SOURCE: "More Tramps at Home: Seeing Australia First," in Meanjin, Vol. 46, No. 3, September, 1987, pp. 400-09.

Many reviewers (here, and in England and the United States) have treated Illywhacker relatively unproblematically as either a realist text or a contemporary version of older genres, such as the tall tale. It obviously has much in common with various pre-modernist types of narrative: for a start, it is dominated by a first-person narrative from a narrator who seems to tell the story from a position of relative omniscience.

Herbert Badgery is a story-teller of immense gusto and confidence. Doubtless, Badgery would like to be thought of as a masterful narrator. The first two pages of the novel are full of self-sung praise for his storytelling abilities: 'lying is my main subject, my specialty, my skill'. But then, on the other hand, the very first paragraph also lets us know that something, somewhere along the line, has gone very wrong: 'It is hard to believe you can feel so bad and still not die'. Badgery is a captive, to an extent that will only be fully revealed almost 600 pages later. If his narration seems masterful, little else about him does: he is resentfully old, decrepit, unable even to die. The confidence seems a trick, the gusto disgust.

The question of his mastery of his own situation is bound up with that of his mastery of his story. As we learn from the long narrative that separates Badgery's two appearances in his cage, he survives here because of his storytelling alone. He is an exhibit in grandson Hissao's Pet Emporium, where all of Australia is arranged by type for the tourist eye—'shearers … lifesavers, inventors, manufacturers, bushmen, aboriginals'. We are not told the label on Badgery's cage, perhaps because that would be superfluous: there it is, 'neatly printed on a chart not three feet from where I lie', on the front cover of the book. Not only is his life one of telling stories, as a profession: it is now nothing more than a story, both diegetically (he is alive because he tells stories) and literally (text and character bear the same label). Badgery's stories are his survival and his captivity: a decrepit old body barely alive, its voice its sole vigour, he has collapsed into his own story, is now no more than his own tale, true or false. The sign on the cage is the sign on the book. Imprisoned in writing, a voice talks on long after the proper time of its death, like that of Poe's M. Valdemar: a narrating 'I' as insubstantial as paper, a voice all but without source.

It is worth looking more closely at this 'I'. The elision of text and speaker makes it impossible to treat the pronoun as simply the sign of a character, let alone the hallmark of a well-constituted, confident and basically realist character. A decrepit old man, isolated beyond death, recounting his gaps-and-all story into a void to pass the time: what does this suggest if not the Beckettian narrator? The 'I' of Beckett's prose becomes less and less of a character, and becomes instead the very effort of the text itself to construct a subject, one which remains hesitant, preliminary, riddled with silences in a perpetual freefall of collapse; the pronouns mark the voice(s) with which the text speaks ultimately of itself in its interminable movement towards subjectivity. Take, almost at random, The Unnamable:

… it's I am talking … no need of a mouth, the words are everywhere, inside me, outside me … I hear them, no need to hear them, no need of a head, impossible to stop them, impossible to stop, I'm in words, made of words, others' words, what others,… I'm all these flakes, meeting, mingling, falling asunder,… this dust of words, with no ground for their settling, no sky for their dispersing, coming together to say, fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them, those that merge, those that part, those that never meet, and nothing else …

What if one reads the opening and closing pages of Illywhacker in this self-referential way? What if this novel, in many ways apparently so old-fashioned, this text which moves so close to certain models of Australian realist and genre writing and to certain national stereotypes—what if Illywhacker is capable of a double reading? If its first-person pronoun not only refers to the history and present situation of an illywhacker, Herbert Badgery, a fictional construct evoking a past era of novel-writing—but also if it refers, in the very same words, to the history and present situation of this Illywhacker, the text, and of the genres and traditions it draws on, sums up, and speaks through? It is not at all difficult to read the framing narrative of Illywhacker in this way: indeed, virtually every sentence of it offers such a double reading. This modernist Illywhacker inserts itself into the traditionalist or genre one, speaking with its voice, in its words; it enacts the protracted death throes of such traditionalisms. In its opening and closing pages, the Great Australian Novel (that summation of realist or genre forms) dies in a slow fall in the very midst of being staged as domestic and international spectacle.

'I am a hundred and thirty-nine years old and something of a celebrity', says Badgery; 'They come and look at me and wonder how I do it'. Perhaps the date is a lie. Nevertheless, 139 years before Illywhacker is published, James Tucker has just written Ralph Rashleigh, and on Norfolk Island Rufus Dawes is about to have his name cleared. By 1919, Badgery is 'already dragging out too many hairs with my comb each morning': Joyce is working on Ulysses, Eliot on The Waste Land, and in Australia Henry Handel Richardson is working on the second volume of The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney, already old-fashioned in its naturalism. If the dates are somewhat arbitrary, they're also apt.

After an anti-intellectual past, Badgery says, he could now 'invent a library':

I could fill up bookcases carelessly, elegantly, stack volumes end to end, fill the deep shelves with two rows of books, leave them with their covers showing on the dining-room table …

If lying, or fictionalising, has always been Badgery's 'main subject'—or if the tall-story has always been seen as one of the dominant genres of Australian fiction—then, as he declares,

It is a great relief to find a new use for it. It's taken me long enough, God knows, and I have not always been proud of my activities.

All but immobile, Badgery has been 'poked … and prodded' by 'independent experts' (of which this paper would no doubt be one), who are fascinated with his longevity (or morbidity) but also with 'my foul-smelling mouth', 'my legs', 'my dick … as scabby and scaly as a horse's'—speech, mobility, dissemination. All that keeps him alive, he says, is the curiosity 'to see what my dirty old body will do next'. Even his obsession with his bodily functions is not simply a matter of naturalism, any more than it is in Beckett.

Not only does Badgery provide a commentary on certain streams of Australian fiction: he also provides commentary on commentary, giving advice to his readers, critics and reviewers and at the same time prefiguring what will be (has been) said about this very text:

But now I feel no more ashamed of my lies than my farts (I rip forth a beauty to underline the point). There will be complaints, of course. (There are complaints now, about the fart—my apologies, my fellow sufferers.) But my advice is not to waste your time with your red pen, to try to pull apart the strands of lies and truth, but to relax and enjoy the show.

And there are, of course, complaints—about the farts, and about the lies. Undoubtedly the most frequent complaint about Illywhacker, echoed in nearly every review, has been that it is really only a series of episodes, most of them individually quite marvelous, but somewhat lacking in coherence when strung together into a fiction of this size. A few examples:

Each story should be there, each one has something to say and says it well. But the stories don't listen to each other. (John Hanrahan, Age Saturday Extra, 6 July 1985)

… for most of the time the novel has an air of lurching on with a kind of desperate improvisation from one situation or fancy to the next. (Laurie Clancy, Australian Book Review, 73, 14-15)

There is a strong whiff of … laboriousness of invention sometimes, an overfertility of metaphor, one dragon and one traveling Australian illusionist too many. (Howard Jacobson, New York Times Book Review, 17 November 1985)

Illywhacker has many brilliant moments but in the end it overreaches itself. (Andrew Hislop, Times Literary Supplement, 3 May 1985)

The perception is accurate enough in the terms implied by the reviews. If we assume that it is a text just like those it mimics—a realist or genre form—and that it should conform to classical expectations of closure and unity, then Illywhacker is certainly something less than tidy. Without organic unity, it becomes distended; without economy in its production of meaning, it becomes laborious; without firm underlying plan, it improvises; unrestrained, it overreaches.

But then might that not be the point? As I have suggested, it is possible to read Illywhacker another way altogether—as a doubled, reflexive, metalinguistic text. Its untidiness can be read as an intense and prolific crisis of meaning, a perpetual excess where the narrative hovers on the verge of collapse, one of whose effects is an oscillation among text (Illywhacker as genre novel), metatext (as comment on genre novels) and meta-metatext (as comment on received criticism of genre novels). It is this tendency to overspill boundaries that the various reviewers above have missed entirely yet at the same time named quite precisely.

Under this doubled reading, the 600 pages that separate the two brief appearances of the caged Herbert Badgery start to look very different from the realist and genre forms they mimic so closely. They more resemble the stories Beckett's Malone tells himself alone in his room, or those increasingly fragmented tales with which the Unnamable passes the interminable time. Carey's narrator, of course, does not work on the edge of panic that informs Beckett's protagonists in ever greater degree throughout the trilogy, the Texts for Nothing and How It Is. Badgery is to the last a showman, after all. His façade of control is all but complete. He very rarely lets his confidence (trick) slip to reveal weariness or despair. But it is precisely the long-delayed approach to the ending of the book that makes the futility of Badgery's stories evident. The more they tell, the more they repeat the progress of Badgery's decline and their part in his downfall, the closer they bring Badgery the character to his final position, as Badgery the old and powerless narrator: the only distance between the two is that created by a reservoir of story ever closer to exhaustion. They attempt to create a past, the honourable past of folklore; but all they create is a present, and a captivity.

Like the Pet Emporium, Illywhacker is full of the types of a nationalist literature: the spruiker, the inventor, the entrepreneur, the dilettante, the man on the land … And mingling throughout the text's host of stories also, like these stereotypes, are all sorts of heterogeneous literary genres, which the narrative raids for its elements: the tall story; the historical novel (Les Chaffey and Robert Menzies, by their simple presence, act as 'independent experts' who attest to the veracity of the illywhacker's narrative); the political novel (the Goldstein sections); or the Bildungsroman of an unsentimental education. In Beckett, there is always only one story, whose endless variation only serves to underline its moribundity. Badgery's host of stories and genres can do no more.

Where Beckettian syntax and stories stumble and halt like their crippled protagonists en route to immobility, the tales Badgery tells are nearly always exactingly evocative, researched, as glossy as a television mini-series and as seductive as the photography of a 1970s Australian film (though it plays a negligible role in the events of the novel, cinema—that recent Australian cultural export par excellence—haunts Illywhacker). In their attention to detail and their meticulous reconstruction of a past, they become a sort of hyperrealism, outdoing even their ostensible models. Compare, for example, Carey's treatment of the Chinese with that of Furphy in Such is Life; Illywhacker is fiction for and from the multicultural 1980s.

However dazzling its surface, though, Illywhacker is never more than a simulacrum of the 'genuine article'. It is incessantly aware of the decrepitude written under its gloss: 'behind' the tales, there is always the caged Herbert Badgery, verging on but never achieving death, forced into more tales and more digressions, unable to let go. Illywhacker disorders and discomforts its own realist and genre affinities by bringing them to sustained crisis; and this crisis is one which Badgery's storytelling can neither repair (as its only tools are precisely those which have brought it to crisis) nor force beyond this impasse of the already-written, into the death of its rationalist speaking subject. The crisis is one of the stories themselves—or, as these are an illywhacker's stories, of lies.

The liar, of course, is a received figure of fiction, and the tall story a received genre. But what makes Illywhacker interrogate these forms is a further twist, which deflects all questions of truth and falsity.

This begins with Badgery's now-notorious opening whopper about being a hundred and thirty-nine years old. Almost immediately after this, he warns that he is 'a terrible liar' and then swears blind that whatever else he might be lying about, he isn't lying about his age. And yet, two pages on, he states that he was 33 years old in 1919. Is he, then, narrating the entire thing from around the year 2025? It appears not: as the book progresses, Badgery seems to be approaching a narrative present in the quite near future at most, not one in the third millennium. At last, two pages from the end of the book, Badgery reveals that his age was a lie all along, a spruik for the customers:

The chart on my door says I am a hundred and thirty-nine years old. It also says I was born in 1886, but there are no complaints. The customers are happy.

In quite a classic way, the text has set up an enigma that arches over the entire span of the book. But it is revealed as nothing more than a false lead, a teaser to keep the reader reading. That it is patently false, or even contradictory, is of no consequence at all. It still works perfectly well in the only way that matters—as a spiel.

From a purely formal point of view, the paradox here is that of the Cretan liar: can one afford to believe or (deadlier still) not to believe a self-proclaimed liar? But form is not the point. The point is that the paradox works. Illywhacker is not concerned with deconstructing the spiel so much as with its pragmatics.

That concern has already been figured in the first epigraph, from Twain's More Tramps Abroad:

Australian history is almost always picturesque; indeed, it is so curious and strange, that it is itself the chiefest novelty the country has to offer and so it pushes the other novelties into second and third place. It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies; and all of a fresh sort, no mouldy old stale ones. It is full of surprises and adventures, the incongruities, and contradictions, and incredibilities; but they are all true, they all happened.

The tone of this passage is of interest here, rather than questions of truth versus falsehood. It is pure tourism. In Twain's Michelin guide, with its search for the picturesque, the novel, Australian history gets five stars. The passage is addressed to those Tramping Abroad, not to the inhabitants: it is Australian history as spectacle, just like the history Illywhacker stages—a diorama of politics and empire builders, the rural, the urban, the illywhackers and their marks. Tall tales and true from the legendary past. As epigraph, the Twain passage sets up a closed system of mediation: this is Australia for the outside eye, which then in a trans-oceanic leap (or loop) mediates the spectacle for domestic consumption.

That looping is everywhere in Illywhacker. It makes even Badgery's speech not his own but something that belongs elsewhere, always elsewhere. His speech is what is demanded of him by his audience: that is, on the one hand by the overseas visitors who come to see 'the chiefest novelty the country has to offer,' and on the other, by those natives who can 'afford the entrance money' to see this mediated tourist Australia. In other words, its customers have no choice but to see Australia through foreign eyes, as tourists. And these customers, who have paid the admission, read the title Illywhacker on the door of Badgery's cage, heeded the caveat emptor and stayed for the stories, include, of course, the readers of the book.

Badgery's grandson Hissao, the proprietor of this Best Pet Shop in the World, has 'put so many of his fellow countrymen and women on display' that the display is almost all-encompassing: 'Who could possibly compete with it?' How could Australian visitors possibly not recognise themselves? The display can no more be false than it can be true: all that matters is that it be exhaustive. Debunking it is useless, because there is no truth it hides, no falsehood to do the hiding, only a spectacular machinery of attraction where truth and falsehood are effects and come-ons. The sign on Leah Goldstein's door says 'Melbourne Jew'; she 'spends a lot of time explaining that she is not a Jew, that the sign is a lie, that the exhibition is based on lies; but visitors prefer to believe the printed information.' Within Hissao's 'masterpiece', even political contestation is just part of the display, the spectacle of controversy. Hissao himself is powerless, proprietor in name only, absorbed into the merchandise:

It would be of no benefit for him to know that he is, himself, a lie, that he is no more substantial than this splendid four-storey mirage, teetering above Pitt Street, no more concrete than all those alien flowers, those neon signs, those twisted coloured forms in gas and glass that their inventors, dull men, think will last forever.

If the present and the immediate future belong to the gaze of tourism, with the proud traditions of illywhacking and independence simply another product to be consumed by others (or by Australians as others), then the past too has always been a series of lies, as the opening paragraph of M. V. Anderson's 'history' suggests:

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 is their first lie that is the most impressive for being the most 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.

Badgery has never really been the even precarious master of his own lies: they have always been somebody else's lies. The voice that asserts itself with such individuality, individualism and independence is always at risk of dissolving out into other voices, or forever talking itself into a corner, or a cage. It is a voice that is its own dispossession, a fabric of voices from elsewhere.

It's this that Badgery tries to keep at bay with his insistent irony: there are, he acknowledges, other voices in this story—a large part of the text, after all, may be Leah Goldstein's, and that too may be no more than lies. Badgery tries to deny that these voices are anyone's but his. When this is not possible, he tries to circumscribe them, in effect to place quotes around them to show where they begin and end, to minimise their invasion of his text, and to distance himself from them with scorn. (Much of that scorn is directed at the reader: the very act of reading turns one into the spieler's mark. More importantly, the voice Badgery has to speak in is none other than his audience's: it's a question of giving the customers what they want.)

But it doesn't and can't work. Badgery cannot close off the quotation marks, and mark off what definitively remains his utterance, because the property and propriety of his language are not his in the first place. Attempting to ironise, he instead becomes ironised himself. The speaking subject haemorrhages out into a spoken subject, spoken from somewhere else. The subject can no longer separate itself from what comes from without and constitutes it as imaginary and dislocated; and yet, in the same movement, it can no longer be anything but that speech of the other, captive, its barest residue, on the garrulous verge of silence.

Badgery's tales not only draw on certain traditions of Australian writing; they are themselves a writing of 'Australian traditions', whether these be fictional or metafictional and critical. 'Tradition' is here no longer something as idealist as the expression of a national individualism, a voice which essentially, necessarily, unstoppably speaks from an entire nation. It is rather the very means by which the idea of such a 'national individualism' is constructed, and involves all the apparatuses of production, consumption, propagation, staging and spectacle, as summed up in the dominant metaphor of the Pet Emporium.

Under the noise and dazzle of the birthday celebrations [1988 marked the bicentennial of English settlement in Australia] that are almost on us, and the rising hum of traditions being summed, Herbert Badgery grumbles on about myths of servitude.