A mystic poet, Chekhov’s sister and a Calabrian astrologer walk into a bar

A Review of Subhash Jaireth’s To Silence

By Scott Halligan

Subhash Jaireth’s To Silence, published by Puncher & Wattman earlier this year, features ‘fictional autobiographies’—the author’s own description—of three long-dead but very real historical figures: Kabir, a 15^th century Indian mystic poet who was a hero to both Hindus and Muslims; Maria Chekhova, sister of Anton Chekhov; and Tommaso Campanella, a 16^th century Calabrian scholar, theologian, poet and astrologer. In the back cover blurb, John Hughes describes this little volume as a ‘tardis of a book’, and I’d agree. I intended to write a short review of perhaps four or five hundred words, but by the end of it I found myself with about a dozen pages of notes. In particular, Jaireth’s innovative and brave experimentation with genre and his surprising choice of characters opens up many doors for thought. I’ll try to act as something like a ‘concierge’ here.

Jaireth is not the first to explore the genre of fictional autobiography. The classic I, Claudius by Robert Graves was written in the form of an autobiography penned in secret by the emperor Claudius. To Silence is nothing like I, Claudius, but a comparison with Graves’ approach is a useful way to illuminate Jaireth’s stylistic innovations as well as how difficult it is to neatly categorise the book.

To Silence takes the form of three short monologues, but unlike that of Claudius, they are not chronological accounts. Instead, we find each character in old age, aware they are approaching their death, their narratives flitting in and out between the immediate concerns of their present lives and the memories sparked by that present, via photographs (Chekhova), songs and poems (Kabir), physical pain (Campanella), and so on. There’s even a moment near the end of the third monologue where Campanella, who has agreed to have his biography written by a literary friend named Gabrielle Naude, is given a set of keywords and asked to reflect on an aspect or episode of his life to match each keyword—an autobiographical device inside another one.

Also unlike I, Claudius, these autobiographies are not comprehensive accounts of the lives of Kabir, Chekhova and Campanella. Indeed, if one untied all the autobiographical loose ends given in each account and laid them out in chronological order, one would still end up with a broken,  unevenly clustered and quite incomplete outline of a life. But it was never Jaireth’s intention to write comprehensive, chronological autobiographies. This approach would have quickly become unwieldy and imposed an unwanted storytelling voice on the characters.

Instead, the monologues are meditative and confessional, almost taking on the form of soliloquies or journal entries. The writing thus takes on an intimacy and immediacy it would otherwise lack, and the reader is drawn into a very private world. I could quote many examples, but Campanella’s description of the child singer Pietro and the old man’s subsequent guilt under the eyes of an omniscient God gives a strong impression that these thoughts were not intended to be widely read.

There he is, the face a perfect heart-shape; nose straight with a slight upturned curve near the tip, almond-shaped eyes rimmed by arched brows, eyelids heavy, lips succulent of the colour of ripe pomegranate seeds, and chin smooth and soft asking to be touched and kissed …

I confess that I was blinded by the beauty of the innocent boy. I shouldn’t have been, because the beauty was undoubtedly Yours… I know this now but then face to face with Pietro I had somehow lost sight of the most obvious… To expiate myself I confess; to redeem my soul I confess; to remain vigilant of future indiscretions I confess; I confess because I am nothing but human asking for love and compassion. (pp. 89-90)

If the term ‘autobiography’ is problematic, this absence of awareness of the presence of a reader also prevents a neat classification of these monologues as memoirs.

Readers of this book, even just picking it up and reading through the blurb, will find it hard to stop asking: Why these three characters? Why, for instance, did Jaireth choose Maria Chekhova instead of Chekhov? What do the three characters have in common? In my case I also wondered what it meant, aside from conclusions that could be drawn about my ignorance, that I knew next to nothing about these people …

One reason for Jaireth’s choice of characters is that while they may not be familiar names to many readers, they belong to a special category of historical figures: the overall shape of their lives and their character is known, but most of the hard biographical details are either not known (Kabir and Campanella), or not previously considered interesting enough to give much attention (Chekhova). Research on Kabir leads me to dozens of stories about his life, some of them conflicting factually with each other, but scarce biographical information. And since Kabir was illiterate, even his poems and songs have a sense of ephemerality, passed down and written down as they were by others. Similarly, Maria Chekhova devoted her own life to documenting the life of her brother, and her personal life was only considered relevant as it pertained to that of Chekhov. That the three figures are mostly known to history ‘indirectly’ gives Jaireth much room to use his imagination.

Another clue is that these three people found themselves, whether they were aware of it or not, living in unusually close proximity to highly significant historical events, periods or transitions. Kabir and Campanella seemed to be lionised and victimised, respectively, by forces over which they had little control and which appeared to select them out for a life of notoriety.

As for Chekhova—and the question: Why her and not Anton?—she survived her older brother by fifty-seven years. Anton died in 1904, a year before the beginning of the most tumultuous period in Russia’s history. From her vantage point of the Chekhov villa in Yalta in southern Ukraine, where Anton spent his final years as his health faded, Chekhova observed the first Revolution of 1905, the First World War, the February and October Revolutions of 1917 and the ensuing years of bitter civil war, which the Ukraine was also tied up in. In the mid-1930s, when Chekhova was in her mid-seventies, the Stalinist purges began, and after the purges, Chekhova then lived through the Second World War, Nazi Occupation, and the Holocaust.

To use I, Claudius once more, Robert Graves used the miraculous Claudius, considered a harmless, disabled fool by his infamous family and thus left alone to observe them as they fell under the spell of absolute power, to indulge his deep interest and write a detailed account of the Roman Empire. Jaireth uses the ‘strategically ideal’ lives of Kabir, Chekhova and Campanella in the same way. He inhabits them, using their minds and bodies to explore the episodes of human history that fascinate and move him.

Jaireth has likened his approach to writing this book to a stage actor who performs multiple roles throughout the one performance. Jaireth imagines himself to be these people and writes their worlds from inside them, discovering as much as writing their thoughts and feelings, their pain, and what they see and hear and touch. The success of this technique is evident in how well Jaireth is able to conjure up vivid impressions of time and place and still maintain an inward-looking, meditative voice when ‘performing’ the three characters. Although there are passages of detailed description—an epic astrological ritual led by Campanella to ensure the re-emergence of the sun from an eclipse is a highlight—a specific example of this indirect evocativeness is hard to find, the effect achieved incrementally and cumulatively across each monologue.

Another achievement of Jaireth’s stage acting technique is how intensely he is able to convey the emotions felt by those people, particularly their pain. Towards the end of the Chekhova monologue, Chekhova learns the fate of an old friend named Dunya Efros, a woman who was briefly engaged to Anton. Having not seen Dunya for many years, Chekhova can’t stop herself from thinking about Dunya and the place where she died, her head shaven, at the age of eighty-two: the Treblinka death camp. In the final paragraphs, Chekhova becomes overwhelmed by the guilt of the survivor and of the bystander, not just for Dunya but for the millions of others of her countrymen and women who died in the wars, revolutions, purges and the Holocaust.

But do I want to be consoled and comforted? I really don’t know. No, I want to suffer and grieve and carry the grief with me undiminished, until I die. Only death will bring me relief. Redemption I don’t want to think about. I haven’t sinned. My benevolent God, I’m sure, understands that, and the feeling of guilt which troubles my heart is also understood and condoned by Him. But my guilt isn’t strictly mine. I am guilty by association, guilty that I have lived in times unbelievably cruel and inhumane, and that I didn’t have the courage to speak up. I should have. I definitely should have.
Like others, I too was selfish, too concerned to save my own skin.
But—
I hate that word. All excuses begin with this terrible word. (p. 70)

Chekhova’s fortune was to live through all of this, for nearly a century, when so many others died. Her burden was to carry her country’s nightmares with her to the grave.

One aspect that initially seemed a weakness in Jaireth’s writing of To Silence is the similarity in the narrative voices Jaireth employs for Kabir, Chekhova and Campanella—even though each character has their own quirks, such as Campanella’s frequent asides addressed to God, which range from declarations of faith to paranoid apologies for perceived indiscretions. The more I thought about it, however, the more I realised that this consistency of voice is in fact a strength. It emphasises the shared humanity between the three very different characters, encouraging the reader to look past the obvious differences and ask what the three of them might have in common.

I will end this review with a reassurance: it isn’t necessary to know anything about Kabir, Chekhova and Campanella, or be a history aficionado, to get pleasure from this little book. I thoroughly enjoyed discovering the very different worlds of these characters, stumbling my way through them, piecing together the clues and inferring the historical context. I do however strongly recommend doing some elementary research into the lives and myths surrounding the three people, and the places and times in which they lived, and then give the book a second reading. Read in a new light with some background knowledge, it almost becomes a different book.

***

A lot more could be said about Subhash Jaireth’s To Silence; the meaning of the title, the supporting characters, and Jaireth’s personal motivations for writing the book are all equally as interesting as the topics covered in this review. Fortunately, Jaireth recently gave a talk at the IPCF book club on To Silence, which was filmed and uploaded on to YouTube in five parts. In the five videos, Jaireth not only discusses the aspects I’ve mentioned and many more, but also gives emotionally powerful readings from the book. Included below is the first video; the other four can be found here.

Subhash Jaireth lives in Canberra. Between 1969 and 1978 he spent nine years in Moscow. He has published three books of poetry, Yashodhara: Six Seasons, Unfinished Poems for Your Violin, Before the Bullet Hit Me, and he has had stories, essays, and poetry published in Australian and international journals.

Port Authority

by Mara Coson

When people pass on lessons on writing, they often choose between two overplayed yet sensible pieces of advice. The first is ‘show, don’t tell,’ and the second, which I plan to discuss here, is ‘write what you know’.

I woke up this morning wanting to write about feminist literature for the Ilura Gazette—but without a literature degree or a published novel, I asked myself if I could write a highly informative post on feminist literature in the span of a day. Probably not.

I decided to write about this need for authority instead. Can we publicly write about issues that we’re not experts on in blogs, or even in works of fiction? The rising trend of citizen journalism and personal blogs means more people feel they have the authority to write about their chosen topics. But does is this newfound sense of authority justified? Where does a writer’s authority come from?

Some fiction authors are able to write about large, research-heavy political issues and describe believably, if not correctly, details such as the pattern of the President’s bedroom carpet. They can write lengthy novels even if all they have is a daily subscription to the newspaper and a keen sense of observation. Before political-thriller author Tom Clancy published his first book, he had completed a literature degree and had run an insurance agency. His firsthand experience with the military was limited to being rejected from service after failing an eye exam.

Is authority just about undergoing enough research or having the right qualifications then? Let’s have a look at health articles. We’ve all seen them: lose weight in x days, or colourful ‘superfoods’, as though they were breakthroughs they hadn’t just been printed two issues ago. These are often written not by nutritionists, but by freelance writers whose only authority may rest in their having previously written five similar articles on weight loss. After a while, these writers become self-appointed authorities, the way Oprah or Tyra Banks know everything about people-problems without having studied psychiatry or without having personally gone through each episode’s life dramas. It has gotten to the point where it’s hard to discern between seasoned diet-experts (no pun intended) and amateurs beating doctors into recommending diet plans.

If we consider these articles, then authority isn’t completely dependent on research. While freelance writers probably don’t have the authority to tell me how much weight I should lose, I seem to have made the mistake of thinking that academic qualifications were the only source of authority. I thought that with only a marketing and creative writing degree, I couldn’t seriously discuss feminist literature—that anyway, these topics are already saturated with voices of authority, and I would be last in line as a valid voice. But then I began to take my own background into consideration: firstly, I am a woman; second, I have learnt through reading feminist texts the basic language in which to discuss feminism, and third, I understand the need for female empowerment and how it affects society. I know that like me, many women who have felt marginalised and oppressed by a patriarchal society, but who did not have a PhD, have published influential feminist zines. These women were completely justified in doing so because they had experience—and experience is as crucial as research.

Does authority, then, come from some combination of formal qualifications and experience, or is it still harder to define? Salman Rushdie, writing Midnight’s Children based on fragmented memories of his homeland while he was in London, asked himself whether he had the authority to write the book. He felt like he was an outsider looking in. ‘Literature is self-validating,’ Rushdie answers in his essay, ‘Imaginary Homelands’. ‘That is to say, a book is not justified by its author’s worthiness to write it, but by the quality that has been written. There are terrible books that arise directly out of experience, and extraordinary imaginative feats dealing with themes in which the author has been obliged to approach from the outside.’ I suppose not all autobiographical fiction would really make us read through to the end, and neither would all political commentaries on blogs. Sometimes it takes a story like Roald Dahl’s ‘The Sound Machine’ where plants are said to scream, or a well-written piece like Jenny Kleeman’s social commentary about the Philippines—such might not be based on firsthand experience, but the quality in which they had been written seems to really make up for it.

But if research, background, and quality still aren’t enough, let’s not forget that we currently live in ‘the age of engagement’. At the publishing conference, O’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishing (TOC) 2010, Arianna Huffington said, ‘for the first time, news consumers and book readers don’t just want to read, they want to engage with what they’re reading. They want to talk back.’ Literary authority no longer seems so daunting to writers with the knowledge that writing is not about preaching but rather engaging with people. There is no doubt I’ve failed to cover issues here in this post, but there are people who will make them known. If blog posts overlook details or fail to properly address an issue, there is a community out there that is ready to engage in discussion. Even for fiction, the engagement of readers is vital. Readers fill in the strokes that complete what is essentially an unfinished circle, as a text is nothing without readers there to interpret it. Besides, in fiction, there is space for the imagination to prop up the otherwise unknown. Nabokov once said, ‘great novels are above all great fairy tales … literature does not tell the truth but makes it up.’

I’ve reached the end of an article that I felt that I had no authority to write, and it’s likely that I still don’t have the authority. Perhaps I’m my own bad example, having failed to possess the proper research, experience, and writing quality to have been a proper authority to write about ‘authority’. However, there is room on this blog for engagement through comments, and where I fall short in my knowledge or understanding, someone like you might be able to fill-in the gaps.

City of Words

By Lana Rosenbaum

My favourite thing about Melbourne is that wherever you go, you’ll always find a bookstore. I’m not referring to franchised stores like Borders, Dymocks or Angus and Robertson that somehow find themselves clumped together within one hundred meters. Independent bookshops, secondhand bookshops and even remainder bookshops are hidden everywhere, down laneways in the city, connected to coffee shops in Richmond, St Kilda and Carlton, or even behind markets. Having worked in an independent bookshop for two years, I’d always preferred them to franchise stores, appreciating the loyalty of customers, the dedication of staff and the special selection of texts. 

Having recently been in London, I felt the same sense of literary culture creeping around every corner. There was an entire laneway in Soho of secondhand bookstores. Some had books that cost thousands of pounds, and others were more affordable. In the Portobello markets, almost every second stall was selling hardback classics. The main franchise bookstore there is Waterstones. It’s not as predominant as Borders and Dymocks in Australia, and had the same feel as Readings Bookstore.

New York, however, shocked me. In the city, I saw only two Borders and a Barnes and Nobles, which was closed at the time for renovations. The streets I ventured didn’t have second hand or independent bookshops, although I’m sure in other areas there would be. I expected New York to have the same literary vibe as other main cities. Then I got to thinking about my dream to open a bookshop. Would an independent bookshop be more successful in a city like Melbourne that is filled with them already, or in a city like New York where the main stores are large franchises?

Social Networking and Literacy

By Scott Halligan

I graduated from high school in 2004, and I can barely remember learning any grammar while I was there at all. Although my attention wavered often in class, I’m confident that this gap in my learning is a result of a genuine lack of grammar being taught at my school. I only formally learned about the parts of speech, dependent and independent clauses, finite and non-finite verbs and all those other wonderful things when I took a Professional Writing class at university.

Most people won’t take a class like that at university, even Arts students, so how much can we ‘get away with’ not knowing the technical stuff? An enormous amount, I think. For example, we can read perfectly well without it, although if we can’t read something we might not be able to explain why; we would just say that it just looks and sounds wrong, and maybe wave our hands around a bit. Although it certainly helps with some genres, it’s not a prerequisite for writing either. We just know which order the words go; in many cases we can ‘feel’ if something is grammatically correct or not. Plus, there’s the handy grammar checker that comes standard on our word processors (what’s a sentence fragment?) 

So we can be literate readers and writers (that is, more or less proficient using so-called Standard English) without a formal understanding of how our language works. We can obtain a working knowledge of our language through listening, speaking, reading and writing, and this will be, most of the time, more than enough to get us through our lives.

But perhaps it’s time to go ‘backwards’ in terms of school curriculum, to reverse the trend, get a bit old-fashioned, and revisit grammar. I think the above argument applies for previous decades, but not anymore. It’s pretty clear that our language is changing faster than it ever has before. The majority of Generation Y now does most of their reading and writing online. There’s a lot of great writing on the net, and many conventions and styles of writing, such as journalism, have made the transition from hardcopy to digital without much change in language. But most young people don’t read that kind of writing online. Most of their reading and writing is done on social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. This is significant because the English used here is very different to ‘standard’ English.

There are no formal writing conventions for using Facebook, MySpace or Twitter, although for the latter each ‘Tweet’ is limited to 140 characters. There are informal conventions though, and the urge to write a certain way is very strong, even for older users. We all know what this looks like: “hii! how hav u bin goin? ive bin sooo flat out wiv work n skool n everything omg its crazyyyy lol hey wat r u doin 2nite u wanna go out” This a fictional example, but it’s not particularly exaggerated. In fact, it’s very common. It’s true that it’s less common for people who came to social networking sites after they had already established their basic reading and writing skills, at university or even later, but even then, many of these older users adapt the abbreviations, lack of punctuation and deliberate misspellings that characterise the social networking style into their writing.

The question is why does this social networking language look the way it does? Why do people write like that? I’m not sure. It’s not convenience. While there is a limit to how many characters one can use in a text message (therefore making abbreviations functional and useful) Facebook and MySpace were around before Twitter’s 140 words per Tweet limit, and these sites set quite generous limits on word length.

That kind of language is so predominant partly because social networking language memes (abbreviations such as lol, wtf, and omg; and conventions like extending the vowel sound of a word by repeating the last letter instead of the letter/s which forms the vowel, like crazyyyyy instead of craaaaazy) spread so fast that people want to show others that they are part of the ‘in’ crowd, that they get the joke. Not using them makes someone look uncool and out of date, just as it did in the playground or on the street.

But my guess is that social networking language is more than anything else a deliberate reaction against more formal language. It’s not really functional, and it’s not that much faster to write or to read. Instead, it’s political. It’s a rebellion. Not only is there no language arbiters (teachers, work superiors, editors) to correct the language in status updates and comments, but there is complete freedom to experiment. Young people are simultaneously throwing out and making new rules in English. And these changes happen extremely quickly. A particular language fad can be invented and become common usage across the world within a few months. Conventions are invented precisely because they are at complete odds with what is taught, or perhaps more profoundly (but something we won’t explore here), what is rational or logical. Writing “crazyyyy” instead of “craaaazy” doesn’t make any sense, but that’s the point. It’s a reaction against sense. Throwing out many standard English rules, such as punctuation, makes the language harder to understand, but in the world of social networking language, if there’s a breakdown in communication, the fault is always the reader’s.  If the reader doesn’t understand the new rules or the lack of standard rules, that’s their problem.

Maybe this is a good thing. Young people are experimenting with language and inventing a new world through new language. They have taken ownership over a new medium and are making it their own. But I’m worried. There is and will always be a need to read and write in Standard English, whether it’s in journalism, academia, technical manuals, or legal documents. I mentioned before that most people can learn Standard English by ‘feel’, through simply being exposed to the language constantly, even if they don’t learn it formally. But if young people are not only not being taught the language formally, but are doing most of their reading and writing in a literary environment, where rules are thrown out the window and new, deliberately (and rebelliously) irrational rules come into vogue every few months, standard English may become unfamiliar to a generation, like a foreign or obsolete language.

If this is true, then soon adults will enter the workforce without really knowing the difference between writing a status update or a ‘Tweet’ and writing an essay, a report or a business email. They will know that it needs to be different somehow, but they will have to guess, not having come across the kind of language they will be required to use before. There was, at least for most people, quite a large jump in sophistication required in reading and writing at university level compared with high school before students did most of their writing on social networking sites. This jump will only become larger. And while it’s true that many adults use social networking sites and are at least broadly familiar with social networking language (and many indulge in it), many are either not familiar with it or reject it outright. A growing disparity could therefore open up between those whose natural language is that of social networking sites and those who feel uncomfortable straying too far from Standard English.

So maybe a return to teaching grammar (and correct spelling) seriously in primary and secondary education is important. It could act as a kind of counterweight to the lawlessness and experimentation of social networking language, help close widening gaps between the reading and writing skills required at university and the workplace, and help make sure that there is a common language with which we can  talk to each other. The goal is not to stop people, especially young people, from using written English however they want; it’s to make sure, at the same time, that they are given the tools to communicate using Standard English for when they need to use it. No matter how ‘digital’ we go, there will always be that need.

Writing Groups

By A. S. Patric

A good writing group can be crucial to a writer. We might prefer the more heroic image of the writer building an empire with his/her own hands. But the act of writing is one of the most fundamentally communal processes a person can involve themselves in.

If you’ve ever read Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gogol or Chekhov, you’ll know there’s a constant reference to what it means to be Russian, and that there’s a dialogue between all of these writers regarding that idea. If they were looking to understand what a modern national character might mean for them in their day, they were also asking each other for better ways to understand the human experience. All of these men were of that empire building heroic tradition, but from Pushkin onwards, this communal sense of a greater literary project fuelled them. It’s amazing how little was accomplished before Pushkin and this sense of a literary community.

The Beats are another example of a group of writers who took upon themselves a set of literary/social values and crafted a new literary movement. It’s easy to get caught up in the mythology that arose afterwards, but I love the early black & whites of Burroughs, Kerouac and Ginsberg, captured in the midst of talking about what they were doing. Workshopping their ideas before they turned into social artefacts like Junkie, On the Road, and Howl.

I can’t say I see any comparable movements in Australian literature, but as much as what we do is composed of singular acts, there is a communal environment within which they are collected and shared. These communal spheres open up in various ways throughout the literary landscape. Much of it will find connections on the internet through blogs and blogging forums, and will continue to stretch out, in any and all available directions.

Connecting and disconnecting, generating communal clusters ceaselessly.
The most basic communal unit is the writing group. You might not be able to find a Chekhov or Ginsberg to share your work with, but there’s still this crucial aspect of communication we need to be involved with. Of course it need not be formalised as an official group, but then there’s something to be said for presenting your writing to readers who aren’t your friends. Who will only know you in the way a reader will.

That might sound basic, but how often do you read a convoluted piece of prose that seems to have no justification for its existence outside of proving the author can string together a few lovely images? How often does the message get presented as a lifeless specimen of logic, functioning to inform us that the required research has been done? Even with established writers, you might feel a gradual disconnect, as their work becomes less aware of the reader; more and more self involved and self referential. There are so many ways for writing to drift away from its target, there’s a need for constant calibration that comes only through getting a variety of responses to your writing.

Robert Giroux wrote of Flannery O’Connor, that when he first met her, he couldn’t understand her Georgian accent, so he got her to write down what she’d just said. It read, “My name is Flannery O’Connor. I am not a journalist. Can I come to the Writer’s workshop?” Giroux described this giant of American short story writers in those early days: ‘Flannery always had a flexible and objective view of her own writing, constantly revising, and in every case improving. The will to be a writer was adamant; nothing could resist it, not even her own sensibility about her own work. Cut, alter, try it again…’

Not all writing groups are the same of course. In their most basic form, they are support groups for people who don’t really have the time or energy to rigorously practice the craft at a high level. Whatever their ambitions, sharing words can be rewarding, even if it doesn’t lead to publication. Other writing groups can form vanity gatherings in which writers primp and preen each other’s delicate word embroidered egos.

Solid working groups of writers do exist of course, and sometimes bring unbelievable commitment and care to each other’s work. It’s about as difficult to find one of those as a great band if you’re a musician, but it’s worth the search.