Chapter 5 Confession and Psycho-sexual Theorising
Having failed in his attempts to take Capricornia’s concerns further, and finding it hard on his return from war service ‘to pick up the thread of writing’215, Herbert turned again to the gender issues first canvassed in three of the early stories. The switch in subject matter coincided with, and was related to, the increasing influence in his work of autobiography, a genre Frye argues is essentially fictional: Most autobiographies are inspired by a creative, and therefore fictional, impulse to select only those events and experiences in the writer’s life that go to build up an integrated pattern. This pattern may be something larger than himself with which he has come to identify himself, or simply the coherence of his character and attitudes. We may call this very important form of prose fiction the confession form following St. Augustine, who appears to have invented it, and Rousseau, who established a modern type of it. […] After Rousseau—in fact in Rousseau—the confession flows into the novel, and the mixture produces the fictional autobiography, the Künstler-roman, and kindred types.216 From the start, confession flowed very freely into Herbert’s novels. Capricornia is full of characters and scenes based on the people and events of his own life217218, and the confessional influence did not diminish over time. In Poor Fellow My Country Herbert mines his own experience even more extensively. From his stint in charge of Kahlin Aboriginal Compound comes the picture of Alfie’s tenure of the ‘Halfcaste Home’. From his war experience comes the portrait of Fabian Cootes. His writing career appears in Alfie’s literary successes. His flirtation with the Australia