AustLit

Ravenscroft argues that 'white critical efforts to make meaning' of Carpentaria have portrayed Wright as indebted to novelists such as Patrick White and Frank Hardy, and have also tended, 'in moves that refuse the text's unfamiliarity' to try to categorise the novel as a work magic realism. Ravenscroft goes on to offer, 'first, a more detailed critique of so‐called postcolonial magic realism in which I point to critics’ refusal to allow markers of difference in texts to be significant; indeed, to signify at all. Instead, there is a habit of skipping over these places where differences are inscribed as if they were not there at all. There are some differences that are just too much, it seems. Second, I propose reading Carpentaria through a different paradigm, and this is the paradigm of radical uncertainty, an impossible dialectic. In this might lie the beginnings of another reading practice, one that allows Carpentaria its difference, its strangeness, and which points to the necessary estrangement of its white readers.’ (Source: essay)