I once wondered what would happen if each time a place was central to a novel what would happen to the place if the mentions carrying charges. If the charges were of fairystuff, then new York and London, more than anywhere else in the English-speaking world, would turn into fairy wonderlands. Japanese anime answered this question for me by making the charges the stuff of detonation and world-changing tragedy. Tokyo has died more times than anywhere else in the Japanese-speaking world.
When I’d explored this notion decades ago, I kept it in mind, and nearly made a map containing all the places that were the heartland of a novel, just to find out more. At that point I entered the public service (this was a long time ago) and there was no time to make maps.
I turned my thoughts to notions that did not need mapping. How much do we centre our narratives around the US and around England? What does this do to our sense of what makes home? How does it affect how we see ourselves? Often it means we see ourselves poorly, because the London and New York publishing industries tend to reinforce the bias from the stories they select for publication. It’s far, far harder for outsiders to get published and have careers without moving to those places and creating networks and being seen. The further one is from a central place, the more difficult it is. In Australia, Sydney, Melbourne (and recently Brisbane) are those central points. People who can travel a lot and create modern networks are less disadvantaged. We know what this does to careers. I’m not sure we have looked deeply enough into what this does for the stories we tell.
Today, I’m thinking about this quite specifically in relation to the US’s story dream of a Wild West and in Australia’s equivalent. In novel terms, my favourite Australian story based in our Wild-West equivalent is Voss. It’s the opposite of anything written by Zane Grey. White won a Nobel Prize and Grey sold more novels than I can count. They are not, to be fair, good comparisons, because they were not simply written at far ends of the world, but they are also at far ends of the literary spectrum. Yet White and Grey are the two writers who always come to mind when I start to think about popular stories that share history. I read them both when I was fifteen and sixteen. I fiercely wanted to understand them. I didn’t want the literary understanding I was being offered at school. I wanted to understand how they tell us who we are and what would happen if we put them in historical perspective.
Both writers demonstrate some of the core stories we associate with European settlement when we’re telling stories that focus on that settlement. Those core stories give me hints on how we shape our own histories to make them distinctive. The publishing tendency to centralise rubs away differences. Publishing tends to limit the range of stories we’re offered and to focus on areas that publishers think will sell. This reinforces a small concept of the past and the reinforces it again and again and again until we think it’s legendary. Those of us who are not in the right region or culture find the legendary passes us by.
When I was twenty-six I accepted that job in Canberra and suddenly the stories of a gunslinging past were staring at me from the roads I walked. Local farmers were descended from famous bushrangers (Australian outlaws). Canberra is on the road from the goldfields to the big smoke. And yet… we didn’t have a big set of Wild West stories. We have some bushranger songs and tales, but they’re not encapsulated in a whole world the way the Wild West stories are. Australia’s writing legacy was through the UK rather than through the US and do, instead of dime novels, we had penny-dreadfuls and their ilk and heirs. We had writers such as Mary Fortune and Fergus Hume and, later, Arthur Upfield. They’re quite different in nature and story style. In many cases, the lives of the writers themselves held elements of that penny-dreadfulness and the books were often set in Melbourne. For Fortune and Hume, the best place to start with with the work of Lucy Sussex. She is also from Melbourne. Melbourne is, these days, a City of Literature, but it still relies on people living there and does not reach out so much to the rest of Australia. Likewise, the earlier Australian popular literature mentions of places do not seem to carry the same charges as novels set in New York or in the Wild West.
For readers, this is a good thing. Each novel can be read by itself and for itself. But from a cultural standpoint, it’s not so good. The pressure remains to write novels set in New York or to tell yet another Wild West science fiction story.
What are we missing with this? I was going to explore this in another post, next week, but I’ve been thinking about it. Would anyone reading this (including Treehouse friends!) like to talk about our histories? We could compare the dates we’re taught as important. We could discuss why the US has the Wild West while Australia has Marvellous Melbourne. We could compare goldrushes and outlaw stories. It could be a great deal of fun. Would anyone like to share a discussion? (Not for next week, for a mutually convenient future time.)