New lands, new literature

Dhvanyaloka, the Literary Criterion Centre at Mysore, derives its names from a classic Indian work of literary criticism and, by way of Cambridge, from T.S. Eliot’s journal of the 1920s. The Indian work saw literature as a spreading of the light, Eliot saw it as the maintenance and renewal of tradition. Mysore, Professor C.D. Narasimhaiah applies these two principles to the study of Commonwealth literature. The term Commonwealth literature is itself unsatisfactory. It puts the emphasis on the particular political phenomenon which gave rise to the nations in which this literature is being written, but this is not necessarily, or even often, a matter of concern to the individual writers. Yet the alternative, new literatures in English, has its own problems, for in most cases it is the language rather than the literature which is new. In India this is particularly true, as writers as diverse as R.K. Narayan and Raja Rao try to explore in English the problems that arise as a much older culture adapts to the modern world. In black Africa, things fell apart when the white man came, and the new nations of that continent all combine diverse mixtures of linguistic and cultural traditions. The experience of colonialism, and the attempt to cobble together from the scraps it has left something to take its place, therefore tends to be a central concern of African writers. The West Indies are even further removed from any single cultural origin, and its writers face a choice of either taking the path of the expatriate to internationalism or of attempting to construct a new tradition from African roots. In Canada, the problem of the writer in English is to resist the lure of the neighbour to the south, and in South Africa to comprehend the absolute division of experience which the politics of exclusion have enforced on the different cultural traditions. Yet none of these writers is so much creating a new literature as, in Eliot’s sense, extending and changing the tradition of English in order to embody the realities of its new existence as an international language. This does not in any sense mean that we can ignore the existence of national writing, or that we should pretend to be concerned just with good literature, regardless of its origins. There can certainly be an international community of writers in the sense that Milan Kundera uses the term – a community linked by their common concern for the truth and for the right of individuals to pursue that truth as they see it, and by a common possession of a cultural tradition which values our common humanity above the distorting demands of any imposed system. There can also be the kinds of international communities of writers that Kris Hemensley talks about in his introduction to The Best of the Ear, a selection of work from his magazine The Ear in a Wheatfield (Rigmarole, $11.95). Hemensley in his journal sought to publish writers who related to each other rather than to a particular nation, ‘situate Australian writing on an international & modernist map’ and present ‘a poetic analog of the geo-political here’. But such a community cannot be generalised as can the first. The writers represented were all educated, nomadic, urban members of industrial societies, and thus represented a quite specific and limited social formation. Their concern for the deceptions and duplicities of language, and the hazardous enterprise of establishing an individual identity free from the stereotyped experience imposed by language, is a product of a society in which language has become alienated both from its sources and from the felt reality of peoples’ lives leaving only a context of ‘recognizable & universal ennui’. To remake themselves, therefore, the writers have to remake both language and tradition. In the new nations, however, reality is the clash between living or remembered traditions and the imposed uniformity of a global economy of which international English is the expression. Their concern is to remake this language to incorporate their traditions within it. The problem of the writer in developed Commonwealth countries like Australia, where the dominant tradition comes from Europe, is different. These writers move naturally within the English language, but in so doing must resist the power of the metropolitan centres in England and the United States. In so doing they are not creating a new literature so much as diversifying an existing one to take account of different perspectives. British literature itself has been renewed in this century by writers from the provinces and overseas, but in moving to London and writing for the audience it defines they have served, whatever their intentions, in strengthening the centre. In reaction, Australian writers have asserted an aggressive, local nationalism and have thus promoted the myth of a new literature. Yet such writing remains bound by its origins, speaking only to what is distinctively Australian rather than to the Australian experience, which is that of Europe transposed, and thus demands translation. Ironically, those who have succeeded in establishing a distinctively Australian voice within the whole body of literature in English are those who have taken the world as their subject matter but continue to see it from an Australian perspective. David Malouf, with his easy movement from suburban Brisbane to the ends of the Roman empire, and from urban terrorism in Italy back to a shabby Queensland dairy farm, is the clearest example of a writer who has succeeded in making the whole of European tradition at home in Australia, and thus forcing us to look again at that tradition from its imperial origins to its contemporary nihilism. It is no accident that the artist in Harland’s Half Acre transcends futility not only, like Patrick White’s Vivisector, through creativity, but also through the sense of responsibility for others he has learnt amongst the farming relatives of his Australian country childhood.

John McLaren

From the New Issue

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