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  PETER GOLDSWORTHY was born in South Australia in 1951. He grew up in various country towns, finishing school in Darwin.

  Goldsworthy graduated in medicine from the University of Adelaide in 1974, then worked for many years in alcohol and drug rehabilitation. He began writing poetry, and has since the late 1970s divided his time between writing and general practice.

  His story collection Archipelagoes was published in 1982 and, after two more volumes of stories, Goldsworthy’s first novel appeared in 1989. Maestro was critically acclaimed and became a bestseller; in 2003 the Australian Society of Authors named it one of the top forty Australian books of all time. Goldsworthy followed the novel with Honk if You Are Jesus and the ambitious, controversial Wish.

  He has won major literary awards in poetry, short story, opera and, most recently, theatre. His novel Three Dog Night won the FAW Christina Stead Award. Goldsworthy’s novels have sold more than 400,000 copies in Australia, and along with his poetry have been translated into many languages. Five of his works have been adapted for the stage.

  Peter Goldsworthy lives in Adelaide. Among his recent works are His Stupid Boyhood, a comic memoir, and the libretto for The Ringtone Cycle, a cabaret quintet.

  JAMES BRADLEY is the author of three novels: Wrack, The Deep Field and The Resurrectionist, an international bestseller. He has also written a book of poetry, Paper Nautilus, and edited the anthologies Blur and The Penguin Book of the Ocean. His reviews and articles appear regularly in a range of Australian and international publications, and he was awarded the 2012 Pascall Prize for Criticism. James lives in Sydney.

  ALSO BY PETER GOLDSWORTHY

  Fiction

  Archipelagoes

  Zooing

  Bleak Rooms

  Maestro

  Honk if You Are Jesus

  Little Deaths

  Keep it Simple, Stupid

  Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam

  Three Dog Night

  The List of All Answers

  Everything I Knew

  Gravel

  Non-fiction

  Navel Gazing

  His Stupid Boyhood

  textclassics.com.au

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Peter Goldsworthy 1995

  Introduction copyright © James Bradley 2013

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by Angus & Robertson 1995

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2013

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters

  Primary print ISBN: 9781922147035

  Ebook ISBN: 9781922148117

  Author: Goldsworthy, Peter, 1951-, author.

  Title: Wish / by Peter Goldsworthy; introduced by James Bradley.

  Series: Text classics.

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Animal Form

  by James Bradley

  Wish

  IT is difficult not to wonder how Peter Goldsworthy’s publishers reacted when he delivered the manuscript that would appear in 1995 as the novel Wish. Already famous for his debut, Maestro (1989), Goldsworthy had established a reputation as one of the most clear-eyed observers of Australian middle-class life, yet here was a book that seemed—at least at first blush—more like science fiction than anything else.

  That Goldsworthy was not entirely comfortable with narrow conceptions of his writing should have been clear from his second novel, Honk If You Are Jesus (1992), a bleakly acerbic riff on cloning technology that imagined the creation of a new Christ from traces of genetic material retrieved from holy relics. If Honk occasionally seemed like the work of a writer determined to resist the expectations of his readership, though, Wish was something else altogether: a fully realised exploration of love, language and the boundaries of personhood that just happened to centre upon the relationship between a human sign-language teacher and a biologically engineered gorilla.

  At first blush it is a subject that is likely to prove challenging to many readers. Yet Wish goes further, not by escalating the science-fictional elements of its plot but by asking its readers to engage with the existence of systems of meaning and ways of being much closer to home, in the form of Sign language.

  The reader’s guide to this second—and in some ways more tantalising—world of meaning is the novel’s narrator, John James. Better known by his Sign name, J.J., he is an anomaly: born to deaf parents, he learned to sign before he could speak, and even in his thirties is more at home in Sign and with the deaf than in speech and the company of the hearing.

  Initially J.J. seems an unlikely candidate for the experiment he becomes involved in as the novel progresses. Recently returned to his native Adelaide, unemployed and still reeling from a bruising divorce, he is adrift, living with his parents on the seafront in Glenelg, his evenings spent watching television or—in a playful reference to the aquatic ape theories of Max Westenhöfer and Alister Hardy—floating, clad in wetsuit and flippers, in the silent water outside his parents’ home. Then J.J. is hired by the zoologist and animal liberationist Clive Kinnear and his wife, the poet and veterinarian Stella Todd, to help teach Sign to Eliza—or, to use the sign name she soon adopts, Wish—a gorilla liberated from a laboratory in Melbourne by colleagues in the animal-rights underground.

  Goldsworthy’s fiction has explored the charged relationship between teacher and pupil several times, most notably in his 2008 novel, Everything I Knew, about a young boy’s obsession with his teacher, and the short tale ‘The Nun’s Story’, in which a boy’s erotic feelings for his teacher collide with physical reality. These later excursions into this highly contested territory suggest a desire to tease out the complexities of such relationships, illustrating not just the ways in which both parties are often complicit in transgressing conventions, but the ways in which these transgressions can reverberate through both lives in unexpected and sometimes tragic ways.

  These issues are present in Wish as well, but for the most part they are subordinated to a more complex set of questions about our increasingly unstable definitions of personhood and their ethical implications. Indeed, even as we are prompted to look past the more unsettling aspects of Wish and J.J.’s relationship we are being asked to grapple with deeper questions about Wish and her ethical status, questions that are made the more disturbing by the way her nature seems to elide so many of the categories we use to frame such discussions.

  In this respect the novel has proven surprisingly prescient, its desire to explore the manner in which advances in genetic engineering and scientific understanding are forcing us to re-evaluate our assumptions about the boundaries between animal and human anticipating not just the burgeoning field of animal studies and the intensifying debates around the ethical status of great apes, but also books such as J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello and Sara Gruen’s Ape House, and big-budget Hollywood movies such as Splice and Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

  The genius of Wish lies not in its recognition that these dilemmas exist but in its deft marriage of them to the conflicts of character at the heart of the novel. Like much of Goldsworthy’s work, Wish manages the not-inconsiderable trick of being both deeply felt and slyly aware of the contradictions and absurdities o
f the characters it portrays, allowing it to move effortlessly between comedy and compassion.

  This lightness of touch also allows the novel to sidestep the temptation to moralise about many of the most unsettling questions surrounding the treatment of animals. Although J.J. is sufficiently appalled by Clive’s descriptions of factory farms and intelligent pigs to give up bacon, these horrors are kept largely offstage, intellectual abstractions discussed and responded to but never experienced or described directly.

  The book internalises and reproduces the rhetorical strategy J.J. ascribes to Clive, his ‘debating trick’ of using a low voice and matter-of-fact descriptions as a means of ‘having cake and eating it, his cool words only fuelling the reader’s emotional heat’. At one level this is deliberate: if nothing else the average reader’s tolerance for the visceral and confronting reality of the treatment of animals in factory farms and elsewhere is likely to be limited. But it also underlines the fact that Wish is as much about language as ethics.

  Goldsworthy’s poetry has shown he is fascinated by language, and its role in shaping thought and meaning. But in Wish this is allied to a larger investigation of the ways in which language shapes our identities. This is most obvious in the novel’s treatment of Sign, and in particular its insistence that we engage with this often-neglected language, both through J.J.’s descriptions and through the many diagrams included in the text. At first glance these diagrams may seem little more than a gimmick. But they are intrinsic to the novel’s design, demanding the reader step out of the realm of verbal language and engage with Sign as a physical, gestural system.

  For those not fluent in Sign this encounter is likely to be revelatory and chastening. While it is difficult not to be amazed that a world of meaning so different from the one we inhabit lies close at hand, it is equally difficult not to be aware of how this amazement underlines mainstream society’s casual marginalising of the deaf and their culture—and how our ignorance of deaf culture points to a failure to comprehend the possibility of other, quite different ways of being that are all around us. For even as we strive to teach dolphins and birds to speak and apes to sign, our solipsism blinds us to the possibility that these creatures may exist in richly complex worlds of meaning quite unlike our own.

  This recognition is the flipside of Wittgenstein’s observation that once you teach a lion to speak it is no longer a lion. And it is also part of a larger ambivalence about language that pervades the book as a whole. Language, the novel suggests, is both liberating and confining, a creation capable not only of communicating but of isolating.

  This is most obviously true in the case of J.J. and Wish, each caught between worlds by the ways in which their respective encounters with language have shaped them. But it is also evident in J.J.’s relationship with his parents, the way his ability to speak separates him from the two of them, and indeed the way in which their shared disability binds them together, ‘two small, neat people in a small, neat house, most comfortable, finally, just with each other’. And—albeit in rather different form—in the novel’s awareness of the tension between language and life, and the profane and the profound. Certainly it’s no accident that Wish’s first symbolic utterance is a scatological insult.

  Nor is it an accident that Wish is both Goldsworthy’s most vernacular novel, and the novel in which his fascination with language and its possibilities is most intrusive. The fluid opening page swiftly conjures the instrumental poetry of Sign: ‘The fist, thumbs up, is the Good Hand, shaper of good things. The Good Hand unfolding and tapping at the heart: Kindness. The Good Hand touching the brow: Knowledge…The observance of good is also in the exception. The Good Hand jerked over the shoulder: Fuck off.’ Goldsworthy’s prose is economical and powerful. Yet J.J.’s narration often evinces a curiously anxious, almost needy relationship with language: the noise of pipes is ‘water-music’; J.J. in the ocean is ‘a buoyant cork at the whim of the sea’; adjectives and similes abound, reminding us of the difficulty of pinning meaning down, and of the complexity contained in every description.

  In the two decades since Wish Peter Goldsworthy has published three novels and several collections of short stories, as well as libretti and poetry, each of which has extended his considerable talents in often surprising directions. Yet in many ways Wish remains his greatest achievement, and the most eloquent distillation of his many interests. Brave, brilliant, as intellectually challenging as it is playful, it is testament to a restless and unpredictable imagination.

  BOOK

  ONE

  1

  I begin with a sign, not with words. The fist, thumbs up, is the Good Hand, shaper of good things. The Good Hand unfolding and tapping at the heart: Kindness. The Good Hand touching the brow: Knowledge. The fist’s protuberant thumb tilted against the lips: Beer!

  The observance of good is also in the exception. The Good Hand jerked over the shoulder: Fuck off.

  First and foremost, the Good Hand is the shape of Greetings, of Hi, Hello, Good-to-see-you—the shape of welcome.

  Welcome to my world, and to my language.

  English is my second language. Sign was—is—my first. I still think in Sign, I dream in Sign. I sign in my sleep…

  My ex-wife’s favourite joke: she woke every morning black and blue all over. Bruised by Sign-language. It was a joke that soured towards the end; became, imperceptibly, a complaint, and, finally, grounds.

  I’m not deaf, but I’ve always felt more at home in Sign. Both my parents are deaf. Deaf as posts. Deaf as adders, deaf as beetles. And proud as peacocks, Deaf Pride long before there was a word, or a sign, for it. I learnt to speak with my hands from birth; there was no other way of reaching my parents. The muttering of English—unnatural and unfeeling it seemed to me at first—arrived later, out of the mouths of others. The graft took slowly; even now I can say things with my hands that I could never squeeze into words.

  But how to write of those things here? How to pin a pair of fluttering hands—the wings of a butterfly, a bird—to a flat page?

  A year ago, almost to the day, I stood with my mother on the steps of the Deaf Institute on East Terrace. I had been away five years, lost, it now seems to me, in the foreign world of speech, in a marriage built on the shifting sand of spoken words. It was mid-summer, mid-morning—mid-life. Divorced and unemployed, I faced a new year empty of structure and responsibility, or the comforting routines of family life. Powerful feelings flooded through me as I gazed up at the big brick jail of the Institute, home-away-from-home for much of my childhood and a benevolent employer for the first years of my working life. I reached out a hand; my mother’s hand was waiting, reading my body-language, as always, almost before it was uttered. Arm in arm we climbed the steps, a small white-haired woman, still agile in her sixties, and her more cumbersome middle-aged son. I pushed through the door, overcome by trepidation and self-doubt. And here, as I scribble these words, I touch the heart of my problem: how, above all, to translate feelings, so easily and naturally expressed in the dance of Sign, so much a part of the actual vocabulary of Sign, into words?

  It’s tempting to sketch a single hand-shape in the top corner of each page, then flip them rapidly through, like the cartoon frames I once scribbled in the dog-ears of schoolbooks and riffled into jerky animation.

  But to tell my story in a flicker of page-corners would take forever. Even then, I’d be missing half the sense, and certainly all the passion, the ballet of eye and brow, mouth and tongue, the little shrugs and body-mimes, the complete performance.

  Which leaves me stuck in the mud of words. I tend to speak English in much the same manner that I use Sign, but what is fluent in one is merely bad grammar in the other. My English lapses into the odd word orders and tenses of Sign; it stutters with qualifications, sub-clauses, modifications. That’s a person I don’t know who it is. I like you—not. This book I will finish giving you. In Sign any hand-shape is up for grabs, the smallest shift in direction or orientation of the hands can imbu
e flavour and nuance. My hands often move, involuntarily, as I speak, like the hands of an accompanist adding resonance to a singing voice. My written English is an improvement on my spoken—there is time to think, and fix—but even as my pen moves my free hand often twitches, qualifying the words as I set them down or expressing their sense more eloquently.

  So perhaps the occasional cartoon sketch is better than nothing. This sign, for instance, which my mother shaped as I pushed open the glass doors of the Institute, and she released my hand and raised hers into the Signing Space between us.

  The Wish Hand, fingers crossed: a single hand-shape which represents my state of mind that day far better than a thousand words.

  2

  ‘Welcome back,’ Jeremy Hinkley said, in English.

  He hadn’t changed. He sat with his feet on a wide teak desk—a teak plateau—smiling, smug, full of himself. His hands, clasped behind his head, didn’t move.

  I signed an exaggerated thank you, a flowery two-handed salaam, but the sarcasm went over his head.

  ‘How long has it been, J.J.?’ he asked. ‘Four years? Five?’

  I held up the Spread Hand—five fingers, Sign-Esperanto—but still couldn’t entice him to abandon his native tongue for mine.

  ‘Time flies,’ he said, a phrase that cries out for the greater beauty of Sign.

  ‘Time is a bird,’ I agreed: right forefinger tapping left wrist, both hands spreading and soaring like wings.

  Morning sunlight poured through the big bay windows behind him, dazzling me. I felt spotlit, under scrutiny. I fumbled a pair of dark glasses from my coat pocket and slipped them on.

  He smiled, indulgently: ‘You might notice a few changes about the place, J.J.’

  I raised my eyebrows, waiting. He leant back, wallowing in his armchair, savouring the sweetness of the moment: his former teacher sitting in his office, cap in hand. Soon he would offer me my old job; first I was required to sit through a speech.