This book began many years ago with an interest in doing a comparative study between Australian and Canadian literatures. I had spent all of my time as a graduate student delving into Canadian subjects, and I felt much might be learned by a comparison with a literature of similar roots and similar international stature (or lack of it). Comparisons with African literature, for instance, involve cultural differences which seemed to me overwhelming. Those with American literature lead to a compulsive need to reject the inferiority of the “smaller partner.”

The next step was a search for a subject. I recognized...

“Lo, the poor Indian.” This short phrase from Alexander Pope’sAn Essay on Man(1734) soon became a part of popular culture. By the mid-nineteenth century caricatures had appeared in which a dejected-looking Indian was labelled as “Lo.” In Pope, “lo” was a directive interjection in a serious comment on the position of the Indian in the universal order. In the caricatures it became a proper name, a silly name for the silly literary obsession with the dying Indian culture and, presumably, dying Indian race. Pope’s words had been subjected to a conscious mis-reading to suit parodic needs. A simplistic...

This study as a whole is an attempt to define the semiotic field of the indigene, primarily through the way it is valorized in a limited assortment of standard commodities in the economy of the image of the indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand literatures. But this is only one way in which the image can be “sliced.” It might also, as suggested above, be examined as one aspect of a different semiotic field. To emphasize the point, just as mysticism is only one of the standard commodities in which the indigene takes part, the indigene is only one...

The title of this chapter reflects an impossibility. Tzvetan Todorov distinguishes between form and substance in many ways in “Poetics and Criticism” (1977) but he recognizes, “The literary work does not have a form and a content but a structure of significations whose relations must be apprehended” (Poetics, 41). In Chapter 1, I show that my analysis of the semiotic field of the indigene operates on a similar assumption. Yet there are questions of form which must be addressed which do not fit easily into the specific analyses of the commodities. Those which arise from dramatic texts have the major...

Sexuality is a major, if not the major, element of human life. Since Freud, psychoanalysis and other theories of the human mind have done much to turn it into a focal point for our view of the individual psyche. We regard sexual attitudes, desires, energies, as central to the definition of each person. From this perspective it requires but a small adjustment of the lens to regard western society as a collectivity of these individual sexual psyches.

Foucault’sThe History of Sexuality(1976) attempts to understand the changes in attitudes towards sexuality which took place in the nineteenth century, which...

Foucault’s rejection of semiotics as a method of analyzing conflict is both understandable and surprisingly ingenuous. It is understandable because “reducing” the ultimate experiential reality of violence, blood, and death to a system of signs seems quite unsatisfactory. It is surprising, however, because Foucault is usually so aware of the limitations involved in his own position, the ideological centre from which he assembles his genealogies. Yet here, Foucault’s discourse, which can be no more than a semiotic construct, is depicted as somehow superior to semiotics.

My analysis of violence and the indigene is based on semiology partly because of a...

The orality of the Indian, the Maori, and the Aborigine seems an intrinsic part of their image, as it is of most representations of indigenous peoples. Films about Africa or South America are full of oratorical natives and of vignettes in which those same natives are literally enthralled by the power of writing. The split between literate and non-literate is often used as the defining point for an absolute division between white self and indigene Other.

Much of the material in this chapter is examined in the light of Walter Ong’s comments inOrality and Literacy(1982). This is not...

Orality is a manifestation, a demonstration, of the Other. But the value of the Other, that different order of consciousness, lies behind the orality. Ong’s claim that there is a direct association between orality and “magical potency” (32) agrees with Goody’s assertion that “spells and other attempts to control the course of events are dependent upon the magic of the word” (1977, 149). Goody continues his consideration of incantation by once again emphasizing the consciousness of the speaker: “The magic of the spell is dependent, at least in part, upon the virtual identity of the speaker and spoken. How can...

Each of the standard commodities might be seen in light of the others but none perhaps so productively as the prehistoric. For the semiotic field of the indigene is constantly both historical and ahistorical. It is historical because it always holds within it a sense of the indigene as an historical value, as a part of the development of the country. All indigene images contain at least a residue of a pre-white past. In this sense the Aborigine is to a modern white Australian what a castle is to a modern Briton. Lévi-Strauss asserts, “The virtue of archives is to...

It is a commonplace in the study of dramatic literature that the play on the page is only a partial outline. In fiction, the reader who lifts the words from the page is controlled only by the interaction between imagination and text. The reader of the drama must also posit limitations to the imagination, the limitations of stage and actors.

Without seeing a staged version of George Dann’s play, it is impossible to have a precise impression of the effects of the production note quoted above. But it neatly encapsulates a factor which clearly separates the indigene on stage from...

The other chapters of this study examine a wide range of texts to consider the variety of ways in which the semiotic field of the indigene has shaped the literatures of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. There the emphasis is on glimpses of the image, brief slices of text. No texts are given extended individual consideration, even those which might be considered major examples, such as Kroetsch’sGone Indianor Herbert’sPoor Fellow My Country. The present chapter employs the methodology defined by the slices of the general and applies it to larger cuts of the specific, to a few...

All of the assessments made in this study can be seen as reflections of the fear/temptation split manifested in the violence and sex commodities. The general sign of fear incorporates an indigenization which excludes the indigene. Temptation holds with it an indigenization by inclusion for the white who, one might say, “acquires Indian.” Note that my word is “acquires,” not “becomes.” Some psychologists might diagnose this acquiring as a rejection of self for not-self which represents a significant’degree of self-hate. The typical pattern of such narratives on the indigene must modify such an interpretation, however. The indigene is acquired, the...