Blue and yellow

I grew these, from bulbs my sisters gave me -- the daffs from C this year as an Easter present instead of chocolate when the family came down here for a hot cross bun arvo tea, the hyacinths from W for my birthday in May. The vase is green alabaster from San Gimignano in Tuscany, a town made famous by E.M. Forster, bought there and brought home in a little backpack, heavily wrapped in soft clothes.

Given that I had a black thumb till I was 45, I think our mother would be proud. Not that I did anything but bung them in pots and forget about them.




For me this picture is both nothing but itself -- flowers, perfect and powerful, with intense and brief and burning lives -- and also immediately about an accreted mass of memory from a life spent mostly reading. Wordsworth. Ovid. Forster. A.S. Byatt. My mother chanting 'daffy-down-dilly'. The perfume I wore circa 1981, whose name I now can't remember, but which smelt of hyacinths, dense and ever so slightly bruised, not exactly sweet.

There were two lemons amongst the plums, to intensify the colour. How would one find the exact word for the colour of the plum-skins? (There was a further question of why one might want to do so ... It was a fact that the lemons and the plums, together, made a pattern that he recognised with pleasure, and the pleasure was so fundamentally human it asked to be noted and understood.)

... Language might relate the plum to the night sky, or to certain ways of seeing a burning coal, or to a soft case enwrapping a hard nugget of treasure. Or it might introduce an abstraction, a reflection, of mind, not mirror. 'Ripeness is all,' language might say, after observing 'We must endure Our going hence even as our coming hither.' Paint too could do these things. ... Van Gogh's painting of the Reaper in his furnace of white light and billowing corn said also 'Ripeness is all.' But the difference, the distance, fascinated Alexander. Paint itself declares itself as a force of analogy and connection, a kind of metaphor-making between the flat surface of purple pigment and yellow pigment and the statement 'This is a plum.' 'This is a lemon.'

... Alexander ... became obsessed with a small painting of a breakfast table, on which Van Gogh painted the household things he had bought for his artist's house ... held together by the contrast and coherence of blue and yellow. Vncent described it to Theo:

A coffee pot in blue enamel, a cup (on the left) royal blue and gold, a milk jug checkered light blue and white, a cup (on the right) white with blue and orange patterns on a plate of earthenware yellow-grey, a pot of barbotine or majolica blue ... finally two oranges and three lemons: the table is covered with a blue cloth, the background yellow-green, thus six different blues and four or five yellows and oranges.

-- A.S. Byatt, Still Life

Any sighted combination of blue and yellow has immediately evoked these pages from Still Life ever since I first read it, and the date I've written on the flyleaf is 1985.

Great opening sentences: an occasional series

Archie and Rose McLaverty staked out a homestead where the Little Weed comes rattling down from the Sierra Madre, water named not for miniature and obnoxious flora but for P.H. Weed, a gold seeker who had starved near its source.

Not counting a short epigraph about how many pioneers simply failed and were forgotten, and the subheading 'Archie and Rose. 1885', this is the first sentence of 'Them Old Cowboy Songs' from Annie Proulx's new book of short stories, Fine Just the Way It Is.

An alert reader -- and this is the kind of exercise we used to do in university English Departments while they were still called English Departments and before capital-T Theory took hold -- would be able to have a bash at identifying the date of composition and possibly even the writer.

For example, if you were to set this sentence as such an exercise today, any student lucky enough to have read a bit of Proulx already -- especially if she or he knew there were two different mountain ranges in North America called the Sierra Madre (I've just had to Google this, myself) and one of them is in Wyoming, a state closely identified with Proulx and her work, especially after Brokeback Mountain -- might be able to identify the writer from the setting, from the style, or from the detailed, focused attention to landscape and the inextricable relationship of landscape to character.

(In fact, this is precisely the sort of passage that used to be set in exams as a trap for young players who might confidently mis-identify it as having been written in the 19th century. In the Adelaide U Eng Dept in the mid-1970s they used to do this tricksy business a lot, setting us things like a chunk of very early D. H. Lawrence that nobody had ever actually read, from a time when his style was not yet fully formed, or a poem containing the classical name of a major character in one of the four plays in our Shakespeare course but actually written in 1840, which almost everybody fell for and identified as Elizabethan, a mere two and a half centuries out. In Adelaide we called this kind of exercise Practical Criticism; in Melbourne they called it Dating, which South Australians and Americans thought was hilarious.)

Anyway, the one-word answer to 'What makes this a great opening sentence?' is 'Grammar', but talking about grammar always gets me into trouble so let's look at some other things.

It sets the scene by answering the questions Who, When ('staked out a homestead' points to the time frame) and Where. It comes up with names that manage to sound natural and convincing, a problem all writers wrestle with (though this is easier if you're writing about the 19th century and names like Alice, William, Jeremiah and Mary Ann are there for the taking). It subtly predicts the likely fate of Archie and Rose (look what happened to the last guy), and it suggests the sinister but all too likely possibility that P.H. Weed decomposed into the river: a river poisoned at its source, a powerful metaphor for all things that are doomed from the beginning.

Louise Erdrich, Julia Kristeva, Dorothy Dunnett, music and the inside outside

This week's four novels include The Plague of Doves by Canada's UPDATE: North Dakota's Louise Erdrich, a French-German-Canadian-Ojibwe writer with a string of prizes and a tragic history behind her. Here's a paragraph I've just this minute read; the notion invoked there of the 'inside becoming the outside' immediately made me think of Julia Kristeva's writing in Powers of Horror on what she calls abjection, signified among other things by the involuntary spilling-over of what properly belongs inside the 'clean and proper body' to its outside: tears, vomit, urine, semen, shit and blood, substances that signify the breakdown of the boundary between self and not-self.

Kristeva's writing on this subject is quite beyond simplification or explication, largely metaphorical but wandering back and forth across the boundary between the literal and the figurative the way so much psychoanalytic discourse seems, shamelessly, to do, but for me one of the useful things about her work on this particular subject is the light it sheds on the the way this kind of bodily disorder can create a sometimes terrible shame, partly to do with the potential disintegration of the self once its bodily boundaries are breached. And that has reminded me that Erdrich has reminded me of the single best sentence I've ever read about music in my whole life, in Dorothy Dunnett's Checkmate: 'Music, the knife without a hilt.'

Here's Erdrich:

Here I come to some trouble with words. The inside became the outside when Shamawenga played music. ... The sound connected instantly with something deep and joyous. Those powerful moments of true knowledge that we have to paper over with daily life. The music tapped the back of our terrors too. Things we'd lived through and didn't want to ever repeat. Shredded imaginings, unadmitted longings, fear and also surprising pleasures. No, we can't live at that pitch. But every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware.

Jane Austen and the case of the tea and crumpets

'Do you miss teaching?' a friend asked the other day when I was reminiscing fondly about some tutorial-room occurrence or other, and the answer was a qualified No. But every now and then I see or hear something that makes me think 'If I were still teaching ...', and checking out the blog of the admirable and formidable 19th century scholar Ellen Moody this morning gave me one such moment.

If I were still teaching, and especially if I were still teaching the subject I always loved teaching most, 'Women and fiction in the 19th century', in which almost every student almost every year was highly motived, highly literate, enthusiastic and self-starting, I would use this post of Moody's to take advantage of the current enthusiasm for all things Jane Austen and introduce my students to the concepts of textual scholarship, practical semiotics, academic disagreement over facts and the interpretation of facts, the history of feminism, and the uses of literature in the study of social (and other) history and historiography.

Not even the ill-advisedly pejorative use of the word 'catty' would discourage me from using this post as a teaching tool. It's a dense discussion of scholarly detail and disagreement, but it's lavishly illustrated with some quite wonderful pictures to help you get your breath and keep up. And, like the great scholar she is, Moody provides a summary overview before going into detail:

A few days ago now I posted about the controversy among Austen scholars over Chapman’s 1923 scholarly textual editing of all Austen’s novels. The question as I understood it was, Are the differences between the original published texts and Chapman’s edited versions so frequent and pervasive to leave a different impression and change the meaning or feel of Austen’s texts significantly. ...

I’ve come to the conclusion there’s more than a debate over which copy text to use going on here; the conflict is also between different agendas which shape how the different groups want to understand Austen’s life, political outlook, the history of the biography, and conservative, kitsch or heritage-style Janeism. In brief, Kathryn Sutherland, Claudia Johnson, and others abjure a perceived picturesqueness & tea-and-crumpets quaint feel in the original Oxfords; they argue strongly against a complacent Janeism & patriarchal elitism, which they think Chapman’s edition helps sustain. They’re indignant at how he accepted the Austen family censorship and shaping of Austen’s life. By contrast, the individual editors of the Cambridge edition (which includes Deirdre LeFaye) and Janet Todd are comfortable with Chapman’s choices for basic text, his scholarly decisions (which they build upon, together with the over 80 years of scholarship since says Todd), and paternalistic conservative outlook (at least no one seems to mind it). ...

Have I ever said that my Austen books fill a 7-shelf 3 feet-across bookcase. I have it in my room. As I also keep my Trollope books in my room (in a similar filled bookcase), I have these beloved books near me. As a friend said, Close at hand, near to heart.

On thinking about not eating meat

Warning: long post

'I blame Peter Singer for turning my wife into a vegetarian,' said a friend of mine about fifteen years ago, and it was enough to send me off to read some Singer and see what the story was. I have continued to admire Singer even through the radical ideas that have made a lot of people write him off or worse, partly because I admire anyone rational and detached enough not to be automatically, unthinkingly anthropocentric, and partly because I also admire anyone who can follow a train of thought all the way to its logical destination without losing her or his nerve.

Also falling squarely into both these categories is novelist J.M. Coetzee, well-known for his views on animals and meat-eating, and since he and his partner Dorothy Driver moved to Adelaide it's been my good fortune to have encountered them in various places. One of the most memorable of these occasions was a public reading at a fundraiser in the Adelaide Hills where Coetzee read a passage from Boyhood about watching men on a farm kill a sheep.

Coetzee is not an elaborator, at least not in the writerly sense of what John Steinbeck once called 'hooptedoodle', but the unexpressed horror and fear and revulsion felt by the watching child is there in the syntax of these quiet sentences. Listening to the reading was a very weird experience, because on the one hand I could feel the horror in the writing, and on the other hand could imagine the scene very clearly because I'd seen this sight myself, many times, at a similar age in a similar place. And for me it's an interesting but matter-of-fact memory, framed by the context of a very happy childhood.

If you grew up on a farm in the 1940s or 50s or 60s, this was just something you saw. In my case we were (like every other kid in the district) inured to it as a natural part of farm life. If you farmed sheep -- and in those parts, everybody did -- you would regularly kill one for meat as a matter of course. There was even a kind of unspoken primitive-hunter-type 'honour the creature' thing going on when animals were killed to eat. My sisters and I, from a very young age, would be neither encouraged to watch nor discouraged from watching the sheep being quickly killed, hung and gutted, but if we were on the spot then we were expected to make ourselves useful, mostly by being handed a bowl of warm brains and kidneys and told 'Here, take that up to Mummy.'

Sheep destined for the table, like the doomed chooks for special-occasion meals, were killed quickly and efficiently; the worst thing they felt was a few moments of fear. A quick death was mandatory. A sharp, clear line was drawn between killing for food and causing pointless pain and suffering.

Any cruelty or neglect shown to animals was despised, and failure to look after one's animals properly was cause for shame. In tandem with the vivid but undistressing memories I have of watching sheep be killed, there are equally vivid memories of my father trundling around in rain, hail and gale in the middle of the night, bodily lifting pregnant ewes or newly shorn sheep into the back of the ute or even, in uteless years, the boot of the car to drive them to shelter.

Obviously much of this was economically based and God knows sheep are very hard to love, but whatever the motives may have been, I grew up steeped in an ethos of treating all animals humanely. Sheepdogs and farm cats were loved, cared for and regarded as individual creatures with personalities and feelings.

All of which is to say that I grew up with a clear sense of the difference between neglecting or mistreating animals, on the one hand, and on the other hand raising them in the open, providing protection from predators and weather, making sure there was always water and plenty to eat, keeping them mainly for wool and eggs and occasionally killing a sheep, a chook or a goose quickly and humanely for food. I think these things were too deeply imprinted ever to be erased.

So, on the continuing-to-eat-meat side of the argument:

-- I grew up in the country; there was enough money; my parents loved each other and me. Beliefs acquired in that sort of childhood cannot be shed easily, if at all.

-- I don't regard eating meat as in any way unclean or defiling.

-- I appreciate the benefits of protein and iron.

-- I really like meat.

-- These days I am very, very careful when shopping about the conditions under which the animals for animal products were raised. Eggs and chooks are free range only. I never eat pork or cured meats at all.

-- I take the point about the environment, but my shopping habits don't support the sorts of farms that do it the most damage, and in any case I think there are more urgent environmental disasters happening, and in any case anyway, I think it is too late.

-- Most of the extreme 'animal liberationist' rhetoric and behaviour I've seen has looked hysterical, irrational, ignorant, sentimental, self-righteous and/or obsessed.

And yet, and yet:

-- I once found myself, after several weeks of getting very run down through overwork and no proper meals, tearing into a couple of half-cooked veal chops still dripping with bloody juices, standing over the sink like Mia Farrow chowing down on raw hearts in Rosemary's Baby. I know the body demands meat -- but look at that comparison I drew there. Why is Mia Farrow chowing down on raw hearts? Because she's been possessed by the devil.

-- A.S. Byatt, perhaps the single living writer I admire most, spoke more than 20 years ago at the Melbourne Writers' Festival about how lived experience gets used in writing fiction. She told a story about opening her fridge one day, seeing the assorted sausages and bacon and chops and chooks, and thinking 'My God, this thing is full of death.'

-- I have no respect for or patience with the anthropocentric view that all other species are there for our convenience, and even less with the view that might is right and therefore the smartest species gets to treat all the others any way it likes.

-- I have even less respect for or patience with people who argue that animals do not have a 'self', feel emotion, or think; that to me simply indicates that these people have never spent any time with animals.

Grapple, grapple.

I can't imagine taking up a formal position on this, or sticking to it if I did. But what with Singer and Coetzee and Byatt, and living with two cats and a gardenful of birds, and the disgusting conditions -- physically as well as ethically disgusting -- under which so many animals are farmed, I can see myself moving further and further away from meat-eating. Not with any conscious resolve or intention to stop altogether, but more in the spirit of what Gertrude Stein once said about her unintentional estrangement from her brother. 'Little by little, we never met again.'

Move over, Dorothy Parker

As the result of a series of random discoveries and coincidental conversations, I have been tracking down the great American essayist and critic Elizabeth Hardwick online to find out more about her. Hardwick and her husband, the American poet Robert Lowell, co-founded the New York Review of Books in the spring of 1963, the first issue roughed out on their dining-room table. (I got a peculiar thrill from reading this; I used to do exactly the same thing with Australian Book Review, every fourth weekend from April 1987 to December 1988, and when I read this about Hardwick and Lowell I felt a flash of minnow-like, retroactive empathy with these fabled whales of New York.)

Hardwick died late last year, at the age of 91, and as she moved towards this venerable stopping place, someone asked her in an interview how she felt about growing older. She replied “Its only value is that it spares you the opposite: not growing older."

Computer says no

When I bought my strawberry iMac in 1999, the Bloke immediately christened it Pink Patty. When I replaced it with the white eMac in 2004, the new model seemed to me to be a boy (possibly because it wasn't pink), and was therefore inevitably christened Patrick White.

(Who was, of course, gay, or as he would have preferred to put it, homosexual -- which is often also signified by pinkness, though not pinkification, which is reserved for full girliness. How's that for a little gender identification construction problematisation clarification valorisation.)

Now Patrick White is one of the many computers dotted about the country who that think daylight saving finished over the weekend. So every time I look at the on-screen, erm, time, I have to add an hour.

Yes, of course I know how to fix this. But I have a sort of atavistic fear of contradicting and correcting any entity called Patrick White. The old poppet has been dead for over seventeen years now, but the idea of gainsaying him still makes one shake in one's shoes. So I might just leave it alone, and by next week the time will be correct again with no intervention from me. Patrick White is merely ahead of his time; 'twas ever thus.

Barbara Jefferis Award, continued; Aust Lit; the lives of animals; various other stuff

The Barbara Jefferis Award, discussed in the post before last in the context of a rave about Michelle de Kretser's The Lost Dog, was in the event won by poet Rhyll McMaster for her first novel Feather Man. Which is indeed a fine book, as I've said at some length already here, and which certainly addresses, directly and on a literal level, the empowerment of girls and women.

But.

I don't know, maybe Michelle is one of those writers, like Elliot Perlman, whose work violently divides those who read it. (Perlman, whose very very long and very very detailed novel Seven Types of Ambiguity was treated to an absolute stinker of a review by Peter Craven of the kind Craven had hitherto reserved for Simon During's book about Patrick White, is regarded -- mainly on the strength of this novel -- by the French in particular not only as a very important Australian writer but as a very important writer, period. Other critical responses were dotted all along the spectrum between these two positions. Perlman's book has a dog in it, too; his name is Empson, which is one of the things that enraged Craven.)

Or maybe people think if there's an animal in the title it can't be a serious book. If so, this is sad, for there is a time-honoured and honourable tradition in Australian literature of writing about animals and putting them in your title. A quick trawl through the colourful history of the Australian short story yields the following by-no-means-exhaustive list of titles: 'The Dog', 'The Cow', 'The Bull Calf', 'The Jackass', 'The Dingo', 'The Donkey', 'The Ant-Lion', 'The Galah', 'The Pelican', 'The Seahawk', Tell Us About the Turkey, Jo', 'The White Turkey', 'The Grey Kangaroo', 'The Grey Horse', 'The Black Mare', 'Wild Red Horses', 'The Red Bullock', 'The Red 'Roo', 'The Rainbow Bird', 'The Powerful Owl', 'Singing Birds', 'The Woodpecker Toy Fact', 'The Three-Legged Bitch', 'The Loaded Dog', 'The New Australian Dog', 'Thylacine', 'Serpents', 'Snakes', 'A Snake Down Under', 'The Turtles' Graveyard', 'Goldfish', 'The Mullet', 'The Snoring Cod', 'Getting to the Pig', 'The Woman Who Wasn't Allowed to Keep Cats', 'My Bird', 'His Dog', 'Hawkins's Pigs', 'John Gilbert's Dog', and 'Nobody's Kelpie'.

Perhaps some people may think The Lost Dog "about" (and only about) a dog, and "therefore" can't be Art. Perhaps some people may have forgotten the extraordinary power of the animal symbolism in the work some of the 20th century's great writers -- Lawrence's foxes and horses, Woolf's spaniel, Hemingway's bulls and fish, Les Murray's magical animal poems, Coetzee's dogs and frogs and other critters of all kinds and the absolutely deadly serious life philosophy behind his representations of animals and our relations with them.

For we are lucky enough to have in Australia not just one but two truly great thinkers and writers who can elevate these matters to a place where no intelligent reader can ignore the dilemmas they represent even with respect to that most alien of creatures, the bat: Coetzee as a man who fearlessly follows a trail of logic with no failure of nerve and arrives at a radical point of understanding, Murray from a point of view profoundly spiritual, a conception of being and presence arrived at via Catholicism, observation and imagination all at once. Here is Coetzee's tough nut (an old bat, even) Elizabeth Costello, in full flight, on bats and being:

What is it like to be a bat? Before we can answer such a question, [philosopher Thomas] Nagel suggests, we need to be able to experience bat life through the sense modalities of a bat. But he is wrong; or at least he is sending us down a false trail. To be a living bat is to be full of being; being fully a bat is like being fully human, which is also to be full of being. Bat being in the first case, human being in the second, maybe; but those are secondary considerations. To be full of being is to live as a body-soul. One name for the experience of full being is joy.

Now if one were not aware that Les Murray had written 'Presence: Translations From the Natural World' some years earlier than this, his bat-poem would seem for all the world like a direct response, or amplification, of it, as though in conversation with Coetzee which for all I know he has been, in fact it seems very likely. I wish I'd been there.

Bats' Ultrasound

Sleeping-bagged in a duplex wing
with fleas, in rock-cleft or building
radar bats are darkness in miniature,
their whole face one tufty crinkled ear
with weak eyes, fine teeth bared to sing.

Few are vampires. None flit through the mirror.
Where they flutter at evening's a queer
tonal hunting zone above highest C.
Insect prey at the peak of our hearing
drone re to their detailing tee:

ah, eyrie-ire, aero hour, eh?
O'er our ur-area (our era aye
ere your raw row) we air our array,
err, yaw, row wry -- aura our orrery,
our eerie ü our ray, our arrow.

A rare ear, our aery Yahweh.

Cross-posted at Australian Literature Diary

Carn Michelle

I see from the current Sydney PEN newsletter that Michelle de Kretser's novel The Lost Dog has been shortlisted for the inaugural Barbara Jefferis Award, and the winner will be announced tomorrow.

(This is the prize that caused such a fuss last year when first announced, mainly because it's for women writers only. [UPDATE: My bad, my very bad, for this is completely wrong: it is open to novelists of either or indeed any sex whose book represents women and girls in a positive light; see comments thread.] Oh noes! What about Teh Menz Liberation, huh? Huh? Etc.)

As you can see if you read the link, this is a very handsome prize. Quite apart from the $35,000, there is the warm glow of winning an award named in honour and memory of a woman who contributed so much for so long to Australian literature -- and associated also with her husband John Hinde, long-standing and much-loved ABC film critic, whose will provided for the establishment of the award in his wife's name.

Peace and all to the current Miles Franklin judges, some of whom are mates of mine, but it's a matter of absolute gobsmackedness to me that The Lost Dog didn't even make the longlist for the 2008 Miles F award. It fits the award's criteria (which de Kretser's previous novel, The Hamilton Case, did not), and it's one of the best Australian novels I've read not just over the last year but for a very long time. I've got nothing against the other books that made the Miles F longlist; I just think The Lost Dog is better than most if not all of them -- for all kinds of reasons, but mostly, I think, for its delicate balance of intellectual sophistication and genuine, intense, beautifully realised feeling. That, and the fact that by about three pages in you find yourself thinking 'Oh my, this book was written by a grown-up.'

This is the review of it that I wrote last year for the Sydney Morning Herald:

The Lost Dog
By Michelle de Kretser
Allen & Unwin, 364 pp, $35 (hb)

Tom Loxley is on a kind of rural retreat when his beloved dog goes missing in the bush. Over the course of the story his search for the dog is interspersed with episodes of back-story: the story of his early childhood in India, his cramped teenage years in Australia, his unlucky and thwarted parents, and most of all his strange, tender relationship with the mysterious Nelly Zhang.

Tom is an academic working on a book about Henry James; he has anchored his racially complicated heritage in English literature. This novel is haunted by James in all kinds of ways, not least by a preoccupation with the idea of haunting itself, as well by the idea of yearning. On the surface Tom’s yearning is for the lost dog, and for the beloved who refuses to become a lover, but these things are situational and remediable; what can’t be changed is Tom’s family history and geography, the complex fate of the post-colonial.

This book is so engaging and thought-provoking, and its subject matter so substantial, that the reader notices only in passing how funny it is. At one point Tom goes to ask the neighbour Corrigan to keep an eye out for the dog, whereupon the narrator produces a sentence worthy of Patrick White: ‘When the Australian desire to provide assistance meshed with the Australian dread of appearing unmanly, it produced the bluff menace that was Mick Corrigan’s default setting.’

Michelle de Kretser is one of those rare writers whose work balances substance with style. Her writing is very witty, but it also goes deep, informed at every point by a benign and far-reaching intelligence. She is still winning prizes for her 2003 novel The Hamilton Case and she is certain to win a few more for The Lost Dog. Publishers Allen and Unwin have shown their faith in her by publishing this novel as a beautifully-designed hardback.

But I only had a 320-word space and they're meant to be brief, lively, accessible shorts; if you want a good, serious, insightful, detailed critical response, go and have a read of James Ley's full-length review in the Age. (Whenever I hear someone say 'Oh but Peter Craven is the best critic in the country', I have a little smile to myself, because while there are things about Craven's writing (not his criticism, so much) that I do admire very much, it's quite obvious to me that the best critic in the country is in fact James Ley.)

And just as an added bonus, that beautiful cover and design are courtesy of the lovely and talented Ampersand Duck. What more could any reader possibly want? Here is A. Duck's fabulous post about working on this novel; give yourself time (a cup of coffee, say) to read and savour this lovely detailed post.

Cross-posted at Australian Literature Diary

Germaine Greer in her home town

Not having had time or other resources to blog about it till I got home from Melbourne yesterday afternoon, by which time I was too knackered to put one word in front of the other, I have almost missed the boat on the subject of Germaine Greer's opening address to the Jane Austen conference that was put on by Laura from Sills Bend and her La Trobe U colleagues at the end of last week. Balcony Helen, Another Outspoken Female and Laura herself have all Greerblogged in detail already. But I have the odd bit and piece to add.

I was very struck by the precision and detail with which Greer had prepared her argument, for argument it was: a proper literary lecture, with a characteristically contrarian bent. Greer chose the least popular and most maligned of Austen's novels, Mansfield Park, to make an argument about a particular genre, the Bildungsroman (or, as one of Elsewhere's students recently called it, the Blundingsroman). In this kind of novel, a young person proceeds with a certain amount of incident through her or his adolescence and young adulthood, acquiring formal and informal education, and learning by trial and error - mostly error -- how to be an adult and function properly in the world.

Greer then, in quite an audacious move, linked Mansfield Park to the Australian novelist Henry Handel Richardson's The Getting of Wisdom. (Richardson, for those unfamiliar with her, was a woman writer who used a masculine nom de plume for the usual reason, writing as she was in an era when a woman's name on the cover of your manuscript or novel would automatically make it harder for you to get published or read.)

Both Mansfield Park and The Getting of Wisdom, argued Greer, are a kind of anti-Bildungsroman; in both, the process of growing up for the young heroines Fanny and Laura consists of learning to be less than themselves. Socialisation for young women of their eras (for these novels were written a century apart) consisted of bland obedience and conformity, keeping their mouths shut and their emotions in check. Fanny in particular, Greer argued, far from being the mouse that many dismiss her as, is actually a little ball of resistant, watchful muscle and a rumbling volcano of determined passion.

Young women's love in Austen's novels is in fact, argued Greer in an aside, 'implacable', and Austen herself was by no means uncritical of it as a force. Around this point Greer also pointed out that learning not to wear your heart on your sleeve is indeed an indicator of being grown up, or at the very least a survival tactic, so she wasn't running any kind of simple line.

This argument made me think of the way that young heroines in literature of a certain era who cannot or will not be properly socialised into womanhood are often savagely punished for it. Jo in Little Women misses out on world travel because of her awkward manners and loud mouth and is fobbed off at the end with a homely, threadbare, middle-aged husband. Katy of What Katy Did is punished for swinging too high and too enthusiastically by falling off the swing and crippling herself; Pollyanna gets the same punishment for tree-climbing.

And Judy in Seven Little Australians, of course, is punished for her passionate and courageous nature and its manifestation in saving her baby brother from being crushed by a falling tree when she is crushed and killed by the tree herself; Seven Little Australians, indeed, is the ultimate anti-Bildungsroman, wherein the heroine doesn't get to grow up at all. Professor Greer might have argued that, by comparison, Mansfield Park's Fanny and The Getting of Wisdom's Laura get off very lightly indeed.

(None of this seemed to mean anything to journalist Pamela Bone, who appeared to have sat through an entire lecture on literature simply so she could stand up at question time and demand to know why Greer wasn't in Darfur interviewing raped women. She seemed to be implying that the fact that she wasn't meant that she was a hypocrite, or that feminism was bullshit, or something. You all know the argument from articles, columns and blog posts by right-wing boys, I'm sure. It's hard to know quite how one is supposed to 'interview a raped woman', I must say; stick a microphone under her nose and ask her 'How did you feel?')

What struck me most about Greer's lecture, however, apart from the fact that at a few months short of seventy she is still straight-backed, energetic, lively and graceful [UPDATE: I've aged her before her time here; she is still only 68], was the way she talked about her students and about the profession of teaching. She illustrated various points she made, both during the lecture and in question time, with a number of anecdotes about her life as a university teacher and she spoke of her students with great affection, and of the profession of teaching with passion.

It wasn't that this came as a surprise, more as a reminder of something I had forgotten. Public representation of Greer is and has always been so distorted and so coloured by masculine fear and loathing that even people who have been following her work for many years tend to forget that she is, first and last, an educator: an explainer, a guide, a putter-together of new ways of thinking, an opener of eyes.

Gotta love spell-check ...

... which has just "corrected" a slight misspelling in the title of J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians in order to re-title the entire thing Waiting for the Birdbrains.

Bookerblogging: Lloyd Jones's Mister Pip

Okay, so this is sort of cheating, and it is also an experiment. I'm too busy to write any but light-hearted / short / batty / photographic blog posts at the moment so here instead, for those who follow these things more closely than I am currently doing, is the review I wrote last September for the SMH of New Zealand writer Lloyd Jones's novel Mister Pip, shortlisted (trust the Poms at the Times to describe New Zealand as "nowhere", but the article itself is good) for the 2007 Man Booker Prize. I don't even know whether stuff written for the MSM is likely to work as a blog post or not. Guess I'm about to find out. Ahem:


What, you might well ask, can the 1861 London publication of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations possibly have to do with Papua New Guinea’s blockade of Bougainville in the early 1990s? What chance hinge connects these two wildly disparate things, with so much time and distance between them?

New Zealand writer Lloyd Jones’ hypnotic novel is set on the island of Bougainville after the blockade has been imposed and all the doctors and teachers have left the islanders to fend for themselves. There is only one white man left: Mr Watts is known to the children as Pop Eye and is married to the mad and mysterious Mrs Watts, a native of the island, whom he met in New Zealand and has followed home.

The schoolchildren have been left with no teacher and Mr Watts is asked to step in. He agrees, but he has only one book from which to teach: an old copy of Great Expectations.

The story is told by Matilda, one of the children, who almost immediately becomes enchanted with Dickens’ Pip; she writes his name in the sand and decorates it with shells. Neither Matilda nor the reader can possibly foresee the appalling consequences this will have.

This novel about another novel is a skilful allegory of colonisation, using Great Expectations in some of the same ways as Jean Rhys used Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea. Peter Carey’s 1997 novel Jack Maggs is another useful point of comparison, taking as it did the character of Magwitch the convict from Great Expectations as its central idea.

For the people of the island, as represented by the young narrator Matilda, there is little to choose between the oppressive army of ‘redskins’ and the rebel ‘rambos’. They all look alike to the children: mad and dangerous enemies whose motivations cannot be fathomed and whose actions cannot be foreseen. Matilda narrates throughout with a kind of deadpan matter-of-factness that, as the book progresses, comes to look more and more like a symptom of shock.

Shortly after Mr Watts has finished reading the book to the entranced children, it goes missing. He sets them the exercise of trying to re-create it: each time one of them remembers a moment, a scene or a phrase from the novel, he writes it down in an exercise book he has been miraculously able to save from the wreckage of his own and everyone else’s possessions. This echoes yet another widely-read 20th century novel – no doubt deliberately, since this is very much a novel about other novels – in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, which features a group of characters who in an era of book-burning have committed one book each to memory.

As Jones has pointed out himself, this act of willed, group recollection is an image of the colonial experience, where the old-world culture is desperately but imperfectly remembered. It also gives the reader an idea of what that experience of extreme isolation and danger might be like. ‘I can remember where I was and what I was doing for every fragment I managed to retrieve,’ says Matilda. ‘Otherwise, I have no sense of time passing in the normal way. Along with medicines and our freedom, the blockade stole time from us.’

Jones has done something very difficult with this novel: he has taken a recent and brutal piece of contemporary history and has told a story that not only reveals these events to the wider world but also shows what they mean in the larger and more abstract field of human behaviour. A brutal and senseless episode – the atrocities committed during the Bougainville blockade have been compared with events in Rwanda -- becomes something from which a lesson may be learned.

It’s also a novel about imagination and about the power and value of art as a potentially redemptive force in a nightmare situation. Pip gives Matilda a focus for an increasingly precarious and fragile life: ‘I had come to know this Pip as if he were real and I could feel his breath on my cheek. I had learned to enter the soul of another.’ It’s not really a plot spoiler to reveal that eventually Matilda makes it out of there alive, for, if she hadn’t, she wouldn’t be around to tell the tale. And Dickens eventually gives her a way to emulate Pip and ‘better herself’ in life.

For so brutal a reminder of atrocities so close to home, this is still an oddly satisfying book that goes on resonating long after you get to the end. It helps to read up on the history of the Bougainville blockade, though that’s not a happy experience for any Australian with a conscience. And it will almost certainly lead you back to read Great Expectations again – or perhaps for the first time.

This Writing Life, or, Someone's trying to tell me something, but I can't quite work out what

Some readers of this blog will be familiar with the work of J.M. Coetzee, and will know that in his novels and essays there is much food for thought on the ethical treatment (or more to the point, the unethical treatment) of animals. The vegetarian Coetzee is known for his literary variations on the theme of human cruelty, and his most straightforward and least complex writing is to do with cruelty to animals and all that that implies.

So as I sat down at the keyboard this morning and was poised to bash out the first word of the last draft of a review of his most recent novel (late, and if my editor is reading this, you are being very nice about it -- the not-being-badgered thing will have its reward when you get this copy later today), wholly concentrating on the keyboard, on the screen, and on the syntax and diction of my opening sentence, the phone began to ring.

And it was nice old Alan from the RSPCA, asking which of their fund-raising lines of merchandise I'd like to buy this time. I don't know why I don't just give them money and tax deduct it, but, for whatever reason, I have amassed an extensive collection of teatowels and chopping boards with wombats and toucans on them. I ordered the 2008 calendars -- Australian Birds and All Creatures Great and Small -- and trudged back to the study.

Begin again from Square One, for the nascent sentence has atomised and blown away. Start from scratch, if I could find it. Ah yes, I was going to say this, and put it together with that, and then I was going to segue to ...

'PRRRRRT?'

Tortoiseshell leaps into lap, kisses my ear, and settles down with her front paws across my right forearm, a position not known for its typing comfort.

Sentence shatters and blows away a second time.

Coetzee would enjoy this scenario, I think, but it's not getting the work done. I'm not game to start again a third time quite yet; I might invoke an elephant, coming trumpeting into this not very big room.

In praise of literature

Of late there have been some particularly shrill trolls around the traps banging on about what a waste of time literature is and how it's all bullsh*t and what a bunch of wankers blah luvvies blah latte blah chardonnay blah blah blah.

Now, one does not usually allow oneself to engage with or be annoyed by trolls, except for the occasional brief passing swipe of a paw, but for some reason it's been more than usually wearing lately. So by way of correction, here -- old news in terms of the event itself, but always worth reading and thinking about again -- is a particularly lovely and pertinent bit from the absolute cracker of an opening speech that the lovely Scottish writer Andrew O'Hagan gave at the Sydney Writers Festival a few months back. (Convolutedly via Matilda.)

'Literature may be entertaining and it may be diverting but its role in a civilised world is neither for distraction nor diversion, but for engagement: every day is Sorry Day in the world of literature and every day is Humanity Day and Contemplation Day and Tolerance Day and Get Your Finger Out of Your Arse Day. Let the word go out. Literature is not Lifestyle – it is Life. It is the news that stays news.'