Empty Sydney or Sydney emptied: Peter Corris’s national allegory translated

ABSTRACT

This article examines national allegory and its translation in the work of Peter Corris, with a focus on The Empty Beach (1983), in two ways. The most obvious approach, which examines what happens to Corris’s novel, and in particular to the ways in which it articulates Australianness and the key place of Sydney within that signifying system, when it is translated, is deemed, if not less important then certainly secondary. What is considered fundamental here is the novel’s original predisposition towards translation. Corris’s empty beach is therefore a site of evacuation – evacuation of any number of things, including of course its crimes and criminal plots, but especially, in the framework of this special issue, of indicators of national specificity. The extant French translation tests this translatability in interesting ways; notably, the French word for ‘beach’, la plage, is itself a broader term, which refers to a flat surface. In this sense, the novel’s translated title is doubly suggestive of emptiness and thus intensifies the failure of the original novel to ground itself in its setting. This analysis will therefore be counterintuitive but will also, hopefully, like the translation process on which it is focused, suggest new lenses for reading Peter Corris, for getting him out of his Sydney mould, which are nonetheless, once sun protection is provided against the glaring Bondi sun, in full view in his work.

KEYWORDS:

• Australia
• Peter Corris
• crime fiction
• liminality
• national allegory
• translatability
• translation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Anon., ‘The Man and His City’, Inside Story Current Affairs and Culture from Australia and Beyond, http://inside.org.au/the-man-and-his-city. Accessed 22 October 2012.

2. In an online post entitled ‘The Godfather: Peter Corris on His First Writers’ Conference’, dated 11 April 2014, Corris discusses meeting Heidi von Born at a crime-writing conference in Sweden in 1981: http://newtownreviewofbooks.com.au/2014/04/11/godfather-peter-corris-first-literary-festival/. Accessed 2 September 2014.

3. In 2013 the new partnership between Australia’s national carrier Qantas and Emirates saw the route between London Heathrow and Sydney switch from the ‘Kangaroo’ route (via Singapore) to the ‘Falcon’ route (via Dubai).

4. This internal self-generation of text is again encountered when Hardy guesses at Singer’s height: his estimation, ‘around six feet two’, is almost identical to his appraisal of gangster Mac’s minder’s height just a few pages earlier, ‘six foot three’ (Corris 1983, 12, 8). Singer, like the Bondi of the diegesis proper, is every ounce a construct.

5. This is also the case in other Hardy novels, including Corris’s first, The Dying Trade, whose introspective Sydney focus is balanced, and resolved, by trips north to the Central Coast, west to the Blue Mountains and interstate to Adelaide.

6. In respect of the latter, Knight notes that ‘such local naturalisation is not without its demystifying value’ (1986, 452; emphasis original). It is quite reflexively staged as early as the incipit, in which Mac’s car is referred to as ‘a left-hand drive’ and thus as American (Corris 1983, 8).

7. It is worthy of a passing note that one of the more esoteric senses of the French noun un plat is as the front or back cover of a book.

8. For details, see http://www.berowrawatersinn.com/berowrawatersinn/Location.html. Accessed 30 November 2012.

9. The crossing of water begins with Hardy’s prosaic explanation as to why he is not wearing any pants: ‘“It’s going to rain,” I said. “I was scratching my knee”’ (Corris 1983, 157). Interestingly, the expression il va pleuvoir, which is, not unnaturally, used in Danièle and Pierre Bondil’s translation (Corris 1988, 206), is also used to convey the fact that somebody is singing, or has just sung, badly. In this case, the siren song that opened the novel is about to be revealed for the ‘bad singing’ that it was: Marion is about to reveal that the investigation was empty, a mere pretext. It will also prove proleptic, of course, a sign of a song that must be repeated and to which even the investigation and novel’s end will not bring closure.

10. This appears to be a rather free translation of the original English. ‘Le printemps sied au Hawkesbury’ speaks to the way in which spring becomes, rather than comes to, the area. Fittingly, on the other hand, this is an expression that speaks itself as translation, picking up the famous translated title of Eugene O’Neill’s play cycle Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), which in French becomes Le Deuil sied à Electre.

11. In horticultural terms, ‘native’ describes plants indigenous to Australia while ‘indigenous’ refers to plants that are specific to a region in Australia.

12. An example is Murray Bail’s (1998) novel Eucalyptus, which appeals to the many species of Australia’s iconic gum tree in order, seemingly, to denounce facile, stereotypical or outmoded Australian allegories. On the first page we read: ‘the very word, desert-or-um [the Hooked Mallee, the first tree mentioned], harks back to a stale version of the national landscape and from there in a more or less straight line onto the national character, all those linings of the soul and the larynx, which have their origins in the bush, so it is said’.

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Notes on contributors

Alistair Rolls

Alistair Rolls is Associate Professor of French Studies at the University of Newcastle, Australia. His major publications in the area of crime fiction and its intersection with the national allegory and/or translation are French and American Noir: Dark Crossings (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), which he co-authored with Deborah Walker, and Mostly French: French (in) Detective Fiction (Peter Lang, 2009), which he edited in the Modern French Identities series (number 88). More recently he has published a monograph on French crime fiction, Paris and the Fetish: Primal Crime Scenes (Rodopi, 2014), and an edited collection on the figure of the Private Investigator (Intellect, 2016), which he co-edited with Rachel Franks.