"The arts of gain”: Usury and Substance in Elizabeth Jolley’s The Newspaper of Claremont Street

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West, Patrick
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Nicholas Birns

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2008
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Abstract

The primary effect of Elizabeth Jolley's novel the Newspaper of Claremont Street is a denial of any lasting Aboriginal presence on Australian land. It produces this effect by "filling the space" of potential Aboriginality with a universalized presentation of the archaic, European, economic antagonism between usury and substance. All the energy of the text is drained into this internecine struggle, literally unto death. The novel reaches its climax with the murder of one of the central characters, Nastasya, as an effective result of the dispute usury has with substance. This leads me co say chat the most objectionable thing about The Newspaper of Claremont Street is chat its fundamental preoccupation is elevated into myth, making of the completed novel a powerful instrument of white colonization. Myth can be recognized wherever one or more privileged formations of language aspire to have precedence over ocher, "inferior," linguistic representations. And chis is just how it appears in Jolley's text. All the major economic concepts to be found in chis fiction are consistently linked to unique modes of language: panicular ways of speaking or of not speaking. These constitute what I am going to call the elevated, mythic level of the text. It is chis semi-autonomous, if not free-floating, "grammar of the economic" chat, in the end, dominates the rest of the novel, most notably the marginal representations of Aboriginality. The economic subject matter of the text internally generates idiosyncratic linguistic formations, which then turn back on what has spawned them, as a metalanguage or myth.

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Antipodes: A North American Journal of Australian Literature

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22

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1

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© 2008 American Association of Australian Literary Studies. The attached file is reproduced here in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher. Please refer to the journal's website for access to the definitive, published version.

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Australian Literature (excl. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Literature)

Studies in Creative Arts and Writing

Language, Communication and Culture

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