1Carpentaria is a joyful, healing work. To read it is to feel rejuvenated – and exuberantly free. But how does Carpentaria accomplish this? How does it mend our psyche when it deals bluntly with so much trauma? How does it lift our spirits even as it frankly anatomizes tragedies that cannot be undone?
2Part of the answer, it seems to me, is that Carpentaria offers an alternative to how we usually read.
3Reading came to be as a logical consequence of writing.
4Writing was invented 5,000 years ago at multiple sites around the globe for a range of record-keeping purposes: logging cargo transactions, memorializing royal lines, preserving sacred rituals. But one of writing’s earliest and most ubiquitous uses was to transcribe oral stories about the creation of life and the world. Those stories had long been celebrated for their power to spark intense feelings of possibility, a power that traces its origin to the mechanics of narrative (Fletcher 2022). Narrative does not sit still; it sprints and wanders and pivots suddenly, like a living creature. That sensation of aliveness is heightened in creation stories, which make us feel that narrative’s generative energy can quite literally generate everything, birthing cosmic chapters that rouse such awe and hope within our mind that they prompt what modern psychologists refer to as self-transcendent experience (or what William James, one of the founders of modern psychology, more vividly termed “spiritual” experience) (Fletcher 2021b). So it is that creation stories go beyond denoting creation’s action into immersing us within it, stirring us to believe in genesis because we taste it, firsthand.
5This savor of immanent genesis is a major reason why ancient peoples in Mesopotamia, Africa, Asia, and the Americas valued creation stories highly enough to not only transcribe but treasure them in archives, diligently re-copying their words whenever they cracked or grew brittle. Yet in trying to preserve the stories’ original vigor, that scribal devotion ironically did the opposite. Writing immobilized narratives, like moths entombed in amber, so tales that had once evolved over time, dynamically reimagined with each verbal retelling, became fixed as sacred scripture and later – when old gods were usurped by new schools – as classic literature. (A historical circumstance that explains why scripture and literature share the identical etymology, that which is writ.) And as stories became less vital, so did their power of genesis. We stopped listening to storytellers in the immanent wonder of knowing that, at any moment, the plot could twist and swivel. Instead, we read purposefully for the ending, turning pages with the goal of learning what happened and trading the experience of live spontaneity for a focus on authoritative resolution.
6This focus was then tightened by another feature of writing. Writing turned stories into text, and text, as priests and scholars discovered, could be analyzed via interpretation. Interpretation has various colloquial connotations, but as formally defined in 350 BCE by Aristotle’s On Hermeneutics and elaborated by modern semioticians from Ferdinand de Saussure to C.S. Peirce to I.A. Richards to Jacques Derrida, it’s a method for converting printed symbols into meaning. Meaning exists outside of time in an eternal is (Fletcher 2021a), so it does not grow, decay, become, or diminish, nor does it end or begin. Like words inked upon a page, it’s a statement of permanence, a valuing of timeless finality over restless temporality.
- 1 For the original diversity of oral languages in Australia, see Mushin and Ponsonnet 2021.
7Hence it became that reading narrowed the experience of creative opportunity that had been literature’s unwritten function.1 Some readers (mostly those who read for personal pleasure) dwelt primarily in story and its mental offerings: suspense at plots, empathy for characters, curiosity for storyworlds. Others (mostly those who read in school) concentrated on the hermeneutic search for abiding significance. But either way, the original possibility – the could be – of oral tales was funneled into the doneness – the is – of plot finales and interpretive conclusions. No longer did a storyteller and a listener come together to recreate the old creation narratives, liberating worlds to spring in new directions.
8Until we read Carpentaria.
9The moment we start reading Carpentaria, we encounter a difficulty: our usual ways of reading don’t work like we’re expecting.
10If we usually read for story, we find ourselves hooked by grabby narrative elements – only to be discombobulated by a narrative that starts, re-starts, re-starts, and re-starts; has multiple main characters, each of whom wanders out of the story’s main lens into other stories; and splits into multiple plotlines that stop, bend, jump, reverse, limbo, vanish, and refuse to merge. If we usually read by interpreting, we’re lured with obvious allegories that the narrative solemnly expounds – only to merrily crash together its symbolical meanings and then laugh them off altogether. It’s as if the novel is smiling: I know how you like to read. And I’m going to catch you by your expectations and lead you sideways in circles until you get too spun about to read that way anymore.
11This process is humbling and discomfiting, which is why some of us quit reading Carpentaria to go read something else – or, in what amounts to the same thing, slog on determinedly, grinding through page after page in the way we usually read. If we usually read for story, we push on to see what happens to our favorite characters; if we usually read for meaning, we gather scraps of texts that fit our interpretations. Either way, we miss a glorious opportunity. Because to allow Carpentaria to twist us free from our prior reading expectations is to escape their source: writing. And it’s to go back before writing’s finality to rediscover what our stories were before.
12Before writing, our stories were oral. And oral stories work differently from written ones.
13The difference can be easy to overlook in our day and age, when writing has conditioned us to think of stories as sequences of words. That conditioning might incline us to think: Oh, the difference is that in oral stories, the words are verbal. They’re therefore less enduring, less absolute, less final. But to think this way is to think about what oral stories are not, rather than about what they are. So, let’s start with what oral stories are: they are voices. Voices are not words. Words are symbols to be interpreted. Voices are living things interacting with us, and because interaction is a two-way activity, a voice does more than invite us to dream, nudge us to laugh, challenge us to think, and stir us to feel. It also listens. It heeds how its story is working, gauging whether our hearts are tugged by its characters and whether our curiosity is captured by its happenings. And it reacts off our responses to change its tale-telling. It emphasizes moments that work, trims ones that don’t, and even (once it feels it has identified what catches our specific interest) imagines fresh plot branches just for us.
14Which is to say: the voice joins with us to make the story. It involves us in the process of creation. It invites us to feel what it is for a narrative to be generated. It gives us narrative not as a finished thing but as an ongoing series of beginnings, as each instant, we connect with the storyteller to re-invent where the story is headed. This experience of re-creating narrative sparks sensations of hope and freedom in our neuroanatomy, reconnecting us to the original psychological reason that human brains made – and kept making – story: not for writing’s finality, but for narrative’s creative opportunities. Such opportunities make us feel that, whatever direction things are going, we can change it: if our old plans don’t work out, we can fashion new ones, adapting to the griefs and disappointments that the day throws at us.
15That feeling, like any neural sentiment, has its limits. It cannot erase the traumas of the past, mend all our sufferings, or bring individual lives back from death’s destruction. But still, it can be extraordinarily potent. It can keep grave hurts from turning us fatalistic. It can restore our sense of agency in the wake of vast catastrophe. It can free us from anger and self-pity, restoring the primal fun of living.
16And it’s the feeling that we get from Carpentaria. Because the novel breaks logic and does the impossible: it uses writing to re-create an experience of oral storytelling.
17The re-creation can be felt, right away, at the novel’s beginning:
The ancestral serpent, a creature larger than storm clouds, came down from the stars, laden with its own creative enormity. It moved graciously – if you had been watching with the eyes of a bird hovering in the sky far above the ground. Looking down at the serpent’s wet body, glistening from the ancient sunlight, long before man was a creature who could contemplate the next moment in time. It came down those billions of years ago, to crawl on its heavy belly, all around the wet clay soils in the Gulf of Carpentaria. (1)
18The first sentence inspires a sensation of awe – and also of distance. The awe comes from the sentence’s third-person, omniscient voice, which booms like an epic muse or genesis scripture. The distance comes from the sentence’s lack of reference to us. The sentence doesn’t explain when or where, in relation to our time and place, its happenings are happening. Nor does it explain the purpose or identity of “the ancestral snake.” (Indeed, through its use of the definite article the, it behaves as though the matter is utterly self-evident.) All the sentence reveals is that the snake is larger than something large (how much larger, we’re left to guess) and is “laden with its own creative enormity” (an evocative but elusively abstract phrase), making us feel in the presence of a narrative that seems more concerned with speaking its own truth than with attending to us, its audience.
19When abruptly, the story pays notice to our existence. The notice occurs in the second sentence, which, having begun with the same god-book thunder as the first – “It moved graciously” – interrupts itself mid-flow to directly address us: “you.” And in that address, we’re informed that the graciousness we’ve just observed was in fact the view from “a bird.” This disclosure is helpful – yet also question-stirring. It’s helpful because the narrative has acknowledged our confusion about where, in relation to us, its happenings are happening. It’s question-stirring because we don’t ourselves possess “the eyes of a bird,” prompting us to wonder: What might graciousness look like through those eyes? Can we share in their winged way of seeing? How much are we stuck inside our own flightless imagination? And so on, and so on, such that at the same time that we feel that we’re perhaps getting closer to understanding the serpent, we also sense that perhaps we’re not getting closer at all.
20Then – suddenly – we become the bird. (Or, maybe, we don’t.) This transformation (or not) occurs as a surprise in the third sentence. Unlike the two sentences before, the third has no conjugated verb, only a present participle: “Looking.” And there’s a big difference between a conjugated verb and a present participle: a present participle inhabits the symbolic present while a conjugated verb progresses from temporal past-to-future. That temporal motion has been the experience generated by the conjugated verbs of the previous sentences, but now in the third sentence, it vanishes, replaced by a timeless sensation of not-going-anywhere that the sentence wryly elucidates with its final phrase: “long before man was a creature who could contemplate the next moment in time.”
21By containing only a present participle, the third sentence thus presses us to discover what it’s like to inhabit a pre-human psychology. In the grip of that press, we feel ourselves nudged out of our tomorrow-musing brain and toward the bird’s visual experience, beholding the serpent as it exists in “ancient sunlight”… and yet, like those sun rays as they glisten, our beholding can last no longer than a flicker. For the sentence’s ending reminder of “the next moment of time” provokes a self-conscious rupture of our impelled union with the bird’s-eye-view, prompting us to question again: How much of this nonhuman story am I actually grasping? Have I glimpsed inside its different life? Or, am I simply skimming past?
22At which point, the paragraph reverses course one last time – but not back toward its initial aloofness. Instead, it restores temporality and intimately renders the serpent’s activity: “It came down those billions of years ago, to crawl on its heavy belly, all around the wet clay soils in the Gulf of Carpentaria.” In this, the paragraph’s fourth and final sentence, the narrative revisits the matter of its opening sentence, going so far as to deploy the very same verb: “came down.” Yet now, the narrative deploys that verb to connect with us. It explains when the descent is occurring in relation to our human epoch: “those billions of years ago.” It vividly characterizes the snake, with its “heavy belly” in the “wet clay soils,” making tangible what had wavered before on the lip of abstraction. And perhaps most importantly, the narrative transitions us from outside the ancestral serpent into its intention, revealing that the great reptile came down with a purpose: “to crawl [...] in the Gulf of Carpentaria.”
23The sum effect of the novel’s opening paragraph is thus to make us feel that the story has reacted to us, its audience. After starting remotely, it has admitted our distant existence and moved nearer, extending a narrative bridge. And when we find ourselves uncertain on that offered passage, not knowing whether we’re crossing successfully or caught still upon our own far bank, it then heeds us again. Returning to re-craft its beginning in a way that allows us to feel that its pre-human tale is something that we, its human audience, can participate in, it shifts from telling the narrative to us into telling the narrative with us, providing a version of serpentine descent that incorporates the post-serpentine evolutions of our psychology.
24This experience of interactive re-creation between storyteller and audience is, of course, an illusion. Carpentaria, like all printed texts, was finished before we opened it; unlike an oral story, it cannot actively adapt to our listening. But even so, the novel has given us a re-beginning. It has shown that stories can start, go sideways, stop, and then restart. It has established that the restart can be both epic and intimate, guiding us to feel that life’s big narrative can be made, in part, our story. And it has done all this while acknowledging that the new beginning is just a new beginning, one that might at any moment be revealed to be limited by a bird’s eyes, a human brain, or another vantage that can be enriched, shifted, or expanded, allowing the re-beginning to itself be re-begun.
25And having opened us to the possibility of ongoing narrative renewal, the novel proceeds to revel in ever more beginning-agains.
26Carpentaria brims with fresh starts.
27Some of them restart the whole novel: Chapter 3 opens with “Once upon a time” and then dives into the fairytale of Elias Smith, a man whose legend looms so large that it seems destined to become the novel’s central focus. But, no. Elias’s tale is just a prelude to another prelude, for mid-telling, Chapter 3 re-begins, jumping from Elias to the story of the “lightning tree.”
28Other fresh starts are achieved by re-using the narrative technique of the novel’s opening paragraph. Over and over, Carpentaria charges into its story without fully orientating us, its readers, so that we feel ourselves wondering: Who are we seeing, and where, and why? Until the novel remembers us. Halting its forward rush, it fills out details of geography and history, allowing us to situate ourselves in relation to its events and restart the story in our mind... before the novel again crashes off to talk to itself while we hurry after, trying to guess where it’s headed.
29We’re carried through this storytelling method multiple times in the first chapter, which, after re-beginning its narrative of the ancestral serpent, initiates a new section to tell the tale of Normal Phantom: “Normal Phantom was an old tribal man, who lived all of his life in the dense Pricklebush scrub on the edge of town” (4). This graceful introduction cues our readerly expectation that we will now hear more of Norm’s story, but what follows instead is a quick series of narrative associations that whip us away from Norm into the tale of “the camels,” who hijack the section with their defiance and their tragedy, until new seeds of life sprout from their “dung.” At which point, as we stare in mingled fascination and confusion at the dromedary excrement, wondering where this novel is going, and who it’s about, and why are we listening, and what on earth happened to that Norm fellow, the narrative re-sprouts itself by starting a new section that re-introduces Norm: “The Pricklebush mob say that Normal Phantom could grab hold of the river in his mind and live with it as his father’s fathers did before him” (6).
30This re-introduction doesn’t lead to a tale about camels or the river or Norm’s father’s fathers (although the narrative does glance momentarily in that direction). It leads instead to a tale about... Norm. A tale vividly lyric and intimately psychological. A tale that answers our wonderings about who and where and why. A tale that feels like a mind-meeting between us and the story, as the storyteller has recognized our wants and reciprocated with an act of co-creation...
31... before once again racing ahead of us into a series of other initiating events: how “one day,” a townsperson not worth mentioning decided to name the river after Normal; how there was a “honeymoon period” of “meaningful coexistence” (8) between the town’s settlers and the Aboriginal people; how the multinational mining company arrived; and how uncle Mickey “had lived with a metal detector for God knows how long” (10). Until finally, having galloped so fast through these happenings that we can barely process them, the chapter ends. And the next chapter runs back in time to re-start us with the story of Normal’s wife and their rubbish-dump home.
32To hang on through these accelerations, bucks, and reversals as the narrative goes (like the river) with “its mood” (3), abandoning us before then running back to carry us forward, is a challenge. But the challenge brings with it a reward that unfolds in two psychological stages:
First, when the narrative plunges away from us, we’re pushed to hypothesize what we think is happening and why. We’re pushed, that is, to assume the task of re-telling the story to ourselves, mentally relating its spontaneous movements to our own perspective so that we can grasp where we are – and where we are headed.
Second, when the narrative returns and regathers us, filling in context and answering our questions, we get the satisfaction of mingling what we’d previously imagined with what the narrative is now explaining, making us feel like partners in the process of story construction.
33In oral storytelling, these two stages are combined, as we work simultaneously on the narrative and with the narrator. Such simultaneity is not possible in writing, but Carpentaria ingeniously replicates oral storytelling’s overall experience by cycling us back-and-forth between stage one (in which we and the storyteller independently craft our own versions of the story) and stage two (in which we come together to re-start the process, feeling a connection between our storymaking minds).
34And then just when we’re getting the hang of this process of co-creation, the novel throws us a creative twist.
35Early in Chapter 9, Norm is gripped with sudden fury at Angel...
He wanted to fight somebody. He wanted to fight her. She must have heard him because she came back to fight. Norm started throwing his weight around the beach while Angel was throwing her weight around in his mind […]. (272)
36Here, we’re pulled into Norm’s emotions and then into his beach-fight with Angel – when the narrative reveals that the tussling is all “in [Norm’s] mind.” What we thought was the story is just a story running through one man’s head.
37With this, the novel inverts the method of its opening paragraph. There, the story ran ahead without us in an outside voice, then narrowed its focus to get us inside. Now, the story has run ahead with us in an inside voice, then widened its focus to get us outside. Or, in other words: where the novel had previously made us feel self-consciously distant from the ancestral serpent, before easing us into the serpent’s plan, it now makes us feel intimately close to Norm, before surprising us out of Norm’s dreamings.
38Why this reversal? Well, by now, we’ve read half of Carpentaria. We’ve met most of its characters and seen much of their future. We think that we know them – and where they are going. We’ve stopped feeling like an outsider fighting to get into the narrative and we’ve started feeling like an insider who can navigate the river bends ahead. This feeling is satisfying; it replaces the experience of working on the story with the experience of flowing with the story. But it also exchanges a mood of oral possibility for a mood of textual predestination, removing the novel’s original gift.
39So, in Norm’s beach-fight, the novel re-gifts its gift by reversing course, disrupting our practiced readerly flow. Our relation to the narrative has changed, so the narrative will change too. It will do to us what the river did to the settlers who built Desperance: spurn us, pivoting in the opposite direction and jilting our anticipated tomorrow. Once again, the novel has found a way to give us the experience of new beginning, an experience it literalizes by then revealing Norm to be in “a house that now consist[s] entirely of doors” (272). Open and shut, those doors swing, providing a shifting labyrinth of narrative options – when the narrative yanks us out of the house entirely. Deciding that none of the house’s doorways suit, Norm realizes: “He would have to start again. This he would do by building himself a new house” (273).
40This process of exiting-stories-we’ve-entered-to-start-new-ones accelerates across the novel’s latter half. Now that the novel has worked us into the minds of Fishman, Angel Day, and all the rest, it will work us out. It will keep up its interactive method by striving against its previous action. It will show us that we can not only create new narratives but also quit those narratives to re-create them. It will reveal that the deeper reason that oral storytelling helps us invent stories is not to stick with them to the bitter end, but to keep inventing, over and over, throwing open narrative opportunities that regenerate our chances to reimagine again.
41In the case of Fishman, we get a regenerative exit at the beginning of Chapter 12, after the “tellers of tall stories” (405) explain how they’ve lost Will. Brushing off this “gammon story,” Fishman stares into the blackened landscape, hunting for what really happened... when abruptly:
A fortune-teller’s time sped fast over [...]. A tragedy kept unfolding, and he, unable to acknowledge his culpability, wished to hide in the smallness of men. He chose. He would not see the extremity of his weakness, nor claim it straightway: he referred time elsewhere. (405–6)
42As Fishman fights to dodge time, we’re separated from his self-told story by a vaster narrative. For a moment we hang in limbo, unable to see that vaster narrative entirely but imagining it in bits and snippets. When we’re re-united with Fishman in a re-beginning:
The attention was drawn of a young turk with the very best eyes, and respect for all religionalities among them, who yelled out in a rasping voice like a Christian crusader, ‘In kingdom come, they will be done. Thank the Lord, here they come!’
The Fishman peered over the rims of his sunglasses, and it was true [...]. They were coming alright [...] with Will Phantom stumbling along. (406)
43This experience of re-joining a character’s storytelling mind to remake the narrative crescendos at the end of Chapter 12 when Angel accepts a lift from some truckies. And: “Their lives went off into another story” (435). Once again, our perspective is interrupted by an outside reminder that the story we’re inside is just a story. Following which, the novel pivots into dreams of Angel, her legend re-imagined by Fishman and by us too, as we piece and riff together strange storylines about Angel dwelling in a pigeon-roofed warehouse and casting for snakes. Until we both believe our visions and don’t, joining the “zealots” who see a palace “glowing with light” (439) while simultaneously insisting, with Fishman, that none of it ever occurred.
44On we go like this, inside-out the narrative and outside-in, feeling the redemptive possibility of creating new stories and then exiting them to start again, all the way to the novel’s ending. An ending that brings more beginnings.
45By the time we reach Carpentaria’s final chapter, we’ve witnessed the death of many lives and the destruction of many storylines, and we know, from the novel’s fortune-telling time, that more tragedy waits in the future. But still, the final chapter stirs hope and healing by continuing the novel’s interactive method of creating chances for re-creation, beginning the story anew.
46So it goes in the novel’s final paragraphs, which turn back upon themselves with insistent rapidity, remaking the narrative over and over:
In his heart, Norm knew he had no more journeys to make. Well! Not for the moment. (498)
The boy thought about all of these eventualities, where the enigma of time sidestepped desire and ran away from dreams [...] All dreams come true somehow, Norm murmured. (499)
Neither spoke, because neither would have heard the other. It was much better to listen to the mass choir of frogs. (499)
47Every time that a vaster perspective imposes the story – “no more journeys [...] ran away from dreams [...] neither would have heard the other” – it’s interrupted by a fresh direction: “Well! Not for the moment [...] all dreams come true [...] the choir of frogs.”
48And thus it is that Carpentaria itself ends with two episodes of narrative renewal. One is with Norm as he sizes up “the flattened landscape, already planning the home he would rebuild on the same piece of land where his old house had been” (499). The other is with Hope. Hope has vanished, abruptly, moments before. For we have been inside Norm’s head, and too late “he knew that she was gone” (497). And gone Hope is, until back she crashes to re-start the story:
The red glowing waters around the boat began to swarm until the boat looked as though it was being propelled on the back of something solid through the water: the groper fish circling the boat, building up speed, crossing each other under the boat, picking the boat up and moving it back to sea through the surging flow of the changing tide. Hope rowed with all of her might with the outgoing tide. She was so blinded by her mission she did not see the gropers helping her. (498)
49This paragraph opens in epic, omniscient style with “the” red glowing waters. Like the ancestral serpent from the novel’s beginning, the waters are self-evident to the narrator – but not to us. We simply forge on, as “blind” as Hope, not seeing or understanding… until the narrative bends back to supply an assist: the waters are a tide of gropers. And in the same way that our mind is flung ahead by Norm’s “planning” to imagine the future home he’ll rebuild, so too is our mind now thrown forward by the boat’s secret rowers to dream its greater “mission.”
50Freed from writing’s ledger into story’s hopeful possibilities.