Marcus Clarke, again

I came across a fas­cin­at­ing post this morn­ing, show­ing the film­ing of Mar­cus Clarke’s For the Term of His Nat­ur­al Life in 1926 includ­ing a kangaroo brought onto the set. To add some Aus­trali­an feel… I’m sure that’s exactly what we’re sup­posed to ima­gine Sarah Purfoy does in Van Diemen’s Land, when she’s off her usu­al money-mak­ing or black­mail­ing agenda. Scruff the roo! ;-D
Paul Byrnes does a very good job in his intro­duc­tion & com­ment­ary to the fol­low­ing clips from the movie itself. It is par­tic­u­larly strik­ing to observe how the back­ground music in the third clip just does not match the action at all. After all, this is the night that Rex spends in a cave after his escape attempt, in which Clarke man­ages to con­vey the near-hal­lu­cin­at­ory powers of horror:

All creatures that could be engendered by slime and salt crept forth into the fire­light to stare at him. Red dabs and splashes that were liv­ing beings, hav­ing a strange phos­phor­ic light of their own, glowed upon the floor. The liv­id encrust­a­tions of a hun­dred years of humid­ity slipped from off the walls and pain­fully heaved their mush­room sur­faces to the blaze. The red glow of the unwonted fire, crim­son­ing the wet sides of the cav­ern, seemed to attract count­less blis­ter­ous and trans­par­ent shape­less­nesses, which elong­ated them­selves towards him. Blood­less and blad­dery things ran hith­er and thith­er noise­lessly. Strange car­a­paces crawled from out of the rocks. All the hor­rible, unseen life of the ocean seemed to be rising up and sur­round­ing him.

Nat­ur­ally this calls for a cheer­ful tune, to which Rex stumbles amid blue-tin­ted caves, head­ing hap­pily towards his final sal­va­tion by boat, which is then marked by a tri­umphant cli­max in pipes and drums. Ouch.

James Boyce, in Van Diemen’s Land (2010, p. 3) makes much of the can­ni­bal scene (also in clip three) being in the sur­round­ings of Port Arthur, an envir­on­ment­ally most benign area. He con­cludes that Clarke “did not know the coun­try and it showed,” as Clarke only vis­ited Tas­mania for a few months. This would be rather weird, see­ing as Clarke spent time research­ing the Port Arthur archives and thus would have been in situ for quite a while. I’m not an envir­on­ment­al his­tor­i­an (BTW, can any­one find Boyce’s insti­tu­tion­al affil­i­ation? I can­not; com­ments please! This is not to detract from the gen­er­al mer­it of his study, which is very well done, merely a small irrit­ant.). As a lit­er­ary stud­ies schol­ar, how­ever, I feel bound to point out that Gab­bett becomes an estab­lished can­ni­bal in Macquar­ie Har­bour first — the fig­ure of Gab­bett is indeed based on the Alex­an­der Pearce escapes. His second can­ni­bal­ist­ic escape from Port Arthur is there­fore only a mat­ter of repeat­ing what has by then become his nature. The envir­on­ment of Port Arthur does not mat­ter to Gab­bett, though Clarke makes a point of keep­ing the run­aways in the bush along the east­ern coast to evade more settled dis­tricts. Gab­bett had planned his escape as a can­ni­bal­ist­ic feast from the start and there are ample hints in the text to show it. He even­tu­ally reaches St. Helen’s Point in the north-east, hav­ing devoured his mates and almost reached the north of the island. His tragedy is that there is no more sav­age wil­der­ness for a can­ni­bal to hide in, Van Diemen’s Land being firmly settled by this time — no mat­ter where he tries to run and how, Gab­bett will be caught, and he will be brought to justice. Civil­iz­a­tion asserts its val­ues eventually.

Post­mortem sketch of Alex­an­der Pearce

The mis­take Boyce makes goes, I think, a little fur­ther into meth­od. A fic­tion­al text, no mat­ter how his­tor­ic­ally based, is a rep­res­ent­a­tion of his­tory, yes, and Clarke’s is a real­ist­ic text, too — but such a fic­tion can as likely be alleg­or­ic­al. Gab­bett’s second fail­ure is the allegory of the extent to which sav­agery no longer lives in the Tas­mani­an bush and no mat­ter how moment­ar­ily suc­cess­ful, cun­ning, & cet­era & cet­era, has no future. The epis­ode is quite simply not a mimet­ic rep­res­ent­a­tion of the loc­al envir­on­ment of Port Arthur. The bush is an object­ive cor­rel­at­ive. After all, we are not read­ing Pear­ce’s story, no mat­ter how close to his con­fes­sions Mar­cus Clarke remains (and he is pretty close). We are read­ing Gab­bett’s, who was intro­duced as a sal­iv­at­ing “hor­ribly unhu­man” can­ni­bal, and remains so.