FROM THE BEGINNING: ORAL TRADITIONS

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia have been telling stories since time immemorial. Although Indigenous oral cultures were once believed to be dying out, it is clear today, in Australia and elsewhere, that many aspects of these ancient cultures have survived in Indigenous communities, and are now thriving as a living, evolving part of contemporary life. Oral songs and narratives are traditionally an embodied and emplaced form of knowledge. Information is stored in people's minds in various narrative forms which, at the appropriate time, are transmitted from the mouths of the older generation to the ears of the young. Many narratives are connected to specific sites, and are transmitted in the course of people's movements through their country. Certain songs and stories are only transmitted in specific ceremonial contexts, while others circulate in the informal settings of everyday life. For oral traditions to survive, then, “the learning generation” must be in direct physical proximity to “the teaching generation”. People must also have access to significant sites in their country, and be free to perform their ceremonies, speak their languages, and carry out their everyday cultural activities.

For many readers, critics and writers, Australian literary biography and autobiography are rich and complex domains. In this chapter the texts themselves will be used as points of departure, and anchors of a series of cross-sections which will stress the importance and energy of this writing from the very beginnings of European settlement, although the focus will remain on contemporary examples. One of the pleasures of these books is their ongoing interrogation of ways of writing about the self and subjectivity; some of the best critiques of biographical and autobiographical writing occur in the primary texts themselves. Another pleasure, and further reason to modify a chronological approach, is that nineteenth-century Australian life-writing remains very much alive, and continues to emerge anew in the present. The past is not settled. Extensive bibliographical and critical work continues to challenge Australian literary history by revealing hitherto “invisible lives” in nineteenth-century materials, so bringing a much larger volume of autobiographical writing into bibliographical records. Furthermore, the recent work of critics who draw on the methods of feminist criticism, deconstruction and/or new historicism has produced rereadings of many nineteenth-century texts. So, for example, in the wake of Paul Carter's The Road to Botany Bay (1987), the writings of explorers like Sturt and Mitchell, or Watkin Tench's journals, previously categorised as “descriptive writing”, may now be read as autobiographical acts, allowing insight into the historical, cultural and social contexts which shape the autobiographic subject. Lucy Frost's A face in the glass. The journal and life of Annie Baxter Dawbin (1992) also uses a nineteenth-century journal as the basis of a biographical study of Annie Baxter, weaving together the autobiographical journal and a contemporary biographical account.

THE SHAPING OF A THEATRE

As the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel said, “those who don't know the past are bound to repeat it”. A great body of Australian drama has been written in the last two centuries, but the repertoire of Australian plays is still relatively small, partly because the dramatic canon is rarely revived. Theatres have instead been encouraged by audiences and funding bodies constantly to renew themselves. This has led to a tendency to stage a catalogue of productions without any sense of the traditions to which the plays belonged, or the larger context in which they were written. Australian drama has kept re-inventing itself without forging a theatrical culture.

But before there is a repertoire there has to be a tradition. First of all, Australian theatre had to be invented. The task of chronicling a country, a psyche, an identity from an apparent tabula rasa was an intimidating one, as the poet Judith Wright points out. She also argues that the perception of living in an "upside-down hut" caused a sense of disconnection which stifled creative development through "death by apathy". That the language of drama was that of British and American theatre did not help the feeling of inferiority from which the phrase "cultural cringe" was coined. This inherent suspicion of inadequacy is brilliantly satirised in David Williamson's Don's Party: "[My prick] isn't small. I just think it is."

Contemporary Australia, with its escalating population, greater social and political complexity, widening economic structures and marked cultural diversity, has provided a fertile ground for novelists. The New Left radicalism of the late 1960s, followed by the politics of women's liberation, led to freer cultural attitudes, enabling literary experimentation and allowing much greater licence in what fiction could speak about. Rapid changes also occurred in the material and institutional structures of Australian literary culture, with increased public funding for writers and publishers and the consolidation of teaching and research in Australian literature. This conjunction of cultural and material factors contributed to a “massive increase in the production of Australian fiction” after the early 1970s. A new recognition that Australian society was not homogeneous, but made up of many groups with competing interests and political claims, each seeking a cultural space, influenced the fictional preferences of publishers and readers. This chapter is interested in the effects of such social and cultural changes on the field of contemporary Australian fiction. While it is structurally convenient to refer to dates and decades, the explanatory force of such chronologies is often inadequate and sometimes misleading, especially in relation to the complex social and institutional contexts of contemporary fiction. Modes of writing constantly escape the boundaries which such chronologies propose (realism in the 1940s and 1950s, modernism in the 1960s and 1970s, and so on), and there is much overlap and movement between apparently convenient period divisions.

In 1898, Henry Gyles Turner, a banker and litterateur, and Alexander Sutherland, a schoolteacher and journalist, both from Melbourne, published The Development of Australian Literature. This opened with the first of many attempts to provide “A General Sketch of Australian Literature”, which devoted forty-seven pages to poetry, about thirty to fiction and eighteen to “general literature”: mainly history, biography, and works of travel and exploration. The bulk of Turner and Sutherland's book, however, consisted of biographies of the three Australian writers whom they thought were of greatest significance: poets Adam Lindsay Gordon and Henry Kendall and novelist Marcus Clarke.

Turner and Sutherland's privileging of poetry, inclusion of what we would now call "non-fiction" and exclusion of more popular genres like children's writing and drama established a view of the terrain of Australian literature which was to hold good for at least the first half of the twentieth century. Further introductory accounts were provided by Nettie Palmer in 1924, the American historian and critic C. Hartley Grattan in 1929, and H.M. Green in 1930. In 1961 Green finally followed this up by producing his monumental two-volume A History of Australian Literature Pure and Applied. As its title indicates, Green's account was by far the most comprehensive yet to appear, not only discussing the "pure" categories of poetry, fiction and drama, but a very wide range of "applied" works, from newspapers and magazines through to works of philosophy and anthropology. Indeed, for the period it covers - 1789-1950 - Green's is effectively a history of the Australian book and so has proved of continuing value as a work of reference.

The English colonisation of Australia from 1788 coincided with a vast increase within the parent culture of both general literacy and the ready availability of reading matter. By the end of the nineteenth century, almost all of the white adult population of Australia could read and write, with the Australian colonies making up one of the major overseas markets for English publishers. By 1900, too, Australian readers were beginning to develop something of a taste for writing about Australia and about themselves. Though the local publishing industry was still printing very few books, the many newspapers and magazines, which had flourished since the 1860s in particular, regularly serialised novels by Australian authors, as well as printing poems, short stories and essays. Through the pages of the Sydney Bulletin, established in 1880 to rapidly become Australia's most popular magazine, writers like Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson became well known. When, in the mid-1890s, volumes of their poems and stories were issued by the fledgling publishing house of Angus & Robertson, they sold in their thousands. Certain works of the earlier novelists Marcus Clarke and Rolf Boldrewood, which had also been serialised locally before achieving book publication in Britain, remained popular thanks to their adaptation for the stage. But for much of the nineteenth century, and indeed afterwards, Australian readers were mainly interested in books by English authors and Australian authors were largely dependent on the English publishing industry. This chapter will trace some of the major changes in what people read and wrote in Australia from 1788 to 1901, with a particular focus on nonfiction, fiction, poetry and writing for children.

Contemporary Australian poetry has often been viewed in terms of factionalism (in which revolutionary forces opposed reactionary ones), followed by a period of pluralism. This model relies on secondary oppositions: internationalist/nationalist; experimental/traditional; urban/rural; modernist/ anti-modernist; anti-formalist/formalist; political/non-political. The opposing positions are occupied by the young poets who appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, known as the “Generation of '68” (or, more generally, the New Australian Poetry), and an “establishment” or “humanist” wing made up of older figures (such as A.D. Hope) and younger writers (such as Les Murray and Robert Gray).

This literary history is relatively convincing, and poets have employed it themselves, but it does not always reflect the actual state of affairs. Oppositional models can also mask anxieties, such as whether contemporary poetry could be said to have a history, whether Australian poets fully engage in contemporary practices, and what constitutes Australian poetry. The '68ers were often the most vocal, but not the only, poets to question matters of style, subject matter, influence, audience and a national poetry, in response to the changing status of writing, technologies and markets with(in) which poets worked.

INTRODUCTION

More than once in recent times literary criticism has found itself in the unfamiliar circumstance of being front-page news in Australia. Controversies about the ethical and historical responsibility of literature and criticism, and a series of high-profile scandals about the identities of some celebrated authors, have brought into the public domain debates about literary theory that might otherwise have remained within the university. There have been echoes of American “culture wars” about political correctness and the destruction of the canon. We have become familiar with talk about a crisis in literary studies. In the pages of the higher journalism, the universities have been accused - in one sense correctly - of having abandoned literary values and tradition for theory, ideology or pop.

Literary criticism in the universities has undergone dramatic changes over last two decades. There has been a new confidence in the relevance of literary studies to broader issues of cultural and political importance, such as questions of ethnicity in the nation's history. But the changes in literary studies have also been driven by anxieties about the point of literary criticism in a postmodern or "post-media" world. Literary studies has typically become a kind of cultural studies. This has increased its scope and worldliness, but perhaps, too, its sense of significant cultural dynamics that exist beyond traditional notions of the literary.

Malebranche was the master of an elegant and accessible style of writing. As well as writing treatises, he popularized his philosophy by presenting it in dialogue form. Moreover, he also taught what many thinking people wished to believe, that the “modern” philosophy of Descartes could, after all, be reconciled with traditional Christian beliefs. As a result, he had a considerable following among lay people of the leisured classes, at the Academy of Sciences in Paris, as well as among those, like some of the clergy, who made philosophy part of their profession. His aristocratic admirers included the Palatine Princess Elizabeth - noted as a correspondent of Descartes - and Mile. Nicole-Geneviève de Vailly, who assembled a company of Malebranchistes in her salon each week. His disciples included some other Oratorians, such as Bernard Lamy, whose influence helped to mediate Malebranche to the philosophes of the French Enlightenment. One of his most faithful followers was the Jesuit priest Yves-Marie André, who wrote the first biography. His admirers also included the mathematicians Pierre Rémond de Montmort and the Marquis de l'Hôpital. He also found a significant following in Italy, where his influence was felt by Vico and other philosophers right into the nineteenth century. A considerable upsurge of interest in Malebranche occurred in England in the 1690s and early 1700s, when a number of his major works were translated. Malebranche's popularity declined in both England and France as Locke came to be regarded as the philosopher of the age. However, there was a revival of support in mid-eighteenth century France and a corresponding upsurge of criticism of Locke.

The twentieth century has done much in the way of transforming the life and work of Malebranche into a cultural legacy. The effects of this transformation are first making themselves felt only now, at the end of the century. At the very least, the century that begins with the year 2000 will have at its disposal all it needs to study and explain his oeuvre, if not to grasp it in full. The history of philosophy is now fully equipped and ready to take possession of that oeuvre and thereby procure for itself entirely new opportunities. The publication of the Oeuvres completès provides us with all the available texts attributable to Malebranche; in the past fifty years only a single new letter has been found! The method used in compiling this monumental collection gathered together the variations of all the recorded editions. I am not speaking of handwritten manuscripts,- for as much as we can avail ourselves of interesting paleographic approaches in the case of Leibniz and Descartes, in the case of Malebranche we cannot return to the primordial state of the texts' composition.

However, in fact, Malebranche considered the previous editions of his books to be the rough drafts - so much so that the work published during his lifetime is only one long rough draft worth all the unpublished writings at Hanover. Evidence for this is found in the fact that there is no permanent dogmatism in any of these writings. The author's retrospection, as well as his conflicts with other philosophers, led him to take account of the objections that were made to him in a way quite different from that in which Descartes responded to the objections that he received. Descartes' thought remained subservient to the necessity of what he was demonstrating; it progresses in an involuted way.

The topic of theodicy looms large in Malebranche's thought. His distinctive views on the subject form the basis of one of his most famous books, the Treatise on Nature and Grace (1680), and occupy a prominent place in important later works such as the Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion (1688). Embracing issues of the relation of the divine will to creation and our knowledge of that will, Malebranche's theodicy is inextricably linked to his signature doctrines of occasionalism and vision in God. Together, they form a single comprehensive theory that attempts to explicate the existence and nature of the world, and the special place of human beings within it, in relation to God as creator.

What has come to be called the problem of theodicy signifies a cluster of issues, some of which any theological explanation of the world's existence must confront, others of which are specifically associated with the tenets of Christian theology. Of the first sort are basic questions about the world's imperfection and what this implies about God's apparent lack of concern for the welfare of human beings. If God is all powerful, all wise, and all good, why does he permit natural circumstances (floods, earthquakes, and drought) that are unworthy of his perfection and that bring harm to human beings, particularly the innocent who have done nothing to earn God's punishment? Why does God allow wicked people to exercise their wickedness in harming the innocent, and then, apparently, fail to punish the wicked, who profit from their evil deeds? Questions such as these strike at the fundamental justice of God's action: How could God allow such things to happen, unless he is in some way limited by less than supreme goodness, knowledge, or power?

The title of Malebranche's first, longest, and most important work might well have been Discourse on Method, for method is what The Search After Truth is most obviously about. Its subtitle adumbrates the centrality of method: wherein are treated the nature of man's mind and the use he must make of it to avoid error in the sciences. The importance of finding a method to avoid error is expressed in the first sentence of the Search's first book: “error is the cause of men's misery” for from it comes the evil that upsets human happiness. Each of the five major occasions of error is detailed by the first five books of the work, and the last book, on method, indicates “the paths leading to knowledge of the truth ” [Search VI.1.i, OC 2:245; LO 408). The method that Malebranche proposes is, like his vision of all things in God, a highly original result of correcting Descartes in light of the Christianized Platonism that he received from Augustine.

The seventeenth century was the belle époque of method. The prominence of scientific advance in the period was such that extreme epistemic optimism was pandemic. It seemed that among rationalists everything was knowable and would soon be known, and that even among empiricists who set limits to human knowledge, those limits would soon be achieved. A sharp break from all precedent was universally perceived; these moderns felt that they were uniquely doing something right, and somehow doing it systematically given the results being achieved, thus the preoccupation with the discovery and articulation of method. (Whether the break with the past was as sharp as the moderns thought is, of course, another question. Nor did the pandemic optimism preclude the period from also being the belle epoche of skepticism.)

INTRODUCTION

Given the radical theocentrism of Malebranche's philosophy-in which God is the only “true” good and “true” cause, in which “we see all things in God,” in which God “moves our arm” on the occasion of our willing it, in which existence is only “continual creation” by God, and in which nature is “nothing but the general laws which God has established” (TNG, Ist Illustration, iii, OC 5:148; R 196)-it is to be expected that a theodicy (“the justice of God”) will be the central and governing moral-political notion, in an almost Leibnizian way, and that this quasi-Theodicée will then shape (say) the meaning of Christian love, the Pauline notion that “the greatest of these is charity” (I Corinthians xiii). This expectation is borne out: For Malebranche a “love of union” should be reserved for God alone (the true good, the true cause) while finite creatures should receive only a “love of benevolence.” As he says in the Traité de morale,

Few periods are more important in the philosophy of mind than the seventeenth century. The new mechanical picture of the physical world confronted many philosophers with an exciting challenge,- they needed to formulate theories of the mind and its place in nature, which were not only more philosophically defensible but also better adapted to the needs of Christian theology than their traditional Aristotelian-Scholastic rivals. Although many of the theories that were advanced are widely rejected today, there is no doubt that they left a decisive mark on subsequent thinking; indeed, they helped to define the contemporary agenda in the philosophy of mind. For instance, current debates over the merits of dualism and materialism are often clearly of seventeenth-century inspiration. Other thinkers in the period may have had a more direct impact on modern philosophy of mind, but few, if any, are more interesting than Malebranche.

The main theses of Malebranche's philosophy are well-known today. The theory of vision in God of ideas, the doctrine of occasionalism, the philosophy of will, the function of intelligible extension, as well as the relationship of Malebranche's thought to Descartes' or Leibniz's have all been carefully studied. Very little work, however, in either France or the United States, has explicitly investigated the status and the function of metaphysics in the work of the Oratorian. The question of the definition and the role of a Malebranchian metaphysics gives rise to two distinct but inseparable lines of investigation.

First, is it legitimate to search for a definition and systematic use of the word métaphysique in Malebranche? This investigation requires us to determine the relation of any possible Malebranchian metaphysics to the history of metaphysics in the classical period. The other issue is whether Malebranche's metaphysics constitutes a new and original figure in the evolution of metaphysics in the seventeenth century. This essay will seek to address these two questions simultaneously.

One of the most controversial of the claims in Malebranche's first published work, The Search After Truth, is that “we see all things in God” (nous voyons toutes choses en Dieu) (III.2.vi, OC 1:437; LO 230). It is true that this text restricts that particular claim by noting that “we see in God only the things of which we have ideas” and in particular, only bodies and their properties. Yet even given this restriction the doctrine that we see all things (that is, bodies) in (that is, through ideas in) God scandalized Malebranche's most prominent critic, the Augustinian theologian and Cartesian partisan Antoine Arnauld (1612-94). Arnauld protested in particular that such a doctrine has the “bizarre” consequence that “we see God when we see bodies, the sun, a horse or a tree.”

Arnauld was objecting here not only to the placement of ideas of material objects in God, but also, and more basically, to the reification of ideas. As an alternative to Malebranche's claim that the ideas we perceive are “representative beings” distinct from our perceptions, he offered the position, which he plausibly ascribed to Descartes, that such ideas are identical to those perceptions. It is difficult not to prefer Arnauld's parsimonious account of ideas to Malebranche's more exotic doctrine of the “Vision in God” (as I call his thesis that we see bodies by means of ideas in God). Yet Malebranche did not simply overlook Arnauld's alternative to his doctrine. Indeed, he came to insist that such an alternative cannot explain how our perception of the nature of bodies can reach beyond our finite experience.

PRESENTATION

From 1683 to 1694, a long and furious polemic took place between Malebranche and Antoine Arnauld. When the debate began, Malebranche was still a “young” philosopher (The Search After Truth was published in 1674), identified by the public as one of the leading lights of the new generation of Cartesians. Antoine Arnauld (1612- 1694), on the other hand, was an “old” thinker, known mainly for his theological (rather than philosophical) writings. These can be divided into two general periods: from 1640 to 1668, Arnauld was one of the principal protagonists of the battles over efficacious grace that took place after the publication of Jansenius's Augustinus, appearing as the leader of the “Jansenist” camp. After the “Peace of the Church” in 1668, Arnauld devoted himself essentially to the campaign against the Protestants, in collaboration with Pierre Nicole. Philosophically, Arnauld had written very little: the Fourth Objections to Descartes' Meditations in 1641, and the Grammar of 1660 and the Logic of 1662 - both called de Port-Royal, the first in collaboration with Claude Lancelot, the second with Pierre Nicole. All three of these texts had earned him a well-established reputation as a Cartesian. Thus, the ideological proximity of Arnauld and Malebranche defined and delimited the domain of their confrontation. They were both Catholic priests and both referred constantly to Descartes and St. Augustine.