Garbage, Gothic, Gyre: Glimpsing the Planetary on Carpentaria’s “Floating Island of Rubbish”

Abstract

The fugitive castaway in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria discovers that, in the wake of a “catastrophic” cyclone, he has been “dumped onto an extraordinary floating island of rubbish”. Where previous readings of the rubbish island have interpreted this figure as an allegory of the nation, the globe, or even the novel itself, this paper ventures to ask: what could it mean to read the rubbish island as an encounter with planetary alterity? Attending to the gothic tropes that wash up in the novel’s cyclone sequence, I explore the connections between waste and the abject, cast adrift and transformed by the sea. Along with the contents of the rubbish island, equally as significant are the agentive watery forces that create this extraordinary setting; the swirling movement of the gyre offers another way to think about the novel’s form and its expansive locality. In the flow of the Gulf’s waters, Carpentaria glimpses itself as a vessel upon which readers can venture towards imagining this strange home: the planet.