'It Cannot <i>Not</i> Be There': Borges and Australia's Peter Carey
You're quite right when you suggest that it might be difficult to say exactly how Borges may have influenced me, also right to suggest that the influence is/was there…. It is there, it cannot not be there.
—PETER CAREY, letter
On first reading Peter Carey's writing, I found it different from other Australian literature, and I resolved this encounter with the unexpected by making broad and perhaps obvious comparisons: Carey belongs more to the world tradition than to the Australian; more specifically, his work suggests South American writers, such as Borges and García Márquez, or North Americans like Barth, Barthelme, Vonnegut, and Kesey, or Europeans like Kafka and Camus—all facile enough parallels to draw. In fact, Australian reviewers had already said much the same about Carey's work, one observing, for example, that "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 (June 1980)]. The Australian critic Brian Kiernan noted in a letter to me that reviewers in Australia often make such sweeping statements about Carey, but critics there fail to develop these generalizations because comparative literature is not generally pursued in Australian universities either as a field of study or as an avenue of criticism, except to a limited extent, comparing Australian writing with American, British, and other English-language literatures. Thus there exists no body of criticism on which to rely.
Instead I turned to Peter Carey himself and in a letter asked the questions one would often like to pose when setting out on a comparative study: had he in truth read Borges? If so, what part, if any, had Borges played in his own development as a writer? Carey replied [in a letter to the critic dated October 22, 1986], in the words of the headnote above, then elaborated:
I remember the name of the friend who introduced me to Borges, remember the Melbourne bookshop where the first book (Ficciones) was purchased…. The bookshop was The Whole Earth Bookshop (God, could it really have been called that?) and its Hippypoet proprietors ignored all the publishers' ideas on how the world of literature must be divided up and (illegally) imported paperbacks direct from the U.S. (Up until that time we could only read what London publishers decided.)… I shudder to imagine how the works of an erudite blind librarian might have been understood, misunderstood, as they were gulped down by a twenty eight year old Australian—recently embarked on the adventure of reading—who, I am sure, took them in long impatient draughts, better suited to simple spring water than such fragrant and delicate distillations.
Agreeable to further question-answering, Carey concluded: "I look forward to the inquisition." [In a footnote, Ross adds: "To Peter Carey, I am grateful for his clear replies to my sometimes muddled questions. I have quoted at length from Carey's response to 'the inquisition.' Perhaps foolishly I ignored his admission in one letter: 'Is what I am saying the truth? Was this really the attraction [to Borges's writing] or am I simply trying to build an answer that will make us both happy?' But such are the hazards of the comparative enterprise, especially with the author looking over one's shoulder."] Whether he used "inquisition" intentionally remains speculative, yet one cannot help but think of Borges's first book of essays, which he called Inquisiciones (1925), as well as of the later volume, Otras Inquisiciones (1952). Another of Carey's remarks, when read in a Borgesian light, suggests that image so much a part of Borges's world picture: the universe as a library, maybe even a bookshop. Did his first encounter with the great South American really occur in a store called "The Whole Earth Bookshop," Carey asks, seeming to hint at the irony involved in such a name.
A young writer, Carey has published two volumes of short stories, The Fat Man in History and War Crimes, and three novels, Bliss, Illywhacker, and Oscar & Lucinda. [In a footnote, Ross states: "In a study of this length, it was not feasible to take up Carey's novels. First published in Australia, they have been issued in the United States by Harper & Row. Bliss is a richly comic novel about Harry Joy who survives a heart attack but discovers in the process that he has been living in hell. On one level more realistic than the short stories, Bliss continues to break down the barriers between fiction and life. In Illywhacker Carey reshapes Australian history, which Mark Twain called 'the most beautiful lies.' The narrator described himself as an illywhacker, an Australian slang term for a professional trickster or con artist. Certainly, Borges would have appreciated and approved of such a name for the storyteller. Not without its shadow of Borges, Illywhacker brings to mind more fully Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, thus showing once again how Borges, on whom García Márquez in part relied, helped to establish modern Latin American literature and its international reputation. Oscar & Lucinda, which depicts a minister (Oscar) who is an inveterate gambler and thinks it is appropriate because believing in God is the biggest gamble of all, also has its Borgesian touches."] With the publication of The Fat Man in History, he established himself, first at home and then abroad, as a highly original figure in Australian literature. In a review of that first book Frank Moorhouse, another innovator of Australian fiction, praised Carey's inventiveness and the freshness he had brought to Australian literature: "For some time now there has been a vacancy in the Sophisticated Fantasy Section of the Short Story Industry. It is my pleasure to announce that Peter Carey, 30, of Melbourne has been appointed to fill that position. He will also do allegories, fables, and astonishing tricks" [Quoted in Don Anderson, ed., Transgressions, Australian Writing Now, 1986].
Like Borges, Carey had inherited a national literature dominated by social realism. Before Carey's writing appeared another Australian, Patrick White, had altered irrevocably, through a series of impressive novels, the course of Australian fiction, which White himself early on described [in "The Prodigal Son," Australian Letters (April 1958)] as "the dreary, dun-coloured offspring of journalistic realism." Like White, who looked to the European tradition and wrote as though Australian fiction before him did not exist, Carey searched elsewhere for his models. That Carey's first book appeared in 1974 is significant, for a year earlier White had received the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first time an Australian had been so honored. Of course, White had been writing for nearly twenty-five years without much recognition from Australian critics who too often considered his metaphysical handling of Australian materials a violation of the social realism, bush humor, and other established conventions they admired. Once recognized by so prestigious a prize, White's work soon became acceptable to the most reluctant of his critics—at least publicly. So did other writing that broke away from the stock and often hackneyed accounts of such seasoned matter as life in the bush, family struggles on a sheep or cattle station, mateship, pioneering, and the labor movement. Gene Bell-Villada concludes [in Borges and His Fiction, 1981] that "Borges's best stories contribute a new praxis and sensibility" to Latin American fiction, and he praises this "fruitful artistic mode that breaks away from psychology and realism, which for some two hundred years have been the fundamental materials of prose narrative." In regard to Australian literature, much the same could be said of White, then of Peter Carey and the others who emulated White in his rejection of literary custom, and in their own ways let ripen in Australia a "fruitful artistic mode" resembling the one Bell-Villada saw take hold in Latin America.
Not many years ago, the question was frequently asked: Is there really an Australian literature? As a result of White's reception abroad, even before he received the Nobel Prize, and the international recognition accorded Australian writers in recent years, the faraway continent's distinctive literary voice now speaks with such clarity that the once scornful question has lost its edge. For instance, Tom Shapcott, director of the Literature Board of the Australia Council, has reported that during 1986 publications in the United States reviewed more books from Australia than from any other foreign country except Great Britain. Scores of Australian books, most often fictional works but occasionally a volume of poetry, now appear on major American publishers' lists each year, many of them faring well in the marketplace. According to editors and agents, the competition for Australian books has become keen among publishers in the United States.
This literary zest, stemming in part from government subsidy administered by the Literature Board of the Australia Council, has benefited Carey and his generation of writers, as have changes in worldwide publishing practices that make the books of international writers, especially those in translation, accessible to young Australians, who can now mature on a cosmopolitan literature. "I grew up in almost total ignorance of literature, the literature of my own country in particular," Carey recalls. When he began to read seriously he says that he did not turn to "the fiction written in, by, or about Australia" but became, as he described himself in a letter [to the critic dated April 6, 1987],
a denizen of one of Borges' libraries—a great circular building crammed with unindexed books, its bulging shelves occasionally interrupted by tall thin windows through which one could see a brilliant ultramarine sky, dust from road works or quarries, a society founded by convicts where even those who now had big houses and expensive cars still carried, not the values of their apparent bourgeois status, but the values and prejudices of convicts. The society outside the library did not value writers, artists, singers, story tellers. It was a society that valued men who were good with their hands.
Yet it is about this society that Carey most often writes, recording his vision of it not in the "dun-coloured" tinge of the realist but in the broad and vivid strokes of the mythmaker, the fabulist, the visionary, the metaphysician.
In his twenties, during Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War, Carey left Australia, which he then considered "a Client State … of the American government." Abroad, he imagined himself "a citizen of the world": "In Europe (Britain in particular) I had come 'home.' I had returned to the culture from which I and two generations before me had been exiled. I cannot tell you what a delight it was to see the electric green grass between Dover and London or, for that matter, to hold a copy of the Sunday Times—complete with colour supplement—on my lap." He came back to Australia, though, a country that he admits he has always held a "great love" for but at the same time "feared and loathed." After returning, he worked as an advertising copywriter, lived part of the time in a commune, and started to write the fiction that is neither Australian nor non-Australian, just as Borges's work is neither Argentine nor non-Argentine. For both, although inhabitants of the world library, are firmly grounded in their own particular countries whose reality they enhance by traveling abroad in the country of the mind, the country that Patrick White describes through Laura Trevelyan's confession in Voss: "Knowledge was never a matter of geography. Quite the reverse, it overflows all maps that exist. Perhaps true knowledge only comes of death by torture in the country of the mind."
This young Australian, growing up in "a society where," he says, "artists were not only not valued but, often despised," found "a book called Ficciones" and years later remembers that first reading when he discovered "within its covers—stories of a potency … never dreamed possible. The stories were magical, hermetic, creatures of the library. They posited a world where books had power, where artists had power, where story-telling mattered." In retrospect, though, how do we determine the ways this journey into the country of the mind affected Carey's writing? Like Borges, Carey demonstrates a strong sense of nationality, for he makes full use of the peculiar materials his country offers—its history, social oddities, geography; its people and their folklore—along with autobiographical and family matter. On the other hand, like Borges, Carey can turn to any part of the world and call it his own within that particular fiction. Yet for both writers the components of a story—setting, plot, dialogue, character—derive their strength not from faithful rendering of locale, not from the sources on which they draw, not from strong character delineation, not from the virtuosity of their prose, but from "truths painfully arrived at," as Carey defines the ancient art of story making.
[In Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary Biography, 1978] Emir Rodriguez Monegal describes Ficciones as "perhaps the single most important book of prose fiction written in Spanish in this century." To make such a claim for Carey's The Fat Man in History (1974) in relation to Australian fiction may be debatable, but certainly this book of twelve stories brought a singular newness to the Australian short prose narrative. Carey had presented himself as being "international," a label with which Australian critics often dub a writer who breaks the mold. Exactly what they mean by that appellation—at times complimentary, at times derisive—remains somewhat obscure, but I rather imagine they intend to suggest that the writer has looked to European and American literary figures, especially those considered postmodern, for his or her artistic mode, rather than to the Australian classic writers like Henry Lawson and Joseph Furphy, whose stature is comparable to that of Mark Twain and Bret Harte in the literature of the United States.
To return now to the original proposition—that Carey's work from the outset led me (and other readers) to think of Borges and those authors often associated with him; let us then ask, in what ways does Carey's fiction recall the Argentine master's? This is an obvious question in light of the knowledge that Carey has admitted to reading Borges and considering this literary experience an important element in his own formation as a writer. If it were possible, I would present here an impressive and all-encompassing list of characteristics to define the qualities that make Borges's fiction distinctive, then methodically apply them to Carey's writing. But no matter how thorough the search, first through the fiction itself, then through the abundant commentary on it, no such ordered list emerges. [In The Cardinal Points of Borges, edited by Lowell Dunham and Ivar Ivask, 1971] Donald A. Yates attempts just such a feat in his essay "The Four Cardinal Points of Borges." While admitting that "to ascribe to Borges's artistic world four key aspects, four cardinal points, is, to be sure, arbitrary," Yates hopes that with "any luck" his scheme will be "in some way telling." And luck rides with him, as he compares the cardinal points to those of the compass and thereby provides an ordered way to look at Borges's work.
South on this compass stands for Borges's deep sense of Argentine nationality, not only in the way he makes use of indigenous materials but also in his absorption and synthesis of borrowings from diverse sources—an easy assimilation Yates ascribes to the special type of Argentine criollismo that Borges represents. Carey, a third-generation Australian, is also a criollo, born of European parents transplanted in the Southern Hemisphere. Bound to Australia, but ambivalent in his sentiments toward it, Carey, like all his countrymen of European descent, has always looked to the Northern Hemisphere and taken from it those elements required to complement his intellectual and artistic development. To call either Borges or Carey "Europeanized" or "international" may be a legitimate appraisal but not a disparaging one, as an examination of the next point on the compass will prove.
North, according to Yates, takes language and literature as its orientation. Borges has often said that the most significant feature of his childhood was his father's library of English books, which helped direct him toward a life of literature. Because Borges's writing makes use of other literatures, he admits to influences without hesitation, Yates notes, and then concludes, "Language … continues in [Borges's] later years to be a point to which he is oriented, a north by which he still guides himself." Carey, too, recalls a library whose "bulging shelves" transported him to a world far beyond the one that "interrupted" through the "tall thin windows" of that "great circular building" in Australia (an apt description of the Victoria State Library in Melbourne). Like Borges, Carey does not hesitate to grant those books a place in his own writing, admitting easily that his eclectic reading led him into literary experiments of his own, some successful, others not. With many creative years ahead of him and with his literary success freeing him of other responsibilities, Carey now lives a life of language, derived in large part from "a north by which he still guides himself." In Bliss, Carey describes the talent of a great storyteller who gave to language a meaning that only his handling of it could impart: "The words of the story could be of no use to anyone else. The words, by themselves, were useless. The words were an instrument only he could play and they became, in the hands of others, dull and lifeless, like picked flowers or bright stones removed from underwater." Thus the north of the compass alone would be useless, an observation that introduces the next point.
East on this literary compass is the cardinal point that represents what Yates calls the most "distinctive feature" of Borges's writing: "It could be described as a fascination with philosophical and metaphysical questions that manifests itself, in part, in the incorporation of these problems as elements of his prose fiction." Drawn more to the abstractions of infinity and identity than to the palpable substance of daily life with which he clothes these larger concerns, Borges has admitted that he is "quite simply a man who uses perplexities for literary purposes." [In a letter to the critic dated April 6, 1987] Carey recalls how, on discovering Borges's work, he had found storytelling that mattered, that gave artists power. No such phenomenon, Carey notes, had occurred in his country (where the tale and its teller mattered little) since the time, a century ago, when Australians took to their hearts Henry Lawson and his accounts of bush life. But Carey finds suspect even Lawson's fabled reception, and he wonders if the popular reports of "shearers and bushworkers reading Lawson by lanternlight may be the wishful thinking of city intellectuals." Similarly, Borges found noteworthy that the literature celebrating the exploits of Argentine gauchos, the equivalent to Lawson's tales of bushmen, was in truth the creation of city writers—those urban intellectuals who claimed to speak in the style and voice of the gauchos. Lawson, like his Argentine counterparts, much preferred the comforts and relatively cosmopolitan atmosphere of Sydney to the bush he extolled. For both Borges and Carey, the storyteller and the story matter—their power is derived not from the faithful yet artificial recording of national myth but from the painful seeking of truth. This belief in the power of story is the province of the final point.
West on Borges's compass Yates considers to be "the strong, ever-present narrative ingredient of drama." This element he describes as assuming the form of vivid color, melodrama, mystery, tight plotting—those features that stand in for the psychological probing or exposition generally absent in Borges's work. Likewise, Carey's stories are well constructed from a narrative standpoint, never employing the tricks of tedious psychological probing or dreary internal meandering. Instead, their dramatic events emerge swiftly in dazzling and mysterious ways. For one thing, both Borges and Carey show a penchant for depicting violence, a tendency Yates attributes in part to Borges's fondness for western films, gangster movies, and detective fiction. Carey, an Australian growing up in the fifties, most likely saw his share of American crime films and westerns. Both come from countries where violence has always played a significant role in everyday life. "I grew up in a country town," Carey explains, "where disagreements were always resolved physically," much in the same way, one might suppose, that Borges's guapos and compadritos—Argentina's native toughs—settled disputes and defended their honor. Another element of their narrative mode is comedy, a device that merges into the story as unobtrusively as it does in real life, sometimes intentionally, at other times accidentally. The first-person narrator, who so often appears in both writers' works, beholds the goings-on around him in a manner detached, ironic, and amused. He then reports his version of what he has seen, in tales that lack narrative pretensions and structural artifice but that display instead a self-disguised plotting and an enviable control of dramatic tension.
The four metaphorical points of the compass may now be transformed into the list of characteristics, albeit abbreviated, that I sought earlier. Both writers display a sense of nationality along with an awareness of the larger world. Their work reveals a broad reading, which they have incorporated. They take up the perplexities that trouble them and their fellows. And they both accomplish this through adherence to the rules that have always governed effective storytelling, so that their readers finish the fiction and are affected by it: remembering it, marveling at its power, and, because of its many-layered thematic texture, finding in it diverse, new, and private meanings.
With this compass in hand, let us venture into the literary territory of Borges and Carey, beginning with one of the stories from Carey's first volume, possibly the best known among them, "American Dreams." Set in a small Australian town during the fifties, the events unfold in a matter-of-fact way, recounted as a young male narrator's reminiscences. He tells how a respected townsman named Mr. Gleason one day orders his Chinese laborers to build ten-foot-high walls around nearby Bald Hill and then orders them to top the walls with broken glass and barbed wire and to build a mysterious construction inside. The years pass and the inhabitants of the town (which closely resembles those bush settlements depicted in countless stories from earlier Australian realistic literature) still do not find out what is hidden behind those walls; nor does the reader. Eventually Mr. Gleason dies and his widow orders the walls destroyed to reveal what the narrator calls "the most incredibly beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life." At first he only "breathed the surprising beauty of it," then he realizes that "it was our town," scaled down and "peopled," so that the townsfolk find themselves in familiar places performing daily tasks, their mundane, earthly lives caught in a miniature stroke of eternity.
Although the town council soon asks Mrs. Gleason to destroy the model town "on the grounds that it contravened building regulations," their action comes too late, for the city newspapers discover the marvel, and the minister for tourism declares the site a tourist attraction, promising that "the Americans would come,… take photographs and bring wallets bulging with dollars. American dollars." And they do arrive, the narrator reports, to examine and photograph the model town, then to compare it to the real one through telescopes, eventually leaving the miniature and descending into the life-size original to take additional photographs for which they pay a dollar each. But "having paid the money," the narrator concludes, "they are worried about being cheated. They spend their time being disappointed and I spend my time feeling guilty, that I have somehow let them down by growing older and sadder." As the story opens, the narrator, who reveals what has happened after the fact, believes that the towns-people somehow offended Mr. Gleason, thus causing him to go to such lengths to settle his score with them. His revenge was to make them immortal; even worse, he forced them to look at their eternal selves while growing mortally "older and sadder."
"American Dreams" brings to mind any number of other literary works—Edward Albee's Tiny Alice, for one, in which a miniature of a house rests within that house, holding yet another replica, and so on. The wall that encloses Mr. Gleason's secret also has its parallels in the labyrinths that figure so often in Borges's fiction. The title, too, plays on and then perverts the tradition of the American dream. Once transferred to the bush town, the dreams turn materialistic and shoddy in their secondhand state, speaking only "of the big city, of wealth, of modern houses, of big motor cars," the wrong sort of dreams for people to use as vehicles for escape from their "poor kind of life" (as Borges describes the existence of people who are too sure about reality). In an interview [from Richard Bargin's Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges, 1969], Borges observes, "If you're a materialist, if you believe in hard and fast things, then you're tied down by reality, or by what you call reality." Carey's townsfolk had tied themselves to such a reality even in their dreams, despite the fact that dissolving reality (which, Borges says, "is not always too pleasant") can mean that people "will be helped by … [the] dissolution."
The picture of the tiny, disembodied townspeople caught in perpetuity, while time takes its toll on those whose lives served as models, brings to mind another of Borges's perplexities: what if man were immortal? Commenting on his story "The Immortals," Borges notes, "Such an idea as immortality would, of course, be unbearable. In 'The Immortals' we are face to face with people who are only immortal and nothing else, and the prospect, I trust, is appalling" [The Aleph and Other Stories 1933–1969, 1970]. Like don Guillermo's son or Dr. Narbondo's "immortals," the residents of the Australian bush town go on living in their own world, detached from the past, alienated from the present, impervious to the future. Carey has treated the same philosophical question that Borges often debated, and he has done so in a manner reminiscent of Borges by grounding his story in reality, then spreading over it a transparent covering woven from the strands of fantasy. In both cases, out of the remembrances of first-person narrators come stories that insist on their believability, for the narrators of "American Dreams" and "The Immortals" have, as Ana María Barrenechea says of Borges [in Borges: The Labyrinth Maker, 1965], erased "the boundaries between life and fiction," indeed the boundaries between story and metaphysical inquiry. Extraordinary events have occurred, yet they seem altogether ordinary, set as they are in very commonplace contexts.
Each of the stories in Carey's first volume gains resonance when read in the light of this commonality of philosophical concerns and narrative structure, even when the relationship is limited to a single element of Borges's fiction: the labyrinth. In "Crabs" the labyrinth evolves into a drive-in movie theater where Crabs and his girl friend find themselves trapped—their captivity an outcome that is natural enough in the real yet fantastic world they inhabit. Another instance of a physical structure figuring prominently in relation to the story's metaphysical framework arises in "Life & Death in the South Side Pavilion." The narrator relates how he has been assigned to watch the horses living in the pavilion, both he and the horses being prisoners in this place of unexplained confinement. That the pavilion represents the narrator's mental labyrinth becomes evident once he tells of drowning the horses and describes them floating in the pool where they "bumped softly into one another like bad dreams in a basin." The fat men in the title story of the collection ["The Fat Man in History"] find themselves shunned by a society that refuses to tolerate obesity. They are imprisoned not only in their fat but also in a bleak and colorless structure amid "high blocks of concrete flats and areas of flat waste land where dry thistles grow." For Carey, the metaphor of the labyrinth emerges not only as a metaphysical structure that turns inward and devours itself but also as a physical entity, a concept realized in another of the stories, "Peeling." Here the narrator relates how he undresses a female companion and accidentally pulls a zipper that removes another layer to reveal a male body hiding beneath, and then another female body; finally "with each touch she is dismembered, slowly, limb by limb" until he loses hold and she falls to the floor, making a "sharp noise, rather like breaking glass." He discovers among the fragments "a small doll, hairless, eyeless, and white from head to toe."
Carter Wheelock stresses [in The Mythmaker, 1969] that "Borges' much-noticed labyrinth, his symbol for the universe, is not the objective universe but the human mind." Both Borges and Carey suggest that once men discover they are lost in a mental labyrinth, entrapped and encircled by its mysteries, afloat in its chaos, helpless in its enclosure, they attempt to provide explanations. The traditional writer or the philosopher will form grave hypotheses to explain away the "Great Labyrinth," whereas Borges "stands above this attempt to account for the universe; his truth does not depend on the things that can be called true but on the assumption that nothing can be so called. For him the goal of thought is not knowledge, but distraction." Extending this critical comment to Carey adds dimension to his stories, which repeatedly explain away mystery with distraction. Both writers derive one aspect of their comedy from this quality of distraction, by eschewing seriousness in the unraveling of the perplexities they behold.
Borges and Carey share another aspect of narrative structure, their handling of time. Most often Borges sets his tales in the past, but he narrates them from an immediate point of view as though recollecting the events as he records them. On the other hand, Carey's stories often occur in a hazy, remote future. Yet, like Borges, Carey relates the happenings from a past perspective, with an immediacy established to contrast with the vaguely defined past of the future about which he is talking. George R. McMurray, in his discussion of Borges's manipulation of time [in Jorge Luis Borges, 1980], concludes, "In the end, at the center of the labyrinth, inexorable lineal time prevails." Both writers embrace this inexhaustible time, stretching backward and forward, and turn the past into immediacy, the future into long ago, the now into the infinite.
Much has been said about Borges's half-formed characters, a criticism that gains legitimacy only in light of the criteria for social realism. Borges, in an interview [with Burgin], talks about books that take characters as their focus (such as the work of Dickens), but he admits to admiring fiction in which "there are no characters," a judgment that he makes concerning the work Franz Kafka and then applies to Henry James: "While if I think of James, I'm thinking about a situation and a plot. I'm not thinking about people, I'm thinking about what happened to them." Borges's stories do not conjure up the likes of Emma Bovary or David Copperfield, all flesh and blood; nor does any piece of Carey's short fiction. In spite of the adventurers, intellectuals, historical figures, murderers, wanderers, outsiders, and criminals of all sorts that inhabit Borges's and Carey's narratives, few, if any, stand out as characters. Instead, they stand as metaphors for ambiguous beings caught in a meaningless universe where they wander, trying to make some sense of its contradictory nature.
Let us look in particular at the wanderer, the picaresque figure found in earlier Spanish literature and, for that matter, in Australian literature. The role such a hero plays in Borges's and Carey's stories is exemplified by the narrator of "The Babylon Lottery" [from Borges's collection Ficciones]. He opens his tale: "Like all men in Babylon I have been a proconsul; like all, a slave; I have also known omnipotence, opprobrium, jail." He goes on to recount other exploits, making known finally that he owes "this almost atrocious variety to an institution which other republics know nothing about, or which operates among them imperfectly and in secret: the lottery." A capricious game dictates the destinies of the Babylonians, subjecting each to the disorder that chance sets in motion. The wanderer, leaving his life to such an unreliable determiner, evolves into everyman facing the vicissitudes of fortune through the ages.
Carey's "The Chance," which appears in War Crimes, provides a similar handling of the wanderer who also falls victim to the lottery's whimsical dictation of men's affairs. In a distant yet lineal time, as far in the future as Babylonia lies in the past, the narrator of "The Chance" opens his account of "the Genetic Lottery" three summers after the Fastalogians have arrived, succeeding the Americans, the previous occupants of this unnamed but perpetual "Client State." He explains that "for two thousand inter-galactic dollars (IG$2,000) we could go in the Lottery and come out with a different age, a different body, a different voice and still carry our memories (allowing for a little leakage) more or less intact." A large part of the story develops the relationship between the narrator and a girl he meets. He fails to prevent her appointment with "the Genetic Lottery" and loses her, along with the illusion of permanency they have created amid the lunacy and fragmentation prevailing in those days. "So long ago. So much past," he concludes, describing himself as "a crazy old man, alone with his books and his beer and his dog. I have been a clerk and a pedlar and a seller of cars. I have been ignorant, and a scholar of note. Pock-marked and ugly I have wandered the streets and slept in the parks. I have been bankrupt and handsome and a splendid conman." "Because Babylon is nothing but an infinite game of chance," as Borges ends his story, the eternal wanderer remains helpless, whether he is the plaything of "the Company" or of "the Fastalogians."
Outlaws and desperadoes have long taken a dominant role in both Argentine and Australian literature, their exploits belonging, as Borges says in the opening of "The Challenge" [The Aleph and Other Stories 1933–1969], "to legend or to history or (which may be just another way of saying it belongs to legend) to both things at once." The gauchos from an Argentine past fascinate Borges, and he puts them to use not as traditional characters whose deeds he celebrates for their own sake but as representations of those whose "manly faith" and "chivalrous passion" was "in all likelihood … no mere form of vanity but rather an awareness that God may be found in any man." Their stories, he says, helped "men who led extremely elementary lives—herders, stockyard workers, drovers, outlaws, and pimps"—rediscover "in their own way the age-old cult of the gods of iron."
Similar figures have found their way into the legends or history of Australia, namely the bushrangers, whose defiance of fate allowed them an escape from "elementary lives." To hardworking, often poor and dissatisfied, farmbound or citybound Australians, tales of the bushrangers' challenging of established order helped these ordinary folk discover for themselves "the age-old cult of the gods of iron." In "War Crimes," the title story of his second volume, Carey has found a new use for the paradigm of the bushranger, by transforming him into the ultimate capitalist, the one who sees that "BUSINESS MUST GO ON." As the narrator of "War Crimes" gloats over his ruthlessness, he considers his code of honor not unlike the "manly faith" and "chivalrous passion" that set apart the gauchos and bushrangers. Once more, Carey has placed "War Crimes" in a far-off time when business must go on, even if its continuation depends on wandering capitalistic bushrangers who overcome all obstacles with violence. The narrator flaunts the peculiar religion created by the demands of capitalism, boasting to those whose "elementary lives" prevent them from similar action: "I am not mad, but rather I have opened the door you all keep locked with frightened bolts and little prayers." They lack courage, he tells them: "you sit in the front room in worn blue jeans, reading about atrocities in the Sunday papers." Carey's modern-day bushranger, ironically cast in his futuristic role as the capitalist run amok, does, at the end of the story, hint that he, as Borges says of the gauchos, acted out of "no mere form of vanity" but behaved more from "an awareness that God may be found in any man": "I wished I had been born a great painter. I would have worn fine clothes and celebrated the glories of man. I would have stood aloft, a judge, rather than wearily kept vigil on this hill, hunchbacked, crippled, one more guilty fool with blood on his hands." But like the gauchos and bushrangers of Argentine and Australian history, he cast himself in the role of the outsider who cultivated violence and developed by necessity a code of courage that placed him above ordinary men: one part of him noble, standing aloof from his fellows; the other part, guilty and bloody, even a little bit foolish.
The stories contained in The Fat Man in History and War Crimes proved, as Frank Moorhouse said of the first collection, that Carey could do "astonishing tricks," learned in part, as we have seen, from Borges. Returning again to Yates's metaphor of the compass, we find that Carey followed the call of its four points. He proceeded in one direction to track his own ambivalent "Australianness"; then he traveled on another course through books that took him far beyond the provincial society where he only half belonged. Thus he prepared himself for further exploration: to investigate the perplexities he encountered and to chart unmapped territories in his native literary landscape.
The new generation of Australians, so much less restricted in national literary choices than their predecessors, greatly admires Carey's sophisticated fantasy. The widespread acceptance of this fantasy, in a literature once dominated by social realism, might make it possible someday to study Carey's effect on the Australian short story and demonstrate how he helped to alter its course. That traces of Borges's genius "cannot not be there," at least in the work of one writer, should assure that Australia's fiction will, as Moorhouse puts it [in The State of the Act: The Mood of Contemporary Australia in Short Stories, 1983], "'go too far' and resist blandness." The new work now appearing, much of it "international" in both mode and publication, suggests that Australian writers have taken up that challenge, just as Carey did a decade before.
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