Writing a Life: John Dwyer's Narrative Identity ¹

[1] A draft of this paper was read by David Grant and John Shields, both of Work and Organizational Studies, University of Sydney, and I thank them for their comments and suggestions. Any remaining errors or omissions are my responsibility.

Abstract

John Dwyer, a working class Sydney radical active in the period 1890–1914, felt compelled to express his being in narrative—his political aspirations and spiritual speculations, his fraught circumstances as a worker, husband and father. Dwyer's narrative is not a streamlined autobiographical statement: his surviving papers follow the upheavals and strains of his life. By exploring Dwyer's life and personal papers, this article argues that narrative identity provides a significant methodological tool for analysing the lives of historical actors, enriching traditional, materialist interpretations while avoiding the disconnection from historical experience that some critics have associated with postmodernism. The article places a stress on the dilemmas of alienation and subjectivity and explores their relationship with narrative theory.

Keywords:

• Narrative identity
• Narrative theory
• Alienation
• Subjectivity
• Biography
• Australian history

Notes

[1] A draft of this paper was read by David Grant and John Shields, both of Work and Organizational Studies, University of Sydney, and I thank them for their comments and suggestions. Any remaining errors or omissions are my responsibility.

[2] John Dwyer, ‘The book of notes and observations on the occult subjects’, 1897, Dwyer Papers, ML MSS 2184/3, item 1, p. 33. State Library of New South Wales.

[3] Mark Hearn's ‘Hard cash: John Dwyer and his contemporaries 1890–1914’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Department of History, University of Sydney, 2000) contains a guide to Dwyer's papers in the State Library of New South Wales. The thesis is available online via the Australian Digital Thesis program at: http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/adt/public_html/adt-NU/public/adt-NU20020722.192025/

[4] Daniel Dwyer to John Dwyer, undated, ‘family correspondence’, Dwyer papers ML MSS 290 box 2.

[5] John Dwyer, ‘Aureum scriptum of occultism’, Dwyer papers, ML MSS2184/3 Item 2, pp. 48–61.

[6] Annie Dwyer to John Dwyer, 3 August 1893, ‘family correspondence’.

[7] Mittagong Express, 20 March and 17 April 1891, clippings in Dwyer papers ML MSS 2184/4.

[8] Notes for an interview between John Dwyer and the Minister for Mines, noted, ‘re my interview on the 4th to-day’, Dwyer papers, ML MSS 290 box 1.

[9] The Socialist, 10 September 1895.

[10] Constitution and Log Book of the Robert Emmett Order of Industry, Dwyer papers ML MSS 2184/5.

[11] Dwyer, ‘The book of notes and observations on the occult subjects’, pp. 72–74.

[12] John Dwyer, ‘Jesus, man, myth or god?’, 1913; ‘The public schools and religion’, November 1913; Dwyer papers ML MSS 2183/3, item 4; Mittagong Express, 7 August 1891.

[13] Bourdieu argues that ‘struggles for recognition are a fundamental dimension of social life’. This desire to gain ‘honour in the sense of reputation and prestige’ is a process of accumulating ‘symbolic capital’ (Bourdieu 1990, p. 22).

[14] The photograph is in the Dwyer papers, ML MSS 290 box 3.

[15] ‘The book of notes and observations on the occult subjects’, p. 15.

[16] Ibid., p. 2.

[17] Ibid., pp. 51–52.

[18] Ibid., p. 39.

[19] Ibid., pp. 66–70; Jill Roe has noted the influence of spiritualism—direct communication with the dead—on theosophists. Theosophist founder Madame Blavatsky had been a noted medium before the Society was formed in 1875 (Roe 1986, pp. 37–38).

[20] Extract from Rosa Campbell Praed's The Brother of the Shadow, quoted by Dwyer. John Dwyer Papers, ML MSS 2184/3, ‘Occult writings’.

[21] Daniel Dwyer to John Dwyer, undated correspondence c. 1910, Dwyer papers ML MSS 290 box 2.

[22] This theme also animates The Hedgehog and the Fox, Liberty (the recently published, expanded edition of Four Essays on Liberty) and The Crooked Timber of Humanity (see, for example, ‘The decline of utopian ideas in the West’, pp. 23–25). As Henry Hardy observes in his introduction to Liberty, the central plank of the book is Berlin's ‘…belief that the values humans pursue are not only multiple but sometimes irreconcilable, and that this applies at the level of whole cultures—systems of value—as well as between the values of a particular culture or individual’ (Hardy 1990, p. x). For a critique of Berlin's pluralism see also John Gray, Berlin (1995), Chapter 6.