Leighton, 'Study'

For the first time in more than 25 years, American adults are reading more literature, according to a new study by the National Endowment for the Arts. Reading on the Rise documents a definitive increase in rates and numbers of American adults who read literature, with the biggest increases among young adults, ages 18-24. This new growth reverses two decades of downward trends cited previously in NEA reports such as Reading at Risk and To Read or Not To Read.

“At a time of immense cultural pessimism, the NEA is pleased to announce some important good news. Literary reading has risen in the U.S. for the first time in a quarter century,” said NEA Chairman Dana Gioia. “This dramatic turnaround shows that the many programs now focused on reading, including our own Big Read, are working. Cultural decline is not inevitable.”

Maybe not. But any statistician will tell you to wait for the next survey, and maybe the one after that: it may be a dead cat bounce. Still, it’s way better than more decline. Pity about poetry and drama – still sinking.

The full report can be downloaded here, and in the same place you can find a six page summary of the Reading at Risk report which started the heartburn.

Chap called Sheahan up in Reedy Creek got into bother a few years ago when he bulldozed 247 eucalypts around his house, thus creating a 100 metre moat against fire. Nillumbik Shire fined him $50,000 and his costs added as much again. After the fire last Saturday, his is the only house left standing for several kilometres around. The Sheahans lost some vehicles, their TV antenna melted, it took four of them, all CFA trained, to save the house, but save it they did.

The Shire of Nillumbik will not permit ratepayers to cut down a tree further away from the house than six metres. That’s the trunk we’re talking about, so plenty of houses in the shire are overhung with branches. And a fire-wind can snap large trees at the base.

Since Wordability HQ is at the southern edge of Nillumbik we take a close and particular interest in this policy. We understand that in our area, which belongs to something called the Green Wedge, the shire is intent on preserving an uninterrupted canopy. That’s an uninterrupted canopy of volatile eucalyptus leaves.

We, too, have incurred the wrath of the shire when we felled half-a-dozen trees just outside the three-metre limit, partly for fire safety, partly because their roots had gummed up the septic system. Not good enough, said the man in the cardigan, and before leaving he took a lot of photographs. My partner got us off. She wrote a magnificent letter of placation, pointing out how many trees we had in fact planted, how many environmental weeds removed. Nothing further was heard, and as you can see, there are rather a lot of trees still around, if not quite the uninterrupted canopy of councillors’ dreams.

I wonder if this catastrophe (over 300 dead, 1800 homes destroyed, 7000 people homeless) will mark the beginning of a new phase in Australians’ attitude to the bush? Phase 1, as we know, was to find it ugly and alien and impossible to draw with any verisimilitude. In phase 2 we learnt to love the gumtree, people hung Hans Heysens on their walls but continued to plant camellias.

A 1950s ideal. But notice the gumtree lurking in the background . . .

The 1960s ushered in Phase 3, in which urbanites began to apologise for our existence, native gardens became fashionable and the green movement was in full swing. This is the period in which places like ours became sought-after and protected.

Not that we’re all that authentically natural. Our district was settled in the 1840s by loggers and goldminers. (Yes, before Ballarat.) Between them they pretty much took out the over-story. Most of the bush around here is regrowth, some only thirty or forty years old. People who have bought houses here since that time – most of us – chose a home among the gumtrees. In so far as they understood them, they thought the risks were worth it.

Saturday will begin a new period of strife over these issues – that’s abundantly clear from the press. And in these places on the edge of the cities, I predict we will see the beginnings of Phase 4, a return to the view that the bush is all very well, but it needs to be tamed and caged if people are to live alongside it. As for those who live in the middle of it, the people in those small places like Reedy Creek (which the press has taken to calling hamlets) their situation is desperately grim. To construct a genuinely safe set of dwellings will involve not only new building standards, but the destruction of the bush around them. Will Mr Sheahan prove a prophet in his own country?

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, Back Bay Books/Little, Brown & Co, 2006 [1996].

Since I’ve now read its 1079 pages twice since early October, and November around here was pretty much a write-off, it has obliterated all memories of other fiction. Old news for DFW’s many readers. What led me to read it was his death earlier this year, one of the sorrier literary events of 2008.

Infinite Jest contains two different kinds of novel wrapped around one another, like a chocolate with a hard centre. The sweet layer – sweet at least for readers tuned in to the genre, Wallace’s contemporaries – is one of those daffy, deliberately creaky postmodern plots. The action takes place in an alternative near-future in Boston. Commercialism now extends to the calendar: years have sponsors and are known by product names, as in Year of the Trial-sized Dove Bar. The problems of waste and pollution have become overwhelming. On every street there seem to be as many dumpsters as cars. The US has fixed its landfill problem (remember those ships cruising down the eastern seaboard looking for a place to dump the trash?) by first ceding a good chunk of New England to Canada, then hurling the crap into it with giant trebuchets. It is the President himself (an insane ex-crooner) who comes up with this magnificently perverse solution.

The action itself centres on a film. In a last effort to make something entertaining (or a last spasm of irony) James O. Incandenza, an experimental film-maker ( Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators, Fun with Teeth) makes Infinite Jest, a film so entertaining that anyone who watches it forgets to eat or drink or go to the bathroom or even move and so eventually dies in place, malodorous, blissfully watching to the end. Word of the film’s lethal power reaches both a Quebec separatist groupuscule (membership restricted to legless people in wheelchairs) and the US Office of Unspecified Services. These two groups embark on a search for the original, copiable version – the few in circulation are read-only – and there is much rather Chestertonian cloak-and-daggery, picturesque mayhem and incidental satire.

This postmodern framework might tempt some readers into a postmodern reading, sliding signifiers, indeterminacy, self-cancelling perspectives and so on. Actually it’s suckerbait. As a writer of his place and time and bent, the postmodern was the obvious container for a polymath like Wallace, a man hyper-conscious of the philosophical problems of representation. In fact, he had a beef about postmodernism and the habits of mind it tends to encourage, the giggles, the irony-trumping games, the fundamental tedious unseriousness. Infinite Jest is an attempt to tunnel out of the prisonhouse.

The gravitas of the book is the hard centre, a counter-narrative, an only-too-realistic study of addiction and the addict’s struggle to get straight and stay straight. (It is a mistake to say, as some have, that the novel is ‘about’ depression: yes, some characters suffer from it, some use drugs or booze to relieve its pain, but the character most clearly and clinically depressed is, precisely because of her condition, unable to free herself, and stumbles from one addiction into something worse.)

This narrative is about two main characters at opposite ends of the social spectrum, the upscale Hal O. Incandenza (oh those postmodern names) and the streetwise Don Gately. Hal is a senior at a Tennis Academy which combines schooling with training for the pro circuit (‘The Show’). Gately, recovering from a heavy addiction to narcotics, has a staff job in an AA halfway house. Both Hal and Gately submit themselves to an ironclad system of control. The aim of AA is to develop the capacity to live completely in the present, in the space between breaths, so that the privations of living without drugs can be endured moment by moment and thus rendered bearable. At the Academy, the head trainer tries to develop in his players the capacity to remain completely inside the game, the possibilities of life reduced to the court, the lines, the opponent, while all that is not-game – the heat of the day, the crowd, the moods, the sun in the eyes – is eliminated from the field of consciousness. He tries, as well, to make them impervious to success as well as failure, to live without his or anyone else’s approval, to want only the goal and to treat that when reached with equanimity. It is very like the training of a samurai.

Gately (we learn gradually) is a pretty serious criminal as well as addict – two murders, GBH, burglary. But he is also presented as a man capable of decency, and given a break, capable of learning fast, with a strong will and immense courage, moral and physical. The long account of him, severely-wounded, in dreadful pain, unable to speak, fighting off the doctors’ attempts to give him pain relief, is an extraordinary piece of interior monologue.

Gately, to use a Christian phrase, is trying to work out his salvation. So , with far less self-awareness, are Hal O. Incandenza and the woman we meet first in her late-night radio show persona of Madame Psychosis. All three characters come from toxic families. But, as the experienced people at AA keep insisting, so what? The way out of addiction is to concentrate on where, not why. Wallace rejects the idea that we are hapless victims, mere functions of discourse or circumstances. In this book, at least, the possibility of a good life begins with acceptance of responsibility in freedom, complete responsibility in complete freedom. As the AA veterans say, “Tough shit, but you still can’t drink.” Any other approach (they say) winds up with you back out on the street talking to parking meters.

All this plot-theme-character talk is probably not the way to go about persuading someone to read the novel. The joy of Infinite Jest comes from the telling.

But an account of that will have to wait a while. I have written too much already, and too formally, and the beach is calling.

But, of course, the English novel was born and perfected as a means to explore women’s interiority and bourgeois domesticity.

As in, for example, Robinson Crusoe.

But - and you can hear him trying to unsmack his gob – “there is a tendency for the prize not to go to to people like them.”

Lie down in a darkened room, Simon, and lay off the Foucault. That stuff rots the brain.

Australia has a few vocational courses in drama and a lot more which bill themselves as non-vocational. These offer drama as part of an arts or humanities degree. In the advance publicity, and at enrolment, students are sternly advised that the course is not designed to train for the profession, though it makes a good basis for future training. (Even about that there are grounds for scepticism.) Some students listen and nod and continue to believe that in a few short years they will grace the stage or screen or even (O comble de joie) get a gig in a comedy series. Most of these give up the idea after a year or so. A handful keep the faith, and some of them do get jobs – often, I note, those who drop out.

So what of the others, the other 98% who graduate with a degree in drama? Why did they enrol, and what do they get out of it? Many years ago now I conducted a survey of second year students and came up with a surprise result: self-development. But in survey work, every discovery is a new puzzle. What did “self-development” mean? Were we back to the seventies?

I began to understand some years later when teaching a graduate class in non-fiction writing and a course in speech. In both classes, but especially in speech, there was an extraordinary level of commitment and energy, far more than in the conventional subjects I had been teaching. Students obviously valued these courses highly, in spite of the fact, about which we were upfront, that none of them planned to become full-time orators or authors. They valued the skills they were acquiring for their usefulness in a range of future jobs, in editing their workplace’s house magazine, or making those ‘presentations’ which are now de rigeur in business. So far so bread-and-butter – that’s the basis on which they were offered. But the special energy they brought to the work suggested a deeper and more personal investment.

It took quite a while before I realised what was happening. In both courses, part of the requirement was to talk or write about their personal experiences. They were not invited to explore them in groups, an activity I regard as quasi-therapeutic hogwash, but to turn them into formal public communications in which something more than ‘sincerity’ was required. And they did, especially in speech, with seriousness and passion and humour and sometimes very movingly. What they said mattered to them, and to the listening group and after a while I realised why.

It mattered so much there and then because there had not been such a space in their education since middle school – the era of ‘What I did on my holidays’. Overwhelmingly, when their education had called for the personal it had been for their personal opinion about issues. What we had done in the speech and writing options was to give students a chance to consider their lives and to articulate the results. And that I now think is at least part of what the drama students meant by ‘self-development’.

We’re talking about the 90s here. Churches shrinking or shrunk, the therapy movement surviving only in pockets, a strong and increasing tendency to convert all education into a species of training for business: where was the space of the personal? In the last redoubt, the humanities faculty, and there only in a few places. I feel privileged to have taught those courses.

Sp perhaps that’s what happening in the creative writing courses: a space for disciplined subjectivity, a place to consider life as a moral journey. (It won’t be that of course where Theory informs the teaching.)

More to come on this topic, but the Essendon-Collingwood match is calling.

OK, Tim Winton learnt something from Elizabeth Jolley, Ian McEwan went to East Anglia (in the first intake, when Malcolm Bradbury presided). Does anyone believe that either writer would have withered and died unless nurtured in the groves of academe? No, the saving remnant won’t save this argument.

We live in a culture saturated, sodden, rotten with stories and swarming with people who want to add more. Most of these people won’t get published. Most of what’s published will be forgotten within a year (and sometimes remaindered within three months). Not to mention the torrent of books published elsewhere in the Anglosphere, and not forgetting the Rest of the World. Enough already.

Especially because, although there’s a rough justice in the system, there’s also a raw deal for good writers. Someone who publishes a couple of well-received novels should have no difficulty finding a publisher for number three, right? Wrong. Increasingly, publishers are looking for the $Big Book. Once it’s obvious that you’re not Bryce Courtenay, you’re gone.

What possesses our universities to decide to turn out, year after year, a small army of people to join this ratrace, and to add to it that distinctive trait of our time, a sense of entitlement? Those grave elders who make the decisions in universities, surely they know these things?

Nope. This is what they know. Student numbers in humanities must be kept up, otherwise there’s less government money, staff cuts and general woe. It doesn’t much matter what the student numbers actually do, since in the humanities there’s no direct connection between course and career. So if creative writing will get ‘em through the doors, creative writing it is. The system is insulated against any vulgar intrusion from the market, because there is no market. Or rather (see above) there is one in which supply massively exceeds demand.

And there’s more, but not tonight.

It brings to mind a 1950s essay on the difficulty of poetry by Randell Jarrell. People ask why this modern stuff is so difficult, says Jarrell. Critics like Eliot have replied that there is no option for a modern poet, the world is excruciatingly complicated nowadays, patati patata. Whereas, says Jarrell, there is nothing new about the situation – good poetry has always been difficult. Jarrell is right, as anyone who has taught poetry to beginners knows. What reader, however experienced, lazes on the beach with Paradise Lost? Cares to be brisk with a Shakespeare sonnet?

Fiction only seems different. I’ve started by dividing the obvious couple of dozen into bands: easy, medium, difficult.

Jane Austen? Within the canonical six, I’d go for:

Easy: Pride and Prejudice | Medium: Emma | Difficult: Mansfield Park, Persuasion

Yet Persuasion was a surprise hit one (distant) year when we set it for first year English . . .
And in any case, by what standard is Pride and Prejudice ‘easy’? It’s more demanding than, for example, Metamorphosis.