INTRODUCTION

The earliest civilisations formed on the banks of rivers. When settlers came, they built their colonies along rivers. For centuries rivers were sites of human interaction with nature, inviting idyllic songs, poems, and stories to be written and passed on. Modern and contemporary river in literature, apart from its geographic or scenic function in the narrative, often carries with it a certain degree of historical, cultural, religious and ecological implication. The Thames and River Congo, as reminded by Heart of Darkness, symbolised the slave trade, plunder and brutal colonialism. The Nile was Agatha Christie’s ideal choice of criminal scene where she formed a critique of human nature. The winding Mississippi River, a constant inspiration for Mark Twain and William Faulkner, bore witness to the history and national consciousness of modern America. In Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, the consciousness of environmental preservation and species equality was heightened with riverine and tidal narrative.

Death of a River Guide, Richard Flanagan’s literary debut, is another such riverine novel that retraces personal and ancestral memory across two centuries. Born in Tasmania, the esteemed writer Richard Flanagan spent the first 23 years on the island, then in 1984 he was granted a Rhodes Scholarship and attended Worcester College, Oxford, where he studied history in depth and earned a Master’s Degree. Over two decades, Flanagan has published seven novels on distinctive genres or themes, among which his sixth novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North earned him the Booker Prize. Flanagan was hence better known to a global readership, and widely considered “the finest Australian novelist of his generation” (McKenna, 2020, para.1). Yet in Australia, Richard received attention not as a writer, but as an environmental activist and public intellectual. A strong advocate for the Australian Greens, Flanagan has written extensively on environmental and ecologically issues, also lobbying for child care, aboriginal and gay rights. In response to the 2019-20 bushfires and the coronavirus crisis this year, Flanagan has stood guard at The Guardian and The New York Times with his articles “Tasmania is burning”, “Australia Is Committing Climate Suicide”, and “Did the Coronavirus Kill Ideology in Australia?”, in an attempt to criticise the failing government and raise public awareness about nature at this critical time. Flanagan believes that “honesty, truth, inclusion and respect” are the things people need to “ease the fear and growing despair gripping this country” (Flanagan, 2020).

Flanagan’s literary practice, of course, does not detach from his social advocacy. Always cautious of the human-nature interactions, his ecological thoughts and arguments can be traced in many of his writings, especially in Death of a River Guide –a novel of the nature (stories are set in wilderness, and nature prevails over man), by the nature (Flanagan’s own experience as river guide and kayaker in the nature enables him to write the novel), and for the nature (environmental awareness is to be raised). Defined by the American ecocritic Cheryll Glotfelty, ecocriticism refers to “a study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment” (Glotfelty and Fromm, 1996, p.xviii), pointing out that “human culture is connected to the physical world, affecting it and affected by it” (Glotfelty and Fromm, 1996, p.xix). She argues for an “earth-centred” approach to literary studies. In this sense, Death of a River Guide is an ecologically self-critical novel.

The stories are predominantly set in the flooded Franklin river in Tasmania, unfolding two layers of narrative: on the surface, Aljaz Cosini, the river guide and first-person narrator of Death of a River Guide, leads a group of city-based tourists on a 12-day rafting trip down the Franklin river, when his raft capsizes and he lies drowning. The other layer of a narrative was told in flashbacks, or “visions” experienced by Aljaz during the final moments of his life, where vivid details of his own life and that of his ancestors were relived. Upon publication, Death of a River Guide received considerable attention and was widely acclaimed by scholars and general readership. Positive reviews include “one of the most auspicious debuts in Australian writing” (Smith, 1997), “Uplifting and immensely rewarding” (Australian Book Review, n.d.), and “Superb … a richly layered narrative … a work of considerable originality. Flanagan’s two novels rank with the finest fiction out of Australia since the heyday of Patrick White” (Kirkus Reviews, 2001). Australian novelist Thomas Keneally also praises the book as it “combines a rich voice, highly original, with great invention and engrossing narrative pace. A fine work of fiction. I thought it very, very good indeed” (Keneally, n.d.). Reviews are also made regarding the novel’s fluvial qualities. Some emphasizes the overwhelming strengths the words convey: “It’s a torrent of a book - take the plunge” (The Independent, 2016), where “torrent” and “plunge” are in the same semantic field with the river. Others metaphorically compare its language to the flowing water: “The flow of language brilliantly stimulates Tasmania’s mighty Franklin River … A powerful and exciting odyssey that can fairly claim to be an epic” (The Weekend Australian, n.d.), and “Like the river which runs through it, Death of a River Guide is possessed of both a fierce, seething energy and a limpid, unexpected tranquillity” (Wallace, 1997). This essay will explore how Flanagan, purposefully and masterfully, utilises river to register the history and memories of a drowning river guide, to critique the devastating influence of global capitalism and urbanisation on man and nature, and to call for a heightened awareness of environmental protection.

AESTHETICS OF FLUVIAL NARRATIVE

2.1 The Circle and the Line: The Structure

River, as a crucial element throughout the novel, is foregrounded and sometimes personified instead of serving as a silent background. In Death of a River Guide, formal and structural correlation with the circular water is evident. As the first draft of Death of the River Guide shows, the book was originally designed to be named “The Circle”. The “circle and line” has since become a recurring pattern in many of Flanagan’s later works, notably in his Booker-prize winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, where the “road”, or the “Death Railway” denotes the straight line and the circle was represented by a Japanese poet’s final drawing at his deathbed. There, Flanagan writes: “Shisui’s poem rolled through Dorrigo Evans’ subconscious, a contained void, an endless mystery, lengthless breadth, the great wheel, eternal return: the circle—antithesis of the line” (Flanagan, 2013, p.27). His obsession with circle was earlier reaffirmed in an interview about Death of a River Guide, in which he says: “My original title was Circle and I was interested in the idea of eternal return. The Aborigines have always been preoccupied with circles. And there are circles within circles. I always wanted the novel to be structured in a circular way” (Flanagan, 1994, p.8). Thus, we see a clear intention that Flanagan determined to sketch his narrative structure as such, where history, memory, and consciousness are constructed in circles, just as ripples on the river. Throwing the stone into water, the first ripple starts with Aljaz Cosini as he got caught by the rocks and lay drowning. It was at this moment that he was granted a magical “vision”, a vision that allowed him to see through time and space, first vision being his own birth, then this ripple of vision spreading to the lives of his ancestors: his great-grandfather Ned Quade, a convict who died in the wilderness, his abandoned wife Eliza; his dad Harry and his Slovenian mother Sonja; his half-Aboriginal great-grandmother Ellie, and her mother Black Pearl, who was raped by a sealer in 1828. Finally the vision bounced back to the dying Aljaz himself, when he envisioned his reunion with all family members in paradise. Through twelve chapters, Aljaz’s vision travelled back and forth in time and it came back to the starting point, thus completing the circle. The narrative was accordingly following him across time and space, stretching out dozens of sub-narratives, like tributaries of a river, and finally they converged.

From what Flanagan revealed in the interview, his insistence on circularity reflects a Tasmanian’s resistance to Eurocentric traditions. Flanagan believes that the traditional European-based narrative – exemplified by epics, Scriptures and travel notes – works in a linear direction and therefore “very much a straight line” (Flanagan, n.d., as cited in Dixon, 2018, p.4). By contrast, Flanagan grew up in Tasmania where oral culture prevails, and people tell stories and pass them on to the next generation in a more circular fashion. Chronological reference does not stand here; the references for lives, feelings, events, and images are just stories that could have happened in any time and space. This explains the jumping narrative in Death of a River Guide. Ecologically, the line as a symbol of speed and efficiency brought by urbanisation and accelerated pace of life, is what Flanagan and his Tasmanian folks detest:

My mother’s family were north-west coast farming people and my mother gave all her children a great abiding love for her land and its people. But it was a special and peculiar love, a love that was about being part of the earth rather than an observer of it. My mother and father couldn’t pass a tree, a hillside, a patch of bush without filling that piece of country with a story – about ancestors, friends, or acquaintances and what they had done or had done to them here or there. Highways were their enemy, proposing as they did the vainglorious and foolish notion that the purpose of travel was to get from one point to the next as quickly as possible. My parents often seemed incapable of taking a straight line anywhere and instead we seemed to circle endlessly in our journeys, slowly going up this country road and down that lane, and all of them, unlike the highways, full of stories… (Flanagan, 1997, as cited in Dixon, 2018, p.5)

The key point is that Flanagan holds that humans and nature are fundamentally inseparable and the same. Rivers, bush and hills do not only decorate their lives, they ARE their lives. The nature is the carrier of time, space, emotion and most of all, stories of people that live or had lived in it. Compared with traveling along a straight line, Flanagan tends to slowly wander around, going up and down without a purpose, just to feel that he is part of the nature.

In summary, the circular pattern between text and imaginary world in Death of a River Guide is explicit and prevalent. Understanding the circularity of the narrative structure helps to sympathise with Aljaz Cosini, the drowning river guide, whose visions are bound with cyclic flashbacks of himself and ancestors living amidst nature.

2.2 Fluvial Metaphors: The Lexicon

River writing is circular in essence. In the novel, circular pattern and fluvial metaphors abound. Choices of words are associated with water and riverine metaphors, and ideas are expressed in the semantic field with water. Aljaz’s unusual birth was elaborated at the very beginning. He was born in his mother’s caul and half strangled by the umbilical cord – a near-death experience at birth. Aljaz’s affinity with water was inborn, physical and mental: physical in the sense that he knew how to “swim within a milky blue sac of amniotic fluid” (Flanagan, 2016, p.1) as a newborn; mental affinity means that he observed the world and expressed himself in terms of water metaphor, as Lakoff and Johnson (1980) propose in Metaphors We Live By: “metaphors are pervasive in our everyday life, not only in the language but also in our thoughts and actions” (p.40). Aljaz relives the details of his birth as such “the power of each movement more powerful than the previous, like a tidal wave gathering size as it skips over new reef” (Flanagan, 2016, p.2), and “…allowing myself to be battered up against the narrow walls of the birth canal”(Flanagan, 2016, p.2) where “tidal wave” and “canal” belong to the same semantic field with water, and “reef” is also semantically related with sea. Feelings and life experiences are also metaphorically described in terms of water: “with these extraordinary eyes, into which you felt if you dived you might never again surface”(Flanagan, 2016, p.8), “my mind …is drifting in strange jerky motions like the air bubbles I can see above me, darting first this way, then, as if seized by some powerful magnetic current, tumbling the opposite way”(Flanagan, 2016, pp.8-9), and “beyond these moments our life seems as if it is one great voyage away from the truths we all encompass ”(Flanagan, 2016, p.9). In these instances, thoughts and actions are metaphorically understood in association with water. The prevalence of fluvial metaphors in Death of the River Guide demonstrates that river writing is not only the subject matter, but also a kind of rhetorical device.

RIVER AS HISTORY, RIVER AS MEMORIES

Throughout history, all rivers with human encounter are loaded with stories. In the Death of a River Guide, two kinds of history unfold: the Macro-history about the colonial post of Australia and Tasmania, and the Micro-history about Aljaz Cosini, his convict and Aboriginal ancestors, his half-Chinese lover, and the Franklin river. As discussed in previous chapters, Flanagan is concerned with circularity and Tasmania’s oral tradition. Thus his writing about history is never linear, but skipping from image to image, from one story to another. In such a narrative, the boundary of fact and fiction blurs, and past and present flow and circle back and around, just like river water.

In his drowning visions, Aljaz sees the history of Franklin River: “in the detail of a piece of rushing water Aljaz reads the changing visage of the entire river, hears the terrible soul history of his country, and he is frightened” (Flanagan, 2016, p.152), showing that river history is the carrier and conduit of human history. Then genealogy of Aljaz’s family was retraced in circular fashion. In remembrance of his ancestors, the true quest for Aljaz is to search for himself. His identity remains vague during his lifetime, and the lack of knowledge for his origin is what constantly saddens him. It is only at the end of his life, granted by this drowning “vision”, that Aljaz finally completed his quest to escape his past and find his true identity, therefore achieving a sense of “transcendental awareness”. In Benjamin’s term, this is a moment of “Messianic time”, and:

He rightly stresses that such an idea of simultaneity is wholly alien to our own. It views time as something close to what Benjamin calls Messianic time, a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present (Anderson, 2006, p.24).

Understanding the simultaneity of present, past and future is Aljaz’s greatest epiphany. In this sense, the river is a symbol of simultaneity as well as continuity, where diachronic events occurred before, are occurring now, and will continue to recur in the future, so is history.

Submerging into the water, Aljaz sees from the river-induced visions that he was the descendent of British convict, Australian Aboriginal and Slovenian immigrant, that his entire life was in cultural hybridity. In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha writes on “hybridity” as:

For a willingness to descend into that alien territory – where I have led you –may reveal that the theoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity. To that end we should remember that it is the ‘inter’ – the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the inbetween space – that carries the burden of the meaning of culture. It makes it possible to begin envisaging national, anti-nationalist histories of the ‘people’. And by exploring this Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves. (Bhabha, 1994, p.56)

For Aljaz, living in the inbetween space of white settlers and Aboriginal “blackfellas” is a struggle. In this “Third Space”, Aljaz carries with him the weight and burden of the repressed, convict-haunted past of his forebears, as well as ambivalence about the new world which he cannot fit in. This novel displays such attempts, often failing efforts, of people on the edge of different cultures, to position themselves in the post-colonial and now multicultural Australian society.

“SYDNEY OR THE BUSH?”: RETURNING TO THE WILDERNESS

As an idiom often heard in Australia, “Sydney or the Bush” means “all or nothing”, or you will either strive to achieve your aspirations or don’t bother and give up. In Death of a River Guide, in an attempt to save another tourist, Aljaz’s raft capsized and he fell into water, confronted with the critical question: “Sydney or the bush. Life or death. There are no other choices” (Flanagan, 2016, p.8). Sydney, the largest city in Australia, is a symbol of “city culture”, which includes industrialisation, urbanisation, material prosperity and social division – quite the opposite to the “bush culture” in the wilderness of Tasmania. What connects the two is “Eco-tourism”, a kind of tourism that allows tourists, often city-dwellers, to go to exotic, often threatened, natural environments, in order to support conservation and observe wildlife. In Death of a River Guide, Aljaz and tourists both return from big cities to the wilderness, for obviously different reasons. Aljaz himself has always lived a sad life. After his baby daughter Jemma died, Aljaz was silently and gradually collapsed inside, and his relationship with his lover, Couta Ho, came to an end. All Aljaz wanted to do was flee “as far away as he could go” (Flanagan, 2016, p.112), and drifted off around Tasmania and then to the east coast of the mainland, “working here and there at whatever was going, driving harvesting machines on farms, serving in bottle shops, labouring on building sites. For ten years he did not return to Tasmania” (Flanagan, 2016, p.113). In big cities, Aljaz felt that:

It had become easier not belonging; he had learnt to cope with that, had made a life out of it, drifting, made a virtue of having no roots by never allowing himself to hang around one spot too long. He felt himself a nobody, an invisible nothing, told himself that was the beginning and end of it. (Flanagan, 2016, p.141)

This rootlessness and restlessness constantly defined Aljaz. Ten years later, Aljaz returned to the island, to the turbulent Franklin river where he grew up, seeing the river as a place for retrospection, reunion and healing.

The city-based tourists, on the other hand, came to the wilderness for a different reason. As accountant or nurse or merchant banker or public servant in a city, the orderliness, dullness and pretentiousness of urban life exhausted many of them, hence they turned to the wilderness for excitement or solace. Also, on holidays, their detached position from routine creates a “fake persona” to evade or forget their normal self in the everyday life: And you don’t ask any of them what they did last week. Because that’s talking about work and they hate that”, “…in his heart of hearts he only wants to pretend to you and everyone else that he is something other than the boring bastard he is. In his holidays he can pretend to be something he’s not. (Flanagan, 2016, p.127)

In such eco-tours, clients are paying to consume the Tasmanian wild and all the marvel that wilderness provides. They would simply like to enjoy the wild as they imagine it to be: “they took photographs of streams that looked like wilderness calendars, and rocks they fancied looked like a human face or a man-made form - a boat, a machine, a house”, but are reluctant to embrace the true face of wilderness: unpredictable, sometimes destructive. At the beginning of the 12-day rafting trip, everyone “takes on something of a carnival atmosphere” (Flanagan, 2016, p.24). But as the weather turned bad, tourists’ fantasy about idyllic paradise were beginning to collapse, from “enchantment” to “disenchantment”, when they felt “a growing unease with this weird alien environment that seems so alike yet so dissimilar to the wilderness calendars that adorn their lounge-rooms and offices” (Flanagan, 2016, p.20). The river disrupts every conception of their orderly urban life and urges them to confront the unknown, or the fear within. For the local guide Aljaz, this place that “causing them to sometimes give an anxious look over their shoulder”, is home. A strong connection is established between him and the river: he knew every gorge, churn, and tributary by heart, greeted them along the journey and bid them goodbye. Juxtaposing the calmness of river guide with the fear of tourists, Flanagan presents opposite attitudes towards the same place.

Ecotourism is greeted with irony and mild condemnation. This was demonstrated by portraying the city-based clients as clumsy and ignorant, by accusing the travel industry that makes where a kayaker drowned a spot of travel highlight: “in the afternoon of the second day they stopped for a break at the side of a rapid the year before. Like other sites on the river where people had drowned it had become something of a highlight for tourists” (Flanagan, 2016, p.36) – such indifference and disrespect of human life, and by concluding the rafting trip with tragedy: a tourist died from negligence, the river guide died of shame and guilt for allowing the accident to happen.

Just as the Walden Pond a transcendental retreat for Henry David Thoreau, the Franklin River is the site of retrospection and healing for Flanagan. His early years of extensive working and kayaking on the river, once nearly drowned, endowed him with firsthand resources to write this novel. By extending a biocentric view that man and nature should coexist in harmony, Flanagan proposes a solution to the crisis of modernity – returning to the wilderness for relief and spiritual redemption. The message is quite clear: “maybe it was time to walk off the road and head back into the bush whence we came” (Flanagan, 2016, p.225).

RIVER AND ECOCRITICISM

As historian, writer and activist, Flanagan writes on fiction and non-fiction on environmental issues. In his works of non-fiction, including essay and speech collections, his urge for a heighten environmental awareness and conservative actions is loud and clear. In his fiction or literary explorations, however, such efforts are not loudly announced but masterfully interwoven with narrative plots. A sharp contrast of the past and present was drawn, to accuse the exploitation since colonial times and its destructive effects on the ecology of Tasmania as a whole:

He could not help but remember how he had explored other rivers of the west, then watched them drown without helping them. He watched the Murchison River drown and he watched the Mackintosh River drown and he watched the Pieman River drown. He drove all the long way from Hobart all by himself to watch the rivers begin to disappear on the first day the new hydro dams began to fill. Watched them begin to fill and their great gorges disappear and die and he cried and he drove all the long way back to Hobart and he did nothing. His was a memory of defeat only, and the most he felt capable of was bearing witness.... I will remember, he thought.... But to what end? (Flanagan, 2016, p.252)

…my mind fills with a vision of when the English first arrived and the land was fat and full of trees and game. Had the loss begun at this time? When the English first saw plains so thickly speckled with emu and wallaby dung that it looked as if the heavens must have hailed sleek black turds upon this land, when they first saw the sea and the vast blue Derwent River rainbowed with the vapoury spouts of pods of whales and schools of dolphins swimming beneath. From that time on, each succeeding generation found something new they could quarry to survive. First the emu disappeared, then the tigers, then the many different fishes and seals and whales and their rainbows became rare, then the rivers were stilled under dams, then the trees, and then the scallops and the abalone and the crayfish became few and were in consequence no longer the food of the poor but the waste of the rich. (Flanagan, 2016, p.258)

Pollution, overexploitation, species extinction, loss of biodiversity, and the widening gap between the rich and poor, are a chain of adverse effects on the ecology. On top of that, the failing ecology is damaging the mentality of local dwellers, invoking a sense of defeat and torturing them with the guilt of incapability to save the worsening situation. All they can do is “bearing witness”. The above excerpts are among the few critical and political-oriented instances in the book.

CONCLUSION

Multiple plots, themes and arguments are interwoven into the river writing in Flanagan’s literary debut, Death of a River Guide. In this essay, I have illustrated how Flanagan employs river writing as a crucial device to state his views on history and memories, on urbanite and the wild, and his reflections of humanity. Now we are entering a time when environmental issues become problematised, also the anthropocentric position is increasingly challenged by a biocentric point of view. As Flanagan suggests, returning to the river and wilderness – a site of healing, retrospection and redemption – could gain some value and merits.

REFERENCES

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