Those who seek a home . . . Hannah Kent and Heather Rose

Once again, unexpected affirmations of literary writing as art. This first one from an autobiographical piece called ‘The Journey Home’ by Hannah Kent, published in The Age, Spectrum, Saturday January 13: ‘Art always admits those who seek a home in it.’

http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/the-journey-home-20180103-h0cu1x.html

And this second one from an interview called ‘The Writer is Present’ with Heather Rose in ISLAND 151, 2017: ‘I love restraint in writing. But I also love emotion in writing. I think that to be a writer is to be a reader, and I have to constantly keep reading, reading, reading. . . . All you ever want as a writer is to find your readers. It’s very difficult in Australia because we have such a small readership for writers, especially for literary fiction – we are the jazz musicians of the publishing world. . . . Being a writer has been a profound opportunity to observe humanity, and it continues to fascinate me and to be the most difficult thing I do by far. But it’s the thing that I love. Writing a novel is the art of endurance. It’s definitely the marathon form of art. And that in itself is very good for me. It’s made me very still. It has carved me into a much more reclusive person too, I think. And I like that.’

https://islandmag.com/

If you’re not sure why I find these observations so affirming and promising, please read my recent post on Michelle de Kretser’s The Life to Come. The worm is turning. The theoretical ideology of relativism is wearing thin and the mantra ‘Show don’t tell’ has had its day. Once more, literature is allowed to be a form of art that inspires aesthetic pleasure and appreciation.

by Adrian D’Ambra

Go to ‘Guardian Angels’

The Self as a Mirror to the Biosphere – Writing Poetry with John Kinsella

by Adrian D’Ambra

‘How does activist poetry cope with ambiguity?

‘John Kinsella is one of the small number of poets who manage convincingly to combine a critical and activist perspective with the ambiguity and multiple meanings of good poetry. In his poetry, he seeks an active form of protest, proceeding from linguistic disobedience. Kinsella [Australia, 1963] has a long record of service as a poet and teacher, he is thus more than welcome to share his experience, passion and knowledge with us.’

Jan Baeke, presenter, 48th Poetry International Festival Rotterdam, 2017

Intelligence is unAustralian: Michelle de Kretser’s ‘The Life to Come’

by Adrian D’Ambra

A recent London Review of Books review of Elif Batuman’s first novel, The Idiot (2017), raised the temperature of hope. Here was a writer from inside the academy, steeped in theory, who was prepared to signal its limitations and to celebrate what older readers still lovingly refer to as literary writing. And then I read Michelle de Kretser’s 2017 novel, The Life to Come. At last, a satire on the Australian literary establishment and on the social attitudes, cultural mores and theoretical poses it promotes at the expense of both writing and reading. I haven’t enjoyed an Australian cultural and social literary satire so much since the novels and at least one of the plays – The Season at Sarsaparilla – of Patrick White. And that, I might say breathlessly, is the point. This country couldn’t wait to bury Patrick White. They thought that they hated him because of his upper class Anglo-Australian accent and mannerisms, because he wrote books that were hard to read, because he came from the wealthy rural squattocracy rather than the miserable suburbs that the rest of us grew up in, because of his European sensibilities and his modernism. Possibly even because of his homosexuality. But really, Patrick White was hated for his intelligence; he was hated as a writer because he wrote literature rather than simply novels, short stories, plays; because he insisted that the kind of writing that really mattered was a sounding board for important aesthetic, philosophical, spiritual and psychological questions about art and about being human. Patrick White was hated because every novel also reminded us that we had not built Australia Felix in the Great Southern Land, but that – really – we were nothing more than Little Britain; Little Britain in our shuttered suburban minds, our English language inarticulacy, and – above all else – in our class-divided society. And once he was gone, he was best forgotten if not reviled. After all, ‘Intelligence’, observes Matt, one of de Kretser’s characters, ‘is unAustralian.’ (p. 145)

What de Kretser performs is partly an act of literary resuscitation, something akin to the rehabilitation of political prisoners once convicted of thoughtcrime. She champions Patrick White. She champions Christina Stead. She champions Shirley Hazzard. Stung by her supervisor’s antiseptic, post-structuralist criticism of her thesis, another character, Cassie, writes in her notebook about ‘The Problem with Shirley Hazzard’:

1. She is a woman.
2. She is a great artist.
3. She is fearless.
4. She has stayed away instead of coming home to be punished for 1-3. (p. 61)

De Kretser bravely genders the academic supervisor as a woman to ensure that the criticism levelled at Cassie cannot be read as a sexist attack on her or her subject matter by a male bully.

De Kretser’s novel is also in part an act of literary rebellion against the ideological constraints and the self-imposed insular limitations of the Australian literary establishment. ‘Everything changed in the Eighties,’ explains Pippa, de Kretser’s shadow-novelist, ‘The big division used to be between people who were born before the Second World War and people who were born after. Now it’s between people who know about post-structuralism and the rest of us.’ (p. 129) Ironically, Pippa becomes a commercially successful novelist without having read or being able to understand Foucault. However, her outlook on life and writing is beset by a moral blindness and emotional insensitivity which appears to have been shaped by the cultural landscape in which she operates. Pippa reflects both the sense of cultural inadequacy that comes with being an Australian and the moral and epistemological meaninglessness that comes with absolute relativism. Most of her co-characters have never read an Australian novel. Pippa appears never to have read a European one, let alone any of the world’s other literatures. Her shallowness is sometimes disarming, sometimes potentially deeply offensive to her friends and lovers as well as de Kretser’s readers. As a young writer, she aspires to write with beauty. As a mature writer, she aspires to write the truth. De Kretser allows Pippa’s own postmodern tech-savvy voice to suggest that she has achieved neither. Indeed, another of the significant achievements of the novel is the connection made between the decline in art and meaning and the rise of online inauthenticity.

At the beginning of the novel we are introduced to George Meshaw: ‘In Melbourne . . . he had wanted to write about modernism in Australian fiction for his PhD. After some difficulty, a professor who would admit to having once read an Australian novel was found. At their first meeting, she handed George a reading list made up of French and German philosophers. When George settled down to read these texts, he discovered something astonishing: the meaning of each word was clear and the meaning of sentences baffled. Insignificant yet crucial words like “however” and “which” – words whose meaning was surely beyond dispute – had been deployed in ways that made no sense.’ (p. 5)

De Kretser’s resuscitation of the great Australian modernist novel is much more than an ideological stance. As she did in The Hamilton Case, she writes about characters who are complex, whose relationships with themselves and with each other are complex, sometimes baffling to themselves as well as to the reader. The various narrative threads in her novel – her shifting use of the free indirect style that appears sometimes almost simultaneously to affirm and condemn her characters – are also complex in their development and the connections between them. Existential anxiety is nestled in Pippa’s certainty, George’s resilience, Cassie’s disillusionment, Matt’s entitled sense of self-sacrifice, just as it is nestled in the multitude of familial, intimate, friendship and professional relationships throughout the novel. Revelations constantly collide with misunderstandings. Like the characters in a Chekhov short story or a White novel, great insights can be experienced by utterly ordinary people; hence the lengthy final section of the novel devoted to Christabel and Bunty. De Kretser understands life and writing to exist somewhere between the Chekhovian idyll that ‘We should show life neither as it is, nor as it should be, but as we see it in our dreams’ and Beckett’s dour observation that we, like Christabel, are always awaiting the life to come.

An Imperfect Reader; Anna Funder at the Melbourne Writers Festival

by Adrian D’Ambra

Anna Funder’s recent presentation on ‘The Art of Fiction’ at the Melbourne Writers Festival was very impressive and well-received. The highlight for me was when she spoke about her 2014 long short story or short novella ‘The Girl with the Dogs’. I’ve only read her nonfiction set of interlinked narratives about the surveillance apparatus of the East German state, ‘Stasiland’. Despite recommendations, I’ve held back on reading ‘All that I Am’, her novel about the fate of left-leaning artists under Hitler, for no good reason other than my intense admiration for Hans Fallada’s ‘Alone in Berlin’, which is no excuse whatsoever. Why on earth I should allow allegiance to one book to impede my reception of another is beyond me but I do know that in this as in many other respects I am an imperfect reader.

Back to ‘The Art of Fiction’. Funder explained the peculiar position she found herself in when she was requested by the Paspaley Group of companies whose primary area of production is pearling to write a piece of fiction on commission. Despite her initial reservations she decided to take the opportunity to do something she had been thinking of for some time; to write a piece of short fiction rooted in our time and place and inspired by Anton Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’. I was hooked and a thousand other English teachers in the auditorium swooned! If you are a senior English teacher in the state of Victoria the new word on everybody’s lips is ‘comparative’. The expectation that VCE students be able to compare two texts of literary merit is now entrenched in the course all the way through to the final end-of-Year-12 examination. Funder had just bequeathed to us a pair of texts that would make perfect sense for a Year 11 English or Literature comparative task. Notebook pages were flipping and smart phone screens were flashing.

That many of the people in the audience were senior English teachers I have no doubt. Most of the questions raised at the end were about ‘Stasiland’, a current VCE Year 12 text. Funder spoke of the lingering damage to the lives of people such as Miriam whose husband died in Stasi custody and of Miriam’s initial but unrealised willingness to provide some visual material for the forthcoming Folio edition of the book. Another forthcoming publication is the single volume edition of Anna Funder’s novella and Anton Chekhov’s short story.

The book signing session after her presentation gave me the opportunity to speak to her about my own problematic relationship with ‘Stasiland’. As a socialist I was distrustful of what I perceived to be an anti-left bias in Funder’s perspective and I was predisposed to disbelieve the claims she made about the East German state. At the very least I wanted there to be some acknowledgement of why the Stasi may have been as paranoid as they so obviously were, the encirclement of the Eastern Bloc by NATO, for example, or the propaganda pedalled by the capitalist West that attempted to establish as fact the proposition that all the acts of aggression during the Cold War were instigated by the communist side. I was also able to explain how a second and third reading of ‘Stasiland’ had enabled me to come to a deeper understanding of her purposes in the text. Far from being surprised by what I told her, Funder told me that she has heard the same response from other readers and she reassured me that the book was not intended to be an anti-socialist narrative but a depiction of an actual Orwellian society.

Go to ‘Stasiland’ #1

Go to ‘Stasiland’ #2

Go to ‘Stasiland’ #3

Despair

by Adrian D’Ambra

“… if you care at all about books don’t vote Liberal at this election. If you care at all about what books mean, don’t vote Liberal. If you value how books can enrich lives, don’t vote Liberal. If you think Australian books matter to an Australian society, don’t vote Liberal.”

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/19/be-under-no-illusion-malcolm-turnbull-wants-to-destroy-australian-literature-election-richard-flanagan

For non-Australian viewers of this post I should point out that the name ‘Liberal Party’ in our country refers to our most conservative mainstream party. It most certainly does not mean ‘progressive’ in the sense that a British or an American citizen would expect it to.

Wanting / Not Wanting; Richard Flanagan’s ‘Wanting’

by Adrian D’Ambra

There are some reading experiences that are just like those other areas of your life that gather around regret. Frankly, you wish that they cold be undone and you know that – just like every other word and action – they cannot be. That’s how I’ve been feeling for the last few days about Richard Flanagan’s ‘Wanting’ [2008]. Not that the novel itself has not been worth reading, no, far from it, but that having just finished it in the last hour I feel burdened by it. There’s an ashen taste in my mouth and a general sense of unease caused by what Flanagan has written about. It begins quite early on with the realisation that this is a piece of historical fiction whose characters are drawn far more from primary and secondary sources than they are from imagination. Misguided in their avowal of a curious mixture of Enlightenment, English and Christian values, Sir John and Lady Jane Franklin believe they are bringing civilisation to Van Diemen’s Land. A bounty hunter disguised as a missionary, George Augustus Robinson is mopping up the last remnants of the indigenous population to have survived the genocidal war waged by the colonists against them, receiving a bounty for every ‘savage’ brought in whilst having himself proclaimed their Protector. Charles Dickens is treading the boards in Manchester and embarking on the affair with the then eighteen year old Ellen Ternan that will destroy his marriage and cover her in secrecy and innuendo.

And then there is the aboriginal Tasmanian girl Mathinna whose story Flanagan recounts from her capture by the Protector, her forced adoption by the Franklins, her rape by her adoptive father who is dressed in the black swan costume of the devil, to her abandonment and brutalisation at first in a typhoid orphanage and then at large in the colony. I cannot tell you how devastated I have been to discover that there actually is an 1842 Thomas Bock portrait of her as an eight year old girl wearing the red dress that Flanagan refers to on numerous occasions.

The history covered in this novel is a story of devastation inflicted on an indigenous population by a foreign power debauched by its own belief in itself, its hypocrisy. It is also truly devastating to read. It is one thing to know in one’s general knowledge of the world that genocide was committed in Van Diemen’s Land. It is one thing to know in one’s political and social consciousness that we can never overestimate the traumatic inter-generational impact of colonisation. But it is quite another to have it dragged through the entrails of language and recast as literature in the way that Flanagan does.

Thomas Bock, Watercolour portrait of Mathinna (1835 – 1856), an indigenous Australian girl from Tasmania (1842)

Ladies in Black; the Melbourne Theatre Company’s musical adaptation of Madeleine St John’s 1993 novel ‘The Women in Black’

by Adrian D’Ambra

I’ve been wanting to mention for some time that the Melbourne Theatre Company 2016 season couldn’t have gotten off to a better start than it did with ‘Ladies in Black’, a musical adaptation written by Carolyn Burns and Tim Finn of Madeleine St John’s 1993 novel ‘The Women in Black’. I have rarely so heartily enjoyed an evening of musical theatre as I did this one and I can only hope that the show will return to an extended season of its own in a much larger venue than The Sumner. This show is generous in humour and pathos and it richly deserves its own run and tour. Being perhaps the only theatre-goer in Melbourne who did not enjoy Simon Phillips’ 2015 MTC production of ‘North by Northwest’, I was a little unsure of what to expect but I thought that his production of ‘Ladies in Black’ was triumphant. Since seeing the show I have also read the novel for the first time, not having read anything by Madeleine St John before. Given her description of being born an Australian as an accident of history and her determination to expatriate herself in the UK, the novel is a remarkably lighthearted and sympathetic portrayal of life in Sydney in the late-1950s as seen through the eyes of school graduate Lisa who is just at the beginning of her adult life and just becoming aware of the limitations against which she is going to have to push if she is going to be able to give her life its own shape and meaning. Have I ever come across a better description of coming of age than this:

“She had never before been in town on a Saturday afternoon, and the episode, following upon the novelty of the interview for her very first job, induced a feeling of awful strangeness – and yet, of a certain ghostly familiarity; for Lisa believed herself to be in all likelihood a poet, and this experience seemed to her to be one about which one could certainly find oneself writing a poem, as long as one could manage to recall this feeling, this apprehension, of a world transformed, and oneself in it and with it: a sensation and an apprehension for which, for the moment, she had no precise words.” [Chapter 6]

I love that deft juxtaposition of ‘awful strangeness’ and ‘ghostly familiarity’ and the longer bow drawn between the ‘novelty’ of one event and the ‘apprehension’ of another. Lisa’s consciousness of her feelings and sensations and of the necessity and inadequacy of language to capture them is equally deft. On the other hand, the extent to which St John might be parodying or mocking her protagonist is unclear. Are we supposed to respect Lisa’s self-identification as a poet, to see it as the affectation of an ignorant and unenlightened child, or to read it as St John’s backhanded reflection on the impossibility of artistic and cultural aspiration in the Australia she grew up in and fled from? The Burns-Finn-Phillips take on this is clear. It is their intention that we spend at least a part of our evening in the theatre celebrating this brave young girl’s growing determination to be herself.

The Symmetry and Order of the Structure; the End of Anna Funder’s ‘Stasiland’

by Adrian D’Ambra

Coming once again to the end of Anna Funder’s ‘Stasiland’ and finding – once again, as so often with literary reading – that it’s the structural features of the text, the symmetry and order of the structure, that I find so satisfying and from which I infer so much meaning.

Anna’s reunion with Miriam at the end of the narrative counterbalances their meeting at the beginning of Anna’s research into the Stasi surveillance of the GDR. Miriam’s current job working at a radio station in Leipzig reminds us of Anna’s initial impetus to research the forty year history of East Germany when she was working at a radio station in Berlin. Miriam’s refusal to produce a programme on Ostalgie nostalgia parties for the GDR reminds us of Anna’s radio boss’ initial refusal to allow her to produce material about people’s experiences of the postwar division of Germany from the Eastern point of view. And then there’s the figurative ‘china stare’ of a porcelain doll on its crucifix of strings that Anna sees in the middle of the night in Miriam’s flat alongside the pierrot description of Miriam sleeping: ‘so slender and crumpled… strings cut, in the spotlight’ of the moon.

Some of us who read look to the structures of language to give literature its meaning. Some of us look to literature to give life meaning. And some of us do both.

Go to ‘Concerning Anna Funder’s “Stasiland”‘

The Throbbing Haze of a Hangover

by Adrian D’Ambra

Am currently re-reading Anna Funder’s ‘Stasiland’. As you might well be aware, this particular text has been the subject of a quite anguished webpage published on this WordPress site. Coming back into it yesterday I found myself experiencing that joy of the reader coming back to a text when the pleasure emanates from an enhanced understanding of the relationship between the structure and the meaning of the text. It’s that moment when you reconfirm that the first reading was anything other than a waste of your time and that a second reading is only going to increase your admiration for the writing.

In this case, I was always impressed by the way Funder begins her non-fiction narrative in the throbbing haze of a hangover. It’s a terrific preparation for the Alice-in-Wonderland disorientation she will experience as she begins to uncover more information and evidence about life under the constant surveillance of the Stasi in the totalitarian GDR. What I noticed yesterday about the opening chapters were the fragments embedded in the hangover haze, fragments that will be returned to and examined at greater depth later on in the text. There’s mention, for instance, of Miriam whose torment and tragedy will become the bedrock firsthand account of what the security police in police state can do to your life. Leipzig’s role in the fall of the GDR is referred to as is the transformation of the Stasi headquarters in that city into a museum. Anna visits the underground toilet in her own rendition of falling through the rabbit hole. Revisiting these fragments she will weave her narrative account.

Concerning Anna Funder’s ‘Stasiland’

by Adrian D’Ambra

I published a new page this morning containing my comments about Anna Funder’s ‘Stasiland’ and I felt that it was incumbent on me to include the following Prefatory Note:

I am posting this response to Anna Funder’s ‘Stasiland’ as a salutary lesson on the dangers of a single reading. I came to this non-fiction narrative about the surveillance state of the GDR during the Cold War with a negative predisposition on two fronts. The first was on the basis of my own politics. As a leftist democratic socialist I was uncomfortable with Funder’s portrayal of communism as a failed god of the twentieth century. I disliked her apparent mockery of Karl Marx whose critical and analytical tools have enabled us to see, understand and deconstruct the political and social world in which we live. The second was my disapproval of Funder’s deliberate blurring of what I perceived to be the line between objectivity and subjectivity. When I first wrote down these notes I thought of them as an example of a resistant reading. It was only when I read the book a second time that I realised that what I had in fact subjected ‘Stasiland’ to was an aberrant and incorrect reading. So far as my politics is concerned, why would I ever want to pose as an apologist for the state terror of Stalinist socialism? It is incumbent on those of us whose politics belong to the left to acknowledge the abuse of human rights and the denigration of individual freedoms that occurred under the guise of state communism during the twentieth century and to promise both ourselves and those whom we might seek to persuade that we would never again resort to such conditions of state terror. The socialism of the future will have to be democratic, collective and inclusive or not at all. A second reading of ‘Stasiland’ also opened my eyes to Funder’s bravery and brilliance in deliberately blurring the so-called lines between subjectivity and objectivity. Knowing what something was like from the point of view of someone who experienced it is no less important than knowing that something happened. How easily I had forgotten one of the mantras of my own formative years, in this case the feminist revelation that, ‘The personal is political and the political is personal’. The experience of that second reading has reminded me that sometimes the best reader is the one who can reserve judgement and that the best writing is often informed by the interplay of multiple narrative perspectives.

Go to ‘The Symmetry and Order…’