Heat 18: The Library of Fire

The latest edition of Heat may be the only piece of printed matter produced in the closing months of 2008 that makes no mention of the global financial crisis. Unlike fellow stalwart of the Oz literary scene, Meanjin, which has recently commissioned a series of essays on current affairs and politics, editor Ivor Indyk’s journal remains determinedly aesthetic in focus. Readers looking for feature stories can go to the broadsheets; if it’s thoughtful extended reflection on Kevin, the intervention, Israel and Obama you want, The Monthly, Quarterly Essay and Griffith Review will do the job; but for poetry, fiction and criticism, Heat is the place to go. The journal plays an important role in the maintenance of Australian literary culture by publishing challenging, sometimes experimental new work.

This issue takes its title from John Hughes’ “The Book of Libraries,” a not entirely successful attempt at Borgesian essay-fiction. Also borrowing heavily from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Hughes gives us a compendium of imaginary places, in this instance a catalogue of “lost libraries” supposedly found in the ruins of the Library of Babel (a direct reference to the Borges story of the same name). Our narrator, an anonymous literary scholar, claims to have rediscovered the mysterious list in a Saint Petersburg library and translated it into English. Character, plot and setting, are deliberately dispensed with here, replaced with dry but erudite reflection on the nature of reading, and the preservation of knowledge across time. There’s a static quality to the writing, brought on by the absence of dynamic verbs and the repeated construction, “I think.” Each of the 11 libraries is an opportunity for us to watch the narrator think. There is some striking image making: the Library of Translation, for example, stands beside a lake where its image is reflected upside down. The Incomplete Library also offers a moment’s illumination. The building’s completion, like an anxious Phd student’s thesis, is infinitely delayed “so that it’s destruction cannot begin” (57). Over the course of twenty plus pages, however, we tire of such conceits and long for some sign of human presence or passion. Borges had the good grace to keep his literary hoaxes to ten or fifteen pages. His best stories like “El Aleph,” and “El Sur” also had a self-ironising element that his Anglophone admirers seem to miss.

Sydney writer Felicity Castagna takes a less cerebral, but ultimately more affecting approach to experimental fiction. Her piece imaginatively recreates the inner life of Kathleen Folbigg, a Newcastle woman convicted of murdering her four children. “Kathy” demonstrates that breaking storytelling conventions doesn’t mean sacrificing narrative all together. There’s still plenty of literary sleight of hand going on here: present tense third person narration, iterative symbolism, prolepsis “none of her children have been born yet. None of them have died” (159). The difference is that we also have a real character, alive in her fleshy selfhood: “she kneads her thighs with her fingers hoping that the extra weight will just melt away like butter” (162). A keen sense of place also imbues the story as we see pregnant Kathy’s morbid fantasies overlap with industrial Newcastle. “She can feel the coldness of the iron against her skin as it thicken around her belly and pierces through her belly button. She is pumped full of iron ore” (161). In a handful of pages, Castagna evokes a troubled individual, a complex set of family relations, a cultural milieu, and a terrible tragedy. The piece could easily be expanded to novella length and marks its author as a talent to watch.

The editorial decision to include an essay about Brian Castro by his partner Jennifer Rutherford alongside an essay by Castro himself is an odd one. Rutherford begins her essay on The Garden Book by positioning the novel as a refutation of the anti-intellectual cultural climate of the Howard years. Fair enough, but one suspects that the inclusion of her essay would only reinforce the right-wing commentariat’s view of the so called cultural elite. Doubling up on Castro gives the collection an air of cliquishness and solipsism, a too-obvious sense it’s participating in the canonization of one of its contributors. There’s nothing wrong with the scholarship in the Rutherford essay – she gives an interesting account of echoes of Flaubert in Castro – but perhaps it would have been better held over for a later issue.

Despite this, Castro’s offering, “In Camera: Arrested Motion and Future Mourning,” is deeply impressive. One of our best respected novelists and now professor of Creative Writing at Adelaide University, Castro is also a gifted literary scholar. His essay considers how melancholy came to be associated with creativity in fourteenth century Italy. The modern notion of melancholy as a productive aspect of the artistic temperament, he argues, developed in this period, using Giovanni Bocaccio’s “The Decameron” as an illustrative work. He concludes memorably that for the contemporary creative writer melancholy is both medicine and poison: “We write because we love our symptom” (53).

Noel King’s interview with Brent Cunningham of Small Press Distributor’s in Berkeley, California, is an instructive if slightly overextended discussion of the poetry publishing environment in the US. It is part of a larger project on small and independent presses in the English speaking world. SPD’s philosophy is that although most poetry will never sell enough to interest a for-profit distributor, much of it is of cultural value and ought to be accessible to the public. “There’s plenty of historical evidence that some book of poems that sold ten copies in its first three years could well be by the person that we all read today from a particular era” (202). Even in the much larger US market, however, there are apparently only 50 to 75 bookstores that stock small press poetry. Perhaps the future of poetry is online.

Among the poet’s there’s an intriguing mix of the distinguished and the indecipherable. Part of the enduring value of a journal like Heat is its role in supporting new talent. It is always a pleasure to read unknown writers beside their more established peers and find that they measure up splendidly. Kate Llewellyn sends us postcards in verse from South America where she tells us “It is raining in Patagonia. And Bruce Chatwin is dead” (30). Michael Farell’s three poems create splendid sounding nonsense through repetition, puns and experimental punctuation. My favourite poem in this edition, however, was “The Bones” by the relatively little known Kay Rozynski. When we tire of raking through the dismal columns of the daily news, it is important we have a place to turn, somewhere to find writing that makes no concessions to the everyday grind, and where we can take comfort in the lines of an unknown poet:

We ride our bicycles down because it’s faster
And to feel the air move in shoals, to feel
That it’s alright that we speak of transcendence still (19).

Heat 18: The Library of Fire
(2008)
Ivor Indyk (ed.)
Giramondo
ISBN: 978-1-920882-51-8
224pp AUD $30