In Conversation: David Malouf and Ivor Indyk

This is the record of a conversation between David Malouf, Ivor Indyk and audience members at the 31 May 2013 David Malouf Symposium, held at the North Sydney campus of Australian Catholic University. The speakers reflect upon the papers delivered at the Symposium

The Place of Desire

The paper discusses themes of repression and displacement, including religion and migration, in the poetry of John Shaw Neilson, Hugh McCrae, Kenneth Slessor, and the work of Norman Lindsay

Imants Tillers' expressionism

200

Hochzeit der Elemente

200

The status of a colonial : like that of a Jew

The Australian writer, critic and teacher A.A. Phillips coined the term 'the cultural cringe' in 1950 to describe an Australian tendency to identify our literature and art as inferior to work produced overseas, particularly in Britain and the United States. The term has resonated in debates about Australian culture, society and identity ever since. Although Phillips' famous essay on the cringe was first published more than fifty years ago, it remains a powerful reference point in discussions of the national culture. It is reprinted here with two of his other essays on Australian culture, and with additional biographical and critical material, including an essay by Ivor Indyk which was originally published in Meanjin, Vol. 59, No. 3, 2000: 28-32, available via the link in this record

A Really Long Prospect : Eiizabeth Harrower's fallen world

When I first read The Long Prospect some thirty years ago, what impressed me was the expressivity of Harrower’s writing, its power in capturing the drama and surge of emotion. It strikes you immediately, in the first pages of novel, which has the formidable and oppressive grandmother Lilian intruding into the flat of her one--‐time boarder, the young scientist Thea, with ‘her eyes on swivels’ – and not just her eyes working overtime, but her eyebrows too, ‘one ironic eyebrow cocked and ready to greet Thea’, and ‘one drooping disdainfully’. As so often in Harrower, the drama of emotion is played out in the face – the characters constantly scan each other’s faces, they twist incredulously or curve maliciously, they beam with admiration or are bleached with dismay. Their mouths are similarly expressive – close--‐lipped with resolution, quivering with anger, clamped shut with rage. They exhibit several different kinds of laughter, smiles, grins and giggles – most of them fairly chilling. And then of course the eyes – cold, downcast, brightly sullen, wild with accusation or fixed with tension, ‘frank and yet guarded’. Within moments of her intrusion into the younger woman’s flat, Lilian’s face and indeed the nervous, endlessly mobile dispositions of her body in the confined space, have registered a whole parade of emotions, disdain, resentment, disapproval, wonder, disappointment, incredulity, anger, excitement, annoyance, jealousy, awe and derision

Simple poems

It must be disconcerting for those who find poetry difficult, to discover that the simplest poems are often the most enigmatic. This is because they depend largely on implication. What they don’t say is as important as what they do. If you’re not alert, nothing happens

The cult of the middlebrow

The critic Jonathan Jones caused something of a stir recently whenhe lamented, in the Guardian, how the belief in literature as a force for change was being debased in favour of the currency of popular appeal. ‘In the age of social media and ebooks, our concept of literary greatness is being blurred beyond recognition. A middlebrow cult of the popular is holding literature to ransom.’ This was in response to the emotional outpouring occasioned by the death of Terry Pratchett, which Jones compared to the much more muted response (at least on the internet) to the death of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I have had the same thought myself quite a lot lately – not in relation to the death of authors, but to the rewards bestowed upon them while they are still alive. It’s in the giving of literary prizes that the cult of the middlebrow seems now to have established itself, which is quite a triumph, if you think of such prizes, as I still do, more and more desperately, as the last bastion, in this world, for the literary recognition that is withheld by the marketplace. I speak as a publisher, and so have to tread carefully – if I mention names I will be accused of bearing a grudge. I do bear a grudge actually – it’s about the thousands of dollars in entry fees I have to pay each year to support the administration of prizes that more and more frequently, in my view, go to authors who are neither challenging or innovative. What they do have, often in abundance, is ‘appeal’

The economics of the Australian literary classic

It was when I started teaching and writing on Australian literature in the early 1980s, that I became aware of the disparity between the critical value attributed to the literary classic as a site of interpretation, and the haphazard existence it led in the marketplace, and in the minds of Australian readers. This was during the second part of the period we now think of as the halcyon days for Australian literature, the period between the two bicentennials in 1970 and 1988, when national self-consciousness was at its height - but even then the teaching of Australian literature was a tricky affair, requiring the reframing of courses, and the replacement of chosen texts, because the classics you wanted to impress the students with were out of print. I remember being fobbed off by publishers when I rang and told them that my course alone would sell 100 copies of their out-of-print title (which even then was an exaggeration), not understanding that they would be the only copies of the title the publisher would sell that year, and a long way short of justif)ring a reprint. There are immutable facts about our vast country and its largely immigrant population which make it difficult to keep Australian classics in print, even without the supposedly devastating effects that literary theory and the destruction of the literary canon are supposed to have had on our universities. 1he commercial viability of Australian literary publishing - at least that part of it devoted to classic titles -is almost completely dependent on educational adoptions since the reading public, in the course of its daily browsing, isn’t likely to feed on a classic, unless some rare event, like a film adaptation, or a television mini-series, or a centenary, piques its interest. University listings might deliver sales of around 200-300 copies a year - given the tiny profit margin that attends sales on this scale, a publisher would need a large number of classics on its list, all of them being taught, to make an impact on their bottom line. The new digital printing technologies make it possible to do print runs of 500 copies, or even 200 copies, at a reasonable rate, which means that you can't lose money on a small reprint - but you can't make money either