Cover not available
Article published In:
English Text Construction
Vol. 8:2 (2015) ► pp.159–176

Saying the unsayable

Imagining reconciliation in Gail Jones’s Sorry

In her novel Sorry (2007), Australian novelist and essayist Gail Jones engages in a reflection on the ethics of reconciliation. Written in response to her wish to acknowledge the debt to the Stolen Generations, Sorry offers new possibilities of ethical mourning, allowing the dead to return and the voiceless to speak. This article explores the ways in which Jones not only fashions a narrative that bypasses the unsayable dimension of Australia’s history and the representational difficulties inherent in trauma but also fosters the empathetic imagination through a metadiscursive discussion of the act of reading. Self-referentiality and self-reflexivity are also examined, as they allow Jones to draw attention to her novel’s writerly elaborations and offer an alternative to standard reconciliation practices.

Keywords: Gail Jones, silence, representation, metatextuality, Sorry
Published online: 3 December 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/etc.8.2.01bel
References
Jones, Gail
1992 Other Places. In The House of Breathing. New York: George Braziller, 28–51.Google Scholar
2007 Sorry. London: Harvill Secker.Google Scholar
Baronian, Marie-Aude & Mireille Rosello
2008 Jacques Rancière and indisciplinarity. Gregory Elliot (tr). Art & Research 2 (1): 1–10. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Block, Summer
2008 Interview: Gail Jones. January Magazine. [URL] (last accessed on 1 May 2015).Google Scholar
Brydon, Diana
2013 “Difficult forms of knowing”: Enquiry, injury, and translocated relations of postcolonial responsibility. In Postcolonial Translocations: Cultural Representation and Critical Spatial Thinking, Marga Munkelt, Markus Schmitz, Mark Stein & Silke Stroh (eds.). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 3–28. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Butler, Judith
1997 Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Callahan, David
2012 Failing to meet in the middle: East Timor and Gail Jones’s “Other Places”. Antipodes 26 (2): 137–142.Google Scholar
Code, Lorraine
1998 How to think globally: Stretching the limits of imagination. Hypatia 13 (2): 73–85. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Derrida, Jacques
2002. [1993] Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International 1993 Trans. Peggy Kamuf. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Fraser, Nancy
2007 Reframing justice in a globalizing world. In Nationalism and Global ­Solidarities: Alternative Projections to Neoliberal Globalisation, James Goodman & Paul James (eds.). London: Routledge, 168–186.Google Scholar
Gelder, Ken & Jane M. Jacobs
1998 Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a ­Postcolonial Nation. Victoria: Melbourne.Google Scholar
Gooder, Haydie & Jane M. Jacobs
2000 “On the border of the unsayable”: The apology in postcolonizing Australia. Interventions 2 (2): 229–247. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Herrero, Dolores
2011 The Australian apology and postcolonial defamiliarization: Gail Jones’s Sorry. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47 (3): 283–295. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hosking, Susan Elizabeth
2011 Water, soap and sanitation: Assimilationist whitewash and ­Stolen Generations narratives in South-West Australia. In Landscape, Place and ­Culture: Linkages between Australia and India, Deb N. Bandyopadhyay, Paul Brown & ­Christopher Conti (eds.). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 218–236.Google Scholar
Jones, Gail
2006 A dreaming, a sauntering: Re-imagining critical paradigms. JASAL 51: 11–24.Google Scholar
2008 Speaking shadows: Justice and the poetic. In Just Words? Australian Authors Writing for Justice, Bernadette Brennan (ed.). St Lucia, Qld.: University of Queensland, 76–86.Google Scholar
Kossew, Sue
2013 Saying sorry: The politics of apology and reconciliation in recent Australian fiction. In Locating Postcolonial Narrative Genres, Walter Goebel & Saskia Schabio (eds.). New York: Routledge, 171–183.Google Scholar
Lloyd, David
2000 Colonial trauma/postcolonial recovery? Interventions 2 (2): 212–228. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McCrea, Michele
2012 Collisions of authority: Nonunitary narration and textual authority in Gail Jones’ Sorry . In Encounters: Place, Situation, Context, Cassandra Atherton, Rhonda Dredge, Katya Johanson, Antonia Pont, Ruby Todd & Patrick West (eds.). Canberra: The Australasian Association of Writing Programs. [URL] (last accessed on 1 May 2015).Google Scholar
McGonegal, Julie
2009 The great Canadian (and Australian) secret: The limits of non-­indigenous knowledge and representation. ESC 35 (1): 67–83. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Murray, Jessica
2008 Tremblings in the distinction between fiction and testimony. Postcolonial Text 4 (2): 1–19.Google Scholar
Rothberg, Michael
2000 Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation. Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Vice, Sue
2000 Holocaust Fiction. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Wachtel, Eleanor
2012  Five Bells with novelist Gail Jones. Writers and Company. CBC Radio. [URL] (last accessed on 1 May 2015).
Whitehead, Anne
2004 Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Montoro, Rocío
2016. The year’s work in stylistics 2015. Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 25:4 ► pp. 376 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 2 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.