Interior History, Tempered Selves

Focusing on Johnno (1975), An Imaginary Life (1978), and Remembering Babylon (1993), this chapter argues that David Malouf’s redeployment of the formal devices of the modernist novel enables a distinctively Australian representation of postcolonial modernity. It explores Malouf’s public and literary advocacy of “imaginative possession” as a means to achieve settler belonging and effect true reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Postcolonial critics, however, have accused Malouf of appropriating Aboriginal history and identity. This chapter argues that modernist investments within Malouf’s fiction enable imaginative possession but also yield enigma. Malouf’s use of Woolf and Faulkner’s shifts in narrative perspective, Proust’s manipulation of time and memory, Proust and Joyce’s reworking of the Bildungsroman, and the modernist intensification of lyrical subjectivity enables the tempering and attuning of settler selves to place. Yet in Johnno modernist resources unravel fixed truths, pointing instead to creative error and the fabrications of the self.