The Macquarie Pen Anthology of Australian Literature has stirred up a hornet’s nest — as it was always going to do.
Sophie Cunningham admires its broad inclusiveness and decries Peter Craven’s desire to see the parameters of the anthology narrowed. By all means make inclusion a plank of Australian literature but please may we include examples that enrich the national literature rather than make it seem (as sometimes in this anthology) a political construction. But to the attack on Craven.
There is no doubt that Peter Craven has been a gatekeeper for Lit Land — or considered himself so — for a long time. He has tended the canon rather like a gardener, weeding out the ordinary and the adventitious, encouraging variegated blooms and hardy perennials both. Which makes it, naturally, Peter Craven’s garden. He would not be so egomaniacal to suggest otherwise.
What he would say about my garden and your garden and Sophie Cunningham’s garden is that any garden is enhanced by judicious shaping.
Contrast is not the least quality of the literary garden as it sets up resonances which help us appreciate the uniqueness of each contribution. This last the Macquarie Pen Anthology of Australian Literature sought to achieve by going out of its way to break the mould of a canon set in stone or aspic.
Unfortunately, the editors have permitted their selection to be overrun by the literary equivalent of oxalis. Which is about where we should abandon the metaphor. The point is that for all its admirable intention to reshape our preconceptions about literary output in this country, the anthology in the end does not reinvigorate the notion of the national literature but arouses the suspicions of the reader instead.
Suspicions that are chiefly prompted by the inclusion of inferior material, particularly in the area of Aboriginal literature. What the anthology marks are important milestones in the inclusion of Aborigines into the polity. But that is not the business of an anthology of literature, surely.
The reader wants to be introduced to outstanding examples of the genre of Aboriginal writing to promote further exploration. All the Macquarie Pen Anthology succeeds in doing by including mediocre or inappropriate examples is creating the distinct impression that Aboriginal literature is a very poor thing indeed. W.H. Auden once defined the chief criterion for reviewing poetry: Pleasure, he said, is not an infallible guide but it is the least fallible.
The anthology in the area of Aboriginal writing does not give much pleasure. Political pieties, you feel, have been allowed to intrude upon the project.
As for Peter Craven, as a canoniser (pun intended) he will know to anticipate the brickbats. But really all Craven is doing is offering an opinion, backed up, of course, by voluminous reading and a polemical prose style. More power to him.
While you might not agree with certain aspects of his assessments (the prose balloons flatulently with some pet enthusiasms) at least he provides something to react against.
Too often the Lit Biz is left in the hands of publicists who regard book reviewers as part of the publicity machine. One consequence is that we are swamped with the worthy second-rate, as Cyril Connolly termed it, or the frankly bad.
Craven sets a standard with which we are free to disagree — and that without, in this case, inferring he is racist.
Simon Hughes appears to share Peter Craven’s own quaintly old-fashioned views on hierarchies of literary value, something those who believe they are blessed with superior taste can identify apparently by instinct, which they likewise use to identify the ‘second-rate’ and the ‘frankly bad’, and therefore see no need either to identify the criteria by which they judge, or to keep up with — much less engage with — the international literary debates of the last thirty or forty years.
Hughes also seems unaware that Peter Craven’s inadequate and sloppy review of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (or, more precisely, his review of the second half of its Table of Contents pages) betrays a very incomplete knowledge of the history of said literature, particularly that produced before about 1955, whatever Craven or his apologists may think about his alleged expertise.
Some of us, however, have more complex and less antiquated views on the subject of literature than either Craven or Hughes, hence the broad spectrum of the anthology. Hughes also appears to be using Sophie Cunningham’s excellent piece merely as an excuse to fulminate on his own account about how awful and silly those ignorant, ideologically-driven editors must be. As one of them, I feel obliged to point out to him, regarding his closing remark, that ‘inferring’ means ‘deducing’, not ‘implying’. To infer racism from a piece of writing is to deduce that it exists there, to which one can only reply ‘quite’.
He isn’t being racist. It would be rubbish no matter who wrote it. In fact, making allowance for race when reviewing it is racist, in a patronizing way.
Aren’t the two sides at cross purposes? The lit-critturs vs the sociologists?
The sociologists want an anthology which is socially representative while the litcrits want to fire their canon. Litcrits love their canon. They polish and caress it and build careers on it. They are Fo dogs, literary lions guarding the National Temple of Excellence. No matter that it’s a district branch of a subtemple, it is their very own.
Each temple has a top dog, noisy and theatrical, with a big swinging lexicon. No point complaining to the council, Peter will still howl at the moon.
If the anthology purports to be both canon and sociology, the Faux dogs are right.
The anthology is narrow in a its estimation of “literature” – there is not one story from the science fiction or fantasy genres, despite the excellence Australian writers have shown.
Rob Gerrand
Editor
The Best Australian Science Fiction Writing: a Fifty Year Collection (Black, Inc.)