AbstractsLanguage, Literature & Linguistics

Abstract This dissertation investigates the enigma of Joseph Furphy’s iconic Australian novel Such is Life (1903) which hides a romance inside its realist portrayal of life in the Riverina at the end of the nineteenth century, and also hides a woman in a male character. An examination of the fragmentary plots in the novel reveals that this enigma can be mapped through the spatial field. It argues that in Such is Life the spatial field, as an isolated motif, and in its continual dialogue with the temporal field, is an active element in, and not a passive background to, the way stories are plotted and to ways we recognise these plots. The spatial field not only delivers the narratives embedded in the novel but is central to the novel’s design. An analysis of the spatial field shows the function of that field in the action of plotting. Using Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope (the fusion of time and space) we can understand that Furphy plays the spatial field of the novel against the temporal in a number of similarly structured plots. Joseph Furphy’s experimentation with our expectations of genre, and of plots and their outcomes provides evidence for a reading of the novel as a parody of literary genres. The operations of the spatial field of the novel, as distinct from the temporal field, allow readers to observe that Furphy infects realism with romance, and romance with realism in his journey to the emotional core of a woman. The structure of my novel, winter, the trees, is organised spatially, as a first-person narrative framed by a flight from Zurich to Sydney via Singapore. Through this frame, stories embedded in past temporal and spatial fields tell the back story of the struggle faced by the unnamed narrator after the birth of her stillborn baby. The death of the baby causes her to reject her partner, to reject her society and to flee first to a hotel room in Brisbane, then to her mother’s home also in Brisbane in the naive belief that the past can answer questions that she can’t. From Brisbane the narrator travels to Europe and Egypt for her employer, a film director, who sends her to photograph locations for a film script he is writing. After losing her way in the desert in Fayoum, Egypt, the narrator chooses to return to Sydney to face the reality of her childlessness, her grief and the state of her marriage. The novel consciously explores the relevance of the spatial field to the structural integrity of the plots of the many stories embedded in my novel.