Why the glass church crumbled: a semiotic reading of Oscar and Lucinda

1 Introduction

The Australian Bicentenary 1988 was one of the country’s biggest celebrations of the twentieth century, and arguably one of the few public events that can be described as a “national” one in which Australia “was rhetorically present at its own celebration” (Bennett 1992: xvi). In terms of its origin, the Bicentenary grew out of a political and cultural impulse to commemorate history, as it marked the 200th anniversary of the arrival of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove in 1788. The diverse activities carried out before and during 1988 created a unique social atmosphere in which different values clashed through frequent exchanges. The popular historicism promoted by the festivities stimulated a strong interest in historical fiction and greatly enhanced the status of this literary genre. Oscar and Lucinda, published in 1988, is a typical bicentennial historical novel that reflects “a distinct climate of expectations, values and interests (of the time)” (Dixon 2005: 254).

Oscar and Lucinda is Peter Carey’s first Booker Prize-winner. Previous studies, both within and outside Australia, have been informed to varying degrees by postcolonial critical lenses, including critiques of colonial thought and practice, analyses of gendered colonial experiences, the study of the role of storytelling in rewriting colonial history, etc. Formally, it is agreed that the novel has obvious postmodern textual features, such as intertextuality, metafiction, and narrative deception, and these features contribute to the presentation of postcolonial content. However, few scholars have noticed that the novel is also replete with symbolic elements that fit into some core semiotic frameworks, such as Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic model of signs, Roland Barthes’s “myth”, and Susan Petrilli’s “semioethics”, making it suitable for the interpretation from the perspective of semiotics.

As defined by semiotician Charles William Morris (1971: 144), the significatum (or signification) of a sign is the set of conditions under which it functions as a vehicle of meaning in a specific semiotic process. So long as something denotes or refers to something else, it constitutes a process of signification. In Oscar and Lucinda, the journey to transport a glass church, which lies at the heart of the narrative, signifies the conquest of the Australian continent by the British colonizers as well as the “ideological enlightenment”, so it is a case of signification, essentially the core function of a semiotic activity. At the most basic level, Peirce’s definition of the three categories of signs can help unravel the intricacies of the labyrinth of meaning in the novel: the glass church is itself an “index” that directs people’s attention to Christianity. However, due to people’s “association of ideas or habitual connection” (Hoopes 1991: 181), the relationship between the church and Christianity becomes natural and does not need to be interpreted with any effort, and it becomes a “symbol”. The glass house is also a fragile display artefact that challenges people’s expectations of the church’s construction, so it is reduced from a “symbol” to an “index”. It also becomes an “icon” because of its resemblance to the Crystal Palace, the monolithic cast-iron and plate–glass structure that housed the first World Expo (the Great Exhibition of 1851). The semiotic lens allows the reader to see clearly the competing colonial impulses at play at the time–economic ambition, social restructuring, colonial control and cultural transplantation–and how they trigger the gamble on the glass church, the reckless risk that foreshadows the cruelty and ethical dilemmas of colonial exploration. It also allows the reader to engage with Carey’s nuanced appraisal of the Christian heritage and the role it has played in the shaping of Australian history and identity.

As a theory focused on the study of meaning, semiotics is concerned with the “production, transmission, interpretation, feedback and various forms (of meaning)” (Zhao 2017: 1). Oscar and Lucinda in the novel are repeatedly frustrated in their search for meaning, but neither of them ever gives up. As a typical semiotic system, myth is closely related to ideology, and its interpretation can produce a new “ideological” language, and the “ideological” language as a new theoretical discourse is the result of the analysis of meaning (Greimas 1987: 3–4). Therefore, it is important to debunk the colonial myths and explore the deconstruction and critique of them by postcolonial writers through the analysis of meaning. According to semioethics, a new branch of semiotics that underscores “the relation between signs and values, identity and otherness” (Petrilli 2016: 247), every individual must take responsibility for all symbolic activities or beings on earth, because “[a]s a biological organism the human being flourishes in the great biosemiotic network interconnectedly with other biological organisms populating the biosphere” (Petrilli and Ponzio 2010: 157). Additionally, human beings are “endowed with a capacity for modelling, which determines world view, communication and dialogism” (Petrilli and Ponzio 2010: 157). This ability to model enables individuals to engage meaningfully with others and their environment, thereby creating a rich tapestry of interconnected views and communications in the “biosphere”. As such, the importance of connectivity cannot be overstated in any age. What follows is an analysis of the novel in terms of meaning, myth and connection in order to illuminate the inevitable “crumbling” of the glass church and its semiotic implications, how the novel comes to encapsulate Australians’ feelings about the “white heritage” in general, and how the descendants of white settlers shape their identification by reflecting on and revising history.

2 The search for meaning

Oscar and Lucinda focuses on two quintessential Victorians, Oscar Hopkins and Lucinda Lepastrier. Both suffer from life challenges such as bereavement, resettlement, and social alienation. In addition to personal factors such as upbringing and character traits, the social factors that have blinded their minds and prevented them from leading meaningful lives include the puritanical education system, the stifling religious atmosphere, and the rigid social and ethical norms.

Oscar lost his mother at a young age and lived with his father, an evangelical Christian and marine biologist. When he was fifteen, he was “seduced” by the Christmas pudding made by the family’s new maid. But his father, a teacher of the Plymouth Brethren Church, insisted that Christmas pudding was “the fruit of Satan” (Carey 1989: 12). When he discovered that his son had eaten the “forbidden fruit”, he chastised him severely. Despite his father’s undisputed authority in the faith, Oscar insisted that a food with such a wonderful taste cannot be evil. The “Christmas pudding incident” becomes the catalyst for the estrangement between father and son, and leads Oscar to see the result of his stone-throwing questionings as a “call from God”, so he leaves home to become a disciple of the Anglican priest Hugh Stratton, who, due to his financial constraints, is unreasonably stingy with money. When studying theology at Oxford, Oscar is introduced to horse race betting, from which he wins enough to cover his daily expenses. He reassures himself that gambling is not despicable or vile, because “he had never bet from greed or avarice. The state of his coal scuttle, the condition of his shoes, all attested to that. He would only bet for a proper godly purpose” (Carey 1989: 180).

Regrettably, the unity of mind and body Oscar felt at fifteen gets unsustainable as he grows up. As a seminarian, Oscar “saw the theatre with two sets of eyes, one his own, but one his father’s. The second set saw the theatre steeped in sin” (Carey 1989: 109). The worldly pleasure of going to the theatre represents the pleasurable side of life that he longs for but has been denied, and his father’s eyes represent the pervasive, heavy influence of the puritanical social climate. Once he has internalized the gaze that represents the orthodox of the society, he is unable to act or live in spiritual autonomy and inevitably has a divided self. While he clings to a lifestyle of extraordinary simplicity and believes that winning is a “gift” from God, he is inwardly disturbed and ashamed by the unusual excitement he feels when he gambles. In fact, the pleasure and guilt he feels then is a continuation of his complex emotions on the occasion of his first visit to the theatre. To free himself from a meaningless life, he tries to suppress the beast of gambling by going on a mission to an overseas colony. Ironically, his decision to go to New South Wales is based on a coin toss to discover “God’s will”. It is this decision that leads to his intersection with Lucinda’s life trajectory.

Raised on an Australian farm, Lucinda is the heiress to a considerable fortune. Her mother used to be a close friend of the famous Victorian novelist George Eliot (née Marian Evans); before migrating to Australia with her husband, she was a passionate campaigner for equal economic and social rights for women. In letters to “dear Marian”, she lamented that her daughter, who was brought up according to their “progressive” ideas, was totally incompatible with the “backward” Australian colonies, and she believed that her daughter’s ideal home was back in London. But as it turns out, both Sydney and London are stifling places for this young woman. After the death of her widowed mother, Lucinda feels for the first time the invisible heavy hand of conservative society: not trusted to run the family farm, she is forced to give it up and leave her hometown with nothing more than a bank note. On the boat to Sydney, she begins to unconsciously internalize the perspectives of others, transforming herself into the heroine of a drama under the weight of the male gaze:

There was a jitteriness, a sort of stage fright about her future which was not totally unpleasant. She dramatized herself. And even while she felt real pain, real grief, real loneliness, she also looked at herself from what she imagined was Sol Myer’s perspective, and then she was a heroine at the beginning of an adventure. (Carey 1989: 128)

Like Oscar who feels divided in the theatre, Lucinda is also trapped between the dictates of her upbringing and the constraints of the rigorous society. In Sydney’s social circles, she is criticized for her “lack of propriety” in dress and hairstyle and alienated by the women of her own class. She then travels to London, but this “homecoming” is equally disappointing. When Lucinda visits Marian Evans she has long admired, Ms. Evans does not develop a liking for “this colonial product of her own feminist teachings” (Ryan-Fazilleau 2005: 14). She finds this young woman from the colony unrefined and uncouth, with a clumsy accent and coarse manners, and is completely uninterested in and indifferent to her enthusiasm for the glass industry. On the journey home in disillusionment, Lucinda tries to find solace in playing cards, the only social activity in which she can feel an equal partnership, and Oscar, who is taking the same ship, happens to be her ideal companion. This tacit relationship continues until it is discovered by a man from Oscar’s parish, causing the poor youth to lose his job in the Anglican Church and fall into the abyss of life. Out of pity and redemption, Lucinda finds him out and takes him into her home, leading to a new round of harsh criticism and isolation. These fictionalized historical scenarios all fit typical Victorian characteristics–“rigid sexual morality, religious hypocrisy, smugness, prudery, intolerance, a high pressure to conform” (Petersen 1991: 113).

On the surface, Lucinda’s childhood fascination with the immensely strong and exceptionally fragile glass bead–“Prince Rupert’s Drop”^[1]–and her perception that glass can be a medium for developing friendships across gender and class divides, leads her to purchase the factory that makes these beads. The bank note Lucinda carries with her symbolizes that single Victorian women could have some degree of inherence or legal ownership of personal property, but this thin, light piece of paper is not enough for Lucinda who sees owning solid property “as a necessary first step towards social recognition” (Wynne 2010: 10). As revealed in the novel, Lucinda has to persuade another glass enthusiast, the Reverend Dennis Hasset, to act as her proxy. This “proxy system” reflected a general mistrust of women’s ability to be independent, and it also reflects that “property, as a concept and relationship, was central to Victorian society” (Wynne 2010: 8). Even after she becomes the owner of the factory, the workers there treat her arrogantly for her daring to enter “the territory of glowering men in high collars” (Carey 1989: 150). She pities them in their poverty and weariness, but “there was a way they looked at her that made her fear and hate them. It was her age, her sex, her class. She knew it” (Carey 1989: 150).

Lucinda’s position as a young woman in colonial society, her struggle and plight are all relevant to the topic of gender in the postcolonial context. Her glass factory is at once a symbol of women breaking out of Victorian gender confinement and a microcosm of the exploitative chains of colonial capitalism. The tumbling liquid glass in the furnace suggests the process of transforming colonial resources into imperial capital. Her journey to London consolidates her industrial ambitions. While Lucinda constructs her subjectivity as a colonial entrepreneur through glass, her passion for gambling leads her to find a connection with Oscar. On the return journey from London, Lucinda confesses to him her addiction, but Oscar declares her sinless, claiming that human faith itself is a wager: “We bet–it is all in Pascal and very wise it is too, although the Queen of England might find him not nearly Presbyterian enough–we bet that there is a God. We bet our life on it” (Carey 1989: 261–262); however, this claim reflects not so much his belief in Pascal’s “wager theory”^[2] as his conviction that faith is a courageous act of trust in the face of uncertainty. The explanation he gives reflects his fanaticism: “It is true! We must gamble every instant of our allotted span. We must stake everything on the unprovable fact of His existence” (Carey 1989: 262). To see faith as a gamble is to recognize that it involves uncertainty. Oscar tries to strengthen his faith and eliminate his doubts by repeating and reinforcing certain beliefs in order to cope with this uncertainty. As he always senses, human existence is inextricably linked to this existential wager, which raises questions about meaning, purpose, and the consequences of choices, so the imperative for him is to find the meaning of life and to commit to beliefs in a world where ultimate truths remain elusive.

While studying at Oriel College, Oscar believes that he “wins” more bets than he “loses” because he is “favored by God”; the situation is in effect the result of multiple complex factors, to which Oscar is lamentably oblivious. When young, he was rigorously trained by his father in mathematics and logic. Due to this early scientific education, his sensitivity to numbers and his analysis of horse racing data and racecourse details, his chance of winning surpasses the average punter. By selectively remembering victories (reinforcing the narrative of “God’s favor”) and downplaying defeats, Oscar maintains cognitive consistency by rationalizing the outcome of gambling within a religious framework. This in turn leads him to join the Empire’s overseas programs, since the colonial project shared the same logic as gambling–ostensibly based on rational planning such as land mapping and resource development, but inherently reliant on irrationality and chance. The novel reveals that science and religion did not exist as opposing systems of thought in the British Empire in the 19th century. To Kirsten Holst Petersen, this mixture of ideologies is a metaphor for the mindset of the time: “firmly embedded in Victorian society, Oscar’s moves no longer seem accidental, on the contrary, they conform to an established ideology (evangelism) and successfully annihilate any contrary systems of thought by incorporating them” (Petersen 1991: 115).

When Oscar loses his priesthood in Sydney for “misconduct”, he goes back to the casinos in search of spiritual reassurance. He spends two months there in a state of distraction, convinced that God is “punishing” him. Lucinda pulls him out of despairing and even helps him get employed. Yet, even during the interview, he tosses a coin to see if it’s “God’s will” for him to take the job. The symbolic activities mentioned above involve processes of signification, but “the interpretation of signs from God is subject to no rule or system of belief, but is embedded in Oscar’s private emotional world to which we only have partial access” (Petersen 1991: 114). In other words, Oscar’s understanding and experience of faith does not follow traditional doctrines or rules: his faith is both a gamble and a self-reinforcing process, based largely on personal emotion and intuition.

Oscar’s fanaticism is reflected not only in his religious views, but later in his life choices. His “wide-eyed blindness” to the history and culture of the colonies not only causes him to miscalculate the effects of his actions, but also leads him to misinterpret and hide his true love. Given Oscar’s passivity and inability to express love, Lucinda, bound by the norms of female behavior and conservatism of the time, decides to risk her entire fortune to motivate him to complete a journey to deliver a glass church to remote Boat Harbor. The gamble is meant to lead to what they mistakenly believe to be a secret plan for both of them–a future they can forge together. But they fail to realize that it is a dynamic process fraught with randomness, uncertainty and danger.

In the end, the glass church, a sign of love and religion as well as a monument to the nineteenth-century glass industry of the British Empire, falls to pieces in the Beringer River^[3] tragically trapping Oscar inside and causing his untimely death. This reverses the familiar “beloved” ending that readers have hoped for, and breaks what they recognize as “the tacit rules of the code […] governing this narrative” (Ryan-Fazilleau 2005: 15). After losing her lover and all her money, Lucinda quickly finds a new purpose in life, free from the burden of her parents’ dispossession of Aboriginal land and property, and lives a life of independence as a lower laborer, growing up to become a famous leader of the labor movement in Australian history.

3 The debunking of the colonial myths

Roland Barthes (2013: 240) defines myth as a “second-order semiological system” which naturalizes cultural values and ideologies by presenting them as seemingly “natural” or self-evident through complex signifier-signified relations; that is, the fundamental principle of myth is that “it transforms history into nature”. A popular myth about Australia’s colonial history is that the European colonization of the continent was a “peaceful” process in which white settlers did not encounter strong resistance from the Aboriginals. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, historians and colonial chroniclers such as James Bonwick, John West, George Fletcher Moore tended to stress that the settlers had acquired land through “legal” means (e.g. title deeds), thereby ignoring or downplaying the violent evictions, massacres and cultural destruction of the indigenous peoples during the process of colonization. What was endorsed was the concept of “terra nullius”, a notion used to support the idea that the Australian continent was “unoccupied” and that settlers could therefore legally take possession of the land. Such historical attitudes perpetuated the disregard for indigenous peoples’ legitimate land rights and continued to cover up colonial atrocities. In the second half of the 20th century, a group of historians, represented by Manning Clarke, Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan in A History of Australia (1962–1987), The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia (1981), The Aboriginal Tasmanians (1982) and others, set out todebunk this “white myth”. Novelists such as Thea Astley, Thomas Keneally and Kate Grenville also joined in exposing the dark side of Australian colonial history. Oscar and Lucinda is a product of the “rethinking history” trend of the period, which deconstructs the mythological archetype of the “explorer-hero” in reconstructed Victorian scenes, thus discrediting the “peaceful process of colonization”.

In Peirce’s triadic model, the sign, also known as the representamen, is “something which stands to somebody for something on some respect or capacity” (Peirce 1940: 99). In other words, the object is what the sign refers to. The meaning one derives from the sign is called the interpretant, “suggesting that it entailed a form of ‘negotiation’, so to speak, whereby the sign-user evaluates or responds to what the sign means socially, contextually, personally, etc.” (Sebeok 2001: 6). The interpretant itself has the potential to become another sign, thus opening up a new round of processes for determining the interpretant. This shows that signs are dynamic, “functioning according to cultural and social conventions and habits that arise through action” (Veivo 2007: 44). All the above three elements are functional and relative, defined by their relationship and role in relation to each other.

In terms of Peirce’s semiotic framework, the glass church epitomizes the triadic interaction between sign, object and interpretant. Due to Sydney’s unique geographical location and abundant quartz sand resources, glass manufacturing had become a major pillar industry in New South Wales by the mid-nineteenth century. Given the special contribution of the industry to the social life of the colony, the sign of the glass church has acquired a clearer socio-cultural significance here than in any other area where white missionaries had set foot. The fact that the colonial expedition, under the pretext of transporting a glass church, is based on a gamble deconstructs the halo of the so-called “mission of civilization”, since it is not the result of grand imperial planning and ingenuity, but of youthful whimsy rooted in the realities of colonial conditions. The novel raises concerns about Victorian society’s attitudes to religion, industry and gender roles, and these “historical realities” resonate strongly with the “fictional realities” in the novel.

For Lucinda’s acquaintances in Sydney, the journey to transport the glass church is unimaginable. For one thing, transporting the heavy and fragile glass architecture across some unfamiliar territories is a daunting task. For another, the transparency of the church is extremely unfriendly to priests, whose every move will be on display for all to see. What’s more, the hot Australian sun would make the parishioners entering the glass church feel as if they were in hell, and they would curse God and the manufacturers for it. (Carey 1989: 435) However, under the demagogy of the imperialist Mr. Jeffris, the two uninitiated youths plunge blindly into the plan. It’s important to note that Oscar embarks on the journey with a sense of spiritual mission, simply wanting to be Lucinda’s “perfect friend” and to participate in the creation of “a prism, a prayer to God” (Carey 1989: 389). Lucinda, on the other hand, sees the journey as an attempt to assert her independence and challenge Victorian gender norms. However, their plans are soon tampered with by Jeffris, who sees himself as a heroic trailblazer. Driven by a sense of destiny and a lust for the power to chart and conquer new territories, he bases his interpretation of adventure on Victorian ideas of “enlightenment” and “progress”.

Unlike Oscar, who relies on the flip of a coin to make his decision, Jeffris responds proactively to the call of the zeitgeist. As observed by Sue Ryan-Fazilleau (2005: 11), “[d]uring the Victorian era, the colonies were a liminal presence that haunted the periphery of imperial awareness: a place where criminals were punished or where progressives went to try out their new ideas far from the stultifying social atmosphere of the mother country.” Jeffris initially appears to be such a “progressive” with a pioneering spirit. Though not interested in the glass church, he believes he can make history by transporting it:

Each pane of glass, he thought, would travel through country where glass had never existed before, not once, in all time. These sheets would cut a new path in history. They would slice the white dust-covers of geography and reveal a map beneath, with rivers, mountains, and names, the streets of his birthplace, Bromley, married to the rivers of savage Australia. (Carey 1989: 450)

As a result of Jeffris’s intervention, the journey to transport the glass church diverges from its original design to become a new sign/the interpretant, starting to represent the imperialist expedition, and the object is the historical and cultural reality of Victorian exploration and colonization.

The cruel law that Jeffris upholds is that “[c]hurches are not carried by choirboys […] Neither has the Empire been built by angels” (Carey 1989: 482). His statement ostensibly reflects the impatience, even contempt, of the militants (represented by himself) for the moderates (the religious people represented by Oscar); but in effect it reflects a subtle complicity between the two types of colonists. The paradox of this colonial discourse is that it both exposes the truth (the violent nature of the empire) and the attempts to dissolve the moral interrogation with the logic of pragmatism. This duality is the fundamental characteristic of colonial ideology–violence in the garb of “civilization”, and a narrative of “progress” that masks the nature of predation.

After spreading rumors that Oscar is hydrophobic to the point of losing self-control, he sends his men to watch him every day and force-feed him laudanum through an unsterilized iron funnel. Even Percy Smith, Oscar’s old acquaintance, is forced to submit to his tyranny. At night, Jeffris allows his men to drink, blaspheme and indulge themselves while he records his “exploits”; during the day he demands their unconditional obedience. He threatens to cut off the hands of a disobedient young carpenter, calling him “a frigging colonial frigging dog, a frigging lemon-sucking incompetent” (Carey 1989: 458), and later acquiesces in the public rape of the carpenter by his closest subordinates. In this way, Jeffris has complete control over the entire team through violence and intimidation. Having witnessed too much brutality and cruelty, Oscar prefers to drink laudanum on his own. His passivity and weakness fuel the impunity and depravity of Jeffris and his men. Apparently, Oscar’s frailty and inaction deviates from the colonial narrative of the “heroic pioneer missionary” and parodies imperial masculinity.

According to Aboriginal storyteller Kumbaingiri Billy, the white men cut down trees and burn the bush in preparation for mapping: “They were surveying with chains and theodolites, but we did not understand what they were doing. We saw the dead trees.” (Carey 1989: 475) In the expedition journal, Jeffris gleefully boasts of his “great achievements”: naming “several largish creeks”, correcting the heights of many “wildly misdescribed” mountains, giving more than taking from “the ‘Spitting Tribe’”, getting rid of “‘6 treacherous knaves’ from the Yarra-Happini”, and “defending the party from the ‘murderous Kumbaingiri’” (Carey 1989: 480). Distinctly, Jeffris not only names and marks some waters and mountains, but spares no effort to stigmatize the indigenous tribes. Bill Ashcroft (2001: 88) reveals how naming is so often used by colonial explorers, cartographers and pioneers to further the empire’s reclamation of place: “at a more profound level the place may be incorporated into imperial discourse by a naming of its climatic, geological, topographical and geographical features which locate the place into a modem, universal system of reference”. Jeffris uses the imperial discourse of “science” and “progress” to justify his team’s destruction of the environment and mistreatment of Aboriginal people, customs and cultures. His diary entries illustrate his degradation into a cold, impersonal imperial machine of territorial expansion: “He recorded all this in a neat and flowing hand which gave no indication of the peculiarities of his personality” (Carey 1989: 480).

Maps and cartography have played an important role in the imperial pioneers’ forays into the “unknown”. Graham Huggan has explored the obsession with cartographic imagery among writers in Canada, Australia and other former colonies. He concludes that this obsession has led to an interest in both “physical (geographic) maps” and “conceptual (metaphorical) maps”, the former proving effective in the implementation of colonial policies but often restrictive or coercive, while the latter is seen as a mode of colonial discourse and therefore provides a viable framework for critiquing it (Huggan 1989: 115). By charting Jeffris’s fervent vision of mapping before his departure and the specific mapping operations he and his team undertake in the heartland of New South Wales, Carey demonstrates the exemplary role of cartography in representing the discursive practices of colonialism, showcasing some of the key rhetorical strategies of the mapping process, such as the “reinscription, enclosure and hierarchization of space” that “provide an analogue for the acquisition, management and reinforcement of colonial power” (Huggan 1989: 115).

The importance of explorers in the collective consciousness of nineteenth-century Australia was largely due to the lack of military heroes to emerge from major wars, “but this gap in the national mythology was filled by the explorers who gained heroic status in the public imagination and became the subject of hero worship” (Petersen 1991: 107). Oscar and Lucinda debunks the myth of the “explorer-hero” and the lie of the “peaceful process of colonization”, and on this basis lifts the mysterious veil of Christianity which played an important part in colonial exploration and imperial expansion.

Oscar’s anachronisms in New South Wales are due to his failure to recognize that when religion is weaponized, it is no longer purely a matter of faith. As soon as Oscar arrives, he becomes “a pawn in Dancer’s power game” (Ramsey-Kurz 2007: 305). When he requests to preach in a remote area, Bishop Dancer mercilessly taunts him that his ideal missionary work is “a waste of time”, because “[t]he blacks were dying off like flies” anyway (Carey 1989: 306). Though disoriented and alienated by the colonial religious system, Oscar shows his creditable side as an individual religious man of conscience. However, his subsequent hostage-taking by Jeffris as part of a colonial expedition which opens with guns and blood, underlines his complex identity as both the unwitting participant in colonial evil and the repentant for colonial violence.^[4]

The greatest irony in the novel about the teaching of Christianity in Australian colonies is that Oscar’s missionary work is largely a failure, but his act of fighting evil with evil (teaming up with Smith to kill Jeffris) touches the heart of Kumbaingiri Billy’s aunt, then a sex slave of white loggers, and prompts her to become a Christian. Oscar’s “courageous resistance” on behalf of the oppressed moves her to become his follower. As Brown points out, Oscar and Lucinda seems to unambiguously condemn “institutionalized Christianity in nineteenth-century Australia”, but some passages in it suggest that “if ideologies can be extracted from structures, Christianity needs to be considered along with a literary tradition as a source of legitimate values” (Brown 1995: 138).

By analyzing the interpretants generated by the signs of fragility, arrogance, resilience, and the potential for destruction, Carey’s stance emerges as critical but multifaceted. While exposing the complicity of Christianity in colonization, he also portrays the human dimensions of faith, the uncertainty of existence and redemption. This ambivalence suggests a tension between rejecting the institutional role of Christianity in colonial conquest and recognizing its significance for individuals. Carey’s attitude to the white cultural tradition can be traced in an interview, in which he recounted how a dilapidated church in his hometown that was about to be demolished triggered his creative impulse. He considered himself an atheist and recognized that Christian culture had been established in the New World on the basis of the destruction of Aboriginal culture, but as an Australian he felt compelled to face up to the fact that Christian culture had a role there (Wachtel 1993: 103). Thus, Ruth Brown is right to relate Carey’s cultural attitude to what Edward W. Said tried to convey in Culture and Imperialism (1993), namely that in the post-colonial phase “we need not to abandon Western culture, but to look at it critically, see how it naturalized imperialism and decide which bits of it can be disconnected from dubious contexts and recycled for new purposes” (Brown 1995: 139).

4 Connection failed and re-established

As argued previously, the two signs of glass and gambling point to the spiritual predicaments of individuals in the context of colonial modernity, but they also imply different paths to redemption. Oscar seeks the certainty of faith through gambling, while Lucinda seeks redemption by disposing of her parents’ ill-gotten fortune through building and transporting a glass church. From Peirce’s semiotic perspective, the profound spiritual picture of the Victorian era can be glimpsed: in the tension between faith and reason, certainty and contingency, human beings are always searching for a spiritual home, a place where they can live in harmony with the divine, with themselves and with others. The search itself can be the greatest source of salvation, and what lies at the heart of the search is the making of connections.

Expositors of semioethics point out that the telos of semiosis is “an orientation beyond the totality, beyond the closure of totality, the capacity for detotalization, for transcendence beyond a given entity, a given being, infinite semiosis, movement towards infinity, desire of the other” (Petrilli and Ponzio 2010: 16) This statement emphasizes the importance of making connections because it allows for a deeper critique of meaning, transcends fixed interpretations, and promotes an ethical engagement with the infinite and the other. In Oscar and Lucinda, the glass church is a powerful sign of the possibility of connection and mutual understanding. Through it, Oscar and Lucinda seek to connect with each other and with the broader world. Although the outcome of their efforts is undesirable, it reflects the dynamic process proposed in semioethics, the process of pursuit characterized by openness and unfinishedness. In other words, what makes their pursuit spiritually redemptive is not the arrival at a geographical endpoint, but the possibility of opening up to unlimited symbolic interpretations.

The whole structure of the novel revolves around the repeated failures and attempts to connect. As Peirce and others have shown, connection does not occur naturally, but requires the fulfilment of certain conditions, i.e., a common “world of meaning” or symbolic system and its “interpretive normative meta-language” (Zhao 2017: 13). By emphasizing the importance of communication at the individual level, Carey gives prominence to individual stories and attempts to prove that individual stories can not only be meaningful in their own right, but can also provide material for thinking about collective identity, since “[i]n order to extract general principles from the individual story, the reader is encouraged, indeed provoked, into undertaking the partially creative act of interpretation” (Ryan-Fazilleau 2005: 19).

Unfortunately, the journey which is meant to be a symbol of connection, leads not only to Oscar’s tragic death, but to the cessation of any possible connections between the whites and the Aboriginals. When the team led by Jeffris launches a bloody attack on the Kumbaingiri tribe, the young Narcoo man who has been forced to show them the way becomes a key witness. He survives the ordeal until it is possible for him to tell the survivors of the tribe the truth about the massacre. Then he kills himself with a piece of broken glass. The act is not only a confession of his unintentional sin, but also an indictment of the crimes of the white colonizers and a firm declaration of separatism from them. This shard of glass later becomes a testimony–solid evidence held by the descendants the tribe. This material residue preserves repressed memories more authentically than the history written by the whites.

After the death of Jeffris, the church is reassembled and transported on two boats. On the eve of the arrival, one of the boats lurches, causing the church base to shift and the glass roof to crack, followed by more. On the surface, the crumbling of the glass church is caused by the collision of the boats, but in effect it is the result of the white men’s arrogant disregard for the risk of transporting the glass church and for the indigenous knowledge of local hydrography. No sooner has Oscar brought the dilapidated church to the destination than he is wracked with guilt and, in a trance, falls prey to Miriam Chadwick, a widow desperate to marry her way out of her predicament. Forced to marry the woman, he loses what’s left of him–his faith in love–and sinks into the Bellinger River along with the broken church. The fragments of the church glittering in the water become the tombstone of colonial logic. Oscar’s drowning suggests a fragile colonial subject turned against by the unfamiliar colonial environment. Therefore, his death is not a martyrdom, but the inevitable end of a gambler deeply involved in colonial modernity. In effect, the glass church’s eventual crumbling and sinking is not only material but also symbolic. Only when it is salvaged and subjected to a series of localized modifications (replacing the broken glass at the top with corrugated iron, securing the weatherboards with fencing wire, etc.), does it adapt to the local climate and environment and become truly in tune with the people of Boat Harbor and their religious life.

The tragedy of Oscar’s life lies in his inability to break free from the absolutist mindset in which he sees chance as a law, randomness as a “dialogue with God”, neglects the physical mechanisms of games of chance, and thus finds it difficult to make any real connection with the people or environment around him. In the eyes of the white narrator–Oscar’s great-grandson, “he drifted up the Bellinger River like a blind man up the central aisle of Notre Dame. He saw nothing. The country was thick with sacred stories more ancient than the ones he carried in his sweat-slippery leather Bible. He did not even imagine their presence” (Carey 1989: 500–501).

Through Oscar’s failures, Carey illustrates why white settlers were unable to establish meaningful connections with the realities of Australia and its inhabitants. But he does not stop there. The novel also explores the possibilities of reconnecting, and places the hope of doing so in the new generations, represented by the white first-person narrator who identifies with Aboriginal cultures and values. This narrator has a very different view of history from his mother who adheres to the imperialist version of history. He brings himself closer to the reader by skillfully recounting childhood escapades. As he recalls, his mother “became emotional, as she often did, when discussing the past, and because she wished Oscar to be a ‘missionary’ and a ‘pioneer Anglican’”, so he and his siblings “grew up imagining Oscar travelling out on steerage, on a clipper ship, crowded in amongst poor immigrants. We imagined our great-grandfather with his map and celluloid, his Bible, his Book of Common Prayer” (Carey 1989: 190). His mother’s version of history is based on “indexes” or “symbols” related to exploration and missionary work, such as maps and religious texts. On this basis, a historical narrative takes shape that combines idealism, religious devotion, and pioneering spirit: “We saw him–even while we squirmed in embarrassment before my mother’s holy-toned recitation–conducting sad funeral services for babies lost […] his hair flaming red, his milk-white skin burnt raw, squinting into the antipodean sun with the ultramarine sea swelling up above him” (Carey 1989: 190). The holy image dictated by the mother’s version of history ironically exposes the fictional nature of historical narratives which exert great influence on the people on the receiving end, especially the children.

Unlike symbols of universal significance, such as maps, the Bibles and the Book of Common Prayer, the celluloid, which the narrator’s mother regards as a family heirloom, is distinctly idiosyncratic. The narrator has been told from an early age that the lines on it are those of latitude and longitude. “She would lay the yellowed, scratched material across a Shell road map and explain to us how it would have worked.” (Carey 1989: 190) The narrator’s father, however, refutes this version of interpretation, and this causes discord within the family. With “a diploma in industrial chemistry”, he refers to the object in scientific terms–“long-chain hydrocarbons”, to which the mother is intensely hostile: “she felt that he was contesting her ownership of its original use, its meaning, its history” (Carey 1989: 190). As the father’s private investigation reveals, the celluloid has as little to do with latitude and longitude as Oscar has to do with the “clipper ship” overcrowded with poor immigrants.

The narrator identifies with his father who always seems to live in the shadow of the “matriarch”. In the eyes of the white community, his father is a maverick who befriends the Aboriginals, respects their cultures and customs, and always instills in his son a respect for Aboriginal oral history. He tells the narrator, “Kumbaingiri Billy has more brains in his nose than the whole shire council wrapped into one” (Carey 1989: 475). Influenced by his father and his Aboriginal friend, the narrator learns early on not to take official history at face value. Having developed a local awareness, the narrator refuses to be complicit in the official interpretation of the white colonization. He points to the dark side of the process–the economic plundering of indigenous land resources and the cultural erasure of indigenous existence, and more importantly in real life, the mass killings intended to “cleanse” a place of its original inhabitants. According to his exposé, the Historical Society, in its official capacity, seeks to erase indigenous traces in the region, thereby legitimizing the white settlers’ expansion and concealing the collective evil they committed in the process: “[N]ot so long before that when Horace Clarke’s grandfather went up there with his mates–all the old families should record this when they are arguing about who controls this shire–and pushed an entire tribe of aboriginal men and women and children off the edge.” (Carey 1989: 2–3) This alludes to an important motivation behind Victorian settler colonization: the greed for land. In his study of settler colonialism, Patrick Wolfe notes that “[i]n contrast to the kind of colonial formation that Cabral or Fanon confronted, settler colonies were not primarily established to extract surplus value form indigenous labor. Rather, they are premised on displacing indigenes from (or replacing them on) the land” (Wolfe 1999: 1). Consequentially, the concept of terra nullius in relation to Australian land rights was “progressively encoded into Australian law” as “a rationalization rather than a motive for colonial invasion” (Wolfe 1999: 27).

The narrator absorbs different “histories” before he becomes the author of his own story. Semioethics considers the personalized perspective important because what deserves serious attention is the individual in his/her uniqueness and his/her inevitable interrelation with others. As a critical reader/listener, the narrator attempts to rewrite his family history from a personal and subjective perspective, in order to rebel against the family tradition of interpreting the world literally, a tradition strongly advocated and perpetuated by people like his mother. He makes no secret of the fact that he draws on his artistic imagination and storytelling skills to the full when recounting the nineteenth-century past, nor does he hide his dominance of the narrative:

In order that I exist, two gamblers, one Obsessive, the other Compulsive, must meet. A door must open at a certain time. Opposite the door, a red plush settee is necessary. The Obsessive, the one with sixteen bound volumes of eight hundred and eighty pages, ten columns per page, must sit on this red settee, the Book of Common Prayer open on his rumpled lap. The Compulsive gambler must feel herself propelled forward from the open doorway. She must travel towards the Obsessive and say an untruth (although she can have no prior knowledge of her own speech): “I am in the habit of making my confession.” (Carey 1989: 224)

This explains why, when the first-person subjective narrative shifts to the third-person omniscient, the narrator’s deep insight into the thoughts, feelings and motives of the protagonists, whom he has never met, instead highlights “the fact that he is a construct, like the past he is constructing” (Petersen 1991: 109). The narrator moves back and forth between history and fiction, blurring the line between historical truth and fictional constructs: “[h]istory is viewed, not as a fixed and given series of events and motives, but as a text itself, which is as subject to the whims and needs of historians as the literary text is to those of the writers” (Petersen 1991: 108).

The third-person part discloses the practical use of celluloid: it is drawn with squares so that Oscar, who is hydrophobic, can see the sea through it without feeling the sea “uncontrollable”. The sacred stories of Aboriginal Australians are also given authenticity and legitimacy that the Christian stories transplanted to the colonies do not have. By rewriting ancestral stories in an individualized, self-referential manner, the narrator is able to draw on the power of literature to “go against the family tradition of literal interpretation”, and “escape from the intellectual prison” prepared for him by the oppressive ideological authority represented by his mother (Ryan-Fazilleau 2005: 20). The oppressive ideological authority is mainly “a fundamentalist certainty in its own religious and ideological superiority” (Petersen 1991: 115). By depicting society in different periods, the novel illustrates that taking certain beliefs or ideas as absolute truths and instilling them in different individuals is contrary to the nature of the diversified development of things and is extremely detrimental to both societies and individuals. Fortunately, the white narrator’s historical awareness, critical thinking, cultural attitude of having respect for diversity, and strong willingness to communicate across cultures provide insights and ways to overcome such common misconceptions and mindsets.

Having noticed the official attempt to dissolve Aboriginal historical memory by incorporating their space into the framework of colonial rule, the narrator decides to leave a gap in his story for indigenous oral histories to mark the lack of discursive space for Aboriginal peoples in history. This arrangement not only exposes the inherent violent nature of grand narratives such as “civilization” and “progress”, but also suggests the redemptive possibilities of cultural translation and the reconstruction of memory. Since “telling stories concerns mediation between a tellee and a story for meaning-making, resulting in transmission of knowledge and wisdom” (Lee 2023: 569), the narrator invites Kumbaingiri Billy to represent his tribe and Aboriginal societies in general, and the two engage in a friendly and relaxed dialogue, a symbol of connectivity with enduring meaning. Billy jokingly comments on his aunt’s conversion to Christianity: “She saw your great-grandfather was a brave man. She saw he had a halo like one of those saints … He told her: ‘You will live in paradise.’ He christened her Mary, for Magdalene. It was a damn silly name for a Kumbaingiri and if you want my opinion, Bob, it was ignorant to talk to us Kooris in that way.’” (Carey 1989: 496) This implies a willingness on the part of the descendants of both the whites and the Aboriginals to overcome historical divisions and hostilities and to make connections through dialogue on an equal footing. Semiotic theorists Petrilli and Ponzio (2010: 152) have pointed out that “[d]ialogue is not a condition we concede out of generosity towards another, rather it is structural to life itself, a condition for life to flourish”. That is to say, connections are essential for uncovering and understanding the complex, intertwined networks of meaning that define human existence; connections are also ethically significant in that they underscore our involvement and responsibility towards others. The concept of a “clean conscience” which isolates responsibility within limited, individual contexts, is therefore untenable. Instead, an engagement with the wider, infinite web of relationships is integral. Therefore, the narrator’s ancestral “history” embodies a distinctly postcolonial semioethical stance: “it insists on recreating confidence in humankind’s capacity to do better than the recorded history of European expansion makes us believe it can do” (Ramsey-Kurz 2007: 307).

5 Conclusions

Interpreting Peter Carey’s postcolonial literary classic Oscar and Lucinda in the context of semiotic theory reveals hidden power structures, cultural conflicts and the mechanisms by which meaning is generated in the text. Like a scalpel, semiotics strips the colonial discourse of its “naturalized” trappings, transforming seemingly neutral material details (such as the glass, the map, and the gambling equipment) into codes for power analysis. According to Roland Barthes, semiotics “bodes well with narratives because it allows interpretants to seize deeper structural principles that help organize and categorize ideas or meanings by way of intersubjective mediation by signs” (Delante et al. 2025: 99). Tracing the intersubjective contestation of symbolic meanings demonstrates that all colonial symbols are unstable referents, just like the river in the novel which carries the remains of the church and washes away the foundations of symbolic hegemony. Reading the novel in conjunction with semiotics not only strengthens its postcolonial critique, but also reveals how it deconstructs the grand narrative through the play of symbols.

Since the interpretation of a text is a process unfolding over time in dialogue at the interpersonal level, the process generates knowledge not only about the text but also about the world in which the author and his readers are living. Through the white narrator’s story about his missionary ancestor, the reader not only gains an insight into such a “journey of faith” into the Australian frontier and deepens his or her own understanding of the spirituality and materiality of Victorian societies, but also the knowledge of the world in which the author lives, knowledge of the intellectual consensus that led to the narrative “positioning” of the Aboriginal historical accounts, that is, the white narrator does not “take over” Aboriginal stories or make them directly his own, but rather returns the right of storytelling to Aboriginal Australians. In doing so, Carey expressed his rejection of the crude political call to “put the controversy aside” before the Bicentenary. Against the overwhelming propaganda of the “celebration of the nation”, he demonstrated his political and cultural positions: although the celebrations were about community and unity, this cannot be achieved by ignoring the voice of the dissenters, suppressing the expression of their real needs and interfering in their affairs under the pretext of “for the common good”; the authorities can never open a real dialogue in this way, because this attitude is not based on the value of true pluralism, but “is nothing other than a mode of colonialism of the paternalistic variety, and therefore itself a form of intolerance” (Lombard and Marais 2013: 64). Carey makes it clear that true connectivity should come from the self-motivated and proactive actions of everyone involved, not from top-down mandates or coercion. In this sense, the novel unwittingly echoes the voice of thousands of Aboriginal Australians and their supporters who took part in the grand protest march on 26 January 1988.

Oscar and Lucinda deconstructs the official narrative of Australia’s Bicentenary in 1988 by depicting the glass church’s dystopian transportation and fragmentation. The novel places colonial symbols, such as the “civilized” nature of glass and the religious authority of the church, within the Aboriginal symbolic domain of the river. This reveals the violent nature of colonial history through the inevitable sinking of the church. The transition from transparent to crumbled glass church perfectly symbolizes the collapse of colonial discourse–just as the Bicentenary celebrations attempted to gloss over history with symbols of “progress” and “reconciliation”, Carey uses historical fiction to proclaim that the legitimacy of the colonial project is fragile and will ultimately fall apart in the memory of the land’s past.

Three decades after the publication of Oscar and Lucinda, Brisbane-based indigenous writer Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip establishes an intriguing semiotic connection with the bicentennial novel. While their postcolonial narrative strategies differ – the latter not merely exposing the vulnerability of colonial symbols, but transforming them into weapons of resistance – the two works demonstrate the continuity of colonial trauma and the evolution of deconstructive strategies through similar symbolic vectors (such as glass, churches and rivers). This proves that Carey’s critique of colonial symbols, proposed thirty years ago, is still relevant in the contemporary world.