Malouf in Remembering
Babylon
Remembering Babylon is a book by David Malouf written in
1993. It won the inaugural International Dublin Literary Award and was
shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Miles Franklin Award. The novel
covers themes of isolation, language, relationships (particularly those between
men), community and living on the edge (of society, consciousness, culture). Malouf in Remembering Babylon Its themes evolve into a greater narrative of an English boy, Gemmy Fairley,
who is marooned on a foreign land and is raised by a group of aborigines,
natives to the land in Queensland. When white settlers reach the area, he
attempts to move back in the world of Europeans. As Gemmy wrestles with his own
identity, the community of settlers struggle to deal with their fear of the
unknown. Malouf in Remembering Babylon The narrative was influenced by the experiences of James Morrill, a
shipwreck survivor who lived with Aboriginal people in North Queensland for 17
years from 1846 to 1863.
Malouf's narrative voice is at once scattered and singular,
skipping between perspectives on the same events, and forcing the reader to pay
close attention to each character's rendering in order to arrive at the wholest
truth possible. Malouf in Remembering Babylon The magical realism theme is cultivated in the exaggerated
response of all the characters to mundane items: Gemmy surrenders to what he
knows is a stick instead of a gun, because he attributes Lachlan's aiming it at
him as a signal of the wariness of the other settlers. Malouf in Remembering Babylon The men of the community
are in an uproar over a stone that visiting aborigines (supposedly) pass off to
Gemmy for no logical reason—only because they fear whatever knowledge the
aborigines have garnered of the land. These settlers are the first whites to
live on that soil, and view anything that is not white with an extreme
wariness, not only of the physical land but the spiritual sense of the place.
In the case of Remembering Babylon, the myth is that of
the settling of Australia and of the fateful contact between white Europeans
and black aborigines. Malouf in Remembering Babylon That contact–and all its tragic repercussions and missed
possibilities–is represented by the sudden appearance, in an unnamed Queensland
settlement in the 1840s, of Gemmy Fairley, an English castaway who was rescued
by aborigines and has lived among them for sixteen years before crossing into
the territory claimed by his countrymen. With his sun-blackened face and
straw-white hair, his twitching gait and few, inarticulate scraps of English,
Gemmy is a confusing–and increasingly suspicious–figure to his new hosts. Malouf in Remembering Babylon On a
practical level, some settlers fear that Gemmy is a spy sent by the aborigines,
who are thought to have massacred settlers elsewhere in the new territory. But
he also represents the dread possibility that civilization, language–whiteness
itself–are qualities as provisional as their farms and tumbledown shacks.
Looking at Gemmy, they find themselves wondering, “Could you lose it? Not just
language but it. It.” [p. 40]In time these suspicions prove too great, the gulf
between cultures too insurmountable: Gemmy is beaten and driven away. Malouf in Remembering Babylon His few
allies, the Scots farmer Jock McIvor, his nephew Lachlan Beattie, his elder
daughter Janet, and the botanizing Reverend Frazer, are permanently estranged
from their community–and indeed, from their ingenuous former selves. In that
outcome, David Malouf sees a fall from grace that has implicated succeeding
generations of European Australians, a loss of the potential self embodied in
this “in-between creature” [p. 28] who was neither wholly white nor wholly
black but “a true child of the place as it will one day be.” [p. 132] Drawing
on the true story of Gemmy Morril, Malouf has created a haunting, melancholy,
and stunningly written parable of the limits of imagination and the
intractibility of human nature, of the moment in which two peoples met on the
ground of a new world–and one of them turned away.
1. Malouf tells his story in an intermittent and at times
circuitous manner. Typically, he reports the essentials of an incident, traces
its repercussions through different witnesses, and then returns to fill in its
missing details–particularly, the actions and motivations of his central
character. Malouf in Remembering Babylon Where else does Malouf employ this narrative strategy? What does he
accomplish by telling his story from shifting points of view and by withholding
critical revelations?
2. In contrast to his use of multiple points of view, the
author employs a stable and somewhat distanced narrative voice. That voice can
express profound and often lyrical insights into each of the novel’s
characters, yet it belongs to none of them. How does the tension between a
fixed, omniscient voice and shifting, limited points of view affect your
perception of the novel’s events?
3. Lachlan and his cousins first encounter Gemmy while
pretending to hunt wolves on the Russian steppes. What irony is implicit in
this game? Where else in Remembering Babylon do characters behave as
though they were somewhere other than the Queensland bush? What are the
consequences of this tendency?
4. Lachlan “captures” Gemmy with an imaginary weapon, a
stick masquerading as a gun. Why does Gemmy surrender? What power does he
recognize in this object and in the gesture that animates it? Where else
in Remembering Babylon do simple objects acquire magical power?
5. To the children, the landscape from which Gemmy emerges
is “the abode of everything savage and fearsome, and since it lay so far beyond
experience, not just their own but their parents’ too, of nightmare, rumours,
superstitions and all that belonged to Absolute Dark.” [p. 3] How is this
initial description amplified or altered in the course of the novel? At what
moments does the landscape seem to physically permeate its inhabitants, as, for
example, on page 18, where Abbot feels his blood beating in unison with the
shrilling of insects in the bush?
6. How do Gemmy and his aboriginal rescuers view the same
landscape? What language does Malouf use to convey their differing perceptions?
Which vision of the land triumphs by the novel’s climax? At what points–and
through what agency–do some of the novel’s English characters come to see the
Australian terrain as Gemmy does?
7. Gemmy’s first words are “Do not shoot. I am a B-b-british
object!” [p. 3] What does it mean to be an object rather than a subject? What
meanings accrue to this phrase in light of Gemmy’s experience as a child in
England–and as a man-child in a white settlement in Australia?
8. Gemmy returns to his countrymen at a certain moment in
Australian history, at a time when settlement in Queensland has advanced only
halfway up the coast and many villages–including the one in which the action
unfolds–are still unnamed. How has Australia changed by the novel’s climax?
What is the implied relation between Gemmy’s fate and the progress of
Australian history?
9. The fact that Gemmy is first seen balanced precariously
on a fence is indicative of his status as an “in-between creature” [p. 28],
poised between European and aboriginal identities. How does Gemmy’s treatment
by the aborigines both parallel and differ from his treatment by Englishmen?
How does Gemmy view himself? What other hybrids or transitions does he embody?
10. Language plays a critical role within this novel,
beginning with Gemmy’s sense that the words in which Abbot transcribes his
story contain “the whole of what he was” [p. 20]. At what other points in the book
does the spoken or written word act as a magical shorthand, one that not only
connotes but invokes and transforms reality? How does Malouf’s prose style
mirror this effect? How does the novel’s sense of language parallel its vision
of objects and landscape?
11. It is tempting to see Gemmy as an innocent. But has
Gemmy merely stumbled into colonial territory or has he come there with a
purpose–and, if so, what is it? Is your earlier sense of Gemmy altered by the
discovery that, as a boy in England, he may have killed his master?
12. Behind every imposture lies a second self. In Gemmy’s
case, that other self is the one that lies dormant during his life with the
aborigines and that first surfaces when he tastes the mash that Ellen McIvor is
throwing to her chickens [p. 31]. How does Malouf describe the interplay
between his characters’ different selves? Which of his characters realize their
inner selves by the novel’s end?
13. In the course of Remembering Babylon, certain characters
change, not only in relation to Gemmy, but in relation to each other. Where,
and in whom, do these changes occur? To what extent is Gemmy the cause of these
transformations?
14. Repetition is an essential part of this novel’s
structure. It is not just that certain incidents–Gemmy’s fall from the fence,
his meeting with the aborigines–are narrated from different points of view.
In Remembering Babylon episodes and objects have a way of doubling.
What is the effect of these multiplications? How do they constitute a cyclical
counterpoint to the linear progression of the narrative?
15. By the simple fact of his presence, Gemmy divides his
hosts into two camps: those who tolerate and in time love him, and those who
are determined to drive him away. What is it that distinguishes Gemmy’s protectors
from his tormentors? What qualities do the two groups have in common?
16. Although Malouf tells his story from multiple points of
view and tells us much about characters as diverse as a thirteen-year-old boy,
a middle-aged farm wife, and an otherworldly parson, he leaves his aboriginal
characters enigmas. We know them only through Gemmy, who has lived among them
but is not entirely of them. Why might Malouf have chosen to do this? What is
the effect of this gap in the novel’s psychological fabric?
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