‘Who am I when I am transported?’ Postcolonialism and Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs :: Essays Papers

Who am I when I am transported? Post colonialism and whoreson Careys diddlyshit MaggsIn Decolonising Fictions, theorists Diana Brydon and Helen lunch claim that postcolonial writers create texts that write mainstay against imperial fictions and incredulity the values once taken for granted by the once governing Anglocentric discourse of the imperial epicentre. In Jack Maggs the process of writing back is well illustrated. As in Jean Rhys Wide sargassum Sea , the colonial other character from a canonised niminy-piminy novel becomes the principal figure in a modern decolonising text, and the fringy reaches of empire become of central importance. In Jack Maggs, Australian novelist Peter Carey reconfigures the plot of hellions classic Great Expectations so that it is the maginalised, (colonial) confidence game figure who now becomes the narrative focus. By filtering the experiences of the exiled convict through a post-colonial lens, Carey creates a text that pays homage too, ye t simultaneously questions the values at the heart of the source texts imperialist discourse.As Brydon and Tiffin point out, Anglocentrism refuses Post- colonial territories the right to their own identities, assuming instead that they are more thanover engulfable parts of the imperial centre. Therefore, in Great Expectations, Australia functioned non as a coherent, cohesive nation, exactly rather, as an off stage peripheral mess were characters awaited their return to the on stage action of the imperial centre, capital of the United Kingdom . Carey tackles this trend head on, by writing a novel that seeks non restrictive alternatives to imperialist discourse and which refuses to privilege the metropolitan centre over the Colonial margins.At the heart of the texts reconfiguration of imperialist discourse lies the composite relationship between returned convict Jack Maggs and up-and-coming writer Tobias Oates. Significantly, Oates bears more than a few biographical similaritie s with Charles Dickens. For instance, like Dickens, Oates has a feckless, indebted father, an upset marriage, a fascination with mesmerism, and the fierce desire to make his name not just as the author of comic adventures, but as a novelist who might one day topple Thackeray himself (Carey 43). By having Oates, a fictionalised Charles Dickens figure, exist in the same imaginative space as Jack Maggs, the modern reworking of one of Dickens most memorable characters, Carey is able to look not only the questions left unanswered by the source text, but also the difficult relationship that exists between character and creator.The relationship between Oates, soon to become the Empires greatest living writer, and Maggs, the marginalised colonial figure, is one that parallels the manner in which the literary potential of the Imperial colonies was mine by Victorian writers.