Material reflections: the scope of memory in Peter Carey’s "Oscar and Lucind"

ENPeter Carey’s Booker-winning novel "Oscar and Lucinda" has been generously praised for how its marked fascination with the eccentric, the exquisite, and the fabulous is conveyed through the metafictional as well as magic realist aspects of the narrative as a (post)colonial parable. Taking its cue from the analytical concerns for the issues of cultural transplantation and legitimation of British colonial presence in Australia, this paper examines the novel’s visual saturation and its alignment with material culture as facets of memory work inscribed in the narrative. To the extent that the story is organized around the figure of a glass church, the house of prayer has both material and metaphorical significance for the refraction of memory that unfolds in Carey’s novel, problematising the act of seeing and seeking the past. Read within the conceptual framework of thing theory, representations of Victorian engagement with material culture reveal new implications for how cultural continuity sought legitimation in the colonial economy. Above all, our reading of the narrative as a way of thinking through things sheds light on the central dichotomy of the physical vs. "the metaphysical", which structures the unpredictable correlations between subjects and objects in the novel.