The narratives of this world are numberless. . . Able to be carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting . . . stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news items, conversation. Moreover, under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere has been a people without narrative. All classes, all human groups, have their narratives, enjoyment of which is very often shared by men with different, even opposing, cultural backgrounds. Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself.
Roland Barthes
This book is about narrative, about the forms and meanings constructed through Australian storytellers. It is based on the conviction that narratives are ultimately produced by the culture; thus they generate meanings, take on significances, and assume forms that are articulations of the values, beliefs—the ideology—of the culture. The approach is interdisciplinary, examining the relationships between examples of two narrative forms, literary fiction and the feature film.
This procedure is adopted in order to gain a fuller picture of Australian narrative than is available by concentrating on one medium. The results of this book, therefore, focus upon culture as the primary subject rather than upon either literature or film. Although it does work within the discrete disciplines of literary or film studies at numerous points (and hopefully it will make many judgements of interest to those disciplines) this book can thus more accurately be seen as a contribution to the developing discipline of Australian cultural studies.
While interested in, and largely drawn from, the study of specific texts, the argument of the book is inevitably more concerned with the similarities than the differences between individual texts—in other words with the common or dominant forms and meanings in Australian narrative. As the culture produces its texts it prefers certain meanings, thematic structures and formal strategies. Within these preferred forms and meanings we find the ideology of the culture: the way it makes sense of itself and infers meaning onto its institutions and practices. In studying some of these preferences, this book aims at providing more than a critical, thematic survey of a range of Australian texts; it examines a number of the ways in which the Australian culture creates meaning in its narratives in order to suggest not only what an Australian narrative is, but also what it does.
This enterprise takes place within a complicated context. The study of Australian literature has been dominated by the search for the definition of ‘Australian’ literature, and has been especially concerned with problems of standards: specifically, by which standards—local, or universal—are Australian texts to be ‘judged’.1 An important political provocation for this preoccupation was the need for Australian literary studies to legitimate their area of interest in comparison with, and in terms of, the more traditional area—English literature. Until quite recently, Australian literary studies has had a predominantly evaluative cast. Its most positive productions have been eager to represent Australian literature as a body of writing that included writers of stature comparable to the greats in the English literary canon. This enterprise has not been entirely successful, but it does give some extra-literary clues to the preference for Patrick White, for example, over Frank Hardy.
Behind the arguments about standards, of course, lurked philosophical and ideological positions which were informally proposed as appropriate ones within apparently disinterested arguments and debates. This aspect of the battle for the control of the definition of Australian literature is the subject of John Docker’s In A Critical Condition.2 Docker sees the dominant model of Australian literary criticism, the ‘metaphysical ascendancy’, as one which looks for the ‘best’ examples of Australian writing—those which are ‘universal’ in quality and metaphysical in implication—and which attempts to draw lines of influence between them in order to establish a tradition. The opposing, subordinate tradition, that of the radical nationalists, interests itself instead in writers for their direct relevance to Australian society, and it has a preference for a more political, critical, and socially concerned fiction. The debate between these two camps, according to Docker, occupies a major area in Australian literary criticism.
Docker’s account, while recognisable in most respects, does simplify overmuch, drawing the divisions too neatly and overlooking differences and contradictions. Further, his outlining of the ideological function of critical positions implicitly discredits the attempt to propose some kind of coherence in our literary tradition. Despite this implication, however, it is possible to list a significant number of studies whose attempts to explain the dominant ways of making meaning out of Australian experience through literary fiction have provided us with useful insights and provisional patterns for a preliminary theory of Australian prose narrative. For example, Brian Kiernan’s Images of Society and Nature,3 while the subject of much revision and amendment, offers in its last chapter a coherent model of the predicament of the individual within Australian fiction. H. P. Heseltine’s 1962 Meanjin article4 (updated in Kiernan’s work) still holds benefits for the contemporary reader. Veronica Brady’s neglected A Crucible of Prophets5 is a source of many insights into the problems of a particular realm of meaning—the spiritual—in Australian writing. And rigorous treatments of discrete areas or periods of writing—such as Ian Reid’s Fiction and the Great Depression6—are resonant with implications about the determinants of the larger tradition.
However, while Australian criticism has become increasingly sophisticated over the last decade, the work of defining the nature of ‘Australian-ness’ in literary fiction is still incomplete. The most adventurous studies in recent times have been discussions of particular texts or writers, or contributions to the general field of the relationship between literature and history—enlarging and complicating the context within which literary studies situates its subject matter. In important ways, this present study is a contribution to this latter area.
While there has been a proliferation of discussion of specific texts in literary criticism—since the evaluation of the particular text has been the first step in acts of exploration and colonisation of the Australian literary territory—this is not the case in Australian film studies. The first efforts at Australian film studies were historical, their approach ‘excavatory, celebratory and polemical’.7 Even quite recent and apparently authoritative studies, such as Pike and Cooper’s annotated filmography Australian Film 1900—1977,8 belong within this mode of film history. There has been a radical change in the last ten years, however, leading to the reconstruction of Australian film history.9 Due especially to the work of John Tulloch,10 the contextual, ideological, and industrial aspects of film production as well as the cultural significance of the meaning of individual narratives have become central concerns of contemporary academic accounts of Australian film. Unlike fiction, film generates widespread popular interest and discussion in the popular press as well as in more specialist journals such as Cinema Papers; and it is even the subject of coffee table books such as Murray’s The New Australian Cinema or David Stratton’s The Last New Wave.11 Theoretical debate of any complexity is carried on through such journals as the Australian Journal of Screen Theory, Film-news, and more recently the Australian Journal of Cultural Studies. To date there is not a large body of academic criticism of Australian films, nor a wide spread of analysis of individual films outside the review pages of the popular or industry press. Having gained respectability only recently, film studies are thus still to emerge from the marginalised position which they have held in Australian academia.
Further, Australian film—even more so than Australian literature—is often seen to be beneath consideration when compared to the work of European or Scandinavian film-makers. The location of film studies within English Departments has been a dominant feature of the discipline’s institutional history—and this has had, as Noel King argues,12 a number of consequences on the success which film studies may or may not have enjoyed in representing itself as a separate, legitimate area of study. Among the consequences which concern us here is the preference which has developed for the articulation of a general film theory over the more literary exercise of establishing a body of orthodox readings of individual texts; and the specific way in which these theoretical influences have shaped the new discipline. The roots of contemporary Australian film theory and criticism are not as predominantly evaluative as in literary criticism. The early influence of cultural historians provided assistance in the establishment of an interest in the film industry itself, so context is rarely as completely ignored in studies of Australian film as it is in many studies of Australian fiction. As the influence of semiotics provided theoretical support for film studies’ interest in popular culture, and as theories of representation focussed attention on the film text as a particular discursive practice rather than as an aesthetic production, the cultural function and significance of film narrative did become an important item on the new discipline’s agenda.
There is a complication, however—and it lies in the marxian suspicion of studies which are nationalist in ideology. So the category of ‘Australian film’ is itself often seen as problematic. The environmental determinism which dominates so much of Australian literary and historical studies as a means of explaining the development of an Australian cultural tradition is explicitly attacked by contemporary film theorists;13 and this dramatises the difference between the theoretical traditions within which the two areas of study have developed. Further evidence of the difference is the lack of attention given to proposing the importance of certain ‘seminal’ film texts. Structuralist in that similarities are held to be more interesting than differences, semiotic in that texts are seen as signifying structures interesting for what they reveal about signification in film texts in general, film theory in Australia has devoted comparatively little time to arguments about particular texts or particular directors. Even the productions of the revival of the seventies (from which the majority of my examples will come) are not usually provided with more attention than is possible within a review or survey article. Tulloch’s first book on Australian film production in the 1920s and 1930s, Legends on the Screen, does provide us with the major sources of close and detailed analysis of particular films and film-makers; but this work has not yet fostered similar treatments for the films of the 1940s, 1950s, or for contemporary cinema—although a number of such works are in press at the moment.14
Although departments of film studies have often grown out of (or are attached to) literature departments, this has not created a close relationship between them. Indeed, the very fact of an institutional dependence—even if only an initial one—on literary studies has made film studies mark out its area in opposition to that of literature. This demarcation often takes the form of a theoretical position which denies the category of high art, and which attacks what is caricatured as the poverty of theory in literary studies. Consequently, while comparisons between film and fiction are frequent they are usually informal rather than proposed in any systematic way. The work of Colin McCabe in the United Kingdom,15 problematic as it is, does not have an equivalent in Australia. A limited exception to this is, once again, John Tulloch’s Legends on the Screen, where much use is made of literary constructions of the bush myth and the Australian legend—although the legend is not as problematised as it normally is in literary studies. The only book to make a systematic connection—Brian McFarlane’s account of Australian fiction made into film, Words and Images16—is a reading of a collection of texts which examines the translation of one medium into another from an essentially evaluative position, one that is intrinsically literary. No conclusions are drawn by McFarlane from his study—and even if there were they would be conclusions about the translation of novels into film, which is a different matter from relating the meanings articulated in our film tradition to those articulated in our literary tradition. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the work which this book sets out to accomplish has not been done elsewhere. The recognition that Australian literature and film are both narratives produced by the culture can be seen in Tulloch’s and Sylvia Lawson’s work,17 but it is not argued by any literary critic. The two disciplines of film and literature studies, it seems, do require a degree of theoretical mediation before the benefits of either one can be shared with the other.
That mediation is occurring elsewhere. Developments in narratology reveal that the study of narrative has the potential of providing a framework within which such a two-pronged study can be undertaken. The study of narrative today is ‘no longer restricted to poetics’ but has become ‘an attempt to describe fundamental operations of any signifying system’.18 British and European cultural studies of representation, using discourse analysis and semiotics, also examine the way in which meaning is produced through the representation of reality in all forms of communication. Stuart Hall talks of representation as the ‘active labour of making things mean’ through a complicated system of regulation and exclusion which operates through language and discourse.19 The methods developed by narratology and cultural studies offer useful ways of establishing narrative as a mediating category, of theorising the relationships between different narrative forms, and of relating the conclusions of such a study to the ideology of the culture which produces them. The opportunity offered by theories of narrative is thus one which this book sets out to exploit, and it produces different analyses of texts to those normally found in either film or literary studies.
This study is therefore text-based. It draws from a range of narratives in film and fiction (occasionally verse) a number of common structures which are then traced back into the culture. Apart from admitting the existence of important differences between the conditions of production of film and fiction, there is no attempt to present an analysis of those conditions. I recognise that a full account of Australian narrative would require this, but I do not attempt to be comprehensive in this study. To provide a full analysis of the organisation of industrial, institutional, representational and discursive determinants of narrative would involve a very different exercise, one that I do not feel competent to undertake, and one which does not serve the more limited objectives of this book.
This book has a number of objectives. First, since my own background is literary, it is aimed at widening the field of discussion of literary fiction by revealing how the patterns which dominate the Australian literary tradition also shape film narrative in this country. This does not mean that I attempt to construct a ‘great tradition’ of Australian film to match that great tradition enshrined in the Oxford History of Australian Literature;20 indeed, qualitative, evaluative and hierarchical judgements play little part in the book or in the methodology that organises it. The notion of value, particularly in its application to Australian literary studies, operates so as to colonise and to privilege certain kinds of discourse. From this study’s point of view, the cultural importance of the ‘elected’ texts is their privileged nature rather than their intrinsic value—or lack of it. By viewing literary fiction as narrative it is argued that literary production proceeds from sources within the culture which are related to those which generate other kinds of cultural production; and although literary fiction is formed in different ways and asks for different kinds of reception, its relation to the culture is no less direct, no less mediated by historical forces outside the author’s control.
A second objective of the study is to continue the work done by Tulloch in proposing some shape for the Australian film tradition. For the films which were made during the 1920s and 1930s the work has largely been done already; films made since that time, despite the amount of attention which the 1970s revival has received, are generally not so well served. Again, this proposition of a ‘tradition’—a word tainted with prescriptive overtones, but for which there is no suitable alternative—does not involve the hierarchising of various texts, but rather the drawing of parallels, the constructing of homologies between the forms which are used and the meanings which are generated by film texts. While I do refer to films made outside the 1970s and 1980s, this period is my main source of examples. I see the films of the revival as being continuous with the body of film which precedes it, despite the customary polemical arguments about the destructive effects of the long hiatus in Australian feature film production.
I have not included television productions as items of analysis, nor would I expect my conclusions to automatically apply to television. While film and fiction do share important similarities as narrative forms and also a craft-like industrial structure, the television narrative industrially and structurally (at the textual level) seems crucially different. As John Ellis points out in Visible Fictions,21 the dominant narrative form in television is the series or the serial rather than the discrete, closed narrative. To have included television within this study would have involved so much qualification and exception as to render it unwieldy.
The third objective of the book is to establish those kinds of meanings which are preferred, the forms in which they are articulated, and their ideological function within Australian culture. An inevitable consequence of this is the concentration on a particular set of meanings, and thus the creation of an apparently monistic model of form and meaning in Australian narrative. In carrying out the business of describing the dominant set of meanings I have made no attempt at prescription, by ruling out aberrant forms in favour of those which seem to fit the pattern. The wider suggestiveness of the result is the justification, hopefully, of the method.
The book is designed as an application of theory. So the examples cited are simply that, rather than comprehensive surveys of the full range of possible applications of the theory—and it is for readers to judge how far one can apply the models proposed. But the examples have been drawn from a whole range of locations, from those accepted within the literary canon to those excluded, from populist film to the ‘quality’ films of the revival, in an attempt to establish the commonality of their sources and function within the culture.
The attempt to find points of synthesis between literary theory, film theory and cultural studies theory means that there are a large number of assumptions that need to be named. Most of these assumptions will emerge during the course of later chapters, and the major theoretical connection between film and fiction is dealt with specifically in the first chapter. Some assumptions, however, need to be named at this point. To begin with, the model of culture from which this study proceeds draws on marxian, structuralist and anthropological concepts of culture. Consequently, the important assumption here is that the concentration on Australian narrative is none other than an examination of the cultural specificity of meaning: the universality of narrative is admitted, and so the focus upon Australian narrative is not an exercise in nationalism but an enquiry into those determinants of narrative which are culturally specific. The enquiry, however, is not extensively comparative, in that references are made to the narratives of other cultures purely as a result of the need to maintain the key focus of the argument—and so they are as often rhetorical as they are systematic. This is not to deny the value of comparative methods. But to make extensive use of such methods would be to write a different book. I acknowledge, in short, that Australia is only physically an island and that its history is enclosed within a larger, western history—so that the examination of the cultural specificity of our narratives is not in any way an argument for their uniqueness but rather for a kind of Australian accent which is audible and distinctive when placed in relation to that of other English speakers.
My use of essentially synchronic methodology also needs to be noted. I have not provided developmental models of narrative in either film or fiction (although the history of both film and fiction does occupy many of the theoretical paragraphs). Primarily I have seen our langue of narrative—the cultural inventory of myths, of associations and of the meanings which they support—as the object of analysis which is best understood by artificially ‘freezing’ it, and by including within it the full range of narratives available, from the beginnings to the present. In doing this I am working within a post-Saussurean semiotic tradition, one which tends to describe a linguistic system by isolating its elements and their internal relationships in order to examine their function within the total system.22 If language is a relational system, the relevant and available relations are those which obtain at the present time, and the analogy I draw between language on the one hand and the language of narrative on the other hand makes this approach the most appropriate.
The study of narrative as a means of studying the ‘ways of seeing’ of a culture is not new. Levi-Strauss’ analysis of myth is a landmark in this area,23 and most contemporary theories of narrative acknowledge its enclosure within the structures of meaning of the culture. We have long been happy to accept a view of the novel as, in Culler’s words, ‘the model by which society conceives of itself, the discourse in and through which it articulates the world.’24 The referential dimension of the novel, its continual advertence to real life, is responsible for the novel becoming the major literary form of the modern era. Even more so the feature film: the referential dimension of realist cinema is so great that it can appear transparent, unmediated. The feature film is the twentieth-century storyteller, and much more than the contemporary novel it is the ‘model through which we articulate the world’. Thus the study of film and fiction narrative as the product of culture eventually—and necessarily—becomes a study of representation, for narrative then also has a cultural function of making sense of experience, of filling absences, of resolving contradictions (and generally, of filling the role ascribed to it by Levi-Strauss as analogous to myth). This makes an analysis of the discourses through which Australian experience is represented all the more essential. As our study progresses, therefore, this aspect takes on greater importance.
The organisation of our chapters requires some summary. Following the introduction to the theoretical connections between film and fiction in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 examines the meanings given to the Australian context, both natural and social. The customary opposition between the country and the city is denied, in favour of a more unitary view of the Australian context which uses the harshness of the natural environment as an alibi for the powerlessness of the individual within the social environment. In this chapter there is wide reference to film and fiction, as well as extended analyses of Caddie, Wake in Fright, Ultima Thule, and Landtakers. Chapter 3 looks at the role of the individual within the context outlined in the previous chapter—as the protagonist in narrative. Two main ideas are examined: the first traces the image of the individual which is encapsulated in the fact and in the metaphor of convictism; and the second looks at this image as the representation of a particular metaphysical or existential stance. The version of the individual which emerges has the Australian protagonist responding to a secularised and alienated environment by admitting the withdrawal of meaning and value, but without inventing a replacement for which he may accept responsibility. Behind this meta-physic there is an ideological proposition that negates the value of individual action and legitimates powerlessness and subjection. The range of texts is again wide, but close attention is paid to Stir, For the Term of His Natural Life, The Getting of Wisdom, The Devil’s Playground, and Bring Larks and Heroes.
Describing the image of a powerless and defeated selfhood constructed through the representation of the Australian protagonist reveals one set of information; examining the modes of characterisation employed in our narratives reveals another. The range of modes of characterisation in our narratives is narrow—and it reveals certain preferences about what constitutes the individual. Although we have heroes in our verse narratives, in the more realist forms of prose and film such highly individualised characters are rare. Chapter 4 examines the ideological implications and motivations of this phenomenon through, among others, the stories of Henry Lawson, the films of Peter Weir, and Sunday Too Far Away. Increasingly, then, this chapter touches upon the problems of representation; and so Chapter 5 looks at the dominance of certain modes of representing Australian nationalism in film and fiction. The thematic and political postures of acceptance and defeat as outlined earlier are now actively celebrated through nationalist constructions such as the battler and the larrikin. Texts examined are the films Breaker Morant, The Man From Snowy River, Gallipoli and Phar Lap.
Since the book gives an account of one dominant field of meaning, the concluding chapter—Chapter 6—therefore begins by reviewing other, possibly contradictory, developments within Australian narrative for their oppositional or ameliorative potential. There is some discussion of new formal directions in contemporary film and fiction (such work as Hayden Keenan’s Going Down and Peter Carey’s Bliss) which is then followed by the general conclusions.
I would like to acknowledge assistance in the preparation of this work from several colleagues in the School of English at WAIT. Delys Bird has offered the intellectual and personal support of a model colleague; John Fiske has been a challenging and important source of ideas and information; while Jon Watts, Robert Dixon and Don Grant have been helpful and sympathetic readers of work in progress. I am grateful for the generous and useful responses that this work has received from Brian Kiernan, John McLaren, Laurie Hergenhan, and, particularly, my editors, Judy Benson and John Tulloch.
I would also like to thank the University of Western Australia for the provision of a research fellowship which allowed me to work in a peaceful and congenial environment, as well as the members of the English Department at UWA—particularly Veronica Brady, Bruce Bennett and John Hay—for their interest and support during my time there. My students of Australian Studies at WAIT, who have been the testing ground for the ideas put forward in this book, receive affectionate acknowledgement and thanks; their discussions have been a major influence on the development of my work. To my wife I owe thanks for her patience and for her understanding of the utterly arbitrary sacrifice of private time demanded by this study. Finally, I owe thanks to my typist, Rae Kelly, for the unflagging excellence of her work.
1 Brian Kiernan, Criticism (Australian Writers and Their Work series) (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1974), p.3.
2 (Ringwood: Penguin, 1984).
3 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1971).
4 ‘The Australian Image: The Literary Heritage’ reprinted in Clement Semmler (ed.) Twentieth Century Australian Literary Criticism (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp.86-101.
5 (Sydney: Theological Explorations, 1981).
6 (Melbourne: Edward Arnold, 1979).
7 Stuart Cunningham, ‘Australian Film History and Historiography’, Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol.1, No.1, p. 123. This article is the source of a number of the general comments on Australian film criticism which follow.
8 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1980).
9 Cunningham, p. 125.
10 Australian Cinema: Industry, Narrative and Meaning (Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1982); Legends on the Screen: The Narrative Film in Australia 1919-1929 (Sydney: Currency Press, 1981).
11 (Melbourne: Nelson/Cinema Papers, 1980); (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1980).
12 ‘Changing the Curriculum: The Place of Film in a Department of English’, Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol.1, No.l, 1983, pp.47–55.
13 See Cunningham op. cit. as well as Australian Film’ in the Australian Journal of Screen Theory, Nos. 5 & 6 (1978) pp.46-47.
14 Amongst these are Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka’s The Screening of Australia, and Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan’s Australian Film Reader.
15 I have in mind his work on the classic realist text, making comparisons between the novel and cinema: ‘Realism and the Cinema: Notes on some Brechtian Theses’ first published in Screen (Vol.15, No.2) and reprinted in Tony Bennett, Susan Boyd-Bowman, Colin Mercer and Janet Woollacott (eds) Popular Film and Television (London: BFI, 1981) pp.216-35.
16 (Richmond: Heinemann, 1983).
17 Sylvia Lawson, ‘Towards Decolonisation: Film History in Australia’, in Susan Dermody, John Docker, and Drusilla Modjeska (eds) Nellie Melba, Ginger Meggs and Friends, (Malmsbury: Kibble, 1982), pp.19 –32.
18 Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 131.
19 ‘The Rediscovery of “ideology”: The Return of the repressed in Media Studies’, in Michael Gurevitch, Tony Bennett, James Curran, and Janet Woollacott (eds) Culture, Society and the Media, (London: Methuen, 1982) p.64.
20 Leonie Kramer (ed.) (Melbourne: O.U.P., 1981).
21 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), pp. 1-3.
22 Jonathon Culler, Saussure (London: Fontana, 1976), pp.29-35.
23 ‘The Structural Study of Myth’ in Richard and Fernande DeGeorge (eds) The Structuralists from Marx to Levi-Strauss, (New York: Doubleday/Anchor, 1972), pp. 169-94.
24 Jonathon Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 189.