The essay offers a critical reading of Australian writer Mudrooroo’s *The Undying* (1998), which is the third novel in his “Master of the Ghost Dreaming” series, widely acknowledged as typically Gothic. A recognised feature of works belonging to this genre is that human bodies undergo, or are made to suffer, transformations of all kinds. The analysis focuses on metamorphic bodies in *The Undying* and discusses how the novel grafts the Gothic on to the magical realist design of the first novel of the quartet, Master of the Ghost Dreaming, which introduces Aboriginal beings with strange magical powers, who ride totemic animals, and interact with their Dreaming ancestors. If in the 1991 novel the writer jettisons realism to explore different types of embodied subjectivities that move through coterminous worlds, in *The Undying* he brings his attack on the stable body, its language, and its relationship with identity to its extremes. In the novel, everyone/everything is someone/something else, all includes and hides alterity; logic is replaced by associative mental processes, and any coincidence between what one is and what one appears to be is excluded. In other words, the principle of identity is doubtlessly revoked. The essay asks what the implications of this meta/trans-morphism may be for the notion of subjectivity in the (post)colonial context that Mudrooroo depicts with shocking strokes, and argues that morphic flexibility is Mudrooroo’s Gothic answer -- biological, literary, personal and cultural -- to the problem of survival.
Metamorphic Bodies and Mongrel Subjectivities in Mudrooroo's The Undying
OBOE, ANNALISA
2008
Abstract
The essay offers a critical reading of Australian writer Mudrooroo’s *The Undying* (1998), which is the third novel in his “Master of the Ghost Dreaming” series, widely acknowledged as typically Gothic. A recognised feature of works belonging to this genre is that human bodies undergo, or are made to suffer, transformations of all kinds. The analysis focuses on metamorphic bodies in *The Undying* and discusses how the novel grafts the Gothic on to the magical realist design of the first novel of the quartet, Master of the Ghost Dreaming, which introduces Aboriginal beings with strange magical powers, who ride totemic animals, and interact with their Dreaming ancestors. If in the 1991 novel the writer jettisons realism to explore different types of embodied subjectivities that move through coterminous worlds, in *The Undying* he brings his attack on the stable body, its language, and its relationship with identity to its extremes. In the novel, everyone/everything is someone/something else, all includes and hides alterity; logic is replaced by associative mental processes, and any coincidence between what one is and what one appears to be is excluded. In other words, the principle of identity is doubtlessly revoked. The essay asks what the implications of this meta/trans-morphism may be for the notion of subjectivity in the (post)colonial context that Mudrooroo depicts with shocking strokes, and argues that morphic flexibility is Mudrooroo’s Gothic answer -- biological, literary, personal and cultural -- to the problem of survival.
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