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An Infinite Onion: Narrative Structure in Peter Carey's Fiction

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SOURCE: "An Infinite Onion: Narrative Structure in Peter Carey's Fiction," in Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 11, No. 2, October, 1983, pp. 195-204.

[In the following essay, Dovey remarks on the mythic qualities of Carey's fiction, focusing her analysis on Bliss.]

It is a common practice of current literary critics to reveal how the subject matter of various literary works is in fact narrative itself, and from the structuralist perspective the process of creating the narrative is the only subject matter there can be. The increasing self-reflexiveness of post-modernist novels deals with the nature of narrative in a largely explicit manner, but Todorov claims [in The Poetics of Prose, 1977] that even the earliest narrative, the Odyssey, has as its theme 'the narrative forming the Odyssey'. So when I say of Peter Carey that his novel and his stories are concerned with the nature of narrative, and with the forms and functions of fiction, I am claiming nothing new, either for myself or for Carey. And Bliss makes it evident that Peter Carey claims nothing new for himself. Harry Joy becomes the storyteller at Bog Onion Road but, the narrator tells us, 'He never thought of what he did as original. It wasn't either…. He was merely sewing together the bright patchwork of lives, legends, myths, beliefs, hearsay into a splendid cloak that gave a rich glow to all their lives.'

This passage might be said to describe the process whereby Carey creates his fictions, and to define his role not as creator, but as re-creator. As in traditional narrative, Harry Joy's stories have been passed 'from one recognized "owner" to his heir'. [In The Nature of Narrative, 1966] Scholes and Kellogg equate traditional narrative with myth, and in this context the structure of Bliss can be described as mythic, in a way which recalls the sacred origins of myth in the rituals enacting the cyclical processes of nature. The plot pattern follows the seasonal pattern of mortification, purgation, invigoration, and jubilation, which corresponds to Harry Joy's first death, period of purgatory in his imagined hell, restoration to self and to the society of Bog Onion Road, and the final joyful reunion with Honey Barbara. That Carey is concerned with myth is evident in the story 'Do You Love Me?' where the results of the annual census are 'the pivot point for the yearly "Festival of the Corn" (an ancient festival, related to the wealth of the earth)'. The juxtaposition of gross materialism and sacred ritual here constitutes an ironic comment on modern ritual.

In the case of traditional narrative, Scholes and Kellogg claim that 'newly invented stories must be only somewhat less rare than accurate historical narrative'. Likewise, the narrator of Bliss makes the point that, with one exception, Harry Joy's stories are not original. If the stories cannot be original in themselves, then it is in the process of telling that the capacity for originality resides; this is the essence of Alex Duval's words to Harry 'You were a good talker Harry. That's what made you, you know that? Not what you said, no … It was the damn way you said it' (Bliss). The foregrounding of the art of the narrator is one of the features of the mode described by Robert Scholes [in Fabulation and Metafiction, 1979] as fabulation:

The fabulator is important to the extent that he can rejoice and refresh us. And his ability to produce joy and peace depends on the skill with which he fabulates. Delight in design, and its concurrent emphasis on the art of the designer, will serve in part to distinguish the art of the fabulator from the work of the novelist or the satirist. Of all narrative forms, fabulation puts the highest premium on art and joy.

Both the title of the novel and the name of the protagonist testify to Carey's concern with these aspects of fiction.

The 'art of the designer' is foregrounded at different levels of the narrative structure. The mythic framework, filled in with stories told, heard, written, and acted out, places all narrative within the all-encompassing bounds of myth. Scholes says 'myth tells us that we are all part of a great story' and

Just as the realistic novel was rooted in the conflict between the individual and society, fabulation springs from the collision between the philosophical and mythic perspectives on the meaning and value of existence, with their opposed dogmas of struggle and acquiescence. If existence is mythic, then man may accept his role with equanimity. If not, then he must struggle through part after part trying to create one uniquely his own.

The conflict between the fictions within which people live, and the fictions which they create, is central to Carey's meaning in both the novel and the short stories. The narratives which make up Bliss are Vance Joy's stories, ranging from folklore through parable to anecdote; Harry's stories, which are Vance's stories, with one notable exception; David's lies and dreams; Alex Duval's reports; the 'wreckers yard of words' in which Bettina spent her childhood; Honey Barbara's folk literature, which consists of Cancer Maps and 'the Dream Police (a legendary squad of psychiatrists) and the whole cast of Cosmic Conspirators, the CIA, flying saucers, multinationals with seed-patents'; the old man in Alice Dalton's institution, writing down his last memories before shock therapy destroys them; the little boy scouts making notes, who drop their pitiful notebook and pencil as they are carried, screaming, from the institution. There are other stories, and there are the non-verbal forms of narrative, the signs and systems which are either personal or social constructs: New York, which Vance Joy says will become 'after the next flood, a splendid book read by all mankind with wonder', the language of advertising, and the death scenarios of Bettina, Joel and David.

At the centre of them all, right inside the infinite onion (which is Harry's vision of hell), is the circus elephant episode. When Harry's car is squashed by a circus elephant he becomes the subject, or the object, of a worn-out joke, he is in someone else's story. It is characteristic of Carey, who refuses absolutes, to place in the mouth of Billy de Vere, the foolish, jovial circus man, the words of Oscar Wilde, 'Life imitating art'—modified somewhat by his afterthought, 'Or should I say … life imitating bullshit'. The proposition is made, and simultaneously undermined. We perceive reality through the lenses of preconstructed fictions which, depending on the value or the validity of the fictions, can be seen as life imitating art, or life imitating bullshit. In other words, you are in someone else's story, and all that you can do about it is to tell your own story.

At the police station, where he is taken as a result of the circus elephant joke, Harry extemporizes 'the only original story he would ever tell. In fear of punishment, in hope of release, glimpsing the true nature of his sin, he told a story he had never heard about people he had never met in a place he had never visited'. At this point Harry is like Scheherazade in the Arabian Nights, who 'lives exclusively to the degree that she can continue to tell stories' (Todorov). Here 'Narrative equals life; absence of narrative, death' (Todorov). On the way home from the police station, the taxi takes Harry over a river 'black as the Styx' (Bliss): as a reward for originality Harry has been released from the underworld. If narrative is the subject of Carey's novel, so is death and, by extension, life. The deaths of the various characters constitute the major articulations of the novel, and the first words we read are 'Harry Joy was to die three times'. By giving us the ending in the beginning, the narrator is saying that there is only one possible ending to the narrative of life, and so gives the lie to any fictions which would disguise this fact. And once again he is saying that it is not the tale which is important, but the telling. To quote from David Lodge [in The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature, 1977], who is quoting from a story by Leonard Michaels (the infinite onion of the world of criticism!), 'Fictions, whether literary, theological, philosophical or political, can never make death acceptable or even comprehensible, yet in a world "incessantly created of incessant death" … we have no other resource'. It is precisely this resource, the capacity for telling stories, which gives Harry a God-like stance and a temporary immunity from death, and it is significant that his resemblance to Krishna is referred to several times in the novel.

Neither David, nor Bettina and Joel have this capacity. They are 'blind-worms pushing forward, entwining in the dark. One could, unfairly perhaps, imagine them as the instruments of someone else's pleasure' (Bliss). They live frustrated, thwarted lives and die violent, meaningless deaths. Bettina lives according to the fiction of the Great American Dream. David is trapped within the fictive constructs of Vance Joy's stories, passed on by Harry, doomed to act them out because he cannot interpret them and retell them in his own way. It is tempting to interpret the actions of David in Freudian terms: he tries to get rid of his father, by placing him in a mental institution, and makes love to Honey Barbara, his father's lover. The oedipal struggle has been translated into literary terms by Harold Bloom [in The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 1973], with the father standing for the literary predecessors of any particular poet. Bloom claims that 'True poetic history is the story of how poets as poets have suffered other poets, just as any true biography is the story of how anyone suffered his own family—or his own displacement of family into lovers and friends' and that 'Poetry is the enchantment of incest, disciplined by resistance to that enchantment'. David cannot resist that enchantment and his actions within the family can be taken as a means of signifying his failure as a storyteller. At the level of the imagination his relationship with the father remains one of pure plagiarism: he orchestrates his life and his death according to Vance's stories. However, the meaning of the novel as a whole discourages this kind of interpretation by reduction through reminding one that the theories of Freud and Bloom are just two more fictive constructs.

David's mock heroic death is a sign that the use or function of fiction is 'not as the "representation of an action", but as an imaginative construct' (Scholes). Similarly, the stories related by Carey's narrator are not to be taken as absolutes. He tells the stories of a particular culture; they are a conglomerate of the signs and systems of meaning by which we attempt to live and to interpret the world. They are myths in the other, smaller sense of the word, the network of beliefs and fears which constitute our perception of the world: the myth of America, of money, of power, of success, of the world of drugs, of cancer, of eating habits, of 'dropping-out'. Even Harry's retreat to the seemingly idyllic existence at Bog Onion Road is undermined by the cowardly way in which he does it, and by his violent reception in 'paradise' at the hands of Clive and Daze. If the novel is didactic—and the didactic quality is characteristic of fabulation—it is so only in terms of what it has to say about the relationship between life and fiction. As Scholes says, the value of fiction is its effect on the life of the imagination. For that reason one has to give something for a story, as Vance Joy says; what one gives is the exercise of the imagination to interpret, to re-create what the narrator has given.

This concern with the relationship between life and fiction is central to the mode of fantasy. According to Todorov

the fantastic text is not characterized by the simple presence of supernatural phenomena or beings, but by the hesitation which is established in the reader's perception of the events represented. Throughout the tale, the reader wonders (in the same way that a character often does, within the work) if the facts reported are to be explained by a natural or a supernatural cause, if they are illusions or realities. This hesitation derives from the fact that the extraordinary (hence potentially supernatural) event occurs not in a marvelous world but in an everyday context, the one most familiar to us. Consequently the tale of the fantastic is the narrative of a perception….

I have quoted at some length from Todorov because this description is particularly appropriate to the world of Bliss and of the stories. The opening sentence of Bliss, 'Harry Joy was to die three times' places the events of the novel within the context of the supernatural, but what follows is more or less naturalistic. Carey himself has said 'My novel is a love story, and it's pretty naturalistic' [Peter Carey quoted by John Maddocks in 'Bizarre Realities: An Interview with Peter Carey', Southerly (1981)]. Within the novel Harry wonders whether he is in hell or whether he is mad. The context is crucial: if the setting is supernatural then the behaviour of his friends and family is 'natural'; if the setting is the natural world then their behaviour is extraordinary, and he is mad. Bliss is truly a 'narrative of perception.'

Carey has also said 'The writer I probably most liked in retrospect was Gabriel García Márquez—his ability to blend elements of fantasy and reality on a big scale, with some complexity' (Maddocks interview). With the novel's emphasis on the impossibility of originality it seems legitimate to seek out his literary sources. The similarities between Carey's novel and Márquez' major novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, are mainly centred around the use of fantasy. For both writers fantasy is an expression of freedom, in the sense that one liberates oneself from cultural 'lies' by telling one's own stories. More specifically, both novels express a cyclical concept of time, and locate their origin not in the author himself, but in the timeless world of myth. Márquez' novel is supposedly written by Melquíades, a magical, mythical figure who resists death, and whose status to some extent resembles that of Harry Joy. There is also the fairly direct parallel between the episode in which the citizens of Macondo write labels for objects as they begin to lose their memory, and the episode in which the old man buries his written memories in the grounds of the institution. They both signify that all we can retain of past reality is words and that these in fact have a very tenuous relationship with that 'reality'.

These similarities point outwards to certain parallels in the socio-historical context of these two writers. Australia and Colombia are both post-colonial societies, and both novels make it clear that the former colonizers have merely made way for more insidious cultural and economic colonization by America. In this context it seems fairly certain that Carey's choice of Bogota as the locale of David's final scenario was influenced by the significance of Bogota in One Hundred Years. There it represents modern, Western civilization—Thomas Wolfe's statement that you can't go home transformed into 'You can't leave home any more?' Western 'civilization' is ubiquitous (almost), hence Miquel Fernandez, who reluctantly shoots David, and looks forward to opening a bookshop near the university in Medelin where he would 'sell Stevenson in translation but also in English' (Bliss).

If the stories the narrator tells, and tells of, comment upon the narrating act, so does his omniscient stance towards the narrative. This omniscience is evident from the outset in the twice-quoted opening lines, and in the unabashed use of prolepses throughout the narrative. [In a footnote, Dovey states: "[See] Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 40. I use Genette's terminology here. Prolepsis signifies 'any narrative manoeuvre that consists of narrating or evoking in advance an event that will take place later' and analepsis signifies 'any evocation after the fact of an event that took place earlier than the point in the story where we are at any given moment'."] These range from brief pointers, such as 'Bettina would certainly grow in leaps and bounds over the following year' (Bliss), to the longer sections telling of David's death and of the coming cancer epidemic, both of which constitute external prolepses. That important opening sentence 'Harry Joy was to die three times' is the equivalent of what Todorov calls a 'plot of predestination' in his discussion of primitive narrative, and so constitutes yet another link with the mythic origins of narrative. As in folklore, the narrative conforms largely to chronological order but it is interesting to note that the few analepses that there are also convey a sense of predestination. They refer to the childhood of Harry, Bettina and Honey Barbara in a way which suggests that the roles of these characters are to some extent determined in advance.

The narrator's direct address of the reader is an important source of meaning in the novel. He does this in different ways. The first is simply another example of his omniscience: 'It was not a question that would have occurred to Harry, who had never seen his family as you, dear reader, have now been privileged to' (Bliss). The next is more significant: 'The rewards of originality have not been wasted on him and if he is, at this stage, unduly cocky, he might as well be allowed to enjoy it. So we will not interfere with the taxi driver, who is prolonging his euphoria by driving him the long way home'. Genette discusses this narrative figure, which classical rhetoricians called author's metalepsis, in some detail. Metalepsis here has the sense of 'taking hold of (telling) by changing level', and the figure 'consists of pretending that the poet "himself brings about the effect he celebrates".' As such it is an important device for foregrounding the narrating act and, although the figure is not used extensively in Bliss, I am going to quote at some length from Genette, as his discussion of the figure is highly relevant to Carey's novel:

All these games, by the intensity of their effects, demonstrate the importance of the boundary they tax their ingenuity to overstep, in defiance of verisimilitude—a boundary that is precisely the narrating (or the performance) itself: a shifting but sacred frontier between two worlds, the world in which one tells, the world of which one tells. Whence the uneasiness Borges so well puts his finger on [in Other Inquisitions]: 'Such inversions suggest that if the characters in a story can be readers or spectators, then we, their readers or spectators, can be fictitious'. The most troubling thing about metalepsis indeed lies in this unacceptable and insistent hypothesis, that the extradiegetic is perhaps always diegetic, and that the narrator and his narratees—you and I—perhaps belong to some narrative.

The narrator again oversteps this boundary between the world of which one tells and the world in which one tells, in the closing sections of the book: 'But now, the last story, and the last story is our story, the story of Harry Joy and Honey Barbara, and for this story, like all stories, you must give something, a sapphire, or blue bread made from cedar ash' (Bliss). He claims the role of traditional narrator, passing the story on to his heirs. It is our story both because we must read it and because, as Harry Joy's children, we are fated to tell it: we can only tell what has been told before. One is aware of a fairly complex narrative effect here, which can be illuminated by Todorov's concept of 'embedding'. An embedded narrative is one told by a second (or third, or fourth) narrator, within another narrative, as occurs in the Arabian Nights. Several of Vance Joy's stories, and Harry's story at the police station, are embedded in Bliss, which is thus the embedding narrative. Todorov describes the significance of embedding as being the 'articulation of the most essential property of all narrative. For the embedding narrative is the narrative of a narrative…. The embedded narrative is the image of that great abstract narrative of which all the others are merely infinitesimal parts as well as the image of the embedding narrative which directly precedes it'. If Bliss in turn, becomes embedded in the story of the reader, the narrative of the novel is doubly enclosed: by the tradition out of which it grows, and the tradition which it creates.

Carey's use of Bogota is evidence of the foregrounding of the intertextual aspect of the narrative, and there are other examples of this, such as the Meursault wine which Harry asks for in Milanos restaurant. Aldo says 'There is no Meursault'. This use of the name of Camus' protagonist in L'Etranger may be interpreted as a subtle denial of the position Camus' heroes adopt in an absurd universe. Discussing black humour (and Carey can be considered a black humorist), Scholes says 'The best, in fact, that Camus found to offer humanity as a response to the human condition was 'scorn'…. What man must learn is neither scorn nor resignation, say the black humorists, but how to take a joke'. In Bliss it is obvious that the way to take a joke is to tell a joke, or a story.

Another example of the foregrounding of intertextuality is the title of the novel, which is surely taken from Katherine Mansfield's story of the same name. The protagonist of that story is also Harry, but there it is his wife who, having mistakenly assumed that she is living in a state of domestic and marital bliss, has her illusion shattered by the sudden discovery of her husband's infidelity. The stories in Katherine Mansfield's collection, Bliss and Other Stories, are about modes of perception, about how people live within their own cosy fictions, which often bear no relationship to the way things are. Which makes them very similar, at a profound level, to the stories in Carey's two collections, The Fat Man in History and War Crimes. Harry Joy's stories are described as 'new constructions' (Bliss), and the recurrence of ingenious constructions in the stories has been noted. The constructs, whether they be of the mind, or whether they are concrete, physical structures, such as the Kristu-Du in the story of that name or Gleason's model town in 'American Dreams', stand for the various attempts of characters to 'narrate' their own world. The ending of the story then reflects back upon the validity or, in most cases, the invalidity of these constructs as ways of perceiving or acting in the world.

The stories correspond fairly closely to Eikhenbaum's definition of the genre in his essay on O. Henry and the theory of the short story [O. Henry and the Theory of the Short Story, trans. I. R. Titunik, 1968]: 'The story must be constructed on the basis of some contradiction, incongruity, error, contrast, etc. But that is not enough. By its very essence, the story, just as the anecdote, amasses its whole weight toward the ending'. In almost all cases, Carey's stories follow this pattern: an expectation or an hypothesis—which varies from the concreteness of a well worked out plan to the vagueness of an undefined fear—is set up by one or more of the characters, only to be frustrated or proven invalid by the ending, which reveals some 'contradiction, incongruity, error, contrast'. Thus Crabs' fantasy about leaving the Drive-In, which has become the world, is thwarted when the road out leads back to the way in, and he is locked out; the narrator in 'Peeling' has his anticipation of the slow exploration of the girl who visits him, the prospect of discovering her layer by layer, episode by episode, turned back on himself when he peels everything away only to reveal a small, broken, white doll. Carey has said of this story that it has 'many, many meanings', and that one of the things it is saying is that 'there was a mystery at the end and it was the mystery you saw in the first place. Dolls—…' (Maddocks)—another 'infinite onion', and a demonstration of the attempt to interpret mocked yet again; the train-trip scenario of 'The Journey of a Lifetime' turns from dream into nightmare as the narrator is served tangible evidence of the true nature of his venture in the form of ice blocks from a refrigerated cadaver; the architect in 'Kristu Du' bases his scenario for the justification of his life's work on the false evidence of the corrupt Mr Meat—and finally his dream is thwarted by his own error in planning. And so on.

The endings do not constitute a revelation concerning the psychology of the characters. In fact character is a secondary consideration with Carey who has outlined the way he sets about writing a story: 'Yes, well I suppose that how I've worked is to be interested or intrigued by a particular situation. In thinking about that situation I've had to find people to flesh it out and be part of it' (Maddocks). If the stories are characterized by a surprise ending, this is not a hollow device of emplotment, but one of the major ways of establishing meaning. If we compose and interpret the world by means of fictions, then surprise is inevitable as they are inevitably exposed as such. This is clearly a more negative view of the human capacity to 'narrate one's world' than that expressed in Bliss. Stories such as 'The Puzzling Nature of Blue' and 'The Rose' are evidence that creativity may have evil sources and consequences, and have been described by Carey [in an interview with Philip Nielsen entitled "Tell Me what Colour You Think the Sky Is," Australian Literary Studies (1981)] as 'the signs of a crime made physically manifest'. 'Originality, without Goodness … is nothing, of no worth' says Alex Duval in Bliss. In true Carey fashion these words have been placed in the mouth of a somewhat suspect character, which undercuts their significance in the total context of meaning. In the light of the portrayal of Harry's experience, with the warping of his perceptions following his two 'deaths', it seems safer to say that creativity without awareness is nothing. Whereas in the beginning he did not understand Vance's stories and so 'transmitted them imperfectly', by the end 'he told them better because he now understood them'.

On the other hand, another group of stories shows that if personal fictions are often invalid, so are the public fictions, the myths, beliefs and cultural assumptions which are taken as reality. 'Conversations with Unicorns' belongs to this group, and reveals the human origins of a belief system. Similarly, 'The Puzzling Nature of Blue' shows how signs, such as blue extremities in the story, are cultural constructs, arbitrary and absurd in their origins, and not 'natural' at all, as modern myths would have one believe. In 'The Fat Man in History' the meaning of 'fat' varies according to the socio-historic context. This story further suggests that any form of investigation is a projection of one's personal construct onto the world and that this construct has the power to change the structures which one seeks to interpret. Nancy Bowlby's relationship with the fat men provides her with the opportunity to study their behaviour, but it becomes the cause of their behaviour, of the 'Revolution in a Closed Society': a marvelous demonstration of the structuralist position.

Whence back to the fallibility of interpretation, something one is constantly aware of when writing about Carey. The tendency of postmodernist fiction is to defy criticism, and Legasse has placed Carey within the context of postmodernist writers: 'His music is more international … and echoes the upbeat rhythms of the three B's: Borges, Barth and Barthelme' [Jim Legasse, review of War Crimes, by Peter Carey, Westerly]. However, as David Lodge points out, with reference to Beckett (another 'B'): 'The often-asserted resistance of the world to meaningful interpretation would be a sterile basis for writing if it were not combined with a poignant demonstration of the human obligation to attempt such interpretation'.

In alphabetical order, C comes after B, Carey comes after the three (or more) B's. While his work is informed by similar issues, it provides a highly pleasurable narrative experience, which is often not the case with his predecessors. Carey has said 'I'd like to write for as broad an audience as possible…. I really believe very, very firmly in the possibility of popular art that's good in anybody's terms' (Maddocks), and he has most certainly achieved this goal. If one has to give something for a story, it is a pleasure to do so, for Carey's stories engage one's interest on so many levels and, to use the words of Robert Scholes, they have the power to rejoice and refresh. And so, for what it is worth, here is my sapphire, or blue bread made from cedar ash.

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