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Article published In: English Text Construction
Vol. 8:2 (2015) ► pp.159–176

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Saying the unsayable

Imagining reconciliation in Gail Jones’s Sorry

Published online: 3 December 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/etc.8.2.01bel
In her novel Sorry (2007), Australian novelist and essayist Gail Jones engages in a reflection on the ethics of reconciliation. Written in response to her wish to acknowledge the debt to the Stolen Generations, Sorry offers new possibilities of ethical mourning, allowing the dead to return and the voiceless to speak. This article explores the ways in which Jones not only fashions a narrative that bypasses the unsayable dimension of Australia’s history and the representational difficulties inherent in trauma but also fosters the empathetic imagination through a metadiscursive discussion of the act of reading. Self-referentiality and self-reflexivity are also examined, as they allow Jones to draw attention to her novel’s writerly elaborations and offer an alternative to standard reconciliation practices.
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2016. The year’s work in stylistics 2015. Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 25:4 ► pp. 376 ff. DOI logo

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