Truth and HistoryOn Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang

Peter Carey’s last three novels have all been set in the nineteenth century. One can understand the poetic licence that Carey finds in history. Someone once said that ‘the past is a foreign country’, but the past is also a country that authors and readers will never actually visit. Aesthetically, history offers interesting pegs on which an author can hang a story. But politically, historical fiction also tries to give an authoritative voice and a ‘true history’ to the victims, the downtrodden, the forgotten of the past. There is, therefore, a contradiction between using history to create fiction and using fiction to reveal the ‘truth’ about history.

Carey’s work reveals this mix of imagination and desire for ‘truth.’ His latest novel, True History of the Kelly Gang, is written in the first person and is meant to be Ned Kelly’s account of his life, written for the daughter he will never see. The emphasis on ‘truth’ is evident in the first sentence:

I lost my own father at 12 yr. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences my dear daughter you are presently too young to understand a word I write but this history is for you and will contain no single lie may I burn in hell if I speak false.

This is pure fiction. Ned Kelly had no daughter and certainly did not write any manuscript like this. Carey’s title, True History, is thus very ironic. Carey has fun maintaining his claim to authenticity by describing in detail the manuscript from which the story was supposedly taken. Bibliographic details are included at the beginning of each chapter. The chapters are called ‘parcels.’ This tactic of emphasising an ‘original’ document draws on a long tradition that dates back to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). However, the reasons behind Carey’s ruse are complex. There is a strong impulse here to make a version of history ‘true.’

The epigraph to True History, from William Faulkner, reads, ‘The past is not dead. It is not even past.’ One meaning is that history repeats itself; another meaning is that past events reverberate in the present; however, a third meaning that is relevant for Carey is that real people lived in the past and what happened to them has significance for us today. The ‘truth’ about history lies in the passion and complexity of ordinary, forgotten people.

As Carey repeatedly stated on his promotional tour in Australia last year, his aim in resurrecting Ned Kelly was to discover the man behind the mask and to describe the inner life of that empty figure who stares out of Sidney Nolan’s famous paintings – to capture the individual behind the icon. Carey describes with great skill the inner life of Ned Kelly. The plot is simple and we know it well. We have all heard of the boy who grew up under the constant tyranny of the law; who lived in poverty with his mother and siblings at Eleven Mile Creek in Victoria; who drifted towards a life of crime and became the leader of the Kelly Gang, which also included Joe Byrne, Steve Hart, and Dan Kelly; who killed a posse of police at Stringybark Creek; who constructed Australia’s most famous suit of armour; and who was captured after the final shoot-out at Glenrowan and uttered ‘such is life’ before he was hung at the age of twenty-six. Carey brings these details to life with great skill.

However, the novel’s great achievement lies in its ability to evoke a distinctive personality through a unique prose style. The plot is simple, but the narration of the novel is remarkable. Carey’s prose recreates the style of a man with little formal schooling and it foregoes many standard grammatical features, such as commas. The effect is impressive. Thoughts and actions are yoked together in a single sentence so as to create a tremendous sense of narrative urgency. Every sentence has so much material squeezed into it that it seems ready to burst apart at the seams. Thoughts, feelings, and events all come in a rush. The following account of Ned Kelly’s first crime at the age of ten, when he kills a heifer to feed his hungry family, illustrates this narrative urgency:

It were across this dry river bed that Mr Murray’s heifer calf come calling out my name I were very hungry when I heard her and knew what I must do…Within the year I would of learned to kill a beast very smart and clean and have its hide off and drying in the sun before you could say Jack Robertson but on this 1st occasion I failed to find the artery. I’m sure you know I have spilled human blood when there were no other choice at that time I were no more guilty than a soldier in a war. But if there was a law against the murder of a beast I would plead guilty and you would be correct to put the black cap on your head for I killed my little heifer badly and am sorry for it still. By the time she fell her neck was a sea of laceration I will never forget the terror in her eyes.

This urgent style is also related to character. The sentences packed to capacity and bristling with energy develop the growing image of Ned Kelly as a man who can only barely contain his violence. Ned realises his own tendency to confrontation. At the age of seven, he stands by his mother when a policeman attempts to molest her and observes how his action contrasts with others in the room: ‘Of a different disposition I begun to move towards my mother’. Ned also repeats the phrase ‘he did not know me’ to describe the violence that lurks within him and that often strikes out unexpectedly. This explosive fury is an essential part of Ned Kelly’s character. What is brilliant is the way the prose reflects his personality through overflowing sentences that burst outward.

Carey’s aim of uncovering the man behind the mask is developed through a language style that also evokes a particular idea of masculinity. Western masculinity is above all active, and is often represented as a flowing, internal force. Our culture’s idea of masculinity is marked by both restraint and violence just as our ideal man is controlled yet always ready to spring into action. Masculinity is a performance that must avoid passivity on the one hand and brutality on the other. The traditional association of masculinity with discipline and the endurance of pain, for example, illustrates the idea that men need to be disciplined. Carey’s prose illustrates and draws on this concept of manliness as a chaotic force in need of control.

In Sidney Nolan’s paintings this image is dominant. Beneath Ned Kelly’s rigid mask stares a mind locked away by steel and iron. Carey’s aim is to probe beneath this image; and he does this very effectively through the counter-image of a man in a dress. Transvestism emerges as a theme in the first chapter of the book when we see the young Ned Kelly discover to his chagrin that reports of his father wearing a dress while riding about the countryside are, in fact, true. The dress is buried in a trunk in the Kelly’s backyard. Ned brings this secret out of its earthen closet and in a fit of fury, he burns his father’s hidden dress. His father does not acknowledge that the secret even exists and there results a growing separation between father and son. After burning his father’s dress, Ned says:

I lost my own father from a secret he might as well been snatched by a roiling river fallen from a ravine I lost him from my heart so long I cannot even now properly make the place for him that he deserves.

Ned defines himself against effeminacy and secrecy. The reader knows, of course, that the rigid masquerade of a suit of armour awaits him at the end of the story. But by placing the dress in opposition to the suit of armour, Carey delves beneath the icons of masculinity that have traditionally defined Australia’s most famous bushranger.

Later in the story, Carey explains away the theme of transvestism by saying that it was the custom of ancient Celtic warriors to ride about the countryside in a dress. Carey should not have done this. His ‘explanation’ is, in fact, the only moment when the narrative loses its urgency. The dress is an excellent metaphor for the fears against which manliness defines itself. It should have been left hanging, as it were, in opposition to Ned Kelly’s suit of armour.

When Carey arrived in Australia last year to publicise True History of the Kelly Gang, he observed that ‘the past is like science fiction to me.’ Carey knows about science fiction. His early experiments in this genre in Exotic Pleasures created some of the brightest stars in the galaxy of Australian short story writing. But at his talk to the Art Gallery Society of NSW, he observed that his historical novels were just as fictional as science fiction. Carey was referring to the ‘easy’ aspect of historical fiction, that within certain acceptable limits it is completely made up. But the best science fiction manages to transport its readers to distant galaxies and also bring them closer to their own condition. Carey achieves this effect in True History of the Kelly Gang, where he creates a new world from the past in order to reveal a ‘truth’ about ourselves.

Faulkner’s epigraph – ‘The past is not dead. It is not even past.’ – is thus very apt in that it describes the effect of Carey’s reconstruction. Faulkner influences Carey not only in the rich figurative language that Carey uses, but in the way he gave voice to the rich thoughts of supposedly simple people. This is Carey’s political function. Carey tries to humanise history’s victims and show the complexity of the unknown and downtrodden. His aim of giving voice to the passions and feelings of forgotten people is evident, for example, at the end of Oscar and Lucinda, when the narrator describes a country thick with invisible stories:

My great-grandfather drifted up the Bellinger River like a blind man up the central aisle of Notre Dame. He saw nothing. The country was thick with sacred stories more ancient than the ones he carried in his sweat-slippery leather Bible. He did not even imagine their presence.

In a narrative of a nation’s progress, all that is left of Oscar and Lucinda’s own story are traces. Carey’s political task is to give voice to the stories that are trampled by the grand narratives of history and civilisation. Carey thus creates history to reveal a deeper truth about history. This ‘truth’ is about the hidden depths of ordinary people; about the extraordinary in the ordinary and vice-versa.

Post-structuralist critics often claim that literature does more than simply ‘reflect’ life; that it ‘constructs’ life and pre-eminently, it constructs notions of personal identity. These critics claim that literature not only represents the inner life, it in effect creates the inner life. Ever since Samuel Richardson wrote Pamela (1740) and gave emotional depth and moral probity to a young servant girl the novel has created this sense of personal depth for common people. The novel as a genre is linked to democracy because it claims that complexity is a common legacy. Carey reveals this democratic impulse in most of his work, particularly in his novels set in the nineteenth-century – Oscar and Lucinda and Jack Maggs. He failed in Jack Maggs partly because he tried to attack something visible, Charles Dickens, and bring that famous author down a notch or two, instead of giving voice to something hidden. However, in True History, he returns to representing the inner life and succeeds admirably.

T. S. Eliot once claimed that ‘the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.’ Carey’s weaving of history and truth confirms this historical sense. In exploring the relationship between truth and history, Carey has moved from entirely imaginary characters (such as Oscar and Lucinda) to historical characters who are fictionalised (such as Charles Dickens as Tobias Oates in Jack Maggs) to real historical characters (such as Ned Kelly). Carey succeeds in True History of the Kelly Gang because his experimental narrative style works so well. However, it would be interesting to see the product of his imagination without any historical constraints. This is not to say that history is a crutch for Carey. Of course, it is always the case and will always be the case that poor novels and meagre tales are padded out by historical detail. This is not the case with Carey’s historical fiction. Nevertheless, it would be interesting to see what Carey could accomplish with a contemporary tale, or perhaps even science-fiction.