In conversation: On writing, music & modernity

The Southbank Centre is currently running ‘The Rest is Noise’ festival, holding talks, performances, lectures and interviews over the course of each weekend. At the beginning of February, I bought tickets to attend the weekend titled ‘The Rise of Nationalism’, primarily to attend the ‘Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf – writing, music and modernity’ discussion.

This discussion was chaired by the esteemed Dr Delia da Sousa Correa, co-director of the Open University’s ‘Literature and Music’ research group, who was in conversation with authors Kirsty Gunn and Gabriel Josipovici. The talk was split into two parts. First, the authors each spoke of their own engagement with music and how this continues to inform their writing, both in terms of content and, more interestingly (at least for myself), form and process. This provided a natural segue into discussing the influences of Mansfield and Woolf’s approaches to music, as regards their own successes in forging a ‘narrative that is much more akin to music’, as Kirsty Gunn so eloquently put it. It was fascinating hearing the two conversations, with Gabriel bringing what seemed to me to be a very European-focused musical heritage and set of influences, given his Russo-Italian, Romano-Levantine background, while Kirsty clearly drew heavily on her New Zealand heritage and pervading Scottish influence, relating stories of her father’s pipe playing while she was growing up.

As chair, Delia opened the discussion and pinned down some key elements that particularly struck a chord with me (given my continued interest in ellipsis, absence and presence in conversation). She discussed the (now) iconic modernist stream of consciousness style that mimics an internal rhythm, rather than narrative linearity, highlighting the juxtaposition between writers’ eternal quests for rhythm (particularly in relation to modernism), yet the avoidance and imprecision of a definition for this term (see John Middleton Murry’s extremely loose and all-encompassing definition for the little mag, Rhythm), particularly for Mansfield and Woolf. She also reminded the audience of modernism’s ‘project’ of creating the lyric novel, which is still very much a project that is alive today, as evidenced by Gabriel and Kirsty.

Kirsty divulged her process approach to narrative, where she begins each book with a preoccupation with a single formative sound, the rest carefully peeled back like an onion. Over the course of the narrative, as anyone who has read The Big Music can attest to, she returns, again and again, to the infinity of the moment, that single note or sound. Music, for her, seemed to be a metaphor and a way or process with which to ‘make’ stories that ‘release the narrative from the temporal moment-to-moment’ progression of a linear storyline arc. In relation to The Big Music, she discussed the cyclic, infinite, almost mobius-like form that the narrative weaves through, almost seamlessly. What struck me deeply about Kirsty’s meditation on her working process was that the gaps, the pauses, the absences were just as integral as the moments of speech, the presence, the filled work – I guess what I mean to say is that there seemed to be equal interplay between notes, sound and silence, absence and presence that were at play, responsible for creating this ‘other kind of prose’.

Reading from Virginia Woolf’s ‘On not knowing Greek’, Gabriel identified both this essay and, significantly, Jacob’s Room as key texts for this interplay between words and music, sound and silence. Both texts are about not knowing, about unsung lives; the anti-novel or anti-biography Jacob’s Room stresses, in direct contradiction to Forster’s impassioned call to ‘only connect’, that in the post-war London environment, there was, in fact, the singular call to ‘only disconnect’. As Gabriel insightfully expressed, for Woolf in constructing Jacob’s Room, she saw no individual meaning, but rather a greater, larger place in the universal rhythm of the cosmos. The singular, individual call for Jacob throughout the first scene remains unanswered.

I came away from this talk enthused about, as Delia stressed, the intersection between fiction and music, which acted – and still does act – to make reading more participative, more collaborative. And yet, for both Mansfield and Woolf, released from the horrors of war (World War I, at least), from the old ways of constructing prose, everything could be significant – single, moving notes in a performance – or equally, they could mean nothing – we could be washed away by the whole, the larger music.

2013 NZ-Australian Modernist Reading List

I admire those who create reading lists. Generally, I read in a far more haphazard fashion. Over the past couple of years, I’ve noticed more and more people creating these ‘new year’ lists of books that they would love to have ‘finally’ read by the end of the year ahead, so I decided to create a specifically ‘Elizabeth’ list, which means modernist and Southern Hemisphere dominated books. So here is a list of the 2013 NZ-Australian Modernist authors/books that I aim to read over the coming year.

Eleanor Dark’s Prelude to Christopher (in particular), but would also love to pick up her Return to Coolami

Robin Hyde’s Wednesday’s Children
Jane Mander’s Allen Adair (and potentially a re-read of The Story of a New Zealand River)
Miles Franklin’s novels, particularly My Brilliant Career and My Career Goes Bung
Christina Stead’s classic The Man Who Loved Children

Eve Langley’s novel The Pea-Pickers and more of her poetry collections; any of Katharine Susannah Prichard novels, with my first pick being Intimate Strangers; M. Barnard Eldershaw (being the collaborative writing efforts of Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw), particularly the collection The Persimmon Tree (Majorie Barnard), but also some of their fiction, such as Green Memory or Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow; Jean Devanny’s fiction, particularly Sugar Heaven and/or The Butcher Shop

So here goes for a Southern Hemisphere Modernist reading list! I will also be popping in other gems amongst these, notably I am currently making my way through Dorothy Richardson’s 13 volume stream-of-consciousness collection Pilgrimage (I am almost at book 3 – Honeycomb) and I am also happily indulging in Kirsty Gunn’s The Big Music. Happy 2013 reading to everyone!

Exile’s Return (or L’Exil et le Retour) conference (Part II)

It’s finally here! Part II of the NZ-lit/Mansfield part of the Sorbonne conference that I attended and spoke at way back in June (hangs head at not being quicker to post what was an incredible conference).

So I left off my last post – see Part I blog post – promising some gems from Alberto Manguel’s presentation and a summary of the Mansfield panels that I was lucky enough to be a part of during the conference. Alberto’s keynote presentation ‘First and Last Modernists: From Conrad to Borges’ was given in the Grand Amphitheatre on Friday evening – the end of the second day of the conference. Manguel famously, at the tender age of 17, attained the job of ‘reader’ for Jorge Luis Borges, who had become blind by this stage in his writing career. He recounted this formative experience to us, divulging in snippets of their nightly habit, including how Borges would interrupt and dissect what Manguel was reading. What really struck me concerning Manguel’s unravelling of his reading relationship was the focus on Borges’ use of Conrad’s geography. Joseph Conrad was reputedly highly influential for Borges, and he took onboard Conrad’s belief that our geographies are imaginary. According to Conrad and Borges, the cartography of the imagination and the cartography of the earth meet very rarely (on this point, I waver). He stressed to Manguel that we simply want to know where we are because we want to know who we are. Any place might throw up relics of never-never land.

Following Manguel’s fascinating keynote speech on the Friday evening, the following day heralded two Mansfield-focused panels. I spoke as a part of the first panel in the Grand Amphitheatre ‘Mansfield, Exile and the Self’. My conference paper ‘Within the pages of Rhythm: Mansfield, exile and nostalgie de la boue’ took two of Mansfield’s New Zealand stories – ‘The Woman at the Store’ and ‘Millie’ – and their original placement in, and engagement with, the avant garde little magazine Rhythm (which Mansfield initially contributed to and later co-edited) as their point of departure. Focusing on these short fictions and Frederick Goodyear’s opening manifesto-essay ‘The New Thelema’, the paper examined the drawing together of the notion of exile and the discovery of the self. As Goodyear extolled in the first issue of Rhythm, and as Mansfield expressed in her early fiction, it is the ‘outcast selves’ who possess a ‘true impulse towards conscious freedom’. My paper was followed by the lovely Janet Wilson, who was the brains behind the organisation of the two Mansfield panels for the conference. Janet’s paper ‘Mansfield, France and Childhood’ traced the shift from the raw outback short fictions (which I covered) to Mansfield’s increasing preoccupation with an impressionistic mode, producing semi-autobiographical stories of childhood, such as ‘New Dresses’, ‘Elena’ and ‘The Little Girl’. I particularly relished Janet’s discussion of Mansfield’s representation of the complexity of adolescence in ‘Something Childish But Very Natural’, which was Mansfield’s first story written in Paris (in December 1913). The focus on Mansfield’s concern with liminal stages and the dramatisation of her own psychological state during this period was fascinating. Janet also delved into Mansfield’s first draft of ‘The Aloe’, which was produced during her time spent in Paris from March to May 1915.

After hot-footing it over to Le Quartier du Jardin-des-Plantes for lunch at La Mosquee de Paris (with gorgeous Tagines, mint tea and pastries), we returned to an afternoon session ‘Mansfield and Gallant: International Modernism and Paris’ in the Petit Amphitheatre. Sydney Janet Kaplan (all the way from the University of Washington) gave her conference presentation ‘Mansfield, Manoukhin and International Modernism: Paris 1922′. Sydney’s paper focused on Mansfield’s last stay in Paris, during which she effectively experienced Paris secondhand through Murry, due to the debilitating effects of her illness. This final sojourn in Paris involved treatments with Dr Manoukhin, which struggle is likened to that of ‘The Fly’. Sydney dealt in fascinating detail with John Middleton Murry’s unpublished journals of this period, which reveal new details concerning this fraught time in Paris. She also discussed Mansfield meeting several notable modernists in Paris, including Joyce, who had just published Ulysses. I was particularly interested in her discussion of Olive Schrivener’s focus on the ‘real life’. After Sydney’s paper came Anne Mounic, senior lecturer at the Sorbonne, whose paper ‘A Flavour of Paris in Katherine Mansfield’s Stories’ honed in on D.H. Lawrence’s phrase ‘spirit of place’ in relation to Mansfield’s Paris stories ‘Feuille d’Album’, ‘Je ne parle pas francais’, ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ and ‘The Fly’. Anne also discussed Mansfield’s connection to Baudelaire. I really loved Anne’s concern with the dynamic impulse of the self, connecting this up to various scenes in Mansfield’s fiction, particularly when the male narrator’s heart falls out of the window in ‘Feuille d’Album’ and the jar lid spinning frantically at the culmination of ‘Prelude’. The final speaker in this panel focused on both Katherine Mansfield and Mavis Gallant. Christine Lorre-Johnston’s paper ‘Women Abroad: Expatriation in Short Stories by Katherine Mansfield and Mavis Gallant’ invoked Said’s delicate separation of the two states of expatriation and exile, taking expatriation as the starting point with which to discuss expatriate characters in both Mansfield and Gallant’s fiction. This careful delineation was skilfully employed by Christine, and it was refreshing to consider a comparison between two writers whose experiences in Europe (particularly in Paris) were dominated by choice, rather than constraint.

It was an insightful and collegial three-day conference in Paris and it led me, as is usual, back to Mansfield’s letters and diaries to dig out her thoughts on that phenomenal city. She said it far better than I ever could: ‘the weather is icy, but Paris looks beautiful. Everything is white & every morning the sun disappears in a pink sky. The fountains are just a bubble in their basins of ice… I am going to enjoy life in Paris I know. It is so human and there is something noble in the city… It is a real city, old and fine and life plays in it for everybody to see’ (1913).

Exile’s Return (or L’Exil et le Retour) conference (Part I)

At the very end of June, I attended and spoke at the Exile’s Return (or L’Exil et le Retour) EMiC conference at the Universite Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris. The conference was a full three days, from the 28th of June through to the 30th of June, of conference presentations, plenaries, roundtables, keynote talks and plenty of socialising with coffee, pain au chocolate (I honestly had a year’s worth of pain au chocolate, croissants and madeleines) and some incredible conference luncheons (most notable, in my opinion, was the incredible La Mosquee de Paris in Place Monge).

As you can anticipate, speaking of Modernism and exile (both willing and unwilling) – two terms so closely interconnected – there were a plethora of notes that I came home with, which literally filled a whole cahier. It has sat and burgeoned out at me on my desk ever since, berating me for not addressing, even in part, those engaging couple of days. So I decided that it would suffice, and perhaps even provide a more interesting (as more succinct and detailed) report to focus on just a few sessions and individual speakers that spoke to me. I took much this same approach with my report on the RMIT ‘Katherine Mansfield, the “Underworld” and the “Blooms Berries”‘ conference, and it worked quite well. So this post will be in two parts, part one detailing more of the conference in general and a smattering of NZ lit and part two detailing the two Mansfield panels, together with the keynote author – who was incredible – Alberto Manguel. I should note that I take a distinct New Zealand-focus in my reportage, mainly focusing on those panel discussions that dipped into our South Pacific writers.

The part of the Sorbonne that the conference was held in was L’Institut du Monde Anglophone, which was on the rue de l’Ecole de Medecine, Odeon/St Michel in the 5th Arrondissement. Traditionally the historic centre of Parisian medical studies, the Grand Amphitheatre, where many of the talks were held, was originally a medical dissecting lecture theatre. It seemed rather apt that we were sitting there, dissecting literature.

The conference opened with a plenary session ‘Modernism Reaching Out: From Paris to Planetarity’ in the Grand Amphitheatre. One of the speakers in this opening session was Dr Andrew Thacker from De Montfort University, whose lecture ‘Taking Root or Moving On? Modernism, Transnationalism, and Little Magazines’ spoke to the idea of cities as dynamic agents of change. This supranational approach, tied to the space and energy of the city (in this case, Paris), for a willing expatriate and urban dweller like myself, really spoke volumes. He discussed the transnational little magazine Broom (which I used to ferret out in the Auckland University library quite regularly a few years back – it’s there and it will make you swoon!), edited by Kreymborg and our very own New Zealander Lola Ridge, which was an apt exemplar within which to discuss modernism’s international allegiances. I have always been fascinated by Ridge’s editorial work on Broom, as such a high quality publication, bridging multiple countries, truly deserving of the title ‘transnational’.

On Friday, the Petit Amphitheatre session ‘Routes of the Modern’ struck a distinct NZ-lit chord. Held directly before an incredible luncheon at Bouillon-Racine (yes, I will be mentioning the French restaurants – it was France, after all) and on an absolutely sweltering day (those historical lecture theatres don’t have the best air conditioning – read: several smallish windows open in the roof), it was pretty impressive to grab my attention, but grab it did.

This session was conducted by three panelists – Marc Delrez from the University of Liege, speaking of ‘Rilke in Frame’, Mark Williams from Victoria University, elaborating on the Modernism of late Manhire and Teresa Gilbert from the Spanish National University, who discussed transnationalism in Mavis Gallant’s writing (Mavis Gallant’s fiction elicits a swoon from my corner). Marc gave a particularly erudite discussion on the iconic Janet Frame and the inevitable influence of the interiority of Rilke. Canvassing several Frame novels, this presentation encompassed a surfeit of connections between the two poetic writers, in particular, discussing Frame’s Faces in the Water, which was the first Frame novel I ever read and so still strikes a nostalgic chord.

Following on from the Modernist poetics of Rilke (and – dare I say it? – of Frame), Mark Williams gave his talk ‘Dark Furniture: The Lugubrious Modernism of Late Manhire’, which focused intensively on Bill Manhire’s poetry (and here I gave a huge satisfied sigh as poetry discussion swilled around me – for what is better?), particularly focusing on the poem ‘Kevin’. I adore the conversational tone of this poem, which seems, to me, to be so integral to both Modernism and peculiar to New Zealand lit – the ordinary demotic. Of course, there are other concerns, other considerations – the modernist bricolage, the subversion of antecedents, the matching of the disjunctive (radio beside death). What always strikes me about this poem, and which Mark discussed in detail, is the positing of the line: ‘They lift us’ (ah, Baxter’s prophetic!) – without it, the poem wouldn’t be the same.

The final speaker in this panel was Teresa Gilbert from the Spanish National University, illuminating Mavis Gallant’s transculturality and transnationalism. I first encountered Mavis Gallant through Katherine Mansfield. Her 1976 short story ‘The Moslem Wife’, published in The New Yorker, opens within the setting of an expatriate hotel run by Netta Asher, which is, so Gallant states, just down the road from where Katherine Mansfield wrote in the south of France. As a writer wholly dedicated to the short story form (Gallant has never written a novel or poetry) and an expatriate, the comparisons between the two writers are numerous. However, in this panel, Teresa focused simply on Gallant in her discussion, detailing her concerted recapitulation of emotionally (and physically) alienated figures which litter her fiction. What particularly struck me about Teresa’s lecture was the subtle distinction that she made between a national sense of self and nationalism, which is often used as a stick (of sorts) to beat others with. This was finely put and left me considering nationalism/the national self in an entirely new light and trying to hash out this distinction in terms of New Zealand lit.

After such a critically satisfying morning, however, it was time for me to debrief and indulge in some of those distinctive South Bank second-hand book stalls (see the semi-French Mansfield that I found below!) and a little excursion to Shakespeare and Company.

Stay tuned for Part II, which will appear in due course, and will detail the ‘Mansfield, Exile and the Self’ panel, which I spoke as a part of (!) and the afternoon panel ‘Mansfield and Gallant: International Modernism and Paris’, coupled with some gems from author Alberto Manguel’s presentation ‘First and Last Modernists: From Conrad to Borges’.

Sorbonne Nouvelle conference

Over the last month or so, the lovely Katherine Mansfield expert Janet Wilson has been super busy organising a conference panel or two to speak at the ‘Exile’s Return: An EMiC Colloquium’ next summer. I am very ecstatic (and rather daunted, I might add) to say that my paper ‘Within the pages of Rhythm: Mansfield, exile and nostalgie de la boue’ was accepted as part of the conference panel and that the Sorbonne, in turn, accepted our conference panels.

It will be wonderful to be among such intellectually stimulating discussions and at such an incredible university. I am speaking alongside some very esteemed academics, as well as my favourite Canadian short story writer, Mavis Gallant! How I will tremble! And I get to speak about the crinkled pages of Rhythm that Mansfield and Murry so tenderly produced. Not so ‘little’ a magazine, after all, in my opinion. I am intrigued and, equally, find it quite apt that I will be speaking about the concept of ‘exile’, it seems an extreme term to me, but there are variations and nuances of degree, I guess.

So it is Paris in spring time, or more correctly, the Quartier Latin in spring time – what a delight! I feel rather privileged to have the honour, quite frankly.

Graduate Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies

A couple of months ago I was fortunate enough to be asked to sit on the editorial board of the research-rich Graduate Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies. This interdisciplinary academic journal is affiliated with The University of Auckland and involves a sharp-minded group of individuals dedicated to encouraging and publishing original academic articles, reviews, commentary, and visual works on issues related to the Asia-Pacific region.

As a devotee of New Zealand literature, I snapped up the opportunity. I sit as copy-editor on the board, which means I am indulged with a wide range of insightful and challenging articles to pore over and attend my editorial eye to.

I’d encourage everyone to visit the electronic journal and access some of its previous issues. There are some truly illuminating articles to browse through that address key contemporary Asia-Pacific issues.

My picks from the past couple of issues are: Emerald King’s ‘The Mountain Witch at the Train Station: the Yamamba and the shojo in Aoyama Nanae’s Hitori Biyori‘ from Volume 6, No.1, Jon Battista’s ‘Robert Sullivan’s ‘Waka 100′: Inscribed by the stars’ from Volume 5, No. 1 and Josh Raymond’s visual essay ‘Re-Imagining Vanuatu‘.

Click here to learn more about the journal and its objectives.

Click here to access previous and current issues.

Katherine Mansfield symposium article

The article written concerning the Katherine Mansfield symposium has just been published in the sixth edition of the Katherine Mansfield Newsletter including a number of photographs of the two-day event. The Katherine Mansfield newsletter is of magazine size and can be acquired via subscription from the Katherine Mansfield society. It is a comprehensive publication for NZ lit and/or Katherine Mansfield enthusiasts! The article is fortunate enough to be the opening article in the publication.