The chase : truth, testimony and myth in the neo-historical novel

This thesis is a product of practice-led research and creative writing. The creative component, The Chase, is a novel set in Sydney in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a period when routine drug-testing of racehorses was first introduced in Australia. The novel is preceded by an exegesis which situates the creative work within its historical, literary and critical contexts; these include the history of thoroughbred horseracing in England and Australia, and efforts to eradicate horse-doping from the sport; Australian mythography of horsemen and literary representations of horseracing; and postmodernist fictional approaches to historiography, including the Neo-Historical Novel. The exegesis examines the intertextual relationships between past and present, and how lived experience is represented in fiction, non-fiction and myth. It also presents the findings of original research undertaken into the early years of the Australian Jockey Club Laboratory at Randwick. Fictional historiography, like its social scientific counterpart, is inescapably constructed and subjective, but this does not necessarily denude it of social agency or significance. Scholars have noted the ‘remarkable proliferation’ of historical fiction since the Second World War, and the neo-historical text is described by Hayden White as ‘the dominant genre and mode of postmodernist writing’. In this thesis, the Neo-Historical Novel is considered as a category of text which exhibits characteristics of its Romance and Realist predecessors, but also bears the imprint of postmodernist innovations. Perspectives on historical fiction canvassed in the exegesis range from the historical novel as theorised by Lukács, to Hutcheon’s ‘historiographic metafiction’ and recent responses to them. The key challenge confronted by this exploration of theory in the context of creative practice is the tension apparent between postmodernist scepticism toward notions of ultimate truth, and the moral force and significance of testimony. A path towards the resolution of this tension is suggested with reference to Mikhail Bakhtin’s reading of the novel as a literary form that incorporates extra-literary heteroglossia and embodies the innate polyphony of human discourse. Framed in this context, The Chase negotiates with individuals and events of a previous era seen from the perspective of the present. It examines, in practice, the quest for a workable balance between the postmodernist sensibility, the legitimacy of remembrance, and the autonomy of fictional art. A focus on key intertexts, including a set of work diaries written by a member of the Sydney Racing Laboratory’s scientific staff in the 1950s, the existence of which is revealed publicly here for the first time, supports the conclusion that truth claims made on behalf of neo-historical fiction, and indeed, all forms of historiography, must be weighed carefully, governed as they are by the shifting frontiers of knowledge and the distorting impact of what White calls ‘the imposition on the materials of real life, of the structures and forms of meaning met with only in story, fable and dream’