The realist tradition is the great curse of Australian literature. It’s part of that Anglo-Saxon pragmatic, prosaic, empirical heritage

Murray Bail.

In the novel of the Lie, ‘the centre of gravity is outside the self, in time and space and in the field-relations among things, in the laws of large numbers and in the incoherence of things’. The New novel in Australia is not merely post-Humanist. it is post Christian. It inhabits and reflects a universe – of things, of discourse –informed by quantum physics and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. It is likely to be fragmented, discrete, discontinuous. While it shares qualities with Nathalie Sarraute’s ‘trop­isms’ and Robbe-Grillet’s noveau roman, Daniel finds the Australian New novel more colorful, vital, and absurd than the drabness of our French cousins. Our Liars arc closer to the ‘magical realism’ of the South Americans.

And who are our Liars? Peter Mathers, David Foster, David Ireland, Peter Carey, Murray Bail, Nicholas Hasluck, Elizabeth Jolley, and Gerald Murnane. They are metafictionists just as Heisenberg was a metascientist. ‘It is our knowledge of particles alone which we can make the object of science . . .Thus even in science the object of research is no longer nature itself but man’s investigation of nature’.

His mind was relentless in its logic, yet fanciful in style, so the most circuitous and fanciful plans would always, on examination, be found to have cold hard bones within their diaphanous folds

Peter Carey, War Crimes.

Dr Daniel’s exposition of our New novel, our Liars, is intimately intertwined with her reading of Douglas Hofstader’s book, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. The New novel is often contrapuntal and its form fugal. This leads Dr Daniel to find fruitful Hofstader’s notions of the Strange Loop and the Tangled Hierarchy. The former occurs whenever, by moving up or down through levels of some hierarchical system (e.g., a Bach fugue, an Escher drawing, a New novel), we unexpectedly find ourselves back where we started. In the Beginning was the World, and the Word was not only self-referential but self-parodic. Mind your Mannerisms!

Among the considerable virtues of Dr Daniel’s study (not to ignore that the very producing of this study is of considerable importance) are its scrupulous and sensitive readings of individual authors and individual texts; its visions and re-visions of many texts (e.g., Bail’s Holden’s Performance) which may, to date, have received rather summary treatment; its attention to the very important but perhaps insufficiently remembered achievements of Peter Mathers; its brave attempt to grapple with and articulate the form/content harmony (fugal concord?) in these works which question the very possibility of harmony.

In this last respect, Liars is really two books, both consciously and unconsciously. Consciously, in that Daniel has alternated chapters which analyse the work of the eight individual ‘Liars’ who are her object of study, with the ‘Dialogues’ between a Reader and a Liar where larger issues are engaged with in a broader field. There is something of the Primer about the Chapters. They read as a Guide for the Perplexed, and will doubtless be of great assistance to senior school and tertiary students. But, as that arch-Liar, Donald Barthelme, said, ‘The business of the Balloon was not to amuse children’ (‘The Balloon’ in Unspeakable Acts, Unnatural Practices). Similarly, by their very nature, the works of the Liars defy the possibility of Primers. In the ‘Dialogues’ Daniel shows that she is only too aware of the pits into which she unconsciously falls again and again in the Chapters.

The real problem – I see it in my lucid moments – is the incapacity of language to deal with the complexities of life, when categories become fluid.
David Foster.

Substitute ‘literature’ for ‘life’ in that quotation, and you have some measure of the difficulty of the task which Dr Daniel, and anyone addressing post-modernist fiction, faces. But, despite her awareness of its improprieties, she again and again falls into the Heresy of Paraphrase, the Sin of(Plot) Summary. Again and again in her chapters she resolves into a coherence which is not necessarily a coherent rendering of a epistemology if not an ontology of incoherence. One can only, in all honesty, respect her attempt to break out of this positivist straitjacket, and admit that one has committed this Heresy and this Sin again and again oneself, as have many more distinguished critics. (Consider, for example, Tony Tanner’s abject failure to deal with William Burroughs – ‘Rub out the word!’ – in his City of Words; consider almost any American academic writing about Pynchon; consider anybody addressing Beckett’s inexpressibles).

Again, it seems in the post-modernist context which she is charting, very curious that Dr Daniel has chosen to include biographical portraits of each of her Liars. (Is this her own doing, or is she to some extent the victim of her publishers’ demands? is a query that recurs to me as I read this book.) Biographical certainties and biographical aetiologies sit very curiously in Dr Daniel’s self-prescribed circle.

The great virtue of the ten ‘Dialogues’, a virtue almost totally absent from the ‘Chapters’, is their very dialogic nature. They depict gradual transformations in the initially conservative, realist, humanist, Reader, and they dramatise shifts in the power-relationship between that Reader and Liar. The ‘Chapters’, on the other hand, are regrettably monologic, with the (unearned, unconvincing, inappropriate) certainties of the monologue. When, in the Bail ‘Chapter’ Dr Daniel slips into dialogue, the effect is liberating – a liberation in the direction of doubt, even aporia.

I am also convinced – and I trust I have read Dr Daniel’s book scrupulously and sympathetically enough– that there is no dialogue between the ‘Chapters’ and the ‘Dialogues’. They exist separately, even if the latter do apparently contain the former. But a more radical interaction between the two discourses– dialogic, parodic, metatextual –might have been not only more effective for Dr Daniel’s purposes but also truer to her material.

I cannot avoid the conclusion that Dr Daniel’s study is not merely old-fashioned, but that it is also philosophically naive. Not only her analyses, but her bibliography (ad­mittedly ‘select ‘) reveal this, as well as underscoring its ‘Primer’ emphasis. It is difficult to know, merely from leading it, how long a study such as this has been in the writing. But, as Roland Barthes is mentioned, it seems not unfair to suggest that this study – by virtue of the very project it sets itself – could only have profited from an awareness of the contributions of Derrida, Lyotard, Bachelard, and even – or, perhaps, particularly – Baudrillard. And, the analyses would have profited from a more- significant infusion of Barthesian jouissance.

Take (to be empiricist, for a moment) as an example, a very small but not petty example, what Dr Daniel says of Gerard Mumane’s The Plains. She describes it as ‘a short, singularly but meditative, a novel . . .’. One must question the appropriateness of the term ‘novel’ to The Plains, or indeed to any of the books in the tradition of Lies that Dr Daniel is concerned with. And I don’t mean she should have used the term ‘novella’. Either of those terms is quite antagonistic to the kind of fiction Dr Daniel is articulating. One might suggest ecrit (as that fine Liar David Brooks prefers to call his fictions), or metatext (to underscore Murnane’s fiction’s relations with the fictions of Patrick White – we are concerned with literary landscapes, among others), or speculation, or, perhaps most adequately, text (cf. ‘From Work to Text’, Roland Barthes). But not ‘novel’.

I trust that Dr Daniel will receive these remarks in the dialogic spirit in which they are intended. All of us who not only live in the post-modern era but read in it and try to articulate it are aware of the immense problems in finding any appropriate articulation of the post-modern. Dr Daniel is to be saluted for treating a body of Australian fiction – a major body of fiction – with the seriousness and sensitivity it deserves. If I disagree with some of her cartographic practices (to revert to her central metaphor), I certainly recognise that she, not 1 or anyone else, is the beginning cartographer. And, as that radical mapmaker of Modernism, Ezra Pound, pointed out, the Mediterranean navigators of whom Odysseus was a contemporary were obliged to draw their maps after they had sailed by the coastline. (The Greeks had a word for it – periplum.) It was for later mariners to refine their drafts. There can be no refining where there is no brave first draft.