Jean-François Vernay - A Brief Take on the Australian Novel

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Teaser

According to cognitive scientists, emotions and intelligence are interrelated and equally important in many situations, especially in decision-making processes such as choosing a good read. And yet marketing strategies want consumers to believe that books, very much like happiness pills, are made available only on prescription: critics are there to tell you which book to buy or not; TV and radio book shows guarantee a quick, though sometimes efficient, airing for selected latest releases; literary festivals tend to feature writers with the highest profiles who, perhaps, do not need to generate further publicity; while literary prizes like the Miles Franklin Award also contribute to this winner-takes-all logic, and the dutiful consumers, spoilt for choice, are meant to take their pickbut chance and personal taste no longer have anything to do with it. The prescriptive trend is so common a practice that, as part of the National Year of Reading, a 2011 campaign was devised to compile a list of books that would aptly encapsulate the Australian experience. Once again the winners are anyone but the readers.

While I was researching Australian fiction, people started asking me what they should read. This is a tricky question because you need to provide an answer while carefully avoiding establishing a canon. Bearing in mind that any recommendation would reflect my own tastes, I tried to conceive a neutral space like a virtual giant table on which would lie any appealing Australiana-packed novel, for avid readers to make their own choices. This project presented itself as the horizontal counterpart of the vertical library bookshelf, in which pre-selection, classification and exposure were of the essence.

In writing this book, I also wanted to convey the oft-neglected pleasure of the text: the kind of cultural enjoyment one may not derive from science books. For it is the privilege of the literary text to enable readers to experience its jouissance a French word which carries a primary meaning of orgasm, but which Roland Barthes uses to encapsulate the highest form of enjoyment and sensual pleasure. I am grateful to my publisher for allowing me to share my emotions with other readers, as I feel there is no better way to enhance the pleasure of the text.

Melbourne, 23 December 2015

Sneak Preview

Jean-Franois Vernays brief take on the Australian novel begins one step back, with a draft definition of Australian literature. This is quite proper, not because the authors definition is provisional, but because Australian literature itself continues to be subject to redefinition, and Australias fictions too. The shape is not settledand I do not mean to say yet, as if one day in the future it will have found itself. It is not a question of adolescence, but rather something inherent in the appeal and interest of Australian writing that it continually breaks away from definitional grabs. To adapt Ranajit Guhas title, History at the Limit of World-History , Australian literature can be considered to be at a double limit of world and literature. The World Republic of Letters , for example, Pascale Casanovas lofty survey, mentions Australia only in passing, as an item in Commonwealth lists. And before the European idea of Australia came into being, the literature of the country was oral, visual, performativeAboriginalor else a matter of speculation. Even if we restrict literature to what is written in a conventional sense, and agree on a notion of Australia as the largely English-speaking society inaugurated with the British invasion of 1788, it is still the case that Australian literature exists at the limit of world literature. While many works can be identified as tied in some way to things Australian (the flexible definition Vernay borrows from D.R. Burns), no single characterisation is generally accepted as adequately or permanently descriptive of Australian literature as a whole or as an entity. Indeed, the label Australian is commonly resisted by Australian authors themselves. Robert Dessaix, for example, is quoted as saying at the Adelaide Writers Week in 2010, Do any of us write as Australian writers? I know I dont. I write as moi . Sydney-born Australian novelist Steve Toltz commented recently that he was more comfortable writing in the northern hemisphere.

This is paradoxical, since Australian literature as a category would seem to be readily delimited, not only by its island-continent geography of place, but also by its marked temporality (in English, at any rate), from colonial commencement in 1788 to the present shifting, always advancing moment. Yet within those apparently clear outlines, there are many different versions of how texts and their authors and readers relate, adding to or departing from the larger field. In essaying his spirited, wide-ranging, highly informed and suitably opinionated survey of Australian fiction, Vernay acknowledges that he must face the reaction of interlocutors who seem unaware of [ the ] existence of Australian literature. It appears that those writers, editors and critics who have been part of the internal dynamics of Australian literature over many years have failed to construe their production for external perception. The situation arises despite the international success of many individual authors from Australia. Its as a contribution to changing things that this new book is so fresh and valuable.