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. Working without
access to an adequate library, and in
some cases without reliable critical
editions of the works he was discussing,
Auerbach was forced to rely on his prodigious
erudition and to make a virtue of his
uncomprehensive and subjective method.
His thesis was simple. The great achievement
of Western realism, he argued, was to
break down the classical divisions of
style. This opened up literature, gave
it the freedom to represent everyday
life and the concerns of ordinary people.
Mimesis begins with Homer and
ends with the modernists. It develops
the idea that a civilisation’s
capacity for depicting reality through
literature is a measure of its historical
consciousness. To illustrate this thesis,
Auerbach begins each chapter with a
long quotation, which he takes as representative
of a specific development in literary
technique. The quotation is then unpacked,
with disarming fluency, in a long discursive
essay.
The sentence reproduced above occurs
in the final chapter. Auerbach is discussing
the way modernist writers had begun
to pay close attention to the subtleties
of consciousness, depicting life as
a fragmented experience lived through
small but often intense moments of awareness.
His examples are Virginia Woolf and
Marcel Proust. He is harsh in his assessment,
detecting in the modernists ‘a
certain atmosphere of universal doom’
that conveys ‘an impression of
hopelessness’. But there is a self-reflexive
aspect to his judgment; it has a confessional
quality that turns his interpretation
back on itself. Auerbach was only too
aware that he was writing an overview
of thousands of years of European culture
at a time when Europe was tearing itself
apart. The harshness of his assessment,
the pessimism he describes as a defining
feature of early twentieth-century writers,
is a by-product of his own historical
situation. His interpretation thus has
a fatal inevitability. The modernists’
loss of certainty is his loss of certainty.
He is not giving a disinterested reading
of a despairing culture; he is looking
inward and feeling a personal sense
of horror. Exiled in Istanbul, he is
both removed from the historical moment
and subject to it. This shapes his judgment
at every step. ‘Mimesis,’
he was to observe in hindsight, ‘is
quite consciously a book that a particular
person, in a particular situation, wrote
at the beginning of the 1940s.’
Even Auerbach’s panoramic vision,
capable of taking in thousands of years
of literary history, returns to this
point of fragile subjectivity and to
the awareness of its limitations.
The final pages of Mimesis sometimes
have the air of a sincere lament, but
also recognise that modernism was a
decisive development that altered the
way literature went about the business
of representation. It was a moment of
self-knowledge from which there was
no retreat, part of a broader cultural
shift away from a belief in rational
certainty and objectivity. In ‘Realism’,
the opening chapter of J.M. Coetzee’s
most recent novel, Elizabeth Costello:
Eight Lessons (2003), the eponymous
heroine, a successful Australian novelist,
gives a speech in which she ironically
likens herself to a talking ape from
a short story by Franz Kafka. The story’s
ambiguities lead her to reflect on this
historical loss of certainty, the way
it seems to have undone the very possibility
of direct communication and unproblematic
representation. There was, she argues,
‘a time when we knew’:
We
used to believe that when the text
said, ‘On the table stood a glass
of water’, there was indeed a
table, and a glass of water on it,
and we had only to look in the word-mirror
of the text to see them. But all that
has ended. The word-mirror is broken
irreparably, it seems. [...] There
used to be a time, we believe, when
we could say who we were. Now we are
just performers speaking our parts.
The bottom has dropped out.
Her
speech is not well received. Elizabeth
Costello spends most of Coetzee’s
novel acting the role of a celebrity
writer. She travels the world making
appearances, delivering lectures, fielding
questions about the meanings and motivations
behind her writing. It is not something
she enjoys. Often her appearances do
not run smoothly; her ideas tend to
provoke dissent and dissatisfaction.
On this occasion, it is implied her
views are passé. Susan Moebius,
a smooth parody of an academic littérateur,
explains that Costello faces these problems
because she does not tell people what
they want to hear. What they want, says
Moebius, is something ‘more personal.
It doesn’t have to be intimate.
But audiences no longer react well to
heavy historical self-ironization. They
might at a pinch accept it from a man,
but not from a woman.’ The audience
wants literal confession; but Costello’s
aim is to keep ‘her true self safe’.
Or so her son John believes; for Costello,
the issue cuts deeper than this. She
has come to doubt the very existence
of such a thing as a ‘true self’.
The word-mirror is irreparably broken,
yet she is compelled to appear before
an audience. Inevitably, what she presents
is ‘an image, false, like all images’.
The irony is that Elizabeth Costello’s
expressions of doubt are sincere. Moebius
is mistaken. What Costello tells her
audience is ‘personal’. She
does not pretend to be someone she is
not; she merely goes through with the
ritual of each public appearance knowing
it is an empty ritual. The problem arises
because her sense of self, conscious
of this artificiality, can only find
legitimate expression through the hesitancies
and qualifications of irony, but she
is faced with a literal-minded audience
expecting the clear and unambiguous
intention, the moral stance, that they
assume underpins her work. In a sense,
they want to be able to short-circuit
her novels. They want a key that will
unlock the secret of the text. They
want to confirm their existing opinions,
so as to avoid the awkward ambiguities
that might arise from the difficult
business of interpretation.
As a depiction of the life of a successful
author, Coetzee’s novel possesses
a dry wit. Costello’s troubles
are seen to be an unavoidable part of
the celebrity writer’s lot, a symptom
of cultural expectations. ‘Television,’
Jonathan Franzen has argued — and
let us assume ‘television’
is synecdoche for the entire apparatus
of the mass media and celebrity culture
— ‘has conditioned us to accept
only the literal testimony of the self’.
Literature, as an ironic and humane
art, holds out the promise of sanctuary
from the literalising and trivialising
power of contemporary culture, but it
is also part of this culture. It is
as the literal testimony of the self
that novels are regularly promoted.
As Elizabeth Costello discovers, audiences
often prefer the security of an easy
illusion to the difficult and ambiguous
conception of the self that she presents.
Irony’s elusiveness is greeted
with suspicion or incomprehension. The
nuanced inner world that was opened
up by the modernists has given way to
a world of images.
Franz
Kafka wrote in his diary: ‘My
doubts stand in a circle around every
word.’
The
latest in the rolling series of crises
that seem permanently to afflict Australian
literature is a crisis of declining
readership. Literary fiction is losing
market share to memoirs and genre fiction.
It has been suggested that a dearth
of good new writers and a glut of mediocre
novels are to blame. Certainly, there
are many novels pub-lished in this country
that are dull, under-realised or just
plain bad, but this is not necessarily
the root of the problem. Culturally
speaking, the shit-at-a-wall theory
has its virtues. On balance, having
more writers rather than less is a good
thing. In any case, Australian literature
is currently more diverse and robust
than it is sometimes given credit for;
good novels are being published, even
if they are not always the most visible.
The problem would seem to be less one
of latent talent — which is beyond
anyone’s control — than of
cultivating readers who are prepared
to take on a challenging, difficult
novel. This may have something to do
with our timid publishing culture, but
it is also part of a broader cultural
failure to attend to literature as a
representative, ironic art form. There
is plenty of chatter about books, but
little in the way of serious consideration
of basic questions about literature,
about how and what it expresses, about
what to expect from it, about how it
should be read. The ways in which fiction
is promoted encourage an idea of literature
that is ultimately self-defeating.
There is a contradiction in the popular
perception of serious literature. On
the one hand, it has prestige. There
is a general impression that an intelligent,
educated person will at least occasionally
read books, some of which should be
‘literary’ in the vague sense
of being the most profound and meritorious
works a culture has to offer. At the
same time, there is a counter-perception
that literature consists of books that
are difficult and dull; that it is something
to be consumed for its healthful properties
rather than its taste. People want literature,
but do not want to be alienated or confused
by it.
The understandable response of publishers,
whose aim is to appeal to the widest
possible audience, is to be conservative.
It is in their interest to make literature
seem serious and profound, but also
safe and unthreatening. Thus ‘literary’
novels are packaged in a reassuring
guise. They are pushed into recognisable
pigeonholes. This is one of the reasons
for the blandness of local fiction publishing,
which was eloquently deplored by the
novelist Andrew McCann in a recent edition
of Overland. Many ‘literary’
works seem to have found their way into
print because their subject-matter allows
them to be slotted into a niche market,
and not because of merit. At the very
least, they speak of a chronically unadventurous
idea of what constitutes a literary
novel. It is a kind of weirdly adolescent
idea that equates serious literature
with swooning lyricism, plenty of ‘poetic’
references to weather and flora, and,
of course, total humourlessness. The
supposedly serious end of the market
is awash with novels dressed in soft-focus
pastel covers that are so slight they
only run to two hundred pages with the
help of oversized, generously spaced
typefaces; novels so precious and insubstantial
that they threaten to dissolve into
dust at the first puff of wind. The
common wisdom is that the reading public
is reluctant to engage with novels that
are difficult, but maybe we are being
presented with books that are not difficult
enough.
On an intellectual level, this striving
for reassurance assumes a number of
forms, all of which are subject to the
law of diminishing returns. The word
‘story’, for example, is regularly
used in a way that implies all narratives
are valuable for their own sake. This
has its basis in the valid idea that
human beings understand themselves and
the world through narrative, but it
has degraded into a term suggesting
a facile universality. We all have a
story; we all understand stories. A
story in any form, we are asked to believe,
will enrich us, no matter how pointless.
The logic resembles that of a callow
schoolboy who wonders why he has to
study English when he already knows
how to speak it; instead of being reprimanded,
however, he is told that he is quite
right and that no effort is required.
The word ‘story’ is now used
to indicate a book is safely anti-intellectual,
that it contains nothing unusual or
challenging; that literature’s
wisdom does not have to be worked for
but can be attained simply by exposing
oneself to the affirming glow of the
story. Novelists are relabelled ‘storytellers’
as a sop to a reading public whose inability
to cope with anything even slightly
unorthodox or thought-provoking is presumed
to be total. The idea of the ‘story’
has, in short, become a platitude that
is trotted out in defence of the bland
and mediocre in an attempt to protect
it from scrutiny. Successfully, it seems,
since no one is reading these novels
anymore.
This tendency has reached its nadir
in the ongoing compulsion to label novels
supposedly written for adults as ‘fairy
tales’. The origin of this trend
is honourable, lying in the decades-old
vogue for magic realism which, at its
best, recognised the subversive psychological
undercurrents in many folk tales. But
it has long ceased to have any subversive
resonance. It is now used to signify
that the ‘literary’ has been
rendered safely infant-ile. The back
cover of one recent débutante
novelist’s book was adorned with
the question, ‘Do you believe in
creatures at the bottom of the garden?’
This is so cretinous it drools. The
only possible answer a sane person could
give to this question is ‘No’.
One can only assume that this unfortunate
author’s publishers have reached
such a level of cynicism that they assume
the target market for new Australian
novels consists entirely of nitwits.
Here, perhaps, is one reason why sales
are low: read a blurb and you risk having
your intelligence insulted.
The
staple of book promotion has become
the author as celebrity, presented in
feature articles, interviews and public
appearances. There are good reasons
for this emphasis. There is no question
it works. The easiest way to spark interest
in a book is to hint at the creative
struggle that was involved in writing
it. There is nothing necessarily invidious
or even new about this focus on the
author. Many great writers — Charles
Dickens, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde —
cultivated public personas that complemented
their writings. Most of the time this
appeals to a basic curiosity about other
people and the creative process. The
revelations tend to be trivial or harmless.
(I hear Brian Castro’s favourite
pencil is a 2B.) Cannier authors play
up to the interest. They learn how to
handle themselves in an interview and
to present their novels as extensions
of themselves. It is a common trick
for novelists to blur the lines between
reality and fiction to give their narrative
credibility.
From a critical perspective, which is
to say from a reader’s perspective,
the distinction between fiction and
non-fiction is difficult to sustain.
The critic Northrop Frye, a dedicated
literary taxonomist, regarded it as
arbitrary, a product of the reader’s
assumptions and not of the text itself,
pointing out that ‘an autobiography
coming into a library would be classified
as non-fiction if the librarian believed
the author, and as fiction if she thought
he was lying’. Novels as far back
as Robinson Crusoe (1719) have assumed
the form of first-person confessions
— the point being that once something
has been shaped into a narrative it
has implications that extend well beyond
the question of how closely it corresponds
to reality. All narratives are tendentious,
with their own logic. They are, as William
Gass said, ‘sneaky justifications’,
even if they pretend not to be. Their
truth is always provisional and subjective.
It is why realism is ultimately in the
eye of the beholder. It is also why
the modernists and their heirs felt
the necessity for formal innovation.
By being railroaded into a narrative,
autobiography becomes fictionalised.
This is not to say that all memoirists
are liars (some clearly are) but simply
that their works are rhetorically indistinguishable
from fiction and demand the same kind
of interpretation, the same scrutiny
of a self that is ultimately an image,
false, like all images. The revelation
that Norma Khouri fabricated the details
of her ‘memoir’, Forbidden
Love (2003), could be seen as a scandal
of incorrect classification. The embarrassment
it caused sprang from the assumptions
that are made when a book is presented
as a true story. The ‘truth’
of the narrative is treated as a licence
for the reader to suspend his or her
critical faculties, to read literally,
as if the word-mirror was still intact.
Rather than being alert to the way a
public persona is constructed, we are
encouraged to collude with its creation
as a way of manipulating our response.
There would have been no controversy
if Forbidden Love had simply been called
a novel. But it was not, and so when
the literal testimony of the self turned
out to be an illusion there was a scandal.
One of the things the Khouri affair
hinted at was the way the promotion
of books as a literal expression of
their author’s beliefs and experiences
encourages a looking-glass view of literature.
It is not possible to consider the meaning
of a novel without considering its aesthetics.
After all, it is a rhetorical structure
that wants to shape your response. This
has to be taken into account in any
competent reading. To read literally
is to misread. But not only are we encouraged
to ignore the fictional qualities of
non-fiction, there is also a tendency
for the public emphasis on the personality
of the author to turn this misguided
credulity back onto works that are explicitly
fictional.
In
James Joyce’s Ulysses
(1922), Stephen Dedalus gives a detailed
explanation of his theory about the
autobiograph-ical inspiration behind
Hamlet. ‘Every life is many days,’
he says at one point, ‘day after
day. We walk through ourselves, meeting
robbers, ghosts, giants, old men,
young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love.
But always meeting ourselves.’
The
most dramatic example of this climate
of literalism was the successful publicity
campaign for The Bride Stripped Bare
(2003), a novel credited to ‘Anonymous’
but revealed almost immediately (before
publication, in fact) to be the work
of Nikki Gemmell. The way the book was
promoted has already been the subject
of some analysis (see Linda Hawryluk’s
‘Miss Gemmell Regrets: Anatomy
of a PR Campaign’ in Overland
176, 2004). The key point here is the
way the novel’s fictional qualities
were either downplayed or ignored altogether.
The author encouraged this view. Gemmell
could have distanced herself, pointing
out that, as a work of fiction, the
book was an imaginative transformation
of reality whose ideas were speculative
and contingent. But her public statements
instead emphasised the novel’s
autobiographical veracity. The Bride
Stripped Bare, she asserted in every
one of her numerous interviews, was
‘honest’. The reason she had
chosen to publish the book anonymously,
she argued, was to allow herself the
freedom to write in a confessional mode,
to be utterly frank about the taboo
subject of female sexuality. She publicly
admitted to sharing many of her protagonist’s
specific sexual dislikes. The book’s
claim to absolute truthfulness, its
faithful representation of the real
experiences and feelings of its author
and her closest female friends, was
presented as its rationale, its defence
against criticism, and the source of
its literary merit.
There is no reason to suspect Gemmell
was anything other than sincere in advancing
this interpretation of her novel. In
fact, she gave the impression of being
as oblivious to any possible complications
to her argument as she was to the contradiction
in agreeing to a punishing round of
media appearances to discuss her preference
for anonymity. But the significance
of this promotional campaign, and the
reason for its success, was that it
transmitted one key message over and
over again: The Bride Stripped Bare
could be read as a work of sexual autobiography.
That Gemmell had wanted the book published
anonymously became a stamp of authenticity,
a guarantee that it expressed her deepest
desires and that they were uncensored
and explicit. The more Gemmell spoke
of her personal sense of mortification,
the more it fuelled the impression that
something terribly private had been
made public through some ghastly mistake.
Here was a book that truly promised
to deliver the literal testimony of
the self. And the publicity worked.
According to The Age, The
Bride Stripped Bare was the highest-selling
Australian novel for the year 2003 and
the second highest-selling Australian
novel in 2004, behind Bryce Courtenay’s
Brother Fish (2004).
If, however, we turn to the book itself,
we can see what a limiting, unsustainable,
even delusional reading this is. The
Bride Stripped Bare’s unnamed
narrator claims ‘no one’s
completely honest about sex’, a
catch-cry that echoed throughout the
promotional campaign. Of course, there
was always an unspoken qualification
to this sweeping declaration: the message
was ‘no one’s completely honest
about sex — except me’. But
if we take this universalising statement
in context as an assertion made by a
character in a novel who then goes on
to talk about sex in some detail, it
could be read as casting doubt on the
reliability of the narrator herself.
It contradicts itself: in fact, it is
a version of the Cretan paradox.
This logical awkwardness might lead
us to attend more closely to those moments
in the novel in which the narrator is
not honest. It might draw attention
to the fact that being honest and the
act of declaring oneself to be honest
are two different things. This in turn
might lead us to take note of the dissenting
voices within the book which imply the
narrator is indulgent and narcissistic.
The chapters in The Bride Stripped
Bare are called ‘lessons’
— might this be ironic? After all,
each ‘lesson’ also begins
with a quotation from a moralising Victorian-era
text instructing women on their social
obligations. These provide a running
commentary on the action, and at times
seem to be mocking the narrator’s
self-image.
Indeed, the claim that no one is honest
about sex might draw attention to the
artificiality of the entire narrative,
its conservative structure, the contrived
way it moves its protagonist from an
exaggerated state of timid repression
to a caricature of liberation. We might
become conscious of the stereotypes
lurking close to the surface of the
novel’s characters: the dissatisfied
wife, the insensitive husband, the enigmatic
Spanish lover. There is, we might come
to suspect, something implausible or
clichéd about the quasi-pornographic
encounters through which the narrator
liberates herself. Our attention might
be drawn to the way her desires, her
ideas about romance, seem to spring
from comparisons to artificial standards
unconsciously absorbed from the wider
culture. We might notice that while
some restrictive gender roles are being
challenged, others are reinforced. We
might want to reflect upon the excessive
squeamishness the narrator feels about
the human body and its functions. We
might detect an underlying dislike for
men in both her pre- and post-liberation
manifestations, and baulk at her belief
that the experience of childbirth grants
her the right to a smug sense of superiority
over childless women. Throughout the
novel, the narrator is, in other words,
constructing a sense of self, defining
herself as a particular type of person
through her narrative. But stories are
sneaky justifications; the stories we
tell about ourselves especially so.
We would be wise to be on guard, lest
we are, as the narrator claims to be
at one point, ‘seduced by text’
and find ourselves believing too readily
in an image whose appearance is deceptive.
To read The Bride Stripped Bare
in this manner, to read it as a novel,
to interpret it as what the Russian
critic Mikhail Bakhtin called ‘a
living mix of varied and opposing voices’,
is to open up a space between the persona
the narrator pres-ents and the implicit
challenge to that persona that is reflected
back at her by the fictional reality
she inhabits. This requires paying attention
not only to what the narrator tells
us about herself but how she tells us.
It requires a consideration of the novel
as an aesthetic object and not simply
as a truthful representation. If we
read in this manner, the narrator’s
brittle sense of self begins to fracture
and the reasons that were publicly advanced
as arguments for its validity disappear.
The novel’s ‘honesty’
becomes redundant.
Literature throngs with characters who
ingenuously cast themselves into the
wider world only to have their naïve
illusions shattered against the anvil
of reality. Indeed, the contemporary
idea that a person’s image of himself
or herself is always valid and unquestionable,
that it should be given respectful treatment
even when it is self-serving and false,
has received derisory treatment from
many of the great novelists of the past.
Think of the wicked sport Jane Austen
has with her characters’ vanities;
or the way some of George Eliot’s
protagonists have their lives efficiently
ruined because their self-belief blinds
them to some crucial personal failing.
By the time of the modernists, Sigmund
Freud had given common currency to the
idea that our motivations are not always
what we understand them to be and are
often far less admirable than we imagine,
but of course literature knew that already.
The literal testimony of the self, it
cautions us, is inherently unreliable.
When Oscar Wilde said that all bad poetry
is sincere, he did not mean that good
poetry is necessarily insincere, but
that the poetaster has such an unshakeable
belief in the special profundity of
her tremulous soul and the unique depth
of her feelings that she is deaf to
the awfulness of her verse. This self-belief
mistakenly assumes that sincerity is
so valuable that it overrides any other
defects. Fatally, it believes that the
act of communicating an experience is
unproblematic, that intention is enough
to carry the day. But it is possible
to confess to one’s deepest secrets
with total honesty and do no more than
reveal their banality.
When
Stephen Dedalus is asked whether he
believes his own theory, he says ‘No’.
The
critic Jane Adamson has suggested that
irony provides a way to understand the
false and sometimes damaging consequences
of a literal sense of self. Drawing
on William Hazlitt’s reading of
Shakespeare, she defines literary irony
as a conversational form that opens
up the possibility of self-criticism.
Irony, she argues, is a mode that creates
‘a multifarious, complex awareness
of an object’. It produces ‘shafts
of insight from disparate yet conver-gible
ideas’. It allows ‘things
to be apprehended simultan-eously from
different angles and in disparate moods,
as in T.S. Eliot’s classic definition
of Marvell’s “wit” as
involving “a recognition, implicit
in the expression of [a particular]
experience, of other kinds of experience
which are possible”’. Irony,
at some level, is essential to serious
literary endeavour. It could even be
argued that irony is implicit in the
idea of literature itself. Representing
something, projecting it into a fictitious
realm, creates a distance between the
creator and the creation. It is this
space that opens up the possibility
of ambivalence and ambiguity. It allows
an idea to doubt itself. Irony is more
than a clever device; it is a constructive
and ongoing process of reinterpretation.
An ironic sense of self is central to
Brian Castro’s Shanghai Dancing
(2003), a novel described by its author
as a ‘fictional autobiography’.
In Shanghai Dancing, identity is something
elusive and ever-changing, drawing on
a swamp of warped memories and untruths.
The narrator is named Antonio Castro.
At the age of nine, we see Antonio reading
Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
(1927) and ‘not understanding a
thing’; but at some point, we can
be reasonably confident, Brian Castro
has read the same novel and understood
it well. Shanghai Dancing is
alive to the nuances of the moment and
the rich swirl of metaphor it creates.
This vivid awareness becomes a philosophy
of sorts. ‘There is no interpretation
of life,’ says Antonio, ‘there
is only muscular memory.’
This idea is expressed through the novel’s
disjointed style. One chapter, for example,
begins with the memory of a specific
object: his grandmother’s wind-up
gramophone. This draws forth one of
Castro’s rich clusters of metaphorical
associations. The gramophone’s
bent arm suggests a broken wrist; the
needles, kept in a silver tin, become
a doctor’s hypodermic. He remembers
feeling the music enter his body through
the needle like liquid through a syringe,
like a drug, rushing like the waters
of the Yangtze. For his grandmother,
the music evokes her past experiences
and this inspires in Antonio a realisation
about the elusiveness of memory that
he associates with his calling as a
writer:
Then
an immense sadness would pass over
from time to time, because as my grandmother
was growing deafer and deafer, I realised
that in her crouching and sighing,
she was trying to recapture a memory
that had already begun to lose its
potency. The effects became briefer,
until there was a kind of confusion
of the senses as to what devastations
had taken place in what past life
and though she could not relate to
me the forgetting which she was desperately
trying to shore up with dramatic performances
and with the aid of her needles, I
knew instinctively that I had been
chosen as the recipient of its multifariousness
and deception.
The
chapter is titled ‘Mimesis’.
But what is being represented here is
less a concrete reality than the experience
of remembering. It is a representation
of a representation. Each image in the
swirl of metaphorical associations refers
to each of the others. The mind is led
from one image to the next, reshaping
and reinventing the past as it goes.
Despite his claims to the contrary,
Antonio’s ‘muscular memory’
is an interpretation of sorts. The transformation
introduces an element of uncertainty,
and it creates a reality that is subjective
and thus unreliable. This is an awkward
and ambiguous position for a man trying
to write a factual account of the history
of his family, and when he meets his
cousin Cindy Ling, her instinctive scepticism
quickly zeroes in on his compromised
motivations:
So
you’re writing some sort of story?
Lives.
Lies? She smirked [...]
I’m just after something to get
me started. True or false it doesn’t
matter. I don’t have any sneaky
agendas.
Sure. They all say that.
Antonio
occasionally longs for something sincere,
for direct access to the truth about
his family’s history, but accepts
with a certain sadness that this can
never be achieved. Shanghai Dancing
could be read as a novel, not only about
understand-ing the past, but about the
problems of representation, of constructing
one’s sense of self from fragments
and fading memories, and the perils
of communicating that subjective understanding.
There is a wonderfully bathetic moment
when the young Antonio, in a naïve
attempt to communicate with the world,
writes his thoughts on small pieces
of paper, twists them, and drops them
out the window of his house. ‘In
their coded weaving,’ he says,
‘they rotated briefly with fatuous
hope, paused, soared and landed serendipitously
in chicken shit or on the soggy garbage
of a dozen families living in tiny ratholes
worse than ours.’
Shanghai Dancing is an ambitious
novel. It makes a point of resisting
the reassuring certainties of narrative.
‘Okay, so you know English grammar,’
says Antonio’s half-sister Stella.
‘Big shot from boarding school.
But you know shit for story.’ This
sometimes makes for difficult reading,
but given its subject matter and the
ideas its sets out to explore, it could
hardly have been written differently.
And if we were looking for another example
of the frosty reception this kind of
ironic exploration of the self is apt
to receive, then we need look no further.
For Shanghai Dancing also arrived
on the heels of a scandal, a real scandal,
although not a controversy to command
the kind of media attention granted
The Bride Stripped Bare. Despite
being the work of an established, highly
regarded writer, Castro’s novel
was published by the small independent
imprint Giramondo rather than by a major
publisher. The reason? ‘I have
to put it baldly,’ Castro told
The Age, ‘I was being forced to
dumb down. People wanted things “clarified”.
The word they used was “signpost”.
I thought, hang on, this book is about
dissociation! So I walked away before
I was kneecapped.’ Our suspicions
about the literal testimony of the self
might lead us to be wary here. Are these
the words of a literary prima donna?
A precious author’s fit of pique
at modest and respectful editorial advice?
Alas, no. Here it is at last: the ring
of truth.
‘Art is not difficult because it
wants to be difficult,’ said Donald
Barthelme, ‘but because it wants
to be art.’ Works that test the
boundaries of form are essential to
a literary culture because they explore
the limits of expression and thus the
boundaries of the self. Inevitably,
these books place demands on the reader
in excess of most forms of entertainment.
They require not just reading, but rereading.
Their aesthetic is one of complexity,
indeterminacy, slow philosophical reflection.
As such, they run counter to the contemporary
idea of entertainment, offering instead
more esoteric and cerebral pleasures.
Reading is an occupation that is opposed
to the temper of the times; reading
literary fiction especially so. Castro
was quoted recently as saying the trick
to great writing is to ‘border
on boredom’ in order to allow time
to be ‘carved out for thinking
the normally unthinkable’. Maria
Takolander, one of ABR’s
reviewers, perhaps bemused that an author
would admit the possibility of boring
his readers, described the remark as
‘enigmatic’. It is certainly
a comment to make a publisher blanch.
But if we look past the cheeky phrasing
of Castro’s assertion, we might
notice how it echoes another claim of
Barthelme’s: ‘what we are
looking for is the as-yet unspeakable,
the as-yet unspoken.’ We might
notice how it wants to bring the reader
into the creative process through the
act of interpretation, how it expresses
the ambitious desire to alter the way
the reader thinks, and how it does not
want to control what is being thought
but opens itself up to new possibilities.
Elizabeth
Costello was a surprising omission
from the 2003 short list for the Man
Booker Prize. One of the judges that
year, D.J. Taylor, later revealed that
Coetzee’s novel was overlooked
at the insistence of one judge in particular.
Taylor wrote in the Guardian
that he admired the book, but his unnamed
colleague was vehementin his dislike,
denouncing it as ‘deplorable’
and ‘dishonest’. It is an
inscrutable interpretation. What might
the word ‘dishonest’ mean
in this context? After all, the eventual
winner, D.B.C. Pierre’s Vernon
God Little, is a novel that is dishonest
in an obvious sense: it is narrated
by a liar whose explicit intention is
to seduce you with his narrative and
so convince you of his innocence. We
can only speculate that perhaps the
judge’s objection was related to
the form of Elizabeth Costello.
Perhaps he thought that presenting a
series of lectures — or ‘lessons’,
as Coetzee ironically titles his chapters
— was evasive; that, even though
the novel gives voice to conflicting
ideas, Elizabeth Costello was a mouthpiece
for Coetzee’s opinions and fiction
was being used to provide the cover
of deniability.
James Wood, a sometimes stern critic
of Coetzee’s work, certainly saw
Elizabeth Costello as a confessional
novel. ‘Coetzee’s framing
device,’ he wrote in the London
Review of Books, ‘does not
so much evade as self-incriminate.’
But what Elizabeth Costello is confessing
to is doubt. She ‘no longer believes
very strongly in belief’; she doubts
her ideas even as she is articulating
them, distrustful of their very form.
‘Belief may be no more, in the
end, than a source of energy,’
she thinks, ‘like a battery which
one clips into an idea to make it run.
As happens when one writes: believing
whatever has to be believed in order
to get the job done.’ She doubts
reason itself, suspecting it of being
a self-validating narrative. This doubt
reaches to the core of her identity.
In the novel’s final chapter, she
finds herself in a kind of bureaucratic
purgatory. In a scene that is both a
homage and a parody of Kafka, she is
told to give a statement of her beliefs.
‘It is not my profession to believe,’
she responds, ‘just to write. Not
my business. I do imitations, as Aristotle
would have said. [...] I can do an imitation
of belief, if you like. Will that be
enough for your purposes?’
When pressed, she does, finally, admit
to a belief of sorts. After all, nihilists
do not exist, and if they did they would
not, like Costello, write novels. She
believes she can ‘think her way
into other people, into other realities’,
even the reality of another species.
She believes there ‘are no bounds
to the sympathetic imagination’.
Wood read Costello’s arguments,
interestingly, as ‘the reply of
literature to philosophy’. It could
also be seen as a retort to a culture
that wants to treat literature as a
storehouse of profound desk calendar
mottoes. The character of Elizabeth
Costello, a representation of a disgruntled
celebrity author, is literature’s
response to a culture that demands something
from writers they cannot in good conscience
give and wants to overlook what literature
does offer. The problem that Elizabeth
Costello confronts is the gulf between
her self and its expression. The act
of articulation falsifies her ideas.
She is constantly bumping up against
the limits of the expressible. Her position
is reminiscent of some of David Foster
Wallace’s characters when they
find themselves trapped in the lethal
involutions of self-consciousness. Elizabeth
Costello is both a critique of the
idea of representation and a demonstration
of its power as a means of understanding
ourselves.
There is a touch of romanticism to Costello’s
ideas about the imagination. Her belief
is a version of John Keats’s negative
capability. She is expressing a faith
in literature, even as she voices her
frustrations with the limitations of
representative art. It is a moral belief
in the imagination as Hazlitt defines
the term in his anti-utilitarian essay
‘On Reason and Imagination’
(1826). Hazlitt argues that the imagination
is an innate human faculty that mediates
between our subjective selves and the
world around us. Imagination is the
means by which we are able to empathise
with other people, to understand their
thoughts and feelings. Moral and poetical
truths, he claims, can only be arrived
at by attending to the specific instance,
not by rushing to claim ownership of
a universal principle derived from abstract
generalities. It is only if ‘we
are imbued with a deep sense of individual
weal or woe’, he writes, that ‘we
shall be awe-struck at the idea of humanity
in general’. Referring to Hamlet’s
directions to the travelling players,
he says that ‘the object and the
end of playing, “both at the first
and now, is to hold the mirror up to
nature”, to enable us to feel for
others as for ourselves, or to employ
a distinct interest out of ourselves
by the force of imagination and passion’.
Auerbach eventually arrives at a similar
idea. Returning his attention to Woolf
after his general condemnation of the
negativity implied by the modernists’
fracturing of perspective, he observes
that ‘something entirely different
takes place here too’. To the
Lighthouse is also a book filled
with ‘irony, amorphous sadness,
and doubt of life’. The reason
for this is ‘the emphasis on the
random occurrence’ and Woolf’s
desire ‘to exploit it not in the
service of a planned continuity of action
but in itself’. This, paradoxically,
provides the glimpse of universality
in which we might detect hope:
It
is precisely the random moment which
is comparatively independent of the
controversial and unstable orders
over which men fight and despair;
it passes unaffected by them, as daily
life. The more it is exploited, the
more the elementary things which our
lives have in common come to light.
The more numerous, varied, and simple
the people are who appear as subjects
of such random moments, the more effectively
must what they have in common shine
forth.
So
the modernists were not destroying after
all, they were affirming. The word-mirror
is broken, but fragments continue to
reflect. The self-lacerating irony of
Elizabeth Costello might be accused,
as the modernists were, of being despairing
and pessimistic and solipsistic, but
it is the opposite. Its irony struggles
against the inevitability of solipsism
and the literalism of the image. It
suggests something beneath the surface.
It is not evasive, although its instability
and irreducibility might be mistaken
as evasive. It is like an animal flinging
itself against the bars of its cage.
Futile perhaps, but we are more likely
to be sympathetic to such a creature
than one who sits passively, mistaking
captivity for the freedom of the jungle.
It is only by acknowledging artifice
that one can move beyond artifice. It
is only through ceaseless interpretation
that we might catch a reflected glimpse
of the human subject at the heart of
literature. Reading is a creative act.
Unlike almost everything we are encouraged
to consider entertainment, it is an
active pursuit. Without this process
of interpretation we cannot know ourselves.
