World literature inspires local writer

There is a regrettable history of Tasmania being left out but author Richard Flanagan puts it well and truly back on the map.

Richard Flanagan in Launceston.

Mainland Australia has a long and inglorious history of deleting Tasmania from the map.

Australian athletes at the Melbourne Olympics in 1956 wore tracksuits with images of the nation lacking our southernmost landmass. In 1982, at the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony in Brisbane, performers created a human representation of the country with Tasmania excised. Arnotts was lambasted in 2012 for its “Australia” biscuit, which was unpunctuated by its island state. Even some promotional posters for Baz Luhrmann’s 2008 Australia left off Tassie. There is some irony in this last instance. One writer brought in to try to give some depth to that protracted exercise in wide-screen fatuity was Richard Flanagan, who even a decade ago was the best-known Tasmanian author of his generation, responsible (if we can resort one last time to cartographic metaphor) for putting Tasmania on the map.

Among the things we learn from the dozen scholarly essays that make up this monograph, remarkably the first extended study of Flanagan’s writing, is that the Tasmanian’s career has been built by reversing that current of indifference and oversight. His novels make a point of concentrating on local ground and ignoring, where possible, the continent to the north. Even when that has proven impossible, Flanagan has chosen to zero in on the metropolises of the east coast, painting Sydney and Melbourne as seething nests of political and economic corruption, sites of moral dereliction and spiritual pollution.

Despite our best efforts to annex Flanagan’s success for purposes of cultural nationalism, his achievement as a creative writer has been built on a conscious refusal to be co-opted by nation. Indeed, for all their disparate angles of scholarly approach, what the pieces in Richard Flanagan: Critical Essays show is that Flanagan, a working-class descendant of convicts and Tasmanian Aborigines, is resistant to the idea of Australia as an overarching construct.

The monocultural nationalism that drew the states together more than a century ago shares too much of its DNA with the Enlightenment-era gulag the British founded in 1788, just with more local-friendly branding and a different subset of society imprisoned.

Instead he regards ecological and social relationships formed on local ground as the truest determinants of culture and group, the most coherent and natural method of identity formation and boundary shaping. Like Noongar author Kim Scott, whose work seeks to renew a sense of the country as an assemblage of immemorial indigenous regions and groupings, Flanagan regards Australia as a group of nations rather than a single one. His nation happens to be Tasmania.

And what a Tasmania that is. As English academic Ben Holgate points out in his essay on the links between ecology and literary form in Flanagan’s early novels Death of a River Guide and Gould’s Book of Fish, “what is unique to Flanagan is his portrayal of his home state’s south-west wilderness as a fictional landscape of the human spirit as much as a geographic terrain, in which European notions of ‘civilisation’ are made redundant and humankind’s spiritual potential may be fully realised.”

Flanagan’s ecological imagination may have been formed across decades by close acquaintance with the region’s dolerite ridges and mountain lakes, wild rivers and sassafras stands, but his cultural imagination has been formed via world literature: by the postcolonial exoticism of Salman Rushdie, the intensely regional attentions of William Faulkner, the magical realism of the South American greats and the literature of witness furnished by Russian and European authors during the dark years of the 20th century.

Several of the essays in the volume address this paradox: the defiant localism that simultaneously admits the most disparate associations and international connections. For Liliana Zavaglia, co-editor with Robert Dixon of this book, Flanagan seeks in his novels to connect, through wormholes of imagistic and textual assoc­iation, the institu­tion­al violence that marked European conquest of Tasmania and enforced its decades-long penal regime with kindred “constellations of viol­ence” elsewhere in place and time.

Writing of the terrible events on the Thai-Burma Railway that Flanagan vividly describes in The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Zavaglia observes that rather than “offering a simplified account of Japanese atrocities in wartime within a moral framework of good and evil, the novel’s exploration of this ‘careless’ and ‘terrifying’ force is examined at a transnational site of collective memory”.

“For Flanagan,” she continues, “the cultural accretions of militarism, nationalism, biological racism and the ‘poisonous’ forms of reli­gion to which any faith can turn, can bring about the conditions through which these sorts of atrocities might occur.”

This observation links back to Dixon’s opening essay, in which the University of Sydney professor of Australian lit­erature observes the division in Flanagan’s writing between the straight line — the infernal efficiency of Enlightenment reason, which has taken us from Protestant work ethic to hyper-capitalism, the musket to the bunker buster — and the circle, an organic form that reflects the endlessly recycled materials of human history and the oral culture of Tasmania, of its indigenous owners and the convict interlopers who came after.

This circularity marks the visionary arc of Flanagan’s writing. It is an approach that takes him to the outermost edge of an island at the world’s end yet speaks eloquently of the central forces and phenomena of global modernity. It is a form that makes space for the stories of the dispossessed, the illiterate, the despised, the forgotten. And it is an aesthetic that, in Dixon’s words, allows Flanagan to “blast” Tasmania “out of the logic of narrative history, with its telos of nation and empire”. A circle, in other words, that has achieved orbit.

The image is a powerful one. It recalls Vladimir Nabokov’s own play on the same theme: “The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free.”

Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic.

Richard Flanagan: Critical Essays

Edited by Robert Dixon

Sydney University Press, 250pp, $45