Books by Belinda Castles
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An inspiring novel of great co... more 9781743315781.jpg
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An inspiring novel of great courage and enduring love set against a backdrop of the turmoil and devastation of World War II.
'A clear-eyed, absorbing and intelligent account of lives adrift, or anchored perilously.' - Sydney Morning Herald
Emil and Hannah live their lives amid the turmoil of twentieth-century history. Emil, a German veteran of the Great War, has returned home to a disturbed nation. As inflation and unemployment edge the country near collapse, Emil's involvement with the resistance ultimately forces him from his family and his home.
Hannah, soaked in the many languages of her upbringing as a Russian Jew in the West End of London and intent on experiencing the world, leaves home for Europe, travelling into a continent headed again towards total war. In Brussels, she meets the devastated Emil, who has just crossed the border on foot from Nazi Germany, leaving tragedy in his wake. All too briefly, they make a life in England before war strikes, and Emil, an enemy alien, is interned and then sent away. Hannah, determined to find him, prepares herself for a lonely and dangerous journey across the seas .
Hannah & Emil is a moving love story of courage and conviction - riven by the powerful currents of history.
A subtle, evocative and engrossing story of secrets, lies and the weight of living with the past.... more A subtle, evocative and engrossing story of secrets, lies and the weight of living with the past. Winner of the 2006 The Australian/Vogel Literary Award.
Winner of the Australian/Vogel's Literary Award 2006.
An engrossing novel of secrets, small communities and the consequences of living with the past.
Set in a small riverside community, The River Baptists tells the story of Rose, bunkered down in a borrowed house overlooking the river, grieving for her dead father and waiting for her baby to be born. It is also the story of Danny, another refugee from life elsewhere, hiding out from his violent father and dreaming of owning a block of land on the river. Then there are the river old-timers, who miss nothing and forget less, and a newcomer who cares nothing for the locals, or the secrets of the past. Set over the course of a long hot tense summer, when sparks constantly threaten to ignite bushfires, the tight-knit riverside community is set alight by confidences betrayed and a renewed age-old grudge.
And through it all flows the mysterious pulse of the river, indifferent, deep and calm, offering the possibility of life and death, renewal and rebirth.
Published articles by Belinda Castles
Text Journal 'Peripheral Visions' Special Issue Series No 57 October, 2019
In the press, a lament for the study of Australian literature is often coupled with mistrust at t... more In the press, a lament for the study of Australian literature is often coupled with mistrust at the popularity of creative programs. It can be disconcerting for writers and teachers of writing in Australia, who work in a practical as well as pedagogical sense in the field of Australian literature, to be placed in an antithetical position to it. One response to the narrative of the decline of Australian literature in universities has been an assertion of its 'embeddedness' across the curriculum. The creative writing classroom is one place in which it can reliably be found, and the act of reading for the purpose of writing brings a distinctive charge to the study of Australian literature, produced by a movement across modal peripheries. This essay argues, via a 'body in time' (Jose 2011) model of Australian literature, and a reading of the novella Vertigo by Amanda Lohrey (2009), that the key elements of process and proximity in this mode of reading make a distinctive contribution to the study of Australian literature.
Two recent books by Sydney writers have explored the figure of William Dawes, drawing on his Sydn... more Two recent books by Sydney writers have explored the figure of William Dawes, drawing on his Sydney Cove language notebooks. The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville (2008) fictionalises Dawes' life, while Ross Gibson's 26 Views of the Starburst World (2012) offers a speculative biography of Dawes' years at Sydney Cove, a 'purposefully fractal account' (vii).
Responding to Grenville's novel, Gibson writes: 'A well-made novel must obscure some of the most puzzling and important elements of the notebooks' (17). Wary of 'the lures of fellow feeling', he seeks a form that 'works with rather than works away' the estrangement between two cultures and between the past and present (17).
Whereas Grenville uses Dawes' notes to spin a contextualising narrative that relies on empathy for much of its effect, Gibson emphasises the piecemeal nature of what we can learn from the notebooks, referring to 'event-fragments' (78). Rather than attempting to build a cohesive or 'moving' picture of what happened between Dawes and the local people, he foregrounds his own suppositions and investments.
What insights do the literary forms applied here offer us about place, and our place? Is there a case to be made for Grenville's fictional 'empathy', in spite of the mistrust it has engendered among historians such as Inga Clendinnen? In what larger project might novelists be participating when they imagine their way back to the beginning of a difficult relationship between cultures?
The Ethical Imaginations: Writing Worlds Papers – The Refereed Proceedings Of The 16th Conference... more The Ethical Imaginations: Writing Worlds Papers – The Refereed Proceedings Of The 16th Conference Of The Australasian Association Of Writing Programs, 2011
In the 21st century, as the Second World War passes from living memory, various art forms carry the injunction to remember. Novelists, often retrieving their materials from the vault of family history, fuse memory and imagination in their attempts to perceive antecedent experiences. This is an act fuelled by imaginative empathy. Empathy, though, is a charged term, particularly in the field of Holocaust studies. To imagine what others have experienced in this context is to risk appropriation, a mawkish equivalence between the circumstances of one's own life and that of others. And yet there are models for empathy that might describe an ethical relationship between contemporary writers and their forebears. Dominique LaCapra's notion of 'empathic unsettlement' allows and calls for an affective response to the suffering of others, an ethical position between the 'objectification' of historiography and 'surrogate victimage' (LaCapra 2001: 39-40). This response is enacted via sensory tropes in Mireille Juchau's Burning In (Juchau 2007). Burning In is a novel of postmemory, the complex, belated form of memory belonging to descendants of survivors of traumatic historical events (Hirsch 1997). Postmemory works deal with aftermath, with a reverberation of trauma through the generations. In Burning In, the past is felt as a physical haunting, a ghostly presence within the body, performed by the senses. The title refers to a photographic technique that allows previously hidden details to come to light through selective over-exposure. It is the means by which protagonist Martine Hartmann discovers the family secret behind the silences in her mother's story of loss and exile from Nazi Berlin. Martine is aware though of the limits of what can be seen, and known. She recalls the words of Lisette Model: 'We photograph not only what we know, but also what we don't know.' Martine's art enacts LaCapra's 'empathic unsettlement'. It reaches out affectively towards her mother's experience but never loses its traces of otherness. Martine receives her inherited past through visual means—her father was also a photographer—and through smell and touch. Though these senses bring the past into the present in powerful ways in Burning In, this paper will pay particular attention to the idea of listening. The child in a family listens to the silences in a household, the fragments of meaning. Listening might be self-interested, but can also be the most empathic and humane of the senses. Dori Laub describes the role of the listener to the witness of Holocaust experience. In listening to another's experience, the listener provides the potential for the speaker to know that
Memory Connection Volume 1 Number 1
In the cellar of the Duisburg metalworkers’ union on 2 May 1... more Memory Connection Volume 1 Number 1
In the cellar of the Duisburg metalworkers’ union on 2 May 1933, four trade unionists, one of them my great-grandfather, were beaten and shot by Nazis. Outside the cellar is a row of square iron chairs, a memorial. For me, this is a place of ghostly presence, a threshold between the violent past and the present. It is a place that contains memory: family memory and collective memory. It contains my history, and that of my children. This article, centred on personal experiences, will explore the role of place and memory in informing my creative work, a novel based on my grandparents’ lives. It will draw on Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer’s memoir of Czernowitz, Ghosts of Home, in particular a visit to the crossroads at which Hirsch’s parents made a decision that saved them from transportation to the Nazi death camps. For those who come after, who inhabit the complexities of what Hirsch has called “postmemory”, being in such places can be at once disturbing and enriching, infused as they are with the contingency of survival or death. What do these sites contain? How do they inform what Hirsch and Spitzer call our “myths of origin”? Via Georges Perec’s notion of “fictive memory”, I will suggest that place engenders “potential memory”, a kind of memory linked to memorial, fuelled by imagination and solidarity.
My grandfather was an anti-Nazi German who escaped to England, only to be deported to Australia d... more My grandfather was an anti-Nazi German who escaped to England, only to be deported to Australia during WWII. My grandmother was a much-travelled translator with a rich political and linguistic background. When I decided to write a novel about their lives I inherited memoirs, letters, photographs and a number of family anecdotes. The traces fired from the past, though vivid, leave dark spaces, in which my grandparents can be re-imagined, rather than recalled.
With reference to Marianne Hirsch's work on the aesthetics of 'postmemory', with its threads of 'ambivalence and desire, mourning and recollection, presence and absence,' I wish to explore some questions central to the process of writing my novel. What happens to us when we encounter the remnants of our dead? What is the afterlife of images and texts? How does memory, or this removed form of memory, operate imaginatively? Of what use to a writer is the particular haunting that this process engenders?
Talks by Belinda Castles
Capital-Empire-Print-Dissent
Association for the Study of Australian Literature
Annual Conferenc... more Capital-Empire-Print-Dissent
Association for the Study of Australian Literature
Annual Conference 2016
How should one characterise Sydney? It can be experienced as suburban, urban, semi-rural or coastal. To be Indigenous or migrant, wealthy or homeless, gay or straight might also shape your account. 'Sydney has never been one place,' Delia Falconer tells us in her memoir of Sydney, but she ascribes recognisable characteristics, one being a kind of haunting, the memory of the people living here when the British arrived. Falconer asserts too the city's 'changefulness'. This is seen in its weather, in its storms and fires, but also in its social geology, its visible layers of experience: colonial pubs, Victorian terraces, armaments, post-war units, mosques, Vietnamese markets, and surfacing between and under the buildings, rock paintings and middens.
As well as considering what might be distinctive about Sydney as a setting, I will explore some approaches to place helpful for readings of its fiction. Robert Dixon has suggested a 'scale-sensitive' approach to reading Australian literature that looks at how texts ask to be read on world or local scales as well as national. I will discuss too how fiction reflects and participates in what Bill Ashcroft has called the 'continual and dynamic state of formation' of place. Fiction is concerned with lived experience in place and time, but it also shapes that experience. We see Sydney made and remade in its fiction, as the place or places we imagine it to be.
Seminar series ‘Sensing Australia’, Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, King’s College, London... more Seminar series ‘Sensing Australia’, Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, King’s College, London, November 2015
Critical responses to Gail Jones’ Five Bells have drawn on its theoretical and literary influences to examine how this novel, set over a single summer day in Sydney, translates its ideas into fictional life via four characters: West Australian former lovers Ellie and James, Irish journalist Catherine and Chinese exile Pei Xing. Theories of psychogeography and trauma, as well as the novel’s literary affiliations to Slessor’s ‘Five Bells’, Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, have been productively explored, as have representations of time and memory. Jones has talked of her novel as the site for ‘a kind of contest between past and present tenses’. Continually the ‘here-now’ of Sydney—its spectacle, clamour, light and water—competes for characters’ attention against the unpredictable inflow of memory.
These contests take place in characters in various stages of ‘newness’ to Sydney. Jones, herself a recent arrival at the time of writing the novel, has said that she wanted to ‘thematise and explore the newness of experience’. ‘Surprised by the beauty of Sydney, its clamorousness, its contradictions, its heterogeneity,’ she wanted ‘to give a sense too of how enlivening this jumble might be, how a sense of self is refashioned’.
All walkers, these newcomer characters’ aesthetic responses to Sydney’s textures are immediate, sometimes epiphanic, and this magnification of sensory experience gives startling inflections to their negotiations with memory. The novel’s solidarity with cosmopolitan heterogeneity and its sense that a person might here be destroyed or remade are grounded in an intensely experienced apprehension of place. Sydney is experienced in this novel as singular, providing distinctive forms of engagement. Before Five Bells is a theorised response to ‘the city’, I wish to show, it is, in its characters’ ‘corny delight’, ‘engulfment’ and ‘revelation’, a novel of Sydney.
European Network for Comparative Literary Studies (REELC/ENCLS) 6th Biennial Congress 'Longing an... more European Network for Comparative Literary Studies (REELC/ENCLS) 6th Biennial Congress 'Longing and Belonging', Dublin City University, August 2015
Kate Grenville’s novels of first encounters between Europeans and Indigenous Australians have been popular and positively reviewed, but have also been the site of a new front in Australia’s long running ‘History Wars’, this front a contention over the roles and responsibilities of history and fiction.
In recent years, land rights decisions, the apology to the stolen generations, the brief popularity of the right wing demagogue Pauline Hanson, military intervention in the Northern Territory and racist comments in the public sphere towards Indigenous footballers have reminded us that Australia’s colonial history is neither settled nor past.
Against this backdrop, Grenville’s novels of settler violence and guilt, and the brief, quickly extinguished possibilities of early contact, are publicly interpreted as part of an ongoing debate about Australian history and culture. What is at stake is what Germaine Greer has called the ‘pain of unbelonging’ as it applies to white Australians and more fundamentally to the displaced Indigenous inhabitants of the continent.
Central to the anxiety Grenville’s novels and public comments have engendered are questions of discipline and form. How much responsibility to historical fact need she take? Can she ‘know’ the truth of the past in the ways she has seemed to imply that she can? Can the realist novel allow space for the otherness of the past and other cultures? Is she simply offering what the historian Mark McKenna has called ‘comfort history’?
In this paper, I will discuss these issues and explore Grenville’s novels and public commentary, focusing on the role of stories and the storyteller in this fraught context. What is the place of fiction in this troubled self-examination of a culture? What does fiction offer that is beyond the scope of history? And what is/ should be the novelist’s ethical stance in matters of contested history?
Australian Literature: The Road Ahead conference, Macquarie University, Sydney, June 2013
Ethical Imaginations conference, Australian Association of Writing Programs, SCU, Byron Bay, Nove... more Ethical Imaginations conference, Australian Association of Writing Programs, SCU, Byron Bay, November 2011
Londonicity conference, London, July 2011
Contained Memory conference, Massey University, Syracuse University and Museum of New Zealand, We... more Contained Memory conference, Massey University, Syracuse University and Museum of New Zealand, Wellington, December 2010
Papers by Belinda Castles
Emil and Hannah live their lives amid the turmoil of twentieth-century history. Emil, a German ve... more Emil and Hannah live their lives amid the turmoil of twentieth-century history. Emil, a German veteran of the Great War, has returned home to a disturbed nation. As inflation and unemployment edge the country near collapse, Emil's involvement with the resistance ultimately forces him from his family and his home. Hannah, soaked in the many languages of her upbringing as a Russian Jew in the West End of London and intent on experiencing the world, leaves home for Europe, travelling into a continent headed again towards total war. In Brussels, she meets the devastated Emil, who has just crossed the border on foot from Nazi Germany, leaving tragedy in his wake. All too briefly, they make a life in England before war strikes, and Emil, an enemy alien, is interned and then sent away. Hannah, determined to find him, prepares herself for a lonely and dangerous journey across the seas . . . Hannah & Emil is a moving love story of courage and conviction - riven by the powerful currents o...
This thesis is composed of a creative component, the novel Hannah and Emil, based on the lives of... more This thesis is composed of a creative component, the novel Hannah and Emil, based on the lives of my grandparents, and an exegesis that examines two contemporary novels dealing with issues similar to those I confront in the creative component: Burning In by Mireille Juchau and The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert. Although there are many narratives based on German experience in the Second World War, Hannah and Emil deals with a group not well known to readers in English, non-Jewish left wing dissidents. Their narrative emerges from the material and non-material effects they left behind: papers, photographs and arcane objects, but also memory and stories, and those things that were left unsaid. This foregrounding of such means of receiving the past situates this novel alongside others, like those of Juchau and Seiffert, that deal with family memory as inheritance. In the novel, Hannah, a Russian Jew brought up in London, leaves her family as a young woman and travels to continental Europ...
New Scholar, Dec 24, 2014
A to Z of Creative Writing Methods
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Books by Belinda Castles
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An inspiring novel of great courage and enduring love set against a backdrop of the turmoil and devastation of World War II.
'A clear-eyed, absorbing and intelligent account of lives adrift, or anchored perilously.' - Sydney Morning Herald
Emil and Hannah live their lives amid the turmoil of twentieth-century history. Emil, a German veteran of the Great War, has returned home to a disturbed nation. As inflation and unemployment edge the country near collapse, Emil's involvement with the resistance ultimately forces him from his family and his home.
Hannah, soaked in the many languages of her upbringing as a Russian Jew in the West End of London and intent on experiencing the world, leaves home for Europe, travelling into a continent headed again towards total war. In Brussels, she meets the devastated Emil, who has just crossed the border on foot from Nazi Germany, leaving tragedy in his wake. All too briefly, they make a life in England before war strikes, and Emil, an enemy alien, is interned and then sent away. Hannah, determined to find him, prepares herself for a lonely and dangerous journey across the seas .
Hannah & Emil is a moving love story of courage and conviction - riven by the powerful currents of history.
Winner of the Australian/Vogel's Literary Award 2006.
An engrossing novel of secrets, small communities and the consequences of living with the past.
Set in a small riverside community, The River Baptists tells the story of Rose, bunkered down in a borrowed house overlooking the river, grieving for her dead father and waiting for her baby to be born. It is also the story of Danny, another refugee from life elsewhere, hiding out from his violent father and dreaming of owning a block of land on the river. Then there are the river old-timers, who miss nothing and forget less, and a newcomer who cares nothing for the locals, or the secrets of the past. Set over the course of a long hot tense summer, when sparks constantly threaten to ignite bushfires, the tight-knit riverside community is set alight by confidences betrayed and a renewed age-old grudge.
And through it all flows the mysterious pulse of the river, indifferent, deep and calm, offering the possibility of life and death, renewal and rebirth.
Published articles by Belinda Castles
Responding to Grenville's novel, Gibson writes: 'A well-made novel must obscure some of the most puzzling and important elements of the notebooks' (17). Wary of 'the lures of fellow feeling', he seeks a form that 'works with rather than works away' the estrangement between two cultures and between the past and present (17).
Whereas Grenville uses Dawes' notes to spin a contextualising narrative that relies on empathy for much of its effect, Gibson emphasises the piecemeal nature of what we can learn from the notebooks, referring to 'event-fragments' (78). Rather than attempting to build a cohesive or 'moving' picture of what happened between Dawes and the local people, he foregrounds his own suppositions and investments.
What insights do the literary forms applied here offer us about place, and our place? Is there a case to be made for Grenville's fictional 'empathy', in spite of the mistrust it has engendered among historians such as Inga Clendinnen? In what larger project might novelists be participating when they imagine their way back to the beginning of a difficult relationship between cultures?
In the 21st century, as the Second World War passes from living memory, various art forms carry the injunction to remember. Novelists, often retrieving their materials from the vault of family history, fuse memory and imagination in their attempts to perceive antecedent experiences. This is an act fuelled by imaginative empathy. Empathy, though, is a charged term, particularly in the field of Holocaust studies. To imagine what others have experienced in this context is to risk appropriation, a mawkish equivalence between the circumstances of one's own life and that of others. And yet there are models for empathy that might describe an ethical relationship between contemporary writers and their forebears. Dominique LaCapra's notion of 'empathic unsettlement' allows and calls for an affective response to the suffering of others, an ethical position between the 'objectification' of historiography and 'surrogate victimage' (LaCapra 2001: 39-40). This response is enacted via sensory tropes in Mireille Juchau's Burning In (Juchau 2007). Burning In is a novel of postmemory, the complex, belated form of memory belonging to descendants of survivors of traumatic historical events (Hirsch 1997). Postmemory works deal with aftermath, with a reverberation of trauma through the generations. In Burning In, the past is felt as a physical haunting, a ghostly presence within the body, performed by the senses. The title refers to a photographic technique that allows previously hidden details to come to light through selective over-exposure. It is the means by which protagonist Martine Hartmann discovers the family secret behind the silences in her mother's story of loss and exile from Nazi Berlin. Martine is aware though of the limits of what can be seen, and known. She recalls the words of Lisette Model: 'We photograph not only what we know, but also what we don't know.' Martine's art enacts LaCapra's 'empathic unsettlement'. It reaches out affectively towards her mother's experience but never loses its traces of otherness. Martine receives her inherited past through visual means—her father was also a photographer—and through smell and touch. Though these senses bring the past into the present in powerful ways in Burning In, this paper will pay particular attention to the idea of listening. The child in a family listens to the silences in a household, the fragments of meaning. Listening might be self-interested, but can also be the most empathic and humane of the senses. Dori Laub describes the role of the listener to the witness of Holocaust experience. In listening to another's experience, the listener provides the potential for the speaker to know that
In the cellar of the Duisburg metalworkers’ union on 2 May 1933, four trade unionists, one of them my great-grandfather, were beaten and shot by Nazis. Outside the cellar is a row of square iron chairs, a memorial. For me, this is a place of ghostly presence, a threshold between the violent past and the present. It is a place that contains memory: family memory and collective memory. It contains my history, and that of my children. This article, centred on personal experiences, will explore the role of place and memory in informing my creative work, a novel based on my grandparents’ lives. It will draw on Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer’s memoir of Czernowitz, Ghosts of Home, in particular a visit to the crossroads at which Hirsch’s parents made a decision that saved them from transportation to the Nazi death camps. For those who come after, who inhabit the complexities of what Hirsch has called “postmemory”, being in such places can be at once disturbing and enriching, infused as they are with the contingency of survival or death. What do these sites contain? How do they inform what Hirsch and Spitzer call our “myths of origin”? Via Georges Perec’s notion of “fictive memory”, I will suggest that place engenders “potential memory”, a kind of memory linked to memorial, fuelled by imagination and solidarity.
With reference to Marianne Hirsch's work on the aesthetics of 'postmemory', with its threads of 'ambivalence and desire, mourning and recollection, presence and absence,' I wish to explore some questions central to the process of writing my novel. What happens to us when we encounter the remnants of our dead? What is the afterlife of images and texts? How does memory, or this removed form of memory, operate imaginatively? Of what use to a writer is the particular haunting that this process engenders?
Talks by Belinda Castles
Association for the Study of Australian Literature
Annual Conference 2016
How should one characterise Sydney? It can be experienced as suburban, urban, semi-rural or coastal. To be Indigenous or migrant, wealthy or homeless, gay or straight might also shape your account. 'Sydney has never been one place,' Delia Falconer tells us in her memoir of Sydney, but she ascribes recognisable characteristics, one being a kind of haunting, the memory of the people living here when the British arrived. Falconer asserts too the city's 'changefulness'. This is seen in its weather, in its storms and fires, but also in its social geology, its visible layers of experience: colonial pubs, Victorian terraces, armaments, post-war units, mosques, Vietnamese markets, and surfacing between and under the buildings, rock paintings and middens.
As well as considering what might be distinctive about Sydney as a setting, I will explore some approaches to place helpful for readings of its fiction. Robert Dixon has suggested a 'scale-sensitive' approach to reading Australian literature that looks at how texts ask to be read on world or local scales as well as national. I will discuss too how fiction reflects and participates in what Bill Ashcroft has called the 'continual and dynamic state of formation' of place. Fiction is concerned with lived experience in place and time, but it also shapes that experience. We see Sydney made and remade in its fiction, as the place or places we imagine it to be.
Critical responses to Gail Jones’ Five Bells have drawn on its theoretical and literary influences to examine how this novel, set over a single summer day in Sydney, translates its ideas into fictional life via four characters: West Australian former lovers Ellie and James, Irish journalist Catherine and Chinese exile Pei Xing. Theories of psychogeography and trauma, as well as the novel’s literary affiliations to Slessor’s ‘Five Bells’, Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, have been productively explored, as have representations of time and memory. Jones has talked of her novel as the site for ‘a kind of contest between past and present tenses’. Continually the ‘here-now’ of Sydney—its spectacle, clamour, light and water—competes for characters’ attention against the unpredictable inflow of memory.
These contests take place in characters in various stages of ‘newness’ to Sydney. Jones, herself a recent arrival at the time of writing the novel, has said that she wanted to ‘thematise and explore the newness of experience’. ‘Surprised by the beauty of Sydney, its clamorousness, its contradictions, its heterogeneity,’ she wanted ‘to give a sense too of how enlivening this jumble might be, how a sense of self is refashioned’.
All walkers, these newcomer characters’ aesthetic responses to Sydney’s textures are immediate, sometimes epiphanic, and this magnification of sensory experience gives startling inflections to their negotiations with memory. The novel’s solidarity with cosmopolitan heterogeneity and its sense that a person might here be destroyed or remade are grounded in an intensely experienced apprehension of place. Sydney is experienced in this novel as singular, providing distinctive forms of engagement. Before Five Bells is a theorised response to ‘the city’, I wish to show, it is, in its characters’ ‘corny delight’, ‘engulfment’ and ‘revelation’, a novel of Sydney.
Kate Grenville’s novels of first encounters between Europeans and Indigenous Australians have been popular and positively reviewed, but have also been the site of a new front in Australia’s long running ‘History Wars’, this front a contention over the roles and responsibilities of history and fiction.
In recent years, land rights decisions, the apology to the stolen generations, the brief popularity of the right wing demagogue Pauline Hanson, military intervention in the Northern Territory and racist comments in the public sphere towards Indigenous footballers have reminded us that Australia’s colonial history is neither settled nor past.
Against this backdrop, Grenville’s novels of settler violence and guilt, and the brief, quickly extinguished possibilities of early contact, are publicly interpreted as part of an ongoing debate about Australian history and culture. What is at stake is what Germaine Greer has called the ‘pain of unbelonging’ as it applies to white Australians and more fundamentally to the displaced Indigenous inhabitants of the continent.
Central to the anxiety Grenville’s novels and public comments have engendered are questions of discipline and form. How much responsibility to historical fact need she take? Can she ‘know’ the truth of the past in the ways she has seemed to imply that she can? Can the realist novel allow space for the otherness of the past and other cultures? Is she simply offering what the historian Mark McKenna has called ‘comfort history’?
In this paper, I will discuss these issues and explore Grenville’s novels and public commentary, focusing on the role of stories and the storyteller in this fraught context. What is the place of fiction in this troubled self-examination of a culture? What does fiction offer that is beyond the scope of history? And what is/ should be the novelist’s ethical stance in matters of contested history?
Papers by Belinda Castles
Quantity:
Download cover
An inspiring novel of great courage and enduring love set against a backdrop of the turmoil and devastation of World War II.
'A clear-eyed, absorbing and intelligent account of lives adrift, or anchored perilously.' - Sydney Morning Herald
Emil and Hannah live their lives amid the turmoil of twentieth-century history. Emil, a German veteran of the Great War, has returned home to a disturbed nation. As inflation and unemployment edge the country near collapse, Emil's involvement with the resistance ultimately forces him from his family and his home.
Hannah, soaked in the many languages of her upbringing as a Russian Jew in the West End of London and intent on experiencing the world, leaves home for Europe, travelling into a continent headed again towards total war. In Brussels, she meets the devastated Emil, who has just crossed the border on foot from Nazi Germany, leaving tragedy in his wake. All too briefly, they make a life in England before war strikes, and Emil, an enemy alien, is interned and then sent away. Hannah, determined to find him, prepares herself for a lonely and dangerous journey across the seas .
Hannah & Emil is a moving love story of courage and conviction - riven by the powerful currents of history.
Winner of the Australian/Vogel's Literary Award 2006.
An engrossing novel of secrets, small communities and the consequences of living with the past.
Set in a small riverside community, The River Baptists tells the story of Rose, bunkered down in a borrowed house overlooking the river, grieving for her dead father and waiting for her baby to be born. It is also the story of Danny, another refugee from life elsewhere, hiding out from his violent father and dreaming of owning a block of land on the river. Then there are the river old-timers, who miss nothing and forget less, and a newcomer who cares nothing for the locals, or the secrets of the past. Set over the course of a long hot tense summer, when sparks constantly threaten to ignite bushfires, the tight-knit riverside community is set alight by confidences betrayed and a renewed age-old grudge.
And through it all flows the mysterious pulse of the river, indifferent, deep and calm, offering the possibility of life and death, renewal and rebirth.
Responding to Grenville's novel, Gibson writes: 'A well-made novel must obscure some of the most puzzling and important elements of the notebooks' (17). Wary of 'the lures of fellow feeling', he seeks a form that 'works with rather than works away' the estrangement between two cultures and between the past and present (17).
Whereas Grenville uses Dawes' notes to spin a contextualising narrative that relies on empathy for much of its effect, Gibson emphasises the piecemeal nature of what we can learn from the notebooks, referring to 'event-fragments' (78). Rather than attempting to build a cohesive or 'moving' picture of what happened between Dawes and the local people, he foregrounds his own suppositions and investments.
What insights do the literary forms applied here offer us about place, and our place? Is there a case to be made for Grenville's fictional 'empathy', in spite of the mistrust it has engendered among historians such as Inga Clendinnen? In what larger project might novelists be participating when they imagine their way back to the beginning of a difficult relationship between cultures?
In the 21st century, as the Second World War passes from living memory, various art forms carry the injunction to remember. Novelists, often retrieving their materials from the vault of family history, fuse memory and imagination in their attempts to perceive antecedent experiences. This is an act fuelled by imaginative empathy. Empathy, though, is a charged term, particularly in the field of Holocaust studies. To imagine what others have experienced in this context is to risk appropriation, a mawkish equivalence between the circumstances of one's own life and that of others. And yet there are models for empathy that might describe an ethical relationship between contemporary writers and their forebears. Dominique LaCapra's notion of 'empathic unsettlement' allows and calls for an affective response to the suffering of others, an ethical position between the 'objectification' of historiography and 'surrogate victimage' (LaCapra 2001: 39-40). This response is enacted via sensory tropes in Mireille Juchau's Burning In (Juchau 2007). Burning In is a novel of postmemory, the complex, belated form of memory belonging to descendants of survivors of traumatic historical events (Hirsch 1997). Postmemory works deal with aftermath, with a reverberation of trauma through the generations. In Burning In, the past is felt as a physical haunting, a ghostly presence within the body, performed by the senses. The title refers to a photographic technique that allows previously hidden details to come to light through selective over-exposure. It is the means by which protagonist Martine Hartmann discovers the family secret behind the silences in her mother's story of loss and exile from Nazi Berlin. Martine is aware though of the limits of what can be seen, and known. She recalls the words of Lisette Model: 'We photograph not only what we know, but also what we don't know.' Martine's art enacts LaCapra's 'empathic unsettlement'. It reaches out affectively towards her mother's experience but never loses its traces of otherness. Martine receives her inherited past through visual means—her father was also a photographer—and through smell and touch. Though these senses bring the past into the present in powerful ways in Burning In, this paper will pay particular attention to the idea of listening. The child in a family listens to the silences in a household, the fragments of meaning. Listening might be self-interested, but can also be the most empathic and humane of the senses. Dori Laub describes the role of the listener to the witness of Holocaust experience. In listening to another's experience, the listener provides the potential for the speaker to know that
In the cellar of the Duisburg metalworkers’ union on 2 May 1933, four trade unionists, one of them my great-grandfather, were beaten and shot by Nazis. Outside the cellar is a row of square iron chairs, a memorial. For me, this is a place of ghostly presence, a threshold between the violent past and the present. It is a place that contains memory: family memory and collective memory. It contains my history, and that of my children. This article, centred on personal experiences, will explore the role of place and memory in informing my creative work, a novel based on my grandparents’ lives. It will draw on Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer’s memoir of Czernowitz, Ghosts of Home, in particular a visit to the crossroads at which Hirsch’s parents made a decision that saved them from transportation to the Nazi death camps. For those who come after, who inhabit the complexities of what Hirsch has called “postmemory”, being in such places can be at once disturbing and enriching, infused as they are with the contingency of survival or death. What do these sites contain? How do they inform what Hirsch and Spitzer call our “myths of origin”? Via Georges Perec’s notion of “fictive memory”, I will suggest that place engenders “potential memory”, a kind of memory linked to memorial, fuelled by imagination and solidarity.
With reference to Marianne Hirsch's work on the aesthetics of 'postmemory', with its threads of 'ambivalence and desire, mourning and recollection, presence and absence,' I wish to explore some questions central to the process of writing my novel. What happens to us when we encounter the remnants of our dead? What is the afterlife of images and texts? How does memory, or this removed form of memory, operate imaginatively? Of what use to a writer is the particular haunting that this process engenders?
Association for the Study of Australian Literature
Annual Conference 2016
How should one characterise Sydney? It can be experienced as suburban, urban, semi-rural or coastal. To be Indigenous or migrant, wealthy or homeless, gay or straight might also shape your account. 'Sydney has never been one place,' Delia Falconer tells us in her memoir of Sydney, but she ascribes recognisable characteristics, one being a kind of haunting, the memory of the people living here when the British arrived. Falconer asserts too the city's 'changefulness'. This is seen in its weather, in its storms and fires, but also in its social geology, its visible layers of experience: colonial pubs, Victorian terraces, armaments, post-war units, mosques, Vietnamese markets, and surfacing between and under the buildings, rock paintings and middens.
As well as considering what might be distinctive about Sydney as a setting, I will explore some approaches to place helpful for readings of its fiction. Robert Dixon has suggested a 'scale-sensitive' approach to reading Australian literature that looks at how texts ask to be read on world or local scales as well as national. I will discuss too how fiction reflects and participates in what Bill Ashcroft has called the 'continual and dynamic state of formation' of place. Fiction is concerned with lived experience in place and time, but it also shapes that experience. We see Sydney made and remade in its fiction, as the place or places we imagine it to be.
Critical responses to Gail Jones’ Five Bells have drawn on its theoretical and literary influences to examine how this novel, set over a single summer day in Sydney, translates its ideas into fictional life via four characters: West Australian former lovers Ellie and James, Irish journalist Catherine and Chinese exile Pei Xing. Theories of psychogeography and trauma, as well as the novel’s literary affiliations to Slessor’s ‘Five Bells’, Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, have been productively explored, as have representations of time and memory. Jones has talked of her novel as the site for ‘a kind of contest between past and present tenses’. Continually the ‘here-now’ of Sydney—its spectacle, clamour, light and water—competes for characters’ attention against the unpredictable inflow of memory.
These contests take place in characters in various stages of ‘newness’ to Sydney. Jones, herself a recent arrival at the time of writing the novel, has said that she wanted to ‘thematise and explore the newness of experience’. ‘Surprised by the beauty of Sydney, its clamorousness, its contradictions, its heterogeneity,’ she wanted ‘to give a sense too of how enlivening this jumble might be, how a sense of self is refashioned’.
All walkers, these newcomer characters’ aesthetic responses to Sydney’s textures are immediate, sometimes epiphanic, and this magnification of sensory experience gives startling inflections to their negotiations with memory. The novel’s solidarity with cosmopolitan heterogeneity and its sense that a person might here be destroyed or remade are grounded in an intensely experienced apprehension of place. Sydney is experienced in this novel as singular, providing distinctive forms of engagement. Before Five Bells is a theorised response to ‘the city’, I wish to show, it is, in its characters’ ‘corny delight’, ‘engulfment’ and ‘revelation’, a novel of Sydney.
Kate Grenville’s novels of first encounters between Europeans and Indigenous Australians have been popular and positively reviewed, but have also been the site of a new front in Australia’s long running ‘History Wars’, this front a contention over the roles and responsibilities of history and fiction.
In recent years, land rights decisions, the apology to the stolen generations, the brief popularity of the right wing demagogue Pauline Hanson, military intervention in the Northern Territory and racist comments in the public sphere towards Indigenous footballers have reminded us that Australia’s colonial history is neither settled nor past.
Against this backdrop, Grenville’s novels of settler violence and guilt, and the brief, quickly extinguished possibilities of early contact, are publicly interpreted as part of an ongoing debate about Australian history and culture. What is at stake is what Germaine Greer has called the ‘pain of unbelonging’ as it applies to white Australians and more fundamentally to the displaced Indigenous inhabitants of the continent.
Central to the anxiety Grenville’s novels and public comments have engendered are questions of discipline and form. How much responsibility to historical fact need she take? Can she ‘know’ the truth of the past in the ways she has seemed to imply that she can? Can the realist novel allow space for the otherness of the past and other cultures? Is she simply offering what the historian Mark McKenna has called ‘comfort history’?
In this paper, I will discuss these issues and explore Grenville’s novels and public commentary, focusing on the role of stories and the storyteller in this fraught context. What is the place of fiction in this troubled self-examination of a culture? What does fiction offer that is beyond the scope of history? And what is/ should be the novelist’s ethical stance in matters of contested history?