Australian Literature

Testing the Tolerance Threshold

Kicking off a new year of reviews for Splice, I’ve taken a look at Ashleigh Young’s essay collection Can You Tolerate This?:

The tolerance threshold is four pages. Read just the first four pages of Ashleigh Young’s Can You Tolerate This? and you’ll know the terms on which to press forward. Those pages belong to a potent work of short prose entitled ‘Bones’. It’s not exactly a story, though it relates a narrative spanning a lifetime. It’s not exactly an essay, though it is informative, associative, and contemplative. It’s tough to read, describing events that are ghoulish and visceral and awfully sad, and yet its sentences have a delicacy of tone which alleviates the work as a whole, lightening the burden on the reader. So, then, what’s the implication of that title? Given that Young’s raw material is self-evidently hard to bear, the question “Can you tolerate this?” seems calculated to prompt readers to consider what makes it bearable. If the subject of ‘Bones’ tests one’s tolerance, Young’s style — her delivery of the material — does a lot of heavy lifting to raise one’s tolerance threshold. Four pages, that’s all it takes. Four pages, and you’ll see that the style inserts an extra word at the end of the title: the default answer to the question is “no”, but foreground Young’s way of approaching her subject and ask again — “Can you tolerate this now?” — and the answer evolves.

Hanging, Suspended, Ongoing

With the artform of literature having come to a certain point, how to write? and indeed, how to read? What remains possible? And what possibilities are closed or exhausted? Especially when the literary impulse doesn’t falter, when there’s still an imperative to keep going: how?

That’s me, briefly making the case for Nicholas John Turner’s Hang Him When He Is Not There as a true descendant of the novels of Samuel Beckett, over on Twitter.

Reading Foster’s Letter

Over at The Collagist, I’ve reviewed Tristan Foster’s début collection of short stories and/or prose poetry — let’s call it a collection of “pieces” — entitled Letter to the Author of the Letter to the Father:

Foster’s signature move, again and again, is to flag a subject, suggest that it has some sort of meaning, and then deflate or revoke the suggestion. Sometimes he does this by signaling that a piece is “about” something and then carving out spaces in which it isn’t “about” that thing at all. “Stories About You,” for instance, takes form as a series of discrete, inscrutable statements about “you”—”You remember the dead and rest your head in your hand, or against a wall. Then you remember something else”—until the fifth one appears inexplicably to be scrubbed of human presence, containing no “you” to which its meaning could apply. Likewise, in two pieces both titled “Neighbourhood Myths,” accounts of extravagant suburban folklore (“Friend’s dad killed friend’s brother in law”) subside into two paragraphs of pure, stirring description: a tranquil summer breeze, the interplay of shade and light, no scandalous rumors whatsoever.

At other times, Foster bores holes into the meaning of a text by withholding contextual details that would make the piece intelligible. “Alive and Well” takes the form of a letter that starts with these words: “In response to your notice from 04/09: I believe the individual you are referring to is me.” But while the text comprises the letter writer’s reply to the notice, it offers few clues to the references that apparently prompted the writing. Striking a similar note in the collection’s title piece, another letter writer begins: “Dear Sir, I send it anyway, but I hope this letter fails to reach you. A failure here seems only right.” What follows is a letter written in response to an earlier letter intercepted and read illicitly, the interception implying that the original didn’t reach its intended recipient. This letter, then, opens onto a textual hall of mirrors, each text addressed explicitly to readers who are or will be deprived of its meaning.

On Small Press Acquisitions

Over at Splice, I put some questions to Milly Weaver, the editor at London-based Wundor Editions, about the thinking behind her decision to acquire UK publication rights to the Australian novelist Elizabeth Tan’s début, Rubik:

Above all, Rubik’s timeliness struck a chord. The novel offers a prescient exploration into the feelings of loneliness and technological anxiety that come with living in our hyper-networked Internet age, which I thought would really resonate with contemporary readers. Rubik embarks upon an insightful and often bleak depiction of life under neoliberalism, while still managing to be generous, accessible. On the one hand you’ve got a biting satire of vacuous, consumer-driven and technology-obsessed contemporary society, and on the other hand it’s a full-hearted adventure story. It’s not easy to achieve such equilibrium between social commentary and straightforward entertainment in a single work; Rubik strikes the balance perfectly.

A Cold Take on Late Essays

I’ve got a new review in the Glasgow Review of Books today, focusing on J.M. Coetzee’s Late Essays: 2006-2017 as well as his two earlier essay collections, Stranger Shores and Inner Workings:

The results are mixed. On the one hand, Coetzee’s greatest gifts as a critic are his eye for narrative design and his ability to elucidate why, under pressure from both the intrinsic demands of the artworks they sought to compose and the cultures in which they lived and laboured, classic writers decided to give their work this or that scope, tone, momentum, and design. On the other hand, Coetzee’s view of these writers is never less than enamoured, sometimes almost envious, and it is this view above all that hints at his anxieties. Often he seeks to pinpoint the lodestones of these writers’ legacies, to determine what technical innovations their achievements and their reputations rest on, and when he does this it’s hard to shake the feeling that he’s wondering what his own work looks like in the shadows cast by theirs. From time to time, especially when he discusses the novels of Roth and Beckett, Coetzee even gives the impression that he’s trying to trace a literary lineage in which he hopes to place his oeuvre. His recurrent attraction to past masters looks like an effort to measure up to them in fits and starts, a piecemeal strategy for finessing his own position in relation to theirs. There’s nothing amiss with this per se, but Coetzee’s way of going about it comes at a cost. Eyes on the heavens, staking his longevity solely on writers he looks up to, he forfeits the opportunity to take a look around himself and survey those who have gathered in the shadow he casts.

I’ve also supplemented the review with a few Twitter comments in response to Stephen Mitchelmore’s concerns about my discussion of identity politics.

The Purity of Potential

I make no secret of my admiration for Gerald Murnane; I’ve written about him previously on this blog here, here, and here. Now, for Splice, I’ve taken a close look at Murnane’s collected short stories, published in the United States as Stream System, and I’ve attempted to articulate something of a theory of the Murnanian mindset:

The typical protagonist of a Murnane story is a man reminiscing on his younger years, thrown back into memory by an encounter with a woman whose presence he finds enchanting. Note that he is not enchanted by her actions, and rarely by her bearing. He is enchanted specifically by her presence, by her dwelling in proximity to him, because her being there in a shared space is a wellspring for purely potential developments, potential scenarios involving the two of them, as yet untainted by grubby reality. It’s the purity of this potential that enthralls him.

Bluntly put, then, Murnane’s typical protagonist is a man who objectifies a woman. But at no stage is this man under the illusion that the woman he objectifies is available to him. On the contrary. The memories he returns to are drawn from a youth, an adolescence, and an early adulthood spent in the conservative culture of suburban and provincial Australia in the 1950s, and particularly in the repressive atmosphere of its Irish Catholic community. He is a man crippled by the war between his Catholic upbringing and his bodily impulses. Women, for him, by virtue of his cultural background, are objects that inspire carnal desires which he doesn’t know how to answer. At the same time, he is convinced that these women and the young men they spend time with do know how to answer such desires — feeling none of the misgivings or confusions that halt him in his tracks — insofar as they are unhindered by Catholic cultural norms and the limitations imposed upon what young Catholics ought to know of the world.

I’ve also followed-up on the review via Twitter, responding to a few comments by readers on Murnane’s use of parataxis and the infamous idiosyncrasies of Murnane’s life.

Feet, Teeth, Dust

He walked all night, feeling no fatigue, trembling sometimes with the thrill of being free. When it began to grow light he left the road and moved across open country. He saw no human being, though more than once he was startled by buck leaping from cover and racing away into the hills. The dry white grass waved in the wind; the sky was blue; his body was overflowing with vigour. Walking in great loops, he skirted first one farmhouse, then another. The landscape was so empty that it was not hard to believe at times that his was the first foot ever to tread a particular inch of earth or disturb a particular pebble. But every mile or two there was a fence to remind him that he was a trespasser as well as a runaway. Ducking through the fences, he could feel a craftsman’s pleasure in wire spanned so taut that it hummed when it was plucked. Nonetheless, he could not imagine himself spending his life driving stakes into the ground, erecting fences, dividing up the land. He thought of himself not as something heavy that left tracks behind it, but if anything as a speck upon the surface of an earth too deeply asleep to notice the scratch of ant-feet, the rasp of butterfly teeth, the tumbling of dust.

J.M. Coetzee
Life & Times of Michael K