Australian dreams
Raids on the inarticulate with Malouf and Hazzard and Murnane
Without planning to or realizing it, over the past year or two I have made a project of reading the great Australian novelists Shirley Hazzard, David Malouf, Patrick White, and Gerald Murnane. It wasn’t until I started rereading a book about a (fictional) Australian writer, Elizabeth Costello by the South African J.M. Coetzee, that I realized how deeply I’d fallen down this particular rabbit hole. I can claim no expertise on the topic of Australian literature, but the question is irresistible: what do these writers have in common, and why am I so attracted to it?
My journey began with Shirley Hazzard, out of no particular consciousness of her Austrlianness—I had just heard, correctly, that she was an absolute master of prose. The Great Fire and Transit of Venus are towering novels that work by strange indirections toward an aesthetic effect that depends upon their highly volatile mixture of romance and irony. Here is an author who believes in love, old-fashioned passionate love between men and women, as the shaper of fates, yet who at the same time is fantastically clear-eyed about the twentieth-century geopolitical realities that shape the conditions of those fates, bringing the lovers to apotheosis or destruction with a nearly unfathomable mixture of cruelty and tenderness.
I read The Great Fire first, and was reminded continually of D.H. Lawrence, an impression strengthened when I then read Transit of Venus, which feels a little like a less wooly-minded Women in Love. Lawrence is probably the last really major writer to elevate sexual love between men and women to a metaphysical principle, and in both of her major novels Hazzard is keen to show the dance of courtship and betrayal (but she does not seem especially interested in marriage) as a game played for the highest possible stakes, as a kind of moral wager that offers her characters their only chance at something like happiness or even existential solidity in a world dissolved by war. She writes indelible scenes (as when Caroline Bell in Transit of Venus comes to stand naked beside her unworthy lover at a window, looking down at his fiancée as she looks up at them) and even more indelible sentences. Here, selected at random, is a passage in which nineteen-year-old Caro listens to a string trio performing in a hotel dining room in Granada, and experiences one of the sudden communions of soul to which most of Hazzard’s characters are prone:
Caro’s chair was placed so that she faced the cellist—a woman of thirty or so with white skin that, contrasting at throat and wrists with black crepe, suggested the pallor of torso beneath a dress voluminous as a nun’s. This woman was passing visibly from Madonna youth to dedicated spinsterhood in calm renunciation. Once in a while her dark eyes would meet Caro’s with melancholy, recognizing tenderness, as if to affirm a bond. As if to state: You and I will make no part of that enervating and degrading struggle.
This passage, incidentally, is extracted from a four-paragraph interlude in the novel that is itself parenthetical, preceded by a couple of sentences that might well be the thesis for Hazzard’s whole career: “Though the dissolution of love created no heroes, the process itself required some heroism. There was the risk that endurance might appear enough of an achievement.”
Endurance is also a theme of David Malouf’s. His 1993 novel Remembering Babylon evolved from an arresting incident: in 1846 off of New Caledonia a shipwrecked British sailor named James “Gemmy” Morril was adopted by a tribe of Aboriginals with whom he lived for the next seventeen years. When he came across a European sheep outpost he left his adopted group and approached with his hands raised, crying, “Don’t shoot mates, I’m a British object!”
The confusion of subject and object in the context of 19th-century Australia fascinated Malouf into writing his astonishingly beautiful novel, in which the appearance in a New South Wales town of Gemmy Fairey, a white man who has somehow lost his whiteness, threatens to undo the entire construct of race upon which the colonialist enterprise is founded. No person or part of the little New South Wales community in which Gemmy finds himself is unshaken by his presence, but his most lasting effect is on two near-siblings Janet McIvor and Lachlan Beattie; it’s implied that their Scots identity makes them a bit more existentially pliable than the English settlers. Janet grows up to become a nun and a beekeeper, trying to solve the mystery of how bees communicate by dancing; Lachlan becomes a government minister who never gets over the moment he captured Gemmy as a boy with an imaginary gun. Their lives have turned in more subtle ways around the kind of analogy that preoccupies Sir George, the satirically drawn Governor of Queensland who has “no interest in facts" and who uses his classical education as a kind of cudgel to blunt unpleasant realities. “Being escorted into a little western town of nine pubs and a butcher shop, by a party of two hundred stockmen, he sees himself riding in the company of attendant centaurs. Analogy is his drug. He finds it everywhere.”
If we say that bees dance and that their dance is a kind of message, we are in the realm of analogy akin to personification; the stick that Lachlan pretends is a gun, and that elicits from Gemmy his terrified stuttering claim of British objecthood, is another kind of analogy. In the Australian colonial context a veneer of European culture is enough, or nearly enough, to turn objects into subjects, and to conceal or set aside the brutality of the enterprise—a savagery invariably displaced and projected onto the Aboriginal people from whom the land has been stolen.
For Janet, apiculture (and the withdrawal to a nunnery) offers a retreat from this brutal exchange, though she cannot separate herself from history: the Great War is taking place in the novel’s last chapter, and she has gotten herself entangled with the state security apparatus because one of her correspondents on the subject of bee communication happens to be a German priest. Lachlan has advanced rather than retreating by becoming a politician, but his phantasmal grip on power gets knocked loose when he becomes implicated in Janet’s scandal. But Gemmy himself disappeared from the scene long ago. At the novel’s climax we have been primed to anticipate an act of violence; Gemmy is suspected of colluding with his former comrades and inviting some kind of retributive Aboriginal attack on the colony. Instead Gemmy, who has become obsessed with the seven pages on which his testimony to his life story was transcribed years ago, visits the schoolmaster who transcribed them as if in hopes of reclaiming his soul. He takes seven different sheets of paper (school exercises that the schoolmaster had been grading; clumsy half-coherent scribblings) from him, and vanishes into the bush.
Of Patrick White, whose novel Voss I’m only a quarter of the way into, Malouf said that his writing "goes behind inarticulacy and or unwillingness to speak, writing that gives the language of feeling to people who don't have it themselves." That seems true of the little bit of White that I’ve read, and it certainly seems true of Malouf; throughout Remembering Babylon he renders vivid the inner lives of characters too limited by youth or education or even possession of language to articulate them unmediated. Hazzard’s characters, on the other hand, are hyperarticulate: they are serious-minded, deeply literate people, well-versed in the classics, who in their dialogue and letters present their inner lives with clarity and forcefulness. Sometimes they drop aperçus, like “Peace forces us to invent our future selves”; more often they go on at some length. Here for example is a passage from a letter near the end of the novel written by Aldred Leith, the hero of The Great Fire, a novelist’s son and an officer in the British army, to his much younger (but no less articulate) lover Helen Driscoll. Leith is in postwar Germany, surveying the wreckage of one war and fearfully anticipating the next:
I find myself again in an army of Occupation, and with less appetite than ever for the role of victor. Out of regard for your tender years, I shan’t describe the forms taken by victory in the ruined cities I’ve so far seen. How, with the evidence before them, men can contemplate more war is incomprehensible and terrifying. It is also completely beyond the ability of people like ourselves to influence. I at last come to believe that, in man, the primitive prevails…. My attitude to the war is puzzling even to myself: I believe I have become a pacifist, without any doctrinaire approach. Having had one go at setting the world right, I decline a second opportunity.
The pacifist soldier, the man of action as novelist manqué; as a character, Leith seems to combine the tender intellectual withdrawal of Malouf’s Janet McIvor with the tenuous political activity of Lachlan Beattie. But what fascinates me the most about this group of writers is their effort to give deeply lyrical voices to the inner lives of characters that emerge from a landscape of profound otherness, inimical to the tropes of European literature and culture that they carry with them like talismans, like the pages of Gemmy’s life story that isn’t even his own.
Gerald Murnane is the strangest member of my foursome; in his work, which bears the marks of Beckett and Bernhard, the hyperarticulation of Hazzard’s characters passes into conscious parody. His 1982 novel The Plains is a shaggy-dog story about a filmmaker who comes to the eponymous plains to make a film that will reveal their essence; he spends the first part of the novel struggling to ingratiate himself with one of the great landowners who he hopes will become his patron and support the film’s making; in the second part he’s achieved the goal of patronage but, like Kafka’s imperial messenger, has moved no closer to his goal and by novel’s end hasn’t shot so much as a frame. The narrator works entirely by hints and insinuations; a characteristic plot point is his scheme, never realized, to write a book that might be published and so appear in his patron’s library, where it might be picked up or at least noticed on the shelf by the patron’s wife, so communicating the filmmaker’s interest in her. Meanwhile much is made of the plainsmen’s feeling of utter distinction from the people of the coasts, who in their liminal state are felt to be somehow other, inauthentic, unAustralian, in what reads as a parody of the coastal elites vs. heartland discourse that goes on in this country. Everyone and everything, it seems, is incommensurate with everyone and everything else. The plainsmen lead baronial lives, seemingly more preoccupied with music and literature and culture than they are with the land they exploit for wealth; or perhaps they are embarked on a version of Sir George’s quest to legitimate their plunder by means of culture. Murnane’s irony is as fathomless as Kafka’s; whereas Hazzard seems to have a real stake in her characters’ romantic quests, Murnane mocks and ironizes his. He seems a write of subtraction rather than addition; I get the sense that he’s trying to get to some bedrock reality represented by the plains, the land itself. Does he really believe in this bedrock, this metaphysics of the plains? I haven’t read enough of him to say.
Reading Australian literature, or at least this slice of it, is like reading American literature through a subtracting glass, revealing the blindness and cruelty on which the myth of new worlds is founded, without the befuddling American ideology. In this country we don’t look to European culture or the classics to legitimate our claims on the land; we don’t look to culture at all. Our founding myth—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—has been a sufficient fig leaf with which to hide from ourselves the depredations of our imperial project and the exploitation and subjugation of slaves, Native Americans, immigrants, etc. We don’t need to appeal to Homer or Keats to feel ourselves civilized; civilization is beside the point to us perpetual American innocents. It’s an astonishingly renewable resource, like Jefferson’s tree of liberty that must be periodically refreshed with blood. The urge to communicate some essential self that wavers like a flame in the breath of otherness may not be as strong with us, or else is differently expressed. For the Australians it still seems possible to imagine an aristocracy of mind that will not justify the colonial project—far from it—but that crosses the lines of class and is capable of reckoning with that project’s bloody consequences. In that sense, they are older than we are, and luckier.
