AustLit

'James Tulip's argument that David Malouf's ‘achievement is essentially that of a poet’ seems cogent, not only because of Malouf's lifelong commitment to poetry but because his novellas (and at least sections of his novels) might be read as long prose poems. These novellas do contain narratives but they are not driven by narrative. Nor are they most notable in the Modernist way as character studies; the novellas' characters do not engage in extensive social interaction. Rather, as individuals they engage in ideas, in existential contemplations of the self meeting a rich but complex universe. Dante always seems very separate from Johnno; Ovid is in exile; the terrorist in 'Child's Play' hardly talks to his colleagues. In fact, in their climaxes the main characters turn away from the possibilities of social interaction to achieve a state of equanimity in silence: the terrorist walking under apple blossom, Ovid as he steps into ‘clear sunlight’, Carney cleansing himself in the stream and Adair eating bread in an ‘outpouring’ of early morning light. In this retreat they resemble to some extent Horace on his Sabine farm, Montaigne on his Bordeaux estate, and Voltaire at Ferney – the tradition that Malouf describes in his essay on ‘The Happy Life’. Malouf's characters may be seen in opposition to contemporary society's ‘fear of inactivity, of stillness; most of all of the withdrawal of every form of chatter or noise in an extended and unendurable silence’. Adair wonders whether ‘what we are really committed to in our hearts is an unceasing motion’.

'It is poets who have found value in silence and recollections of tranquillity; Keats's sweeter ‘unheard music’ represented a silence that was a kind of perfection, not just the absence of noise, and the French Symbolistes were intent on finding it. Malouf's characters differ from Horace, Montaigne and Voltaire in that they stumble on silence or have it thrust upon them. However, this does not reduce the meaningfulness of the silence they experience. Malouf is neither a classical figure, a Renaissance humanist, nor a man of the Englightenment, although his writing evinces some empathy with all three. He is a modern figure who thinks our world and us ‘an accident’ so that we must find meaning where we can. His characters seem to find that meaning outside fictive realism in a mystical equanimity discovered only through a personal retreat and silence that is at odds with the contemporary world and its attitudes. This paper seeks to explore that process as presented in Malouf's prose and poetry.' (Publication abstract)

'The essay addresses the poetic dimension of David Malouf's novels, suggesting that a poetics of possibility can be found in all his work. The poetics of possibility is a function both of Malouf’s thematic interest in the future and of his use of poetic language to draw the reader to imagine various kinds of ways of experiencing and knowing the world. The essay draws upon the philosophy of Ernst Bloch to illuminate the utopian dimension of Malouf’s work, whether in seeing the radiance of possibility in simple objects, the silent ‘presence’ at the centre of language, or the possibility of a different kind of future that Australian society might have experienced.' (Publication abstract)

'In 'The Middle Parts of Fortune' (1929)—perhaps the best narrative of the Great War—Australian author Frederic Manning asserted that ‘there was nothing in war which was not in human nature’ (128). Eighty years after Manning, in 'Ransom' (2009), Malouf returns to the classical world to give us an emotive, complex consideration of the events which provide the basis for Western civilisation’s oldest surviving war narrative, 'The Iliad'.

''Ransom' is not Malouf’s first exploration of war, though it marks a movement into a mythic rather than a liberal, realist interpretation. Through 'Fly Away Peter' (1982) and 'The Great World' (1990), we can trace Malouf’s multilayered exploration of the place of war in both individual story and cultural history. In particular, Malouf explores the ways in which war is both shocking and ordinary, delivering a complex appreciation of this recurring aspect of human experience.' (Publication abstract)

'David Malouf's oeuvre is characterised by a specific treatment of the natural world. Malouf’s sensitivity towards nature is very present in 'Remembering Babylon', inspired by the true story of Gemmy Morrill, ‘lost’ in the ‘wilds’, the novel framed by epigraphs drawn from Romantic poetry. This paper seeks to re-examine this treatment through an ecocritical lens. That is, I seek to explore the novel in terms of its redress of denigrating, exploitative, or idealistic views of human relationships with the non-human natural realm.

'Remembering Babylon' pits characters’ interactions with the natural world in diverse ways and the culminating impression is far from idealistic or apolitical. Ultimately, the novel’s complex rendering of human relationships with place and the non-human animal offers a specific challenge to romanticised visions of place. This argument is counter to some criticism of the novel as idealisation of the natural world at the expense of historically salient political considerations.

''Remembering Babylon' explores the significant political issue of human attitudes to the natural realm in complex ways. In order to reconsider the criticism of idealism, the novel is examined in terms of the genre most closely associated with idealisation of the environment: the pastoral. 'Remembering Babylon' appears to have a complex relationship with what can loosely be termed ‘the pastoral’. The novel revises idealising visions of nature and gently parodies the notion that nature is separate from or a tool of human, cultural concerns, particularly through its figurative and literal foregrounding of the nonhuman animal. The epigraph provides a deliberate and significant signal of Malouf’s challenge to pastoral understandings of nature because the poets cited within it, William Blake and John Clare, arguably offer in their wider body of work what might be termed a post-pastoral ethos that evokes, challenges and thus adapts pastoral idealism of nature. The paper suggests that 'Remembering Babylon' expresses such a post-pastoral ethos, if in a very different context and form from Blake and Clare.' (Publication abstract)

'David Malouf’s work is notable for the range and mix of genres it encompasses (including poem, novel, novella, short story, essay, memoir, play, libretto, translation, review). Parts of his fiction approach autobiography or the essay; his essays range from personal memory and travel to social and cultural commentary, and beyond; his fiction is historical, fabulist, naturalistic and poetic in turn. Some of his works adapt existing works into another form: novel to opera: Greek or Latin into English. One of his most celebrated works, 'An Imaginary Life', recreates the life of the poet of 'Metamorphoses'. A metamorphic quality or interest or theme reappears throughout Malouf’s writing, exemplified nowhere better than in his ‘Seven Last Words of the Emperor Hadrian’, a set of variations. Yet Malouf has also spoken of the way each new part of an author’s ‘body of work’ extends what has gone before, adding to it coherently, as if that body of work is one evolving thing. In other words, the change from one thing to another (one form, one mode, one kind) does not seem to change a pervasive unity (underlying, overarching). This is the paradox of the one and the many as they relate artistically and conceptually to each other. The paper explores Malouf’s metamorphic vision by focussing on his understanding of opera, the most mixed of art forms, as risky, dream-like, miraculous, communal.' (Publication abstract)

'This is the record of a conversation between David Malouf, Ivor Indyk and audience members at the 31 May 2013 David Malouf Symposium, held at the North Sydney campus of Australian Catholic University. The speakers reflect upon the papers delivered at the Symposium.' (Publication abstract)