Literary Studies

For some time now literary criticism has been fascinated by the role of naming, and the inscription of the name, in relation to the identity of the self. There are rich pickings to be had from examining autobiography for the way the writer reveals and hides behind the words with which a life is described. And in this era of autobiographical and biographical tumescence, it is most important that the analysis of such writing is done by those with the ability to do so. Think of the recent debates over biographies and autobiographies in Australia and you will quickly recognise how unsophisticated is our general understanding of what is going on when a life is inscribed, and yet how different the living is from the writing.

Bertolt Brecht’s poem, ‘To those born later’, contains the following line: ‘For we went, changing countries oftener than our shoes.’ The publication of this translation of Brecht’s Journals 1934-1955 (written in an e.e. cummings-style lower case throughout) provides an abundant fleshing out of that line, giving a detailed sense of what it meant to Brecht to be an artist in exile, denied the comforts of his culture and language, denied the possibility of seeing the plays he was writing rehearsed or run-through, a process he always regarded as the final stage of writing: ‘all the plays that have not been produced have something or other missing. no play can have the finishing touches put to it without being tried out in production.’

As a preliminary I must say, frankly, that I am hardly interested in canonised literary culture. And having known for a long time that it is absurd to criticise the conventional literary establishment and then expect its attention or affection, I can also say that canonical inclusion has never been a personal aspiration. However, I am alert to the ramifications of the processes of historicisation. I don’t want to sound high-falutin’ but I’ll begin with Nietzsche who began his enquiry into the value of history with a gem from Goethe: ‘In any case I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity.’

Well I’m damned! Ern Malley of all people! It’s been fifty years since I last laid eyes on him. Seeing him again recalls my vanished youth as nothing else could. Angry Penguins, Cecily Crozier’s valiant Comment magazine, the ‘social realists’ upbraiding everyone like so many Marxist Savonarolas, the Jindyworobakians quarrelling with the ‘cosmopolitans’, the Contemporary Arts Society quarrelling with itself – stirring times! But Ern was the epicentre of our cultural storm in a teacup.

I have had a haunted week reviewing the The Oxford Companion to Australian Folklore; haunted by a host of inadequately credited or totally omitted characters and folklore subjects clamouring for their status and value to be recognised. Thus, in that vast penumbra of lost souls, the plaintive cries of characters such as Ginger Meggs, the Magic Pudding, and the Banksia Men, Rolf Harris and Barry Humphries, together with subjects such as Strine, Rhyming Talk, Hanging Rock, Ghosts, and Oral History, have begged for their recognition! And swelling their ranks are those who only got a toehold in the door, so cursory is their mention: Dad and Dave, Joseph Jacobs, Marion Sinclair, Clancy of the Overflow, the Man from Snowy River, et al.

An ancient grammarian who had pondered Horace’s remarks on whether a good poem is the product of natural aptitude (ingenium) or acquired skills (studium) opted for ingenium and produced what was to become a much-quoted aphorism: poeta nascitur non fit, ‘a poet is born, not made’. His privileging of ‘nature’ over ‘art’ is favoured by those anxious to preserve the mystery of poetry by deriving it from an inscrutable faculty called ‘genius’. Others, eager to unscrew the inscrutable, favour the rival and demystificatory claim that poets are made, not born, which enables human interventions to overcome biological determinism.

The first thing to be noted about this collection of essays is that it is aimed at a quite specific market – HSC/VCE students. There is a list of ‘Study Questions’ at the end, and the language of the essays is consistently pitched at an upper secondary school level. Readers who want more complex responses to My Place would be better served by consulting the eclectic bibliography to the text as a starting point.