White Story and Black Pains in Gail Jones' Sorry

Labao Wang

《Concentric： Literary and Cultural Studies》 46卷2期 (2020/09) Pp. 115-135

https://doi.org/10.6240/concentric.lit.202009_46(2).0006

摘要

Australian writer Gail Jones's postmodern novel Sorry (2007) can be read as a serious if modest intervention in Australia's recent debates about the white treatment of indigenous populations. Without resorting to an appropriated Aboriginal testimonial voice for a full presentation of indigenous tribulations, the novel (1) taps into Aboriginal pains through the occasional and sidelong glimpses afforded readers while a white female narrator is relating a story about her own family tragedy; (2) hints at the horrendous mistreatment of Aborigines by white people through the story of the narrator's own struggle between imperial and colonial knowledge; and (3) treats Aboriginal suffering through a deliberate form of poetic ＂shadow-speaking＂ in which pain is vicariously felt from a distance. For these reasons, Sorry would not impress readers as a direct censure of white colonial atrocities. Instead of claiming authority as a grand national narrative, the novel is designed as a postmodern petit récit that tackles a big issue in a small way. If it engages with the theme of national reconciliation, it communicates the message through a form of personal dissent against Australia's conservative political establishment's refusal to apologize. Through a voice of humility, Sorry champions a kind of communication ethics that requires listening to and caring for the other.

關鍵字

Gail Jones ； Sorry ； white story ； Aboriginal pains ； petit récit ； personal intervention ； ethics

參考文獻

Jones, Gail. “Shanghai Library Talk-Nativeland and Elsewhere.” Shanghai Writers’ Association, Shanghai Writers’ Association, 15 Mar. 2010, www.shzgh.org/renda/node5661/node5671/userobject1ai1659402.html. Accessed 17 Mar. 2018.

Jones, Gail. Sorry. Vintage Books, 2008.

Jones, Gail. “Sorry in the Sky: ‘Empathetic Unsettlement,’ Mourning and the Stolen Generation in Imagining Australia.” Imagining Australia: Literature and Culture in the New New World, edited by Judith Ryan and Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Harvard UP, 2004, pp. 159-71.

Jones, Gail. “Speaking Shadows: Justice and the Poetic.” Just Words? Australian Authors Writing for Justice, edited by Bernadette Brennan, U of Queensland P, 2008, pp. 76-86.

Kennedy, Rosanne. “Australian Trials of Trauma: The Stolen Generations in Human Rights, Law, and Literature.” Trials of Trauma, special issue of Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 48, no. 3, Sept. 2011, pp. 333-55.