“How bold to mix the dreamings”:: The Ethics and Poetics of Mourning in Alexis Wright'sThe Swan Book

• Autores: Bárbara Arizti Martín
• Localización: The Poetics and Ethics of (Un-)Grievality in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction / coord. por Susana Onega Jaén, Jean-Michel Ganteau, 2023, ISBN 978-1-03-238976-9, págs. 75-95
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Saluted by critics as a planetary novel, Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013) connects the fates of Indigenous Australians, climate refugees and swans in a dystopian post-apocalyptic scenario. This chapter draws on the synergies between Aboriginal philosophy and some recent Western thought to analyse Wright’s delving into loss alongside her interrogation of established hierarchies of grief. In the footsteps of Judith Butler’s Precarious Life, the novel propitiates ways of mourning that highlight the interdependency of human lives and deem any life equally worthy of grieving. When read in conversation with the wholistic Indigenous worldview, apparent in thinkers like David Mowaljarlai, The Swan Book reveals a radically inclusive conception of mourning in which grievability is no longer regarded as the prerogative of humans but extends to the natural world. Besides analysing the ethical underpinnings of the work against the backdrop of the legacies of colonialism and the current climate crisis, the chapter brings into focus the singularities of its form. As an instance of Aboriginal realism—a concept coined by Wright—the poetics of The Swan Book fortifies the novel’s ethics by combining different literary strategies in an organic form, capacious enough to hold together the Indigenous and non-Indigenous traditions.