Abstract
Since its publication in 1938 critics have generally read Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia as a nationalist novel, even when its nationalism is seen to be structured by contradiction. But little attention has been given to the ways in which Herbert’s complex, multifarious and heteroglossic novel exceeds and challenges the very possibility of coherent national space and a coherent national story. This essay considers moments and spaces in Herbert’s novel where the national is displaced and unravelled. Drawing on Rebecca Walkowitz’s idea of cosmopolitan style and Suvendrini Perera’s work on Australia’s insular imagination I identify a critical cosmopolitanism that inheres in the novel’s geographical imagination and its literary form, particularly the narrative voice which retains a critical distance from the nationalist sensibility of various characters and plot lines, performing a detached and restless homelessness that I identify with the cosmopolitan. Ultimately I ask how the novel’s spatial and environmental imagination displaces its nationalist agenda, making space for a different kind of social imagination—one that does not confine itself to the terms of the nation or organise itself around a central figure for the nation.
Highlights
I suggest that it takes place through the novel’s geographical (spatial and environmental) imagination, which despite the novel’s positioning at its time of publication as ‘Brilliantly Australian’ and ‘the novel of the Spirit of the Land’ is not strictly national but perhaps more accurately regional, stretching from Capricornia (Herbert’s name for the region around Darwin) to the East Indies and the Philippines as well as to China and Japan.2 the novel demonstrates the way shifting tides and river levels in the sea country of Northern Australia pose a challenge to the fantasy of a bounded, insular and mappable national space
Since its publication in 1938 critics have generally read Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia as a nationalist novel, even when its nationalism is seen to be structured by contradiction
Drawing on Rebecca Walkowitz’s idea of cosmopolitan style and Suvendrini Perera’s work on Australia’s insular imagination I identify a critical cosmopolitanism that inheres in the novel’s geographical imagination and its literary form, the narrative voice which retains a critical distance from the nationalist sensibility of various characters and plot lines, performing a detached and restless homelessness that I identify with the cosmopolitan
Summary
I suggest that it takes place through the novel’s geographical (spatial and environmental) imagination, which despite the novel’s positioning at its time of publication as ‘Brilliantly Australian’ and ‘the novel of the Spirit of the Land’ is not strictly national but perhaps more accurately regional, stretching from Capricornia (Herbert’s name for the region around Darwin) to the East Indies and the Philippines as well as to China and Japan.2 the novel demonstrates the way shifting tides and river levels in the sea country of Northern Australia pose a challenge to the fantasy of a bounded, insular and mappable national space.
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