(Post)Modernity in the penal colony: Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish

摘要

In world literature, the penal colony theme obviously has powerful ethical and political implications. Among the texts dealing with this theme are Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” A. Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish. This essay first looks at the history of the sublime object—Gould’s fish—in relation to Foucault’s critique of “technologies of the self” and “regime of truth.” Then, in the light of Benjamin’s concept of history and Agamben’s notion of “bare life,” the author argues that Flanagan’s diagnosis of progress in the modernity project—his use of panopticonism, the construction of a railroad and the Great Mahjong Hall in colonial Tasmania as symbols of modernization—offers us a window onto the past through which we might redirect the future. Based on a materialist view of the change that Flanagan anticipates in colonial Tasmanian social life, in its discussion of the questions of history and modernity—a colonial-imperial British modernity and a “glocal” modernity in Tasmania—this essay follows Benjamin in rethinking the boundary(-crossing) between world literature and national literature.