The McMillan Diaries and Grief, trauma and letting go in Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves

Abstract

This thesis is comprised of two sections. One is a novel called The McMillan Diaries; Or the Oedipus of the Antipodes. The other is an exegetical component titled "We All Create Stories to Protect Ourselves,": Grief, Trauma and Letting go in Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. The exegetical component examines Danielewski's first novel at length with a brief discussion on his second-which, broadly speaking, fit into the genre of postmodern gothic horror-as explorations of trauma on the mind and body. In turn, Danielewski's explorations will be read through the lens of Bessel Van Der Kolk's theories on the subject as laid out in his text The Body Keeps the Score Danielewski's choices in depiction of trauma will be examined at length. The McMillan Diaries is influenced primarily by Danielewski's body of work and utilises many of the techniques that he does to explore overlapping themes. However, The McMillan Diaries takes some of the concepts and techniques Danielewski explored on a personal level and politicises it, transposing the idea of traumatic repetition onto a national and historiographic stage. It posits, as per the work of historian Ann Curthoys, that white Australia has been unable to perceive itself as the beneficiary of colonial conquest due to the lasting trauma of expulsion and exodus dating back to convict times. It proposes that white Australia is too preoccupied with its own comparatively trivial suffering to acknowledge the damage it has dealt to Indigenous Australia, and this myopia is what has allowed it to create folk heroes out of the perpetrators of frontier massacres.

Date of Award	2022
Original language	English