Resisting Biopolitics through “Diaphanous Wonder”: Richard Flanagan's Gould's Book of Fish (2003)

In Gould's Book of Fish (2003), author Richard Flanagan manages to invent a format in which
content and style account for historical events on Sarah Island, Tasmania in the 1820s, yet he does
so in a manner that is not in the least objective, disinterested or fact-orientated. The perspective of
Gould's Book of Fish's (Flanagan, 2003) first-person narrator is highly subjective, usually unreliable
and always less than truthful. Flanagan (2003) thereby shows that literature can provide a form of
knowledge that differs from historical truth, but without being its dialectical opposite. Literature
can construct a non-referential narrative space in which experiences unfold that hardly
unimaginable. Literature can show the urge and desire to understand historical events that are
terrible to relate to. It can invent a story that can account for the consequences of a violent colonial
system. Yet, above all, the novel stresses a desire to render stories of unspeakable horrors through
what can be call the “becoming-fish” of its first-person narrator. This desire expresses a hyperbolic
love of each and everyone, one which extends so far as to even include all the other wonders of this
world in its account too. By depicting convicts and natives as loving and lovable persons, author
Richard Flanagan (2003) refrains from reducing them to the colonial conditions in which they were
caught up. He thereby offers a point of view that differs from Giorgio Agamben's (1998) highly
influential account of “bare life.” I will take this perspective, in which life and its conditions cannot
be lumped together, as a point of departure from which to criticise Agamben's (1998)
transhistorical and transnational account of biopolitical determinations of life.