Unbinding spells: Malouf's romantic postcolonial existentialism, Pel Mel and Praise

Ever fallen under the spell of a writer or a particular book?

John Irving, author of The World According to Garp among other novels, talked about a moment in writing when the the universe of a novel fell under one tone of voice. When a single tonal register enclosed the world of the novel: its characters, events, places. Is this what happens when we are drawn into a story or oeuvre - we surrender to something like a gravitational pull, and stop resisting the story and storytelling and begin to feel our way into the emotional contours of the tale?

Do we ever really begin to inhabit a story until sparks of identification and feeling make the jump from the page to our emotional and cognitive receptors? And once sparked, to put the question in its inverted form, what sorts of readings are those that rasp against the grain of the verbal wood or unrepress the traumas and loss that the text is a maze of dreamwork-like symptoms for? Do we need to first be spellbound before such literary-critical unbindings occur?

Australian novelist, poet, essayist David Malouf did exert a spell over me for a period in the mid 1990s. Malouf's fictional prose often tumbles and flows through a mesmerizing tone of voice, that combines romantic awe with tenderness and a sly sense of humour. Malouf is also a canny plotter and seems to have ingested much of Heidegger's early existentialism and Edward Said's postcolonialism, giving his prose sustained passages of reflection where the narrator works through a problem or event with the timing and feel of the calmer, epiphanic instances of romantic poetry.

Malouf's novels are often structured around an intense homosocial relationship and often involving an 'artist' who the narrator is close to yet ultimately distant from. These romantic artists are also postcolonial forerunners: their primary mode of being-in-the-world is forged out of a confrontation with the limits of colonial structures and discourses, and in such confrontation the creative imagination (what Cornelius Castoriadis calls the Radical Imagination) is enabled to break into newness or alterity. Frank Harland (Harland's Half Acre), Gemmy Fairlie (Remembering Babylon), the wild Child (An Imaginary Life) and Johnno are characters in Malouf's fictions that become post-colonial through their creative responses to encounters with the limits of colonial space and imperial presence. If, as Heidegger in Being and Time argues, authentic existence is a modification, rather than transcendence, of everyday being-with-others then the creative modifications of such colonial and nationalist social being in Malouf's fictions are postcolonial becomings that hover on the brink of transcendental idealism without ever becoming ungrounded.

Exiled from Rome to the rural village of Tomas the poet Ovid, the narrrator of Malouf's second novel An Imaginary Life, tells us early in the narrative that:

[T]he spirits have to be recognised to become real. They are not quite outside us, nor even entirely within, but flow back and forth between us and the objects we have made, the landscape we have shaped and move in. We have dreamed all these things in our deepest lives and they are ourselves. It is our self we are making out there, and when the landscape is complete we shall become the gods who are intended for it. [28]

Yet later in the novel, after Ovid has worked through the mourning of his lost father and had the existential encounter with his own mortality (being-toward-death), such Romantic idealism enters a dialectic with a returned gaze of a Native child - the wild wolf-like Child of the village:

What I remember clearly now are his eyes, fixed on me across the open space between the trees, that stare is something I could not have imagined. I have seen nothing like it before, except from the eyes of my child, so many years ago . . . It exceeds my imagining, that sharp little face with its black stare, and I think how poorly my poetry . . . compares with the accidental reality of this creature who must exist not to impress but simply because he has somehow tumbled into being. [50 - emphasis added]

In Remembering Babylon [1993] a character's authentic existential experience is also dialectically entwined with the ethics of the Other - the Other for whom the self's recognition (and vice versa) establishes identity:

[H]er regard was upon him . . .trying to see right into him, to catch his spirit, aware, as the others were not, that he was not entirely what he allowed them to see . . .her gaze was so open and vulnerable that he felt no threat in it, and in himself only a stillness, a sense of tender ease at being exposed for a moment - not to her, but to himself . . . he felt in the concentration of her gaze that he hung there still. Something, in that moment, had been settled between them . . . he went back and back to it. [35-6]

In the scene above the putatively indigenized Gemmy Fairlie (Malouf's portrayal of the white indigene as hybrid racial-cultural subject), gives presence to a totality of possibilities for postcolonial inhabitance through the reflection returned to Janet McIvor's open gaze:

'I have never seen anyone clearer in all my life. All that he was. All.' Something Gemmy had touched off in them [Janet and her brother Lachlan] was what they were still living, both, in their different ways . . .[and] in a stilled moment that had lasted for years, Gemmy as she saw him, once and for all, up there on the stripped and shiny rail, never to fall . . .drawn by the power, all unconscious in them, of their gaze, their need to draw him into their lives - love, again, love - overbalanced but not yet falling. [195-9]

I do still find both the expression and the ideas spellbinding: the possibilities of the imagination working with presence and Others to enable a deeper dwelling, and the simple, precise and elegant language, that tumbles clauses together in a conversational tone. The Free and Radical Imagination and the radical social imaginary are tempting dreams to believe in, as sources of postcoloniality, justice and liberation. But the social imaginary doesn't behave in the same way as the creative-productive imagination: the power of institutions, of discourses, of the production and distribution of commodities, of the turning of people into waste products, the power of capital to shape and form the social imaginaries that most people live within.

Reading Malouf's fiction as postcolonial Romantic existentialism finds its limits when you start looking to historicise the period from which he begins to produce prose: 1975 to the present. From someone of my generation 1975 is the year punk rock starts to emerge, and this musical-cultural form was short, sharp and rooted in negation and Warlholian aesthetics. So, while Malouf's seductive prose and ethical-aesthetic project retains its power to spell me, I feel like I'm being gravitationally pulled into a history that doesn't square with being shaken by experiencing Newcastle's post-punk band Pel Mel at the MacQuarie Uni Bar in 1983 and feeling as though that was where life was. And it wasn't until Andrew McGahan's Praise (1992) that something of what Pel Mel were doing - a shared structure of feeling - came into Australian fiction, for me at least, with the tone of voice of Praise's Gordon Buchanan:

I'd always maintained a certain distance from the staff at the Capital. I liked them, I drank with them, but I didn't get involved. There were only a few, Carla and Morris, and maybe Lisa, that I bothered with outside of work hours. Most of my friends came from other parts of my life. From school. University. Most of the sex came from there too, but there wasn't much sex and what there was hadn't been much good. I was young and nervous and not very enthusiastic. I didn't have the libido I felt I was supposed to have. And I didn't expect things to improve. I relied on masturbation.

Praise [7].

[Pel Mel - No word from China You tube link]

The uses of FB literacy

I'm ambivalent about Facebook. I tend to lurk there, occasionally posting You Tube clips, but mostly checking in on friends and acquaintances, feeling as though I'm part of a network. My ambivalence springs, in part, from being uncomfortable with the genres of writing it seems to demand: the additive comment, the quick witted rejoinder, the enthusiastic affirmation, the self-display update.

As a teacher of young adult literacy, one of the complaints I hear about FB is that it is a time-wasting distraction, taking teens away from education, real life. I wonder, though, if there are opportunities in the engagement these young adults have in FB for literacy learning. Because it values script above oral communication, FB surely offers opportunities for literacy growth as young people are generally more accomplished in the oral genres: in order to grow a FB network, teens need to write in ways that form and build relationships.  A problem, however, is that the appearance of a 'teacher' figure--who might act as means for such improvements--within a FB teenage social network, would bend the network out of shape. But what if there is no teacher/ mentor figure? What if one of the achievements of FB is to open spaces in which such hierarchies are flatter? 

If there are uses for literacy improvement within FB that go beyond promoting programs and courses, these are perhaps to be found in the less direct, catalytic effects achieved by working on building social trust across multiple networks. In other words, FB opens up multiple social networks that individuals can engage in. But these networks crosshatch with others. It is, then, the capacities and skills to move between networks that might well be more important (in governing the self and in participating in the government of others) than building symbolic capital (in Bourdieu's sense--the cachet that one's name has) in one network. Indeed, such capacities to move between networks could be seen as a new type of symbolic capital. 

These concerns go to the concept and practice of translation: moving between networks, fields, and situations in ways that the knowledge, skills and self-belief practiced and invested in one activity, in one social network, can be drawn on in another. For example, it took me a while to accept the idea that teaching a class was a performance and not a manifestation of innate responses to a curriculum-based situation. Having performed live music over a number of years, I began to translate the techniques of preparing for and performing a gig to the tutorial situation: rehearsal, learning the pieces, improvising, recording rehearsals, having a set list, timing, keep going, playing as though it was the first time, using adrenaline . . . There are other practices involved in tutoring that gigging can't prepare you for, but having translated these key performance techniques helped to generate belief in my own capacities. I was able to move between networks, or fields, through these gateway techniques that were learnt initially in a domain that I was enthusiastic about; driven to participate in. 

The sorts of enthusiasms that circulate through FB require computer and social techniques and knowledge that complaints (or grizzling--see below) about the uselessness of FB ignore. The drive to be-friend and grow one's network generates opportunities for literacy growth that, however seemingly 'useless', can be translated into other networks, fields and situations. Providing we recognise what literacies are already happening.

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Complaints about the uselessness or even malign influence of FB are part of what Meaghan Morris argues is 'Grizzling about Facebook'. Morris finds that such grizzling, as can be found in the Murdoch press, for example, is an old genre in which technological innovation is held to be an attack on traditional or everyday life. Thus the trope, in FB grizzling, of its valorising of inauthentic friendships and facile communications in contrast to the authentic sincere relationships that old media, like telephones, letter writing supposedly enable:

‘Facebook no substitute for real world contact' is a grizzle in this sense. What on earth is supposed to follow from a declaration like that? If parents are being incited to pull the plug on their children, or to seize their mobile phones, will millions of adults also rush off-line to chat in a neighbouring office or across the back fence? What would happen in the ‘real world' of our working lives if we did so?

Against FB grizzling, Morris mounts a defence of the utopian possibilities of it and other social media. Indeed, what I find most interesting in her argument, is that she sees FB's best attribute as its capacity to combine genres of sociality. It is perhaps in this combinant facility that FB encourages translation as a skill, making it a tool for literacy learning.

Let me offer my own two or three cents about utopia and Facebook. First, Facebook is not all quizzes, ‘hey babes' and pokes. Most negative media stories obsess about one or two features (photos and status updates in particular), but the point about Facebook is that it bundles together multiple functions and potential things to do. Most of us never use all of them, and other social networking platforms do some of these things better than Facebook does (MySpace for new music, Live Journal for communities, Ning for interest groups, Twitter for global converse and news as-it-happens …), but what Facebook does well is combine: you can write private letters, play games, send gifts, do quizzes, circulate news, post notes, music and clips, share photos or research, test your knowledge, join groups and causes, make haiku-like allusions to your state of mind and chat on-line with friends, all in one place and time—restoring or relieving, according to need, the pattern of an everyday life. Facebook is on-line culture ‘lite': this makes it an object of scorn for digital elitists and ‘white noise' haters (see Tuttle), but it is also a source of its mainstream appeal. Corresponding to this variety of uses is the diversity of kinds of contact Facebook allows, with the relation between ‘contact' and intimacy also having the potential to vary over time within each singular friendship. In this respect it follows the rhythms of ‘real life' as a whole: as Lauren Berlant puts it, ‘all kinds of emotional dependency and sustenance can flourish amongst people who only meet each other at one or a few points on the grid of the field of their life' (‘Faceless Book').

Nothing flourishes for people who join Facebook and do nothing with it; passive or un-giving use of any network is rewarded in kind (Strohmeyer). As Thompson points out, a depth dimension to ‘ambient awareness' accumulates only with time and aggregation. It does grow over time; Facebook has increased my affective quality of life, and not only because it offers a break from my academic service work. The collective stream of posts brings me word of books, articles, music, films, video clips and news that I would otherwise never discover. At a time of life when new involvements become more rare, I suddenly have digital penfriends with whom I exchange old-fashioned letters through Inbox (one of the least remarked features of Facebook), while an acquaintance from decades ago has become a dear friend whom I contact almost daily. Retrieving a joy of my childhood, when my father would bring home a ‘two bob' chocolate on a Friday night and we'd listen to The Goon Show and My Word on the ABC, I play variants of Scrabble with friends on four continents throughout the day. Facebook also nudges me to remember more of my past than I am wont to do, as other people's actions unpredictably pull bits of our scattered lives together. There is more to this aspect than the nostalgia decried by Susan Dominus (‘sometimes it seems like Facebook is the most back-ward looking innovation ever expected to change the future') and Steve Tuttle (‘Goodbye, William and Mary alums I barely remember from 25 years ago'). Facebook has utopian force for me because it gently undoes the dissociative patterns I learned as a girl in pugnaciously ‘real' Australian country towns; it lets me have family on the same plane as my ex-students, my friends who talk books, my colleagues in Hong Kong and Australia and friends who also post in Italian, French and Chinese. Directly because of Facebook, I was able to speak by phone to a much-loved cousin just before he died. If Facebook vanished overnight, I would experience grief.

on Meanland

A summary of the articles and discussions at Overland's site about the Meanland project: Reading in a time of change.