It is this double strand of narrative that I wish to follow here, the one that clings to realism but veers from it in sideway scuttles, “one long prophetic oratorio” relying on meta-narrative or meta-artistic commentary, and reflecting on the purpose of the epic, thus standing for a subliminal artistic manifesto that might unite the spirituality of both the Indigenous and the Anglo-European worlds. As a bard of her people, she writes a new collective epic in prose that calls for the power of verse to set the story in memorable and glorious terms, incorporating the vernacular and orality in her multivocal diction, in a renewed form of the genre spanning cultures.Ģ In the cave where Mozzie Fishman’s followers bury the three boys who died in custody, the characters hear a droning sound, and before they understand realistically that it comes from dingoes in a chamber of the cave, the expression of Will’s perception is meta-narrative and evokes music and poetry: “The sound he heard was as if someone a long way off was playing a stanza on the didgeridoo, then, others responded with their own version of the melody which went droning on as one long prophetic oratorio” (Wright 2009, 423). She also uses Waanyi expressions, both languages including many alliterations and converging to suggest meter in prose. To do so, she uses meta-textual words such as stanza (Wright 2009, 423) and others, to inscribe her work in an exogenous poetic tradition, amongst other borrowings and echoes of English verse, and the occasional English meter in her remarkably rhythmic prose. Strongly anchored in the Gulf of Carpentaria, her epic provides an Indigenous world vision in writing, a medium other than the traditional oral transmission in songlines, or the visual one of cave drawings (both mentioned in the novel), but keeps the memory of the change from songlines to written lines. 1 The main difference between the European tradition and Wright’s epic is that she does not sing the (.)ġ In her novel Carpentaria, Alexis Wright does not celebrate the prowess of a lonely hero as is often the case in Western epics, but as in its Western counterpart, 1 invokes ancestral spirits to celebrate the union between the people and Country, extolling the strength which numerous characters draw from the elemental spirits of land, air and water, and their joint fulfilment.
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