Content area
Full Text
One evening in the driest grasses in the world, a child who was no stranger to her people, asked if anyone could find Hope. The people of parable and prophecy pondered what was hopeless and finally declared they no longer know what Hope was. The clocks, tick-a-ty tock, looked as though they might run out of time. Luckily, the ghosts in the memories of the old folk were listening, and said anyone can find Hope in the stories, the big stories and the little ones in between. So ... (12)
Alexis Wright's Carpentaria is a long and sprawling carnivalesque novel that offers a cautiously positive outlook for Aboriginal people, one that also recognises the difficulties of contemporary Aboriginal experience. The novel creates a space that is not 'within the imagined borders that have been forced' on Aboriginal people (Wright, 'On Writing Carpentaria' 82) by resisting being framed by the history of dispossession and marginalisation that so often defines Aboriginal people as silent and passive victims. The novel's use of the carnivalesque and magical realism, the latter a style also associated with the carnivalesque, disrupts accepted ideas, challenges mainstream or dominant representations of Aboriginal people in historiography, language, literature, and politics, and proposes new ways of thinking about the interaction between two cultures.
The carnivalesque features ambiguity, opposes uniformity and homogenisation and mocks authority and the familiar through the use of parody, exaggeration and the comic. It is a form that has traditionally allowed marginalised sections of society to resist the dominant culture. Carnival originated in the Middle Ages and was initially a physical celebration that allowed people some freedom from official rituals and ceremonies associated with the Church and political power. However, with the rise of the middle class in the seventeenth century Carnival was transferred from physical celebrations into literature, art and music (Stallybrass and White 181). Mikhail Bakhtin describes the carnivalesque in literature as the voice of the people that seeks to
consecrate inventive freedom to permit the combination of a variety of different elements and their rapprochement, to liberate from the prevailing point of view of the world, from conventions and established truths, from clichés, from all that is humdrum and universally accepted ... [and it] offers the chance to have a...