Lost in queer translation

The book list for senior English students is not “queer” enough, according to teacher-academics writing in a journal of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English. Only two of 21 set texts for the national curriculum passed muster: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose narrator gets a tick for “homosexual leanings”, and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night for its “love triangle that challenges notions of both gender construction and sexual attraction”. The academics finger the villains as “heteronormativity” (the idea that heterosexuality is normal) and the “ideology” of childhood innocence. They urge a “queering” of the English curriculum, creating “an opportunity for LGBTIQ+ students to see representations of themselves in stories”. They are not offering a literary critique but a program for enlisting children in “transformative action” as combatants in a gender politics struggle. The alternative, they warn, is that “heteronormativity endures”.

Power is an undoubted element of the human story but literature enriches because it can range across the full panoply of themes, such as friendship and love, faith and duty, heroism and courage. It’s true that writers change with society but not in simple lock-step. These academics demand “overt” literary images of non-hetero clans — holding up an agitprop mirror to today’s fashions. But identity and relevance are subtler and more interesting than this. Sometimes it’s precisely what we don’t recognise in a text — what at first seems alien — that makes a lasting impression. Good fiction enables us to travel in time and live out someone else’s fate. One of the depressing aspects of the social media bubble is its groupthink hostility to other views. We need literature to school students in the empathic effort of imagination necessary to bridge human divides. The idea that texts must target readers according to their membership of a social tribe is worth fighting against, and the same goes for the solipsist’s edict that a gay white female cannot give literary life to the story of a hetero black male.

These academics make the familiar didactic demand for “relevance”. But what we know from history is that the present often turns out to be a deceptive vantage point. The struggling Spanish writer Cervantes thought he was satirising the overblown chivalric tales of his time but the escapades of Don Quixote have obliterated any memory of that fact. CP Cavafy, a little-known writer in the early 1900s, made an eccentric decision to write in an understated style about forgotten tyrants in the backblocks of the Roman Empire. But his meditations on human vanity and desire (he was undoubtedly and unapologetically queer) earned him a reputation as one of the most distinctive and timeless poets of the 20th century. The staggering variety of gum trees was hardly a hot topic when Murray Bail began his novel Eucalyptus in the 1990s, but through the trees we saw unfold an unforgettable fable about passion and choice.

Art transcends crude identities and fashions, it does not wallow in them. Last year Keira Knightley starred in the biopic Colette. This French writer ghosted saucy schoolgirl stories for her much older husband in the late 19th century, sometimes dressed as a man and lived openly with a female companion for a decade of her long life. She has been exhumed as a heroine for our gender-fluid age. Perhaps that is why the film shows no great interest in her genius as a writer — her psychological penetration, immortal characters and earthy humour. Colette would have been too free-spirited to embrace a grim campaign against heteronormativity. Schoolchildren curious about the strange world of women and men would do better to read far and wide, beyond any politically correct book list.