As I’ve mentioned a couple of times before, I’m currently existing in the rather strange zone of being just about to complete a first draft of my PhD thesis, which means that my social life is on hold, as are outings generally. (And I’ve just been saved from impending insanity by getting an extension from my supervisor til Monday.) Anyway, I blogged on Sunday about visiting the Lifeline Bookfest, which as a bibliophile is always one of the highlights of my bookshopping year. I did take some more time out on Monday to pop back in for an hour or so, to remedy the ommission of fiction from my previous visit - so I could relax and get back to writing, feeling as if I’d “done” Bookfest properly.
My modest haul was all Australian fiction, with the exception of a Robertson Davies novel I unaccountably no longer seemed to own - perhaps lent to one of those nasty book thiefs many years ago (I have a good memory for these things, and I’ll be chasing down my obscure Robert Graves and my Montaigne one of these days).
I can’t say I’ve ever been an enthusiastic reader of Australian prose fiction, as such, and I’m not even sure such an enthusiasm would make a lot of sense to me. I’m no literary historian or critic (science fiction and speculative fiction being the only genres where I’ve read a lot of the academic literature), but to me, such a category (and perhaps the idea of a national canon) is just too broad. I did get into a few of the grunge-lit books of the early to mid 90s, and Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip which I suspect is a sort of predecessor, and I’m fond of novels set in Brisbane (and I’ve enjoyed discovering older ones such as those of Vance Palmer and Rosa Praed which I hit on last year when I conceived the idea for a modest research project in local social and cultural history to turn to once I’ve got the business of being Doctored out of the way). I’ve also enjoyed what might be dubbed (in the narrow sense) political fiction, such as Power Without Glory. I’m looking forward to my first taste of Patrick White now that I’ve got hold of The Twyborn Affair.
Again, I don’t have the knowledge to be able to evaluate this claim properly, but I have read over the years - in places like Overland, the argument that much of contemporary Australian literary fiction has taken a turn inward, if you like, at some point in recent decades, and doesn’t engage with broader social and political issues. I think such a claim needs complicating (and I’ll come back to that), and I’m sure it’s a generalisation. Amanda Lohrey’s name is usually cited as an exception to the rule. Perhaps The Hand That Signed The Paper is too, and certainly some of the novels by local authors in the last two decades or so rebut this contention.
Anyway, I was intrigued to pick up M. Barnard Eldershaw’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow at Bookfest. Eldershaw was a pseudonym for the joint work of Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw.
This is what the publisher’s blurb has to say:
Set in Australia of the past and of the future, this remarkable work is two novels in one.
It is the twenty-fourth century. Knarf, a writer, lives in a society of technocratic socialism that has abolished war and poverty through “scientific” laws. Knarf has written a novel which begins in November 1924 and tells the story of an Australian working man, Harry Munster, of his hopes, fears and loves, of his family, their friends and lovers. Through their eyes we experience the terrible years of the Depression: years of rising anger that culminate, at the end of the Second World War, in civil disturbance and the threat of a Third World War. When first published in 1947 these stirring passages were seriously cut by the Government censor: now for the first time the full uncensored text is printed as the authors wrote it. The result is both a warm and vivid portrait of one man and his times, and a prophetic vision of what was to follow - the nuclear shadow which is our common inheritance.
Obviously, because I’ve got so much thesis writing and editing to do, I haven’t had time to dip into it so far, but this seems intriguing to me in all sorts of ways - there are obvious overtones both of “working class writing” and the sort of Edward Bellamy tradition of futuristic political utopian novel, and the censorship issue is fascinating, too, in light of recent events.
The introduction makes clear that both Barnard and Eldershaw’s writing was very closely intertwined with their political commitments. I’m aware from the work of critics like Ian Syson and William Hatherell that this was very common indeed through a large part of the last century. In fact, I wonder whether the politicised culture wars discourse of the “luvvies” doesn’t involve a certain projection of a McCarthyite anti-communism of 1950s vintage onto today’s largely depoliticised “arts community”. I don’t think we do see such an intimate link between politics and writerly culture now, and I’d be fascinated to learn why.
So, back to the question of what constitutes “political fiction”. In an otherwise fairly disappointing article on that topic in Bookforum, Morris Dickstein does ping one aspect correctly - the shifting boundaries and the relationships between the (constructed) public and private. You might observe that one of the other books I picked up on Monday was a rather dated history of Victorian literature, which contains the obligatory chapter on the “social problem novel”. I suspect a lot of the stereotypes of what is and is not political fiction go back to this sort of criticism, and were actually a frame imposed on the Victorians - for instance, Anthony Trollope, of whom I’m very fond, was often subjected to analyses in the 1950s and 1960s questioning whether Can You Forgive Her? properly belonged to the sequence of the Palliser or parliamentary novels. Too much domestic politics, too little parliamentary politics, was the verdict. Trollope, and his more recent appreciators, knew better, of course.
Anyway, I’m not 100% sure where I’m going with these musings, but I’d be very interested in hearing what others’ thoughts on all this may be.
You seem to be grabbing thesis-avoidance strategies with both hands … and who can blame you? (I’m supposed to be writing system documentation at the moment … )
Heh!
You can’t work on it 24/7. About 12 hours a day at the moment is what I’m doing. Down time is necessary!
Mark,
Good ro see you’ve got onto Kylie Tennant and Patrick White. The Tennant book is one of a trilogy - the others are Tiburon ( about rural Australia in the 1930s, and The Battlers (I think) about being on the road during the Great Depression. Ron Tullipan’s March into Morning is also another very good, quite political novel about the Great Depression, a prize-winning novel published in the 1960s.Both Kenneally’s novels about WW2 are, I’m told, well-worth reading, but I’ve only read Cut-throat Kingdom, about the Curtin Government.Its not a major work, but it is interesting. I can’t recall the name of the one I haven’t read.
Now that you’re getting into Patrick White, may I recommend Tree of Man, Voss, Fringe of Leaves, and my favourite, The Vivisector.
Haxby’s Circus, by, I think, Kathleen Susannah Pritchard (though I’m willing to stand corrected on that) and Conardoo [sp.?] are well woth reading, as are Ruth Park’s searing novels about Irish Australia, Harp in the South and Poor Man’s Orange.
You could also have a look at Darcy Niland’s In the past rwenty five years, there is Xavier Herbert’s Poor Fellow My Country, a flawed but magnificent work - I had hoped it would be Australia’s War and Peace, but it ain’t. The two novels on the United Nations by the author of The Coca-Cola Kid, (his name escapes me at the moment) is, btw, utterly brilliant.
I could go on forever, so I’ll stop.
I would perhaps be more critical of how some recent Australian fiction engages with the social and political context rather than of a supposed turn inwards and away from that context. It certainly feels to me like social and political ‘issues’ novels are all over the place lately in one form or another, though I’ve hardly done a comprehensive survey. Richard Flanagan and Andrew McGahan are really obvious examples, but there are lots of others.
I will be very interested to know what you think of the M Barnard Eldershaw. I borrowed it at one point and, for various reasons, never got around to reading it. I’d like to know if I should go back to it.
And enjoy the White - ‘The Twyborn Affair’ is a very interesting book indeed. It’s not ‘typical’ of the earlier work which brought him to prominence (though typical is not really a good word for any of White).
Thanks, Mark.
Just a couple of comments from a non-critic reader.
Frist, MARK WOULD LIKE HIS Montaigne RETURNED, OK?
Second, the famous and infamous “Power Without Glory” has apparently been selling well for decades: a tribute to the talents of Frank Hardy. But why does this book stand out so much amongst the titles published by the Australasian Book Society (?name?) - were they turgid? weighed down by CPA orthodoxies? dull caricatures? I know FH published PWG privately. Then scored another book in telling the tale of the secret printing and his trial. In the confined spaces (so we are told) of 1950’s publishing in Australia, could his work have seen the light of day by any other route? The Realist Writers Group no doubt fostered fellowship amongst budding writers, but again political correctness seems to have stunted its members? FH flourished as a writer when he found commercial publishers, but seems to have been a dinkum Aussie bullsh*t artist and hopeless addict to racetrack gambling. Poor bastard. His name DID lend weight to the Gurindji agitation, however well or badly he treated then. My difficulty with PWG is that as a Melbourne lad I was informed it was a ‘roman a clef’ and took every incident in the book seriously, as fact. Yes, very stupid to do so.
Subsequent reading persuades me that FH weaved a web of innuendo, gossip, rumour and untruth together with fact and supposition, in crafting PWG. The publicity around the TV series (ABC-TV) seemed to suggest that PWG portrayed truths, however inconvenient they may have been to the Lib/Labor/Nat establishment circa 1950.
Anyway, it’s a fascinating case study. There’s a whole industry built up around it, and I apologise for adding my drop to the steaming heap.
cheers
Oh my, where to start. (I wrote my own PhD on Australian fiction.) Mark, I wonder how you’d classify Jessica Anderson’s (author of the much better-known Tirra Lirra By the River) The Commandant, 1974 or 5 I think, which is a short, intense novel based on the last year or two of the life of Captain Patrick Logan, who went down in history as a brutal commandant overseeing the Moreton Bay penal settlement around 1830. It went out of print years ago and was never that well-known to start with but it is one of my favourite Australian novels evah.
Much of this novel seems ‘domestic’ — focusing on Logan’s wife and sister-in-law and the wives of one or two other officers at the settlement — and much of it is about what isn’t or mustn’t be said, so there’s a play between silence and sometimes-violent action. The focalisers are nearly all female characters who observe and mediate. The novel while in no way didactic or overt is ‘about’ the politics of the British Army, the brutalities of the convict system, the way British political events and trends affected the fates of antpodean exiles, the treatment of Aborginal people the place of women (if any) in a place like Moreton Bay, the gender interactions of the military classes in 1830 and various other overtly political issues.
Obviously it’s got particular resonance for Queenslanders, as has Thea Astley’s A Kindness Cup which was published around the same time, is about a late-19thC Aboriginal massacre, and was very obviously Astley’s response to Australian race relations as she observed them in the mid-1970s.
Admirable as the Overlanders are, they run a well-defined line so it’s probably not enough to depend on them alone for overviews about fiction. Much of the talk in the last few years along these lines has stemmed from two public addresses in particular, one from Drusilla Modjeska at Adelaide Writers’ Week in 2002 when she spoke about the contemporary Australian fashion and passion for writing historical novels instead of tackling the Howard era directly and head-on, and another from David Marr, who said similar things early the following year in a public lecture. But as is obvious from the two examples I’ve given above, historical fiction is as often overtly ‘political’ as not. Besides, of course the whole point of fiction is that isn’t literal or documentary: it works through metaphor, allegory and analogy.
I think there’s been some response to Modjeska and Marr, all the same. Apart from the obvious example of Andrew McGahan, who may be one of the people you’re thinking of, there’s a terrific recent Australian novel by Charlotte Wood called The Children, in which one character, a journalist, locks horns with her siblings and parents about their inattention to international affairs and atrocities.
(Re Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, although still writing under the collaborative ‘brand’ Barnard wrote this pretty much all by herself. ‘Knarf’ is the backwards spelling of ‘Frank’, for Frank Dalby Davidson who was Barnard’s lover for eight years and treated her abominably. I like to think of his name being written backwards as a form of voodoo.)
Hey PC, was Frank Dalby one of them “Realist Writers”? And thanks PC & Klaus for knowledgeable guiding.
I’d agree “The Vivisector” is a great book, but reading it requires dragging your eyeballs across the pages - like swimming against the current. It’s so damn *dense*.
Great book though - really liked the idea of the artist as exploiter of friends/lovers as grist for the mill of artistic production and the weird meta-narrative that slowly arises as you tend to the daily grind of finishing it. Never read the other White book you’ve got though.
Dr Cat, it seems ‘The Commandant’ is available from Sydney University Press - I think I saw it in gleebooks this morning.
Paul Burns, I think you’re referring to Frank Moorhouse as the author of ‘The Coca-Cola Kid’.
Frank Moorhouse was the author of the rwo books on the League of Nations. (Not United Nations, what was I thinking.?) Well worth a look at. Though I’ve always been a Moorhouse fan.
Thanks, Dr Cat, and Klaus - I remembered a prior recommendation of The Commandant, but have so far been unsuccessful in tracking it down. Will have another go!
Yep, I was wondering whether they were working with a sort of pre-feminist notion of what constitutes “political” - perhaps that’s unfair, but it did seem to me that narrative privileged big P Politics. And/or a bit of nostalgia for the days when writerly and activist cultures overlapped very closely - I’m interested, as I say, in whether anyone can point me to anything written about this in particular.
Here is the ‘Classic Australian Works’ series at SUP. Along with Anderson there are a number of other interesting and/or important books available there - Rosa Cappiello’s ‘Oh Lucky Country’ for one.
Cheers!
Incidentally, it’s great to see reprints from publishers of works that are important. Rosa Praed, to whom I referred before, owed her republication to a series from Pandora on Australian women writers edited by Dale Spender in the 80s. And I always keep an eye out at second hand book sales and shops for anything from Virago - who were responsible for the republication of the Eldershaw book.
It’s a satirical work, right? Right?
Ah yes, with the green spines! A lot of their best stuff is out of print, though they still operate as an imprint of one of the majors, I think.
Klaus K,
Cross poosted on the Frank Moorhouse thing.
Mark,
I’d venture that Moorhouse’s various collections of short stories/discontinuors novels fit what you’re looking for. Coca Cola Kid, The Americans Baby, etc. Well worth a look at, and they’re a delight to read.
Virago’s history:
http://www.virago.co.uk/about_virago.asp?TAG=&CID=&PGE=&LANG=EN
Thanks, Paul, I’ve got some of Moorhouse’s books picked up at previous bookfests. One of the unplasant things about doing a PhD (and I know I’m not the only one) is having to take a vow of abstinence from reading (much) fiction. I think I need one of those holidays where you sit in a cabin at the beach or in the mountains for a couple of weeks with only a pile of novels for company.
Anyway, I’d best get back to the business in hand!
Mark,
did you read the whole Higher Ed review? (on another thread)
You certainly fit a lot into your “down time”
Not as much as Greta Scacchi was to look at in Coca Cola Kid, but to be fair few things are.
Good luck with the toil. Best alternative involves fresh air and mindless yelling. Try a rugby game over the weekend.
Much the same when you’re writing and researching a book, Mark. I can’t remember the last trime I read some fiction that wasn’t !8C since I started my current project, or for that matter a history that wasn’t in some way related. Did indulge myself today though - bought The Longest Decade.Have already got 5 18C history books on the go, and 1 17 C . (Dampier’s Voyages.)
Still, its worth it in the end.
Try not to get too distracted till its all over. I reckon people sometimes go a bit slow at the end of a postgrad degree unless there’s a deadline looming.
I know didn’t like leaving the university cocoon.
Just a couple of quotes from some academic-writers. Both argue that form, including genre, is also political:
Fiction dealing with politics successfully is responsive to the forces of society; these forces manifest themselves in the cultural area, have their aesthetic expression. In political fictions we would expect to find not only the political conflicts of social choices, but also the aesthetic conflicts of fictional choices.
Michael Wilding, Political Fictions 1980: 5
Aesthetic questions are inseparable from the political questions because how you tell a story is a politics unto itself. Naturalism is a politics, realism is a politics. The way you tell the story is the politics of the story. It’s not simply the content, as in the events as such.
Amanda Lohrey
Has anybody read Anthony Macris’s Capital, volume one? Mark, you might like it, much of it is set in Brisbane in the 1970s.
Morris Dickstein, not Wickstein. His article is about novels explicitly concerned with politics, and I cannot for the life of me see what’s disappointing about it.
Not central to the argument, but he does suggest that Jameson is a ‘postmodern theorist’ rather than a ‘theorist of the postmodern’. I’m disappointed by that.
Two of the most obvious names here are your fellow Queenslanders David Carter and Carole Ferrier, who have done a huge amount of work in this field over many years. Ferrier’s Gender, Politics and Fiction (a collection of essays by various contributors) was published by UQP in 1985 and again in a revised edition some time in the 1990s. Carole also edited a collection of letters among six Australian women writers all more or less known for their various levels of political engagement and activism — Barnard and Eldershaw, Jean Devanny, Katharine Susnnah Prichard, Miles Franklin and Eleanor Dark (I think) — called As Good as a Yarn With You, in which these issues are discussed at length and with a mutual understanding of various givens about the political culture of the literary culture, if I can put it like that. (There’s a particularly lovely letter from Franklin in Sydney to the still-defiantly-Communist Prichard in Perth saying that on her forthcoming literary visit to Perth she’d really love to come and stay with Prichard just to annoy Menzies.)
Dave Carter has done a great deal of work on Judah Waten and the Communist Party including a full-length biography of Waten. Pat Buckridge’s biography of Brian Penton addresses this subject as well, in fact any autobiographies and biographies of writers from the late 1920s through to the early 1960s would have to have something to say about it (although Michael Wilding put the boot into Hazel Rowley’s bio of Christina Stead in his review for not paying enough attention to the political dimension of Stead’s life and work).
There’s also a really interesting book by Fiona Capp called Writers Defiled: Security Surveillance of Australian Authors and Intellectuals 1920-1980.
The Moorhouse books on the League of Nations are called Grand Days and its sequel Dark Palace and they are terrific. I’ve heard mutterings of a third in this sequence which I hope are true.
Thanks PC.
Thanks, Ag, for the quotes and the suggestions, and thanks, Dr Cat, for the recommendations! Strangely I haven’t read much of Carole’s work (except the odd essay in Hecate) - perhaps I’ve got an unconscious grudge because in the one English Dep’t subject I did as an undergrad, she gave me a 5 for an essay while Bronwen Levy gave me a 7! If so, I should get over it!
Laura at 29, thanks for the correction - I’ve updated the post accordingly. I have a number of problems with the essay - one being something Klaus alluded to - I think he’s got Jameson wrong and also the argument of The Political Unconscious wrong - I reread it recently because one thing my thesis is looking at is utopian imaginaries and Jameson has been a prolific and useful writer on that. Over and above that, I’d question his claims about engaging with history, and also the scope of the work he discusses - it seems to be a tour of NYRB certified “great American novelists” for the most part, and while he works with a distinction between prewar and postwar authors, the postwar authors he discusses are largely not recent ones. His related claim that s11 hasn’t been worked through well in fiction could be refuted by just one book - Claire Messud’s The Emporer’s Children - and it’s not as though she’s obscure - the book was on the NYT ten best list for 2006 and longlisted for the Man Booker. More broadly, can his rhetorical question asking where the books and films making sense of Vietnam are really be a serious one (even granting his argument that history takes a while to permeate culture)?
FWIW, I also think - despite his argument that political fiction does and should surpass a narrow political setting - that he falls back on it by default. And even there, there is some interesting writing on Washington “inside the beltway” political themes - from Gore Vidal and more recently Neal Stephenson for example.
Can anyone who’s read Power Without Glory by Frank Hardy recommend or derecommend it?
Ah. Ta for that, Ambigulous.
What no Fabio? http://www.fabioifc.com/page4.html
I couldn’t resist… I went the other day but only bought one book! Edmund Burke’s “A Vindication of Natural Society”… a very interesting book, given that it is considered by some to be the first example of philosophical anarchism. Of course, an older (and wiser?) Burke denigrated the book as a piece of satire…
H&R,
You will be one of many thousands who’ve read it, if you do. “The Hard Way” is about its writing. Several books on John Wren are available. “Red Letter Days” is about the Communist Party at that time and some of its leading members’ attitudes to literature and to Frank Hardy.
Jenny Hocking’s biography of Frank H paints a generally sympathetic portrait. But a slightly earlier book by a former CPA member (Pauline Armstrong?) and near contemporary of Hardy says he was a nasty rogue. Dr Cat could provide better guidance than me. Several of the authors she cites (Devanny, Prichard) figure in stories of Hardy during the 40’s and 50’s.
But there have been so many other Australian political novels - see above!
cheers
Mark. “It seems to be a tour of NYRB certified “great American novelists” for the most part” ?? Come on….this is not worthy critique. (especially when the key novelists Dickstein is writing about are Conrad, DeLillo and Doctorow!) It reminds me of undergrads who look down their noses at novelists like Toni Morrison because they are popular with the Oprah crowd.
You have every right to be disappointed, but for myself, I thought it was a very good, discussion-opening essay, it reflected and interpreted what I’ve repeatedly found reading and teaching American literature. He makes a good if necessarily compressed and general (Bookforum) case for why recent novels about 9/11 have not achieved the remotest shred of the interpretative power and authority of novels like The Book of Daniel, and if Dickstein’s idea of Marxist critical practice doesn’t tally 100% with Jameson’s, well I think that is simply legitimate and critical disagreement. Not getting FJ “wrong”.
“More broadly, can his rhetorical question asking where the books and films making sense of Vietnam are really be a serious one”
He’s not asking this, though. He’s noting that pundits like to ask such questions, in the immediate aftermath of calamities, and they ask them because the books and films the public is offered inevitably seem thin and journalistic (I think most of the 9/11 novels and movies are minor, fey, very unsatisfying things, and I am a strong admirer of the writers (Safran Foer, DeLillo, Amis, Updike.) And he goes on to say something I think is borne out by these novels: “History needs time to simmer before the novelist can digest it.” Again, The Book of Daniel is the touchstone there (and it certainly does profoundly address America’s involvement in the (Cold) Vietnam war, but not in a way that uncomplicatedly ‘makes sense’ of that era.)
The only issue I can see with what Dickstein’s written is that he doesn’t say anything about Mao II, which as a sort of political novel _about_ a postmodern novelist attempting to keep history at bay, anticipates and fictionalises some of the problems he’s observing. But that book was so proleptically far ahead of its time that the rest of us are just beginning to catch up anyway.
But Laura, he does get Jameson wrong - he is basing his critique of Jameson’s position on an apparent misunderstanding of what Jameson is actually arguing. I don’t know what to conclude from that, but on this point I agree with Mark.
Laura, I was thinking of the time he spent discussing Roth and Mailer - that’s what I meant.
Also, his rhetorical question refers to “critics” as well as to “pundits” - given the rest of the argument, I thought he was identifying himself as one of the critics concerned. Surely that would be supported by the comparison between Doctorow and post s11 novels?
FWIW, I’m a big fan of Doctorow.
He spends a lot of time talking about Trilling - someone whose work I don’t know, so I skimmed that bit. It seemed to me that his reading of Trilling was fairly crucial to the overall point, and so he lost me a bit there (obviously that’s not his fault!)…
And in the rhetoric of the piece, the quote and interpretation of Jameson does seem to occupy a strategic position, so I do think it’s important that he understand what Jameson was actually saying.
But I agree it’s a good discussion starter!
Mark, it looks like it’d please you if I were to write a Brisbane-based contemporary fiction novel with political content.
Linda Jaivin meets Arundati Roy. Oooh - what a beautiful thing.
I’ll see what I can do.
Elissa.
Oh - and Lifeline Bookfest has its own domain for the first time ever. I fought hammer and tong for that. Thanks for linking to it! I think you’re the first!
Elissa.
Or “frist” even, Elissa!
Sign me up now for the book launch of your novel!
There is indeed a third Moorhouse volume in the works and it certainly seems to have politics with a capital P for its subject matter — this is him talking to Stateline Canberra about it in 2005, and there’s nothing to suggest he’s abandoned the project since:
He said at the end of 2007 that it was ‘at least 18 months from completion’, so we won’t be seeing it for a while.
H&R wrote:
I’d cautiously recommend it - a pretty workmanlike piece of writing, but historically interesting in itself and offers a pretty neat perspective on the Catholic Church / irish / working class intersection of culture, religion, politics and class. Not sure it’s particularly accurate with regards to John Wren but I’m not a historian (Paul Burns can help us there). You can find it at any school fete for $1, I had the impression as a child that it was standard issue in Australian households, alongside a Good News bible and a copy of Rod Marshs memoirs about getting his ball stuck in the rough and sinking 20 cans of Fosters on the flight to blighty.
I read it a long long time ago. I found it compelling reading at the time - probably in part because it was at the same time (as an undergrad) I was really getting into labour history. It’s certainly a very involving story, but at this distance in time, I can’t really recall what I thought about its literary qualities as such - but maybe that speaks for itself and David is right about “workmanlike”.
So, what other advice is there (other than PC’s) on books set in Brisbane? (I like Janette Turner-Hospital’s “The Last Magician”, partly for the SEQ refs.)
Klaus - I don’t agree that it’s a misunderstanding of The Political Unconscious. It’s a strong reading. If I was marking this essay (hypothetically of course, I would not actually presume to be awarding marks out of ten to the work of the president of the ALSC) I’d write ‘you’re perhaps not being 100% fair to FJ here, but in the context of your full argument your reading of him is justified.’) I think it’s a plausible reading, actually, and the implication is that the present universal acceptance of the truisms we got at about the time FJ wrote this book have further eroded novelists’ capacity to think in the simultaneous multiple perspectives and frames of reference demanded by a coherent, committed, political novel about the realities of the present. I don’t happen to agree with this myself, because we are still getting exceptional books like Carpentaria, but I think it does represent the beginning of an appropriate account of why otherwise good novelists like Martin Amis have suddenly begun to write limp sensation fiction, and why there is so much whiny first person individualist instant-broader-significance fiction being written and published (coughElliotPerlmancough). It’s not that an individualist, first-person account can’t have reach and resonance and extension, of course, it can - but too many novelists now expect that a story about one person’s or one family’s private & singular perspective on a fundamentally public event will automatically have broader significance, because of course as everyone knows, the personal IS political.
You said you didn’t like that he called Jameson a ‘postmodern theorist’ - well, in 1981 FJ was a Marxist literary critic interested in modernism, ie not a theorist of the postmodern, and I took from Dickstein’s characterising him thus that he regards Jameson, in this point at least, as a symptom of postmodernity rather than an explicator of it.
Christine: Johnno, by David Malouf.
Oh, that’s clever.
That puts the finger exactly on what the limitations of Perlman’s work are (so far). It also makes me feel better about not wanting ever to read any Ian McEwen again. And feel compelled to renegotiate my own entire blogging practice, which I’ll do today after I’ve washed the teatowels in cold water and hung them on the line. (See what I did there?)
Carpentaria’s a terrific example of the way round this, too. Coetzee also sees and negotiates the problem, albeit quite differently, in Diary of a Bad Year.
Christine, I suggest Jessica Anderson’s Tirra Lirra By the River if you haven’t got much time and Venero Armanno’s The Volcano if you have; they are both wonderful. I think the latter is the single most underrated Australian novel since the turn of the century.
If you are up for some nonfiction too then Malouf’s 12 Edmonstone Street is terrific and Gwen Harwood’s Blessed City (letters from her as a young woman in wartime Brisbane, a city she loved and wrote about a lot) is hilarious.
I think you are giving too much to Dickstein on this one. From my reading the reference is just intellectually lazy. Why not just call Jameson a marxist? And if, as you say, he is reading Jameson as a symptom of postmodernity, then why not say that? The reason I found it disappointing is because in my reading Dickstein is in that phrase continuing the tradition of putting any theory one disagrees with under the heading of ‘postmodern’. If Jameson is a ‘postmodern theorist’ then so is Dickstein, as far as I can see, the category now being so broad.
Of course, it’s not central to Dickstein’s argument that he give an adequate account of Jameson’s intellectual genealogy. More important perhaps is that he give a sound account of the sections of ‘The Political Unconscious’ he disagrees with, and I’m less inclined to disagree with his reading of that, although it’s a (necessary?) simplification.
On the question of Mark’s ‘tour of NYRB certified “great American novelists”’ line: I think that this is somewhere where disciplinary context becomes really obvious.
If I understand the point being made, this is a questioning of the assumptions guiding the assembly of a group of texts for consideration. It’s a classic reflective social science move. I agree, to the extent that Dickstein is making untheorised assumptions about what constitute ‘worthy’ texts for consideration.
However, Dickstein is relying on an alternative disciplinary framework to isolate his source material: his choices may be untheorised within the piece as presented, but within the broader context of the disciplined study of American literature - which I see Laura is very familiar with - there is a tradition of reading that establishes the worthiness of these texts through discussion of their merits, disputed readings and so forth.
Well, that’s my reading of that point anyway.
Well I guess I don’t think the whole essay is about Fredric Jameson. I guess that’s why Dickstein doesn’t labour the point. In a publication like Bookforum, you need to be crisp and focused. Certainly the finer points are always blunted in those circumstances. Lazy? You must find coming up with broad synoptic stuff like this easier than I do, I guess.
Point taken about Dickstein being also a postmodern if it’s a periodisation, but in fairness to him, he is sketching a preliminary, heuristic spectrum which has Disraeli at one end and FJ at the other.
Pav, I will read Diary of a Bad Year.
Klaus, I’ve been teaching 20th C American lit for a few years, focusing on modernist & postmodernist novels, and have just enough grasp of the field to be uncomfortably aware of the huge gaps in my knowledge of it. Most of the books in my thesis are 20th C American. Dickstein’s writings on American fiction (esp. Gates of Eden, are actually readable and useful, for teaching purposes, unlike the vast majority of academic publications, so I might be being too kind to him. Still prefer that to being too strict.
three points on the NYRB thing: one, Lionel Trilling may the best known cold war literary critic America produced but he has zero reputation as a novelist so that breaks the ‘certified’ scheme then and there.
two, when the NYT last year (or the year before?) published a list of the ‘best’ contemporary American novels / novelists, with the expected candidates at the top, I was deeply saddened to read so many Americans channelling their valid discomfort with this sort of silly listmaking into scornful comments on the ‘middlebrow’, ‘pandering’ qualities of books like Beloved or The Human Stain or Underworld, and even Jesus’s Son. The notion is that these books and their writers are only so highly valued because they are designated O.K., they have cachet and prestige of a worthless kind (Oprah), and in themselves they’re not that special. Tall Poppy stuff, and it’s made me very suspicious of sweeping, under-argued dismissals of writers in that contemporary canon.
The third point is that some of these allegedly too-prestigious novels continue to set my head on fire and exceed my capacity to exhaust them, so it puzzles me when other people write them off as an over-determined glorified publishers list.
I would have said Dickstein chose to discuss many of the books he discussed because of the reasonable assumption that most US readers of that generalist periodical would know, or know of, many of them: it’s not a disciplinary context perhaps so much as a lingua franca consideration.
Laura and Klaus K, top discussion, enjoying it v much. You’re reminding me of why I loved American Lit so much as a callow young woman. (And also of why I prefer reading fiction to theory. :-/ )
Here’s a post S11 novel by Ken Kalfus, richly dark:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060501405
but it’s comedic (be warned).
His “The commissariat of enlightenment” is more overtly political, concerning Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
Australian political comedy: the Murray Whelan series by Shane Moloney, inc an introduction to the labyrinth of ALP factions (Victoria). http://www.shanemaloney.com/books/book/sucked-in
very lightweight, and funny (IMO)
This http://www.amazon.com/Caligula-President-American-Through-Tyranny/dp/1596915889/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213319456&sr=1-3 is the forthcoming Condition-of-America novel I’m hanging my hopes on. Looks utterly demented and great.
“it’s not a disciplinary context perhaps so much as a lingua franca consideration.”
This may be the case, but in the context of literary studies it’s probably more accurate to say that the work of disciplinary ‘canon’-creation is done at the intersection between non-academic and academic criticism, with a number of individuals bridging that gap - Dickstein being an example. I see this as disciplinary in the broad sense, then, though the types of readings generated will differ at different points on the spectrum. The point is that a broad set of texts and authors is built up over time, and I would argue that this process is conventional and not theorised as it takes place in a way that I would call disciplined. Participating in the ‘discipline’ (or maybe just conversation?) thus involves cultivating familiarity with these conventions rather than working from first principles.
I should add that I don’t see these conventional forms of knowledge - insofar as they are produced in this way - as easily dismissable simply because of that. If anything, I would urge those making interdisciplinary gestures like Mark’s to be very conscious that identifying something as un- or under-theorised is only one part of an interdisciplinary conversation.
“Certainly the finer points are always blunted in those circumstances. Lazy? You must find coming up with broad synoptic stuff like this easier than I do, I guess.”
I’m definitely being lazy in my accusations of laziness: I’m pretty much just sensitive to the word ‘postmodern’ and start to read closely when it is used. In this case Dickstein is simply participating in a kind of public discourse shorthand not of his making: given he is an academic, I was disappointed by that. If even ‘we’ don’t want to get it right - or at least avoid the most obvious pitfalls - then what hope is there for the non-academic crowd?
One solution: the word ‘postmodern’ should be forced into an embittered retirement, left to mutter about meta-narratives under its breath while working the pokies at the RSL. Or better yet to sit on it’s porch hurling theory-laden abuse at passing texts who are just going about their business.
Word, Klaus!
Christine - on books set in/about Brisbane, Last Drinks by Andrew McGahan, A Place Among People by Rodney Hall, Reaching Tin River by Thea Astley, Lives on Fire by Rosie Scott, and Dr Cat has already mentioned Jessica Anderson, and Laura’s mentioned Malouf’s Johnno. When it comes to Venero Armanno, I’m quite partial to Firehead, which is set partly in New Farm where I live, though I’ve got friends who think it overly sentimental and too Isabel Allende/Magical Realism - ish.
I’m conscious of that, Klaus, I hope! And also conscious that I’m outside my terrain.
It might be relevant to add that there’s a lot of stuff written - not just from the sociological and/or cultural studies perspectives - on the processes of canonisation, as I’m sure folks here know.
Re Power Without Glory.
What Wren (indeed the Wren family) took exception to, from memory, was the depiction of Wren’s personal life, especially his marriage.
One would have to be careful using it as a primary source for the period, without consulting an authoratative biography of Wren,various histories of the Labour movement, the DLP, the Catholic Church, and for that matter, the history of crime and business in Melbourne.I wouldn’t attempt a history of the period without looking at it, but mainly as a guide to the perceptions of the far left, and one would have to take Hardy’s other writings on it into account, as well as any positive and negative critiques of the book.
Even after all this time its still worth a read - a real page-turner.
To me the novel that really captured the essence of an Australia that no longer exists is My Brother Jack. IMHO George Johnston is one of the great Australian writers, and My Brother Jack was his finest achievement.
And will abandin my 1*C regimen temporarily to read Moorehouse’s new book immediately it comes out.
As I said, I don’t know who Trilling is/was, so to the extent that my argument is wrong because of ignorance of him, I’m happy to concede that!
Well, he was a very interesting and clever writer, but Mark, I don’t want to drag you or anyone else into talking about writers or topics that you’re not interested in.
I guess Dickstein was just a discussion starter for me, Laura - I didn’t really set out to critique him initially, and probably I was unfair to characterise him that way - the Jameson thing stuck out like a sore thumb to me in terms of my interests and that probably coloured my view of the piece.