5 - The Politics of the Bestseller: The Slap and Barracuda

Summary

Towards the end of Barracuda, Tsiolkas's troubled protagonist, Danny Kelly, finds a dog-eared copy of David Copperfield. He has already read the book, but he opens it nevertheless and rereads the opening lines, which have always struck him with a “visceral force”: “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” The sentence forces him to reflect on his own disgrace. He continues to read, but nothing other than the quandary of this opening sentence seems to stay with him: “He couldn't think how anyone but himself could be the hero of his own life, but he knew that he wasn't a hero.” Later (years later in the story but a mere forty-odd pages as we read the novel), Danny returns to Dickens. After an angry but cathartic confrontation with his working-class father, Danny realizes that his father “was a good man”: “It struck him with the force of revelation, exultation, light flooding through him. His father was a good man. His father was the hero of his own life” (459). These moments are, thematically speaking, at the center of the novel. They also orient Barracuda to a fairly conventional sense of character development. This is a Bildungsroman in the tradition of David Copperfield or Great Expectations, yet it also takes a metafictional approach to the genre. For Barracuda to emerge as a Bildungsroman, Danny has to learn to reconstruct the ruins of his own life into a narrative that can take him beyond the anger and alienation that has largely defined him. This also means that he has to develop a passion for reading, for the pleasures of language and for the sort of temporality that narrative can provide. From this perspective, Barracuda is, first and foremost, a novel about the medium of literature and its profoundly restorative function. In chapter 1 I suggested that Tsiolkas's first novel, Loaded, rejected the form of the Bildungsroman and the vision of cultural education as a mode of social integration that it implies.