The Politics of Possession in Paddy O’Reilly’s <em>The Factory</em>

Abstract

In first chapter of The Factory (2005) protagonist Hilda, writing from a Japanese prison, says,I remember someone saying to me when I first came to this country, may speak perfect Japanese. You may live like Japanese, sound like Japanese, believe what Japanese believe. But you will never be Japanese: (2).This statement provides spur for novel's sustained engagement with nature of national, cultural, and racial identity. This essay highlights way novel both problematizes and reproduces borders that govern who is Japanese and who is and, by extension, who is not Japanese and who is not Australian. The above extract presents Japanese identity as incommensurable with identity, and sees as distinct from Asia:The label Australian [. . .] separates from its place AsiaPacific region and from plethora of its connections with and interests other parts of world; one of effects of this is to assimilate it to a model of white and settled Australianness that does little justice to its internal heterogeneity. (Frow 60)Suvendrini Perera characterizes imaginary borders between and as not simply territorial or national but defined by racial identities as well: the geographical of island-body, Australia, from islands of is paralleled by a process of racial differentiation (3).However The Factory also problematizes this border thinking with its genuine desire to integrate with Asia, despite nationalising forces showcased above (Iwabuchi 17). The increase rhetoric around issue of entering so called Asian Century and various anxieties surrounding Rising Asia (Walker and Sobocinska 1), highlight topical nature of novel's attempts to become part of Asia (O'Carroll and Hodge 157). O'Reilly wrote novel with help of an Asialink writing-in-residence scholarship. Asialink, an affiliate of University of Melbourne, focuses on public understanding of countries of and of Australia's role region, something echoed its tagline Building an Asia-capable Australia (Asialink). In addition, novel clearly represents what is being termed turn literature (Ommundsen 2), typifying urge to Australia's gaze to areas beyond nation (Dixon 20).This transnational gaze reflects Benedict Anderson's metaphor of inverted telescope The Spectre of Comparisons. For Anderson, while telescopic gaze of Europe on highlights a traditional authoritative gaze, reciprocal gaze that looks back through telescope, now an inverted telescope, sees Europe as not enlarged but a miniaturized object. For Anderson this makes it forever impossible to take Europe for granted (20), and he therefore questions West's assumed centrality cross-cultural comparison. The Factory does indeed stage this questioning of authoritative gaze of Westerner or Australian, especially as it seriously calls into question legitimacy of Hilda's authorial voice and way that voice represents Japan from an authoritative perspective. However, this destabilization of authoritative Western gaze takes place displaced transnational space of Japan, significantly not space of Australia. The inflection of Anderson's telescope ventures into space of Japan, and yet reciprocal gaze does not extend back into land of Australia. Thus, to follow Harry Harootunian's critique that in Anderson's gaze Europe still appears dangerously magnified (141), novel risks guarding from outside transnational, as well as internal, scrutiny.The novel's interplay between national and transnational thinking culminates, at end of novel, Hilda's retreat from Japan and tacit acknowledgement that she will never, indeed, be Japanese. …