Aesthetic Surrender, Hanya Yanagihara and Frances O’Connor

by Adrian D’Ambra

I’ve really only just begun wading into Hanya Yanagihara’s spiral-shaped constellation of a novel, A Little Life (Picador, 2015), and I’ve come across this most perfect of paragraphs: “No one was there, he realized. The room was his. He felt the creature inside him – which he pictured as slight and raggedy and lemur-like, quick-reflexed and ready to sprint, its dark wet eyes forever scanning the landscape for future dangers – relax and sag to the ground. It was at these moments that he found college most enjoyable: he was in a warm room, and the next day he would have three meals and eat as much as he wanted, and in between he would go to classes, and no one would try to hurt him or make him do anything he didn’t want to do. Somewhere nearby were his roommates – his friends – and he had survived another day without divulging any of his secrets, and placed another day between the person he once was and the person he was now. It seemed, always, an accomplishment worthy of sleep, and so he did, closing his eyes and readying himself for another day in the world.” (p. 99)

If you don’t believe me – and I don’t (please forgive me) see any reason why you shouldn’t! – try reading it aloud, weighing and measuring it for its rhythmic balance, its simultaneous counterbalance of EITHER this OR that, it’s capacity for revelation and withholding. Alongside the careful balancing of past and present, person and creature, it’s the circumspection of the content that I value so much. This is a paragraph about a fictional character named Jude St. Francis. As Yanagihara discloses a little something of his survival narrative in this paragraph, I find myself responding as though Jude is a living entity in front of me, a friend, an acquaintance, someone I’d like to get to know better: I want so much to know so much more about his background, his suffering, and yet I find myself simultaneously respecting his privacy, his right to silence or reveal his story as he sees fit. The accomplishment of miracles – food, shelter, school, sleep, friendship, especially friendship – is more than enough for one miraculous paragraph to share with us…

This is the surrender that you look for sometimes in your aesthetic appreciation of art, suspending momentarily not only your capacity for disbelief but your propensity to critical analysis. I found myself thinking about this the other night as I walked away from Frances O’Connor’s 2022 film Emily, an imaginative reconstruction of the life of Emily Brontë. Emma Mackey’s performance in the title role was emotionally overwhelming. In fact, it was just as vertiginous as that first experience of total immersion in one of the Brontë novels, the wrist slashing on the broken window pane, the girls freezing and dying of typhoid fever in their school dormitory, those dangerous encounters with Heathcliff or Rochester. These moments in art – the dizzying performance, the ecstatic prose, the visual beauty of Emily, the poise and counterpoise of Yanagihara’s paragraph – what these moments require of us is aesthetic surrender.

An Afterthought:

MATERIALIST: Should art facilitate the critical analysis of society?

AESTHETE: Yes, it should.

MATERIALIST: Should art educate the masses, raising their awareness of the world around them and their consciousness within it?

AESTHETE: Yes, why not?

MATERIALIST: Good, we’re in agreement then!

AESTHETE: Not quite total agreement.

MATERIALIST: Why not?

AESTHETE: Because you didn’t ask me the next question!

MATERIALIST: I don’t have a next question.

AESTHETE: But I do…

MATERIALIST: And what is it?

AESTHETE: Should art stimulate awe and wonder in the viewer?

MATERIALIST: That’s just bourgeois claptrap, the illusions of individualism. In fact, even in aesthetic terms, I’m sure Socrates put that one to bed in Plato’s Republic.

AESTHETE: Desire, love, passion? Hubris, anger, hurt, grief?

MATERIALIST: But consciousness and education count for so much more.

AESTHETE: Solidarity in the face of human experience and suffering – do you educate for that, is your mechanistic action-reaction, thesis-antithesis-synthesis enough to stimulate that solidarity? More importantly from the point of view of the artist and the viewer, why should you assume that there is only one way of stimulating it?

The Map’s Folded Away; Farewell Robert Adamson

by Adrian D’Ambra

Robert Adamson – “But since this news that I’ve got four months to live, I just said, that’s interesting. I can have a great four months. I can get my last book finished and be with Spin (a rescued bowerbird, “my soul’s friend”) and Juno and on the river. I was more worried about Juno than dying.”

“I have no one to blame. If this cancer (liver) came from the time I was drinking too much, that’s what happens. If it came from when I was taking drugs, or if I just wore myself out, it’s no one’s fault.  The doctors did their best. It’s God and nature – that fits in with Spinoza.”

“A couple of times I nearly died. I was always worried about things I hadn’t done. But now I can see even if I lived another 20 years, there’s not a huge lot more.”

On Mondrian’s “search for order… he kept refining it and making it purer and clearer. That’s what I tried to do in my poetry, hone it back and back and back, just the essence.”

– from his final interview with Susan Wyndham. Robert Adamson spent almost all of his life – the best of it – living on the banks of the Hawkesbury River. Survived by Juno Gemes, he died on 16 December 2022.

A Bend in the Euphrateshttps://soundcloud.com/bloodaxe-books/adamson-euphrates

Unfolding in the Actual, A Letter to John Kinsella

by Adrian D’Ambra

Thank you, Dear Comrade, for your annual fraternal greetings

Your reminder of the climate escalation and the consistency

Of human barbarity. I had not known until this month

Dear John, that Robert Adamson had died the month before

In December 2022, all the drugs and booze and early crimes

The usual addictions, forgotten now, the body’s forgiveness – death

At last, fuck redemption, merely reprieve, and just the love of Juno

And the poetry, and the river, the Hawkesbury, flowing through the lives

Of Robert, his parents and his grandparents, the dinghy floating

In the photograph, and one-third of my triumvirate of contemporary

Australian poets – John Kinsella, Robert Adamson and Anthony Lawrence –

One-third now gone under, never to return, except in the reading

Of the poems, his 1989 The Clean Dark, in my opinion, one of the finest

Volumes of Australian poetry ever published, alongside your

Peripheral Light and Lawrence’s Skinned by Light, all three of you

So modern, so contemporary, and yet so connected to a set

Of natural and rural landscapes that I cannot discover

Sleepwalking through the nightmare comfort of suburban life

Which to update you on should be my more immediate purpose here…

As you can see, the Fragments continue their accretion, their erosion

Of my consciousness, their registry of my presence in the world

The first volume, 1-20, finished more than a year ago now, and knowing

That there will be sixty across three volumes altogether, ending

With an invitation to a funeral, not Joyce’s night-trauma comedic fun-for-all

But the real deal. After all, isn’t that the whole problem right there

Right now, right then, the value and the meaning of what comes

Between the beginning and the end?

Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies; good night, good night

Could anything be more fragmentary than this misshapen assembly

Unsure of its beginnings between the name and the memory, more certain

Of its end at the final dying fall as the empty wind empties the emptiness

Elaborating a grammar of diminishing returns and the hollow skull shudders

At unexpected sunlight, the world and the body moaning a cellular declension

Of disembodied sounds rustling through the foliage of olive trees

Picking up the sweet-astringent scent of za’atar, a breath of Palestine

Remembered, abandoned, yet retrieved in memory. How many villages

How many families and their homes, how many have death and displacement

Undone? But just that for the moment, the breath of oregano on the air…

The three of you have seen it – the value and the meaning – in a field of wheat

A bird’s flight, a fish splitting the stillness and the silence of the water’s surface

The darkness and the light of every day, and every other day forgotten

And remembered: a netted bream, an owl roosting, your Field Notes

For Harold Bloom. I’ve been reading the opening sequences of Adamson’s

New and selected, The Golden Bird from 2008, blown away again

By the sheer readability of the poetry, each poem a link in the great chain

Of being, each poem an addition from the life, an edition of innocence

And experience, observation and event, unfolding in the actual

Failure, in Fiction

by Adrian D’Ambra

“Failure, in fiction, is a promise. It’s a promise of action. A person is called a failure when the world has failed them: left them behind, made them invisible, forced them underground, frustrated them at every turn.”

– Daniel Soar, ‘Think of S&M’, London Review of Books (6 October 2022)

Go to ‘Art and Failure’

Am I an Idiot? Some Thoughts on Elif Batuman

by Adrian D’Ambra

I’ve been struggling to read Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, despite wanting to read it very much. So, let’s go back to the beginning. Why did I want to read this novel? Two reasons readily present themselves. Quite early in my career as a high school English teacher I taught for two years in Istanbul. During that time I was able to visit the Black Sea coast up close to the border with Georgia, Northern Cyprus, and travel as far east as Kurdish Diyarbakir and the border with Syria. The city itself, Istanbul, was at times, a difficult place to live, particularly in the winters. In the early 1990s the heating furnaces in the basements of most of the buildings were still fuelled by burning unprocessed lignite, so that the famous vistas across the Bosphorus disappeared beneath an impenetrable blanket of dirty, gritty smoke. But Istanbul was, for me, the City, an extraordinary palimpsest of civilisations bisected by one of the greatest waterways of the world and adorned with the flowers of Ottoman architecture, particularly the imperial mosques and minarets.

         Towards the ends of my two winters, Istanbul celebrated its annual international film festival. I remember very fondly now the frustration of attending a screening of one of my then favourite Australian films, Paul Cox’s Man of Flowers (1983). The volume was deliberately turned down very low, the subtitles were in French and a man with a microphone was delivering a live translation into Turkish. But the light was there on the screen, the southern light and the colour of the sky on a clear Melbourne day. The publication of an Orhan Pamuk novel was also celebrated in the bookshop windows up and down İstiklal Caddesi in a variety of Lego-like displays.

         Since then, I’ve read the novels of Orhan Pamuk as they’ve become available in English and I’ve recently been given one or two by Elif Shafak. I know that Batuman is not a Turkish resident, that she is the American child of Turkish migrants, but I was still interested in what she might be writing. I was also drawn to her by listening to a conversation that was recorded in Australia during one of our writers’ festivals in 2022. Reflecting on Selin and her young-adult female peers in The Idiot and its sequel, Either/Or, Batuman explained that these were intelligent, educated, even privileged young women whose lives were going fine until they embarked on their relationships with young men. These relationships brought tension and unease into their lives. I loved Batuman’s turn of phrase in the interview, her confidence and wit, and, as the father of three young adult daughters, how could I not be interested in Selin and her friends’ experiences?

         This next detail is an irrelevance because I never buy books based on what the blurbs say. However, on the paperback edition The Idiot is described as ‘masterfully funny’ and ‘frequently hilarious’. Whilst comic writing is not high on my list of literary preferences, I thought it might be possible to really enjoy reading this novel. I’m sorry, indeed, I’m embarrassed to say that I’m something like 350 pages in and real laughter has separated my lips precisely once. Selin is teaching English in a small Hungarian village on a summer exchange program. One of the local trainee English teachers is unimpressed with her pedagogy:

“This is your plan?” Rózsa asked afterward in a voice full of outrage. “Candies and games?”

         “That’s basically the American way.”

         “I think you are very…” She consulted her dictionary. “Inexperienced.”

         “We have different systems.”

         “Yes – I am serious, and you are not!” (357)

Batuman’s swipe at the American system of education which has produced her protagonist is genuinely ironically witty. Much earlier in the novel I had pretty much given up hope for that system myself as Selin and her fellow-students described their studies and their lecturers at Harvard. If this is what elite education looks like in the twenty-first century, I found myself thinking time and again, then America really is fucked.

         But what about the humour? Can someone who repeatedly reveals to us that she does not understand why people behave, speak, feel, think or write the way they do make us laugh? Can a character who appears to have almost no connection with her body, her gender, her sexuality, even – and I know this sounds incredibly cruel – no real connection with her own mind or emotions, can a character like this make us laugh? You bet they can. Think of all those stand-up comedians, those masters of self-deprecation who have had us rolling in the aisles at their expense. But, clearly, Batuman doesn’t want to sacrifice her protagonist in this way. Selin, I will be asserting a little later, is far too important a literary experiment or symbol to allow the reader to laugh at her in this manner. But seriously, her dialogue, her interior monologue, her affectless disconnection from just about everything, make of her – unfortunately – not just an idiot but a character who struggles to command our attention, let alone our sympathy. This is beyond naivety, beyond innocence. Selin appears to be an example of what a tram driver once described to me as ‘an educated idiot’. If it wasn’t for that moment in the shower in Hungary when she acknowledges sexual desire for the first time (349), I was beginning to wonder if she was some kind of an android dropped in from an Ishiguro novel, a Klara or a Kathy H who had accidentally migrated from one imaginative universe to another.

         Like someone bamboozled by a piece of modern art, I knew I needed backup: the didactic panel, the ideological statement. At this point I have a further confession to make. My Google search term was this: is there such a thing as a negative review of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot? Happily though, this led me to the discovery of her September 2010 essay in the London Review of Books called ‘Get a Real Degree’. Ostensibly a review of Mark McGurl’s study of the rise and impact of creative writing programs on American writing, Batuman uses the opportunity for a longform examination in which she establishes some markers in terms of her own views on the function and value of literature. Interestingly, the essay was also published midway between her writing of the first draft of The Idiot in 2001 and its eventual publication in 2018.

         Reading this essay, I was in the presence of a writer who not only had something to discuss, something to consider, something to say, I was reading something I truly wanted to read. Neither completely dismissive or utterly sceptical of the contribution of tertiary creative writing programs to the condition of contemporary American literature, she does find both the programs and the literature questionable. Batuman points out, for example, that the two primary exhortations of the programs – ‘write what you know’ and ‘show don’t tell’ – are actually contradictory. Batuman also  performs some incisive surgery on the claims to originality and newness inherent in so many of the tenets and practices of postmodernism, tracing them back not just to Henry James but to Don Quixote. Both Batuman and McGurl locate the emergence of the programs in the immediate post-war Cold War era, Batuman interpreting this in the context of the contest of ideas and values between the US and the Soviet Union. Batuman goes on to consider the kind of managerialist ideology underpinning the courses, their commodification of writing, of the novel and of the novelists graduating from them. Without challenging the value and importance of diversity, Batuman highlights the dialectical process which abandons the study of canonical works in favour of the new, especially if the new arises from a diversity of formerly marginalised voices. In her analysis, the new diversity becomes its own compulsory orthodoxy, ‘an unhappiness-entitlement contest’ through which outsiders become insiders whilst continuing to claim their outsider credentials.

         Batuman is so concerned about this commodification of writing that she draws a distinction between much of the writing now being published in the US and what she still bravely, aesthetically and dialectically describes as ‘literature’. The proliferation of ‘mediocre’ novels with ‘about three genuinely beautiful sentences… one convincing, well-observed character’ and ‘a story that you can’t bring yourself to care about’ comes down, as Batuman admits, to a matter of taste. However, her critique is clear: the creative writing programs have led to a significant increase in productivity, in quantity, not quality. Indeed, Batuman claims that ‘the real work of the novel (the juxtaposition of personal narrative with the facts of the world and the facts of literature) is taking place today largely in memoirs and essays.’ I cannot tell you how alive I felt as a reader and as a writer reading this essay.

         But did it help me understand and appreciate, will it help me enjoy The Idiot? Reading ‘Get a Real Degree’ makes me wonder if The Idiot, in particular Batuman’s disarming(?) / infuriating(?) characterisation of Selin, is a kind of literary experiment? A response, for instance, to the damaging impact of cultural theory on creative practice? Or, is it an attempt at literary reclamation of the mainstream from all those voices simultaneously challenging the mainstream and demanding admittance to it? Perhaps Selin is a kind of tabula rasa intended to get us looking at the world again without the obligatory demands of diversity and cultural theory? What would happen if you wrote about a person living in the world who knows she does not know how the world works, who knows she wants to know by learning through her own experience and – more importantly as it turns out – through her own observation? For more than three-quarters of the novel, Selin does not seem to be able to answer the simplest questions about herself: what does she want, what does she feel, what does she intend to do? Then, all of a sudden – significantly, I think, after the self- and sexual realisation of the shower scene – she can tell her most difficult Hungarian interlocutor, Rózsa: “Truth is okay… But civilization is based on lies.” (360-361) A bombshell dropped by a character from whom we can at the very least learn this: not knowing is no excuse for not observing, not thinking or not learning. What matters in the remaining seventy or so pages of the novel is Selin’s shift from self-abnegation to self-awareness, culminating in her realisation that a year’s study of linguistics and the philosophy and psychology of language has taught her nothing she wanted to know ‘about how language worked’ (423) and her decision to change her major. Cultural theory and postmodernism down, aesthetics and literature up.

         And by a curious diversion, something like three-quarters of my way through this curious river of a novel, I had learned to appreciate Selin’s company and Batuman’s style. Selin is a cypher through which we come to learn that the task of the artist is not to accumulate experience but to practise observation.

Go to ‘Selin Gets Laid!’

Less Than You Desire, More Than You Deserve: Ruben Östlund’s ‘Triangle of Sadness’ and Mark Mylod’s ‘The Menu’

by Adrian D’Ambra

The popular culture fetishisation of wealth and the wealthy has faced some welcome and long-overdue rebuttals in two recent films: Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness and Mark Mylod’s The Menu (both 2022). To some extent each of these films relies on a comic iteration of a theatre-of-cruelty, subjecting their rich and (in)famous characters to degrading humiliations, such as rolling them in their own vomit and sewage in the former and the arbitrary amputation of a wedding finger in the latter. But the viewer never loses sight of the broad comedic brush with which these stories are told. Humour both underlines and nourishes the social and political satire so that the image of an elderly woman picking up a live hand grenade or the authoritarian handclaps of an obsessively compulsive celebrity Chef evoke laughter and horror in equal measure. Especially when the Chef refuses to serve bread, the staple food of the poor and oppressed, to his handpicked clutch of wealthy diners.

         The social microcosms of these two films are worlds of monsters but within this similarity there also lie significant if subtle differences. In Triangle of Sadness all of the monsters are passengers upon an elite cruise – arms dealers, social media influencers, profiteers and oligarchs spawned by the collapse of state communism in Eastern Europe – in a word or two: capitalist entrepreneurs; one-percenters. Östlund’s depiction of class antagonism is further cemented by the boat’s crew whose responsibilities extend far beyond the essential cleaning, catering and engine maintenance. They must indulge every whim demanded by the passengers. At the beginning of the cruise, the upstairs, white collar crew members are specifically instructed to never say ‘No’ to a passenger’s request. In a brilliant parody of billionaire philanthropy, every crew member, including the invisible cleaners and engine room workers, is forced to swim in the sea because one of the passengers demands that they enjoy the same freedom and pleasure she has thus far taken for granted.

         Östlund’s hierarchical demarcation between classes is an essential precondition for his overt intention in the second half of Triangle of Sadness to disrupt and invert the social order. Following a catastrophically mishandled act of post-colonial revenge in the form of piracy, the elite survivors must submit themselves to the control of a new captain on their deserted island. Abigail (Dolly De Leon) is a woman, a foreign worker, a toilet cleaner and the only person on the island who knows how to fish and how to make fire. Her newfound power also entitles her to the privilege of demanding the compliance of the sexual partner of her choice, despite his current relationship status.

         Mylod’s handling of class is no less important to The Menu, but the demarcations are a little murkier, a little less dialectic. The reclusive celebrity Chef, Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes), would at first appear to be a member of the elite, someone whose esteem amongst the super-wealthy has elevated him to a similar status. Despite his humble and humiliating upbringing as a child migrant whose first kitchen work was flipping burgers, surely he is now on the same side as the diners, one of them, in this ghastly game of conspicuous and gratuitous consumption? But, no. In his attempts to uncover the identity of unexpected dinner guest Margot (the wonderful Anya Taylor-Joy), he explains to her that there are two types of people, the givers and the takers. The givers are all of those whose roles in life are to give service to the rich and powerful, including workers of all kinds: servants, staff and sex workers such as Margot. Following the analogy through, the vast majority of human beings (the 99%) survive by prostituting themselves to the wants, needs and demands of the takers who here are represented by embezzler bankers, business people and media tarts. In Chef Slowik’s dichotomy he is no less a wage slave who has prostituted his talent – indeed, his genius – to the tastebuds and wallets of those few who can afford to pay more than a thousand dollars for a meal, than the lowliest apprentice chef or call girl. Slowik’s release of Margot from the death pact he has concocted for his patrons and his culinary acolytes after preparing a perfect cheese burger and chips for her, is an act of solidarity strangely at odds with his act of mass murder, but it is also an act of sincere recognition and self-acknowledgement on his part, recognition of her as an innocent ‘giver’, the paid company and hostage of pathetic food fanatic Tyler (Nicholas Hoult).

The politics of class division and social stratification of consumption are addressed with similar eloquence to Chef Slowik’s earlier giver/taker dichotomy by his leading front-of-house dinner host, Elsa (Hong Chou), who tells one of the gangster-banker-diners: ‘You will eat les than you desire, and more than you deserve.’

Both the Chef in The Menu and the Captain (Woody Harrelson) in Triangle of Sadness are portrayed as monstrous characters with comic overtones. The Captain sequesters himself in his cabin, drinking himself into a stupor, while the Chef orchestrates every course and each turn of events towards the final catastrophe. Both characters are appalled by the people they must pander to and both loathe themselves for their complicity in the corrupt world of crony capitalism. Slowik’s expiation is achieved through his recognition and release of Margot, delivered with true pathos by Ralph Fiennes. The Captain achieves his in the word play, debating points and witty rebuttals exchanged with the shit merchant, Dimitry (Zlatko Buric).

Indeed, it was these intertextual moments in both of these films that I found most enjoyable. Firstly, Chef Slowik’s reverential quotation from Dr Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail: ‘We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.’ Secondly, the hilarious trading not in insults but in quotations between the Captain’s Marx, Lenin and Chomsky and Dimitry’s Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. At last, some laughter as the ship and the shit both go down, laughter at the expense of the captains of industry, the princes of productivity and the purveyors of propaganda who have steered us towards the disasters we are now encountering.