AWW Gen 4: Postmodern?

AWW Gen 4 Week, 16-23 Jan 2022

AWW Gen 4 is (Australian women) writers who were first published in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. I have written elsewhere that the changeover from Gen 3 was marked by the end, in Australia, of a white, Anglo monoculture – where our major ‘other’ was the large Irish Catholic, largely working class, minority. Gen 4, then, begins with waves of ‘Mediterranean’ immigration, from Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia and Lebanon; the ‘youth culture’ of the sixties; Womens Lib; Civil Rights; a release from the sexual constraints of the 1950s; much greater access to tertiary education, and indeed to late secondary education; and a widely shared prosperity which, by the end of the eighties had crashed headlong into the neo-liberalism of Regan and Thatcher (and of Keating and Howard), though it was another couple of decades before we began to recognise what we had lost.

I have a problem in that I enjoy reading Lit. Theory but very little of it sticks. There is no doubt though that at the beginning of the period, the majority of writers were still working in the Modernist tradition (see last year’s Late Modernity), and that the ideas of Postmodernism, post-structuralism, post-colonialism being explored overseas, were both poorly understood and only slowly taken up.

Clearly postmodern works like Thomas Keneally’s A Dutiful Daughter and David Ireland’s The Unknown Industrial Prisoner, both 1971, were beacons in a sea of conventionality.

Keneally, (Bethany’s Book) and probably every other author at least once, pissfarted around with the idea of conflating the book being read and the author of the book being read with the book and author being written about (which Miles Franklin did earlier and better in My Career Goes Bung); and my feelings about Peter Carey’s taking up of the fashion of Magic Realism, beginning with Illywhacker (1985) don’t bear repeating.

Putting the author into the work always seemed to me to be a straight riposte to the ‘Death of the Author’, and pointless after it had been done once; MR was a fashion that worked when used sparingly but soon became every aspiring author’s new toy. If you want more, the ALS Journal has an interesting review of Maria Takolander’s Catching Butterflies: Bringing Magical Realism to Ground (2007)*.

Other aspects under the postmodern umbrella are irony, unreliability, commercialism, pop culture. Modernism was a serious project to understand the nature of writing and of the self; without the politics of feminism and post-colonialism, postmodernism is largely a cop out, promoted by the left and taken up joyously by the right as cover for their aversion to truth telling.

The first writer in our Gen 4, in more than one sense, is Thea Astley, whose first work, Girl with a Monkey, came out in 1958. Leigh Dale says that while Astley’s fiction is post-colonial in that much of it is concerned with the consequences of the colonisation of Australia, and particularly of course, Queensland –

Astley’s novels have a tendency to reject the recuperation of resistance that has been the major task of much post-colonial literary and cultural criticism, and to emphasise both the devastation caused by colonialism on indigenous populations, and the lasting refusal of colonial regimes to recognise the causes or effects of that devastation.

This is understandable, both because she is a pioneer in the recognition of the violence done to Indigenous peoples, and because “the recuperation of resistance”, establishing that the Indigenous were more than just victims, is the task, in the first place, of Indigenous writers.

Astley was an innovator in her subject matter, but in her writing she was concerned to write in the Modernist tradition, seeking reassurance from Patrick White, and most similar probably in the denseness and precision of her writing to her contemporary Randolph Stow. Still, I noted in my recent review of Astley’s Reaching Tin River (1990) that Astley had clearly, over time, absorbed some of the tropes of postmodernism, playfulness say, allowing two characters 70 years in time apart, to be in some way aware of each other.

Two other AWW Gen 4 writers I’ve reviewed this year are Sara Dowse and Carmel Bird. Bird was the recipient of the 2016 Patrick White Award. The judges wrote: “Using elements of the Gothic, fantasy and fairy tale as easily as realism, Bird can be surreal, quirky and macabre, but also humorous, humane and warm.” I struggled with the postmodernism of The Bluebird Café (1990) but that might have been just me. I gave Milly Bird’s The Family Skeleton (2016) for xmas. How that will go I cannot say.

Dowse I’ve run into a couple of times in the newspapers. In reviews of work by Australian poet Kate Jennings, and US feminist Shiela Rowbotham, Dowse revisits her own time as an activist in the sixties and seventies. In the period covered by West Block (1975-76) Dowse is already bogged down attempting to get women’s policies past an unfriendly (Fraser/Liberal) government. But there was a time of hope before that.

[Kate Jennings’] Trouble has brought it back: the demos, the passion, the laughs, the daring. Subtitled Evolution of a Radical, the book is a selection of Jennings’s writing from 1970 to 2010. The first entry is the raw, spitting speech Jennings hurled at a 1970 Vietnam moratorium rally on the front lawn of Sydney University – the opening salvo of Women’s Liberation in Australia. Did we actually speak like that?

That day, at that moment, I was 850 kms down the road, with the Melb Uni contingent listening to similar speeches in Treasury Gardens prior to the March – 100,000 people or more, all the length of Bourke St. What a day!

My first review for the Week will be Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip (1977). The women’s movement for Garner’s Nora is already just a hum in the background, women living co-operatively, but still seemingly at the beck and call of men.

I’m looking forward to seeing how this period, the beginning of adulthood for many of us, appears to you. And please, let me know in Comments what you hope to read (and review!).

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References:
Leigh Dale, Colonial History and Post Colonial Fiction: The Writing of Thea Astley, Australian Literary Studies, 1 May 1999 (here)
Karen Lamb, “Yrs Patrick”, Southerly, Vol 72.1 2012
Sara Dowse, Trouble, Age, Melbourne, 23 April 2010
Sara Dowse, Days of Hope, Inside Story, 17 December 2021 (here)

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“Maria Takolander’s ambitious project, Catching Butterlies: Bringing Magical Realism to Ground, seeks to clear up the confusion surrounding the literary term ‘magical realism’, an oxymoron which Takolander says has become ‘a dumping ground for the convenient disposal of any fiction that deviates from or experiments with the rules of realism’ …

Takolander goes on to argue that using MR to represent the spirit lives underlying Indigenous cultures is necessarily inauthentic. The reviewer (and I) disagree:

“However, rather than suggesting that reality itself does not exist, [non-European authors] propose that there are other ways of experiencing it. Such magical realist authors recognise and expose the cultural clashes, merges and changes in postcolonial situations, and express it through magical realism. Such works are not, or not necessarily, ‘inauthentic’ because they present twentieth-century versions of indigenous cultures.

Tanja Schwalm, Review of Maria Takolander, Catching Butterflies: Bringing Magical Realism to Ground (2007) in Australian Literary Studies, 1 June 2009.

An Unfortunate Woman, Richard Brautigan

Richard Brautigan (1935-84) is one of those authors I would automatically pick up if I saw his works second hand – increasingly unlikely as he gets further out of date and all the second hand stores anywhere near me close, leaving only op shops – though this seems to be the only work of his I own at the moment.

In my twenties, I read Watermelon Sugar (1968), Trout Fishing in America (1967), and gave to the Young Bride The Abortion: An Historical Romance (1971). I was aware of his first novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964) but can’t recall now if I ever read it. I loved his work and if I ever wrote, Brautigan would be my model.

Brautigan, an alcoholic and depressive, married and separated a number of times, died by his own hand in 1984. An Unfortunate Woman: A Journey (2000) was published posthumously, first in France, as Cahier d’un Retour de Troie [“Diary of a Return from Troy”] and only later in English.

An Unfortunate Woman is written as the narrator R reflecting on his wanderings over a few months in 1982 – which it would be cliched to see as an odyssey, though the author probably means us to – circling a number of times through the house of a woman in San Francisco, who had hanged herself some time previously, before ending up back home in Montana

maybe part of what I’m trying to say is … I wonder how old the woman was who hanged herself. Have I been working obliquely, almost secretly to this end.
I think she was in her early forties, but I do not know her exact age and probably never will. I guess it wouldn’t make that much difference in the long run. She’s very dead.

With writers like Brautigan (and Helen Garner) their lives and their fiction intersect so closely that it is impossible to know where one ends and the other begins. Brautigan begins this novel with, as a sort of prologue, a letter to a friend, N (Nikki Arai), who has just died, aged thirty eight, of cancer. The letter is dated Pine Creek, Montana, July 13, 1982. The novel chronicles the days from Jan 30 to Jun 28, 1982, so before N’s death, ending with R alone on his Montana ranch, on the hills above a tributary of the Yellowstone River.

R begins his ‘odyssey’ with an empty notebook and the intention of writing every day until it is filled. He doesn’t of course, and is frequently sidetracked.

With this auspicious beginning [a single abandoned shoe], I’ll continue describing one person’s journey, a sort of free-fall calendar map, that starts out what seems like years ago, but has actually been just a few months in physical time.

In those few months prior to Jan 30, 1982 R went from Montana to San Francisco, then to Buffalo, a week in Canada, back to San Francisco for a few weeks, up to Alaska, where he got drunk with a young politician, spent some time in Hawaii, and now, at the beginning of this record, he is back living in Berkley, in the house already mentioned. Having listed where has been, R takes us backwards and forwards between descriptions of ‘now’, accounts of those initial travels, and bouts of pure speculation.

My trip to Canada was wasted. At that time in my life I probably should have gone to any other place in the world but Canada…

Toronto will always be like the flipside of a dream for me. I called heads but Toronto came up tails. [R goes looking for a Chinese movie theatre, but the only one he finds is showing American movies]

What else did I do in Toronto? I had a very bitter affair with a Canadian woman, who was really a nice person. It ended abruptly and badly, which was totally my fault.

The novel, novella really, is not getting written as quickly as it was meant to. R has been to Chicago and is now back in that house again in Berkeley where he is awakened each morning by the sounds of a woman in a neighbouring house making love. He makes another visit to Chicago and …

… suddenly it’s March 1: What happened to the last 14 days of this book, which is now obviously chronologically mischievous and grows more and more to follow the way life works out?

There’s a gap, he’s home, has taught a semester at the local university – presumably Montana State University in Bozeman (which I struggle to believe is a real place) – goes on a blind date which works out better than a previous blind date where he got into an argument about the woman’s masters dissertation on Italian architecture in Henry James; advises a young student to write about herself because when you’re young that’s all you know; does some other stuff; takes a call from his daughter whom he won’t see because he doesn’t like the guy she married; and, finally, thinks a little about his dying friend, sends her a telegram, calls her, talks to her

My friend continues to die of cancer, even as I write now shardlike cells grow inside of her, never stopping until I talk about her only in the past tense.

R has nearly reached the end of his notebook. What about all the things I’ve left out he worries. He goes for a walk across the creek to his neighbours’. Leaves the last line empty.

“Iphigenia, your daddy’s home from Troy”.

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Richard Brautigan, An Unfortunate Woman, Canongate, Edinburgh, 2000. 110pp.

see also:
Emma/Book Around the Corner’s review of Trout Fishing in America (here)

Reaching Tin River, Thea Astley

AusReading Month 2021

Apparently I have read this before. Inside the back cover there’s a boarding pass Melbourne-Adelaide with my name on it and the date 03Jul16. Why the hell was I flying from Melbourne to Adelaide? And on the back of the pass there are notes, extracts and page no.s. Having got so close, I wish I’d gone on to write it up.

Checks back through blog… My posts for that week are Benang and Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence. My work diary is a little more informative. I’d been staying with mum. On Sat Jul 2 I swam 3km in the morning and had dinner with mum and B3 that evening (for B3’s upcoming 60th). Sun 3 is blank. Mon 4, Fly home. Go with Milly to see Psyche belly dancing. I give in, I must have flown home Sun night/Mon morning with a connection through Adel.

Reading now, bits are familiar, but not the overall story.

In the Comments after West Block – my ACT read for this month, as this is QLD – I finally began to get my head around the fact that AWW Gen 4 Week is coming up fast and I have given very little thought to the underlying theory. I said then that I thought Sara Dowse’s writing was based on/was an advance on the Modernism of, say, Eleanor Dark and that this would likely prove typical of Gen 4.

Reaching Tin River (1990) is a late Astley, written at the end of the Gen 4 period (1960-1990), so that the author has had the whole period, one in which Postmodernism was increasing in importance and influence, to develop her writing. It shows.

Astley’s earlier novels reflected most the Postcolonial aspect of Postmodernism, dealing with the legacy of white oppression of the Indigenous inhabitants of particularly her home state, Queensland. There are aspects of that here, but muted. The protagonist, Belle, grows up in and subsequently takes us on a journey through central Queensland. In that context she mentions the Hornet Bank Massacre* a number of times without taking it much further.

The novel is an exploration of Belle’s progress from childhood to her thirties, told in simple, almost diaryish style, in the first person. There are subsidiary themes running through – the unsatisfactoryness of marriage (for women); music, and in particular her dislike of the piano practice piece The Rustle of Spring; and Euclid’s rules of geometry – I get frustrated when arty people misuse maths, especially chaos theory, the uncertainty principle, and Schrödinger’s cat – Belle uses Euclid’s rules as similes for her attempts to locate her ‘centre’.

I am looking for a one-storey town
with trees
river
hills
and a population of under two thousand
one of whom must be called Gaden Lockyer

Or
Mother was a drummer in her own all-women group, a throbber of a lady with midlife zest and an off-centre smile

Or
I have decided to make a list of all the convent girls who learnt to play ‘The Rustle of Spring’ by Christian Sinding between 1945 and 1960.

This is how the book begins, in fact it’s nearly the whole of the first page. I think I’m in for Astley in experimental mode, but she soon settles down. The plot is straightforward. Belle and her mother, Bonnie live on Bonnie’s parents’ farm ‘Perjury Plains’ near the (fictional) towns of Drenchings and Jericho Flats. Belle’s absent father, for whom she later goes looking, is a mediocre trumpet player and and US serviceman from the Korean War.

Belle on a school excursion learns of and subsequently becomes infatuated with turn of the century farmer politician Gaden Lockyer (ie. someone who is long dead).

She becomes first a teacher, then a librarian. Inexperienced sexually, she marries an older workmate given to mansplaining and is soon disillusioned.

Finally, she sets out on a road trip to discover Gaden Lockyer, to put herself in places where he has been and this crosses over (fairly successfully) into Magic Realism as he, Lockyer, becomes aware that a ghost from the future is haunting him.

There’s lots of other stuff and other characters. Bonnie, who was never an attentive mother, becomes more hippyish as she gets older. We learn pretty quickly to dislike Sebastian, the mansplaining husband. Belle’s father and Bonnie are never divorced but stay in remote contact on opposite sides of the world. We get to stay in some pretty shabby boarding houses – in fact I’m not sure Belle and I don’t walk to work together in the early 1970s when we both lived in New Farm boarding houses and walked across the Valley to the Courier Mail building – and end up in one that was once the nursing home where Lockyer saw out his final years.

An enjoyable book. Yet another Astley swipe at provincial Queensland (ie. all of it). And an interesting text for the influence of Postmodernism on Australian writing.

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Thea Astley, Reaching Tin River, Minerva, Melbourne, 1990. 222pp (cover painting by Faye Maxwell)

All our Thea Astley reviews are listed on Lisa/ANZLL’s Thea Astley page (here)

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*Hornet Bank Massacre: In October 1857 Rosa Praed was at a corroboree which presaged the massacre of seven members of the Fraser family, and one Black worker, on neighbouring Hornet Bank Station (map), in retaliation for the usual ‘dispersal’ of the traditional inhabitants and misuse of their women. Following the massacre, posses of white settlers, in which Murray-Prior [Praed’s father] was prominent, virtually wiped out all the local Yiman people.

Oldest son, William Fraser who had been away at the time of the massacre, returned and began murdering Black people – without hindrance from the police – at every opportunity, including two men exiting Rockhampton courthouse where they had just been acquitted. Astonishingly, Fraser is the model for Colin McKeith, the hero of [Praed’s Lady Bridget in the Never Never Land] – extract from my review.

Hornet Bank is in the vicinity of Taroom, Qld about 470 km north-west of Brisbane (good cattle grazing country, though now subject to extensive fracking)

A recap of the Massacre story in The Queenslander, 15 Sep 1906 (here)

The Remake, Clive James

This is a remake of an essay I wrote 17 years ago, which I’m putting up now not because I like Clive James, I don’t, but because it is my one essay which directly addresses postmodernism which, theoretically anyway, forms the underpinning of the novels of AWW Gen 4 (and maybe because I’m working and haven’t prepared anything else).

If I’d found The Remake on my inadequately alphabeticised shelves I might have re-read it, but I remember it well enough. Briefly, the protagonist Joel is a ‘brilliant’ fortyish astronomer who gets kicked out by his wife, goes to stay with his friend Chance who has a fashionable apartment in the Barbican (London), and when Chance goes to Rio on a filming assignment, finds himself sharing the apartment with a clever and attractive 18 year old (female) student called Mole.

James’ writing is made ridiculous by his injokes and this may well be the first – all Australians are quite clear about what it means to call a woman a Moll (or Mole. When I was a kid that o was always long).

Clive James (1939-2019) was a well-known London-resident Australian who wrote memoir, criticism, poetry and some fiction and who prostituted his considerable talents on popular television. The Remake (1987), the second of his four novels, was intended as a satire on the postmodern noveau roman.

My essay originally began: It is central to the Post-Structuralist theory which gives Postmodernism at least a veneer of intellectual rigour that the work belongs to the reader not to the author. “It is a very familiar thesis that the task of criticism is not to bring out the work’s relationship with the author, nor to reconstruct through the text a thought or experience, but rather, to analyze the work through its structure, its architecture, its intrinsic form, and the play of its internal relationships.” (Foucalt, 1969)

But it is my thesis that the fact that The Remake is written by Clive James is central to any reading of it.

The relation between James and Joel, between author and protagonist, becomes part of what must be dealt with by the reader, or at least by any reader in the milieu of 1980’s English/Australian popular culture. We initially pick up the book because we are familiar with James; he then pops up as a subsidiary character “… an old drinking pal of Chance’s who had evidently been kept on out of pity … a flaky writer of some kind called Clive James.”; and Joel, the protagonist, looks like James (middle aged, fat, know-it-all, TV presenter). 

Clive James, the author, is conscious that we know him all too well, but he also needs us to acknowledge that he could have been a Writer – so his opening sentence is necessarily polished in its first-sentence-ness, “Lauren was within her rights, but letting me do it to her on the night she threw me out was one below the belt”. And throughout the book we continue to feel him pushing himself at us, crying “look at me, look at me”, Kath & Kim style, dissing the Post-Structuralists, displaying his famous intellect, chatting directly to the reader in an intrusive style that takes ages to develop any narrative flow, but not without slipping in “God save me from any novel in which the author gets a mention.”

The novel is clearly intended to be read ironically, as a novel written in the postmodern style to show up postmodernism; although that ignores that the principal aim of all James’ writing is to establish James’ overwhelming cleverness: “My [IQ] score should have gone off the clock ..”; “In childhood I had put in my years as a flute prodigy”; “I employed my trick memory for a devastating quotation”; reads Le Monde, Die Zeit; and so on.

David Lodge writes “No book .. has any meaning on its own, in a vacuum. The meaning of a book is in large part a product of its differences from and similarities to other books.” (1981) and it is just such “similarities to other books” – intrusion of the author, placing doubt on the author’s version of the narrative, etc. – which place The Remake firmly within the conventions of the late twentieth century (literary) novel.

Remake as Mid-life Crisis?

Structurally, The Remake is quite conservative. Joel gets kicked out by his wife, goes up to London to stay with his friend Chance, meets girl, falls in love, persuades girl to sleep with him, and after a suitable interval, gets taken back by his wife; but the twist in the ending reveals that we have not been reading Joel’s diary after all, but rather Joel’s diary rewritten (remade) by Chance to conceal inter alia Joel’s and Chance’s ‘real’ identities.

More, we discover both Joel and Chance have ‘remade’ themselves to suit the dominant, anglo ethnicity of Australian society, Joel changing his surname from Korth to Court and Chance from “Janilowitz or something like that” to Jenolan, but as cute names predominate throughout, this doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the plot.

The usage of ‘remake’ which implies mid-life crisis is difficult to sustain despite the author’s claim that “my crise a quarante ans became a story”. James makes no attempt to gild the lily and describes Joel as he would himself, TV presenter – fat, balding, middle-aged and verbose. That a slender, beautiful, bi-sexual 18 yo girl would be attracted to Joel, even on the limited terms he describes, is unbelievable and his pursuit of her verges on paedophilia.

In the end Joel returns to his wife without making any attempt to understand why she dumped him in the first place. He has the crisis but it fails to ‘remake’ him.

Conventions of fiction-story-telling

James makes some genuflections in the direction of postmodern theory, or at least in the direction of some of the conventions of 1980s literary fiction. The Author intrudes, then his authorship is cast into doubt; he decries “well-researched novels” then parades his research; decries the use of letters, “novels with a lot of letters in them are a real cop-out” (p.41), but Chance’s letters to Mole which Joel surreptitiously reads are vital to the progression of the plot, for example the letter written from Rio (p.75) describing the Copocabana beach is necessary to an understanding of the problematic nature of Chance’s final disappearance.

The Remake is most authentically postmodern in that is in some ways a work of meta-fiction. That is, its major theme apart from Joel’s ‘progress’ is itself, the modern novel. Mole reports to Joel that her classmate Amanda struggles with Alain Robbe-Grillet with the implication The Remake is a (mock) nouveau roman.

On the other hand, “Her bottles and boxes and sprays, which would be named in detail if this were any American novella influenced by Franny and Zooey” (p.28) has no seeming purpose at all. Salinger’s loving, closely detailed descriptions of his family are not referred to again, not by emulation nor by any intentional omissions. Unless this connects up with Lodge’s description of ” … the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet, whose immensely detailed, scientifically exact and metaphor-free descriptions of objects actually prevent us from visualizing them. By presenting the reader with more data than he can synthesize, the discourse affirms the resistance of the world to interpretation.”

In one place, during a discussion with, or as she sees it, a lecture to, Mole, Joel puts a cogent case for his main theme that postmodernist theory lacks intellectual rigour (pp. 58-63), ending with “the real reason  why any form of structural approach, up to and including deconstruction … is not and can’t be science is that you can’t go wrong [because] nothing anyone says, using those methods, can be disproved.” Perhaps, in the end, James wrote The Remake because it was less effort than writing a closely argued essay, and less subject to critical scrutiny.

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Clive James, The Remake, Jonathon Cape, London, 1987. 225pp (free to read here)

I don’t know what edition that cover is from, but it is apparently another from Perry Middlemiss’s Matilda blog.

The Flesheaters, David Ireland

Feature Author 2019: David Ireland

The Fleasheaters (1972) was David Ireland’s third novel, following a year after his (first of three) Miles Franklin award winning  The Unknown Industrial Prisoner. I couldn’t find the cover above, of the original Angus & Robertson hardback, on the web, so I’ve photographed the copy given to me in 1973 by the Young Bride. It’s hard to imagine now, waiting for the new release of the latest sensational Australian writer, but I used to, for Ireland and Carey particularly, and to a lesser extent, for Tom Keneally.

The setting of The Fleasheaters is Merry Lands, a rooming house in one of those old working class suburbs around Parramatta (Sydney, NSW) where Ireland grew up and worked, and which were the setting also for The Unknown Industrial Prisoner and The Glass Canoe (1976). In fact, the protagonist/narrator, Lee drinks at the Southern Cross, the hotel at the heart of The Glass Canoe.

At the front of the house an old veranda had a curved corrugated iron roof, candy-striped in rust-red and aged-white. S plates held the ends of the brick walls. High up, an attic window had been bricked in … Wisteria climbed up to the half-glassed veranda. Bags flapped further back. Wrought iron lace-work decorated the upper storey.

Brick additions had been made to the stone, timber extensions to the brick, fibrocement additions to the timber, and from fibro down to corrugated iron, hessian, then chaff bags sewn together.

I remember houses like that on The Esplanade in St Kilda, Surrey Hills in Sydney, in the Valley and New Farm in Brisbane, let by the room to derros and workers down on their luck, half-way houses for society’s leftovers, sufferers of congenital poverty and unemployability. All gone now, or gentrified, million dollar mansions.

As with the other two, Ireland builds his ‘story’ by short sketches as Lee is introduced by the landlord O’Grady to his fellow inmates. In fact, it’s possible Ireland wrote the three all together – men at work, men down the pub, and this one, men in a home. It feels like he did, though the characters don’t cross over, or not that I noticed.

Lee lives with Clayton Hercules Emmet who, outside Merry Lands is a lover of women and a dissector of animals; is friends with Scotty, a would-be writer whose ‘room’ is a tree-house; and is an observer of all the others, permanent and temporary, men, women, and couples.

Scotty has the last line of his book – “Far more than when she was naked” – and is waiting for the words preceding to fall into place. Granny Upjohn wears a dog collar and is chained to her kennel. She is viscious and must be sedated for family visits; at night she barks to the Grannys in the other back yards. Fred and Felicity, pensioners, and Granny share one set of dentures between them. Summo works at a nearby industrial plant. A big man, he terrorizes his wife. His employers are already easing him out, so when he loses his hand they put him on light duties, preparatory to making him redundant, to avoid paying compensation. O’Grady uses a half brick to teach his basset to speak. John Luck, fat and ill, goes off to work every morning. He “hasn’t had a day off in fourteen years”. Trouble is, he was put off three months ago.

“O’Grady,” I said, “what can be done for them?”

O’Grady said, “Forget it. They’re incurably poor. You can’t do anything for them. A hundred dollars a week and they’d still be poor. This is the only society we have, the only one we know. It’s a money society. So if they’re poor, they’re inadequate. If they’re inadequate they’re mentally ill, by the definition of our society. Their illness can’t be fixed by effort or dollars.”

As usual, Ireland is contemptuous of women. Joy Luck takes the handyman to bed and when John comes home from ‘work’ he has no choice but to lie beside them. Ann, who bends over in the garden to display her buttocks to passersby, tells her husband she’s been unfaithful, and he shoots her dead. Cicely and her baby live in a ‘room’ under the house made of sheets of corrugated iron tacked to the stumps. “Cicely’s strong point was she was a virgin” – a tattooed virgin with a child, who went out every night looking for men. Crystal, Emmet’s girlfriend who comes to live with them, believes every man should be given whatever he asks of her.

And the title? ‘”We are the ransackers of the planet”, Clayton said. “Progress is the worst flesheater of all. Our existence depends on the death of other organisms and the despoiling of the planet.”‘

When I think about it, David Ireland is probably our first serious post-modernist writer. His works investigate a post-industrial world, ahead of time really given he was writing in the 1970s, seeing not that industry will fail or be off-shored, but that the giant corporations will move away from mass employment as a model, towards automation, as they have, leaving in their wake a vast underclass of people who don’t have, will never have, work. And that society will turn its back on these people.

And he expresses this not through social realism and the politics of the left as was the case between the Wars, nor generally through dystopian near futures as is more often the case now, but through right wing populism and the literary tropes of satire, irony and magic realism, as in the grandmother who must be chained to her kennel; service stations for the bulk-dispensing of  drugs; and culminating of course in Althea, “A Woman of the Future“, mutating into a panther and fleeing Sydney for the Blue Mountains.

Ireland is an important and maybe even,  revolutionary writer. The Flesheaters is not his best work, but it is an interesting one, especially when read in conjunction with The Unknown Industrial Prisoner and The Glass Canoe, which together provide a snapshot of both our Anglo White-Australian past and our neo-liberal future.

 

David Ireland, The Flesheaters, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1972

see also my other David Ireland posts: –
David Ireland (here)
The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (here)
The Glass Canoe (here)
A Woman of the Future (here)
City of Women (here)
The World Repair Video Game (here)

PS. Another quote:

I had a vision, looking down, of the time in the future when the carbondioxide level in the atmosphere will be so much higher. I felt the increased radiation of the sun, the gradual heating of the earth, the melting of the polar ice-caps, the sea rising a foot a year. And why should I worry? What could anyone do? Industrial production and its constant growth was god. (p. 129)

Yes, we knew 40, 50 years ago that global warming was coming. And we did nothing. Industry, and the corporations that own them, are indeed god.