“Other Horizons Exist”: irreducible difference and ethical reading in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book

In The Swan Book (2013), Alexis Wright facilitates productive communication while maintaining the ethical and political importance of irreducible difference. While there are readings of this text that I can and do produce, what is equally important are the moments when my reading cannot proceed, when my reading is stalled by irreducible difference and untranslatability. Close reading and the application of familiar critical frameworks such as postcolonial Gothic or magical realism produce valid political analysis and are an important aspect of my engagement with this text. However, always, The Swan Book pushes back, disrupting any attempt to produce uncomplicated or stable meaning, denying any delusion of knowability or transparency. Its complicated narrative form and opaque poetics create irreducible difference that encourages recognition of the limits of my own reading position. This recognition forms the foundation of an ethical reading practice that allows for communication and exchange but avoids reduction or appropriation of difference. Alison Ravenscroft’s work in The Postcolonial Eye: White Australian Desire and the Visual Field of Race (2012) provides the foundations for my argument for the necessity of recognising the limitations of my position as a white Australian reader of an Indigenous text. However, I find Helen Hoy’s How Should I Read These: Native Women Writers in Canada (2001) to be a necessary counterpoint that allows me to extend Ravenscroft’s explanation of how I should not read this text into a more productive theorisation of how I might. I begin by presenting both feminist and postcolonial readings of the Gothic elements of this text, arguing that Wright uses Gothic tropes to assist in the production of meaning, adapting and manipulating them to create narrative and political critique. However, Wright also continually complicates and disrupts the application of this framework, undermining my attempts to convert the difference of this text into a knowable form. Wright’s use of multiple systems of knowledge and ambiguous poetic language creates a positive undecidability. While it is tempting to ascribe this undecidability the label of magical realism, ultimately it proves to be a limiting method through which to read The Swan Book’s ambiguous narrative mode. Translation from the language of the text to the more familiar language of a critical framework is shown to be possible but always limited and limiting. I chart the effect these translations have on the text, and more importantly, the effect The Swan Book’s untranslatability has on my reading practice. By producing instances of communication that do not depend on stable and universal meaning, or that deny the existence of irreducible difference, The Swan Book inspires, and enables, non- appropriative and ethical dialogue.

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