This chapter will discuss idealism in Australian literature, with especial consideration given to the role of artificial structures in promoting idealism. In the work of Frank Moorhouse, the artificial capital of Canberra is linked to a global idealism of international organisations and a realm of perpetual peace. In the work of Gerald Murnane, idealism pertains to imaginary landscapes and the cognitive and ethical power they exert. The chapter concludes with an examination of recent Australian fiction by Michelle de Kretser and Brian Castro that continues this idealism in a more mobile and transnational mode.

Idealism can be defined as the optimism that resists commercialism. As Nicholas Rescher puts it, idealism, in the philosophical sense, is “mind-directed or mind-coordinated” and transcends the material.1 Twenty-first-century conventional wisdom, dominated by a neoliberalism no less materialistic than classical Marxism, is apt to deride or dismiss it. Nowhere is this more true than in architecture, where the utopian and pedagogic aspirations of modernism are now seen as absurdly lofty paeans to a future that never came about – they are “hymns to yesterday’s future”, as Margaret Thatcher put it when denouncing the Berlaymont building in Brussels.2 During the unrest between Sikhs and Hindus in the Punjab in the 1980s, it was routinely noted that the modernist architect Le Corbusier had designed the city of Chandigarh, as if his architecture were somehow to blame for failing to foresee or to prevent the ethnic strife.3

In her acclaimed 2013 novel The Flamethrowers, the American novelist Rachel Kushner uses the Brazilian capital of Brasilia, designed as a capital by the architects Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa as a metaphor for twentieth-century totalitarian violence (“Brasilia equalled death”). Kushner sees modernist architecture, such as Eero Saarinen’s airport terminal building in New York, as “the underside of modernity”.4 The character Sandro believes Brasilia amounts to “a prescriptive lie about progress and utopias”.5 In general in the post-romantic era, literature has been slightly less euphoric about modernity than other genres or disciplines. Dickens scorned the Crystal Palace, as did William Morris.6 Much of canonical modernism seemingly lamented technological modernity.7

Although the architect of Australia’s own modernist capital, Walter Burley Griffin, was not a modernist in the same vein as Le Corbusier – he respected earlier vocabularies, while still revolutionising urban life in the habitats he designed – his architecture participated in the broader modern challenge to traditional concepts of design and space.8 If Canberra attracted no less a traditionalist than A. D. Hope and no less an environmentalist than Judith Wright, that was due to academic and career happenstance; surely the grain of these poets’ work pointed towards a more organic location, whether rural or urban. Although reconsiderations of cultural modernism have palliated any melodramatic gap between literature and technology, this has not extended to the technological by-product of the artificial capital.9

How provocative, then, that one of the more sustained efforts at genuine idealism in contemporary Australian literature – Frank Moorhouse’s Edith Campbell Berry trilogy – set its final instalment, Cold Light (2011), in Canberra.10 In this novel, Edith, who had formerly worked for the idealistic if doomed League of Nations, goes home to Australia to help actualise the stillborn vision of Griffin. Canberra is unquestionably Australia’s Brasilia, even if it is far less doctrinaire-modernist in architectural terms than the South American city, so it is pertinent that Moorhouse does not see the capital as yesterday’s future, or as a prescriptive utopian lie. Moorhouse views Canberra as a poignant unfinished project that still beckons in challenge to contemporary Australians.

The artificial capital exists in settler colonies for perhaps two and a half reasons. Most European countries have grown around a discrete capital for centuries, whether as “imagined communities” (as Benedict Anderson puts it), through nationalising violence, or through the presence in a certain city of a ruling house. Settler colonies, conversely, are often the amalgamation of several different initial settlements. The major cities of those different initial settlements develop rivalries that have to be mediated by establishing a third city (Montréal / Toronto / Ottawa; Sydney / Melbourne / Canberra; Boston / Richmond / Washington DC; Rio de Janeiro / São Paulo / Brasilia). Australia here is more like Canada or Brazil than the USA. In the USA, since as early as 1880, every city other than New York has been provincial in literary terms, whereas in the other settler countries both of the original major cities continue to exert a national cultural pull. The artificial capital as a concept is wholly different from the renovation of an existing city – such as that led by Baron Haussmann in the Paris of Napoleon III, so memorably lamented by Baudelaire and chronicled by Walter Benjamin. Building new buildings and demolishing old ones may change the visual scene of an existing city, but the new buildings inherit the accumulated cultural prestige and centrality of the old. In countries such as India and China the situation is slightly different, as those cities that have attracted the greatest attention for their cosmopolitanism – Mumbai and Shanghai are not the capitals, but the capitals are also, in relative terms, old, established cities with layers of cultural heritage.11 The artificial capital, conversely, starts out anew, with no accumulated prestige but an association with the government that, in terms of the city’s cultural capital, is at best a double-edged sword. Settler colonies take this risk because they want to mediate arguments between competing factions. They may also want to embrace the land that they are in, not just to hug the coasts but to advance boldly into the interior. Canberra, of course, is not that far inland, which leaves room for even more utopian visions, such as the eidolon of an Inner Australia in Gerald Murnane’s The Plains, or the quixotic quest of Patrick White’s Voss to consummate his spiritual vision in the outback. But the choice of Canberra’s location was still a gesture towards a move away from the coasts, as was Brasilia more concertedly. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s relocation of the Turkish capital from Istanbul to Ankara, a city further inland and without European historical associations, is another pertinent example.

Other nations have tried and failed to build such a capital. In April 1986, Argentina under the presidency of Raúl Alfonsín considered moving its capital to the more southern interior city of Viedma, the goal again being to get away from the coasts. By then, however, the fissures in such an idea were more apparent. It was seen as a diversionary tactic from the nation’s legacy of past misrule and, as Carolina Rocha puts it, as testimony to the “failure” of Argentina to fulfil its promise to replace “the barbarian tribes by civilised and productive” European culture.12 In the twenty-first century, Argentina again considered moving its capital, this time to the more centrally located city of Santiago del Estero, but this idea received heavy opposition; it was denounced by the Harvard academic Filipe Campante as an “isolated, planned refuge”.13 Sometimes, the idea of an artificial capital can be dystopian rather than utopian. The Burmese military junta’s move of the capital from Yangon to Naypyidaw, calculated to limit the government’s vulnerability to protest and dissent, is an example.14 Australian literature contains a terrifying example of the susceptibility of architecture to authoritarian exploitation in Peter Carey’s short story “Kristu-Du”, in which a Western architect is hired by an African dictator to design a capital that is also a slaughterhouse.15

Even in democratic societies, artificial capitals can be burdened by the privilege of government. It is easier for populists to campaign against a monolithic “Canberra” or “Washington” than it would be to campaign against Sydney or New York. Artificial capitals separate government from the rest of society. Whereas the young man from the provinces in a novel by Stendhal or Balzac or Flaubert can come to Paris to pursue both political and literary ambitions, in settler societies with artificial capitals the two career paths are kept separate: one has to choose. Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby can come from the Midwest to the East and plumb the depths of high society; if they had wanted to scale the heights of government, they would have had to go to a different city. The artificial capital separates government from the nation’s cultural centre, rendering it impossible for writers to access governmental figures who might otherwise bestow patronage or prestige, as would have occurred in renaissance Florence or the Paris of the belle époque. If the Medici had been in a different city than Michelangelo, but still governing the polity where he worked, the support of his art would have diminished. Had Paris not been the governmental and cultural capital of France, the plots of books like Flaubert’s Sentimental Education would not be feasible.

This makes the topography of settler-colony novels very different from that described in Franco Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel. If, as Moretti puts it, the “lack of a clear national centre” produces a “sort of irresolute wandering”, it becomes even more complicated in settler-colony literatures, in whose lands there is a defined national capital, but that capital is not the first or the second or even the third city in the country.16 The separate founding of the various Australian colonies, the rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne, and the consequent construction of Canberra have prevented Australia from having this unitary centre. In Nicholas Jose’s The Custodians, a novel consciously modelled on The Great Gatsby, several contemporaries from Adelaide rove widely in the larger world – some to Sydney, some to New York, but none to the centre of political power. There is no single magnetic drawing-point, no defined centre. This clutters up the literary map, and renders moot a firm distinction between the metropolitan and the provincial.

The utopian urge of the artificial capital also has, within Australia, a distinctly dystopian underside. The very idea of the Europeans embracing a new land and migrating inward is an affront to the Indigenous people and to their custodianship of the land. The building of Canberra may have taken the Australian government further into the interior of the continent, but it only further derogated the Ngunnawal people who had been historically associated with the land. The idea of idealism is problematic in settler colonies because of this, and there is an inevitable point at which idealistic writing must deal with themes of concern. Murnane figures the limit of this idealism in his story “Land Deal”, in which Australian settler history is a nightmare from which Indigenous dreamers struggle to awake.

The two writers active in the twenty-first century mentioned so far in this chapter, Moorhouse and Murnane, will, along with Brian Castro, be its focus. Both Murnane and Moorhouse are rather unconventional idealists. Moorhouse made his name as an irreverent satirist, Murnane as an idiosyncratic but rigorous metafictionist. Neither is associated with the left in conventional terms. Moorhouse is often seen as a libertarian, albeit one with atavistic Labor sympathies. Murnane has stayed as far from public political posturing as is possible for an Australian writer to do. Both writers might easily be associated with one of the potential drawbacks of idealism: its traditional alignment with what George Kateb has termed “antidemocratic individualism”, which sees the idealistic figure as valuable because he stands out above the crowd.17 But Murnane and Moorhouse are idealist in not being bound by the material of being non-realist. They are not tethered to a reductive idea of things as they are. This is very different from any sense of head-in-the-clouds optimism or an elitist disdain of the given. Their idealism is a fundamentally democratic one.

The artificial capital, for all the dark aspects mentioned above, exemplifies this democratic idealism. But it does so curiously and unpredictably. Because it is usually inland, with a less developed cultural infrastructure than the older and larger cities it has replaced, the artificial capital is often less cosmopolitan and diverse than the longer-established cities. Compared to Rio and Sydney, Brasilia and Canberra seem provincial company towns, lacking the layers of historical architecture so brilliantly evoked by the Polish-descended Melbourne writer Antoni Jach in his experimental novel about Paris, The Layers of the City.18 The artificial capital has the deracination of the transnational without its glamour; it is poorly positioned to accumulate cultural capital in an age that wants sophistication, not utopianism.

The artificial capital is but one of many possibilities of contemporary urban manifestations that do not fit the neoliberal script. If Canberra sits at one end of the transnational spectrum, Western Sydney sits at the other. Michael Mohammed Ahmad describes the Western Suburbs as Australia’s “most densely populated region, and specifically, the most diverse region, with the largest populations of people from Aboriginal, migrant and refugee backgrounds”. Ahmad proposes that Western Sydney is the “kind of Australia that we all imagine and hear about, and that we constantly say is worth celebrating, but one that is heavily underrepresented when I watch television, read books, go to theatres, or attend arts festivals”.19 This underrepresentation also pertains to how Australian culture is represented overseas, always under the mantle of globalisation, but not in light of the communities where people of diverse backgrounds actually live. What the international model of globalisation wants is a sheen of exoticism, sweetened by the allure of the economically privileged; neoliberalism is more than willing to accept multiculturalism if that multiculturalism is economically successful. As discussed in Chapter 5, the most challenging multicultural Australian writers resist this consensus, which is at once anodyne and cynical. For all its transnationalism, neoliberalism shrinks from reaching out to places like Western Sydney, where the ideal of cultural hybridity, even if hardly utopian, is lived out. As Lachlan Brown, writing of Macquarie Fields in Sydney’s southwest, puts it:

Vaucluse features in both Harrower’s In Certain Circles and White’s The Hanging Garden, and seems almost paradigmatic of late modernity. The representative Australia of the neoliberal era, meanwhile, is to be found in cosmopolitan, commercially buzzing metropolises, not in working-class, multi-ethnic communities. One could here compare the Newcastle of Greg Bogaerts’ Black Diamonds and Dust (2005), even if the latter is not set in the present. Both Brown and Bogaerts describe gritty urban spaces that have difficulty being seen among the hyper-capitalist urban sheen of neoliberalism.

Moorhouse’s Artificial Capital

Moorhouse’s Canberra, although different again from the inland urban settings described by Ahmed, Bogaerts and Brown, with its utopian qualities and its bustling dynamic cultural producers, poses as much of a challenge to the neoliberal ideal of the glistening metropolis as Western Sydney does with its grittiness. It may be, fundamentally, that there is something suburban about artificial capitals, and something artificial about suburbia; this makes them abject in relation to the glistening metropolis. The artificial capital thus becomes an interstitial place. Like other such places, such as the suburbs of Western Sydney, and Steven Carroll’s suburban locales in his Glenroy series, these places reveal fissures in the corporate urban space. Even the left often lauds corporate urban space. Saskia Sassen, a scholar widely seen as being part of the radical vanguard, stresses in her oft-cited The Global City three time-honoured, teeming metropolises: New York, London and Tokyo. Of these, only Tokyo has a whiff of artificiality, as it was not the capital of Japan until the Meiji Restoration in 1868.21 Sassen sees urban space as the dynamic hub of large, long-inhabited metropolises. The futuristic yet quasi-organic urban aesthetic Sassen is promulgating is the contemporary equivalent to what Robin Boyd, in his 1960 book The Australian Ugliness, decried as “featurism” – the love of adornment for its own sake, the assumption that a pluralism of possibilities for design and living is equivalent to a true dynamism.22 Neoliberal urbanism postulated itself as an antidote to suburban featurism, but ended up becoming an aesthetic similarly constraining and stereotypical. A neoliberal exaltation of laissez-faire urban dynamism, represented by entrepreneurial and creative energies, can lead to a cynicism about such presumed fixities as government and bureaucracy, and idealism about the creative destruction of unfettered capitalism. Yet there are places where “featurism”, for all its flaws, can become more interpretively interesting: when it is not endorsed by the consensus or not ratifying already existing inequalities of power. I would argue that midcentury Canberra, as represented by Moorhouse, is one of them,

Thus there are modes of cosmopolitanism which are slighted because they are seen as too artificial or too suburban, but in reality they evade the consensus. Their cosmopolitanism veers off the straight and narrow; it is not comfortably energised and neoliberal. In the first two books of his Edith Campbell Berry trilogy, Moorhouse chronicles the history of the League of Nations, an institution that was decidedly utopian in its cosmopolitanism. It has since been stigmatised in the USA for its failure to prevent World War II (the United States, after spurring the League’s formation, ended up refusing to join).23 Although this stigma no doubt limited the American success of the first of Moorhouse’s Edith novels, Grand Days (1993), the book nonetheless did well in the USA, garnering a particularly perceptive review in The New Republic by Michael Heyward (later publisher of the Text Classics series), a rare instance of an American publication inviting an Australian rather than a British critic to review a major Australian novel.24 After the calamity of 9/11, there was a growing interest among the American reading public in international organisations and global cooperation. When on 14 October 2001 a teaser of the upcoming week’s New York Times Book Review mentioned that there would be a review of a book about the League of Nations, one naturally assumed it would be the second instalment of Moorhouse’s series, which had earlier that year won the 2001 Miles Franklin Literary Award (an honour denied him for the first book as it was deemed not to be sufficiently “Australian”, despite its Australian protagonist). But no; it was a history by John Milton Cooper. Dark Palace (2001) went unreviewed in the New York Times, and in most other places in North America. The opportunity for the USA to understand how Australian writers might see world order faded.

Moorhouse’s trilogy also considers “artificial capital” in a different sense: the League’s cultural capital, in Bourdieu’s sense, was never accepted by nations and their politicians. Two factors were at work here. The League of Nations had accumulated the same sort of stigma that modern architecture eventually would; people from both the left and the right saw it as a utopian folly. Even its more durable successor, the United Nations, would eventually be seen as a disappointment by many. (The UN was chronicled by the expatriate Australian Shirley Hazzard in both fiction and nonfiction: People in Glass Houses and Defeat of an Ideal. Hazzard excoriates the bureaucratic tedium of the United Nations and the way it became the de facto instrument of the Great Powers.25) The League’s major flaw was the fact that, because of American non-participation, it became the de facto vehicle of the two remaining dominant powers, Britain and France.

Yet as Hazzard makes plain in Defeat of an Ideal, an ideal can be defeated without being invalidated. The League of Nations represented the ideal, not just of international cooperation but also of the potential self-determination of nations in all parts of the world. Although the League’s mandate system in one sense perpetuated colonialism, it also anticipated the future independence of countries such as Iraq and Namibia. Inevitably the League failed its own promise, even before the rise of the totalitarian impulses so acridly reflected in Christina Stead’s fiction made its very idea impossible. Brazil left the League when it was not made a permanent member of the Executive Council, and the mandates were prolonged and defined in such a way that they became little more than colonies by another name. But the principle of a different sort of internationalism was, as Peter Holquist has argued, at least aired, even if it remains unfulfilled to this day.26 (Moorhouse began his trilogy at a time, at the end of the Cold War, when many hoped that the international order might be made fairer.)

There is an Australian international idealism, beyond simply “winning” and being economically successful, and beyond gaining notice for work well done: a desire to make the world better, to strive for a world not yet dead. This goes back to the 1890s, when Australia was well ahead of the world in terms of women’s suffrage, labour rights and democratic governance.27 The twentieth century saw this Australian determination to build an ideal or better society exported abroad. The consummate expression of this was the work of H. V. Evatt to secure a greater voice for smaller countries. Later Australian writers on international affairs such as Coral Bell have continued this tradition of advocating for a multipolar world, even if, as time went on, the arguments were made more in realist than in idealist terms.28 Australians continued to look to the wider world not only to make their own fortune, but also to contribute meaningfully to making the world better. This idealism is apt to be lost in a world market that has emphasised the commercial success of Australian fiction more than its literary merit. Terry Smith has commented similarly on the role of biennials and other special exhibitions in the world art market. By institutionalising the exceptional, such events encourage a bimodal categorisation of artists into the successful and the unsuccessful, elevating hype over enduring achievement.29 Such has been the Australian situation in the world literary market.

Frank Moorhouse was born in 1938 and gained fame in the 1970s as part of a new irreverence and informality in Australian writing. Initially, his work was associated with that of the novelist and academic Michael Wilding, as well as with the critic Brian Kiernan, as part of another vector of the “Andersonian” tradition of Sydney libertarianism. In his early work, Moorhouse displayed an internationalist irreverence, and wrote mainly short stories as well as longer but not organically unified sequences, which he termed “discontinuous narratives”.30 It was somewhat surprising, then, to see Moorhouse turn, in the 1990s, to Grand Days, the first of three lengthy books concerning twentieth-century diplomacy and government service. Although Moorhouse’s style is more sprightly and comical than Stead’s, like Stead he describes a young woman entering the cosmopolitan world and navigating complicated sexual relationships. The foremost of these is Edith’s relationship with Ambrose Westwood, a cross-dressing British diplomat whose presence queers the trilogy, shifting it away from the sterile sexlessness often (perhaps misleadingly) associated with the bureaucratic corridors of modern power. Edith and Ambrose’s sexual escapades operate formally as a leavening of both the high serious and the bittersweet idealism that might otherwise characterise a series about the League of Nations. The books avoid both the earnestness of the pacifist novels of Henri Barbusse and Romain Rolland, and the social chronicle of Upton Sinclair’s Lanny Budd novels or the later work of John Dos Passos.

The sexual experimentation in the books also inflects their depiction of bureaucracy. Far from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and its sense of bureaucracy as incipiently totalitarian, Moorhouse sees the League’s proliferation of agencies and bureaus as a cornucopia of experimental forms. What attracts him about bureaucracy is just what repels most of those who have denounced it: it is not especially political or ideological. Instead, it provides a vehicle for both routine and improvisation. Far from being deadly and monotonous, there is a ludic aspect to the interplay of bureaucracy that plays into the muted but persistent counterfactual element in Moorhouse’s trilogy. (Not every historical datum he mentions, such as Azerbaijan being a member of the League, is reliably true.) Bureaucracy exemplifies the practice, not the theory, of governance. It is the material expression of idealism: altruistic, goal-driven, but not dogmatic or charismatic. In Cold Light, Edith’s brother and his partner are depicted as communists, and the charismatic but ideologically corrupt communist organisation is contrasted with the Canberra bureaucracy.

Of course, bureaucracy is no utopia, and contains its own dangers. Importantly, Edith works for the International Atomic Energy Agency and visits Israel, both entities that are idealistic yet associated with potential domination or destruction. Despite this threat, what Delia Falconer calls Moorhouse’s delight in the “less obvious machinery of political engagement – meetings, lunches, minute taking, memos and, above all, negotiation”31 – has the potential to be boring, and this is why most authors, if faced with this subject matter, would satirise it. Yet, although there are many comic moments in Grand Days, Moorhouse takes his governmental processes seriously. In Grand Days, as an epilogue to the book’s diplomatic intrigue and sexual hijinks, Moorhouse provides a short panegyric to the first-stage copying machine employed by the League, which reproduced paper for bureaucratic needs to an unprecedented extent. Whereas a late-modern writer would have scorned bureaucracy for trammelling individual freedom and agency, Moorhouse sees it as a symptom of a range of possibilities emancipated from crude political motives. Although the action of Moorhouse’s series is basically set in the first half of the century, he brings to it a contemporary sensibility. He celebrates personal freedom but does not express the cynicism about large-scale social action, such as the League, that is routine under neoliberalism.

Edith is demeaned and slighted in her government work, but this is due to misogyny, and to the infighting that is the peril of any sort of organisational work; the problems with her job are not presented as symptomatic of a problem with the idea of statist government itself. Although sexually libertarian, Edith’s values include a positive role for governmental and supragovernmental organisations. Moorhouse is one of the few novelists to depict such a politics. (David Foster Wallace came close in his posthumously published The Pale King (2011), but his early death made it impossible to complete that vision.) In both his idealism and his defence of bureaucracy, Moorhouse is conscious of going against the grain. The despair at the end of Grand Days, when present-day Genevois have no idea of Aristide Briand, the great peacemaker, is a reaction to the unseasonable nature of an ideal that in another age might have been, or might yet be, a resounding success.

Government bureaucracy is so unromantic that Moorhouse knows he is being irreverent by romanticising it, and by lacing it with sexual and social transgression. Moorhouse is idealistic but not smugly so, and indeed the reader always wonders when the curtain will be pulled down and the entire tableau revealed as an outrageous parody. The books verge on, but never quite attain, the comedy that readers of Moorhouse’s earlier “discontinuous narratives” have come to expect. Moorhouse takes bureaucracy and government seriously because he intuits that, although they are ostensibly at the centre of things, in the minds of most they are on the margin. Edith thinks that “the isolation from the world, and even the isolation from Australia at large, gave them an intense observer status about the wider world” (159).

Why set the third volume in Canberra? It may be Moorhouse’s rejoinder to the accusation that the first book was not sufficiently “Australian”. But Canberra, as an artificial capital, is strangely both within and outside the Australian national space. Although certain modernist architectural icons have been lionised in Australian literature (as in Frank Cash’s 1920 Parables of the Sydney Harbour Bridge), more often than not Australian literature has foregrounded the natural landscape. Even Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House, as portrayed by the contemporary poet Louis Armand, is seemingly liminal:

Modernist architects of a later generation than Walter Burley Griffin, such as Harry Seidler, made much of Sydney’s streetscape seem as prefabricated and rectilinear as any other twentieth-century metropolis. As Erika Esau and Jill Julius Matthews have observed, Australia embraced modern architectural styles, mostly proceeding from the USA.33 But this is not what the world seems to expect from Australia, and it is not what most Australian literature has presented to the world. At the tail end of the late-modern period and in the early days of neoliberalism, Australian modern architecture frequently got a bad press. Craig McGregor, writing in 1985 for the New York Times, welcomed the return of a more “vernacular” Australian architecture:

That the new Parliament House, by the twenty-first century, seemed as typically 1980s as an early MTV video, illustrates the problem with “eclectic historicism”: in any of the arts, the creations of one generation will be eclectically historicised by the next. McGregor wrote three years too early to be aware of Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda, in which the idea of constructing a glass church in the late-nineteenth-century Australian bush figured the Gothic revivalism of architects such as William Butterfield, George Gilbert Scott and Viollet-le-Duc, as, with respect to Australia, just as much an external imposition as the modernist architecture of Seidler and Utzon. But it also illustrates that, in 1985, an eclectic historicism was seen as the solution for an Australia in which modernism was not just an introduced species, but was fundamentally alien. With respect to Australia, the International Style of architecture, and cosmopolitan modernism in general, seem so incongruous as to be a portent of disaster. Even the instinctually modernist John Kinsella expresses this in his early poem “Dematerialising the Poisoned Pastoral”:

Kinsella, however, injects a note of the natural – the very ocean is described in terms of a colour which was artificially concocted by the Swiss painter Yves Klein as a gesture of deracination. Moorhouse’s international-bureaucratic cold light – echoed by other writers on Canberra such as Paul Daley, who repeatedly uses the words “bureaucratic” and “artificial” in what is generally an admiring portrait of the capital – may be disruptive to more organic norms of Australian habitation. But it is not finally foreign to an Australian sensibility. This directly contradicts the assumptions of McGregor’s article, which also spoke of “a swing back to representation” in Australian painting. The point is not whether or not this was true. Anne Stephen’s copious presentation in Modern Times of the manifold influences of modernist abstraction in Australian design might lead us to think otherwise.36 The point is that it was said to an audience that wanted to hear it, that associated Australian works with sprawling representational bravado, not cerebral, metafictive introversion. McGregor’s portrait of Australian art fed so readily into what the audience already desired to believe to be true.

In July 2014, I overheard a conversation between a young couple walking along Anzac Parade in Canberra. As they passed by the Anzac Park West building, a modernist building devoted completely to housing government offices, the female of the couple said to the male, “Oh, I love the International Style”. This was said in a tone of enthusiasm but also faint defiance, with a sense that the International Style was now, like Kushner’s vision of Brasilia, seen as passé, as a token of the faded twentieth century. Moorhouse’s portrait of Edith Campbell Berry is similarly defiant, although even at the height of modernism Edith is a wayward and maverick character who, as a middle-aged woman in Cold Light, does not find an adequate outlet for her talents in mid-century Canberra. This is due not only to misogyny but also to self-limitation. Both Edith and Canberra are caught in the contradiction of their own aspirations. Australia wanted a modernist capital, but not too much of one; it wanted an artificial, twentieth-century city but not to spend too much money on it, or to have it be too  daring. Walter Burley Griffin’s dream, at once methodical and mystical, of a city that would integrate governmental and civil life and be both systematic and liveable, was never fulfilled, and the city remains half-built, if that. Moorhouse’s plangent frustration about this, however, is not an exercise in Australian nationalism. It is a mistake to attribute Edith’s eventual, and understandable, dissatisfaction with Ambrose as husband to his allegorically functioning as a figure for a British imperial authority, an authority both effete and residual. The appeal of Canberra for Moorhouse is that it stands for an Australia not just national but international, not just emergent but visionary, even if Canberra’s achievement is truncated and unfinished.

Like Switzerland and like bureaucracy generally, there is a neutrality about Canberra that other writers would excoriate in favour of the pungency of committed partisanship, but which Moorhouse likes for its abstraction and indeterminacy. As with the League of Nations, Moorhouse’s depiction of Canberra is of a dream at once rooted in modernity but incompatible with it. Nicholas Jose sums it up well when he says that, for Moorhouse, Canberra is the “ideal flawed subject, with a double time scale of the transient individuals who make it and the impersonal institutional memory it carries beyond the life of any one person”.37 That Canberra is built on circles rather than on a rectilinear grid, and that it separates its civil and governmental precincts by a great artificial lake, gives a mysticism to its rationalism that is apt for Moorhouse’s grave yet witty narrative mode. Edith wages a quixotic battle not to have the lake named “Lake Burley Griffin”. She points out that “Griffin”, not “Burley Griffin”, was the architect’s surname; his wife, his partner in planning Canberra, was Marion Mahony Griffin – her name did not contain “Burley”. If the lake is to be named after Walter alone, it should be “Lake Walter Burley Griffin”. As a woman, Edith identifies with Marion’s underappreciation; as a bureaucrat, she values exactitude. Moorhouse’s idealism is modern, not romantic, and eschews vagueness.

Edith also manages to purge residual romanticism in herself. She first comes to Canberra hoping to work in foreign affairs, to change the world, and, despite her a priori optimism about what is possible in office work – which Moorhouse seemingly shares – finds herself shunted to a minor bureaucratic niche. Canberra may be the centre of political power in Australia, and of Australia’s engagement in foreign affairs. But Edith is denied this global reach (although Cold Light entertainingly derives much of its tension from Cold War skulduggery and the drama surrounding Australian government attempts to ban the Communist Party). She has her energies redirected – misdirected – into the merely local. She comes to realise, however, that creating a modern city, one which can give substance to internationalist ideals, is just as important, and far less precedented, than the work she initially hoped to do. It is a genuinely modern adventure, and Edith senses the thrill of it even though it is literally and figuratively incomplete, and even though its relationship to twentieth-century reality is still only sketchy, much like the political cartoons by Emery Kelen that Moorhouse so admires.

Although its ideals may not have been realised, Canberra’s local variation on the International Style can yet provide a respite, a perch from which to observe the rest of Australia and the world from a different angle. Canberra is a place to which Edith, after her internationalist education in Geneva, can come home. It is easy for an Australian to migrate abroad; much harder to return (a theme explored in Joan London’s Gilgamesh (2001), which also features a heroine named Edith).38 The very shortfall of ideals that characterises Canberra is what, in Moorhouse’s vision, makes the city sustainable and exemplary; the city’s very artificiality prompts its denizens to strive more actively and independently for a fresh vision of what community might be, unencumbered by inherited assumptions. If it is still uncertain, after all the compromises and disappointments recorded in Cold Light, what Canberra stands for, there is at least the hope that it stands for something.

Gerald Murnane and Australian Idealism

If Moorhouse depicts an urban landscape characterised by a surprising hope, the landscapes of the novels of Gerald Murnane seem at first far more abstract and unpeopled. Murnane, in biographical terms, is a parochial figure. Born in 1939, one year after Moorhouse, Murnane has never left Australia, and has never visited Queensland, the Northern Territory or Western Australia. He has visited Sydney several times, once in a brief attempt to train for the priesthood, the other two times for academic symposia. He went once to Tasmania – a landscape of immense symbolic importance to him, especially in the bravura short story “The Interior of Gaaldine” – a story once thought by Murnane and by his readers to be the conclusion of his published oeuvre. He is overwhelmingly associated with Victoria, the state of his birth, and lived for many years in the Melbourne suburb of Macleod. After the death of his wife Catherine in 2009, he moved to Goroke, in the western part of the state; he now occasionally goes over the border to South Australia to attend race meetings in Bordertown or, once, to read at the Adelaide Festival. Goroke is just over a hundred kilometres from Penola, a small town in eastern South Australia where the early twentieth-century lyric poet John Shaw Neilson was born. This apposition is pertinent, as both Murnane and Neilson are at once vernacular and abstract; they are of the common people and fruitfully sourced in specific places, even as their works speak to the mind and to the soul. Like Neilson, who said that life:

Murnane is not an ornate writer. He is grounded, simple, and severe. Yet, also like Nielson, he reaches for the difficult, for effects attained only through a concentration on the personal and on images that, real or imagined, resonate deeply with the author.

The publisher Ivor Indyk, whose Giramondo Publishing rescued Murnane from relative obscurity and has made him a highly regarded, worldwide figure (Murnane’s name is frequently mentioned in speculation about the Nobel Prize), has described Murnane as the epitome of “the Provincial Imagination”.40 Yet Murnane is also one of the most international of Australian writers. Even his first two, fairly realistic novels, Tamarisk Row (1974) and A Lifetime on Clouds (1976), have lengthy moments of reverie that floats elsewhere: Palestine and Egypt in the first, a lengthy fantasia on America in the second. With The Plains (1982), Murnane permanently jettisoned realism; indeed, the book was published by Norstrilia Press, a firm specialising in science fiction whose name, taken from the science fiction of Cordwainer Smith, punned on Australia and was the name of a planet, projected as a remote descendant of Australia; the firm also published Thomas Pynchon.

The Plains is the story of a young filmmaker who is hired by the grandees of a fictional “Inner Australia” that exists on broad grasslands of the sort that do exist in Australia but only intermittently; they are considerably expanded in Murnane’s visionary imagination, as the novel’s narrator seeks in essence an Australian equivalent of the Great Plains of the United States. The narrator yearns to extrapolate from the plains an ultimate meaning, even as his imaginative ambitions coalesce with his romantic desires: he tries to impress a young woman by surreptitiously placing a book in a library, hoping she may read it. Although there is disagreement among the Plainsmen about the meaning of the plains – members of the Horizonites faction exult in the texture of the plains, while the Haremen are local-colourists who strive for grassland costumbrismo – all believe that there is such a meaning.41

The Plains meditates upon the Australian search for national identity and has a pronounced internal geography. It is not simply full of nebulous landscapes of the mind. What Murnane describes as the principal goals of the Horizonites, “to push back the limits of pasturage into regions too long neglected”, and the Haremen, with their “realistic plans for closer settlement” (35), might be allegories for the literary duel between Patrick White and A. D. Hope, or between the Jindyworobak poets and James McAuley: between romanticism and classicism. Murnane is an aesthetically excellent writer with abstract, theoretical concerns, as Borges and Calvino were; but they were men who were also deeply, if not always wisely, imbricated in the politics, including the literary politics, of their own times.

In the thirteen years after The Plains, Murnane produced three masterful books of short fiction, Landscape with Landscape (1985), Velvet Waters (1990) and Emerald Blue (1995), none of which has been published internationally. Many international readers will not know Murnane until these three books, or a selected or collected short fiction, ideally edited by the author himself, are available. But Murnane’s generally agreed upon major work is the novel Inland (1988). While The Plains is programmatic and abstract, Inland is vividly specific, even if these specificities are ruthlessly spliced between fiction and reality, moving as it does between landscapes such as that between the Moonee Ponds Creek and the Merri Creek, which Murnane knows intimately, and the Sio and Sarvez rivers in Hungary, which he knows only through imagination. It is Inland rather than The Plains that set the paradigm for his future work.

After Emerald Blue, Murnane fell silent for nearly a decade. Many thought that the hauntingly tentative litany of jockeys, horses and racing-silks that characterised “The Interior of Gaaldine”, the last story of Emerald Blue, would be his final aesthetic testament. It was well known that the published works were but a small portion of a far larger canon of mainly unpublished work, and that Murnane did all sorts of writing: epistolary correspondence, highly personal and idiosyncratic notes on horse racing, forms of diary and memoir. Murnane’s insightful and moving memoir Something for the Pain (2015) gives the reader some sense of what this material is like, as does Murnane’s description of his archive, published in 2013 in the international journal Music & Literature.42

Murnane’s oeuvre also got a second wind from a seminar organised by his first and cardinal critic, Imre Salusinszky, at the University of Newcastle in 2001, at which Indyk, who as editor of Southerly had edited a symposium on Murnane’s work in 1995, was present. Indyk not only reissued Murnane’s two earliest novels but encouraged Murnane to write further. Within a few years Murnane published three more novels, Barley Patch (2009), A History of Books (2012) and A Million Windows (2014), and the essay collection Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs (2006). These reached a far wider international audience thanks to three developments. One was the rise in popularity of ebooks (which Giramondo, like Text, wisely allowed to be released directly into the international market, defying the conventional wisdom of the past, when the tendency had been to wait for an overseas publisher to buy rights to the book before allowing it to reach their particular market). The other was the fact that Dalkey Archive Press, the leading avant-garde publisher in the USA, picked up Barley Patch and Inland in the early 2010s. There had previously been two American editions of The Plains, neither of which had made a huge impact, although the second, published by New Issues Press in Michigan and introduced by the American poet Andrew Zawacki, remained in print. And, thirdly, J. M. Coetzee, who was by that time Murnane’s fellow Australian, published a lengthy and appreciative essay on Murnane’s work in the New York Review of Books in late 2012, concentrating especially on Inland.43

Although Murnane has found an international readership, he should not be stripped of the core of his imaginative framework. Without Murnane’s Australian dimension, The Plains would be a dry and abstract parable. That it is not is demonstrated by the novel’s awareness of social class. Much is made of the contrast between the wealth of the landowners who employ the young man and the young man’s own bohemian penury. The Plainsmen are able to speculate on philosophical questions because they have the leisure to do so. In conceiving a society abstract enough to pursue its own dream, Murnane is not simply wishing away the society that produced him. But few, other than Indyk, have valued this provincial aspect of Murnane – the way that, as he himself concedes, he is an ordinary Australian male of his generation whose background, bearing and attitudes make him the sort of humane, tolerant, unpretentious person that Coetzee admired among the Australians he first met. Murnane commented at the 2014 Melbourne Writers’ Festival, “I didn’t feel any need to grow a beard or wear a beret, no offence to anyone here who does.”44 He did not self-consciously seek out literary pretention. In addition, it is easy to misunderstand The Plains as more of a riddle than it is because Murnane did not originally conceive this material as standing on its own, but as part of a far more ambitious and complex work called The Only Adam.45 This book presumably would have cavorted on the interstices between fiction and reality the way Murnane’s later, major work has done.

In 2011, I wrote an article for Dalkey Archive’s in-house journal, Context, in which I proposed that Murnane is at once the most and the least Australian of writers. This article was quoted on Chad Post’s popular and erudite Three Percent blog, but Post only quoted the statement about Murnane being the “least Australian” of writers, suggesting that being avant-garde made a writer less Australian.46 Writers from other countries are not often discussed in these terms. Yes, there are special cases such as Kafka, who, as Deleuze and Guattari famously pointed out, lived as a minority in an undefined national situation. But with writers more securely anchored in a particular national identity, like Dostoyevsky or even Proust, it is possible to consider their national identity without detracting from their aesthetic achievement. In other words, to say that Proust is the least French of writers does not make him more of an aesthete or a metafictionist.

When Indyk speaks of Murnane’s provincial imagination, he is not arguing that Murnane is parochial or minor; indeed, he sees him as one of the most daring and imaginative writers currently writing. But Indyk suggests that, as with other great writers, an appreciation of the local is necessary to understand his transnational importance, just as it is to understand writers from Joyce to Lermontov, from Faulkner to Mann. Locality and transnationalism are often in poignant counterpoint, as the local is frequently the base of lived experience, while the transnational is necessary for that experience to be disseminated.47 In speaking of Inland, Coetzee labelled Murnane a “radical idealist”, someone who exalts (as another South African writer, Olive Schreiner, put it) dream life over real life.48 Coetzee, however, is not classifying Murnane as socially evasive. As James Ley has said, a “wrestle with idealism” is “one of the unifying features of [Coetzee’s own] work”.49 Coetzee sees Murnane’s idealism as a catalysing purity, a quality that explodes banality. It is not for nothing that, in medieval scholastic philosophy, the long-time anchor of Roman Catholic speculative thought, idealism was tantamount to realism – as opposed to nominalism. Murnane’s Catholic background, inculcated in the 1950s, has stayed with him conceptually even after being unhesitatingly jettisoned dogmatically. Coetzee says: “His fictional personages or ‘image-persons’ (characters is a term Murnane does not use) have their existence in a world much like the world of myth, purer, simpler, and more real than the world from which they take their origin”.50 Against those who would see Murnane as a dreamer who deals with aesthetic castles in the air, Coetzee sees Murnane as renouncing the real world because it is not good enough or true enough to be really real.

These ambiguities in Murnane’s relationship with the referential have begun to be seen the more his fiction received sustained consideration. Emmett Stinson comments that Murnane is “altogether different from the various postmodern practitioners of metafiction – such as John Barth, John Fowles, Italo Calvino, B. S. Johnson and Robert Coover – to whom he has frequently been compared”.51 Whereas these authors, according to Stinson, act as if fictional characters are as real as real people, Murnane presumes that neither is real, that both are gestures made towards a vanishing point of imagination. Stinson bases this on comments made by the narrator of Murnane’s 2014 novella, A Million Windows, that he does not like self-referential fiction.52 Although the narrator plausibly speaks for Murnane, and although Murnane is not susceptible to a formalist separation between implied author and breathing author, there is a chance that there is iterative irony here. As in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, even the most complex aesthetic declarations and renunciations cannot be taken straightforwardly in Murnane. On another level, it could be argued that all of these authors mentioned by Stinson (Murnane’s narrator mentions only Calvino) had convictions about reality. Fowles actually possesses, somewhat like Alex Miller, a Tolstoyan, realist aesthetics alongside his game playing. Calvino was a convinced leftist. Barth points as much to regionalism and to morality as to metafiction. Each of these writers as a writer has a soul, even if not an obvious or stereotypical one. Geordie Williamson wisely speaks of Murnane’s combination of “obdurate literalism and visionary pitch”.53 International critics celebrate the latter, but the former is just as crucial an ingredient of Murnane’s achievement.

Murnane’s Million Windows

Bodies may or may not have souls. What is indisputable in Murnane’s world is that houses do. Although Murnane’s interest in actually existing architecture is nowhere near as pronounced as Moorhouse’s, architecture is not insignificant in his work. Williamson speaks of Murnane evoking architecture “oddly yet profoundly”.54 There are the houses of the magnates in The Plains. There is the haunting image of the second-story window in Barley Patch – which in that novel comes to embody consciousness or reflectiveness, the very idea of there being a surplus or perceptual mystery to life, “the observer from an upper room” indicating perspective but not omniscience, perceptual privilege but not totality; every angle brings with it an obscurity, a vanishing point.

Finally there is the metaphor of the house of fiction having “a million windows”, borrowed from Henry James for Murnane’s 2014 novella of that title. If Canberra is an inland capital, Murnane’s “Inner Australia” is an Australia liberated from the coasts and their, as Hope would say, five teeming sores. But it is not an unhoused Australia, and it is not trying to escape from Australia itself. Murnane does not seek to deny or repudiate the world as it is, but to be free of rigid codifications, and to let in randomness, chance and conjecture. Coetzee recognises the importance of love in Inland, and the point is apposite here. The title of Coetzee’s article in the New York Review of Books was “The Quest for the Girl from Bendigo Street”, a reference to the second half of Inland,55 in which an adult male narrator tries to find the address of the girl he “liked” as a boy, a girl he knows as “the girl from Bendigo Street”. He tries to get the address from another girl, whom he knew at school and for whom he did not have romantic feelings; this second girl is called “the girl from Bendigo”. Bendigo Street is in Melbourne; Bendigo is a mid-sized city ninety minutes’ drive north-west of Melbourne. The metonymic apposition of Bendigo and Bendigo Street links the idealism of pure unyielding love affirmed across decades with the other idealism of going beyond the material and direct. We cannot assume that something is more present imaginatively because it is more present materially. This is a logic that would lead people to reject artificial capitals – perhaps, by extension, Calvino’s “invisible cities” – in favour of traditional cities because of the former’s thinner and deliberately engineered levels of reference. Coetzee’s thoughtful reading of Murnane links irreverence towards the reality of the real with an ability to love, to cherish, and to care.

This tie between imaginative idealism and affective altruism is opposed to the real world. It argues that no reality can be fully satisfactory. Now, a neoliberal utopia is to be preferred to a fascist or Stalinist one. It could be that neoliberalism is an auspicious constellation that brought economic opportunity to millions around the world, variegated our cultural alternatives, and brought us material plenty without the stricture of government control. Even if that were true, however, neoliberalism runs up against the same hurdle as every ideology: it can never be as good as it claims to be. To hail any ideology unequivocally as an unalloyed good is to relinquish the sort of horizon that allows what Keats called “negative capability”, and what Bill Ashcroft reframed as “horizonal capacity”56 (Neoliberalism, with its reductive vision of winners and losers and its definition of man as homo economicus, encourages us to jettison this longer view and take the foreground only). To accept neoliberalism’s claim that it offers a pluralistic plenitude is to mistake its surface for depths. This is the “cruel optimism” Lauren Berlant speaks of that asks us to accept the incompletely or only superficially good in place of the ultimate good.57 Cruel optimism asks us to circumscribe our aspirations to the material, to the immediately beneficial and to the instantly discernible; it tells us to forsake image-life and image-reality simply because they are neither calculable nor measurable.

Murnane’s idealism is in part a rejection of “dun-coloured realism”, but it is also more than that. His books also resist a simple postcolonial reading that sees Australia as merely reacting to the British legacy. To argue for an approach to Australian literary studies that does not see everything in terms of British colonialism is not to gainsay either the relevance of postcolonial theory or the residual role of colonial governmentality. Nor should it discourage comparative studies across the English-speaking world, as seen today in such cases as Hari Kunzru’s and Teju Cole’s championing of Murnane and Colm Tóibín’s of Christos Tsiolkas.58

Murnane broadens this internationalism into a truly multipolar globalism. In Murnane, it is not Britain, or even Murnane’s ancestral Ireland, that is the “other” of Australia, but Hungary, Paraguay (troping on the New Australia adventure as did Stead in Letty Fox), Romania, the United States, in the title story of Emerald Blue, the “Helvetia” or Switzerland, so differently explored by Moorhouse’s. Very little in the world is entirely foreign to Murnane.

It would be easy to see his interest in Hungary, as some have done, as a Mitteleuropäisch high-aestheticism. But Murnane is not only conscious of the 1956 Revolution – as the Hungarians call it, the Forradolom, many refugees from which came to Australia – but aware of the status of the Magyar language as a Finno-Ugric language related to tongues spoken in inner Asia and injecting a quasi-Asian element into the heart of Europe. Murnane, however, is not at all representing the real Hungary or the real Hungarians. For him, Hungary is forever a landscape of the mind. But that there are real Hungarians and a real Hungary do matter to him; his learning of the language and his translation and appreciation of Hungarian writers such as Gyula Illyés, Attila Jószef and Sándor Márai have made that clear. That Jószef was, in his own idiosyncratic way, a proletarian writer, and that there is a highly populist aspect to Illyés, suggest that these connections stem from a deep identification on Murnane’s part with the people of Hungary. The Hungarian element, as well as the importance to Murnane of the Catholic milieu in Victoria in the 1950s, strongly influenced by recent European migrants, makes his work, if not literally migrant fiction, not totally distant from the work of such writers as Peter Skrzynecki, Arnold Zable and Rosa Cappiello.

The idea of the Hungarian in Murnane operates as a foreign voice within the mind, a tendency not quite decisively other but that evades the same. An analogue to this can be glimpsed in the haunting episode in A Million Windows, when the narrator, in late adolescence, sees “a dark-haired girl” of a similar age on a train. She might almost be the prototype of “the girl from Bendigo Street”. The “young woman hardly more than a girl” (a locution used repeatedly in A Million Windows, as if to acknowledge that the young woman involved is an adult, even though the affective realm might try to define her more securely as a child) sees the narrator’s name on his schoolbook (480). He has written it in bold letters precisely in order to capture her attention. For Murnane, inestimable yearning is combined with the stipulation that the beloved be “difficult of access”. He is far keener to have her learn his name than to learn hers. Yet at one point she unexpectedly, and perhaps semi-intentionally, lets the narrator see her first name, which seems to be the exotic Dathar:

He eventually finds out, when he actually speaks to her a year later, that her name is not Dathar but the more mundane Darlene. The episode illustrates that the exotic is but the mundane differently regarded; “the drab of the everyday, so to call them, are mere signs of another order of things” (645). The theoretical locutions here, “signs” as in semiotics, “order of things” as in Foucault’s translated title, are interesting even though Murnane claims to be indifferent to theory.

The epigraph to Inland is a quotation from Paul Éluard: “there is another world, but it is in this one”. In Murnane’s work, the transcendent is summoned and then held, suspended, in what Harald Fawkner, a Swedish academic and a superbly incisive reader of Murnane, contends is multivariant immanence: a dense, elusive, yet still palpable affectivity (a word Fawkner himself used with respect to Murnane).59 The line from Éluard implies that there is a world of art, but it is feeling. (The same line from Éluard, by the way, appears in White’s The Solid Mandala, his most searing Sarsaparilla novel, filled with savage social and psychological subversion.) Murnane does not find the material world sufficient as an object of representation, but he is not seeking merely to divert or to elevate his reader from the material world, but to recognise its immanent fissures and contradictions.

The Dathar episode evokes a cherished ideal, never fully to be realised. Edith Campbell Berry’s dreams of Canberra are similar: although she yearns for them to be achieved, they are ideals that are not really intended to be fulfilled. Murnane’s writing has surprising continuity with other Australian writing. The next generation of writers influenced by or taught by Murnane during his years as a lecturer in writing at Deakin University includes Christopher Cyrill, Tim Richards, David Musgrave and Tom Cho, all writers of self-conscious playfulness and melancholy. One can further contextualise Murnane. In A Million Windows, the narrator says his fiction is an example of Australia’s leading novelistic export: historical fiction. The narrator mentions that he has read a historical novel about the Vendée rebellion (1216) (a historical episode we will encounter again, in Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier, in Chapter 8) as well as Richard Blackmore’s Lorna Doone, the only book known to have been read by another maverick from Victoria, Ned Kelly.60 Lorna Doone and the Vendean book are regionalist novels: novels of a given place or time, the obverse of metafictive, but also books that speak back to a metropolitan consensus.

Murnane’s “chief character” (a winsome phrase often used by him, expressing both agency and contingency) expresses certain preferences about the fiction he would like to read, and explains certain facets of the fiction they are writing or would like to write. But, as the phrase “a million windows” indicates, he does not laud only one kind of book. Nor is Murnane indifferent to society, even if he is hardly a conventional advocacy novelist. The emphasis on plains and grasslands in his novels, even if they are often plains of words and rhetoric, does have a real environmental significance, as Lawrence Buell, one of the leading American ecocritical scholars, has pointed out.61 In A Million Windows the narrator speaks of his fascination with the Native American man Ishi. In the early twentieth century, Ishi was claimed to be the last Native American living in the wild by the American anthropologists Theodora and Alfred Kroeber. Murnane imagines a female counterpart to Ishi; together the pair would constitute the “last of their people on earth” (1915). “Land Deal” had already established Murnane’s awareness of the urgency of Indigenous issues. These are not Murnane’s main subject as a writer. He does not, as writers such as Grenville, Miller and Jones do, profoundly explore themes of reconciliation. But the mantle of concern, of restorative justice, is not absent from his work. In A Million Windows Murnane gently satirises his traditional Labor-voting family, who see the Liberals as “the party of the oppressors” (1216). The narrator’s parents are horrified to learn that their son is using a Liberal ladies’ lending library. Their left-leaning politics, however, are not recanted, or ironised.

If there is no real but only a visible, no material but an ideal, then there can be as many ideals as there are perceivers. One cannot assert a radical subjectivity and then posit it as the only mode of perception. Murnane fosters deep attention on the object of perception, even if that object is not presumed to be real. Murnane’s representation of women has been either lauded as idealistically Petrarchan or attacked for putting women on a pedestal.62 There is a tradition in Australian fiction of male writers associating the ideal – in both the conceptual and affective senses – with the vanishing woman as symbol of irresolution and indefinition. This is seen in Liam Davison’s The White Woman (1994) and Michael Meehan’s The Salt of Broken Tears (1999),63 and as far back as Christopher Brennan’s Lilith poems in the early twentieth century. The Indigenous poet Peter Minter captures this feeling of melancholy aftermath:

Language becomes an effect of experience always already lost, which we can love but never retrieve. With these and with Murnane’s image of the occulted beloved we have a figure of the lost object of desire to match that of the lost child made famous by paintings of the Heidelberg School and by Peter Pierce’s monograph on the subject.65 Idealism can be an acknowledgement of what has been lost. In Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance, Bobby Wabalanginy’s arc of values, as opposed to the actual events that happen to him, motivate him to work for the convivencia of whites and Aborigines. This is foiled, in Scott’s narrative, by white arrogance and colonial inflexibility. But Scott strenuously posits this supple idealism as a mode for present and future. Between the extremes of idealism as a policy and idealism as a conceptual category there is idealism as an affect – the belief in a life lived forward in an international style of Australian hope.

Streets and Gardens: Brian Castro and the Architecture of Mobility

Brian Castro was born in 1950 in Hong Kong and moved to Australia in 1961. He is of Portuguese, Chinese and British descent, and has written of the African chicken available in the former Portuguese dependency of Macau as an epitome of the hybridity his own life also represents.66 Castro, as of 2015, holds a named chair at the University of Adelaide, and, although his work is underrated in the USA and UK, he has become an increasingly canonical Australian author in continental Europe, as well as in China. Castro is comparable to Bail and Murnane in rejecting conventional ideas of referentiality.

If Moorhouse and Murnane, in very different ways, display the architecture of idealism, Brian Castro’s oeuvre emphasises another sort of non-normative building space: the architecture of mobility. Castro’s novels are often about migrants, or juxtapose people from different backgrounds; more crucially, they also depict landscapes that are in flux, or highly dependent on the angle of the perceiver. After China (1992) has as its protagonist a Chinese architect who, like Gail Jones’ Pei Xing in Five Bells, migrates to Australia in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. Most stories about architecture either describe architects and their visions (such as Carey’s “Kristu-Du”), or the consequence of built environments (such as Cold Light and, in a different sense, The Plains). After China, however, considers both: the action of the story, involving the architect’s relationship with an unnamed female writer, takes place in a hotel he has himself designed. This hotel is a transitional space, something like what Marc Augé calls a “non-place”.67 Both characters have experienced trauma and suffering, and a non-place thus peculiarly suits them, as a post-traumatic space of reparation.

In the architect’s hotel, Castro seeks a hybridity that escapes consensus and even permanent monumental status. What Bernadette Brennan terms the novel’s “denial of linear time” challenges ideas of fixed space.68 It is not what Castro’s characters find but what they pursue that matters. In The Garden Book (2005), however, to search for the ideal requires that the point from which the search starts is already complex. The heroine of the novel has a distinct origin – the Dandenong Ranges of Victoria – but she is half-Chinese by descent and identifies with her Chinese as much as her Australian heritage. Her name – Swan Hay – sounds like it comes out of an allegorical Australian pastoral utopia, but it is in fact Shuang He. Castro confounds our ideas of home. And, although home is more than a house, the architecture of mobility is used in The Garden Book to elicit the interstitial spaces between deracination and belonging.

Swan Hay is not a first- or second-generation migrant; her father, Baba, a famed professor, muses that for “years, before the turn of the century, my father, grandfather and their people went back and forth freely between Australia and China”.69 Yet in the eyes of white Australian society, these Chinese people were not encouraged to call Australia home. Baba remembers a “large group of us living in the shadows beneath these brooding hills. Then came the restrictions. No freehold land, no bank loans, our labour boycotted” (228). As Swan tries to find a home she blossoms into an experimental, internationally renowned poet, but as with Edith in the Moorhouse trilogy she must challenge stereotypes of gender and culture in order to do this. The man she marries, Darcy Damon, could be a classic Harrower husband: initially appealing, with clear force of will and an interest in books, he is ultimately a tyrant. The man who becomes most important to Swan, Jasper Zenlin (an odd combination of “Zen” and “Lenin”) has more in common with Edith’s Ambrose Woodward: he accepts and encourages her ambitions and is accommodating to her agency.

Jasper is also an architect, but unlike many fictional architects, he does not have ambitions to surpass the human scale. He not only, to cite the title of one of his treatises, insists on keeping the art in architecture, but, through his relationship with Swan, becomes interested in “the architecture of disappointment” (186). As in Edith’s relationship with Ambrose, a person who is “logical and rational, by predisposition”, is driven to be “ridiculous and illogical” by his “infatuation” with Swan (186). It is Jasper who encourages Swan to write poetry and who helps her to achieve international acclaim.

Castro’s next novel, Street to Street (2012), is an even more explicit portrait of an idealist, this time the great Australian poet Christopher Brennan (1870–1932). Brennan was at once a quintessential embodiment of the cosmopolitan society of his day and a misfit within it. Notably, within the space of a few years, both of Australia’s major cosmopolitan poetic voices, Brennan and Kenneth Slessor, had significant novelistic afterlives, Slessor in Gail Jones’ Five Bells and Brennan in Street to Street. Although Five Bells is not “about” Slessor the way Street to Street is “about” Brennan, the title and the book’s focus on Sydney Harbour do much to broadcast Slessor to readers who may be unfamiliar with his work. Street to Street, similarly, is at once a tribute to Brennan and an introduction to him. Both Jones and Castro insist on the continued relevance of these poets. Slessor and Brennan are both emblematic of colonial modernity, in that they participated in and exemplified the emergent idioms of their day – symbolism and modernism – but did not receive credit for it internationally. Castro and Jones, as contemporary Australian fiction-makers of an innovative mien, seek a usable aesthetic past in their poetic predecessors while vindicating them in an international arena.

Street to Street is as much reverie as narrative. But it is also a portrait and a polemic. Brennan, although his poetry is sufficiently modern to fit into the global project of his era, is sharply rebuked by a bourgeois and conformist Sydney for daring to be a dissenter and bohemian. Although one might expect an academic career to suit such an introspective and imaginative person perfectly, the department of comparative literature at Sydney University is conservative; the chief professor tells Brennan to “get a haircut and buy a proper hat”.70 The dilemmas of an imaginative soul in a world determined to deny imagination are also seen in the book’s contemporary strand. This deals with Brendan Costa, a modern-day academic. Costa bears some resemblance to Castro, and shares his initials, which in turn are the inversion of Christopher Brennan’s. Costa is having an affair with a young Dutch woman, Saskia. This allows Castro to bring in Dutch realist art as a rooted counterpoint to the wandering quality of Brennan’s Sydney streetwalking. As well, Costa’s feelings for Saskia parallel Brennan’s obsession with the feminine ideal, represented in his poems by a figure named Lilith, dimly reflecting the poet’s late-in-life mistress, Violet Singer. As in Murnane’s work, where the quest for the girl from Bendigo Street leads the narrator through a complex imagined landscape, so in Castro love and yearning lead the way through the architecture of mobility in modern Sydney and contemporary Amsterdam. Although, as Brennan muses, “lovers do not write the best love verses” (86), the presence of love and its potential loss prevents Castro’s descriptions of urban landscapes from becoming eulogies for contemporary urban dynamism. The architecture of mobility generates artistic achievement, but also commemorates and even occasions loss.

Can Architecture Travel?

We have seen how architecture can represent national or transnational ideals. But can architecture do this in an era when people and even institutions are so relentlessly on the move? The architecture of mobility is more flexible and ingenious than the architecture of idealism. It is able to produce non-places such as Augé describes while also designating places with reinvigorated meaning. In the era of non-place, even the place becomes a premise for speculation about how it can be relativised. In Murray Bail’s The Pages (2008), a sheep station deep in the country provides an arena for a contest between the claims of philosophy and psychology, as if the paradox of a built domicile on a “trouser-khaki dryness stained with trees. With shadows ink spilt” is the fitting instance for this conceptual clash.71 Romy Ash’s Floundering (2012), the taut, contemporary story of Loretta, a failed mother who abducts the sons she previously abandoned and takes them west across the Nullarbor Plain, embodies this clash in personality and landscape.72 Floundering is as emblematic of the architecture of mobility as The Pages is of contemplative life. Motifs of autonomy and transitivity prevail in Ash’s book; the protagonist’s car is even personified as “Bert”, suggesting that mobility is so important it has to be affectively embodied. Floundering’s final line is “I stare out through the glass blurred by dust. The highway stretches black and liquid into the sky” (202), and the novel is galvanised by a sense of escape and possibility characteristic of neoliberalism far less available in the more constricted days of late modernity. But, inevitably, the escape offered by travel in Ash’s book is illusory.

Of course, ultimately a novel of any sophistication will not promise liberation merely through journeying. This is seen in Tony Birch’s Blood (2012), in which Indigenous children fend for themselves in the absence of an effective parental structure, and the city is no improvement over the country.73 In “Sound”, the last story in Ellen van Neerven’s David Unaipon Award-winning Heat and Light (2014), the Aboriginal narrator, Jodie, looks for her brother David, who has been sheltered by a white woman named Sarah.74 In Sarah’s house, Jodie at once finds an unexpected erotic relationship and a sense of the ambiguity of the house as a place of refuge. Domesticity is not as domestic as it used to be, and the architecture of mobility may be all that we have. There should not be too reductive an opposition between stasis and mobility. Steven Carroll’s The Art of the Engine Driver (2001), the first in his Glenroy series, uses trains and cars to delineate a time now passed, the novel’s end “tolling the end of an era”.75 In Carroll, cars and trains are vehicles for secrets, for hidden identities. Ash, however, uses mobility to outline the contemporary: a condition of mobility and transparency where affect, if it can manifest itself, must do so on the move.

In Floundering, the connection between the two architectures is resonantly evoked when Tom finds, in the back seat of the car, “a bit of Coke as hot as tea” (17). Coke in autos, as opposed to tea in middle-class suburban houses, should indicate that contemporary mobility is associated with prosperity, but the comparative advantage is all lost. Ash captures how Australia has changed since the time of Edith Campbell Berry. Moorhouse’s heroine dreamt of a cosmopolitanism that is now at our fingertips. In Floundering, Mongolian lamb is available, a token of a superficial gastronomic sophistication, a far more cosmopolitan repast than the “bananas and onion and sausages” (17) eaten at a representative moment in The Long Prospect. Yet this availability of exotic Asian food does not prevent Loretta from casually uttering an anti-Asian ethnic slur. Similarly, Floundering takes place outside of the psychological landscape of suburban limitation, amid prodigious kangaroos and stunning red cliffs jutting above beaches, but the characters cannot therefore escape those limitations. Indeed, Ash’s great achievement is to portray such iconic vistas of Australian nature as, affectively speaking, “non-places” in the sense in which Augé speaks of supermarkets or airports: meaningless, transactive places that cannot provide serenity or restorative virtue. The image of the public bathroom in Floundering, that banal corollary of travel, embodies this. The architecture of mobility has its virtues, but its glamour is no more durable than that of the architecture of idealism.

Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel (2012) similarly tries to deromanticise travel; however, it has a larger agenda.76 Like Castro, de Kretser seeks not just to introduce Asian and Asian-Australian experience into the Australian literary mainstream, but also to complicate the dichotomy between home and elsewhere. The novel’s two main characters, Ravi Mendis from Sri Lanka and Laura Fraser from Australia, seem to be travelling along opposite trajectories. Ravi is fleeing the civil unrest in his homeland for refuge in Australia while Laura, lucky enough to inherit money, seeks the glamour and sophistication of overseas travel. Laura works for a publisher of guide books, run by a family marked by complacency and spurious philanthropy (not unlike the Howards in Harrower’s In Certain Circles). The novel is concerned throughout with a pitfall in the idea of cosmopolitanism. Its epigraph quotes E. M. Forster: “Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle …” Although Forster was influenced by a Paterian aestheticism, the quotation also reflected the ambition, seen in Niemeyer’s Brasilia and Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh – although not in Griffin’s Canberra – to transcend the mundane and the local. In de Kretser’s time, the Promethean altruism that once led to the architecture of idealism has yielded to a more professionalised world of NGOs (such as the one Ravi’s doomed wife works for) and cultivated tourists. De Kretser’s second epigraph, from the Canadian-born American poet Elizabeth Bishop’s “Questions of Travel”, makes one think of Bishop’s line from the villanelle “One Art”: “I lost two cities, lovely ones”. Within the architecture of mobility, if one home is lost, another can all too easily be found simply by the exercise of financial or cultural capital.77 This is a world in which, as Dominic Pettman observes:

Although Ravi Mendis is an individual with a life of his own, and although Laura Fraser is not simply a synecdoche for contemporary Australia, but a sensitive and caring woman with her own problems and travails, de Kretser makes clear that Ravi’s travel is the second sort described by Pettman, while Laura’s travel is merely the first.

In this world, architecture is no longer the architecture of idealism. The Ramsey guide book firm is headquartered in “a former knitwear factory in Chippendale” (226), the sort of place that Harrower’s Felix Shaw or Patrick White’s Mordecai Himmelfarb might have worked, now gentrified and turned into office space for the service economy; the building’s industrial use is now so far away as to seem, in Margaret Thatcher’s phrase about the Berlaymont, yesterday’s future. But Questions of Travel also presents a more interstitial view of the architecture of mobility, one that can destabilise congealed and privilege expectations. The town where Ravi grows up just outside of Colombo has colonial churches laden with a “baroque flourish” (7), which confounds tourists seeking the purely exotic, not third-rate copies of images they have already seen. The novel’s harrowing denouement – in which Nimal Corea, a Sri Lankan-born web designer now living in Australia, sees Sydney mansions briefly illuminated and then abruptly lose power on the day of the devastating 2004 tsunami – highlights the role architecture can play in inequality. In this regard a more transitive and mobile view of architecture can bridge the gap between the privileged and the victimised. Architecture can travel. But, while the architecture of mobility might seem poised to upset hierarchies, its actual deployment often seals them.

Mobility, in de Kretser’s view, tacitly needs to be pried away from an idea of winning. In her Journals, Antigone Kefala notes the way assumptions of success turn a deaf ear to genuine diversity:

Contemporary prosperity hails cultural diversity in the abstract but, when it actually encounters it, often treats it with suspicion. The need to divorce “the desirable” or “the excellent” from “the successful”, to make sure that, unlike in the world of Tsiolkas’ Barracuda, in which only the winners are desirable, there are other desirables than mere success, is seen in Claire Corbett’s speculative-fiction novel When We Have Wings (2011), set in a fantasy world in which human beings acquire wings via massive surgical and prosthetic intervention, which elucidates the difference between those who soar while thinking of others and those whose wings are simply appurtenances of self-aggrandisement. Throughout the book, two narrators, Peri, a female champion flier, and Zeke, a male detective, exchange attitudes to flying. Zeke wonders whether he wanted his son Thomas to fly – to have wings – simply to “set himself up for life” or to “make him a success”.80 When We Have Wings ends with the sense that transcendence must mean more than simply prevailing. The wings of the characters provide embodiment as well as exhilaration; idealism is expressed by the firmness of architecture. This is seen in another speculative novel, James Bradley’s Clade (2015), which like de Kretser’s book describes an ecocatastrophe.81 In the near future, climate change devastates not just the land itself but also architectural structures, including a seemingly secure beach house in Bondi. The novel focuses on a married couple, Adam and Ellie, and their teenage daughter, Summer. Summer’s friend Meera, rebellious but charismatic, breaks into houses and spurns politics. Her destructiveness is not just non-idealistic but seemingly intentionally anti-idealistic. At the end of the book, one of the survivors of the global catastrophe, Bo, has a “reassuring solidity” about him as he engages in a “reconstruction project”.82 The association of natural disasters with anarchy, and with anti-architecturalism, is clear. Planned environments can be utopian. But they can also act as sanctuaries in which the affect of idealism can persist. In this context, modern architecture, with its ideal and interstitial relationship to lived reality, shows that it can be more than merely yesterday’s future. The planners’ make-believe of the artificial capital, like the writers’ make-believe of fiction, can render sustainable cities in which we can move beyond a division between winners and losers.

Affect as Antidote

The three modes of affect discussed in this chapter – rancour, concern, and idealism – are the literary solutions this book proposes to the problems of neoliberalism. Of course, these three are not the only affects, just the ones most pertinent to this book’s argument. The affect theorists cited at the beginning of Chapter 5 discuss alternative affects, as well as the discursive operations of affect itself. But my aim in this book is to show that states of feeling can offer an answer and an antidote to the hierarchies and reductions of neoliberalism, and to neoliberalism’s putative division of the world into winners and losers. This is probably as strong a riposte to neoliberalism as we can expect from literature or from literary criticism. As tempting as it might be to attempt a more polemical or prescriptive response, that is best left to public policy makers.

A deeper danger, and one to which literary criticism has historically been intermittently subject, is of nostalgia, a wish for the way things were, or might have been. If the welfare-state structures of late modernity had survived, the inequalities of neoliberalism would have been avoided. But those structures collapsed, and, as my analysis of the work of Christina Stead and Elizabeth Harrower has shown, there was much in them that was static, repressive and patriarchal. That these two writers were committed leftists, albeit of different stripes, makes their critique all the more compelling. The last outcome their books solicit would be a resurgence of free-market capitalism. Yet the predicament of late modernity they describe was burst by just such a resurgence.

Australia cannot go back to late modernity today because late modernity’s elevation of the white male is unacceptable, because late modernity was too confining, and because humanity, and the world, have changed too much. The way forward is through the states of feeling whose expression neoliberalism has encouraged, but whose emotional depth challenges the flattening and monetising of neoliberalism’s Darwinian, monochromatic anthropology, its sense that the agenda of mankind is naught but getting and spending. It is through the vehicle of emotion that, in the preceding three chapters, writers not explicitly political, like Alex Miller, Gail Jones and Gerald Murnane, can have a tacit politics as much as writers such as John Kinsella, Ouyang Yu and Michelle de Kretser, whose political thrust is far more manifest. Affect also provides a way for spiritual themes, in their various avatars of fury, compassion, and hope, to be paired with literary analysis without, on the one hand, elevating any particular religious dogma or, on the other, melting into a blandly pluralistic soup.

Literature engages with politics and history. But it is also distinct from them. It unfolds itself imaginatively, as more of an apparition than a proposal, and thus generates emotions in the reader. To lean too much on these emotions, however, or to simplify them, would lead to sentimentality. It is because rancour, concern and idealism are such contradictory and self-conscious emotions that they do not succumb to self-pity. Yet, in the strength of their purpose and their confidence in their arduously achieved convictions, they lead the way forward.