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James Ley

For there is always going on within us a process of formulation and interpretation whose subject matter is our own selves.

These words appear towards the end of Erich Auerbach’s study of representation in Western literature, Mimesis. First published in 1946, the book has become a classic of twentieth-century literary criticism, but is almost as famous for the circumstances under which it was composed as for its content. It was written between 1942 and 1945 in Istanbul, where Auerbach, a German Jew, was living in exile.

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Meanjin edited by Ian Britain & Overland 177 edited by Nathan Hollier

by
March 2005, no. 269

Meanjin,’ writes Ian Britain, ‘always aims for a blend of the astringent and the convivial.’ A worthy aim, and one that is well realised in its ‘Psychology’ edition. It may simply be a consequence of the theme’s depth and complexity, but On Psychology also feels weightier than previous issues. Britain shares responsibility for this edition with guest co-editor Robert Reynolds, a Senior Research Fellow at the National Centre in HIV Social Research, University of New South Wales. Reynolds contributes an essay arguing for the importance of distinguishing between a valid sense of sadness and full-blown depression. He also seems to have influenced the overall tone. There is a touch of academic dryness about several of the essays and slightly less emphasis on personal reflection, although cover-star M.J. Hyland’s account of her experience of depression is central.

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To celebrate the best books of 2004 Australian Book Review invited contributors to nominate their favourite titles. Contributors included Dennis Altman, Brenda Niall, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Morag Fraser and Chris Wallace-Crabbe.

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There is often a speculative dimension to Rodney Hall’s fiction. Throughout his long career, he has tended to build his novels around alternative histories or unusual possibilities. Past works have imagined scenarios as diverse as Adolf Hitler arriving on the south coast of New South Wales and (where does he get his ideas?) Australia becoming a republic. The Last Love Story is in some respects unrepresentative of Hall’s vivid and expansive body of work. Compared to some of his earlier novels, it is concise and the natural flamboyance of his writing seems a little subdued. The novel does, however, develop from a typically interesting ‘what if?’

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There is a species of Victorian mystery story that is as pure an expression of nineteenth-century rationalism as you are likely to find. A strange event occurs which, at first glance, appears to admit no rational explanation; by the end of the story, it is revealed to have a logical explanation after all. Thus foolish superstition is banished by the pure light of reason. But there is another side to late-Victorian fiction of the unexpected, represented by Henry James’s ghost tale The Turn of the Screw (1898): a darker, slipperier, and far more unsettling narrative in which the supernatural elements are never satisfactorily explained and are charged with menacing psychological overtones.

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When Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude was first published in English, there was an outbreak of what the late Angela Carter called ‘extravagant silliness’. Márquez’s novel was given a rapturous reception that focused on its wondrous exoticism, with scant regard for its grounding in the social and political reality of his native Colombia. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Carter was prominent amongst English writers who, influenced by South American fiction, began to take an interest in folklore and fairy tales, and to incorporate elements of fantasy into their work. But she recognised that the apparently strange dreams Márquez describes ‘are not holidays from reality but encounters with it.’

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‘The fucken oozing nakedness, the despair of being such a vulnerable egg-sac of a critter, like, a so-called human being, just sickens me sometimes, especially right now. The Human Condition Mom calls it. Watch out for that fucker.’

The speaker of these lines, fifteen-year-old Vernon Little, is a literary descendant of Huckleberry Finn.

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