“Shakespeare was wrong”: Counter-discursive intertextuality in Gail Jones’s Sorry

Abstract

In what is presented as a moment of truth in Gail Jones’s novel Sorry, the narrator’s brief statement that “Shakespeare was wrong” appears to call into question the English dramatist’s literary and epistemological supremacy. Starting from this unsettling premise, this article seeks to define Jones’s counter-discursive use of Shakespearean intertextuality. While it has, for decades, proved a risky task for both historians and novelists to write about the delicate issue of silence in Australia without risking the appropriation of an Aboriginal voice, the article examines how Jones exploits defamiliarizing techniques in order to undermine the dominant European discourse (as encoded in the Shakespearean text) without assuming an Aboriginal perspective. Her aim is to facilitate the emergence of an incipient, tentatively defined counter-discourse sufficiently attuned to the specific realities of Australia. The article argues that by adopting an Australian cultural perspective designed to decentre Shakespeare, Jones hopes to reconcile history and writing, and also the divided aspects of White Australia’s twofold identity at a time of profound national changes.

Keywords:

• Gail Jones
• Sorry
• Shakespeare
• intertextuality
• counter-discourse
• Australia
• Aborigines

Notes

1. “Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, / So do our minutes hasten to their end; / Each changing place with that which goes before, / In sequent toil all forwards do contend” (Shakespeare 2008a, 1966).

2. Similarly, Nicholas is associated with Leontes, in keeping with the negative view of the Shakespearean character sustained in the novel: “His profile had a sharp, Sicilian quality. Leontes. And the light glinting off his eyeglasses, Perdita thought, made him look sightless, brutal” (Jones 2008a, 34; emphases in original).

3. John Mowitt (2000) was the first to remark that “trauma has come to be invested with such authority and legitimacy that it elicits a concomitant desire to have suffered it, or if not the unspeakable event itself, then the testimonial agency it is understood to produce” (283).

4. The first- and third-person narratives succeed one another, typographically separated by an asterisk, yet within some sections both narratives are merged. For instance, (a) when the first-person narrator claims that “this is a story that can only be told in a whisper” this suggests that she is the narrator (first- and third-person); (b) chapter 2 starts with “I believe that” (14) followed by details of Nicholas’s and Stella’s lives that only a third-person narrator could possibly know; (c) chapter 3 begins with “It was the wet season when Stella heaved me out” (24; my emphasis) and ends with “Perdita grew chubby, contented and well” (26; my emphasis); (d) at the end of the penultimate chapter, the third-person narrator suddenly turns into the first-person narrator: “And only then [ … ] did she begin to know, did she begin to open and grieve. [ … ] should have said sorry to my sister, Mary” (211; original italics).

5. For more on this matter, see Herrero (2011), 291.