos and goannas; then, directed by the American Nathan Schick, it becomes a “joint promotion” (505) that exports pets all over the world; finally, in the hands of Badgery's grandson, Hissao, the Pet Shop is sold to Mitsubishi of Japan for “one million dollars (US)” (596). Under Hissao's direction, it is transformed into a late-capitalist theme prison for international tourists to visit; collected and displayed in this Australian monument are not only the Badgerys but also other Australian types: an agoraphobic illegal Chinese immigrant who plays imaginary baseball, “shearers, […] lifesavers, inventors, manufacturers, bushmen, aboriginals,” even a “Melbourne Jew” (599). Badgery is attracted to this panoptic structure for many reasons. He sees it as a home, as a “scheme”: “Damn it, I had a weakness for grand buildings and I liked the sound of his shop. It was not merely a building with a tower. It was a tower” (489).
One might recall, at this point, how the figure of the convict and the space of the carceral in Australian literature has functioned as a “potent metaphor” (Hodge and Mishra 142) in the construction of national narrative. In Unnatural Lives: Studies in Australian Convict Fiction, for example, Laurie Hergenhan suggests that the “broad cultural patterns” of incarceration and discipline have created a powerful and “continuing preoccupation in literature and the popular arts with convictism as a time of great communal suffering which was somehow survived” (173). Similarly, Turner argues in National Fictions: Literature, Film, and the Construction of Australian Narrative that the figure of the convict, patterns and images of imprisonment, and carceral spaces in Australian narrative project images of a powerless and defeated national selfhood, one that marks an Australian habit of presumed inferiority that “negates the value of individual action and legitimates powerlessness and subjection” (9-10), a “politics of subordination” (143) that is at the core of a particularly “consoling cultural mythology” (74). Certainly the Pet Shop has become a space of “protected intimacy” (Bachelard 3) and mnemonic stability for this latest, late-capitalist generation of what David Ireland calls “comfortable prisoners” (62), those Australians who cannot “escape” or understand their “legacy from the bloody and accursed empire” (2). In Illywhacker (the working title of which was Pets), Badgery, too, has been unable to comprehend the persistent past “engraved” in his mind as architectural “functions of inhabiting” (Bachelard 14-15). Indeed, his rhetoric of liberation is contradicted by a “consoling” architectural narrative of confinement and subjection embodied in the buildings that punctuate his life story, buildings that, as Georges Bataille puts it in a different context, dramatize the symbolic power of architecture to cancel time, to empty the present of significance and in doing so to make individuals as much as societies forget their ignoble, their heterogeneous pasts.
The problem with architecture, according to Bataille, is that it embodies an ideal and transcendent harmony, one effect of which is to eliminate time and repress historical difference—to make the future conform to the present and the present conform to the past. As Bataille argues, architecture is essentially authoritarian: the external expression of an anthropomorphism that embodies repressive social taboos from the past and uncritically translates them into the future. Architecture, as Bataille puts it, expresses “only the ideal being of society, that which orders and prohibits with authority. […] Thus, the great monuments are raised up like dams, pitting the logic of majesty and authority against all the shady elements: it is in the form of cathedrals and palaces that Church and State speak and impose silence upon the multitudes. It is obvious, actually, that monuments inspire socially acceptable behaviour, often a very real fear” (21). To be sure, Carey's Australians uncritically believe in the carceral architecture they fearfully inhabit, in buildings that flatten historical difference and work to regulate the (convict/colonial) past by sanitizing it, by making it forgettable or safe to remember. Such an architectural disavowal, as Denis Hollier explains, “performs spacing: a space from before the subject, from before meaning” (xi). Hence, Bataille indicts the imposing logic of the modern architecture he despised: “The mathematical regulation set in stone is nothing other than the culmination of an evolution of earthly forms, whose direction is given, in the biological order, by the transition from simian to human form, with this last presenting all the components of architecture. Men seem to represent only an intermediary stage in the morphological process that goes from apes to great edifices. […] Moreover, the human order is bound up from the start with the architectural order, which is nothing but a development of the former” (21). In this inescapable circuit, Bataille warns, modern consciousness itself becomes an effect of architecture: humans rationally design buildings in their (ideal) image, and wistfully see their own (inferior, impermanent) image in the structure and design of their buildings; they are propped up by the architecture that they inhabit, that inhabits them.
Bataille's model articulates some of the allure of Badgery's buildings and the cultural amnesia, the cancelled time, that they embody: what Hodge and Mishra call the “dark secret of Australian consciousness” (xvi) and Frow names Australia's twinned “cults of disremembering” (a “deep-rooted reticence about the dispossession of the indigenous peoples and about the convict beginnings of European settlement” [“Penal” 4.2]). In Illywhacker, Carey architecturally traces this unstable and amnesiac habit to the convict “stain” or “stigma,” a pseudo-scientific moral blot, as Robert Hughes reminds us, that was soaked into Australia's social fabric, that dominated arguments about Australian selfhood by the 1840s (and for more than a century thereafter), and that produced a desire to forget about Australia's felon origins (xi). In a country that was settled, or invaded, as what Hughes calls a “jail of infinite space” (596), the convict past indeed shaped a national consciousness so thoroughly that “amnesia seemed to be a condition of patriotism” (xii).
Such an authoritarian and amnesiac aesthetic is certainly manifested in Badgery's patriotic buildings, in his textual and architectural inventions. Put another way, Badgery writes in the same way that he builds: to control and confine, to con and convince, his readers and tenants that finally he has become a “kind man” (600), a sanitized spectacle to be consumed by curious Australians and international tourists (not to mention readers). But such structures, such texts, are always ambivalent, fractured by their own instabilities and contradictions, by what has been written over or only partly erased. In the tangled history of colonial encounter in the antipodes, in how Australia has “taken place,” this includes the forced migration of British convicts and the dispossession and genocide of Australian aboriginals. Of course, Badgery, who has been monomaniacal in his attempts to make a “place in this rotten lonely world” (489), has blindly built on/over this national past, ignored it effects. Despite his textual will to confess, to come clean, the truth is that he is incapable of thinking about being Australian in any terms other than ownership and (dis)possession, colonial inferiority and incarceration. In contrast with his specious rhetoric of transcendence and liberation, then, Badgery's buildings prove that he is most comfortable when he is confined—and when he confines others—within elaborate and deceptive cages, whether in textual ones like his so-called autobiography or in architectural ones like the homes he builds for his families. “I always built a place of my own when I could,” Badgery confesses. “You could say I was obsessed with houses, but I was not abnormal. My only abnormality was that I did not have one. I had been forced to leave my houses behind me, evicted from them, disappointed in them, fleeing them because of various events. I had left them to rot and rust and be shat on by cattle on the land of the so-called legal owners who were called squatters because they'd done exactly what I'd done” (33). Badgery, the belated colonist, the perpetual trespasser, cannot grasp the “ancient and established meanings” (Ashcroft, Griffith, and Tiffin 27) of the landscape he wanders through for more than a century, nor can he find and define a home. His own defensive, and deceptive, buildings have failed him: they have not alleviated his feelings of displacement or impermanence or guilt. It is only when he cages himself in his son's emporium and becomes an author, when he translates himself into a “luminous” text, that he feels at home, grounded, self-possessed. As he imagines himself writing in one of the windows of the Pet Shop, in this neon-lit monument, he asks, “The question is: how would you take me, sitting there in my chair, […] surrounded by these swirling signs? Am I a prisoner in the midst of a sign or a spider at its centre?” (545).
We cannot meditate on this semiological dilemma for long, but it is clear that as Badgery's rhetoric becomes increasingly autonomous the home/text he fashions becomes increasingly carceral; eventually, he entraps not only his family in this prison house, but also a cross-section of Australians, for international tourists to visit. By excavating this architectural (dis)order, Carey fictionally interrogates the disturbing memories that Australia is built on/over, remembering the (mythic) figure of the convict and the history of settlement-invasion against a cultural tendency to forget crucial elements of Australia's “guilty past” (Hergenhan 1). A sense of this contradictory mnemonic economy is represented in Bud Dumas's First Impressions, a 1979 sculpture of a figure of the convict—an ambivalent figure at once hauntingly absent yet proudly, indelibly present—that stands as a mark of European origin in the fashionably reinvented tourist district of The Rocks at the foot of the Harbour Bridge in Sydney (see Plate 18, colour section). It strikes me that Badgery and his fellow Australians live out a similarly paradoxical temporality; determined by a once shameful and forgotten but now celebrated, if selectively remembered, convict past, they too embody a carceral unconscious that manifests itself as a willingness to be confined, as a desire to feel guiltless and comfortable when imprisoned, what Turner names the “colonised subconscious” (“American” 440) that produces the very enclosure and entrapment that forms the “most basic structural situation” of Carey's fiction (435).
Badgery, I think, embodies just this sort of systematic self-deception, although he would never admit it. His archi/textual constructions, I argue, are prison-like buildings and narrative traps that Carey uses to frame larger questions about the discontinuities of national identification. Architecture is thus a counter-memory in the novel, a record of difference, as Foucault would say, that is most obvious in the novel's penultimate scene: an act of national de(con)struction in which Badgery, who has begun to renovate the Pet Shop, exposes bricks manufactured by convicts at Brickfields in the nineteenth century (see Plate 17, colour section). In these bricks, records of the past literally persist into the present; inscribed in each brick is the thumbprint of the convict who made it. “‘You see this brick?’” Badgery asks his grandson. “‘You see the thumb print? You know how that got there? Some poor bugger […] a hundred-and-fifty years ago did that. He turned the brick out of the mould and, as he did it, he had to give the wet clay a little shove with his thumbs, see. This one, and this one. They've all got it. So there you are. All around you, in your walls, you've got the thumb prints of convicts. How do you reckon that affects you?’ […] We, both of us, looked around. It was a big building. It was a lot of thumb prints to consider” (542). In this ironic national reading (and writing) lesson, it is clear that the “shame” of the convict past and the “guilt” of colonial settlement-invasion are indelibly impressed in the material out of which Australia has been built. In this cryptic scene, Carey unearths questions about Australia's past, its colonial “ruins,” that Badgery cannot—or will not—answer. Badgery, at this point, is a prisoner himself, along with a gallery of Australian cultural emblems entrapped in comfortable cages. Badgery might claim that he can read the convict and colonial past, but he fails to see its legacy in the postcolonial present. Put another way, he refuses to acknowledge how the prisons of the convict system have been replaced by the perhaps no-less-limiting deceptive national narratives housed in the symbolic Pet Shop, what Carey, in an interview, has named “the lies we have been told in history about Australia, the lies we've told ourselves” (Tautsky 32).
Pontificating about the lies of Australian history, Badgery quotes from the famous work of “M. V. Anderson,” the historian in the novel:
Our forefathers were all great liars. They lied about the lands they selected and the cattle they owned. They lied about their backgrounds and the parentage of their wives. However it was the first lie that is the most impressive for being so monumental, i.e., that the continent, at the time of first settlement, was said to be occupied but not cultivated and by that simple device they were able to give the legal owners short shrift and, when they objected, to use the musket or poison flour, and to do so with a clear conscience. It is in the context of this great foundation stone that we must begin our study of Australian history.
(456, emph. mine)
Invoking a national “edifice complex” (Wigley, Architecture 6), Badgery seems to see through the amnesiac lies of Australian history; but he cannot recognize how the “lies” of the convict past have been impressed upon his own unconscious. For some of Carey's Australians, at least, these lies and the Australians who perpetuate—who perform—them in the Pet Shop are no longer appealing: something outside the “protective” architecture of the Pet Shop is going wrong. Or right. “There are all sorts of noises in the night,” Badgery says, “and I don't mean the keening of an aboriginal woman or the grumbling of a mason, but rather noises in the street outside where the enemies of the emporium have set up their camp. I have never seen them, but anyone can hear the sirens, the shouting, sometimes the drumming of police-horse hooves” (599-600). Thus, the Pet Shop might not be the “bleak” final or “dystopian” image that some critics suggest but a more positive (albeit disturbing and heterogeneous) mnemonic structure, an ironic Tower of Babel in which Carey stages a parodic and antipodean, a satirical and noisy, devolution as humans degenerate into pets, as Australians devolve into Bataille's thoughtless apes in an Australian edifice, in the edifice of Australia. Badgery, willfully blind to his own complicity in the construction of this offensive monument, says of the Pet Shop, “Its whole function was entrapment and its inhabitants could happily while away afternoons and years without any bigger scheme, listening to the races on the radio, reaching out for another oyster, worrying only that the beer glasses were free of detergent and kept, cold and frosted, in the fridge. They discussed the quality of harbour prawns, got drunk, and crunched the prawns' heads, imagining themselves free and happy while all the time they were servants of the building. It made them behave in disgusting ways” (581). This “disgusting” behaviour comes close to what I call the amnesiac cultural (colonial) logic of the Pet Shop, an international spectacle where tourists will pay to see Australians who “do not act like caged people. The very success of the exhibit is in their ability to move and talk naturally within the confines of space” (599).
We are left, finally, with the feeling that the doors are about to be pushed in on the Pet Shop, on this worn-out metaphor, with the hope that the spectres of penal colonialism, of settlement invasion, might be re-addressed, for there are a growing number of Australians, Carey insists, who will no longer build on nor cover over the lies of the past. There is a street-level protest that threatens to break into the Pet Shop at any time; enemies “shout […] in the street” (600). Even Badgery, at the end of his novel, sees that the Pet Shop functions by “sucking rage and hatred towards itself” (600). Badgery, of course, does not understand the implications of this resentment: he is not the “kind man” he claims to have become, nor is the Pet Shop the celebrated national space he imagines. Rather, as a despised cultural monument built over a haunting penal-colonial “crypt,” the Pet Shop is an Australian house of memories teetering on an unsettled foundation. Its pending collapse, its deconstruction, indicates the need for alternative national narratives that re-embody spectres from the past and refuse singular and continuous narratives of national origin, novels like Illywhacker that speak of, and to, the injustice and blindness, the willful forgettings and deceptive rememberings, of Australia's penal colonialization. Badgery's last words promise “interesting times ahead” (600), but a more architectural, a more spatial conclusion might be to insist that there will be interesting Australian texts ahead, including buildings that persist from a remembered world and that signal the need to keep looking into how, and of what material—what memories—postcolonial nations and the subjects who inhabit them are built.
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