| Manacles - review by Maryanne Dever and Jennifer Ash |
| The Politics of Publishing and Postmodernism: Robert Whyte's Manacles | |
In an article on small press publishing in the 1970s Michael Wilding notes that the progress towards recognition can be slow. "The small presses and little magazines", he writes, "do not achieve the immediate acceptance that simultaneous exposure through print and-electronic media can gain the product of big business establishment media. It seeps along slower. But it gets there." [Michael Wilding, "Small Presses and Little Magazines in the 1970s", Australian Literary Studies 9 (1980), 506.]
Robert Whyte's novel Manacles makes an interesting case in point. The fact that Manacles received little attention when it was first published in 1985 suggests that "getting there" is not getting any easier. Its progress, however, provides an interesting critique not only of the position of the alternative press in the 1980s, but also of the reception of experimental texts which problematize the very notion of fiction. Critical interest in the small press movement in Australia has tended to focus rather narrowly on the upsurge of activity in the early and mid 1970s. A certain nostalgia associated with this boom period of publishing and government subsidies has lent a retrospective tone to many judgements about the area. This tone is reinforced by works such as Michael Denholm's Small Press Publishing in Australia which carries with it, like Tregenza's earlier study, the air of a post-mortem examination. [See Michael Denholm, Small Press Publishing in Australia: The Early 1970s (Sydney: Second Back Row Press, l979) and John Tregenza, Australian Little Magazines 1923-1954 (Adelaide: Libraries Board of South Australia, 1964).]
The altered profile of the small press movement from the late '70s has meant a significant reduction in critical attention from literary magazines and newspapers in the '80s. Comprehensive surveys of small press works in Australian Book Review, for example, have been well spaced, appearing in 1981 and 1985. [In 1981 ABR included a section on the small press as a regular feature.]
Other reviews which appear in ABR from time to time tend to group the latest offerings together and in a single small article. Major journals and newspapers are now unlikely to review a small press publication unless it happens to be the work of an established author, which is seldom the case, or the product of a recognised press such as the Fremantle Arts Centre Press. However, Ian Templeman still recalls the time when that press too was dismissed as a "two-book wonder". ["Comment", Fremantle Arts Review, 1, No. 1 (1986, 2).]
The question, perhaps, is just what kind of alternative the small press represents in such an environment? Traditionally, the small press has served the dual functions of fostering new writers at a critical stage in their careers and of handling the so-called "uncommercial" products that have been rejected or ignored by mainstream commercial publishing houses. But, as Judith Rodriguez has pointed out, "the small press cannot create writers where there are none". [Judith Rodriguez, "Here Come the Locals", ABR No. 28 (1981). 54.]
A short list of established writers whose work first appeared from small presses in the '80s would have to include Bert Facey, Beverley Farmer, Philip Salom, Carmel Bird and Sally Morgan; extending the same list to the 70s would provide such names as Jolley, Malouf, Garner, Moorhouse, Hemensley, Tranter, Shapcott and Viidikas. The small press, it would appear, continues to provide opportunities for new writers. And one has only to cite the now familiar example of Keri Hulme's Booker Prize-winning novel The Bone People in order to recognise the importance of the small press in handling the unconventional and supposedly uncommercial product. Indeed, the ability to accept and promote the different, the unconventional, the new, remains one of the distinct advantages that the small press has over a mainstream press geared to producing books which conform to conventions little altered since the nineteenth century. Hilary McPhee makes a similar point when she suggests that editors now "have to develop new ways of dealing with authors who don't comply with [their] rules". [Hilary McPhee, "A Sense of Place", ABR No. 80 (1986).6.]
That Manacles appeared from a small press then is not altogether surprising, but its history provides significant insights into the production of a one-off publication.
Begun in 1973, the novel was written over a period of some ten years. An early draft of the work was submitted to University of Queensland Press in 1974 who returned it with favourable comments about "vignettes". In subsequent years the manuscript was heavily revised and expanded, some of the work being completed on a Literature Board Young Writers' Fellowship. During this period Whyte also published a collection of short stories and completed a 400-page novel which was lost after it was posted to a friend in Vienna. The final draft of Manacles was completed in a cut-and-paste job in 1983. "I was still a luddite," Whyte reflects, "I would have been assisted enormously by a word processor." [Letter from Robert Whyte to Maryanne Dever, 8/2/88. The authors are grateful to Robert Whyte for his assistance in providing details about the production of Manacles.]
After a Melbourne literary agent declined to handle the novel, Whyte was approached by the editor of a small literary journal who was prepared to consider publishing the work. As he was then freelancing as a newspaper production editor, he was able to arrange for the typesetting of the novel during 1984. The typesetter repaired inconsistencies in the manuscript and consulted Whyte over the real names of cigarettes and drinks. He received the galleys of Manacles at his own expense and proceeded to make corrections and final revisions before pasting the galleys into pages and making a photocopy mock-up of the whole. This close involvement of the author in the production of a work is reminiscent of the recent experience of Finola Moorhead, personally keying in her novel Remember the Tarantella for Primavera Press.
By early 1985, however, the journal editor had lost interest in the Manacles project, so Whyte took it upon himself to complete publication. He found a printer who had just acquired a book press and a 16-page folder and was willing to try out Manacles for a reasonable price. The total cost, including typesetting, of the run of 600 worked out at about $2,250 or $3.70 per unit. Even by 1985 standards, that pricing reveals a great deal about the capacity of small presses to utilise materials and labour which don't need to be costed after the fashion of the larger commercial concerns. Manacles eventually retailed for $6.
Having published the novel, there was still the issue of distribution. Traditionally, distribution has been one of the major problems confronting small press operations. Even successful publishers like McPhee-Gribble and the Fremantle Arts Centre have opted for arrangements with Penguin in order to give their authors the distribution they deserve. In Melbourne, Manacles was handled by Collected Works Bookshop, a venture of the Small Publishers Collective which specialises in stocking small press titles from Australia and overseas. Other copies managed to find their way into shops like Gleebooks in Sydney. Whyte then moved to Brisbane and did a round of the bookshops there. They proved extremely receptive and often took copies on a straight sale basis. In general, sales of the novel were steady and Whyte eventually covered his costs.
While individual responses may have been encouraging, the media proved less so. The fifty review copies sent out resulted in a single review some six months later in the Age Monthly Review. That review was by Robert Kenny, a Melbourne writer and prominent figure in small publishing in the 1970s. The review is largely sympathetic and acknowledges that Manacles is a work of explorative fiction which reflects upon the form of the novel and upon its own fiction-making processes. Kenny also comments on Whyte's "ability to produce passages of prose which are a joy to read", [Robert Kenny. "Speculating on Genres: Three recent books of explorative fiction", The Age Monthly Review, 6 No. 3 (1986). 5.] although he does not actually quote from the novel at any point. He praises Whyte's skill and humour, concluding that the work "deserves attention". The review fails, however, to recognise the fundamentally parodic nature of much of the text or to suggest the extent to which Manacles challenges received notions of authority and textuality. Manacles is a text which calls into question, vibrantly and imaginatively, the processes of its own production. It is a work which questions conceived notions of fiction and fiction-making. A text intrigued by and preoccupied with its own textuality. It is a text reflecting on itself: the narcissistic narrative of postmodernism. Manacles is the story of James, a portrait of the artist as a young man, very much caught up in the trials and tribulations of producing his first literary work. James meets Charles. another young man, another young artist, struggling to make paintings. Embedded within this narrative is the story of James labouring to bring his manuscript into being. On at least one occasion, James' manuscript erupts into textual consciousness and being, its different status signified materially by italicised printing. So that in Manacles there are stories within stories; there is not the straightforward cause and effect emplotment which shapes the narrative of the "psychological realism" to which the reading public has become accustomed. Manacles works on several different levels simultaneously, it is fiction about the fiction-making process: metafiction. It self-consciously challenges a whole tradition, the great tradition of what constitutes "literature", and in the process of this it also challenges established practices of literary criticism. But above all, this text subverts the process of reading. Each reader is confronted and challenged by this text's subversive difference, the subversive games it is playing with the literary status quo. Writing about formative influences on his work, Robert Whyte says:
I am interested in fiction. Reading Joyce gave me some idea of writing interior monologues, which are powerful in helping the reader to suspend disbelief. Reading Flann O'Brien, Boris Vian, and Alfred Jarry gave some insight to writing for the reader's pleasure -- but not for their expectations. [Letter from Robert Whyte, 8/2/88.]
Manacles is fiction problematised, fiction as metafiction which comments on its own status as fiction, draws attention to a reading process which is necessarily an active process, a labouring of the reader to make meaning, to (re)construct the text. The problematised postmodernist text is what Barthes calls an "open" or "writerly" text, where meaning is always multiple and plural, and can never be pinned down to a single monologic "right" reading, the one and only reading which is the text's True Meaning. [See Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, 1974).]
The ideology of the text with one true and correct meaning participates in the cult of the Author, whose intention gives rise to and authenticates the right reading which reveals the only meaning. But post structuralist theory has declared the Author to be dead. Instead there is the author-function, the "scriptor" who simply writes, produces ecriture, the polysemic or "dialogic" text where a multiplicity of voices speak a plurality of possible meanings. [Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?" in JV Harari, ed. Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post structuralist Criticism, London and Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979, pp. 141-160 and Roland Barthes, "The death of the Author" in Image-Music-Text (New York: Hill & Wang, 171)]
And this is based on the postmodernist (Lacanian) notion of the fractured, fragmented subject; the subject is not whole, can never, will never be whole; the subject is always radically divided between the conscious and the unconscious, and so can never speak in terms of a unified monologic discourse. There will always be those "other" meanings not (consciously) intended, often not even heard, but which insist on being spoken.
A text such as Manacles participates in the postmodernist discourse which stresses plurality, disjunction, disturbance, dislocation: it is the postmodern condition of both text and speaking subject.
That Manacles was greeted with indifference by publishers and literary agents is hardly surprising. For the reader who is unaware, the ruptured narrative surface and structuring of the novel may prove shocking. The text revels in its subversive play, stressing its multiplicity, taking pleasure in its own fractured, fragmented state. The narrative moves from one level of story to another, meanings slip and slide, always deferred, somehow never present here and now. And always the text refers to itself, its own textuality, problematising the relationship between "literature and reality". This in fact would seems to be the major preoccupation of the text: what is "fiction" and what is "reality"?
"He sat down again beside her and began speaking in three simultaneous baritone voices.
"He had taken a job as a gardener, he told her, because he thought it would be impossible to make a living as a writer. What would you write about? she asked him. He spoke in words puffed up with battle fatigue, ballooned and swollen with pride, colourful exaggeration. He told her he would like to make the city into a work of fiction, with a character who had to clamber and climb through the stink and the slime, with a shining sword and a suit of armour, bellowing , and battling with hawkers, hawsers, ropes, popes. He spoke of soap boxes and battle dress, of subterranean caverns and purple passages. Warming to his theme he leaned back into his richly resinous, pockmarked, red-nosed anecdotes. He was not aware that her attention had drifted almost immediately from the thread of the narrative. She looked distantly up through the trees at the blurred city beyond." [Robert Whyte, Manacles (Melbourne: Pataphysical Representatives, 1985). p.59.]
What is fiction and what is reality? And is there any difference? Is reality after all constructed from language -- just like fiction? Postmodernist theory would answer in the affirmative; "reality" is really and "imaginary" state of mind and being:
"The substance of this idea, which now seemed so plain and obvious, was him wondering whether it could be possible that he could be fictional himself. If he were a character. In a book. Then, suddenly aware again of the raw, bleeding havoc of his madly wounded neck, the excessive heat, the improbable nature of the women beside him, and the cinematographic speed of the story in general... The story. He was already referring to it as. The almost impalpable fear of this possibility now coalesced in his mind. If someone else was responsible for this. Worse, someone like himself, who couldn't care less. His eyes wrang their tiny shrivelled hands and shivered. The shudder went through his body, a strange sense of knowing. Once he entertained the idea, he felt sure of it.
"It raised all sorts of questions. How much of what was happening could be relied upon as being real? How much of it was his own imagination? How much was the writer's imagination? To what degree did he have free will? Would his realisation of what was really going on make any difference? Was it the writer's intention that he should be thinking this?" [Manacles, p.73]
In this last quotation the writer is written into the narrative, a real and menacing presence with Divine characteristics. The writer, the authorial voice and presence are notions to be played with. And this raises questions regarding the relationship between (fiction) writer and (fictional) characters where the writer is God the creator. So the fictive creature finds himself troubled by questions of a theological nature, whether he (as character) possesses free will, or whether authorial intention determines all within the world of fictive "reality". But textual discussion of Authorial status is not limited to James' troubled psychic monologuing. In Part Two, each chapter has a rubricated statement introducing that chapter's events. For example, Chapter Six
"in which the Author registers disapproval of the increasing tendency to lapse into hallucinatory monologues. In which the Author further expresses interest in the phenomenal reserves of energy the characters must have to be able to continually rationalise their changing surroundings in terms of their own experience."
and also Chapter Ten
"in which we return to follow the course of the couple in the car where the Author manipulates the perceptions of the characters and exaggerates the weather conditions until the reader suspects the plan is to develop a semiotician's desert, so popular in modern fiction."
Who is this Author who is written into the text, who is named in the text, interpellated into the text, and who in Chapter Six both spectates and speculates on the world and the characters which he himself has created, and whose Authorial Omnipotence is openly recognised in the rubrics to Chapter Ten? Who is this Author (-God) and what is his textual function? Nor is the role of the reader ignored. As with Italo Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveller, the reader of this text participates actively in the narrative, is involved in a reading which is an active process. To read is to participate in a dialectical relationship with the text, is to enter into dialogue with the text; to read is an active and (re)creative process which is also the production of meaning. These critical issues are among the concerns of Manacles, and there is a long discussion in Part Three which is worth quoting in full. It is James who speaks, who manipulates the 'I' of the utterance:
In a book, if I was going to write one, and by this stage I was sure I was, there were at least always two characters. The author. and the reader. One should give them names, which was simple in the author s case, but what about the reader? One had to allow for a certain variation.
I was at this time still working in the gardens, though to be sure I was spending a lot more time adding to my manuscript than tending the plants.
A thoroughfare near the stairwell in the library, where I could freely observe all my characters passing in their walks of life suited my purposes perfectly. A warm orange light, provided by the interaction of the sunlight and the carpet, threw a friendly glow about me while I added notes to the story in my notebook.
My main consideration, apart from the characters, was the point of view the story would be written from. Not mine, probably. I was toying with the idea of creating a fictional writer to tie all the sections of the book together, but I was unsure if this was introducing too much the element of free love. A writer, I reflected, was always the one who wouldn't when he was wanted.
I could on the other hand write it from the reader's point of view, as though everything was already finished and written and all the problems solved. It would certainly give it a clinical air, like a post-mortem.. Or again, from the point of view of a posthumous reader. But that would mean writing the book twice. And if once was too much, twice was already on its way back from Mars. [p. 83]
But who really speaks? James? Or is it the voice of another author who speaks through James, using James' voice to speak his own authorial dilemma?
For the characters in the fictive world of Manacles, reality is something of a terrifying experience. It is dreamlike, or rather nightmarish, where boundaries are fluid, where solids melt and states of consciousness alter in rapid succession. Textual reality, like meaning, slips and slides, a horrifying surreality reminiscent of Dante's hellish vision. [Whyte's work-in-progress is in fact a version of The Divine Comedy which includes three of the characters in manacles.]
All is flux, nothing is constant. For example:
James held his hand in front of his face but instead of reassuring him it merely increased his amusement. He regarded with an intense scrutiny these long white shapes of madness. Similar shapes swirled in his mind. And outside in the slavedriven streets. Troublesome. Turmoil. Into. In. Too. Wild rips of mad gentlefolk cavorting lumpy bodies through his mind. Sideways. Ancient Pyramids of Time. Eyes, forming themselves into a handle for shovelling thoughts of his mind as it adapted itself to the condition by becoming displayed. He looked now at the woman and was surprised to discover that her face was peeling away revealing the face beneath, identical to the one above. (pp. 72-73)
Here reality has dissolved into the crazed hallucinations of psychosis, or of a drug-induced state. Meanwhile, Brisbane is burning, has become a raging inferno. And a killer bus is on the rampage!
In an article on the postmodernist condition, Fredric Jameson discusses the schizophrenic use of language. [Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" in Hal Foster, ed. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Washington: Bay Press, 1983), pp 111-125.]
Here signifiers and signifieds are separate, signifiers float free, but have become concretised, are now material signifiers functioning as material objects within psychotic discourse. The schizophrenic is the shattered subject, the severely disintegrated and fragmented subject whose altered language signifies this subjective state of being. We can therefore expect to find similar alterations in the language of the postmodern text. And in Manacles this would seem to be the case. Manacles is a work of prose fiction, yet its language participates in the pleasures of poetic play. Its language is reflexive drawing attention to itself, to the materiality of phonological effect as the enounced becomes the act of enunciation through the reading process. The signifier takes precedence over the signified, the signifier is foregrounded, is privileged at the expense of "meaning". In Kristevan terms, this is the semiotic order breaking through the rigid controls of the symbolic and syntactic law and order. [See, for example, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) and Desires in Language, trans. Thomas Gora et al (New York: Columbia University Press 1980).]
The semiotic with its pre-symbolic chaos and confusion, its poetry and madness, constitutes the text which takes delight and pleasure in itself. It is the text at play; it is textual jouissance: [see Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975).
Hundreds of pre-natal, ham-fisted, star-spangled angels were emerging from the red lips of the world, warm in refreshment and wringing wet. their gossamer wings, sticky from the encumbrance, shook with the satisfaction of celebrity and rose into the air, carrying their owners with them. The sky was calm and tender, and received them decorously on one side, as night quickly undressed on the other. The bleeding horizon blubbered on the beach, giving the whole scene a look of infinite betrayal. (p. 93)
One section of Manacles consists entirely of a Joycean free-flow of language -- a constant stream of free-floating signifiers:
Forever doppler hum inhabits our lives roadways streams mobile metal past reminder bubbles gentle sedge bordered stream rippled surfaces schooling mullet perch swaggering diamond patterns (p 31).
For the reader this section is less satisfying than others. And perhaps the reason for this is that this section seems to be simply imitative, is not involved in the parodic play which characterises the relationship between Manacles and other texts, other genres playfully brought into textual consciousness. For Manacles is a text about textuality, about textual play which is its textual pleasure. And the pleasure of this playful text is also pure pleasure for the reader. It is unfortunate that a text which not only needs but deserves to be read over and over can not, at present, be read at all.
|
|  |
