Storytelling and Affect in Sonya Hartnett’s The Children of the King (2012)

Melbourne writer Sonya Hartnett frequently explores the ways in which a sense of place impacts on the development of identity. In her memoir Life in Ten Houses (2012), Hartnett maps each of her novels to her place of habitation at the time of writing, describing the relationship between each place and herself and the subsequent impact of this dialectic on the creative process. This reciprocal relationship between narrative and lived experience is examined in Hartnett’s novel The Children of the King (2012). Using perspectives on temporality from phenomenology and cultural memory and incorporating ideas of place from human and cultural geography, this article proposes that Hartnett uses the device of embedded narrative to examine the affective qualities of storytelling and place on the subject. This juxtaposition invites the reader to consider the fluid notions of identity inspired by embodied oral storytelling along with the perceptual opportunities afforded by the physical, sensorial world. Hartnett encourages the reader to critically assess the reliability of narrative, narrator, and the process of subjective judgement that occurs when responding to story. This recalls Linda Hutcheon’s (1989) work on historiographic metafiction, which, as she describes, has the effect of demarginalising the literary ‘through confrontation with the historical’ (p. 108). Metafictive historiographic novels, as Robyn McCallum (1999) articulates: ‘foreground the discursive and textual conventions of history writing, usually by physically incorporating and representing historical texts and discourses in ways that destabilise the relation between fiction, history and reality’ (p. 230). In The Children of the King this destabilisation is achieved through Hartnett’s double plot structure which calls attention to the constructed and affective elements of historical and fictional narratives and by the employment of the gothic mode within a realist frame.