Archive

When I introduce undergraduates to the work of Maurice Blanchot, I begin with three simple stories. In the first, a philosopher refuses to allow himself to be photographed. Foucault tells of engaging in vig-orous conversation at a May 1968 demonstration with a man he learned only later was the elusive Blanchot. He was the unrecognised colleague, invisible and self-effacing, but also enormously productive (Leslie Hill tells us that his works, if collected, would run to three dozen volumes). The second story is told in Blanchot’s TheWriting of the Disaster (1980), in which a small boy awakens at night, looks out into the blackness and sees no stars, no presence, ‘nothing beyond’. It is a remembered scene, riveting in its clarity, of originary loss and intimations of mortality. The third story is without doubt the most well known. In 1944, Blanchot faced execution by a Nazi firing squad but somehow, mysteriously, ‘escaped his own death’. This bizarre impossibility, the sense of death’s untimeliness and capricious propinquity, marks all Blanchot’s work, his essays, journalism, fiction and philosophy, and infuses it with a pervasively melancholic tone.

The subject of fear and politics has often captured the attention of the political left. Indeed, I am immediately reminded of two wonderful books: In Place of Fear (1952), by the British Labour politician Nye Bevan; and The Fear of Freedom (1941), by the post-Freudian and socialist Erich Fromm. Whilst Fromm set out to understand the roots of fear in the human condition, Bevan sought practical solutions to the most obvious manifestations of fear in a world that had been shaken to its foundations by economic depression, fascism and war. Both were democratic socialists who believed that the insecurities which led to fear could be tackled through political, social and economic change.

For a brief moment following the collapse of communism, it appeared that such a solution might be within our grasp. Some even talked of ‘the end of history’. How wrong they were, as we witness the rebirth of insecurity associated with global warming, international terrorism and nuclear proliferation.

The idea that literary journals gain something by being yoked to a single theme seems to me one of the mildly dubious aspects of the enterprise. I suspect the tendency grows from a fear of disorder – ‘the anarchy of randomness’, as Adam Phillips puts it. But if these organs do require some unifying concept, it should ideally be a determination on the part of their contributors not to be herded into acquiescence with any one position. The true pleasure to be had from their pages is the jostle of selfhoods, the dust and din of competing subjectivities, rather than a communal reinforcement of, or opposition to, the status quo. As with any muster, it is the breakaways that provide the best exercise.

The problem with many ‘big occasion’ publications is that they are written for the occasion rather than for an audience. This collection – the first reference work to cover all the premiers of New South Wales from 1856 until July 2005 – has been published to coincide with the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of responsible government in New South Wales. Happily, however, The Premiers of New South Wales displays none of the failings typical of other ‘landmark’ volumes. On the contrary, this is a valuable and relevant work that merits the interest of non-specialist readers. The authors have profiled the premiers in their social and personal contexts, as well as in their political environments. This extends the appeal of the collection and adds considerable interest. Together, the two volumes provide valuable insights into the evolution of New South Wales from a colony to a state.

In 1993, when he was editor of Quadrant, Robert Manne published a short essay, which is collected in his recent book Left Right Left (2005), called ‘On Political Correctness’. The essay rehearsed some familiar right-wing arguments against this ‘highly intolerant’ doctrine and the threat it posed to academic freedom. Manne’s political opinions have, of course, undergone a considerable realignment in the intervening years, and so has the national political landscape. While the term ‘political correctness’ has proved far too convenient to disappear completely, these days it is heard less often and is generally invoked with less heat. This is partly because, over the past decade or so, it has done its job of denigrating any leftish sounding opinion so effectively.

This eagerly awaited volume is the last in a trilogy which will recount the history of the book in Australia. The first volume, which will cover the years to 1890, is in preparation. Volume Two, A History of the Book in Australia, 1891–1945: A National Culture in a Colonised Market, edited by Martyn Lyons and John Arnold, was published in 2001.

What is a history of the book? The present volume regrettably does not tell us. We need to consult Volume Two, where Martyn Lyons tells us that it is the history of print culture: ‘The historian of the book is concerned not just with the creative imagination but with all the processes of production, including typesetting, binding, illustration, editing, proofreading, designing, and publishing.’ In addition to the history of book production, the history of print culture encompasses distribution and reception, which involves bookshops and booksellers, libraries and librarians, and, by no means least, readers. The promotion of reading and its hindrance (censorship and other factors) are important topics. It is a broad canvas.

Towards the end of her story, Jean Debelle Lamensdorf admits that she ‘wanted to mentally shut out the horror of Vietnam – to remember only a sanitised version of our year out there’. Having spent twelve gruelling months working as a volunteer for the Red Cross, tending to the non-medical welfare of wounded ANZAC troops, Debelle Lamensdorf has succeeded in cleansing this personal account of life during one of modern history’s most bloody wars.

The Liberal Party, in its barren years (1983–96), was consumed in battles over beliefs. The dries took up the cudgels in a war over the nature of liberalism and effectively gained control of the party room. As Paul Kelly has described it, the party torched its Deakinite heritage. John Howard was not central to these battles, but he was the inheritor. His brilliance has been to take the neo-liberal agenda (individualism, choice, markets versus ‘bureaucracy’, the ‘mainstream’ versus ‘élites’), to give it an Australian resonance (by reinterpreting the ‘Australian legend’ as a story of individual battlers) and, relentlessly, to link his profession of beliefs to every policy statement he makes. It is unlikely that most of the punters systematically assess what Howard says in their own voting deliberations, or could complete a test on Howard’s key principles, but impressions have their effects. Recently, when I asked a group whether they thought there was a difference between the parties, a young woman confidently replied: ‘Yes, one party knows what it thinks and gets on with it; the other doesn’t.’