The Australian Apology in Fiction: Gail Jones's Sorry

My dissertation focuses on Sorry, a novel by the Australian academic and writer Gail Jones. The novel centres on the friendship between an Aboriginal girl, Mary, and a white girl, Perdita, and hints at an ideal of reconciliation. It is thus against the background of the Australian Reconciliation that my dissertation first attempts to set apart colonial trauma from the Eurocentric trauma model, avoiding in this way any conflation of national tragedies and warning against the Western tendency to trivialise colonial traumatic experiences. It is my contention that one should resist the attitude consisting of homogenizing all colonial experience into the same sort of victim complex. This phenomenon of victimization is allegorically illustrated in Sorry through the first-person narrator, that is, the adult Perdita. Reflecting retrospectively on her childhood, she adopts a discourse tinged with trauma envy that allegorically echoes the ambiguities of the reconciliation policy.
My dissertation then explores how Jones employs the trope of the spectral and draws upon Gothic terminology on the narrative level in order to centre on the repetitive and enigmatic occurrence of trauma on the plot level. In addition to the fragmented structure of the novel’s narrative, the mixing of genres and the wavering between fiction and testimony suggest the pertinence of an allegorical reading. I believe that this gives Jones, even as a white writer, the otherwise so controversial ‘right’ to tackle the highly delicate issue of silence in narratives dealing with Indigenous characters.
Moreover, through her use of fiction and of different forms of indirection, such as perspective and intertextuality, Jones avoids the appropriation of Indigenous testimony: the first-person narrator, that is, the adult Perdita, gradually silences Mary by superseding the latter’s trauma (as the victim of rape) with her own trauma (of murdering her father). Young Perdita, by contrast, is not silenced in spite of her stutter and disrupted speech; indeed the reader gains access to her thoughts retrospectively. In addition, in order to mirror at a formal level the effects of trauma, Jones resorts to literary techniques and stylistic features which evoke as faithfully as possible the effects of trauma. Sorry thus shares numerous features with trauma fiction and unites testimony and fiction. By the same token, intertextuality mirrors the repetitive effects of trauma and its belatedness and highlights the role of the reader, who plays the part of an active agent determining the meanings connecting the source-text to its rewriting. My dissertation therefore eventually investigates the notion of Shakespearean and Conradian intertextuality.