The Ethics of Literature

The Ethics of Literature

Silke Hesse

MonashUniversity

Throughout my years as a lecturer in literary studies I have always been uncomfortable with the generally held view that literature must be approached primarily through aesthetics. It is so hard to substantiate aesthetic claims. This is not to say that I haven’t at times sensed powerful beauty in works of literature. I carry verses of poetry around with me that rise to the surface when I am moved and that, to me, are the very essence of beauty. But it is rarely possible to share such experiences. I have come to the conclusion that many Australians are embarrassed by beauty.

Back from recent travel in China, I have been surprised by an inconvenient but compelling need to read essays, reread, for instance, essays in The Monthly or in the annual Australian essay collections. Among those in the pile in front of me one of the first that drew my attention was Gerald Murnane’s “Save Us from Text Maniacs” in Best Australian Essays 2008. In it he voices a suspicion I sometimes shared as a student that his lecturers in English literature based their pronouncements concerning the merit of a piece of writing largely on fashion and the accepted reputation of the author. Were works of literature published anonymously, he suggests, the established hierarchy of great and lesser writers would very likely collapse.  If you want to pass exams you may need to know what the lecturer’s views of a writer are but, of themselves, such preconceptions mean little.

The next essay is an unexpected inclusion in Dessaix’s 2004 essay selection because it is a translation from the French, namely Pierre Ryckmans’ “Ethics and Aesthetics: The Chinese Lesson”, my topic! Have I read this essay before? Ryckmans points out that for classical Chinese scholars beauty of the written text was considered an inferior quality, suspected of trivializing the substance of a piece of writing by drawing attention to superficialities like ornamentation. The value of a Chinese text, he explains, depended on its ethical qualities:

The Chinese Aesthetic, which, in the field of literary, calligraphic, pictorial and musical theories has produced a wealth of philosophical, critical and technical literature, developed without making any reference to the concept of “beauty” [...].

When this concept crops up it is often in a pejorative sense, since to strive for beauty is, for an artist, a vulgar temptation, a trap, a dishonest attempt at seduction. Aesthetic criteria are functional: does the work do what it does efficiently, does it nourish the vital energy of the artist, does it succeed in capturing the spirit that informs mountains and rivers, does it establish harmony between the metamorphoses of forms and the metamorphoses of the world? (143)

For the Chinese scholar the criteria by which creative work should be judged were:  “authenticity, original purity, absolute naturalness (what the Germans call Echtheit).” This, Ryckmans suggests, is also what Stendhal meant when he said: “I believe that to be great in anything at all, you must be yourself”. But of course, being yourself is once again an intangible quality and I am not even certain whether it is an ethical one.

My own academic discipline is German Literature, a literary tradition that was shaken to the core by the horror of the events of the Nazi period. In their wake, writers and literary scholars mercilessly condemned what they stigmatized as the “ivory tower” literature of the pre-Nazi period. It had, so their accusations, concentrated on beauty, spirituality and the private life and left the political sphere unscrutinized. The literary elite had failed in their role as responsible intellectuals. Germany’s contrite and now politically conscious writers began to take their cue from the committed socialist Bertolt Brecht who had begun to worry in his poems of the 1930s that it could almost be seen as a crime to write about trees, or green boats and their gay white sails, if this meant keeping silent about the injustices of the world. For some years after the war even lyrics were written as though the nation were still in a state of emergency in which politics were the only permissible topic. And under its burden of guilt and its urgent desire to make amends, West Germany was, of course, certainly still in a state of abnormality while the East, once its writers had come to their senses, had the more realistic task of exposing and sometimes fighting a new emergency, that of dictatorial socialism. But political commitment as the essence of great literature was not a formula that could last and by the mid-seventies it had largely lost its moral power in the west.

There have been other attempts to impose moral or ethical standards on literature. In Britain and Australia there were years in which the censor saw it as his role to protect taboos and uphold sexual morality. And to give just  one other example: currently there seems to be a growing consensus that disadvantaged or persecuted groups, in particular indigenous nations and Holocaust survivors have, for moral reasons, sole ownership of their stories. Governments or societies may at times feel the need to impose such restrictions but they have nothing to do with literature as such. What I am searching for is an ethical value system intrinsic to literature that is of our times and suited to assisting us with judgments we can explain and justify.

The literature of recent years is characterized, among other things, by the role played by non-fiction writing, much of it skillful, fascinating, and quite profound. For such writing there are journalistic standards such as informative value, factual accuracy, respect, the protection of privacy and, in the case of public figures where the latter is difficult, the minimization of harm. As non-fiction writing has become more sophisticated, it has learnt a great deal from the traditional genres of literature so that we now talk about “creative non-fiction” as a new genre. But in spite of such forays into other genres, we rely on non-fiction writing to be factually accurate and well researched. Whatever else it brings to the mix is permissible only in so far as it serves its mission to inform society about things that matter.

The Demidenko scandal of 1995 was the first time the importance of the distinction between fiction and non-fiction engraved itself on the Australian literary consciousness. Helen Darville had made ambiguous statements about her book The Hand that Signed the Paper as a work of non-fiction or fiction. It told of poorly educated, teen-age Ukrainian peasants, brutalized by the poverty, disorder and corruption that accompanied Stalin’s imposition of collectivization and his persecution of their people: a story of disturbed adolescents who needed scapegoats for their anger. In this situation, two Jewish women Communists, under whom they had suffered injustices, seemed to present themselves as their quintessential enemy. Many of their neighbors from those times also equated Communists with Jews, thus reinforcing their prejudices.  So when the Germans recruited them and variously deployed them for Holocaust activities, the brothers seemed to have no complaints. It would put food in their mouths but also allow them to take revenge for sufferings they attributed to “the Jews”. Even years later, now settled in the civilized and orderly society of Australia, they can apparently see nothing wrong with their former roles as perpetrators in the Holocaust, although it is mainly their sister and their daughter and niece, the author, whose opinions we hear. The two women are outraged at the prospect that these now respected elderly men could be tried as war criminals. For them, there is a complete disjunction between then and now. Bad circumstances produce bad people; good circumstances produce good people. The brothers’ Ukrainian youth was in another life for which they should not be made responsible now. We have to acknowledge that circumstances of extreme disorder may well produce people like the young Kovalenkos; in a sense they are victims. But does that exonerate them?  Would it not be the novelist’s role to make them explain to us the workings of their minds and consciences, then and now? Would not some regret seem appropriate?

Darville goes further than the suggested author-narrator identity to give the impression that her book is a documentary. She obviously wants the reader to take the experiences of her characters to have been real and the historical facts to be accurate. We are given a variety of hints: her Ukrainian pen-name Demidenko, the dedication of the book to her family, her thanks to family and friends “who talked with her”, and what appears to be intended as a motto in the “Author’s Note”:

            There are many stories in the world. People speak; stories are passed on. Stories   and words have a life of their own, but only if others listen.

Quoting this somewhat ambiguous unattributed statement, which could as well apply to (her) invented stories taking a hold on people’s imagination as to the power of “true” stories, was presumably intended to suggest that what is here told has long been suppressed and needs at last to be aired. Yet Darville’s “Áuthor’s Note” begins with these words:

            What follows is a work of fiction. The Kovalenko family depicted in this novel   has no counterpart in reality.

Of course, this is the normal, often half-truthful legal formula used by writers who want to avoid libel suits; consequently we can easily be persuaded to overlook such a statement.

Darville’s deceit relies on a transgression of the border between fiction and non-fiction. The crucial question is: why did she choose to do that? Was it because she wanted people to accept her version of Ukrainian history as accurate and therefore exonerating? If the book is read as a novel, historical accuracy should perhaps not be an issue. If it is read as a documentary, its biased representations, presented without commentary, could be quite misleading. Should this be of serious concern? There will always be books that contain spurious or simplified historical accounts and they will need to be critiqued. But perhaps the real problem lies elsewhere. A message of “forgiveness” has a seductive moral attractiveness; but what Darville is actually doing here is using it to smuggle across views that are close to being anti-Semitic (and that in the context of Holocaust atrocities), immoral in sanctioning brutal vengeance, and anti-legal in their opposition to war crimes trials. The point at issue is not so much her transgression of borders - one could argue that responsible novelists are entitled to use documentary techniques playfully - but to what extent we feel bound to humiliate and expose writers who give public voice to anti-social or even just unpopular opinions, justified by spurious or contestable facts? If Darville’s purpose had been more honorable or more profound, readers may have tolerated or even enjoyed her deception. Incidentally, her fluent and graphic narration had already been given important literary awards when the scandal blew up. In Australia, the Demidenko affair, which gave rise to a flood of books, articles and letters, has had almost the effect of a trauma. It seems to have lingered in the mind as a dramatic demonstration of the importance of insisting on a rigid distinction between non-fiction and fiction and the need for writers to be scrupulously honest in this regard. The most significant sanction taken against the author was that her book was reissued under her real name, thus exposing the deception that it was a family based documentary.

Writers of history novels are, however, still seen as being particularly prone to transgress the boundary between fiction and non-fiction. They have been forcefully attacked by historians such as Mark McKenna and Inga Clendinnen, both meticulous researchers and fascinating writers of history. In the latter’s April 2007 contribution to The Monthly “Lost in the Woods” Norman Mailer is taken to task for his largely invented, demonically embellished, biographical novel about the young Hitler. Reading Clendinnen’s review, it sounds as though there could be good reasons not to waste time on it. But the area of the historical novel is tricky and historians may not always be the best judges. In Voss, Patrick White solved the dilemma by creating intentional parallels between the explorer Leichardt and the fictional character Voss; the two could legitimately reflect upon each other but it was understood by every reader that they were by no means identical. In her Quarterly Essay 23 from 2006, The History Question, Clendinnen recognized myth-making as a genre that grows out at an angle from history-writing, legitimate because its images remain open enough to allow for individual interpretations, thus facilitating democratic unity in diversity and promoting cohesion in society. In spite of conceding there were rare exceptions, Clendinnen was far less generous towards the historical novel, quoting Henry James when he warns a novelist:

           

            You have to think with your modern apparatus a man, a woman - or rather fifty -          whose own thinking was intensely otherwise conditioned, you have to simplify      back by an amazing tour de force - and even then it’s all humbug... (28)

Both Clendinnen and McKenna have attacked Kate Grenville for claiming that her novel The Secret River was “history”. In her “Writing Memoir”, Searching for the Secret River, Grenville describes the process of her own personal exploration of the meaning of history: submerged family memories washed to the surface by some discovery; the hasty and awkward search for one’s roots in the old country, here London; genealogy as a dead end; an attempt to imagine the deprived lives of the late 18th century poor and their conflict with the law of the rich that lead to deportation; the search for Australian records about an individual ancestor; the attempt to grasp what the prospect of modest prosperity, constantly under threat, must mean to a former convict; and lastly, the matter that is so difficult for modern Australians to face, what the relation of the early settlers would have been to the Aborigines whose land they took. You cannot simply look up your ancestor in a historical archive; Grenville had to fall back on a patchwork of bits and pieces from quite diverse sources, including some historical studies. But once heritage questions have surfaced, they can become an urgent matter of personal conscience that cannot wait for the long slow process of historical scholarship to complete its impossible course. Fiction and the flawed but necessary invention of the past and its characters must come to the rescue. Grenville has legitimate material for a novel with its peculiar technique of imaginative empathy. While empathy will only ever lead to approximations, it is an essential social skill to nurture. Like any piece of writing, of course, empathetic fiction can be good or mediocre, honest or self-serving, politically correct or genuinely imaginative. Grenville’s novel is not history in the scholarly sense. Against the historical evidence available to her, she created an almost ideal ancestor for herself: a decent, intelligent, hard-working man, a loving husband, and somebody with a gift for language, alertness to the fine detail of any experience, and an instantaneous love of the natural beauty of this country that matched her own. The tragedy of the story she tells is that even somebody like Thornhill, who tries hard to get things right, will eventually become guilty, partly because he cannot understand the natives but also because the needs of his family and the needs of the indigenous owners of his land are ultimately not compatible. If Thornhill can participate in a massacre, there is little hope that we could ever claim to rightfully own the country we have learned to love. Grenville’s ancestor stands for all our ancestors; her almost mannerist style that shadows his point of view conveys to us that she is not writing about a real person but a “hero” larger than life. He represents us and, like him, we cannot escape our guilt and our sadness, however much we try to suppress it. In its own way, Grenville’s novel is as concerned with our history as the writings of the researchers; she has, however, chosen a different and differently effective genre.

Fiction, comprising genres like the novel, the short story, and the novella, but also most drama, has very different aims and standards from non-fiction. Instead of factual accuracy it tends to seek verisimilitude; instead of protecting privacy it insists on the anonymity of characters, often going to the trouble of expressly denying any reference to living personages; instead of providing information relevant to members of a specific society, it diverts the reader to a parallel world that seems real to the imagination but from which no direct bridge leads to everyday life. Fiction can greatly expand our knowledge of the human condition, of the often unexpected and extraordinary situations people may have to face and how they might react. It can develop our capacity for empathy (as already observed, an important social skill), for it is in the nature of fiction that the reader identifies with its characters; it can increase our understanding of situations we may never come across in real life, giving us maturity beyond actual experience. A fiction writer must be inventive and must hold our attention on things that we might normally ignore because they do not directly concern us. Fiction had its heyday in an age when people rarely moved out of their prescribed social circles and women in particular had little direct access to the world. In the novel, we look for characters that could be real, events that could happen though they may be unlikely to actually happen around us, and places and circumstances that could and might exist. The more mobile society becomes, the more we all travel and the more access we have to the lives of other people, as the media and the shelves of non-fiction biographies now available in bookshops present them to us, the less we will appear to need fiction to know the world and the more we are likely to use it as an escape from real life. When we judge particular works of fiction in the context of our society we will want to ask whether they can help us be more understanding human beings or whether they are just aiming to entertain us with a holiday from real life. I do not agree with Clendinnen’s statement that the difference between fiction and non-fiction amounts to the “primarily aesthetic” purpose of the first, namely to “delight” audiences, and the “primarily moral purpose” of the latter. In my view, ethics is relevant to both, and both can delight.

There is, I believe, a third category of writing that is important today and again it has its own ethical rules. This is subjective writing of the kind that was once the prerogative of the lyric poet, for whom the expression of his unique experience of life has always been of greatest importance. Here we also have the confession, the personal letter, autobiography, contemplative writing, and the subjective essay. In these genres people can talk about matters that will rarely find a hearing in everyday life; as readers we enter into a world of individuality and profundity, of emotions and ideas, thoughts and perceptions. Originality and honesty lie at the heart of this particular literary endeavor. It is almost always driven by themes that persist like fixed ideas rather than by stories and plots. And we, the readers, are respectful of the writers who know themselves and can express themselves in their own language and imagery just as we are critical of self-indulgence, self-importance and triteness. Though the personality of the writer to some extent shines through in all writing, giving a sense of authenticity and uniqueness, it is crucial only in subjective writing. Subjective writing allows us, the readers, to plumb our own depths and it teaches us to be tolerant of others, however strange they may seem. It is of growing importance in our individualist society where even religious confession is no longer a guarantee of like-mindedness, equally in our multi-cultural immigrant society where people need to get to know each other quickly so that they can live and work together. In token of this, poetry clubs have sprung up in most of our suburbs. Though our best poets have an extraordinary range and precision of language, the expressiveness we look for here does not necessitate a complete command of the literary or even the standard idiom, just an ability to experience one’s mind. If such language may at times sound strange and primitive, it is also a great source of renewal.

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My hunch is that these three categories are central to modern Australian writing, that each one has its own ethical standards and that though there is some permissible overlap, this is superficial and a successful piece of writing will normally be committed to one category. If it is not, the critic is likely to become uneasy. Robert Dessaix’s essay “Kitchen-Table Candour” from the April 2008 Monthly looks at Helen Garner’s The Spare Room from just this perspective. Dessaix concedes that “Helen Garner is indubitably not just a writer, but one of our most gifted” (180); however, he also implies that she is confused about what she is trying to do. She claims The Spare Room and other of her works are novels. ”But they are not novels. They are all of them fine works of art and innovative explorations of literary approaches to non-fiction, every one of them an outstanding example of stylish reportage, but none of them is a novel.” (179) I am, like Dessaix, not sure whether Garner is here writing non-fiction, perhaps in protest against quackery that exploits the desperation of the terminally ill, though this doesn’t come across as her central concern; whether her intention is to express and explore her own limits in the face of the illness of a demanding friend; whether she is awkwardly and between the lines searching for a metaphysical reality that could allay the extreme and socially disruptive fear of death that destroys the personalities of people like Nicola; or whether, maybe, she just wants to get recent experience off her chest. Dessaix comments: “It reads like the monologue of an angry, exhausted friend, sitting across the kitchen table from you, telling you, since you haven’t asked, what looking after poor, mad Nicola was like in gritty detail.”(180) Most readers will feel deeply sad for Nicola and sorry for Helen and outraged about the quacks, just as they would if a neighbor told them the story while they were silently recalling experiences of their own. Could Garner be attempting to see things “as they are” without the distortions and preconceptions of genre? Dessaix’s ending is conciliatory: “Nobody writes these reports from the suburban front line with quite the passion, the abrupt insights and kitchen-table candor of Helen Garner” (183) but, as I read him, he has also made the point that perhaps Garner could think about the more substantial possibilities of respectively non-fiction, fiction and subjective writing as separate and self-propelled modes.

To continue spinning the thread of Dessaix’s critique: The story of Nicola and Helen could have become a novel. That would have allowed the author to delve deeper into the character of Nicola, almost a caricature in the present account, and give the relationship between the two women the subtlety and complexity of a friendship, rather than just an acquaintanceship under stress; for we find it hard to believe that they were ever true friends. But to do so, Garner would have had to throw off the shackles of literal truth and give scope to invention. If, on the other hand, the story which so painfully intrudes into the private lives of what are, presumably, two real women, was to be a non-fiction account, we would have had to be more fully convinced that it had the “public good” in mind. Garner’s hit at quackery would have had to be more thoroughly researched and presented than an adherence to the story of Nicola permitted. And if the book was to be a substantial meditation “on ageing, women’s friendship and how to look death in the eye” (Dessaix, 183), and of the three categories this is probably the one it fits most nearly, it perhaps needed to shed some of its detail and go deeper into the author’s confrontation with her unfamiliar self in this situation for which she was, to her surprise, in no way prepared. Maybe The Spare Room works partly because we, the readers, pick up elements of this moving story and work on them ourselves and because that is an enabling and enriching exercise. Garner’s book, one might say, opens up the messy business of life to us and encourages our own creative efforts in its mastering. In doing so, however, it seems to draw attention to those same three categories that appear to me to be dominating Australian literature at the moment: non-fiction, fiction and subjective writing.

The distinction between non-fiction writing and what I have called subjective writing that aims at conveying the writer’s feelings and developing insights is not always straightforward. Collecting information can be a very personally experienced road to discovery and newsworthy stories can be reported with deep concern and empathy. Alternatively, subjective writing can initially mask itself as objective reporting; some writers are quite shy about revealing themselves. Initial ambiguity is, of course, not always a bad thing. A reader’s uncertainty may cause her to focus her attention more sharply. Murnane’s “Save Us from Text Maniacs” not only draws almost exclusively on personal experience but is also delivered in a tone of angry frustration. Its ultimate purpose is, however, by no means personal. Murnane writes to warn the public of the dangerous practice of spurious text evaluation that was once widespread in English Departments and has left its trace. Such judgments can make or break both poets and examination candidates; they also seal off literature as a subject of academic study to all genuine research and insight. Murnane is informing us, the public, about an area of corruption and misuse of power that does damage to our social fabric. There can be no doubt that his is in essence a non-fiction essay. If we don’t acknowledge this, we are unlikely to take his account seriously enough to try to tackle the problem.

In his essay on Manning Clark in The Monthly, March 2007, Mark McKenna has to grapple with a different kind of border-crossing. Clark’s six volume History of Australia established his reputation as the great historian of this country but curiously, historians have ignored him and he them. McKenna looks for clues to this paradox. Clark’s was a “singular vision - emotive and mischievous, tortured and divine - like that of no other historian or writer of his generation.” (199) In his 1976 Boyer Lectures, he tells us, Clark “listed the writers that had sparked his interest in writing a multi-volume history of Australia: Chekhov, Hardy, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, James. Not one historian of Australia - not one scholar - is mentioned”. McKenna elaborates: Clark “was out of step with the intellectual fashions and preoccupations of his colleagues. He was the great generalist in a time of increasing specialization”. (201) He believed that historians “should be judged by their success in increasing wisdom and understanding and their capacity to entertain”. (201)  His personal voice, on which many reviewers have remarked, is grounded, McKenna believes, in a “profound religiosity”, a “highly individual understanding of the religious - ecumenical and spiritual, in the broadest sense”. (204) In fact, “the personal quality of Clark’s historical voice was connected intimately with his personal life”. (206) While all this is not essentially incompatible with history writing, it is an unusual approach. What we do, however, expect from a historian is reliable factual information and this is something Clark does not always give us. McKenna mentions a story, which Clark told repeatedly, of his arrival in Germany on the morning after Kristallnacht and of this being for him an epiphany that led directly to his career as a writer of history. In actual fact, he did not arrive in Germany till a few weeks later; it was his future wife, Dymphna, who experienced that event. Clark had simply assimilated or appropriated her letters. This did not mean that he was not deeply shocked by what happened and that it did not influence his life. It simply means that symbolic truth and dramatic effect were more important to him than factual accuracy, and that his books, which paraded as non-fiction, are perhaps best classified as subjective writing. McKenna sums up:

Far from being out of place or shocking, Clark’s misrepresentation of his presence in Bonn on 10 November 1938 is entirely in keeping with the spirit and intent of his life and work. Rather than diminishing Clark, it reveals him. He fictionalised his life, just as he played with primary sources in writing his histories. He lived out the life of his greatest character, himself, the historian whose potential greatness was constantly undermined by his fatal flaws. Both his History of Australia and his autobiographical writings are unreliable as historical sources. [...] He created himself as myth, cultivating a theatrical persona of the people’s priest and sage, telling history as parable. And as the Kristallnacht epiphany reveals, the moral of the parable always mattered more than the facts. (219-20)

Once this is understood, our criteria for evaluating Clark’s work change; we can appreciate it for what it is, something, McKenna tells us, that his own novelist friends found far easier to do than his historian friends.

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As mentioned earlier, non-fiction currently seems to be enjoying particular favor in Australia. Much of it is well written, though we might hesitate to call it “literature”. One essay that does perhaps make this leap is Nicolas Rothwell’s “The Blast Zone” in the September 2010 Monthly. It can introduce us to the potential of non-fiction writing. “The Blast Zone” begins with a description of Stalker by the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. The film is set in a “zone” in which something like a nuclear explosion has altered the laws of nature. The narrator talks of the film’s seeming irrelevance in today’s world, but also of a strangely resurgent memory of it in the context of the Chernobyl disaster. He points out the film’s artistic failings such as a “gossamer-thin plot”, “wooden” acting performances, “near-farcical” dialogue and its now unfashionable “high-art” pretensions. And yet, he admits he has found the film unforgettable; its powerful images, he says, taught him to take each thing as it was without preconceptions or hierarchies. These images transmit above all Tarkovsky’s concern for nature, a concern that was in some ways different from ours but perhaps also prophetic of current fears. With its cryptic and guarded allusions to religion, the film also has a subtext of faith. Sadly, its filming appears to have had a lethal legacy for its makers; Tarkovsky, his wife and the lead actor all died prematurely of lung cancer, presumably because they had chosen for filming a site that was superbly representative of the industrial degradation and poisoning of nature Tarkovsky so deplored. Rothwell highlights the film’s unforgettable central symbol, the “magic” room at the heart of devastation where “all wishes would be answered” (42). This is an unsettling symbol; can it mean that we need devastation to gain peace; or that we will only value nature when we have all but lost it? And what would either alternative imply?

The complexity of Tarkovsky’s work might lead us to expect that Rothwell’s essay will be devoted entirely to its analysis. But he moves on to the Australian desert which is, much like the former Soviet Union, nowadays in the grip of industrialization and a mining bonanza. He then proceeds to tell us of various early films made there during pre-industrial days, highlighting as noteworthy, for example, Ian Dunlop’s award winning Desert People from the mid sixties, again a film that concentrates on seeing things as they are, without preconceptions. In those years white anthropologists and film-makers were discovering this outwardly hostile region. The film follows a small family of hunter-gathers who lived an apparently idyllic life in a place where nature was sparse and constantly threatened. Eventually, however, the desert existence became too hard even for these “traditional owners”; the next generation left their lands and now, Rothwell tells us, marauding camels destroy what is left of the vegetation. Away from their lands, however, the exiles became troubled and disorientated people, like Ian Ward, one of the children of that long-ago desert family. Ward eventually fell victim to the careless and thoughtless law enforcement practices of the white police and was “cooked to death” in a faulty police van on his way to a distant prison.

The narrative moves on. We are told that the narrator himself has explored the desert for years in long and lonely drives or occasionally, trudging after an Aboriginal woman on her hunting and gathering sorties. Over time he has learnt to see and appreciate even barely noticeable features of the natural world for their own sake, as Tarkovky’s and Dunlop’s films had taught him. At the end of one such excursion he has a chance encounter with Andrei, an aspiring film-maker, and is told of the disturbing experience his friend has just had. When the car he was driving was snagged on a rock, he had found himself stranded in the desert without tools or water and had panicked in the face of what appeared to be inevitable death. But once the surrender had been made, he said he had felt a “clarity, quite unlike anything I had felt before.” This friend is called Andrei (like Tarkovsky) and he reminds the narrator that this was also the name of the dying prince in Tolstoy’s War and Peace who had likewise experienced a great peace and quietness in his last moments. (Is this the room, we may want to ask, Tarkovsky had dreamt of, where all your wishes would be answered?) 

Shortly after, the narrator has another encounter in the desert. This time he happens to meet “one of the old doctors of the health-service team”. Both he and the doctor are initially guarded about revealing their real motives for being there. Eventually the narrator decides to talk about his experience of Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, presumably saying much of what he has previously told us. (In doing so, the reader may notice, he leans against the bloodwood tree beside which he discovered the doctor, much like Tarkovsky lounged against a tree in a documentary the author earlier told us of, where he spoke about “his ideas of nature, art and life”. There, the film-maker had looked “almost as if he felt the desire to become one with its trunk and bark” (42).) Tarkovsky, the narrator tells the doctor, taught him “to look - to see on the desert’s own terms” (48), as the doctor then puts it. Once this confidence has been received, the doctor reveals himself to be not just the uncritical admirer of Len Beadell’s  road-building feats, hoping to see Beadell’s roads “on the heritage register one day” (incidentally, thus rendering them unusable as roads), but a specialist in nuclear medicine who had once sat on the panel of the McClelland Royal commission into the British Maralinga nuclear tests in the adjacent desert, a man whose sense of responsibility had driven him to the life he then chose “travelling between desert camps and run-down outstations, between old, dying men and women, watching them fade away” (49). He is now no longer the “very idealistic” man of faith he was in his youth but somebody who for ever sees in his mind’s eye the black mist of the nuclear explosion that destroyed the health of Aboriginal desert people “sweeping the landscape, sweeping up every last thing that sustains us in this world” (49). These were nuclear explosions that the adventurer and heroic pioneer, Len Beadell, had thoughtlessly facilitated. “Beadell hadn’t paid too much attention to the tests and what happened afterwards” (49), are the doctor’s words. The essay ends with a looming sandstorm that requires the hasty separation of narrator and doctor whose confessions were possible, we are told, only because they knew they would never meet again.

Rothwell’s essay is full of unsettling parallels and coincidences. (To give another example: In the half-submerged anteroom to the “‘magic’ room where all wishes will be answered” Tarkovsky’s camera “picks out a torn-off day-marker from a calendar: it bears the date of 28 December. Seven years after the filming,” the author tells us, “that day was the last full day Tarkovsky spent on earth.” (42)) Listening to the doctor, one theme is dominant. To use his words: “Nature has become the sign of sadness for us. How much we destroy just by being! It’s too unbearable to look at for very long.” (49) Among concerned people around the world this is now a theme of dominant importance.

What should we be doing, what can be done? These are questions that haunt us all and on one level, Rothwell’s essay can suggest some answers. But its segments, in themselves classical non-fiction, relate to each other uneasily and leave a good deal of space for the reader to fill. For there is also the incompatible realization that it is actually the desert places that teach us to appreciate nature, as the narrator puts it: “it occurs to me that the desert - the whole desert - is something very like that secret room, where your inmost wishes, which you can’t even recognize yourself, come true.” (49)

There follows that, for most Australians, highly uncomfortable and unexpected question put by the doctor: “And do you think that death is the end of the line? I have to ask”. (49) Initially religious or at least “idealistic”, he himself seems to have gradually shed his beliefs whereas Tarkovsky, the author tells us, remained a “man of faith” whose gravestone speaks of him as “the man who saw the angel” (42). What the film-maker Andrei’s experience of surrender to death in the desert means must remain for us to ponder.

Is there a metaphysical, a divine power that guides us, that creates the unexpected coincidences and connections the essay reveals? Are there signs to direct us? Ian Ward, the last member of the desert family in Dunlop’s Desert People, was “cooked to death” in a faulty police van due to the callous carelessness of policemen determined to punish a trivial offence. But the narrator’s almost triumphant description of this death comes across as highly shocking: “He [Ian Ward] had gained a fate: he was fixed for ever; he had entered time.” (45) Normally, death is seen as a departure out of time. But in Ian Ward’s case, of course, his death, which made headlines in Australia’s newspapers, will not easily be forgotten by this generation of Australians. It has become a sign.

Throughout Rothwell’s essay the mind of the narrator remains strangely opaque. The dialogue between him and the doctor is not only gruff, but also off-centre in the sense that replies often hardly seem responses. In other words, the narrator evades our empathy and refuses to be our guide. What distinguishes Rothwell’s use of the essay here is that he arranges his information in such a disconcertingly layered manner that the reader is forced not only to think for himself about uncomfortable issues but to think about them in unfamiliar and even threatening ways. He has turned the two-dimensional essay into a three-dimensional mobile. We can still appreciate this non-fiction for its informative value but it is no longer the writer who shapes our opinions, as is usually the case. In Rothwell’s text the reader must come of age and take responsibility.

The narrator sums up Tarkovsky’s ideas about “the aims of art”, as formulated in the interview mentioned earlier. The film-maker talks about: ”how beauty lies in the balance of parts in a composition, how art is only necessary to us because we seek harmony in an imperfect world. We have no harmony: if we lived in such a state, art would be pointless, the urge to make it would pass away.” (42) This is an aesthetic rather than an ethic of art.  But, Rothwell writes: “In retrospect, it seems ever clearer that one of his [Tarkovsky’s] principle subjects was the fate of the Russian countryside and the entire continent stretching east beyond the Urals.” (43) Today we can recognize this, in a way Tarkovsky himself perhaps could not, as an ethical concern. We have entered an age where “ivory tower art”, “high-art”, is suspected of being irrelevant, if not immoral, an age where “a superfluity of creative projects surrounds us and the point of this rich banquet seems ever more obscure” (42), an age where literature needs to find a new vision and purpose to remain relevant. I would suggest that this could be ethical. 

But let us not be too hasty. There is, nevertheless, beauty in Rothwell’s text: the “beauty” of the uneasy relation of parts to each other, of echoes, of dynamic dissonances, of signs and symbols, of silences that create spaces to think, and of a shock-like and disconcerting climax that is not at the centre of the story but almost an aside. Throughout, the style is one of slight distortion, slight unease, slight off-centeredness. It draws attention to how difficult it is to focus on things and see clearly, to find “truth” in the midst of facts. Beauty, one could say, is the fixative that holds the structure of a work in place, and structure, for its part, guides and guards literature’s ethical force. It is perhaps not so much harmony that matters here, but balance, “rightness”.

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This takes us back to the discussion of the nature and role of Australian literature as it has taken shape in the last few years in the pages of The Monthly and other publications. Until recently, Australian writers had more or less adopted the European genres: the novel, the drama, the poem, all defined as formal categories centering on prose, dialogue, and rhythmic musicality as the case might be. Of course “novels”, “dramas” and “poems” are still being written in Australia, but they are often so different from the conventional understanding of these genres that using such designations diagnostically gives us very little analytic help.

Murray Bail’s novel Eucalyptus can serve as an illustration, for in it almost every expectation we have of the novel is flouted. It appears impossible to determine a meaningful narrative point of view. Plot is non-existent and we are a third into the book before the merest trickle of story becomes discernable. Characters in the sense of psychologically plausible actors with whom we could identify are missing; we puzzle over Holland, Ellen and Cave, partly because they are so strange and partly because the information we are given about them seems so irrelevant and inadequate. The beginning of the novel is purposely bungled and the end unsatisfactorily brief. Verisimilitude is of no concern; in spite of a realist sub-stratum of western New South Wales country routines to raise our expectations, the lives of the main characters make little social, psychological or economic sense. And while there are constant flashes of brilliance from the author/narrator (who could, the reader might feel, be an extraordinary essayist were he more disciplined), his story-telling is so disorganized, his outlook so idiosyncratic and his language-levels so mixed that we are left with what resembles preliminary and as yet quite unsorted jottings and drafts. It is the author’s psychology, rather than that of the characters, that preoccupies us; who is he and what does he think he is doing when there are well-defined tasks for a novelist? Of course our author does, in a sense, know what he is doing. This is to be a book about eucalypts, ideally more than five hundred of them, and they will give their names to his chapters. Like Holland, the farmer who has planted them all, and Cave the specialist, who can identify them all, the author is obsessed with this particular species of tree and any information he can lay his lands on takes pride of place, while matters of human relevance have to squeeze into the cracks.

I’ll commandeer Murray Bail’s novel for my own argument: Like so many Australian writers today, his author, it seems, would much prefer to write a non-fiction book that gives us an accurate classification of a certain field of knowledge. Why he has chosen the novel form for this purpose is anyone’s guess. Luckily for us, the readers, who are very soon as sick of eucalypts as the heroine Ellen (she, of course, has more reason than we do because her hand in marriage has been promised by her father to the man who can name his more than five hundred eucalypts correctly, in other words, to the biggest bore on earth), luckily for us, a mysterious story-teller turns up half way through the novel who is able to tell Ellen and us a different and fascinating story for every tree. They range from realistic stories (Alex Miller?), to semi-plausible and occasionally even fantastical ones. Though they tend to be a little untidy and unfinished, they give us gripping and unforgettable views of the as yet unfinished lives and unsolved dilemmas of people all over the world. Just as each eucalypt has unique characteristics, each story does too; it is the tree’s singularity that awakens the story, though in most cases it would be hard to pinpoint what the specific connection is. And it is these stories, in turn, that awaken Holland’s treasured but emotionally neglected daughter, Ellen, to full humanity and femininity, to love. When their narrator suddenly disappears she becomes so ill that her life seems in danger. Eventually her visitors realize that she can only be cured with stories and all sorts of helpful people try to fill the gap. But none of the usually fairly self-absorbed and unimaginative accounts they proffer have the poignancy, irony, warmth and genuine interest in people of every kind that characterize the stories told by the stranger. When he finally turns up again she goes with him, fleeing her Rapunzel-like life on the farm, a life where she was guarded and constricted by her well-meaning but unimaginative father who had been increasingly falling victim to the project of scientific naming represented by the specialist Mr Cave. On the farm, we are told, Ellen had had almost nothing to read and no company to talk to. She did, however, keep a journal where she recorded a strange and as yet unconnected collection of things that seemed to have meaning for her.

In her journal she described conversations with herself, and real and imaginary conversations with her father; there were descriptions of certain large birds, of the sea and the school gates in Sydney; also recorded were unusual dreams, and impressions of many of the visiting suitors, the latest being Mr Cave. (84)

But like her fairytale sister Rapunzel, Ellen had also often just sat in the tower of the homestead, looking out over the eucalypts, which, of course, only have the power to inspire those whose travels have already allowed them to catch glimpses of the dormant stories of the world. 

Murray Bail’s Eucalyptus is not just a tongue-in-cheek account of the redemptive power of story-telling; it also attempts to smuggle through to us something like a new “aesthetic” for Australian literature. This could be described as the aesthetic of the eucalypt and its “chaotic diversity” (35). It is to replace “all those laconic hard-luck stories, as many as there are burrs on the backs of sheep and just as difficult to remove” that seem to have been produced by the “National Landscape”. (24) (Holland, in contrast, won his superb property by an amazing stroke of good luck.) The author laments: “A kind of applied psychology has taken over story-telling, coating it and obscuring the core.” (24) In keeping with the aesthetic of the eucalypt, Holland, we hear, had begun his tree-planting “casually, no apparent design” (34) and his creation had turned into “virtually an outdoor museum of trees”:

A person could wander amongst the many different species and pick up all kinds of information, at the same time enthralled, in some cases rendered speechless, by the clear examples of beauty. The diversity of the eucalypts itself was an education. At the slightest movement of the head there was always another eucalypt of different height, foliage and pattern of bark, and there was the weird-looking homestead as well, impressive in its dark imbalance, and glimpsed at a window or in a cotton dress at the middle distance, with an elbow welded to a tree, his daughter. (45)

This daughter, whose name Ellen is a barely perceptible diminishment of Helen, the woman with the “face that sank a thousand ships”, is constantly being lauded by the author for her exceptional beauty. “Everybody was proud of her; to think that such a beauty in all its rarity was living in their parts.” (49) But it is an unusual kind of beauty.

It was a speckled beauty. She was so covered in small brown-black moles she attracted men, every sort of man. These few too many birthmarks of the first-born tipped the balance on her face and throat: men felt free to wander with their eyes all over, across the pale spaces and back again to the factual dots, the way a full stop brings to a halt a meandering sentence. (32)

The stranger’s stories are perhaps the best approximation to a new literary aesthetic that matches Ellen’s speckled beauty:

He had a circuitous story-telling manner, as if he were making it up, and what is more he told it under a tree where the crows were making their din; he also added bits of factual information she [Ellen] had no way of verifying, which seemed to have little bearing on the main thing being said. For all these distractions Ellen found the story powerful for what it may have represented, in other words, for what it didn’t say exactly. (96)

To return to our initial question: Can Murray Bail’s book be called a novel? In spite of its “distractions” and its false starts, Eucalyptus, though not “saying exactly that”, becomes the story of “one of the great and most surprising courtships in literature” (Michael Ondaatje on the cover). At the same time, Eucalyptus is also the wry and poignant story of the modern Australian author and his byways, demonstrating what magic can happen once the non-fiction writer steps back and makes way for the story-teller. Authorial matters are not normally a subject for the novel; but Eucalyptus is still an invented prose work of 250 pages or so about people and romance. There is really no other category in which we could place it.

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So what seems to be happening with Australian literature today? Let me suggest the following: Cultures that have reached a preliminary, self-confident maturity tend to go through a “classical” phase. I will try to explain what I mean by resorting to an analogy with the literature with which I am most familiar, German literature. During the eighteenth century the German lands, still split into countless principalities with their differing dialects and dominated by a king who spoke French and favored French culture in preference to German, suddenly produced two writers of great genius: Goethe and Schiller. During what has become known as their Storm and Stress period, these writers both wrote impulsively, using the language of the common people and treating the conventional genres dismissively. In doing so, they each discovered and expanded upon their own peculiar style and enriched the as yet rudimentary German language. In their mature years, however, which became known as the Classical period, they then formed a literary alliance in the course of which they examined genre after genre establishing its nature and rules and making a concerted effort to accept these restrictions and use such discipline to enhance their work. During this Classical age, German literature as a great and vibrant movement was established. In the third, Romantic phase of their literary lives the two writers then returned to freer and more inventive forms, now using the transgression of literary rules to give their works a further dimension. It was important to discover and describe rules relevant to their age and culture, but once these had been established, it was then equally important to play with such rules. (I know I have no proof that the development of German literature can be seen as a blueprint, but I have decided use it as such, nevertheless.)

I am suggesting that similarly, Australia’s fiction, non-fiction and subjective “genres” have now been identified and their rules are being discussed. This follows an earlier era of exuberantly descriptive, metaphorical “Storm and Stress” writing in which authors were discovering and developing their unique sensibilities. This phase still echoes in Kate Grenville’s The Secret River. The narrative point of view here is, on the surface, conventional in that it shadows the main character, William Thornhill. But for most of the novel it is actually a hybrid voice; its second strand is that of the author, someone who tried to create for herself an ancestor of great sensitivity with whom she could identify, someone whose deep love for her Australian homeland and in particular, the wild bush country of the Hawkesbury, caused her to feel anxiously responsible for this ancestor and the decisions he made, decisions which led to the violent dispossession of the indigenous owners and thus, ultimately, to her own inheritance of their country. For this authorial voice Grenville chose what one might call a typical Australian “Storm and Stress” style, idiosyncratic and almost mannerist in its beauty, laden with descriptive detail and simile far beyond anything the ex-convict from the slums of London, to whom this voice is wedded, could plausibly be expected to see or feel. 

            Blackwood pointed his boat towards a solid wall of land, a heaped-up ridge that           tumbled down into the water all cliffs and skinny trees that grew out of the very          stones themselves, and what had seemed a dead end slyly opened up into a stretch            of river between cliffs. As the boat glided along the tide, the cliffs rose sheer on both sides, mouse-grey except where the wind had exposed buttery rock, as if the             landscape itself was a dark-skinned creature with golden flesh beneath. (100f.)

A description such as this is not in character with the occupants of the boat and too flamboyant for a task-focused narrator; it has to be attributed to Grenville the author, here seizing the opportunity to demonstrate her unique appreciation of the beauty of her land. One review makes this point: “Grenville, as ever, describes an Australia so overwhelmingly beautiful that readers will lust after its sunbaked soul.” (Telegraph on Saturday, UK).

On the other hand, Australian literature is now also showing first attempts at exploring the full potential of the “Australian genres” and playing with transgressions. While we are, I believe, still in a “classical” phase, Rothwell’s piece demonstrates a new “romantic” freedom and Murray Bail’s novel plays with the genre and redirects it with the abandon of the romantic phase.

Why have Australian writers chosen these genres rather than continuing to modify traditional European ones? Australia is, of course, no longer the European colony it once was but a mixture of many peoples and cultures attempting to find a new dynamic centre. In our modern, media controlled and scientifically oriented world, non-fiction writing is all around us; much of what is on offer, even in bookshops, belongs in this category. It was an obvious place to start when inventing a new national literature. A second place was almost as obvious. In our fast-moving, stressful society we rely on recreational activity to keep us sane. Fiction had slid easily into this niche; it now needs to be reclaimed for literature and that is a project that requires imaginative transformation. Serious new Australian “novels” are, on the whole, not quite like European novels were. And lastly, our individualist society insists that every voice, however strange and discordant, has its own value and unique sound. The intricate formal beauty of poetry, appropriate in a courtly, elitist culture, has no place in Australian democracy. A much wider and less precious category of subjective writing is required. Furthermore, since democracy ideally demands that everyone’s opinions be heard, it is above all the essay, both as non-fiction and as subjective writing that can fulfill this mission. But democracy also needs people trained in making considered, intelligent and ethical choices; here too literature can be of use. Bail’s Eucalyptus pulls the rug of literary convention from under our feet; we have to re-orientate ourselves. Rothwell’s “The Blast Zone” does away with the writer as guide and mentor, forcing readers to sift and combine the evidence and come to their own conclusions. Helen Garner sets her readers up to sort things out. This, it would seem to me, is a good direction for Australian literature to be taking.

And what has ethics to do with all this? We are no longer an ancient or medieval society in which populations could be brought together in some great building, a temple, a cathedral or a town hall, that imposed on them the aesthetic unity it symbolized. Our Australian iconic building, the Sydney Opera House, is more like a sculptural background than a receptacle for crowds; one could say it encourages us to take off on the flights that music and drama, the arts, can offer. We are also not a modern dictatorship in which vast numbers of people can be summoned and choreographed to become the visual embodiment of slogans or political symbols, as is still the case in North Korea. Where people are not recognized as individuals they can be arranged as or subsumed into a beautiful thing. But our Australian democratic cohesion relies solely on the behavior of citizens towards each other, on ethics guided by law and conscience. The new genres acknowledge this. Each of them has its own ethical standard. For non-fiction it is factual accuracy; for fiction it is imaginative empathy; for subjective writing it is self-expressive honesty. If our literature continues on the path it seems to have set for itself, it is likely to be these values that will contribute significantly to the future of our society.

Bibliography

Bail, Murray Eucalyptus. Text: Melbourne, 1998.

Clendinnen, Inga “The History Question. Who Owns the Past?” Quarterly Essay 23, Black Inc.: Melbourne, 2006, pp.1-69.

Clendinnen, Inga “Lost in the Woods”. The Best Australian Essays 2007, Black Inc.: Melbourne, 2007, pp. 172-181.

Darville, Helen The Hand That Signed the Paper. Allen and Unwin: St. Leonards, 1994.

Dessaix, Robert “Kitchen-Table Candour”. The Monthly, April 2008, pp. 58-60, and Best Australian Essays 2008, ed. David Marr, Black Inc.: Melbourne, 2008, pp.179-183.   

Garner, Helen The Spare Room, Text Publishing: Melbourne, 2008.

Grenville, Kate The Secret River, Text Publishing: Melbourne, 2005.

Grenville, Kate Searching for the Secret River, Text Publishing: Melbourne, 2006.

McKenna, Mark “Writing the Past”. The Best Australian Essays 2006, ed. Drusilla Modjeska, Black Inc.: Melbourne, 2006, pp. 96-110.

McKenna, Mark “Being There”. The Best Australian Essays 2007, ed. Drusilla Modjeska, Black Inc.: Melbourne, 2007, pp. 199-226.

Mann, Robert “Free Speech, Political Correctness and the Jews” in Left Right Left. Political Essays 1977-2005, Black Inc.: Melbourne, 2005, pp.168-184.

Murnane, Gerald “Save Us from Text-Maniacs”. The Australian Literary Review, 5 March 2008 and Best Australian Essays 2008, ed. David Marr, Black Inc.: Melbourne,

2008, pp. 199-209.

Rothwell, Nicolas “The Blast Zone”. The Monthly, September 2010, pp.40-49.

Ryckmanns, Pierre “Ethics and Aesthetics: The Chinese Lesson” Best Australian Essays 2004, ed. Robert Dessaix, Black Inc.: Melbourne, 2004, pp. 141-146.