Spatial Linearity and Postcolonial Parody in Murray Bail’s Holden’s Performance

Abstract

0. Introduction If we are to consider how heterogeneous populations ‘share places’ in post-colonial cultures, we might start from a literal interpretation of the conference theme and examine the ways in which space is effectively organised and occupied in a given national context. Insofar as such an analysis can be undertaken through the prism of fiction, it can be argued that the Australian writer Murray Bail’s work lends itself remarkably well to this purpose. Since the 1970s, Bail has indeed been much concerned with the exploration of the space--time complex in general, and with the history and geography of his native country in particular. It is probably in Holden’s Performance that the author’s dual vision of space most blatantly emerges, leading him to distinguish between, on the one hand, a typically Australian natural space and, on the other hand, a cultural space where most great urban centres prove infected by a ubiquitous and clearly Western sense of linearity. In this essay, I will dwell on the European origins of the trope of linearity and on the role it plays in connection with the geographical dichotomy mentioned above, focusing all along on Bail’s parody of the straight line and on the ontological implications thereof. 1. The Western origins of spatial linearity The straight line, as Euclid and his antique school of Greek mathematicians’ contribution to the history of geometry, instantly betrays its Western origins. From the third century before Christ and until the industrial revolution, the straight line has reigned over Europe. If we except the Middle Ages, which marked a return to obscurantism and to “labyrinthine thought,” the hegemony of linearity thus lasted for an entire millennium and reached its climax in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment -a period that is referred to as the age of Reason par excellence and the end of which coincides with the European colonisation of Australia --, the straight line has dominated absolutely all areas of European thought