“The World Had Forgotten about Us”: Heterotopian Resistance in Richard Flanagan’s Wanting and Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip

Charlotte Wadoux

doi:10.3390/h11010009

Abstract

This article explores how the different forms of heterotopias present in Richard Flanagan’s Wanting (2008) and Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip (2006) articulate problematic identity politics and cultural memory. In Wanting, the collocation of Mathinna’s story with that of the lost Franklin expedition offers a form of reclaiming. This article argues that Flanagan’s novel moves from heterotopias of deviation to a crisis heterotopia, displacing and debunking the compensation function of the colonial heterotopia to highlight the crushing of Aboriginal identity. This shifting heterotopia is doubled by Mathinna’s heterotopic carceral body, that is, body as confined space, which qualifies the act of reclaiming. In Mister Pip, heterotopias concern cultural memory as the island of Bougainville, secluded from the rest of the world, turns into the repository of the villagers’ culture juxtaposed with the reading of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860–1861). This article argues that Jones’s creation of a palimpsestic heterotopia allows him to resist Eurocentric views as well as to actualize postcolonial concepts. Jones’s novel calls for a dynamic appropriation of literature. Matilda’s ‘Pacific version’ of Pip’s story reflects the cracks in the Victorian and contemporary exploitations of the island. Readers’ immersions in these heterotopias do not provide an escape from but a thoughtful commitment to the past.

Highlights

Fictional sites are always heterotopias, since, for John Thieme, “the act of rendering them in language inevitably renders them ‘other’” (Thieme 2013, p. 118)
Jones’s novel presents Victorian England as both a therapeutic heterotopia and a heterotopia of illusion, while the island and novel turn into a palimpsestic space celebrating hybridity
The palimpsestic space of the school in Mister Pip in part reverses this development: I contend that Jones’s representations of heterotopias of accumulated time generate a creative site for memory as the expression of (Matilda’s and the children’s) individuality

Summary

Introduction

Fictional sites are always heterotopias, since, for John Thieme, “the act of rendering them in language inevitably renders them ‘other’” (Thieme 2013, p. 118). While the first presents a clearly affiliative response to Dickens, Jones’s novel is more nuanced, celebrating a form of appropriation and hybridity In both novels, space has a striking importance not merely as a setting but as a powerful device to explore historiography and identity politics. I explore the multiplicity of heterotopias that Flanagan uses in Wanting to try and reclaim the Aboriginal Mathinna while debunking colonial discourse. This act of reclaiming is qualified by reading the representation of Mathinna’s body as space through Foucault’s focus on the body as a site of containment in ‘Le corps utopique’. Jones’s novel presents Victorian England as both a therapeutic heterotopia and a heterotopia of illusion, while the island and novel turn into a palimpsestic space celebrating hybridity

Heterotopic Down Under

The Carceral Body

Heterotopias of Accretion and Crossfertilization

Conclusions