When I reached the end of Rodney Hall's dystopic Kisses of the Enemy, it occurred to me that I had read one too many metafictional variations on the power of narrative...because, despite my assumptions about where Kisses of the Enemy was heading, it was not heading towards a celebration of narrative power per se. Hall sets his dystopia in a future republican Australia, headed by a real estate agent plucked out of virtually nowhere to become an all-powerful dictator. Behind the new dictator, Bernard Buchanan, lies the shadowy (not to mention shady) American company IFID, which funds campaigns, arranges secret deals, and skims off all the profits.
Hall spends much of the novel establishing what looks like a conventional binary opposition between a singular, "official" voice of authority and multiple, community-centered voices of resistance. In his victory speech, Buchanan "was inventing, chanting, singing a whole history to come, his voice inducing a trance capable of shaking a nation" (131): this two-hour speech, which promises to reinvent Australia as an entirely new and utopian space, turns out to initiate eight years of techniques for silencing the opposition. For Hall, these techniques logically extend earlier acts of silencing and historical erasure--in particular, the erasure of Aboriginal history. Bernard temporarily succeeds as president because he so effectively presents himself as the voice of the nation; his official history of Australia even manages to overwrite his own sense of the past, leading him to confuse "what had been true before and which facts were his improvements" (369). But Bernard's vulnerability to his own voice highlights the fictionality of this "singular" speaker: the state-sanctioned official voice requires multiple collaborators to function, ranging from censors to propagandists to blackmailers to volunteer spies to IFID itself. In fact, the novel suggests, many of the oppressed collude in silencing alternative voices, either actively or through sheer inattention. The narrative voice--which, when it calls attention to itself, turns out to be a collective "we" instead of an "I," in contrast to Buchanan--admits that "when we come to review this period, we find a montage of cut-and-paste images, a flash of action slipped in between monumental chunks of ceremonial architecture, an isolated gesture frozen to enigmatic completeness, a word shot in the chest or some fugitive trying to leap craters of cowardice" (143). The all-controlling state creates a paradoxically fractured archive, filled with a multiplicity of fragmentary texts, images, and actions that of themselves form no coherent narrative at all. Such breakdowns are echoed in the momentary lapses of Bernard's own subjective borders, in which he dreams the experiences of other people. Who, then, reconstructs this novel's plots, and how?
If the official voice isn't singular, then it's not clear that multiplicity per se will fix much of anything. Almost all of the characters who oppose Buchanan come from the ranks of the marginal: anyone who isn't Caucasian (all of them cooped up in a forced labor camp), homosexuals, prostitutes, the poor, artists. Their work against Buchanan includes street theatre, painting, and, of course, storytelling. The "Friends of Privilege" imprisoned in the labor camp, for example, create and distribute cereal packets printed with autobiographical narratives, wisdom literature, morality tales, parables, and so on--a riot of narratives drawn from multiple cultural traditions. Similarly, near the end of the novel, a crowd of arrested women burst into "singing, acting, talking, dancing" (581), transforming masculine state action into a scene of feminized, carnivalesque play. And, most importantly of all, Buchanan's wife Dorina testifies against him in a televised divorce case, turning the power of the media back on her husband and asserting the right to speak truth to power, as it were. But none of this changes the political situation. Our satisfaction in the novel's climax promptly deflates once we realize that IFID has plotted it all in advance. The narrative folds just about every act of verbal or artistic resistance back into the system; only physical resistance potentially offers a way out of IFID's net, whether by blowing up a tanker or massing together quietly to protest a murder. Yet again, one suspects that such acts have already been accounted for by IFID's apparently omniscient strategists. "To keep our own country, we're going to be forced to fight for it" (620), realizes Buchanan's son Rory--whose voice breaks off in mid-sentence, leaving us with an open-ended narrative that literally lacks the final punctuation mark. One wonders about that "we"...is it the collective voice of a truly independent state, or the collective voice of a state that merely believes it has escaped oppression?
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