Literary Studies

In his Structure of Complex Words (1951), William Empson counted fifty-two uses of the words ‘honest’ and ‘honesty’ in Othello. Nikki Gemmell, the publicity-shy cover star of the latest edition of Meanjin, manages to cram ten references to honesty (her own) into five lachrymose pages of her essay ‘The Identity Trap’, in which she explains that she refused to publish The Bride Stripped Bare (2003) under an assumed name because ‘a pseudonym is a lie’. How comforting it is to know that a writer of fiction should be possessed of such integrity, even if she does say so herself. Gemmell’s revelation does, however, constitute a severe blow to the reputations of George Orwell, Henry Handel Richardson and those lying Brontë sisters.

J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics Of Reading is both a deeply scholarly response to the work of a brilliant and challenging writer, and an act of advocacy for a particular mode of reading, which Derek Attridge characterises variously as ethical, literary, ‘attentive’ and scrupulously responsive to the text. This mode draws on practices of ‘close reading’, while proposing the ethics of ...

Few Australian authors have been so prolific or so well-rewarded for their labours: twenty-six novels, as well as plays and a reluctant memoir; not to mention advances – in the 1960s – of hundreds of thousands of American dollars per book. How many of our writers have sold copies of their works in tens of millions, let alone been translated into twenty-seven languages at last count? None has been so prescient in his fiction, whether predicting papal succession, international terrorism, the quagmire of Vietnam, or another Arab–Israeli war. Yet the author of whom all this is more or less true is largely without critical honour in his own country. The author is Morris West (1916–99), who had the distinction of emulating Charles Dickens by dying at his desk with an unfinished manuscript before him. In West’s case, this was The Last Confession (2001), another of his attempts to understand the brave heretic and Renaissance martyr Giordano Bruno. Of Bruno, West wrote ‘the better I knew him, the more modern I found him’.

‘It is escape not from life, but from literature.’

       (Marjorie Nicolson on the detective genre,

       ‘The Professor and the Detective’, 1929)

I began reading crime fiction in the 1950s and became serious about it in the 1960s, searching out what  scholarship there was then about its history and development, its types and practitioners. So I am probably an atypical reader (and reviewer) of these two books. I read them with the pleasure of familiarity and recognition, being reminded of things I hadn’t thought of in a long time. No little part of that pleasure lies in seeing how others assemble and weigh the components of this genre’s history.

Here is an entry in one of A.D. Hope’s notebooks: it is from 1961: ‘Ingenious devices for letting in the light without allowing you to see out, such as modern techniques provide – e.g., glass brick walls, crinkle-glass, sanded glass and so on – remind me very much of most present-day forms of education.’ This is a representative passage from the notebooks. Lucid itself, it bears on elements of frustration or nullification in experience. As such, it testifies to Hope’s recurrent sense that human beings can easily mislocate their ingenuity, with results that are both memorable and regrettable. In a later notebook, in 1978, speaking of the labyrinth as a model of human life, he writes: ‘Looking back one sees that comparatively trivial blind choices have often determined one’s course and that the majority of people do end up in blind alleys.’ One might contest the generalisation, but will not easily forget the analogy.

Since the publication of the inaugural Best Australian Essays in 1998, Black Inc.’s ‘Best’ series has grown into an impressive franchise that now takes in the Best Australian Stories, Best Australian Poems and Best Australian Sportswriting. That, until this year, the essays, stories and regular Quarterly Essay should all have had a single editor, Peter Craven, seems in retrospect quite extraordinary. It was perhaps inevitable that such an empire would eventually fragment – evolving, say, into a rotating series of guest editorships under Craven’s direction. But his departure from Black Inc. early this year, after a disagreement with publisher Morry Schwartz over the future of the Quarterly Essay series, came as a shock to followers of this series.

In the latter decades of the twentieth century, the idea of ‘culture’ was radically democratised. The meaning of the word shifted away from the old, exclusive definition – culture as ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world’, as Matthew Arnold put it in 1869 – and became a more inclusive concept that took in popular forms. We have become used to the idea that there is no clear dividing line between high and low. There is something liberating about having the freedom to treat popular cultural forms as the objects of serious attention. Even Meanjin, the most venerable and literary of these three journals, can publish an essay – an interesting. well-written and intelligent essay – on a pair of television soaps without it seeming out of place alongside more traditional subjects. But while some barriers fall, others go up. Cultural studies, as the academic discipline that has sprung up to exploit this relatively new freedom, faces the question of whether it should direct itself toward a general, non-academic audience or police the distinction between ‘serious’ academic writing and the kind of analysis that might be found in the mainstream media.