The Lieutenant

About midway through Kate Grenville's The Lieutenant, her protagonist, Daniel Rooke, experiences a sudden flash of insight about his friend, Silk:

...But he could not comprehend how a man could be presented with a moment as astonishing as a star moving out of its place, and see only the chance to make a story.  He saw for the first time how different they truly were, he and Silk.  Silk's impulse was to make the strange familiar, to transform it into well-shaped smooth phrases.

    His own was to enter that strangeness and lose himself in it.  (139)

This paean to Rooke's passion for difference becomes rather jarring, however, once you realize that Rooke is a deliberately "familiarized" version of his original, William Dawes.  In Grenville's reworking, the strictly evangelical Dawes turns into someone who believes in God but has no investment at all in doctrinal Christianity; this is because, she explains in an interview with The Age, we now live in a post-"Camus and Sartre" world of "existential loneliness."  Thus, "[t]o leave Rooke a Christian would, in Grenville's eyes, have diffused the drama of his situation and made the book less resonant in the present."  In order to learn the book's lessons about the need to engage with a potentially terrifying otherness, about the necessity of refusing to tell ourselves stories that "make the strange familiar," we need a protagonist whose worldview is...pretty much just like ours.  (That assumes, of course, that "our" worldview isn't Christian, but be that as it may.)  Contemporary strangeness is all very well; historical strangeness, however, must be flattened out, lest we miss the novel's point.

This ironic discrepancy between the novel's theory and its actual practice goes entirely unremarked, even though the plot frequently hinges on the difference between Silk's and Rooke's respective attitudes to both language and narrative.  Silk (i.e., as smooth as) is not just a professional soldier, out for the main career chance, but also a would-be professional author, and his experiences in New South Wales are all fodder for a future travel narrative.  Silk is a slick talker and an equally slick author, a man who believes in crafting and recrafting personal experience until it best suits the reader's palate; Rooke, by contrast, is a man who initially prefers the exactitude of numbers to the spoken word, and, as a result, finds it difficult to deal with his fellow officers.  "It was foreign to Rooke, the idea of taking the real world as nothing more than raw material," the narrator tells us.  "His gift lay in measuring, calculating, deducing.  Silk's was to cut and embellish until a pebble was transformed into a gem" (47).  Despite Rooke's social inadequacies, his scientific bent renders him open to the possibility of true unfamiliarity, whereas Silk's focus on pleasing his audience (whether the audience consists of his superiors or his potential readers) leads him to substitute uncritical stereotypes for accurate observation.  Silk, the good storyteller, turns out to be a terrible proto-anthropologist.

Rooke's fascination with the unknown enables him to connect with the Cadigal, especially a young girl named Tagaran. In effect, Tagaran turns out to be Rooke's sentimentalized salvation.  First, though, Rooke must escape the allure of the audience.  Initially, he imagines himself performing his mastery of the language for his superiors (153)--a linguistic conquest very much in line with the larger colonial project.  And he understands the process of learning this entirely new language in terms of a "machine" (156), something objective, depersonalized, affectless.  By interacting with Tagaran, however, he realizes that something greater is involved, what he calls "the heart of talking"--a shift from mechanical to organic imagery--in which he and his new friend "had found common ground and begun to discover the true names of things" (186).  In dialogue, Rooke finds himself eddying along in the unquantifiable, perhaps even the unsayable; not all meanings can be neatly tabulated.  Because the complexity of his new emotions cannot be fully articulated, Rooke must move "blindly, in trust" (191).   If Rooke's numbers prepared him to engage with the other, that engagement moves him away from numbers and toward the much messier world of dialogue.

Here again, the novel strives to negate the ambiguities in William Dawes' records.  As Keith Vincent Smith notes, "Grenville's Tagaran is a prepubescent 10 to 12-year-old whose playful, innocent friendship with Dawes has no hint of a sexual dimension; in fact Patyegarang was probably about 15. Some passages indicate she had reached puberty and that theirs may have been a sexual relationship."  Erasing any potential hint of sexual exploitation, The Lieutenant in fact turns such speculations into a colonizer's "bad" reading of the evidence.   Rooke, who by now has ceased to think about his audience (a sign of his moral development), is shocked back into awareness when Silk reads his notebooks: "In Silk's mind there could be no intimacy with a native girl that was not physical.  And how can I hope to persuade him otherwise, Rooke thought, when I myself do not understand and have no word for that intimacy?" (209)   Silk, who sees the world in conventional terms of race, sex, and  power, and who has a word for every occasion, certainly cannot see the possibility of some relationship outside the usual stories.   Rooke, who once believed that everything could be properly named, now finds his own earlier position turned against him.  The unspeakable innocence of this relationship, however, belongs to an already-lost Eden of sorts; Silk, and those who think like him, will drag Rooke down into the colonial muck.  Even more: for Rooke, the thought of sexuality in this relationship is a horrifying, contaminating problem, whereas for Silk, sex is the only means of "relating" to the Cadigal.  Rooke's redemption depends on his growing willingness to relinquish his power; to that end, the novel must cleanse him of anything that even remotely suggests that he might take advantage.  

What Rooke ultimately does, in fact, is use his linguistic semi-mastery (it's not mastery at all, as he must eventually admit to himself) to warn the Cadigal that the Governor intends to capture several of them in retribution for a murder (and, although Rooke doesn't realize it at the time, decapitate them as well).  This subversive moment partly atones for his earlier fear of speaking against his military superiors, as well as for his unwillingness to help Tagaran and the other children when some soldiers hurt them.  His earlier quest for mastery turns, instead, into a desire to abandon mastery, to actively undermine it.   As Smith points out, the real event on which this expedition is based happened before Dawes met Patyegarang and began learning the language; there's certainly no hint anywhere that Dawes actively undermined the Governor's orders, as opposed to being relieved that the whole thing collapsed.  In the larger scheme of the novel's redemption plot, though, Rooke finally finds his own moral voice through his friendship with Tagaran: "'It was a wicked plan, sir, I am sorry to have been persuaded to comply with the order.  I would not for any reason ever again obey a similar order'" (285).  Even though his rebellion against the Governor leads to a double loss--of his career and his possible future in Australia--it also leads him to his "destiny" (a word that appears more than once) as an abolitionist.

My longtime readers may vaguely recollect that I've found some of Grenville's earlier novels rather frustrating, and my frustration did not abate here.  If anything, it increased (although my reaction seems to be an outlier, if the reviews I've seen are any indication).  As I've been suggesting, the novel seems unaware of its own operations: it celebrates the challenge of difference but does its best to erase the challenges posed by William Dawes' historical difference; it imagines the possibility of authentic, even egalitarian dialogue between Rooke and Tagaran, but winds up using her to spark Rooke's personal transformation into the "good" anti-colonial; it asks us to risk venturing into the unknown, beyond what can be counted or put into words, but does not reflect on its own political certainties.  The novel may be on Rooke's side, but its story-telling belongs to Silk.