This dissertation consists of a creative component, a novel Home Leave, and an exegesis exploring silence within three contemporary Australian works of war fiction, The Great World by David Malouf, The Wing of Night by Brenda Walker and After the Fire, a Still Small Voice by Evie Wyld. Silence within fiction sits uneasily between what is known, what is unknown and what is unknowable. Present in both content and form, it encompasses a) literal silences, where secrets are kept, actions are hidden, and information is lost or missing, b) characters' silences, where they don't speak to each other, they speak indirectly, are traumatised or otherwise abandoned in states of unknowing, and c) formal silences, where silence is embedded in the writing through syntax, imagery, and structure. In war fiction, these silences are the consequence of each individual's war experience and its impact on their family and community. The exegesis derives this interpretation of silence from a variety of sources, including history with Jay Winter's essay "Thinking about silence" from Shadows of War: a social history of silence in the twentieth century, seminal trauma theory texts Testimony: a crisis in witnessing by Shoshanna Felman and Dori Laub and Unclaimed Experience by Cathy Caruth, literary criticism on silence with Literary Silences in Pascal, Rousseau, and Beckett by Elisabeth Marie Loevlie and Language and Silence by George Steiner, psychological text Memory, War and Trauma by Nigel Hunt, and literary analyses Trauma Fiction by Anne Whitehead and Bernadette Brennan's doctoral dissertation, "The Wounds of Possibility: Reading absence and silence in some contemporary Australian writing". This understanding is used to demonstrate how silence is an integral component of the three works of war fiction selected for study. Malouf explores the silences around masculine intimacy and the prisoner of war experience in World War II. Walker explores the enduring power of grief and trauma from World War I, and how it is both bound up with, and healed by, the Western Australian landscape. Wyld investigates silence in the connections between intergenerational trauma, war service in Vietnam, masculinity and landscape. The novel covers two weeks in the lives of the Talbot family in Glebe, Sydney, leading up to Anzac Day. Kate Talbot, a soldier coming home on leave from Afghanistan, discovers that her brother Ben, also a soldier deployed in Afghanistan, is missing. When Kate arrives home she meets her uncle Greg for the first time in seven years. He is a photojournalist and has photos of Ben in Afghanistan, but he has no memory of where or when he took them. Kate and Greg search for Ben, using Greg's photographs as a starting point. They delve through their contacts, through the family history of military service, and through Greg's traumatised memory. In their pursuit of any leads about Ben, Kate uncovers family secrets, and Greg partly recovers his memory, and both gradually come to understand the secrets they have been keeping from themselves. Ultimately, Ben is not found, but Kate finds out enough to be sure that he will not come home alive.
| Date of Award | 2013 |
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| Original language | English |
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