Language and Naming Theme Analysis

In Fly Away Peter, a novel about finding meaning in the face of death and war, language imposes a sense of order upon an otherwise chaotic world. Unfortunately, though, it’s not always possible to use words to make sense of life, which is often full of incomprehensible forms of horror and tragedy. For instance, when his brother falls into the blades of a grain harvester, the novel’s protagonist Jim Saddler is unable to express what has happened. No words, it seems, are adequate to describe his brother’s gruesome death. This is not to say that language completely fails when it comes to human expression, however. Later in his life, Jim becomes obsessed with bird names, recording them in a comprehensive list with artistic handwriting that lends a sense of importance to the task. Ashley Crowther, the owner of the land on which Jim birdwatches, is deeply impressed by Jim’s ability to name these birds, feeling as if beauty lurks in his friend’s effort to articulate what he sees. Indeed, Jim proves that naming something is a way of making up for all the things language fails to capture. In this way, Malouf suggests that the mere attempt to order one’s world using words is noble, an endeavor worth undertaking even if language is limited and thus bound to fail.

Jim first confronts the shortcomings of language when he’s fifteen. Riding on the bumper of a grain harvester, his younger brother falls backwards into the machine’s quick blades: “Jim had run a half mile through the swath he had cut in the standing grain with the image in his head of the child caught there among the smashed stalks and bloodied ears of wheat, and been unable when he arrived at the McLaren’s door to get the image, it so filled him, into words.” In perhaps the most important moment of his young life, Jim can’t “get the image” of his mangled brother “into words.” Simply put, he can’t express what has just happened. This surely causes him to doubt the efficacy of linguistic communication. Malouf notes that “there were no words for [the accident], then or ever, and the ones that came said nothing of the sound the metal had made striking the child’s skull, or the shocking whiteness he had seen of stripped bone, and would never be fitted in any language to the inhuman shriek […] of the boy’s first cry.” In this passage, Malouf insinuates that there are certain experiences that simply can’t be represented linguistically. The “sound the metal” blades make against Jim’s brother is simply too elemental and ghastly to be recreated in words, and the “inhuman shriek” that the boy lets out is too strange and incomprehensible to describe. As a result, these experiences stay with Jim as memories that refuse expression.

Having watched his brother die in such a (literally) unspeakable way is perhaps what prompts Jim to describe and catalog the natural world. Unable to articulate horror, Jim decides to name things of beauty instead. He does this by pointing out birds to Ashley, who never tires of his friend’s knowledge. When Jim tells him that the “Dollar bird” has “come down from the Moluccas,” Ashley is delighted. “When [Jim] named the bird, and again when he named the island, he made them sound, Ashley thought, extraordinary,” Malouf writes. He continues, “[Jim] endowed them with some romantic quality that was really in himself. An odd interest revealed itself, the fire of an individual passion.” Although Jim has, since childhood, carried around the atrocity of his brother’s death—about which he has never been able to speak—he also has a “romantic quality in himself,” one that becomes apparent when he names the Dollar bird. With the “fire of an individual passion,” he essentially makes up for his failure to articulate the circumstances of his brother’s death, focusing not on this shortcoming but on his ability to summon beauty and impose a sense of order upon the natural world, which is brimming with wildlife waiting to be identified and named.

Language can call forth a sense of beauty and wonder, but this isn’t all it evokes. When Jim writes down the names of the birds he sees on Ashley’s land—working to create a comprehensive record of the wildlife in this “sanctuary”—he feels as if he’s bringing them to life. “This sort of writing was serious,” Malouf asserts, “It was giving the creature, through its name, a permanent place in the world, as Miss Harcourt did through pictures.” Using only words, Jim gives these creatures a “place in the world,” one that feels “permanent.” Language, then, can make something that might otherwise seem fleeting real and tangible. These names, Malouf explains, contain both “the real bird” that Jim has “sighted” and “the species” to which that bird belongs. As a result, the creature’s existence comes to feel solid, since Jim is able to evoke not only its present existence but also its history. Unlike his brother’s death, which feels so unfathomable and thus unspeakable, Jim can use language to describe these birds. And although this may not make up for the incommunicable horror of his brother’s death, it at least proves that some things can find representation in language. This kind of expression, Malouf indicates, is worth pursuing because it makes a “permanent place” for beauty in a world that is otherwise full of chaotic horrors that escape language.