Making Up People and Making Up Nations

By andré Dao


 

André Dao reflects on The Novel, the function of fiction, historical constructs and future of nationhood.


I


Australia is not real. Nor am I. Put differently, we are both fictions—made-up, imagined. Our status as fictions says little about our moral worth, nor about our effects in the world. Nor about how easily we might be done away with. Terra nullius—the doctrine that this continent was uninhabited, and so available for British settlement—was famously declared a fiction by the High Court. The Court seemed to think that by declaring it a fiction, terra nullius would easily be done away with. They assumed the binary that makes us Modern: reality/fiction. Law (good law, the law that must be preserved at all costs, the law of the settler, of the white judge) is real. Terra nullius (bad law, the law that reveals too much, that says the quiet part out loud) is fiction. The fiction is ‘mere’. The fiction can be dismissed (hands can be washed). Reality remains (unblemished, unquestioned. When one story is said to be fiction, then other stories – by dint of comparison—come to seem real. If a novel is fiction, then what you read in the newspaper must be true. If terra nullius is a legal fiction, then the laws that produce and reproduce deaths in custody must be legal truths. The function of fiction is to make the real seem real.). Race, too, is a fiction. According to the educative approach to racism, we need only to learn this fact—the fact that in reality we are all the same, that is, the fact of universal humanity—and race will be consigned to the dustbin of history. But what is universal humanity if not another construct, another fiction? A useful fiction, to be sure. One which grounds certain appeals to human rights, to equal treatment. A useful fiction, and one that comes with a price. To appeal to a universal humanity, you have to craft another fiction: a self without texture or contour or colour— a transparent, whitewashed self in the mould of universal humanity.

Evelyn Araluen says, after Édouard Glissant, that marginalised and colonised people are always struggling to justify their own right to opacity against the colonial assumption that all colonised bodies are, or must be, for their consumption and extraction and perception. Evelyn says that a Goodreads reviewer wrote, of Dropbear: I just feel like I didn’t know anything about who the real Evelyn Araluen is by the end of it.


II


Brian Castro says that the novel is plastic, it can change, it has different empathies. Jessica Au says that she mistrusts the notion that a single book could sum up the essence of Australia. The three of us agree that the search for a Great Australian Novel is kind of stupid.

What I forgot to say is that the novel is a form that announces its own fictionality from the outset. The novel is a form that teaches us the meanings and consequences of fiction. Reading a novel, we learn what is at stake in making up nations, in making up people. Reading a novel, we learn how to make up nations and how to make up people. The best kind of novel tells you how to be a different kind of person. The best kind of national novel does not tell you what the nation is, but what it might be. In both cases, the novel opens up possibilities first by revealing that what is taken to be concrete—to be reality—is only an especially congealed fiction. Good novels take such received wisdoms and smash them to pieces. The best novels show you new configurations for putting the pieces together (in the full knowledge that every configuration is contingent—open to, needing to—being smashed again, and again). They will try to say that Praiseworthy is the Great Australian Novel; some are already saying it. I say, let us read Praiseworthy not for what is great in it—for greatness tends to glorify domination, as in national myths, war-like leaders, and the large and the powerful—but for what is minor in it, resistant, subversive, opaque. Let us read Praiseworthy not for what it says about Australia as it is, but for its visions of the nations that we might be. Let us read Praiseworthy not as a Novel but as a fiction, with all the possibilities that that entails. Fiction is the unacknowledged ground for the structure we call reality. That which we call real has the right to that status by virtue of not being fiction. The novel can do one of two things (or both at the same time): it can affirm the reality/fiction dichotomy—both through the disavowal of any necessary connection to reality, as in genres of ‘escapism’, or, conversely, by purportedly indexing reality, as in various genres of ‘realism’. In both cases, whether the fiction is fantasy or mirror, the distinction between the fiction of the novel and the outside reality is maintained. The other thing that the novel can do is to call the whole structure into question. To smash the great wall between reality and fiction, to allow them, as Anne Carson might say, to ‘tenderly mingle in speculation’.

 

André Dao is an author and researcher from Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. His debut novel, Anam, won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. In 2024, he was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist. André was awarded the 2024 Pascall Prize for Cultural Criticism for essays published in The Saturday Paper, Meanjin and Liminal.

The Liminal Festival took place 2–4 August 2024, in partnership with The Wheeler Centre. This collection of work is in concert with, and responds to, the panels, conversations and provocations put forth by some of the nation’s most talented writers, artists and thinkers. Find out more about the Liminal Festival here.


Leah McIntosh