Joseph Furphy has been termed the closest thing to an Australian Herman Melville and Such is Life has been called the Aussie Moby-Dick. This is not to be interpreted literally: Such is Life contains not monomaniacal ship captain in pursuit of a white whale. The comparison is literary in the sense that just as Herman Melville is not first and foremost considered a “storyteller” neither is Furphy. Both man approached the task of novel writing from a more expansive conceptual point of view which allows for extensive digressions, asides, the commingling of non-fiction and fiction, myth, allusion and a general understanding that the novel is a unique literary form in the sense that there really are, quite literally, no rules.
A short story, by definition, is limited in terms of length. Drama must always adhere to the rules of what can effective be represented visually—even if the performance is conducted entirely darkness. Poetry, of course, is the exact opposite of the novel in that it is a literary form that is actually defined by its rules. What the novel presents authors—especially the novel as it had evolved by the time Melville and Furphy came along when earlier conventions such as dressing it up as being based on a true story and the epistolary structure had been loosened or abandoned—is absolute freedom of form to match each idiosyncratic idea of content. Respective to both their homelands, Melville and Furphy pushed the limits of what a novel “meant” with their most famous works.
So when one hears the comparison between Moby-Dick and Such is Life, one must forget about whales and focus on its aspects of creation. For instance, opening lines. Melville likely had no idea he was crafting what would become one of the most famous opening lines in fiction when he penned the words “Call me Ishmael.” What makes the fact that it has become iconic is the pure simplicity of it. It is not wordplay or an author showing off his flair for constructing language. The same holds true of the opening line of Such is Life. Although not nearly as famous and instantly recognizable as the reader’s introduction into the world of New England commerce and whaling through the eyes of a wandering narrator, Furphy’s stripped-down simplicity in his opening line has the same effect: “Unemployed at last!”
Furphy does Melville one better, however. For central to the significance of this opening line that introduces readers to the economics of the Australian bush through the eyes of a wandering narrator is what immediately follows those three words: “…”
Ironically for a book which actually is notable for the extended and extensive passages in which the writer immodestly demonstrates his flair for constructing language is that one of those three dots (ellipsis) are invested with such weighty meaning. They are the equivalent of a dramatist inserting a stage direction like “[Pause…pregnant with unspoken meaning].” The narrator’s seemingly glorious exclamation of an overpowering sense of joy at finally finding himself without a job immediately comes under social scrutiny with the insertion of those dots.
The judicious insertion of that ellipsis will be followed throughout the book by a variety of other uses of techniques which would initially result in the prime candidate for The Great Australian Novel clocking in at more than a thousand pages. Severe editing brought that length down to a more manageable size for publication. Furphy and Such a Life would almost inevitably, it seems, wind up finding more common ground to share with Melville and Moby-Dick. Sales were disappointing for both novels initially which nearly led to both becoming completely forgotten until they were rediscovered decades later in a reappraisal which situated both as one of the defining works of their respective countries as well as novels which revolutionized the form itself.
