Literature and Politics

What is the significance of the act of writing, and indeed, of the literary arts in general?  A perennial question perhaps, but this paper addresses the issue from the reflexive standpoint of mid-twentieth century Australian commentary by C.B. Christesen, the editor of the then fledgling little magazine, Meanjin on the one hand, and the creative rendering of it by Eleanor Dark in The Little Company on the other.

In Christesen’s case, it took the form of launching a literary magazine in the midst of the war because literature does not, “spring into being at the word of command…its suppression is death.” Soon afterwards, he would publish Jean-Paul Sartre’s flawed but significant appeal for an “engaged literature,” one that was not like the “dead fruits” of bygone eras, but which spoke directly to its time.  Dark’s complex rendering of the writing life brings the grand ethics of engagement into the context of domestic space, challenging and transforming – but not giving up on the need to affirm – literary engagement, and indeed, the prospect of an engaged literature.

Our paper suggests a renewed relevance for “engaged” Australian writing projects from the 1930s onwards (Dark, Prichard, Tennant, Wright).  Our interest goes beyond frameworks that have been suggested for the analysis of Meanjin and its founding editor: in terms, variously, of the interrogation of Australian identity; of the moral function of literature; and of the political capacities of writing.  We explore what the journal and Christesen’s other pronouncements reveal about the phenomenology of the writing act itself.   We argue that The Little Company offers a contemporaneous dramatization of what the writing act is and means, as the novel auditions its main characters for the role of the ‘engaged’ writer imagined in the pages of Meanjin.