Literary Studies

Once the prerogative of connoisseurs and bibliographers, the study of the book has become an increasingly popular field of cultural history. Earlier scholarship was concerned with rare and variant editions of canonical texts; recent work is more inclusive, comprehending a wide range of popular and ephemeral literature that extended the reach of print. Attention has turned from production to consumption, tracing the spread of literacy and analysing the changing interests of readers. Hence Martyn Lyons and Lucy Taksa’s Australian Readers Remember (1992) sits alongside a number of similar studies for other countries.

Through the significant cultural presence of Heart of Darkness, I am regularly confronted with the work of Joseph Conrad in my everyday life: an elephant in Disney’s Tarzan exclaims ‘the horror’ at the sight of a human camp; a young man reads the novella on a ship bound for Skull Island in the latest King Kong; and, during the fortnight while I am writing this review, Radio National is broadcasting a serialised reading of the novella each afternoon. In Postcolonial Conrad: Paradoxes of Empire, Terry Collits wonders ‘how … we may read and understand Conrad nowadays’. With so many cultural claims to just one Conradian text, such a question is timely.

However respectful its intentions, literary biography invariably takes on the character of a siege, laid by oneself against another. Every biographical subject, unwittingly or not, builds fortifications to repulse such invaders, and George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) was no exception. He did, however, adopt a characteristically sly defence. His castle was regularly open to the public. Inside, he would be on hand to guide visitors through its rooms, an amusing if distant squire, knowledgeably arguing the architectural merits of his own, not insubstantial, additions, and giving the punters their money’s-worth with polished tales of eccentricity, debt and alcoholism for each of the family portraits. He was both garrulous curator and living artefact in a museum of his own design.

In the last essay in this collection, Robert Macfarlane touches on the main reasons why Peter Carey’s novels ‘have proved so very attractive to academic exegetes’, in their combination of the postmodern and the postcolonial. Just how attractive is demonstrated in the sixty-page bibliography, which is sure to be one of the most used parts of Fabulating Beauty, especially by overseas readers without access to the invaluable AustLit. Editor Andreas Gaile, a young German academic, notes in his introduction that Carey is now ‘the most widely commented-on living Australian author’. While Patrick White is currently well ahead, with more than twice as many critical items published on his work, Carey is catching up fast. Visit any bookshop, whether in Melbourne, London, or New York, and you will of course find many more titles by Carey than by White. If, as Simon During has argued, White was the perfect novelist for those wishing to argue for the academic significance of Australian literature in the 1950s and 1960s, then Carey has just as obviously caught the dominant theoretical currents of the past thirty years. While Tim Winton may sell just as well and, if ‘favourite book’ polls are any guide, be more loved, no one has yet published a major critical study of his work.

Treasures exhibitions have reached epidemic proportions in Australia since the runaway success of the National Library’s ‘Treasures from the World’s Great Libraries’, which ran from December 2001 to February 2002. Now the National Library has decided to repeat its act, but this time to concentrate on home-grown exhibits. Australia’s ‘great’ libraries, it must be noted, are in this case only the national, state and territory collections, a definition that might put the noses of some of the other major Australian libraries, such as those belonging to the older universities, out of joint.

As an academic teaching in literary studies, I regularly feel compelled to justify my job, particularly in the light of dwindling enrolments. Literary journals and the writers who feature in them, judging by the latest issue of Westerly, also feel pressure to defend their relevance, primarily due to their small audiences. Delys Bird and Dennis Haskell, in an editorial commemorating fifty years of Westerly, pay tribute to the ‘creative and intellectual enthusiasm’ that drives the journal and celebrate its survival in a culture they believe is becoming increasingly visually, rather than verbally, literate. Tracy Ryan, one of the contributors, alludes to a different obstacle: public resentment. Her poem ‘Curriculum Vitae’ summarises public attitudes to writers: ‘Narcissism, egotism, think the world owes you a living, / God’s gift.’ What to do in the face of such indifference and even dislike?

The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms, to take a random example, indicates the challenges facing anyone undertaking a definitive and detailed account of modernism. According to the Dictionary’s author, J.A. Cuddon, modernism is: ‘A comprehensive but vague term for a movement (or tendency) [that] pertains to all the creative arts, especially poetry, fiction, drama, painting, music and architecture.’ As he notes, it is a matter for debate as to whether modernism, ‘as an innovative and revivifying movement’, was essentially over by the late 1940s or persisted well beyond that period. The ‘vagueness’ of the term ‘modernism’ and of its definitions reflects the diversity of artists, works and ideas that it encompasses; and the implicit contradiction of Cuddon’s pairing of the adjectives ‘innovative’ and ‘revivifying’ is suggestive of modernism’s emphasis on both radical originality and engagement with (rather than uncomplicated rejection of) the past.

Reading Luke Slattery’s Dating Aphrodite, I was reminded of dining once with the classical scholar Bernard Knox and the poet Anthony Hecht. Neither man was young: each had experienced remarkable and appalling things during World War II: and both had found ways of transposing those experiences into the register of art. They were at once unillusioned and instinctively creative.

Hands up if you subscribe to an Australian journal. Keep them up if you subscribe to more than one. More than two? If you read them? Cover to cover? Half? More than two articles an issue? Hands up if you look forward to them. Maybe it’s just me, but there’s something that makes me terribly tired when faced with the prospect of Australia’s literary and political journals. I stand in front of the (small) shelf made available for them in my local bookshop and try to muster up the enthusiasm I might feel when faced with a shelf of new books; try to feel excited at the prospect of reading them. I have a couple of subscriptions, and when they arrive, I make a point of tearing the envelope open immediately to have a look. And yet I still have to push past a barrier of resistance to sit and actually read them.