Melinda Harvey

Back in 2007, his academic cap firmly fastened, David Sornig wrote in the pages of Antipodes: ‘Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the city [of Berlin] has, more than any other, become thought of as the place where, in Fukuyaman terms, history actually ended. In this sense it is the eschatological city par excellence.’ It is a curiosity of sorts that Australian writers have been in the front stalls documenting this apocalyptic vision.

Like Monaco, journals are sunny places for shady people. Black sheep and dark horses have often found a first sanctuary there. Precarious principalities, they are built on the shifting sands of subsidies, sponsorships and subscriptions. But their lifeblood is won or lost at the roulette wheel of submissions and commissions.

Disaster has always shadowed the traveller. Today’s adventurers differ from their forebears only in the kinds of calamity they have cause to fear. Arabella Edge’s second novel – like her first, the award-winning The Company (2000) – will have readers thanking their lucky stars that shipwreck, at least, has gone the way of history. As its cover suggests, The God of Spring centres on Théodore Géricault’s masterpiece, The Raft of the Medusa (1819) – its painting, its painter and the real event it depicts.

These are hostile times for literary fiction in Australia. New novels are well advised to don flak, not flap, jackets. And it’s not just a simple case of critics sniping from the sidelines, wanting their piece of the action. This is a full-blown civil war involving all the vested interests – publishers, editors, journalists, publicists and booksellers – not just writers and readers. The smarting adjectival arrows continue to find their targets. Current fiction is too dreamy, starchy, inconsequential, ingrown, belletristic, portentous. While our non-fiction writers have been doing time in South American jails and running the gauntlet of spy networks, our best novelists have been tending the lily-livered genres of historical fiction and fable. Many of them have been accused of skedaddling off to the library at a time when a confrontation with the forces of xenophobia, philistinism, fogeyism and greed is more than ever required. Novel-writing, in a word (and it’s one that has been flung around with a degree of passion recently), has become ‘gutless’ storytelling.

Evil empire or fellow citizen? It seems to me that the arguments and counterarguments about America’s role in the world today run parallel to the debates concerning cultural studies’ standing in the humanities. It’s a thought that would have Raymond Williams rolling in his grave, of course. As an academic discipline, cultural studies was born Marxist, and reared to champion the local, the underdog, the oppressed. But intervention of all kinds, good and bad, is a form of influence. Act on behalf of others and for every round of applause, there’ll be a competing cry of indignation. Perhaps I should declare my hand? I’ve been in and out of English departments for the last fifteen years. I feel a sense of overwhelming gratitude to cultural studies for loosening literature from New Criticism’s explication de texte. That said, I mourn the loss of a community of readers that the canon – and the existence of English departments, discrete unto themselves – ensured. I also baulk at the idea that readers are mere consumers – that catch-all term – as if curling up with a novel was experientially no different to eating, shopping or watching television.

As the late Susan Sontag noted, interpretation tends to fall into two opposing camps. The first kind, ‘aggressive and impious’, treats works of art as landscapes concealing mineral ore: it ‘excavates, and as it excavates, destroys’. The other, by contrast, resembles less the pit-worker than the more distractible traveller who, so thrilled by the picturesque surrounds, decides to remain awhile: it ‘see[s] more, to hear more, to feel more’. These critical tendencies are still at war, forty years on. In a nutshell, this is the contestation between academic and journalistic writing. Australia’s interdisciplinary periodicals are the ambulances – and the ambulance-chasers – scrambling back and forth across its frontline.