Essays

I came to this book with a question: how will the author select the dozen or so artists upon whom he focuses? Of all the artists in Australia and beyond, why these few? One answer is pragmatic: What Artists See is based, in part, on previously published essays, several from The Monthly, others in exhibition catalogues. Sprague’s book might be understood, then, as an assemblage of previously dispersed parts, a drawing together of discrete pieces under one title. But it is also far more than this.

While reading Notes to John I wondered about the words commonly associated with Joan Didion’s style – verve, discipline, precision, breathtaking diction (she is described as capturing the American 1960s and 1970s like no other writer). Notes to John, a posthumous publication of 150 pages made up of notes Didion made following a series of therapy sessions with her psychiatrist, contains clarity and acerbic wit in places, but in general is made up of writing that is dull, repetitive, and achingly private. Didion, who died in 2021, appears to acquiesce to her psychiatrist, Roger McKinnon. His interpretations of her life are often presented as clichéd banalities and Didion tussles linguistically with him without her usual cutting analysis and humour. It is as if in these notes she has given herself over to the supposedly greater power of psychiatric knowledge and in the process become less sagacious. The sessions cover grief, confusion, the indominable wish to understand more about oneself, and how to manage family traumas. But does the writing add anything to Didion’s body of work? I think not.

Edward Said, who passed away in 2003, is often hailed as one of the last public intellectuals, a literary scholar whose advocacy for Palestine took him beyond the narrow confines of academia and into the media spotlight. With the humanities in perpetual crisis and a culture of anti-intellectualism taking hold, it has been suggested that it is no longer possible for an academic to attain the same level of recognition and cultural influence that Said did. While this may explain the waning influence of critical theory, Viet Thanh Nguyen has demonstrated that intellectuals still have an important role to play in the public sphere. Like Said, Nguyen is a well-respected and prominent literary scholar. Nguyen’s cultural status, however, has arisen through his creative work; his début novel, The Sympathiser (2015), won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted for a high-profile HBO limited series that screened in 2024. Nguyen has been the recipient of a prestigious MacArthur Foundation grant, starred in photo shoots with the actress Sandra Oh, and been profiled in the pages of Vanity Fair. Suave, eloquent, and willing to embrace Hollywood, Nguyen is a media savvy intellectual ready-made for today’s fast paced digital climate. In recent years, he has become an important voice of the Vietnamese diaspora.

‘The time is out of joint,’ says Hamlet. And, as Jacques Derrida tells us in Specters of Marx (1993), it is also ‘deranged, both out of order and mad. Time is off its hinges … off course, beside itself, disadjusted.’ If time was deranged thirty years ago amid the AIDS crisis and the Balkan wars, in the wake of Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ and the first Gulf War, the times have now mutated, become radically other again and again. There is before Covid-19 and after, before generative artificial intelligence and after. There is time before the return of fascism as a global phenomenon and time after: time now as authoritarians surge to power on promises of a return to pasts not only unreachable (and, for many, undesirable) but which never existed in the ways they are now imagined.

In Too Soon Too Late: History in popular culture (1998), Meaghan Morris evokes Walter Benjamin’s ‘poor angel of history’, whose wings, ‘encrusted’ with scholarly citation, now beat ‘sluggishly in the service of a not very lively professionalism’. The critical discourse around W.G. Sebald (1944-2001) sometimes produces a similar feeling of fatigue, not least in its relationship to Benjamin, whose influence on Sebald’s melancholic oeuvre is well documented. 

Tasmania punches above its weight in the literary world, as elsewhere. And not before time: traditionally it always seemed marginal and could be left off the map of Australia on logos. A change came about fifty years ago, with the emergence of the Greens and the campaigns to save Lake Pedder and the Franklin River. Now, what with quality food and wines and MONA and MOFO – plus something of a southward migration given climate change – Tasmania has become trendy. But it remains a place where the past lingers.

Anyone who has read Michael Wilding’s book Milton’s Paradise Lost (1969) will remember what an intelligent and generous critic he is. That book was part of the revival of Milton scholarship in the 1960s, with its skilful reading of the poem’s enigmas: Satan’s humanness, the problems with God. It was also cheering to read Wilding’s scolding of T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis for their superficial and prejudicial readings of the poem.

For a creature born to life as a small songbird, days and nights can be treacherous. At any moment, a goshawk, a cat, or a goanna may be lurking, waiting to turn the songbird into supper. So these pretty little prey objects – scrubwrens and lorikeets and honeyeaters and the like – have developed an astute group behaviour. One bird spots the predator and issues an alarm call. Others hear it and zip out from behind branch and leaf to surround the threat, all of them twitting and hissing and flitting about, a mixed-species hullabaloo that together harasses the predator into pitiful retreat. This behaviour, known as a ‘mobbing flock’, is an evolutionary survival response. It is beautiful in its ingenuity, and the conviction it displays in the power of the collective. It is, to draw a metaphor from the literary ecosystem, an anthological act, a communal relay of meaning born of a shared inner urgency.

John Tregenza’s 1963 study of Australian Little Magazines noted that neither Meanjin nor its near-contemporary Southerly could be characterised as ‘little’, unlike their predecessors and earlier selves. No longer solely dependent on subscription income from a small local band of devotees, both had attracted a wide following. Indeed on transferring his journal from Brisbane to the University of Melbourne in 1945, Meanjin’s Clem Christesen claimed that it had become ‘a well-established quarterly ... with a circulation of 4,000 copies per issue’.