ABSTRACT

Alexis Wright’s novel The Swan Book (2013) has been read as contesting imperialist histories in its use of ironic magical realism: asengaging with debates in Australian indigenous communities about sovereignty; and, as world-making in its portrayal of conflicting and overlapping material forces and temporalities. Previous readings have examined the text’s dramatisation of biopolitical interventions into the lives of Aboriginal people, and the novel’s near-simultaneous evocation of different time periods. To date, scholarship on The Swan Book has not fully conceptualised its assault on western narrative forms. The following paper focuses on the novel’s contestation of crisis and catastrophe as metonyms for colonial and western ways of being and knowledge, and its narratival focus on what could be termed ‘survivance’, a term used (after Derrida) by Native American fiction writer and scholar Gerald Vizenor, to whose novel Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles (1990), Wright’s book makes intertextual references. The following paper contends that Wright’s novel offers radical structures of feeling that counter western notions of narrative,history, time and the individual. These are manifest in the text’s inclusion of nested narratives, its critique of western notions of history, its de-hierarchisation of time, and in its disputation of the centrality of the individual.

摘要

亚历克西斯·赖特（Alexis Wright）的小说《天鹅之书》（ The Swan Book）（2013 年）被解读为在使用具有讽刺意味的魔幻现实主义时对帝国主义历史提出质疑：参与澳大利亚土著社区关于主权的辩论；并且，在其对相互冲突和重叠的物质力量和时间性的描绘中创造了世界。以前的阅读已经检查了文本对原住民生活的生命政治干预的戏剧化，以及小说对不同时期的近乎同时唤起。迄今为止，《天鹅之书》的奖学金还没有完全概念化它对西方叙事形式的攻击。以下论文着重于小说对危机和灾难作为殖民和西方存在方式和知识的转喻的争论，其叙事重点是可以称为“生存”的东西，这是美国原住民小说作家使用的一个术语（在德里达之后）和学者杰拉尔德·维泽诺（Gerald Vizenor）的小说《熊心：继承者编年史》(1990)，赖特的书进行了互文参考。以下论文认为赖特的小说提供了与西方叙事、历史、时间和个人观念相反的激进的情感结构。这些表现在文本对嵌套叙事的包含、对西方历史观念的批判、对时间的去等级化以及对个人中心地位的争论。