Orality and Narrative Structure in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria

Abstract

This essay proposes a narratological framework for Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006). While many critics have commented on the novel’s ‘remarkable’ and ‘magisterial’ narrative voice, no one has sought to describe the narrative structure of the novel. This may be because Wright appears to defy diegetic conventions, making it hard to work out who the narrator/s and narratees are in the text. The clues to unravelling Carpentaria’s narratological puzzle, I suggest, are to be found in considering the sense of orality that Wright seeks to impose on the text. She uses both implicit and explicit strategies aimed at asserting the power and longevity of indigenous oral storytelling and knowledge systems over and against (‘white,’ Western) written systems. The narrative framework assists in this assertion of orality. I argue that the ‘main’ story of Carpentaria needs to be read as an embedded narrative, although this is difficult to recognise because the framing narrative is so minimal; it comprises just two short passages of capitalised text at the beginning of Chapters 1 and 2. The narratee of this framing narrative is a non-Aboriginal Australian, who is then forced to retreat to the edges of this extradiegetic space to ‘listen in’ to the grander tale that follows, the embedded narrative. Here, an altogether different Aboriginal narrator addresses captivated Aboriginal narratees. This framework, possibly unique in postcolonial fiction, allows Wright to position an indigenous oral storyteller at the centre of her story, freed from the constrictions of literary address that indigenous authors often remain captive to.