Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Susan Lever

Dear Editor,

In responding to Peter Craven’s broad-brush review of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature in last month’s ABR, which I suppose you ran for the sake of controversy, let me touch on the wider debate about what’s in the book, and why.

In compiling such an anthology, where you obviously can’t have everything, a principle of metonymy comes into play, in which the one is asked to stand for the many. In the Macquarie PEN, this is a principle of inclusion, not exclusion. Where space permits no more, authors are indicated by association or citation, making the whole greater, we hope, than the sum of the parts, more open and many-layered, as anyone will discover who reads the essays and author introductions in the book. Thus Gerald Murnane’s fiction is implied by a superb piece of non-fiction, ‘Why I Write What I Write’, showing him at his best. The only other answer to why the editors did not choose this particular work is that they chose that one, after careful consideration not only of the work itself but of its interaction with other works in the collection. Nothing’s perfect, of course. If readers have suggestions or corrections, we’d be grateful to hear them. See the feedback link on the home page of the anthology website: www.macquariepenanthology.com.au.

... (read more)

Janette Turner Hospital is an Australian-born novelist with an international reputation, though Australian readers often have reservations about her work. She has written some brilliant short stories, but her novels can strain for effect, with insistent intellectual allusions and postmodern shifts of fictional status. Perhaps, though, this is a typical Australian response to an expatriate writer whose work is not immediately accessible. Australian critics have not been as willing to praise Hospital as some North American readers, including Joyce Carol Oates, who, on the cover of Rainforest Narratives, describes Hospital as ‘a writer of consummate craft and visionary insight’.

... (read more)

While rehearsing in Martin Place for the recent Sydney Festival, my daughter found herself dancing on a plinth while a heckler below chanted ‘Wanker!’ throughout. On another platform, her fellow artists, all of them performing their intricately choreographed work, endured the calls of another passer-by, ‘You’re so predictable!’ In Australia, everybody’s a critic.

... (read more)

When applied to art and literature, the word ‘serious’ can be used to suggest a work is substantial and important, not necessarily that it is the opposite of humorous. There is a sense in which Rabelais and Cervantes are serious writers. But the slippage between these two meanings – the fact that our language permits a casual conflation of worthiness and sincerity – reflects a long-standing cultural prejudice which relegates comedy to a second tier, as if a talent for provoking laughter were somehow less praiseworthy than a talent for inspiring pity and terror. Tragedy is often assumed to be profound and ennobling, but comedy’s levelling tendencies, the anarchic implications of mockery and unbridled laughter, are apt to be viewed with suspicion.

... (read more)

Travelling to the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) conference on the morning tram, I marvel at Melbourne’s sophistication and self-regard. In Swanston Street, new sculptures honour John Brack’s satire of Melbourne’s regimented workers, while in front of the State Library there’s a classical portal half buried in the pavement, as if the ancient world lies below. At the Trades Hall in Carlton, the framed wall directory is ‘Heritage Only’, so I follow the photocopied paper arrows to the conference venue. There’s more historical self-consciousness here than in the new National Museum in Canberra. Banners assert the importance of eight hours’ work, recreation and rest, and there is a massive socialist realist representation of good Australian workers toiling to keep the country alive. We’re in the sacred place of the Left: Frank Hardy, Stephen Murray-Smith, Judah Waten surely haunt us here. 

... (read more)

In the New Country by David Foster & Studs and Nogs by David Foster

by
May 1999, no. 210

At the end of The Glade Within the Grove, D’Arcy D’Oliveres coughs his way towards death from lung cancer. With him dies David Foster’s benign alter ego, the narrator of his comic Dog Rock novels. Of course, the ‘Arcy who narrated The Glade had become less sociable and considerably more learned than the postman of Dog Rock, but it seemed reasonable to assume that his demise marked the end of Foster’s fictions in the comic mode. Not so. In his latest novel he mixes a good-humoured third person narration with the kind of colloquial dialogues which dominated the MacAnaspie sections of The Glade. In the New Country gives us a funny, more accessible, and more conventional Foster.

... (read more)

Artful Histories represents that extraordinary achievement – a learned critical study, based on a thesis, which is exhilarating to read. While it covers the expected ground, with careful accounts of Australian autobiographies of various types, it also addresses a core problem of current literary debate – the relative status of different literary genres, and the interrelation between writing and life. There is no mention here of The Hand That Signed The Paper or The First Stone (they are beyond the range of the discussion) but McCooey’s elucidation of the relationship between autobiography, history, fiction, and life bears directly on the issues which have kept Australian readers arguing over the past year. At the end of his chapter on autobiography and fiction, McCooey summarises the difference in a seemingly simple statement: ‘Fictional characters die fictionally, people die in actual fact.’ The implications of this are far from simple, and McCooey argues for the maintenance of the boundary between genres on the grounds of moral responsibility.

... (read more)

Bleak Rooms by Peter Goldsworthy

by
May 1988, no. 100

Peter Goldsworthy uses the short story to examine and question elements of the kind of life he leads. There is an attractive lack of pretence in his kind of story; Goldsworthy sketches social situations clearly and succinctly so that he can move on to probe the weaknesses in his characters’ otherwise complacent lives. As the back cover tells us, and the stories reveal, Goldsworthy is a medical practitioner in Adelaide and his fiction is in a tradition which begins with social experience and reflection on it.

... (read more)

Testostero by David Foster

by
April 1987, no. 89

David Foster is obsessed with opposites. He likes to play polarities of place and value against each other: in The Pure Land he contrasted Katoomba and Philadelphia, the sentimental and the intellectual; in Plumbum he put Canberra against Calcutta, the rational against the spiritual. At a talk in Canberra several years ago, he commented that it was the symmetry of the words Canberra and Calcutta that attracted him to the idea of the cities as polarities. Words themselves invite Foster to play games with meaning and suggestion, and he finds an endless source of absurdity in the gap between actuality and the words chosen to label it.

... (read more)

Reading Kevin Child’s book, Men on Women, creates the irresistible temptation to answer on behalf of the women. I can imagine them offering the following kind of replies to their sons and lovers.

... (read more)
Page 4 of 5