How I would use David Ireland’s The Glass Canoe as a related text for HSC English Extension 1, Module B, Ways of Thinking, Elective 1, After the Bomb

 

David Ireland’s The Glass Canoe (1976) depicts an archetypically alienated individual attempting to find meaning within a cold war context. The authorial persona in this first person narrative, ‘Meat’, relates a series of fragmented episodes drawn from a life revolving around the Southern Cross Hotel, a fictitious drinking hole ostensibly located in Northmead. In structure the novel is similar to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. The similarity is more than merely superficial, for both novels employ a disjointed narrative to convey the chaotic consciousness of their protagonists. we follow ‘The Great Lover’ on his peccadilloes; we barrack for ‘The King’ as he weighs into opponents with his fists and sometimes his “slippers”; we empathise with “Alky Jack” as he drinks himself to death; we share Meat’s love for his “Darling”; we worry about young Sibbley, the intellectual. Each character is the subject of one or two eponymously titled chapters. Where Heller gives us almost forty significant characters, Ireland limits himself to a score, yet the effect is similar. Meat’s story is punctuated by episodes of violence, alcoholic excess, work, love and pathos. One is reminded of the situation Simone de Beavoir described on visiting America in the late 1940s, where a celebration of individuality had given way to “repressing originality, both in itself and in others; rejecting criticism, measuring value by success, (leaving) open no road to freedom except that of anarchic revolt; this explains the corruption of its youth, their refuge in drug-taking and their imbecile outbreaks of violence” As Robert Merrill puts it in his analysis of Catch-22’s structure, “like such novelists as Dreiser, Steinbeck, and Wright, Heller dramatizes the crippling effects of our social system on the sensitive individual-witness his portraits of Yossarian, Dunbar, the chaplain, Major Major Major, Clevinger, Nateiy, and Snowden.” We might easily add Ireland to this list of authors, for his authorial persona and the ensemble of characters he describes are at once victims and product of the social system that emerged in response to the Cold War. Like Yossarian, Meat discovers that there is no centre, that to live in an age of anxiety is to be without certainty. In Meat’s words, he “didn’t want to be caught talking a lot of nonsense beginning with the two silliest words in any language: I believe.” Just as the reader is given insights into the nature of this social system through the device of Nately’s conversations with the old man, readers of The Glass Canoe are given an admittedly expository insight of Alky Jack:

The modern cult of violence and animalism,’— he looked down at his trousers, but said nothing. I looked too, but there was no sign there of violence or animalism—‘ is an admission of defeat. We can’t be men and resist or overthrow the monster that rides us, this way of doing things, this economy with its roots in feudalism, so let us go the other way and be barbaric. And since we can’t free ourselves from the past, let us use educated words for our defeat: alienation, cult of absurdity, realism, the beauty of the irrational, cult of cruelty.

The violence in The Glass Canoe, like violence on a global scale, is pointless, but at least the local violence was observable, representable. Baudrillard argued that nuclear warfare removed the possibility for spectacle while introducing a threat that was at once immanent and perpetually deferred: in the world Ireland describes the sort of psychic numbing that Daniel Cordle ascribes to a life lived under these conditions of powerlessness and suspense. The anxiety is best put by meat, who, despite his lust for life, longs for oblivion:

I remember I was thinking at the time what would happen if the sun blew up. It lives by explosions; who says they can’t get out of balance? It wouldn’t be so tragic if we all went together.

Like Yossarian, Meat is an anti-hero in search of resolution; like Estragon and Vladimir in Waiting for Godot, Meat and his fellow travellers are left eternally to wait at the beck and call of indifferent fortune and forces beyond their ken and control.

How I would use David Ireland’s The Glass Canoe as a related text with Raymond Gaita’s Romulus, My Father for the Advanced and Standard HSC English Area of Study

David Ireland’s The Glass Canoe (1976) explores the concept of belonging by showing readers that in order to belong we must first understand ourselves. The protagonist, ‘Meat’, narrates a series of anecdotes, vignettes and insights that give readers an insight into the world of blue collar camaraderie in Australia in the mid-1970s. At one point Meat writes despondently that “They would age, and one day never come again. No one would remember their faces, or write their story.” Such is Ireland’s skill that ‘their faces’ are rendered vividly in stories of archetypal characters whose deeds, heroic or otherwise, form a gripping narrative: we follow ‘The Great Lover’ on his peccadilloes; we barrack for ‘The King’ as he weighs into opponents with his fists and sometimes his “slippers”; we empathise with “Alky Jack” as he drinks himself to death; we share Meat’s love for his “Darling”; we worry about young Sibbley, the intellectual. Each character is the subject of one or two eponymously titled chapters. The sense of belonging in The Glass Canoe is informed by a strong connection to place, The Southern Cross Hotel, Rydalmere. Meats picaresque narrative is an attempt at “writing the Southern Cross on paper.” The pub gives refuge to those within it, defining their community and protecting them from harm: “The dark, a live monster, leaned on the roof and tried the glass doors. Its eyes were black, fathomless as death.” The problems of the world are personified, a sinister force held at bay by the building and by the community within it. When the world of work and family became too real, says meat, “we lit out for the pub, where we belonged.” The colloquialism reeforces the authenticity of the narrative voice in the novel. The strident, vernacular language in which the story is told emphasises a sense of cultural identity. Ireland does not describe a grand hotel, he describes a homely establishment which, like Gaita’s Frogmore, gives shelter and succour to the men within. The worst fate, the worst punishment that can be meted out to the men at ‘The Cross’ is to be barred, to be excluded “like black men forced to leave their sacred places and water holes and become strangers in another tribe.” Like Gaita’s ‘Romulus’, who “called himself a gipsy and later, in Australia, an Aborigine”, Irealand’s ‘Meat’ draws explicit parallels between himself and the traditional owners of the land. Ireland’s comparison is, perhaps, dated, but it does at least show an ability to accommodate other sub-cultures within an otherwise parochial narrative. When confronted by youths with fashionable haircuts, meat wonders:

. . . what sort of a tribe did they have. Did they drink? Did they fight? A fight now and then might stir them up to live, to have solid enjoyment, bright eyes, quick muscles and life on every face.

Maybe. Maybe they had those things, but if so, how? I only knew the way of our tribe.

Whether these questions are speculative or rhetorical, they suggest that it is only through attempting to understand others, to understand their sense of place and community, that we can truly find belonging for ourselves.

HSC English Extension 1

After the Bomb - Hiroshima

Hersey’s Hiroshima signalled an intensification of challenges to modernist assumptions of progress. The attrition of the Great War, the mechanised and bureaucratised slaughter of a generation, brought teleological assumptions increasingly into question. Modernism’s affirmation of historical positivism, of a metanarrative of technological innovation and human ennoblement, was always qualified and tentative. As the twentieth century brought manmade calamity after calamity modernists redoubled their scepticism. In 1939 the renewal of global conflict was even more mechanised, more ideological and more explicitly eugenicist, culminating in the annihilation of civilian populations and the industrial, methodical extermination of a people.

The closing chapters of the Second World War sent a shockwave through modernist thought that would eventually result in deconstruction and postmodernity, beginning with a renewed questioning of critical assumptions. When the Frankfurt School cultural theorist Theodor Adorno returned to Europe after the war he contemplated the agony of Europe and concluded that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Adorno was thus moved not simply by horror but because, intellectually, the death camps brought the project of civilization into question. What might the canon represent, what values remained if human reason and human genius could devise such inhumanity? How could Auschwitz have happened on the verge of the same Teutoburg Forest that had inspired Goethe? What culture could produce poetry and Zyclon B? Paradoxically, scepticism of the canon came to pervade texts we might consider central to the Cold War canon. In John Hersey’s Hiroshima, we are told that “in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.” The culture of the Cold War would be increasingly suspicious of itself: metatextual, self-reflexive and deconstructivist.

Adorno may have felt that poetry was inappropriate to the aftermath of war, but he was nevertheless inspired to publish volumes of criticism. With the loss of faith in science as an absolute good came a further, philosophical dilemma. Human history was demonstrably not a grand narrative of eternal progress. Indeed, Adorno maintained that:

Universal history must be construed and denied. After the catastrophes that have happened, and in view of the catastrophes to come, it would be cynical to say that a plan for a better world is manifested in history and unites it. Not to be denied for that reason, however, is the unity that cements the discontinuous, chaotically splintered moments and phases of history — the unity of the control of nature, progressing to rule over men, and finally to that over men’s inner nature. No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb. It ends in the total menace which organized mankind poses to organized men, in the epitome of discontinuity. It is the horror that verifies Hegel and stands him on his head. If he transfigured the totality of historic suffering into the positivity of the self-realizing absolute, the One and All that keeps rolling on to this day—with occasional breathing spells — would teleologically be the absolute of suffering.

If we focus on the single affirmation, that “no universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb”, then we can see the philosophical rupture caused by the detonations over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We can also see the significance of Hersey’s textual transmission of this dilemma in his extended essay, Hiroshima.

Hersey’s article was avidly received by readers whose demand for information was equalled by moral uncertainty. Michael Yavenditti observes that “Hiroshima was popular, not because Hersey advanced theories about the will to survive, but because he did what no one had accomplished before: he recreated the entire experience of atomic bombing from the victims' point of view.” Hersey’s article was significant in that it showed Americans the Japanese perspective, but also because it was among the first ‘Japanese’ versions of events to reach Japan. Japanese responses did circulate despite the efforts of the occupying force’s censor. Tamiki Hara published his personal recollection of Hiroshima in ‘Summer Flowers’. Yoko Ota published ‘City of Corpses’ following a visit from the censor in 1948. Hersey’s work appeared in Japanese in 1949, at which time it had already enlivened public debate in the United States.

Hersey was well suited to communicate the events of war to his audience, disciplined as he was in the craft of the war correspondent. David Sander’s describes the discipline under which Hersey worked during the war, flying from theatre to theatre for Time-Life:

Hersey and his colleagues were often subject to Henry Luce’s personal journalism, which may have reached an extreme with Whittaker Chambers’ editing of foreign reports from Hersey and others in 1944-45, but it was often expressed directly from Luce to a writer.

Even after Hersey earned his byline, he was still bound by the strictures of the war correspondent. Of these strictures another war correspondent, John Steinbeck, tells us that the “Noncombatant Commandos of the Stork Club, of Time Magazine and The New Yorker” were rarely the subject of direct censure but were, as part of the war effort, their own censor. The exact rules were difficult to define, according to Steinbeck:

We really tried to observe the censorship rules, even knowing that a lot of them were nonsense, but it was very hard to know what the rules were. They had a way of changing with the commanding officer. Just when you thought you knew what you could send, the command changed and you couldn’t send that at all.

When Hersey was commissioned by the New Yorker to write an investigative piece on the atomic bombing of Japan, he was in many ways emancipated from these restrictions: the erstwhile enemy need not be demonised; authority need not be omniscient; the message need not be unambiguous. Hiroshima, however, was still written with the economy of style, with a mastery of textual form that Hersey had honed as a war correspondent.

Hersey’s skill as a war correspondent was used instead to humanise the ‘faceless Asian horde’, to present the decision of high command as arbitrary and cruel; yet Hersey managed to retain a sense of detachment. Yavenditti characterises Hersey’s work as a masterpiece of understated realism, the “contrast between the apparently objective simplicity of his prose and the enormity of the phenomenon he described made Hiroshima all the more graphic and frightening for most readers.” Both the objectivity and simplicity are demonstrably more “apparent” than actual. Hersey’s choice of subjects, for instance, presented the American audience with sympathetic characters: doctors, priests, mothers. Hersey had found his interviewees through missionary contacts, so the sample is more accidental than intentional. Still, the sample was as opportune as much as it was opportunistic. The structure of Hiroshima was also intended to elicit an empathetic response: the mundane details of six lives are interrupted by an eruption, clinically described, followed by a surreal sequence of flight and survival and a period of feverish recovery and sickly regrowth of weeds and keloid.

HSC Standard and Advanced English, Area of Study

 

Romulus my Father

The Area of Study, Belonging, requires that you develop a complex understanding of the concept of belonging. You must be able to recognise belonging in texts and you must be able to write about belonging in analytical and creative responses.

The core text we will study is Raimond Gaita’s Romulus, My Father. This is a biographical memoir written by the first generation Australian author about his family and their migration to Australia. The book exploits a wide range of language features to convey a sense of belonging that is poignant, candid and multi-faceted. There is, for instance, a strong authorial voice, authentic language, the symbolism of landscape, food, traditional and popular culture etc. and a relentless narrative drive. When you write about this text you will do well to distinguish between the authorial persona and the main character and between the characters and the people they represent. The story of Romulus and is family is quite accessible but, because it so easy to read, many students fall into the trap of recounting the family’s experience of belonging without providing any textual analysis. Try to remember that the only person who experiences ‘belonging’ when you read the book is you – there are no people in the book, just characters.

You will need at least two related texts in addition to Romulus, My Father. Ideally, these texts should represent a complex concept of belonging that is in some way similar to that represented by Gaita. If, for instance, you are convinced that narrator’s ethnicity gives him a strong sense of belonging to family that also challenges his cultural identity, then you should find something similar in your related text. If you would like to explore the way that the dysfunctional family described in the text actually brings some of the family members closer together, then your related text should also explore something comparable. If, on the other hand, you would like to explore the way that the memoir operates as a means by which an author can reclaim the past and therefore find a sense of belonging in it that can be conveyed to an audience, then you need to find a text that operates in a similar way. The texts you choose should have textual complexity. Even if the text has a strong and complex notion of belonging at its centre, you will not be able to write an essay that scores well on the “understands how composers create meaning” bullet point if you have no techniques to discuss. If you choose Billy Ray Cyrus’ “Don’t Break My Heart, My Achy Breaky Heart”, for instance, you will be able to recount a situation in which a composer fears the breaking of a heart that is already, adverbially, broken, but you will have no techniques to discuss other than a boot-scooting beat. Do not write about song lyrics. You need texts that allow you to discuss the textual representation of complex and related concepts of belonging. Choose a number of complex text – the advice is usually to choose texts of varied types so that you will be able to demonstrate a broad scope of analysis.