Tom Petsinis
The Twelfth Dialogue
Penguin $17.95pb, 447pp
0 14 027936 9
TOM PETSINIS' THE TWELFTH DIALOGUE is a curate's egg of a novel. As a disquisition on the pleasures of reading and the role of the imagination, it engages me to the extent that I want to see where the whole work tends, in spite of my reservations about stretches of stilted conversation in the initial dialogues.
There are rewards in forging on to the finale. Some of the middle passages are beautifully written, the book sparkles with argument, and the framing is so clever that I emerge in admiration that such a risky undertaking is capped by a conclusion that doesn't sell short the novel's focus on ideas.
Prospective readers will be familiar, from the recent spate of reviews and author-profiles, with the drift of the novel and of Petsinis' ventilation in it of his stylistic preoccupations, without my repeating the paraphrases that have passed for appreciations. Accordingly, I give the merest outline before coming to those aspects of the book that engage me.
A recapitulation goes like this. During a period of economic recession, a reading-obsessed young woman called Sonya Gore abandons a dispiriting teaching career and sets up as a second-hand book dealer in a small-business district in Melbourne. A mysterious gold envelope appears in the shop. Inside the envelope is a carefully hand-written dialogue on teleology, between Karl Marx and Moses. Sonya reads it admiringly, particularly because she recognises a portrayal of herself in the tale. Other dialogues are subsequently delivered to the shop and Sonya experiences a growing sense of intimacy with the writer. With the arrival of the eighth dialogue, she meets the writer and, from here to the end of the story, sexual and textual desires are teasingly conflated. While this strand ravels itself out, Sonya's business declines: she remains dilettantishly devoted to reading and amateurishly incompetent in modern retail practices. As foreclosure looms, she considers taking up an offer from a former fellow student now turned criminal, to 'torch' her business for the insurance money. The dénouement draws together the literary, business, erotic and criminal strands of the 'plot' and highlights the inherent dangers of liaisons in each of these spheres.
Considered this way, the themes of the novel intersect like Venn diagrams and the overlapping ellipses provide the novel's chief attractions. I expect that most readers will experience pleasurable frissons in Petsinis' rephrasing, in the 'literary' dialogues, as well as in those between the protagonists, of some of the perennial arguments about the relationship of the language arts to society in general and, in particular, to a dispensation that commodifies all artefacts and relationships. The background 'colour' -- life for the under-thirties in a contemporary Australian city -- provides interest in that Petsinis, like his bookish protagonists, eschews fashionable existential and grunge fiction by his protagonists' 'younger contemporaries'. At all accounts, The Twelfth Dialogue invites reflection on a broader range of emotions than self-gratification. Petsinis draws on gritty realism in order to contrast his characters' imaginative flights. Sonya's bookshop is located between a funeral parlour and a brothel -- between the quick and the dead, as her landlord observes -- and its neighbours include a body-piercing parlour, a successful rival book dealer's establishment and a burnt-out café. Let's revisit that interesting space between the living and the dead.
Sonya's attraction to reading poses questions that are addressed in several of the dialogues delivered by her young admirer. The binary form of each dialogue admits no resolution of the issue of art's relation to life. In the second dialogue, Agathon and Aristophanes argue the claims of tragedy versus comedy to 'a spiritually and morally bankrupt society', while Socrates sits apart, getting drunk and withholding judgment, until his guests are almost oblivious. His decision is something of a cop-out: a tragedian may write comedy and a comic dramatist may write tragedy.
In the third dialogue, Verlaine and Rimbaud (not Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, as one reviewer has claimed, in Weekend Australian Review, 11-12 March 2000) are presented, discussing poetry and piety. On the point of his earthly dissolution, Rimbaud argues that poetry is the 'dead circle of yesterday's fire': he believes that words are 'nothing but the shadow of the world' and the future belongs to mathematics, not poetry. Up to this point in the novel, the invented dialogues between the literary, philosophical and religious figures seem to me to be extraordinarily wooden and their language sometimes jejune and banal, even while Petsinis is enjoying the game of planting allusions and in-jokes in the fables written by Sonya's admirer. I suspect that Petsinis felt he had to spell out the issues in terms that relatively dull readers (or a reviewer who mistakes Arthur Rimbaud for Art Garfunkel) could follow, but it seems a pity that he didn't go for a touch more subtlety of inference. Moses and Marx, in the first dialogue, sound like teenagers practising for a high school debate.
As I hinted above, I made allowance for much of the contrivance, in order to focus on the way Petsinis would resolve the dilemmas posed in these case-studies in literary invention. His dialogues raise concerns that are intrinsically those every writer confronts. (While reading The Twelfth Dialogue, I was also re-revisiting several writers' observations in The Poet's Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of Contemporary American Poets, a 1995 Norton collection of writers' jottings on the pleasures and the anxieties of writing in contemporary times. Pleasure in recognising others' wisdom or cleverness, worry about one's self-delusions, fear of computers, fear of glibness, worry about audiences, jealousies, criticism -- how much of this sort of introspection surfaces in Petsinis' clever young protagonist's efforts!)
The fourth dialogue highlights the difficulties of transmission of ideas. An imagined interpreter acts as go-between in an imagined encounter with Kafka and Hemingway, who debate one of the book's crucial topics: whether one writes for oneself or for others. Variations on this theme are reprised in later dialogues in the novel, for instance, between Borges and Cervantes, Von Kleist and Goethe, Dostoievsky and Tolstoy, and Strindberg and Ibsen. In the course of these conversations, the 'selfish' angle (the artist who lives for self-expression) is opposed to what I suppose I can call a variety of extrovert impulse (the writer who seeks to entertain, or to criticise, or to inform, or to persuade others to some course of action). (That writers write for cash is an idea given short shrift: presumably, 'younger contemporaries' write for this most debased of reasons.)
This is, of course, putting the matter too low. Petsinis rings the changes on varieties of apologies for expressionist and imaginative doctrines, and has Kleist, like Aristophanes, Leopardi, Nietzsche and other notable individualists in his all-male cast, variously assert the hollow absurdity of human endeavour. The pessimism of such figures is offset by a counter-chorus of prophetic, didactic or socially concerned figures (Moses, Plato, the Apostle Paul) who are wary of any word but the one they have 'authorised', but who nonetheless contrive to assert faith and hope.
In one fantastic dialogue, Plato, lording it in his ideal-made-actual republic, meets Homer. Plato extols his totalitarian city and, in a mood approaching sorrow (since he freely acknowledges and is overcome by the power of Homer's performance), turns out the bard, only to discover that the cryptic words scribbled by Homer's sibylline amanuensis on the walls of the city become actual myrmidons that proceed to swarm over his body. In such moments, Petsinis hauls us into the heart of the paradox whereby the act of reading can work such profound disturbance in us that we fall victim to a host of pathological conditions ranging from 'Quixotism' (identification with literary inventions) through to the types of censorious monomania that would expunge from society not only books, but (other) writers of books. One of The Twelfth Dialogue's paradoxes is that the mysterious writer of the dialogues is himself an enemy of the modern means whereby words get to exercise their power.