Australian literature surveyed by US scholar Birns in A World Not Yet Dead

In American scholar Nicholas Birns, Australian literature has found a committed and honest umpire.

A scene from TV series The Slap, adapted from Christos Tsiolkas’s novel.

Celebrated scholar Erich Auerbach believed a nation’s literature was not a frivolous adjunct to the state but its foundational fact, its animating principle. In an essay only recently rediscovered and published in English 70 years after its composition, the ­German-Jewish philologist outlines a curious thesis. He argues that the ­poetry — in the archaic sense of the word, referring to a period when poetry was the dominant literary mode — of a particular people is a ­record of and testament to their growing into consciousness.

The literature of a nation is, then, the song of that old, tribal coming-to-be retooled for a world of sovereign states, one that notates collective character and even gestures towards ­national destiny.

This is how Germany welded itself from a patchwork of warring principalities: by recourse to Schiller and Goethe. This is how England was invented by Shakespeare, Spanish became known as “the language of Cervantes”, and Walter Scott and Robert Burns created Scotland’s sense of itself as a nation apart. And just as Scott returned to distant historical events to revivify modern Scotland, Auerbach believed that when civil discord or invasion or some other phenomenon impeded the organic growth of a national literature, a return to wellsprings — that is earlier, canonical works — might help restart the process.

This may sound a little volkisch to Australian ears. Certainly the idea of an Australian national literature has taken some knocks in recent decades. There are those on the political Left who regard canons such as these as the ossified remains of world views that no longer reflect contemporary circumstances and arrangements; they are clubs designed to exclude. Meanwhile, the culture-warrior Right pays lip service to the same canon while dismantling the infrastructure that helps build and sustain it. It is a debate long descended into trench warfare and so requiring an outside arbitrator. In Nicholas Birns, we have thankfully found a good and honest umpire.

Birns is a professor of English at The New School in New York. He is also that rarest of academic birds: an American scholar with a special interest in Australian writing. He has been editor of Antipodes, the US journal of Australian literature, since 2001, and has published widely on Ozlit subjects since the early 1990s.

His reading is broad and catholic, his judgments shrewd yet generous, and his ideological positions nuanced. And in Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead, he assembles a series of substantial essays that attempt a survey of the field of Australian literature, past and present.

“This book,” he begins, “is largely concerned with the economic philosophy of neoliberalism.” Though he is not blind to the advantages neoliberalism brings — cultural diversity, free circulation of goods and ideas, greater opportunities for choice — he nonetheless is wary of any system that places such utopian confidence in the powers of the market. He is keen to disavow the “sentimental pessimism” American scholar Stephen Greenblatt sees collapsing “everything into a global vision of domination and subjection”. Birns writes:

But, like all periods of history, the current one involves forms of injustice and dogma that writers must defy, evade or circumvent … This era’s writers have a unique challenge, and this book tells the story of how, in Australia, they have responded to this challenge.

What links the disparate cast of poets and writers in these pages, from arch-formalists such as AD Hope to wild postcolonial originals such as Alexis Wright, is that their work represents a counter-narrative to what Birns regards as the totalising tendencies of neoliberalism. Their works suggest there are ways of responding to place, or forming communities and relationships, or judging value that evade the one-size-fits-all approach of the market.

Most of all, the incorrigibly plural nature of Australian literary practice, the instability of its canon in relation to those Anglosphere monoliths the US and Britain, means the rankings are looser, the competitors more dispersed (and, more recently, diverse). The banal dichotomy of winner and loser that passes for competition in contemporary society feels impoverished by contrast.

So it is a liberal, loose-limbed, messy democracy of voices that Birns summons up — from the old-school modernism of Christina Stead to the contemporary ecological poetics of John Kinsella, from Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap to Thea Astley’s It’s Raining in Mango. He follows a subtle reading of Elizabeth Harrower’s slender oeuvre with a chapter considering the length of Australian novels in relation to their national and international reception, then furnishes the reader with a triptych of pieces on “rancour”, “idealism” and “concern” respectively as they play out in various Australian texts.

His insights are informed by psychoanalytic theory, post-Marxist economics, new historicism and a dozen other theoretical rubrics. Yet his prose is orderly, his turn of phrase often elegant: he employs theory where it is helpful but maintains a stubbornly humanistic enthusiasm for the alternative worlds he enters as a reader.

And what he finds there is an evolution, from the postwar welfare state to our hypertrophied consumer culture, that has demanded different strategies in critique. Alex Hope’s poetry “had an animus against modern innovation”, loathed groupthink, activist literature and what he saw as the idiocies attendant to egalitarianism in Australia during that period. Yet as Birns ­observes:

Hope was modern even as he virulently criticised the modern. He could not conceive of modernity being vulnerable to annulment or appeal.

To see his rancour contextualised and his life and work fruitfully complicated is to read Hope with greater sympathy and respect. The reader suspects that if Hope had the opportunity to see what a vastly more unequal society was actually like, a hi-tech version of his beloved neoclassical England, he would not have welcomed it.

Conversely, a figure such as Tsiolkas uses the same rancour to very different ends. His Australia is place suffering from what University of Sydney professor Robert Dixon calls “slow violence”. The earnest activism of those earlier decades is gone, the social compact Hope railed against unravelling. It is a richer, faster and altogether more precarious place. Danny Kelly, the Scottish-Greek hero character at the heart of Tsiolkas’s 2013 novel Barracuda, is a working-class boy made good, his place at an elite Melbourne secondary school won through his talent for swimming. Yet the obligation towards success becomes so great in this hot-house environment that he cracks, attacking another boy for calling him “a f..king loser”.

This is the biggest insult, the most stigmatising ignominy. At the peak of his promise, Danny may be a winner, but that status is always vulnerable. Like financial investments, social status fluctuates; it can never be presumed to be permanent. Being called a loser hurts Danny so severely because his entire identity is built upon being a winner.

Birns notes that while Danny may have been mocked for being gay, or because of his ethnicity, or because of his working-class origins back in Hope’s era, even the parameters of social rejection have narrowed:

In the world of Barracuda … being a winner or a loser is predestined, like Calvinistic grace. It is because Danny is condemned to this eternal category that he snaps and pummels Martin with rage, responding to Martin’s “slow violence” with a more traditional fast violence.

In the light of this observation, the slap of Tsiolkas’s eponymous novel — given to a child by a self-made entrepreneur who is not the child’s father — carries a further metaphorical sting. This, writes Birns, is the violence of neoliberalism made flesh. It is asides such as these that make the experience of reading A World Not Yet Dead such a pleasure. Highlights include a section devoted to teasing out the buried Australian setting of Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, a valuable retreading of Tim Winton’s Breath and Eyrie, and a meditation on white authors’ efforts to use literature as a means of atonement to Aboriginal Australia. Birns reads us in a softer light than we may read ourselves, but he is not beyond critique and admonishment.

On the evidence of A World Not Yet Dead it is unlikely that Birns would wholly subscribe to Auerbach’s vision of what a national literature should be. Our situation as a mainly migrant ­nation, as incomers whose presence has only obscured the primal poetry of the continent’s original inhabitants, is too far removed from the blood-and-soil ideology of many otherwise impeccable German thinkers (though in fairness to Auerbach, he wrote his piece as an act of faith in wartime, as a Jew exiled to Istanbul).

But readers will come away from this thoughtful and wide-ranging book with a more positive and reconfigured sense of the merits of our national literature. His faith in the ability of Ozlit to provide a strongly felt, aesthetically various and intellectually sly alternative to the current status quo is catching. It is a wellspring to which we should all return.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic.

Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead

By Nicholas Birns

Sydney University Press, 252pp, $30