8. Patrick White’s ‘The Aunt’s Story’: Collapsing Identity in an Avatar of the Age

The Aunt's Story, by Patrick White, 1948. Eyre and Spottiswoode. Pictured, Penguin paperback, 1985.

Patrick White’s third novel was one of his own perpetual favourites, little noticed at the time but eventually viewed as a cornerstone of his early career. White, Australian literature’s first, and so far only, Nobel laureate, is an intimidating figure to many contemporary readers, and not without reason. His glutinous prose style can be off-putting, with his firm resistance to the minimalism of language normally associated with modernism, even whiles delving into some of modernism’s key concerns, matters of perspective and conceiving the world. He also often wrote about an haute-bourgeois, Eurocentric sector of Australian society that’s much less defined today.

As both a reading experience and an artistic statement, The Aunt’s Story is both impressive and sticky. Slow, intense, often hallucinogenic in its perceptual intricacy, and yet as distant from immediate reality as its half-mad heroine, The Aunt’s Story is, as a feat of technical writing, quite amazing. Time and time again, White conjures sentences that paint in perfervid tones an imagination that perceives experience in an off-kilter, hyper-vivid style, shading into vague dissociation and then true madness.

The aunt in question is Theodora Goodman, the kind of human – a spinster, unattractive, too individual for her world and too distracted for meditation – easily ignored by life. And she is not, in her fashion, entirely pitiable. Her self-contained, sphinx-like quality, which tantalises and taunts, conceals a boundless and formless character, as Theodora intimates a descent into nihilism, a sense of inherent murder, of “the great millennium of dissolution”, contained within her psyche. Editing herself out of the real world, and into those lives she chooses, Theodora in her crazed way embodies a disintegrating world. Like a virgin priestess to some unseen deity, she holds herself in readiness, meditating on a too intensely charged connection to the nature of the earth and life. Or is she just an old dingbat?

The novel proceeds in three parts: “Meroë”, “Jardin Exotique”, and “Holstius”. It opens just after the death of Theodora’s mother. Once the mistress of a large and impressive colonial homestead, Meroë, on a grazing property that her feckless intellectual husband had allowed to go to seed, Mrs Goodman had finished up living in a Sydney house with the less beloved of her two daughters, the ill-shaped Theodora, despite a subtle strain of mutually homicidal resentment that lived between them. Theodora’s conventionally pretty and humdrum sister, Fanny, had received all the grace and favour of their mother, which helped her lasso an equally humdrum, good-looking neighbour, Frank Parrott, who was initially as intrigued by the tomboyish, knowing Theodora. Even from an early age, Theodora, wilful in her lethal desire to know everything, seems linked in a strange, morbid fashion to the world around the genteel Meroë, akin to its bone-like stony outcrops and seeing some ghost of her own soul in the hawks, one of which she shoots down to impress Frank, but perceives only her own self-annihilating streak in the act. She also senses a bond with an aging tramp, seemingly an old friend of her father’s, who comes to beg a meal, and accounts bitterly about how her father had once been a wanderer like him. Her father died:

‘She walked out through passages, through the sleep of other people. She was thin as grey light, as if she had just died. She would not wake others. It was still too terrible, too private an experience. As if she were to go into the room and say: Mother, I am dead, I am dead, Meroë has crumbled. So she went outside where the grey light was as thin as water and Meroë had, in fact, dissolved. Cocks were crowing the legend of the day, but only the legend. Meroë was grey water, grey ash. Then Theodora Goodman cried.’

And Mrs Goodman and her daughter left Meroë for the city, where Theodora sustained a long platonic friendship, underscored both by fascination and loathing, with a successful aging lawyer, Huntly Clarkson, with the potential for marriage that never quite entices either of the enough. Finally, by the time Mrs Goodman dies, Theodora is pushing forty, healthy but turned ugly, twisted up as much by internal confusion as by genetic lot, sporting a faint moustache that her sister’s children love touching. Theodora takes her chief refuge in playing the role of aunt to her nephews and especially her niece, Lou, to whom she feels kinship as the kind of girl just a little too intelligent and outside of things to make Fanny comfortable. Nonetheless, her mother’s death frees Theodora to take advantage of her inheritance and embark on a trip to Europe, where White throws her in the path of the spiritual calamity of the late ‘30s.

Theodora’s final descent into schizoid madness reflects a disintegrating culture. As Kerryn Goldsworthy noted, Theodora’s crack-up mirrors the world’s, which is breaking up, achieving a state of flux, the same state to which Theodora moves, not through religious learning but through spiritual instinct. In the novel’s second episode, Theodora, and the narrative, dips in and out of immediate reality, as Theodora immerses herself in the stories other guests in the same coastal hotel tell her, especially those of an old Russian soldier, Alyosha Sokolnikov, who calls himself a general, but later admits to only ever having risen to the rank of major. Sokolnikov calls Theodora Ludmilla, projecting onto her the likeness of his long dead sister, who was murdered by revolutionaries. Another guest, Mrs Rapallo, an American heiress, with whom Sokolnikov has a running but not deeply serious quarrel, later admits that a daughter that she has told her of, who supposedly married a rich aristocrat, doesn’t exist, an invention to make her own experience amongst the grandees of Europe more coherent and purposeful. Thusly, Theodora finds herself as a person with limited capacity to discern reality amongst many folk who maintain fictions to make their lives bearable.

Theodora embodies, firstly, a schism, that between social role and private persona. If a key modernist concern was the question of perspective and how it affects the world – and how prose presents that world – Theodora perceives that world hazily, through a filter of private fantasy and estrangement. Though seemingly innate, Theodora’s estrangement is surely enforced by her inability to adopt a shape pleasing to the world, in any form. She accepts the cliché of maiden aunt without demure, even with a touch of ironic pride, because it’s an identity that at least keeps her momentarily rooted to the structure of things, whilst also liberating her; it has no attendant ties, no solid part to play in other people’s lives, save the ethereal designation “aunt” to her sister’s children, or more specifically to Lou, that is a kind of spiritual, once-removed mother, the kind who sees into a soul without blinkers of expectation. It also prevents her from having to define herself in relation to the forces that work upon her, which finally becomes her crisis.

Other guests in the Hôtel include Katina Pavlou, a teenaged girl to whom Theodora becomes another kind of aunt; Wetherby, an English writer; and his German lover, Lieselotte, a Countess and painter who ran away from her crazed, Fascist husband, and is now possessed herself with a deeply nihilistic intent. Wetherby and Katina begin a flirtation which Theodora casually aids, hazily perceiving in their trip together to an old Napoleonic tower as the event for Katina’s loss of virginity. This precipitates Lieselotte’s final auto-da-fe, in which she murders Wetherby and sets fire to the hotel:

‘She was alone now, in the passage of the hotel, of which wall-paper rejected a long imposed flatness. Walls whipped. All the violence of fire was contained in the hotel. It tossed, whether hatefully of joyfully, it tossed restraint to smoke. Theodora ran, breathing the joy or hatred of the fire. She was not certain where. She heard the desperate cockroach pop under foot. Her own report, she supposed, would not be so round or, authorities said, so final.’

The fire, of course, is percipient of oncoming war, and Theodora, now completely untethered from secure reality, heads to the United States, where she gets off a cross-country train and wanders about a small Midwestern town and its outskirts, is briefly taken in by a poor but kindly family, the Johnsons, before setting up home in an abandoned house that merges with Meroe in her mind, and she is revisited by the wanderer, who now calls himself Holstius and encourages Theodora to accept her imminent incarceration and divided self with acquiescence. Theodora is indeed soon collected by a doctor called by the Johnsons.

Theodora spans gulfs: new and old worlds, male and female, sane and insane, civilisation and nihilism, mystic and cynic. If the ideal of shamanism is something beyond male and female, a figure like Tiresias who can shift between the two and remain outside the normal slipstreams of time and identity, Theodora is something similar. She is, at last, everything and nothing. Carolyn Bliss suggested that Theodora, like another White hero, Voss, lurches in a great nothingness precisely because of this mix of solipsism and self-ignorance. Theodora’s meditative nature skips around her own nature, constantly critiquing everything else, imagining herself in other modes, other identities, trying on and casting away the rags of fraying world. She’s happiest drifting far beyond that structure, trying on other lives for size once she finally reaches that great outer world and finds, chiefly, endless reflections of her own mind. Once she is divested of her last true worldly responsibility, her mother, she goes out to meet the world; only when she is divested of her sanity can she begin to comprehend herself.

The France she encounters in the Hôtel du Midi is anachronistic, and the source of my unease about this segment: it feels walled up against the outside world, full of cultural refugees living in a distended belle époque that has precious little to do with France of the ‘30s, with Mrs Rapallo trailing associations of Henry James and John Singer Sargent, and Sokolnikov, straight out of Dostoyevsky and Chekhov, and the rest, all of whom reflect the fractured state of pre-War Europe. But then again, Theodora’s distorted imagination seems to repaint everything in a new shade, and the Hôtel and its denizens could be as much her imagination as fact. Either way, it’s reminiscent of the Davos sanatorium in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, a similar abode of émigrés unknowingly awaiting a cataclysmic, with a seeker-hero keeping the focus. Theodora’s fantasias draw her off into lives that she might as well have lived – her particular identification with Sokolnikov’s legendary sister, which seems to sit well with her own mother’s foreign, possibly Russian background, the most potential of her variety of potential lives.

Who then is Theodora? Or, who is she not? With her masculine traits and father’s favourite status, she suggests the defeated tomboy, the crushed spirit of a sensualism not flowing through the familiar channels, to the point where her capacity to sense is both out of all proportion and yet strangely dead, an identity strangled in its cradle by a code of civility losing all purpose. Theodora’s youthful communion with the colonial landscape has remade her into something that cannot yet, at least not in her mother’s eyes, live; only after the old world immolates itself will it find a form.

Theodora perceives evil in herself, and her mother, hateful as she is, perceives a criminal solipsism, which finally is given free reign once her mother dies. Theodora’s association with weapons and death, her mastery of shooting and habit of walking off with knives and deep, preternatural identification with murderers, imbues her with the character, if not the actuality, of an angel of death. She carries a negativity within her that matches the age, one of war, declining presumptions of gentility (seen in general scope in the Hôtel du Midi, with its collective of runaways from revolutions and the “myth in jackboots”. She kills the little hawk, the spirit of wildness that reigns over the landscape at Meroë, the emblem of a brief and ferocious existence, thus annihilating her own self-realisation on that stage; she denies her own desire for a spectacle (also annihilating her sister’s love for her, who recognises she’s mad, and the glimmering interest Frank had in her). She’s a seeker, a searcher, and yet she’s not an aspirational explorer. Her father, fan of The Odyssey, charts Homeric enterprises, but, as for Odysseus, Theodora splits into the many-headed Scylla, looking quite the gorgon to the eyes of men. She escapes deterioration into utter mediocrity, such as inevitably grips her conventionally pretty sister and her conventionally masculine husband, who simply fulfil a biological function and instantly petrify.

Theodora’s desire to know takes on the morbid intensity D. H. Lawrence diagnosed in an Edgar Allan Poe tale like ‘Morella’, a need to know the world and people down to the bones, down to a basic nature, whilst simultaneously erasing herself, disposing of that “great monster Self”. The broader influence of Lawrence, who, some critics like Carolyn Bliss note, was an influence on White’s early fiction, can be detected in the symbolism of Meroë and the crucial avatars Theodora, product of a contorting, dying genteel civilisation, discovers instead in earth and animals; the closest kin she finds from the world of men is a Greek musician, Moraïtis, to whom she is introduced in Sydney, and whose music penetrates her deeply. He was a peasant from the ancient pagan cradle of civilisation, a trailblazer for her own search for some knowledge and experience of substance.

But Theodora never truly penetrates the nature of neither the world nor herself, peeling the skin off the onion, until only nothingness is left. Bliss called her a Faust, the first Faust of White’s career of Fausts, offering her soul for knowledge and gaining only chaos and dissolute purpose. Theodora encounters her nihilistic, destructive side in the German artist Lieselotte, prognosticating an auto-da-fe that bursts out and consumes this European conclave, and leaves Theodora stranded to at last reckon with her own shattered self, just as modern culture, after that millennium of dissolution, will pick up its pieces. As Lieselotte predicts, ‘We have destroyed much, but we have not destroyed enough. We must destroy everything, everything, even ourselves. Then at last when there is nothing, perhaps we shall live.” As Lieselotte is driven to annihilate her lover, the poet, musician, and teacher Wetherby, that is a fount of creation, so to does Theodora pursue her annihilating programme right to its bitter end.

White shows off his brilliance constantly - a bit too much so. Like the Jardin Exotique of the Hôtel du Midi which gives the second part of the novel its name, White’s prose is tangled and teeming. Meanwhile his narrative is compassionate, visionary, deeply conceived, but also often distended, alienating, and, truth be told, as interminable as often as it is hypnotic. Most truly great works of literature can be as difficult as hell and yet graceful, a gift White hadn’t quite achieved by this point: The Aunt’s Story is often ponderous and immobile, showy in its poetic affectations. Because the viewpoint is so intimately tied to Theodora’s skewed, occasionally unintelligible sense of reality, the ‘Jardin Exotique’ isn’t deeply persuasive or terrifying in the attempt to paint a crumbing Europe. Lieselotte, who acts out the destructive impulses Theodora harbours, is too distant to be deeply disturbing, in the same way that, say, Smerdyakov is to Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov: White would have achieved more power in his intent with a less circumlocutory style. Whilst White richly communicates Theodora’s mindscape, his thematic imperatives are dulled.

And yet it’s still an important and stimulating work of literature that rewards the patient reader with a darkly conjured sense of the disintegration of personality and of a cosmic need for disinfection.

See also:

Bliss, Carolyn 1986, “Patrick White’s Fiction”, MacMillan, London.

Goldsworthy, Kerryn 2000, ‘Fiction from 1900 to 1970’, in “The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature”, ed. Elizabeth Webby, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

7. 'Tirra Lirra by the River’: Memory as Mystery

Tirra Lirra by the River, by Jessica Anderson, 1978, Macmillan Company of Australia; pictured edition Penguin paperback, 1985.

As Mister Zimmerman sang: “He not busy being born is busy dying.” And such is the essential thesis of the life Nora Porteous, the heroine of Tirra Lirra by the River, a work that provoked mixed feelings in me. It is an archetypal example of a ‘70s Australian “slim volume” novel: 141 pages long, laced with then-fashionable concerns, chiefly feminism and the cultural cringe, it captured the 1978 Miles Franklin Award, and it’s exactly the sort of stucco-crusted work that prize delights in. The narrative takes the structure of an aging woman’s assessment of her less-than-satisfied life, and expresses often urgent and telling emotions in a prose style that is occasionally witty and yet, for the most part, pedantic and lacking any formal grace, the kind of poeticism that could give it the weightless quality of reverie it requires. You can practically smell the green tea and potpourri wafting off the page. Heroine Nora is supposed to be a likeably flawed, heroically self-possessed woman who manages to reinvent herself against impossible odds, but she comes across more often than not as a tone-deaf irritant who successfully blames everyone else for the traps she puts herself in.

Nora is a child of a Queensland town, to which she returns after nearly a half-century’s absence to find has been annexed by suburbs. She had left it first for Sydney, where she lived with her former husband, Colin Porteous, and then in London, where she forged a career as a dressmaker and theatrical costumer. When she returns to Australia after a series of calamities ends the comfortable retired life she had been leading with two female friends and the man who was their landlord, she’s laid flat by a case of pneumonia for weeks and sorts through her mass of barely examined recollections, fancies, deliberate elisions and half-formed prejudices that have defined her life, in relation to her sister, Grace, whose death left Nora with the family house again, to her ex-husband, to two old childhood acquaintances, successful author Olive Partridge, and Dorothy Ivey, who married a man named Rainbow and had a son, Gordon, who is now Nora’s wan, distant attending doctor. His phlegmatic manner evokes a mystery for Nora over Dorothy’s end which, when Nora learns of it, proves far stranger than anything Nora could have expected.

As a detailed portrayal of shifting cultures and psychological acuity, Tirra Lirra isn’t deeply moving, because Nora’s perspective on other people is so disengaged, and the mysteries of her personality not all that terribly interesting. The core memory she dredges up of an incident when she was a teenager with a younger boy, Jack Cust, which seems to have caused her retreat from passion, isn’t exactly a riveting revelation, and the climactic discovery that Dorothy slaughtered her family except for young Gordon strangely lacks menace and horror, and proves, truth be told, to be just another wellwhaddayaknow in Nora’s life. The novel reads partly like listening to a long ramble on an airplane flight by the lady in the next seat. Compared to the vibrant psycho-sexual tension and indiscernibly confused mysticism and madness Patrick White evoked in his similar The Aunt’s Story, Anderson’s writing is only prosaic and passable.

It is as a piece of rumination that the novel gains a depth beyond the humdrum. It suggests that life is finally being little more than the accumulation of memories that prove it occurred, as Nora’s journey of reverie reveals. Nora has no children, so it is the momentary proofs of her life that signal its substance to her. Proof comes in objects, photographs. The father she never knew, smiling impersonally in ancient pictures. Brothers and once-were-loved-ones beaming in pristine remoteness. In the house, in the totems of a long-discarded existence. Objects confirm the past, but only memories explain the past, and memory can be tricky. Nora’s self-study pivots around the events of her past, and yet her memories are slow, even unwilling, to resolve. And without the willingness of memory, no object is itself a proof of anything.

Of course Tirra Lirra tells a temporal narrative, of a woman who has lived long, poised in a perpetual state of becoming. Death is of course the easier choice. Easier by far to cry one’s heart out to the last like the Lady of Shalott than to build Camelot (Nora maintains an attachment to Tennysonian imagery, and an of course unfulfilled vision of a perfect Lancelot, from childhood). Nora presumes that Dorothy chose death as Nora almost chose death, but in fact they were Janus faces conjoined to the same annihilating impulse.

Nora’s life encompasses several familiar Aussie mythologies, not the old ones of Clancy of the Overflow, but more contemporary varieties: the creative soul who has to fly overseas to find fulfilment. The hopeless dreamer hemmed in by dull-witted suburbs. The lively female corralled by an empty male. Very ‘70s. No, wait, very now. How many women do I know in their mid-’30s who have run screaming from paltry marriages? But I digress. Nora attempts to assert a measure of control over her life, and yet discovers in the end that possibly she cheated herself of becoming something else, something more interesting. Like too many people, she is an accumulation of mistakes, and not necessarily the best judge of herself.

For Nora is a bundle of contradictions. Dissociated and ardent, tortured and blithe, talented and mediocre, self-destructive and self-actualising, unforgiving and compassionate, highly resolute and utterly malleable, she does a good job to survive as long as she does. She almost doesn’t, but she does. Nor does she go crazy from some unexamined anxiety like Dorothy. The twinning threat – self-annihilation or extermination of others – looms darkly in both her immediate life and the world about her, in the strange and yet coherent accord of her depression over her fading looks and the horrors of concentration camps, establishing the depressive’s sensibility that entwines all ills into a single mass, but also the artist’s sensibility, the poet’s sense of everything being connected – in what way do the terrors of the age reveal themselves in the individual life? Was Dorothy’s rampage only her own, or an explosion of frustration and horror keen to a generation like her? Is Nora alone in her plight, or a representative?

In this regard the novel is deadly accurate: the tight-fisted matriarchs, bowling club conspiracies, nervous homosexual bohemians and churchy suburban compost-tossers plainly evoke the seamy tedium of pre-‘60s Australia. Nora retains a distance from all this and her own life, great swathes of which pass by in dissociation and wilful passivity, and yet this doesn’t entirely conceal the lack of sense in Nora’s marrying a ponderous assassin of the soul like Colin: it feels more like a conceit to essay a theme. Like Theodora, Nora finally pursues the dream of Europe, only to find that dream cracking up; like her, she finishes up dreadfully sick and yet her physical confinement enables a final reckoning with her own nature. Nora’s sister Grace tries to have faith: she defines, both for herself and for Nora, faith as immobility, the definition of lethargy and non-becoming: death, in fact. Her novelist friend Olive suggests Aussie Protestants instead lapse into a kind of pantheism. Nora claims not to know what that is, but she does, in the sustenance she gains from the rivers and waters of her home, to which she returns, and yet cannot finally rediscover when she goes to search for the river in her now built-up suburb. Grace finally concluded rather that she had opinions rather than faith, and took up another faith – that indeed of the earth, fastidiously feeding her garden with compost, producing a gorgeous green glow and a proof of faith that Nora can’t quite submit to but still takes comfort in.

Nora too has faith, of a different, more immediate variety: faith in getting the hell of out sad and sickly little places. Like Grace, however, her conclusion is troubled by the sense that she missed something. In the act of running, much of the passing landscape is blurred. Nora, in waiting for life, refuses to live, in a crucial sense. She aborts her child and has a facelift, and both surgeries are crucifying disasters that rebound: her efforts to hold time at bay only confirm its force, and she is left old and powerless. The illness that afflicts her on homecoming seems as much the manifestation of an exhausted spirit, which has to be worked through before she can face her waning days with simplicity, as Nora looks at the mystery of herself and those people in her life.

The ultimate destination of Tirra Lirra, and its redeeming grace, is such meditation on memory, and how it constructs a person for their own understanding. Nora’s memories do not flow readily, and therefore her stock-take of her life gains an elusive, eliding uncertainty. Nora conceives herself as a mystery, which she attempts to solve in delving into the past, turning up lost fragments, like her forgotten physical flirtation with Arch Cust, that have the potential to upend her understanding of the past. The chains of her memories are built around severance, conclusions, to long patterns of existence that are vague in their being settled, and it is in that vagueness that Nora finds ambiguity, the kind that taunts and corrodes the settled opinion, the established prejudice, the assumed necessity. Nora’s certainty in what she doesn’t like, and her determination to escape it, reveals a final uncertainty of just what she wanted. Nearing the end of her days, Nora has no more experience to gain, but she does find a true second chance in her homecoming, a chance to delve into the nature of things, and discern their essence. Finally, Anderson suggests through Nora’s story, the time has come for Australians to stop either running in hysteria or settling into lethargy, but to settle and recompose their natures.

6. Randolph Stow’s ‘Tourmaline’: Ambiguous Parable

Tourmaline, by Randolph Stow, 1963, Macdonald and Co.

What is Tourmaline?

A Great Australian novel? A myth? A parable? Mystery? Obscure tome? Pie in the sky? All of the above?

What is rare about it is that is no single thing.

Its preoccupations seem to contradict the possibly atheistic, surely pagan, almost nihilistic, strand in so many of our poets and writers. But I’m not so convinced. Tourmaline is about the need for Gods, the love of wonder, the water of hope. If no God shows up, humans will invent one. A man might call himself one.

In more concrete terms, Tourmaline was the third novel of Randolph Stow, who had won the Miles Franklin Award with his previous work, To The Islands. Tourmaline itself made a far more ambivalent impact upon Australian letters when it was published in 1963, generally dismissed by many critics with their grounding in and insistence upon social(ist) realism, for Tourmaline is nakedly allusive and spiritual in its method and intent. And yet it’s no failure as a depiction of small town life; its reported dialogue is quite often precise and flavoursome, and its characters burn with the lightning solidity of impressionist figures. Stow was (and is: he’s still kicking, now 74) also a poet and his prose bears it out, his sentences pruned but beautiful, his visions essayed in cunningly elusive terms. The novel’s themes, entwining grim visions of environmental decay and the collapse of spiritual bastions, have only proven all the more vividly prognosticative and relevant.

Tourmaline is a town on the outermost fringe of the habitable world, an outpost in the advancing dead heart of Australia. Once a prosperous, even beautiful town during a gold mining boom, its lack of a steady water supply in an age of corroding drought, plus the waning value of the town’s gold compared to the cost and difficulty of extracting it, has seen the place reduced to the closest thing to a ghost town. The oldest white resident calls himself The Law, for he is their sole police officer, and he narrates the tale. He recalls a town of gardens, fecundity, and hope. He is the law, yes, and the lore, the ledger-keeper, the rememberer, the story-teller. Other figures in town include Kestrel, the publican, a taciturn marauder and petty potentate, whose cousin, Byrne, is the town’s drunken troubadour, and Kestrel’s favourite victim. Kestrel is shacked up with Deborah, a half-caste girl, daughter to an aboriginal prostitute Kestrel himself had once frequented. But Deborah was raised by shopkeepers Tom and Mary Spring, before gravitating towards Kestrel as the lone figure of potency in the town. An encampment of Aboriginals live nearby, keeping their own contract with the bitter earth.

One day the town’s supply-carting truck pulls into town with a find: a sun-charred lump of man the driver found on the roadside. At first they think he’ll die, but he slowly recovers in Mary’s ministrations, and calls himself Michael Random, revealing that he’s a diviner. Byrne is besotted with this emissary of mystery, Kestrel alarmed and distrustful, Deborah fascinated in spite of herself, whilst Tom Spring prods him in a barely-spoken metaphysical argument. Random lost his divining rod in the desert, and with it, he says, his virtue, but he also thinks that God has spoken to him, and that his having been saved and brought to Tourmaline has signalled God’s design for him, to bring life back to the shattered town. And the residents, especially The Law himself, desperately anticipate his discovery of water. But Random delays, turning up instead a reef of gold, and setting about prodding the townsfolk into returning the town’s church. But rather than instituting a spiritual revival, Random achieves more a kind of cult with himself as the messenger and deliverer.

Levi-Strauss would surely have understood Stow’s conjuring, in a novel that becomes in essence a study in comparative religion, tracing likenesses in Christianity and Aboriginal spiritualism and Buddhism and Taoism, threatening to boil them all down to a constitute singularity, a yearning for the infinite. For the water the town so desperately needs to revive is likened to spiritual fulfilment, to hope, in fact. But Random does not simply offer up water. He gives the town gold first. Of course we all know those fairy tales where princesses get gruesome comeuppances for snatching at gold whilst serving maids take up the water and gain all they desire. But is Stow’s point really that simple? Well, yes, to a certain extent. And yet it’s not exactly the shadow of greed Random uncovers, for he wants to give it to the whole town of Tourmaline, to anyone who wants it. And yet somewhere the bite of a serpent awaits.

Is Michael Random the fallen angel, Satan? A misbegotten messiah? Or con man turned cult leader? He truly believes in his mission, but he hardly knows what it is. God spoke to him in the desert. As Kierkegaard said, you ought to be carefully about whose message you’re receiving in such moments. If Random is a Satan, he’s not the one of medieval horrors. The Satan of Milton and ‘Paradise Lost’. The egotistical rebel without a cause, searching for one. He calls himself, either way, a Diviner. In the original sense. Touched by the divine. Searching, relying on the intimations of that divinity, but without a map. Who walked into the desert to find Tourmaline or something like it, or die, finished off by the deity he’s wrestling with.

“Wild beasts are loose on the world,” the Diviner reports.

A few years before they were letting off atom bombs in the desert, raining the already stricken earth with wormwood.

Either way, Michael Random comes to Tourmaline, riddled with wounds, purified by the fires of the desert – of hell, he claims. He brings hope to Tourmaline. Hope for water, for renewal and revival. Tourmaline, a dusty shithole populated by the tested and faithful – or the most craven and gutless, those who remain when all else have fled, the white conquerors who marched in, broke the earth, stripped its riches and fled as the desert asserted its wrath and took away the water. And the remnant progeny of its ancient race, the local tribes. They cling to the broken bones of the town. The “Law”, that old man, stalking his realm with philosophical impotence, dreaming of a return to glories of the past even as he becomes aware of his own imminent mortality.

Byrne, the troubadour and victim of Tourmaline, looks like the Devil. The Devil’s own son, fatherless. The man who sings of ruination, and tempts the destroyer in Kestrel. Kestrel, who flees, only to return, with mysterious, threatening minions and machinery to aid his own divination. Or are they just men with boring machines?

The Law, testifier and memory-keeper. As old as the hills, the Elder of his particular tribe. And a canny country copper who senses something might be out of sorts, eventually. The scars that pit Random’s body tip him off.

Old Gloria, matriarch of the tribe, who keeps a tree alive purely with her pee and keeps the church when no-one comes. Not until Random forces them to, signing them to an unfulfilled contract. The church, seemingly ruined, and yet with its roof off to the stars, where The Law constantly looks for his intimations of the eternal.

Tom Spring alone openly stands against him. Tom with his religion without words, only signifiers, preaching instead of the “unity of opposites”, “of being a rock to be shaped by winds and tides”. His is a passive, observant, waiting for death. His death seals the book. The loss of the last pillar in the town? Or its lone hero, given the transcendence he clung onto? His faith resists being translated into totems, any totems, not even words (how very Protestant), especially not gold hewn from the earth, which spring Random promises The Law will flow through him – his safe – and onto the rest of Tourmaline. It seems however that the gold is a harbinger of failure, of misdirected purpose. And yet it’s the only clear sign he receives. Tourmaline, a cursed place from the start. The earliest tombstone in Tourmaline: Kenneth Macarthur, struck by lightning. From on high!

Abandon all hope ye who enter here. Michael comes to save them but loses his rod “all the virtue went out of me” – and Byrne’s replacement draws him to gold, not water. Tourmaline, and by implication civilisation, equips him with the tools of greed, not divinity.

Reversals: Byrne, who seems to be Random’s most loyal and ardent apostle and admits to loving him as other love gold or water, says he never believed in him. Kestrel, the doubter, takes his message most to heart and remakes himself as a Diviner. But what kind? Kestrel has a dark, violent heart. His reign as mystic chief in Tourmaline contains more inherent threat than Random’s.

The unity of opposites.

A Divine purpose is not necessarily friendly to humans. It tests them, burns them to the bone, decimates races of the faithless, abandons them if they remain unworthy.

Mary, adopted mother of Deborah, whom Random brands a harlot - who becomes spiritual mother to Michael. Mary the mother? and Deborah, Magdelene? Shiny-eyed and delivered. The townsfolk become his acolytes, his church, his cult, his exodus, clawing at the earth in vigorous labour at his direction. His discovery of the reef of gold promises something. But what? A token? A temptation? Either way, Michael gains his congregation, a mystic ruler.

Until the project fails. No life will return to Tourmaline, not yet. Although the landscape is altered, the rhythms are unaltered. The sun will shine and the dust push in until nothing is left.

Michael’s communication with God fails. His hotline to the spirit world has become a party line, giving all sorts of garbled truth. Was he ever blessed in the first place? Did God really betray him? or was it Yahweh’s practical joke? That Michael had a gift is practically certain. He found the gold after all. Riches of the world, but not its life-source. Not the tool of renewal.

Even Moses wasn’t let into the promised land when he disobeyed the Lord’s precise instructions about just how to tap that stone to let forth the water to feed his flock.

“Some nut who thought he was Moses or something,” Kestrel says.

“Not Moses,” Byrne said. “Lucifer…He thought Christ was Lucifer too. Trying to make good and go home.” A Satan who constantly mistakes his lord’s power for his own? For Random’s final sin is more one of pride, of trying to force the folk of Tourmaline, no matter how hesitant or privately governed, into signing on for his kingdom of heaven. The villain as saviour. “The conviction came into my policeman’s head,’ The Law asserts, “And never left it, that he had been, somewhere, a criminal of quite extraordinary distinction.”

Michael tries to make good. And then goes home. Back into the desert, surely to die. Or to hell. Or to Blacktown. Kestrel, meanwhile, where he once fed the townsfolk beer, will now feed them faith, a more addictive strain.

I’m reminded of a very different book of the same era: Frank Herbert’s Dune. The same imagery – the water of life, the desert congregations, the troubled and troubling messiah. Muad’dib walks into the desert to die at the end of Dune Messiah, too, to escape the grim consequence of his efforts. Tourmaline too is a science fiction novel: “The action of this novel is to be imagined as taking place in the future,” as the introductory note says. Or is not Dune but Mad Max 2? Or Peter Weir’s The Last Wave – the opposite variety of apocalypse, but still the apocalypse. We Aussies are a calamitous lot.

Whatever Tourmaline’s philosophical vagaries and metaphysical obscurities, which will strike anyone not of the religious persuasion as only theoretically interesting, the novel nonetheless possesses a dark, bristling, intangible kind of power that’s virtually one of kind in our literature, and a genuine intellectual curiosity in the pan-cultural conceptualisation of faith and of sin. Dashes of the Melville of Moby-Dick and The Confidence Man face off The Magic Mountain and Goethe in a post-apocalyptic war-zone. I loved it.

5. Michael Dransfield and the Hipster Apocalypse

Michael Dransfield has something of the status of a Jim Morrison of Aussie poetry (or is it the “Keats of smack and hippiedom”, as John Forbes called him?): died young, had talent, had cool, with only the all-important balance of the two in question. Dransfield’s free-form, yet doggedly coherent and easily grasped poetry is replete with familiar themes fit for a post-Beat poet of the era: social protest, idealisation of outsider lifestyles and wayside culture, and longings for retreat in historical and rural idylls, the standard-issue pacifistic and anti-corporate slants, and attitude of rejection of the regulated and well-heeled. His ‘Endsight’, dedicated amongst others to Union Carbide and A.D. Hope conflates environmental pollution with the creed of “Official Poets”. In essence, he says, “IMHO – you’re all stinking up the landscape.”

An air of desperation and a pose of aggressive rejection is a consistent feature of much art from the period, and also of newly celebratory earthiness, well encapsulated in the epic, circumlocutory let’s-get-it-on buzz of ‘Epiderm’ (“two islets in an atoll of each-other” is an exceptional chat-up line). Of course you could always take refuge in make-believe in the ‘60s, and the Courland Penders sequence, like ‘A Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man’, revel in a retreat to a non-existent rural mansion and making like a homestead Edgar Allan Poe, the Rolling Stones in gentlemanly decadence on the cover of ‘Beggars’ Banquet’, or perhaps like Yeats in his tower. But it’s a useful imagistic basis for Dransfield, a symbol of pure imagination and the place of artistic revival, containing the tattered remnants of a long poetic and artistic tradition and the schism of generational divides – it is, after all, his father’s house, and contains all the memories, frustrations, resentments, and ardours associated with such a place. His inherited realm echoes with ghosts and teems with gothic potpourri even though it rests in a fertile and tranquil land. The ghosts that haunt it, are they immediate ghosts, are they the Rick and George of ‘That which We Call a Rose’, or wraiths of an indistinct past, historical, familial ghosts? Dransfield doesn’t cough his specificities up – call them all ghosts, and fight away shadows. What is distinct enough is the atmosphere of happy, embracing decay, and the title, ironic enough when the author is not yet twenty-five and all the more so considering Dransfield’s early, but probably anticipated, death, as a Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man; the Joycean inversion invokes a whole rejection not merely of being young, or socially engaged, but also of the whole youth culture and the culture of that young country, Australia, evoking a vaguely old-world atmosphere of fecund history, glorious lineage and civilisation so worn it’s falling apart – a country only for old men.

Therefore Dransfield’s vision of counterculture art is at once both ageless and understanding the archaic, anti-elitist but demanding intellect, the inevitable position of a mind spanning high art and low life. For out in that everyday, contemporary eight-hour-workday world, things look pretty grim through Dransfield’s eyes, in poems like “That which We Call a Rose”, where the delicate Shakespearean title announces a grim vision of an old and noble city being swiftly rebuilt by locusts of commercialism, and the last wild men whose “ideals precluded them from the Great Society” (cheeky LBJ reference) with its mix of idealism, barbarity and commerce (rather the idealism, barbarity, and commerce of drug culture), and the Whitmanesque self-contradictions of both delighting in the shattered, reconstituted perspective of the counterculture and the longing for the older, vanishing world. Dransfield envisions an era silently eating up men and materials in a “glut of martyrs money and carbon monoxide”, a landscape of merciless consumption and war, and “freedom is obsolete and honour a heresy”, envisioning Canberra as a place of lost minstrels and an Italian city waiting for rape of Huns, but it’s the Huns on the “morgue lists of morning”, his emblematic junkie heroes Rick and George dead and buried, symbolic offerings to Ginsburg’s Moloch. It’s not the heroic aren’t-we-great collegiality of a protest or academic-rebel culture, however. It’s the raw beauty and fear of a street life that Dransfield stares at and finds idealism and heroes in. It doesn’t seek the well-regulated poverty relief and necessary gratitude of Great Society-era social idealism, smelling the reek of conformity and hypocrisy.

The real, urgent wellspring of the anxiety, in the atmosphere of Vietnam and the Atomic Age, often noted but also often underrated in appreciating the concerns of the era, the atmosphere of outrage and frustration, and not simply the showing-off of a generation of prodigies, turns crucial in a work like ‘Visiting Hour (Repatriation Hospital)’, envisions a casual death comes just before mealtime, and contemplates the carefully metered-out time allowed the young men mangled by war, a world rendered sterile with a “white world after a urine-yellow sunset” and “chronometers of pity” as he calls them, the deliberately hoary technical word evoking a frigid, regimented approach to mercy. The young go to war and are sacrificed to war, or remain home and are sacrificed to drugs or commercialism or technology or something. Consuming fear of apocalypse and vital wrestling with questions of engagement with the world and war in “A Day at a Time”, where the poem meditates on Da Vinci’s participation in Renaissance Italy’s war-craft, whilst conjuring visions of a lonely walkabout, or living at the eye of a hurricane, that is, the utterly disengaged artist, serving in essence the same purpose as the fantasy of Courland Penders, the place of refuge and repose, becoming impossible to the contemporary man, as Dransfield anticipates death coming like a bullet or a bomb, with his back turned to it, sneaking up on the distracted, self-involved writer. It is then this air of reportage from life on the edge of an abyss that charges Dransfield’s poems with more than modish interest.

4. Notes on Dorothy Porter

Dorothy Porter ironically proved with her successful verse-novel ‘The Monkey’s Mask’ that she had something in common with Joe ‘Basic Instinct’ Eszteras: crime yarn + lesbians = hit potential (and yet such potential entirely eluded the film of it: a friend of mine said that it was so bad it was the first film ever made where you wanted the women to put their clothes back on). My first encounter with Porter’s work, the follow-up ‘Wild Surmise’, was a portrait of a ménage-a-quatre that mixed Sappho, Hokusai, hentai tentacle porn, and David Cronenberg to roughly equal degrees. A distinguishing feature of both her poetry (and poetry in general in the past half-century) is the reference to culture beyond the borders of poetry itself – and not merely the classical allusions of the early modernists but pop culture in its (theoretically) most seamy manifestations. Such is the new cosmopolitanism, poetics for the Age of Tarantino and Queer-lit. Contemporary with a capital-C, and yet, ironically, infused with a feel for classical culture – ah, what a pagan lot we are.

A central concern of her poems is sensuality, but not exactly bawdy, instead alive to other textures, sickly things, even terror, in closeness to others – it’s a morbid little world she often invokes, and the culture beyond the beds of her narrative heroines lies in a billion iridescent pieces. Thus ‘Lollies Noir’ evokes horror movies and film noir in its stanzas cut down to murderous little pikes, the telephone transmogrified into “something awesome” announcing the ring of a lover like the ring of a murderer, bringing on “that psychopathic step / on the stair” and the conflation of acts of violence with acts of love. Porter’s evoked sexuality wavers between classical purity of Sappho’s elegant homoeroticism to the far-out tropes of slasher flicks, sensing the same gritty, effulgent mix of raw sensualism and pre-modern carnality in such disparate creations, “transcending / bad acting / cheap sets / lukewarm love” (any fan of Hammer Horror like myself understands this intuitively).

“The wind the Goddess brings / is both wonderful and vicious”, so Porter theorises in ‘Exuberance With Bloody Hands’, which evokes the carnality of classical culture for precisely the same end as ‘Lollies Noir’ and its cinematic potpourri, a tense mix of death and fecundity charging the eroticism. The poem suggests the ancient Minoan sport of bull-leaping as a central metaphor, a sport in which teenaged girls and boys both participated in, a vital rite of passage, and powerful in its sexual imagery. “Whose throat would you cut / to have it happen again?” the conclusion begs, narrowing to a point the repetitive obsession of the height of ecstasy and annihilating consummation, the words and rhythms of the poetry evoking a mad pagan dance, contrasting the eternal potential of passion (and art) with the commonplace, immediate reality of “your mortal lover snores / and snuffles into your mortal skin” – back to Earth with a thump. And yet the imagery, the need to “(b)ecome the stone altar / become the moist fetish / become the bird screaming down on you” is powerful, immediate, more immediate than life, transcending its cheap sets again; the cheap sets, the bad actors, the merely mortal partners are indeed window dressing for the archaic blood rite.

The distance between artifice and sensation becomes, inevitably, crucial. In “P.M.T.” the moon explicitly lacks the quality given to it in a “fastidious T’ang poem”, throwing off its artifice and taking on the immediacy of a “mesmerizing chilblain”, thus taking on a painfully corporeal reality, that distant purified poetic world lost amidst radio “gossip, rubbish / and caramel”, just as a lover’s “delectable mouth” is lost in meditations upon moonlight that “splashes on my driving hands like freezing water”. It’s this “insistence, in her writing, on the bodiliness of experience – not just sexual experience, but sensory experience of all kinds, indeed being/alive”, as Leigh Dale described it, that is the loudest quality of Porter, imbuing her work with a kind of heady romanticism. With a note of self-satire in “Romantic”, one of the passages in ‘Wild Surmise’, Porter considers “(o)f course / lesbians like herself / could be the foolhardiest / romance junkies of all.” And yet it’s precisely Porter’s unapologetic hunt for concussive experience that gives the poems grandeur beyond the occasionally queasy, over-ripe images.

Such a leveling process, which tosses references to horror films, Minoan rites, and T’ang poetry together, suggests myriad reflections of a world culture that’s utterly free game, a cornucopia of refracted experience, both archaic and constantly rediscovered. Such is, as Porter’s poems hint, the state of the modern world, in eternal flux, relying on codices but unreliable in itself, in a state of flux; love, art, sexuality, infused with interchangeable qualities. In terms of a specifically Australian art, it makes perfect sense, as a multicultural society defined less by long history than multifarious, commonly inherited ideas and artifacts, everything is at once provisional and a smorgasbord. Specialised fields of interest become symptoms of retreat and failure in ‘Wild Surmise’, where the heroine Alex takes refuge from her anarchic sexual and emotional confusion, with theories of life on Europa, and her dying husband Daniel with his dreams of Virgil and Dante, searching such icons for fecundity and finding instead death and sterility. It’s a world without easy gods and easy transcendence, and possibly without any variety of either.

In terms of a gay artist like Porter, the references to a pre-Christian world are intelligible enough, sensing in the mores of that world something friendlier to homoerotic experience, not discounting also the sheer cultural authority of the classics, first in the long line of outside influences upon the Australian culture. The cultural memory is as long as the moment of pleasure is short. As Leigh Dale notes in her essay ‘Canonising Queer’, Porter’s explorations of many of her concerns, both artistic and sexual, through European, classical, high-falutin’ cultural references can often seem, to a certain extent, hidebound, still in thrall to some narrowed cultural perceptions. Dale went on to note that surprising little room was available in the critical framework to accommodate an artist with such impulses and desires to be raw and communicative and intelligent and artful. Through being successful, she was suspect – no real artist can be successful! As well as engaging in the flux of modern culture, Porter’s desire, realised with ‘The Monkey’s Mask’, to hit a nerve and become, in itself popular, and thus, part of pop culture – anyone can “get” ‘The Monkey’s Mask’ or ‘Wild Surmise’ – and not merely commenting on it from an on-high position.

And yet Porter herself wanted to write poetry “as tight and gutsy as rock ‘n’ roll”, as vividly and energetically communicative, as well as refined in principle. Her poems attempt to unify opposites, in a search to find commonalities in a host of concepts and seeming opposites, a reading that David McCooey supports in his essay ‘Contemporary Poetry: across party lines’, calling it a neo-Romantic impulse of the “post-‘68” generation of poets, that systematic annihilation of the regulation binary oppositions in the long history of fiction.

It’s also possible to see likenesses in Porter’s work with, say, Kenneth Slessor, in that her poetry reports from fringes of experience (bohemianism for one, gay life in another, the relatively marginal nature of literary culture in this country for both, and indeed for another figure like Michael Dransfield) desperately concerned with expressions of mortality in art, and yet neglect refuge in metaphysical concepts. Just as Slessor’s living and dead are caught in their glassy bubbles of momentary existence, Porter’s float in clouds of sensation and culture, sustained only by memory and furiously created realms of artistry.

See also:

Dale, Leigh 2001, ‘Canonising Queer’, in “Authority and Influence: Australian literary criticism 1950-2000”, eds. Delys Bird, Robert Dixon, Christopher Lee, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, Queensland.

McCooey, David 2000, ‘Contemporary Poetry: across party lines’, in “The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature”, ed. Elizabeth Webby, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Page, Geoff 2008, “60 Classic Australian Poems”. University of New South Wales Press, Sydney.

Porter, Dorothy 2002, “Wild Surmise”, Pan MacMillan, Sydney.

Porter, Dorothy, ‘Statement’ in “Poetry and Gender”, eds. David Brooks, and Brenda Walker, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, Queensland.

Tranter, John, and Mead, Philip, eds. 1991, “The Penguin Book of Modern Poetry”, Penguin Books, Ringwood, Victoria.

3. The Bay of Noon, by Shirley Hazzard

The Bay of Noon, by Shirley Hazzard, 1970, MacMillan & Co; pictured, Penguin paperback, 1982.

Possibly the best living writer born in Australia, Shirley Hazzard was lost long ago to a larger world that saw her finally wash up in New York and win the National Book Critics Award for her 1980 novel The Transit of Venus. I first encountered her through her almost mystically sparse, and yet damnably romantic, The Great Fire (2003), and like that novel, The Bay of Noon yearns to evoke an age of emotional and physical displacement, the haunted epoch after World War Two, in which the world is being tethered together in tighter bonds by modernity and yet still riddled with fault-lines between cultures and individual humans. In The Great Fire, the blasted wasteland of Hiroshima was both symbol and nullification of symbolism, an undeniable remnant of extermination that both dwarfed and yet gave a strange new urgency to the problems of those individual humans in reinventing the future. In The Bay of Noon, the city of Naples serves a similar purpose, as evocation and avatar of the expanse of history.

The Bay of Noon tells a wispy, and yet highly involved and detailed little story, and tops off at about 145 pages. It is a study of a quartet of people, which eddies and then resolves without resolving, a choice that concludes with more force then a less skilled writer could deliver. It accounts a year or so in the life of Jenny, whose name is actually Penelope, but she had been misnamed on a refugee ship taking her to South Africa to wait out the war. Employed as a translator and typist by NATO, she had come to Naples in the vanguard of a party of military personnel, her early arrival lucky as it gives her a chance to slip the net of the billets, and find her own lodgings, finally ending up in a seaside apartment. Engaged in some sublimely boring but time-demanding work, translating endless amounts of material to prepare a port that will see the construction of a major NATO base, Jenny is far more interested in engaging with the city. Armed with a letter of introduction from a friend who works at Ealing Studios to a woman novelist, Gioconda, whose first book had been made into a highly successful neo realist film, Del Tempo Felice, she hesitantly calls the lady up, hoping to make a useful local acquaintance.

Gioconda proves a brilliant, intriguing, but lonely and disaffected woman, all too eager to gain a new friend, and she and Jenny become steadfast companions. Gioconda’s lover, Gianni, the film director who made Del Tempo Felice, is the man Gioconda credits with saving her life, in some vague, non-melodramatic fashion. As the histories of the two females resolve out of the murk of the past, Hazzard etches a picture of provisional emotional states. Jenny was happy to flee buttoned-down post-War Britain, but her more immediate motive for taking the job is that she had fallen in love with her brother, and her staidly bourgeois sister-in-law had unconsciously encouraged the passion. When Jenny realised that she lacked stable ground under her feet if this situation were to blow up, she looked for the first exit on hand. Gioconda is haunted by the death of her great love, a young painter, who had been a discovery of her father, an eminent History professor. The painter has sat out the war as a conscientious objector, but died some time after VE Day, when his boat struck an unrecovered mine, a late victim of that war. Now, tethered by real ardour to Gianni, but faced with a romantic life that cannot resolve itself into an accepted form, she becomes increasingly nervous and finds herself acting out almost embarrassingly stereotypical scenes. The last major character is Justin P. Tulloch, a Scottish marine biologist working out of the Naples Aquarium, but initially sponsored by Whitehall, an intelligent, but coolly withdrawn, glibly discursive man who courts Jenny without any apparent intent.

Hazzard’s concerns are generational, inevitably and even willingly dated, and yet her sensibility is similar to a writer like Doris Lessing, with the same efforts at achingly precise charting of divides between men and women, in a context of post-War rootlessness, and turns retrospective flavour into an asset; it is precisely about the nature of recalling the past and watching it turn into present that is the key-note of The Bay of Noon. Sharing a biting precision in bottling secondary figures, Hazzard’s a more convincingly sensual writer and a less forceful conceptual thinker than Lessing. Sentence for sentence, there aren’t many modern writers who can stand up to her, especially in conjuring epigrams that are biting, cynical, and suggestive of deep hurt. Try, for instance:

“Edmund would assure himself that my disappearance was the best thing for everyone – it is what people always say when they have arranged something exclusively to suit themselves.”

Or:

“Thus, gratefully, he renounced uniqueness for a textbook anonymity.”

Hazzard’s prose is usually at its most lethal when describing the provisional psyche of provincialism or military men, like the patronising, xenophobic Colonel who is Jenny’s supposed superior:

“When I joined (the mission) I knew nothing of the professional soldier in modern times. Seething is the word I find for them: so many of these people, particularly the officers, were perpetually seething – with fury, with fear, and with the daily necessity of striking out before they could be felled by inapprehensible foes. Of this seething, their profession was but a logical extension. (In fact, their attitude to their authorized enemies – Soviets, socialists, and agitators of all breeds – was tinged with a wistful worship. ‘Catch them putting up with a mess like this,’ or ‘They wouldn’t tolerate this set-up for a second.’)”

Gianni presents himself to Jenny as a conceited, opinionated man of the world, offending her when he tries to kiss her in the ruins of Herculaneum because it’s the expected thing. He’s stringing Gioconda along with several other women, and has a wife and kids tucked away somewhere. The actual man takes some time to resolve, first glimpsed by Jenny when Gioconda rejects his request for her to move into his Rome apartment. When she actually sees that apartment, Jenny is dismayed because it indicates a man of a different sensibility to the one he projects to his women. This comes after a disastrous trip where Gioconda follows Gianni to Tangiers on a film shoot, the fractious results of which Gioconda describes with the words “You can imagine,” –

“At this ‘you can imagine’, with its first reference to my own idea of Gianni, its first suggestion of culpability, I felt the compunction one feels when one has ultimately converted – corrupted – another to one’s point of view at the expense of some deep conviction of their own. With this phrase Gioconda acknowledged no only my reservations about Gianni, but their validity as well: there was no gratification in getting my own way; only, much graver, more crucial, the pang at her surrender.”

Such is the way of things in a novella where Gioconda assures Jenny that love, being the most conditional thing in the world, can alter with minute gestures, and that her love for her brother will recede, in time, not in status, but like a landmark in the distance; such indeed is how the narrating Jenny regards all these scenes. Both the processes involved in moving on from a situation, a temporary state of things, and how that situation lingers, affects, determines actions in the future, are the tale’s crucial ideas; how nostalgia can weave itself around the most painful moments in life.

The irony that slowly becomes apparent is that Jenny has skipped out from one situation with the threat of real incest and stumbled into another, albeit only metaphorically, as the go-nowhere romance of Jenny and Justin (the aural and visual similarity of the names of all four major protagonists is obvious) segues into a psycho-sexual train wreck where, whilst Jenny is stricken with jaundice, Justin and Gioconda skip off to Seville for a romp whilst a distraught Gianni comes to Jenny for comfort, which he finally gets. It is, as Jenny immediately identifies, more an expression of frustration on Gioconda’s part than a real break, and she, taking an offer to move on with the report to Washington, advises Gianni to go and fetch Gioconda back.

Hazzard excels at reversals of expectation that don’t try too hard to amaze, as when Jenny introduces Justin to Gioconda, with Jenny assuming the meeting to be a crashing disaster, only for Justin to muse on the "remarkable" lady shortly after. It's a moment that’s vital and predicative of what eventuates, and yet only announces itself as a slyly comedic punchline. Likewise Gianni’s resolution from an almost caricatured Italian macho to an intriguing figure pauses to acknowledge that he’s aware of, and likes, his assumed character. Gianni in his fullest realisation is a tender, leonine presence, who can’t entirely countenance being one of those “reformed characters” and give up his wayward, authoritarian masculine ways. In contrast, the humorous but artfully deflecting professional cynic, Tulloch, “seemed fictitious, a sort of sub-plot, something that had no existence other than to augment her experience and mine, to contribute to our legend. He himself had strengthened this impression by the defences – of language, of manner, of making love – he had constructed’ had become their victim, like those heavily fortified towns that invite their own downfall by suggesting that there is something within to assaulted.”

Hazzard’s sensibility is too mediated and textured to favour thematic propaganda or bourgeois exoticism; it’s true, we cling to exotic places, the uncommon experience, and fondly recalled friendship. Her characters have the certain flesh of real people, even if they dance around each-other without really engaging in such a way that would make for a great, rather than a very good, work of literature. Gioconda can act recklessly and Gianni can look like a hero, and then reverse roles. Jenny watches and absorbs with youthful, not entirely wise eyes, so that her wiser older narrator can make that sense of altering perspective, rather than mere incident, the important realisation.

Hazzard’s theory that life tends to revolve around the same constant reference points, in different scales of relationship, is born out in its repeated motifs. The novella’s finale counterpoints two journeys: that of Jenny and Gianni leaving Naples and travelling north, so she can take a ship from Genoa and he can fetch Gioconda from Nice, and then, many years later, Gioconda’s return, when she make the passage from Naples to Capri by hydrofoil. This is a ride that she feels cheats her, in stripping her of the anticipated, rightful, becalmed pace of the old ferry, of the proper chance to gather her thoughts and steel herself before encountering Gioconda again. Likewise, the eerie opening report of a plane that crashes on Vesuvius in a fog that takes days to clear, which, when it does, reveals that the searchers had been looking in the wrong place, anticipates the almost tangential revelation of Justin’s fate in a plane crash that Jenny learns of in the newspaper after many half-hearted stabs at locating him. The volcano itself becomes an emblem, of emotional volatility, naturally, but also in the threat of perpetual stasis, of becoming locked, like the victims of Herculaneum, in the same eternal poses flight and fear. The tension between eternal stasis and eternal movement, in essence equal forms of death, hardly resolves; it’s the tension that sustains its characters, who lives explicitly counter the more commonplace mode of life that people are adopting, clinging to the provisional, flavourless, history-lacking world of the military base and its bland, boxy structures, and even blander, boxier personnel.

The Bay of Noon is not a tragedy; in material a little sex farce, in effect a work of meditative near-poetry, it may be said to tell a story about what happens between stories. In the past lie events such as Jenny’s hopeless passion and Gioconda’s wartime travails, and in the future, Jenny’s marriage and settlement in some unspecified but hopefully organic way of life, and Justin’s mysterious fate. The city, Naples, imbues it all with a gauzy romanticism, its reckless, history-laden structures and mossy air of weary and yet every-youthful experience. Jenny’s final journey to Capri offsets an earlier incident that Gioconda had remembered, of walking into a New York art dealer’s and seeing a painting by her dead lover for sale, a pure shard of the past stabbing into the present, where Jenny’s journey is forced to take on the tasteless quality of tourism.

2. Hawthorne, Puritanism, and The Scarlet Letter.

The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850. Signet Edition, 1959.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter envisions the earliest era of Puritan settlement in New England, presenting an invented narrative Hawthorne describes as if it were accounted in an obscure historical document, a tale of folk-inheritance. The ideals and philosophies of that era and its people stand at a remove from Hawthorne’s time, and yet his novel affects to deal with the ideals of the Puritans in their own terms, and enacts the tradition of the morality play with aspects that could fit well into the fire-and-brimstone ideology of Jonathan Edwards. And yet the novel is finally more of an open dialogue with the past. Rather than embrace the ideals of his own era or Puritanical values, and see one victorious over the other, he identifies tensions between the two and the part they play in the psyche of America.

Hawthorne understood the importance of the Puritan founders, their character and world-view encoded in his sense of tradition. The novel’s vision is that of a writer who was cordial towards Emerson’s ideas, but for whom the tradition of Jonathan Edwards, the fierce preacher of The Great Awakening, retained a great metaphorical weight. The essential spirit of The Scarlet Letter is haunted by a past forbidding and strict to a modern eye, yet Hawthorne affirms it also as more resolute, authoritative, and inviting in its appreciation for human weakness and offer of all-embracing values. Hawthorne pays homage to the Puritans for their vital part in forming his character, imagines his ancestors disdaining their feckless descendent, and surveys a present-day America that Hawthorne sees as littered with clapped-out heroes and spindly, shrunken women. Though Hawthorne disparages his Puritans right back – their punishment of Hester betrays “severity”; they are “gloomy” – he also decides their women have “boldness”, the men have “fortitude and self-reliance”. They possessed the as-yet undimmed fecundity of Elizabethan England.

At the novel’s outset, Hester and Dimmesdale have expended physical passion and the novel charts consequence rather than event, mimicking the Biblical Fall from Paradise. The first real act of the human condition is to lose security of innocence. The actual mark adulteresses in New England were sentenced to wear, as Leslie Fiedler noted, was not a mere ‘A’ but ‘AF’, or ‘Adam’s Fall’, in reference to Eve’s causing Adam’s ruin, a more explicitly misogynistic designation. Hawthorne’s alteration quietly dilutes the potency of the denigration. Far from dismissing Hester as his “fall”, Dimmesdale, her lover, is consumed by guilt as an individual sinner, and by his failure to stand with Hester in the moment of shaming. He blames himself. The narrative of the novel has distinct aspects of a medieval morality play or gothic novel, where morality and superstition coalesce in emblematic figures. Pearl, offspring of Hester and Dimmesdale’s affair, takes on the aspect of a demonic personification, a perpetual reminder of sin, mocker of her mother’s pretences, scourge of other children, and she presses, without knowing why, Dimmesdale to join her and her mother on the scaffold. Her husband, Roger Chillingworth, reconfigures into a taunting devil, waiting for the moment when, as Edwards might have it, “their foot shall slide”. And Minister Dimmesdale’s soul becomes the object of this spiritual tussle, as he combats guilt and the threat of damnation.

There is in the novel just such a constant threat of damnation, or moral failure. The narrative acts out a spiritual principle as Hester, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth seem driven by forces beyond and outside themselves. The forest that surrounds Boston is identified as the playground of “The Dark Man”, Satan, where Mistress Hibbins, the witch, invites Hester. In that wood Hester and Dimmesdale meet and succumb to the asocial impulse again. The dramatic climax sees Dimmesdale reject a temporal union with Hester, which would seem, in his system of values, an embrace of sin, and escapes then the menace of Chillingworth, minion of The Dark Man who brought out of the woods with him improvements to his alchemic skill which he uses to keep alive and then taunt the priest. Dimmesdale’s spiritual victory saves, by implication, his soul, Hester’s, Pearl’s, and even Chillingworth’s. Sin is real in The Scarlet Letter, or at least the impact of sin as a social metaphor.

Much of Hawthorne’s narration affects the pose of an historical mediator, relaying the impressions of the townsfolk and civil legend as projected upon the event. Such refrains as “it was whispered” and “it grew to be widely diffused opinion” bear witness that the tale is being relayed via interpretations of its era. Such mystical signs as the great A that appears in the sky, and the mark on Dimmesdale’s chest, are differently construed by observers. What in Hester’s tale is folk myth and what is literal is not precisely identified. Running parallel is Hawthorne’s more modern delving into psychological perspective, where it’s possible to see Pearl’s childish wrath as stoked by resentment and isolation; Chillingworth’s anger likewise stoked by his aggrieved status as a cuckold, his pride as an intellectual injured, stung in having married a young woman against his better sense and gained exactly the result he might have expected; Dimmesdale tortured by his weakness before social wrath and all he holds sacred. Hawthorne refuses to force a distinction between the two viewpoints, making the novel ambiguous in effect, yet opening up an exploration of the relationship between the religious and the psychological view of existence, and of the transition from understanding humanity through religion concepts to a new viewpoint.

Hawthorne contrives to have Dimmesdale’s guilty lonely vigil on the scaffold coincide with the death of John Winthrop, the first Governor of Massachusetts and author of the famed text ‘A Model of Christian Charity’. He also has Hester, with Pearl, and Chillingworth attend his deathbed in their different capacities. This places all the major characters within the context of actual history. The haunted husband, wife, and minister are also in thematic proximity to Winthrop’s metaphysical charter for the colonial ideal, and reflect three things imported from the old world that Winthrop and the pilgrims could not leave behind: passion, hate, and frailty. Though the pilgrims Winthrop addressed were engaging in a fiscal enterprise, this he held to be a smokescreen for a real purpose: to make a perfect realm of Christian life. If “New England was not an allegiance; it was a laboratory”, as Perry Miller put it, sinners explicitly disappoint the experiment. Hester is thus rendered a branded outcast with special stringency. The communal punishment is intended to save the soul, as well as defend the ideal of the Christian community: it is as vital a collective act as any ritual of celebration.

Yet in Hawthorne it is Hester who appears a “model of Christian charity”. She makes no more money from her endless labouring than she needs to keep herself and her child. She visits the sick and dying and gives freely of herself to the whole community that initially loathes her and spurns her. That she could leave at any time and pursue a route of self-interest is never in doubt, and instead, by persevering, she is transformed in perception for many from unholy wretch to a sister of mercy. In both Winthrop’s vision and Edwards’ hellfire, there is a concept of chosen community, a double-sided coin of hope and threat. Winthrop promised his pilgrims that they would build a more perfect community, a beacon for the world’s salvation. Edwards promises eternal damnation for any sinner who does not come forth and seek salvation in his congregation. In both, the body of the faithful are the blessed, in opposition to the solitary, sorry lot of the sinner. And yet through an intimate knowledge of temptation and moral ambiguity, Hester becomes such a model.

By contrast, the dignity of, say, Governor Bellingham is of no more detailed substance than the devilishness of Mistress Hibbins. Dimmesdale faces diminution to the most impotent of moral figures in his stricken inability to cast aside his public face: private sin is far more corrosive to his soul than Hester’s public disgrace. Hester’s decision to remain in Boston, withstand her humiliation, and work in selfless expiation, seems initially to confirm Hester as a woman of deep conscience. In ‘The Market Place’, Hawthorne draws a likeness between the condemned sinner Hester and the “papist” image of the “Divine Maternity”, the Virgin Mary and child – reflecting, amongst other things, the editing-out of the Puritan Protestant ideal of the feminine in their religious icons: what’s left is the Scarlet Letter, Adam’s Fall, and the Witch. Only pages earlier, he notes that her passage from the prison passes by a bush supposed to have sprouted after Ann Hutchinson, the controversial evangelist who was exiled from Massachusetts, walked the same route. This echo will repeat, and there is more to these likenesses than mere ironic reflection. Such comparisons confirm Hester’s deeper moral knowledge, where the other Christians have no real substance in terms of how they experience their religion. Suffering turns Hester from woman to martyr and model Christian. That her most private universe is not, however, quite that of a penitent is a truth Hawthorne penetrates late in the novel.

As Hawthorne turns religious iconography to his own purpose, so too Hester reconfigures the A into her own symbol with her showy embroidery, one she casts off at the moment when it seems she will gain what she wants, and takes back when she loses that hope. The most crucial entrance into Hester’s interior life, in the chapter ‘A Flood of Sunshine’, confirms Hester’s interior debates on the nature of sin, society, and salvation. “For years past she had looked from this estranged point at human institutions,” Hawthorne tells us, not as reported by others, but with direct authorial voice, offering Hester’s distinct perspective: “The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers – stern and wild ones – and they had made her strong.” It seems an overture to something like the Emerson of Self-Reliance: “‘…if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil.’ No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.”

Hawthorne will nonetheless snatch back the import of Hester’s self-realisation with the addendum: “But taught her much amiss.” If only in terms of her reintegration into the society she shares, her self-directing bent is conceived as potentially destructive. Nonetheless, Hester’s temporary removal of the embroidered A, as she endeavours to put this private code into action and reconstitute herself and Dimmesdale as natural beings, sees a moment when “her sex, her youth, and the whole richness of her beauty came back” – reborn as a living, passionate female. This contradiction, the voluble natural life of Hester and the laudable spiritual yearning of the Puritans, is the warring heart of the tale. Mark Van Doren summarised this well: (Hawthorne’s) Puritan world is in its own way beautiful. It fully exists, as Hester fully exists. If their existences conflict, then that is the tragedy to be fully understood.” Society wins, as always, but the self keeps fighting.

If New England is the laboratory, then Hester is the by-product of experimentation, and such mutations will keep occurring, until the “American Revolution” comes of age. If the Puritan ideal is socially encompassing, the matter of the tale is the way private conscience alchemises what enters its contemplation, and the conflict this causes. The narrative vindicates Dimmesdale’s spiritual, over Hester’s natural, consummation – and yet it does not erase it. It is necessary that Dimmesdale’s conscience triumphs – his hypocrisy, his loss of private integrity, is the worst sin, and cannot be abided, as D. H. Lawrence pithily noted. Dimmesdale obeys his ideal, and he dies. Hester obeys her ideal, more earthly, which bade her suffer everything if she could not realise her version of fulfilment. Only the beatification of that ideal had the power to remove the letter for her satisfaction: yet in accepting the disdain of society, she becomes strong. This is Hester’s transcendence. She does not die.

Hester’s incapacity to voice dissent in a fashion that does not seem immoral by the codes of her society calls to mind Anne Bradstreet’s faintly sarcastic disavowal of any intention to dispute masculine hegemony. It can’t be argued with, and only the concession of a right to speak anyway can be requested. There is a lack of cultural form through which to approach dissent, amidst a community that considers everything else to be falsity. “The Greeks did nought but play the fools and lie. / Let Greeks be Greeks, and Women what they are,” Bradstreet insisted in her poem ‘The Prelude’, likewise relegating pagans and the female voice to a minor key. Hers is a society that takes shows of female independence, like that of the novel’s paragon of feminine purpose, Ann Hutchinson, as proof of ill intent. The historical figures of Hutchinson, on one, distant side of Hester, and Mistress Hibbins, executed witch, rather closer, confirm Hester in the centre, suffering the push and pull of the dualistic concepts that a Puritan ideal imposes on everything.

That Hester cannot become a figure like Hutchinson is both Hawthorne’s conclusion and that of Chillingworth, his creation: “I pity thee for the good that has been wasted in thy nature.” She’s a failure in Puritan terms, but not only those terms. It’s a failure in terms of being able to express, to turn her private learning into a philosophy, a final inability to build as well as give birth; a failure of mental self-involvement that counterbalances her social dedication. Her efforts all go into action, not into philosophy. What Hester has learnt will have to be re-learnt, and communicated, by others. Hester retreats to the margin of her society, hovering yet between the wild of the wood and the discipline of Boston, neither condemned nor liberated from within or without. That she refuses the easy way out confirms her as a moral entity. That she is trapped between the poles of her time and Hawthorne’s is the tragedy of her life and the novel.

© Roderick Heath 2009

Bradstreet, Anne 1985, ‘The Prelude’, in The Norton Anthology of American Literature Vol. 1, 2^nd edn, eds Murphy, F., and Parker, H., New York, Norton.

Edwards, Jonathan 1985 (1741), ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’, in The Norton Anthology of American Literature Vol. 1, 2^nd edn, eds Murphy, F., and Parker, H., New York, Norton.

Fiedler, Leslie A. 1967, Love and Death in the American Novel, Jonathan Cape Ltd, London.

Kaul, A.N. (ed.) 1966, Hawthorne: A Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Spectrum.

Lawrence, D.H. 1964 (1924), Studies in Classic American Literature, Heinemann, London.

Lewis, R. W. B. 1966, ‘The Return into Time: Hawthorne’, in Hawthorne: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Kaul, A.N., Spectrum, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.

Miller, Perry 1981 ‘The American Puritans’, New York, MacMillan Co, quoted in The Literary Guide to the United States, ed. S. Benedict, Blanford Press, Poole, Dorset.

Murphy, Francis, and Parker, Hershel (eds) 1985, The Norton Anthology of American Literature Vol. 1, 2^nd edn, Norton, New York.

Winthrop, John 1985 (1630), ‘A Model of Christian Charity’, in The Norton Anthology of American Literature Vol. 1, 2^nd edn, eds F. Murphy and H. Parker, Norton, New York.

Van Doren, Mark 1966, ‘The Scarlet Letter’ in Hawthorne: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. A.N. Kaul, Spectrum, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.

1. Othello’s Soliloquy.

Othello, by William Shakespeare, 1604. Pictured, Signet Edition, 1963.

III, iii.

OTHELLO:
This fellow's of exceeding honesty,
And knows all qualities with a learned spirit
Of human dealings. If I do prove her haggard,
Though that her jesses were my dear heart-strings,
I'd whistle her off, and let her down the wind
To prey at fortune. Haply, for I am black,
And have not those soft parts of conversation
That chamberers have; or for I am declined
Into the vale of years – yet that's not much –
She's gone: I am abused, and my relief
Must be to loathe her. O, curse of marriage!
That we can call these delicate creatures ours
And not their appetites! I had rather be a toad
And live upon the vapour of a dungeon
Than keep a corner in the thing I love
For others' uses. Yet 'tis the plague of great ones;
Prerogatived are they less than the base.
'Tis destiny unshunnable, like death:
Even then this forked plague is fated to us
When we do quicken. Desdemona comes:

(Enter Desdemona and Emilia.)

If she be false, O, then heaven mocks itself!

_____________________________________

Othello’s speech of Act III, Scene iii, represents the dramatic and psychological tipping point of the play. Up until this point characterised as a sturdy, stentorian nobleman, brave warrior, and devoted husband, from here we witness Othello’s murderous intent build and his personality disintegrate. Othello’s leaps of rhetoric reveal his most private, powerful anxieties, his vanities as a private man and public figure. All of these coalesce to create a foundation of credulity for Desdemona’s betrayal, pointing the way forward to his ultimate undoing. Many of the play’s core motifs, recurring ideas, concepts, images and figurations, are furthered in this speech, and open the way for subsequent events.

Othello’s single true soliloquy (Granville-Barker, 1969) opens with the most ironic of statements, that is, his reckoning of Iago’s trustworthiness: “This fellow's of exceeding honesty, / And knows all qualities with a learned spirit / Of human dealings.” It is a central irony, this constant use of the word ‘honest’ and its attachment to Iago, of whom “every moral attribute applied to him by anyone in the play is ironic finger pointing to the truth of its opposite” (Spivack 1958). This motif is entwined with Desdemona’s perceived lack of honesty, she and Iago being dualistic opposites in the work – Desdemona, honest, angelic, but not believed; Iago, dishonest, devilish, readily believed.

Othello’s appraisal is, however, correct. Iago does know all qualities of human dealings. It’s the fashion in which he uses this knowledge that Othello is mistaken about. Iago faultlessly identifies every point of character he can take advantage of. He can establish an assumption of trust, as he has already succeeded in with Roderigo and now Othello himself. Take his avowal, earlier in the same scene: “Men should be what they seem.” This is Iago, exactly the type of man he is warning against, dispelling suspicion of it, whilst simultaneously inferring the presence of others who are not “what they seem.” He warns against jealousy, “the green-eyed monster, which doth mock / the meat it feeds on”, being precisely the emotion he is trying to spark. Such is the method with which he has woven his way into the mind of his quarry, and Othello’s unwitting acknowledgement of his power reflects his skill.

Othello’s next thought is not to weigh the evidence and likelihood of Desdemona’s infidelity, but to contemplate his response to it as if he was a hawk-trainer releasing a half-wild bird “to prey at fortune”. His figuration of Desdemona as a half-wild hawk which, when unable to respond to “training”, ought to be released, flung away, contains both a desperate tenderness – “Though her jesses were my dear heart-strings” establishes the intensity of his attachment to her – and also a surprising, if short-lived, openness to the idea of letting her go her merry way.

The theme of sexuality as animalism is rife throughout the play, commencing in Iago’s fervent images – “The beast with two backs” (I, i), and so forth. When, a few lines later, Othello will cry out, “O curse of marriage that we can call these delicate creatures ours / And not their appetites!”, his sexual anxiety is laid bare, the notion that whilst a man is considered master of the female, there is an element of the female – their capacity for sexual pleasure – that is beyond the mastery of a man. The juxtaposition of “delicate” with “creatures” and “appetites” is the ironic fulcrum. The war between the ideal and the base that is the anxiety of the characters and the meat of the play. The concept of the woman as something not quite human is ingrained here as earlier in the hawk metaphor. Desdemona is “delicate” like a dove or moth, yet also a rapacious beast of “appetite”.

Othello segues into a series of stark, painful suppositions as to why Desdemona may betray him. That he is “black, / And (has) not those soft parts of conversation / That chamberers have” encapsulates his lack of easy social grace, his unfamiliarity, as a foreigner, with the finer points of language, his awkwardness as a black man in a white world, his being not as accomplished in seduction as the boudoir panderers of Venice. That he has “declined / Into the vale of years”, his age greater than Desdemona’s. His swift self-correction, “– yet that’s not much –”, fails to dull the bite of these concise lines, which confirm his panic. Though such aspects of his and Desdemona’s relationship have been drawn out by others – by Brabantio in the first act, by Iago constantly – this is virtually the first admission by Othello, that he shares these apprehensions.

The perfect Venetian maiden, a role as defined by Brabantio and others, supposedly submissive and sublimely ethereal in her thoughts and deportment, is one Desdemona had self-consciously violated in her marriage to Othello. Female idealisation is not merely a social form, but a virtual philosophy, a religion. As Brabantio testifies, when he describes Desdemona as having been “of spirit so still and quiet that her motion / Blushed at herself” (I, iii), she had always fulfilled this role, and continues to after her singular lapse, a lapse inspired by powerful love. The unresolved issue in Othello and Desdemona’s marriage, that, as Brabantio warns, “She has deceived her father, and may thee,” (I, iii), is the single social breach by which Iago leverages his whole plot. The fact that Desdemona was so impressed by his character, that she could be inspired to escape, however temporarily, her social expectations, might serve for a more truly secure personality than Othello’s as proof of love. Yet it is instead for Othello’s insecure self a goad. Living as he does by the values of European civilisation, Othello is idealist turned misogynist (Granville-Barker, 1969), inherently confused then by a “maiden never so bold” being his wife, because it seems to contradict a set of values presented as inherent truths. Here, “we watch a culture reach the limits of its capacity and then snap.” (Long, 1976)

From sexual anxiety it is a short leap to intense sexual jealousy. “She’s gone. I am abused, and my relief must be to loathe her”, is embarrassing in its peevishness. The transfiguration of Desdemona is answered by Othello’s own, in the image of wishing himself a toad squirming in a dungeon rather than be a cuckold. Here is an increasing urgency and disgust in the animal metaphors. To the utterly base reduction in “the forkèd plague” of being a cuckold, Othello’s masculine pride asserts itself and refuses such a reduction. He sees himself in a situation that is “the plague of great ones”, whose relationships, supposedly, are placed under greater, more complex stresses than ordinary men’s. He is “simple, romantic, and – here is the chink in his armour – more than a little vain” (Speight, 1977). This powerful vanity in Othello is inseparable from his social and sexual anxiety. His feeling that Desdemona only loves him for his being a “great” man, rather than a wit or a nimble young lover, means the worst agony conceivable to him is part and parcel with his status, which has both won him and lost him his wife. This double-bind thinking entraps Othello.

It is within Othello’s fault-riven psyche that the concepts of this Christian Europe, with its admiration for purity, fairness, courtly idealism, and nature in its pagan framing filled with dirt, squalor, sex, colour, are at war. Othello is a living contradiction, by the standards he is presented with. A coloured man, defender of white Christian Europe from the infidel Turks. An aging, unhandsome male married to a fair young woman. A non-intellectual warrior without a war to fight, instead contending with politics, administration, and devious plotting. Othello is an outsider, whilst he conflates Desdemona with her status. She is inseparable from the state of Venice, being a Senator’s daughter, and also from the image of Christian purity. This hints at an explanation for the vehemence of Othello’s jealousy. If he is rejected by Desdemona, he is also rejected by his new home and his religion. All of his assumed identities are threatened. If one of his ideals is tested, all are endangered.

His final declaration, delivered upon seeing Desdemona enter, seems a disavowal of suspicion, and yet, there is a type of extremism encoded here that is ultimately catastrophic. His idealisation has reached the apogee of “heaven mocks itself!” If Desdemona is unfaithful, then heaven itself is a joke. Othello’s idealisation of Desdemona as the incarnation of heaven is, then, entwined with his murder of his angelic wife, his own collapse as a Christian man, and self-extermination as an “infidel dog” (V, ii). Whereas Desdemona, dutiful in heading to her death, achieves the status of martyr, as Emilia confirms in her cry at the climax, “O, the more angel she, / And you the blacker devil!”

So this is Othello at the crux of his own tragedy. Aghast, torn by self-doubt and now doubt in his wife. A man, desperate to believe in the ideals of his adopted society, infected by Iago, who loathes all ideals. Though he concludes with a disavowal of credulity, he is already utterly prepared to believe in the possibility as Desdemona’s unfaithfulness. Iago has prepared the stage, but Othello will enact the war within himself upon it, and end in a savage catharsis.

© Roderick Heath 2008

See also

Granville-Barker, Harley 1969. ‘Preface to Othello’, in Prefaces to Shakespeare: Othello and Love’s Labour’s Lost. B.T. Batsford Ltd. London.

Eastman, A.M. & Harrison, G.B. 1964. Shakespeare’s Critics From Jonson to Auden: A Medley of Judgments. The University of Michigan Press. Ann Arbor.

Long, Michael 1976. The Unnatural Scene: A Study in Shakespearean Tragedy. Methuen and Co Ltd. London.

Speight, Robert 1977. Shakespeare: The Man and His Achievement. J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd. London.

Spivack, Bernard 1958. ‘Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil: The History of a Metaphor in Relation to His Major Villains’, in Shakespeare’s Critics From Jonson to Auden: A Medley of Judgments. Eds A.M. Eastman & G.B. Harrison. The University of Michigan Press. Ann Arbor.