Fables for the age: The ambition of Tim Winton’s (2018) The Shepherd’s Hut London, Picador.
Tuesday, 10 Jul 2018, 15:06
Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Steve Bamlett, Wednesday, 11 Jul 2018, 07:42
Fables for the age:
The ambition of Tim Winton’s (2018) The
Shepherd’s Hut London, Picador.
I read every word of Tim Winton as it falls (in the UK) from
the press. This novel reads like a fable addressed to the largest domain of
meaning to which the novel can aspire. In form it is a bildungsroman in the
voice, and perhaps the imagined pen, of Jaxie Clackton, and is set in a world
in which authenticity and authority of identity has lost its meaning just as
are Goethe’s Young Werther, or Joyce’s
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Like both it utilises myth – here Ned Kelly. Like both characters the august
meanings of names like ‘mother’ and ‘father’ have lost their meaning through
failures to enact the role, either from active violence (as in Jaxie’s father)
or failure of courage and autonomy (in his mother). This is not a context in
which three central metaphysical questions can be answered: ‘Where was I?’, ‘Who
was I?’ and ‘What was I?’ These questions can be posed and may even be
answered, although deliberative not with cognitive but with a more embodied clarity, until near the novel’s end (264).
Jaxie ends the novel still seeking romantic validation of
himself though his love for a girl who first showed love and sexual experience to
him. For most readers, however, I suspect that this ongoing quest has little or
no reality next to what he achieves though his relationship in the novel with the
old man, who talks copiously to himself to distract from severe tinnitus, named
Fintan. With him the slow process of trust-building, lest he might too be an
abusive father (‘a pedo’), happens when he sets up
home with him in a ‘shepherd’s hut’ through the most complex turns of circumstances in
the narrative. ‘Father’ Fintan is a God-forsaken Irish priest, who is still
searching for that event, that action, in which God might appear to him beyond
the beautiful illusions offered by the air over a dried salt-lake. These remain
mirages but become the metaphors that that help form the central moment of
self-seeing in the novel. And the senses engaged are multiple – most noticeably
‘smell’ and its meaning.
What Fintan and Jaxie find (and eventually see) in the most pregnant
and significant exchange of glances is the meaning of ‘sacrifice’ but it would
spoil things for readers to say how or why in any detail, since this novel,
like most symbolic allegories lives on many self-sufficient levels of meaning:
And then he caught my eye. Or
maybe it was just a flash of sun off his busted up specs … then he began to
sing. (263f.)
This novel reminds me most of Dirt Music but it is so much more haunting – as a story and not just in
key passages of the most miraculous writing and contrasting generic shifts. The
haunting presence of Australian history is felt through the shifting meanings,
tied to mirage and ‘illusory’ visions of all kinds of the landscape around a
salt-lake, a source of preservation for mere meat at one level (he goes there
to seek a means of keeping his ‘kill’ of wildlife better) and at another the
meanings given it by its native inhabitants in white Australian pre-history and
the history of exploitation in mining thereafter. Modern Australia has no ‘dreamings’
like these – perhaps the latter are just the product of cannabis which plays its part
in the history, as a sad version of how and why illusion must be sought whilst
in the void of contemporary meaning where there is no God or substitute
thereof. Yet the novel itself bears the weight of a second coming and a
resurrection: where ‘you are in your beginning, and here am I near my end.
(135)’
Meanwhile the ways in which that search for, and
simultaneously conceal, meaning (in and out of books and Fintan is a reader) is
conveyed – in the inquisitive looks of a ‘curious fella’ (128) that both throw
at each other - are just as remarkably realised (and yet full of the everyday) in
writing as it is possible to make them.
And that’s it. For the longest
bloody time, that’s all. After a while the smell of the roasting meat gets
going but nothing else happens. He just sits there. Reading his bastard book
with that poochy, puckered look on his face. Like it’s a hello funny book or he’s
just happy he’s got a hunk of goat in the oven. …
So I don’t know what to think.’
(103)
Sharing of looks alone can reveal and conceal meaning. Once
a meaning is recovered (as it is in the novel), we know it may not last.
However, what we do know is that Jaxie holds onto Fintan’s books. Hence the
fabulous nature of this novel. A metaphysic of deep and central meanings is
merely hinted by exchanges of looks, smells, touch (but rarely touch) and sound
– remains elusive except that the reader help build it too (as in all of the
best writing?
Over to you!
‘Whatsay?’ You’ll find this quotation at lots of lovely
places.
Fables for the age: The ambition of Tim Winton’s (2018) The Shepherd’s Hut London, Picador.
Fables for the age: The ambition of Tim Winton’s (2018) The Shepherd’s Hut London, Picador.
I read every word of Tim Winton as it falls (in the UK) from the press. This novel reads like a fable addressed to the largest domain of meaning to which the novel can aspire. In form it is a bildungsroman in the voice, and perhaps the imagined pen, of Jaxie Clackton, and is set in a world in which authenticity and authority of identity has lost its meaning just as are Goethe’s Young Werther, or Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Like both it utilises myth – here Ned Kelly. Like both characters the august meanings of names like ‘mother’ and ‘father’ have lost their meaning through failures to enact the role, either from active violence (as in Jaxie’s father) or failure of courage and autonomy (in his mother). This is not a context in which three central metaphysical questions can be answered: ‘Where was I?’, ‘Who was I?’ and ‘What was I?’ These questions can be posed and may even be answered, although deliberative not with cognitive but with a more embodied clarity, until near the novel’s end (264).
Jaxie ends the novel still seeking romantic validation of himself though his love for a girl who first showed love and sexual experience to him. For most readers, however, I suspect that this ongoing quest has little or no reality next to what he achieves though his relationship in the novel with the old man, who talks copiously to himself to distract from severe tinnitus, named Fintan. With him the slow process of trust-building, lest he might too be an abusive father (‘a pedo’), happens when he sets up home with him in a ‘shepherd’s hut’ through the most complex turns of circumstances in the narrative. ‘Father’ Fintan is a God-forsaken Irish priest, who is still searching for that event, that action, in which God might appear to him beyond the beautiful illusions offered by the air over a dried salt-lake. These remain mirages but become the metaphors that that help form the central moment of self-seeing in the novel. And the senses engaged are multiple – most noticeably ‘smell’ and its meaning.
What Fintan and Jaxie find (and eventually see) in the most pregnant and significant exchange of glances is the meaning of ‘sacrifice’ but it would spoil things for readers to say how or why in any detail, since this novel, like most symbolic allegories lives on many self-sufficient levels of meaning:
And then he caught my eye. Or maybe it was just a flash of sun off his busted up specs … then he began to sing. (263f.)
This novel reminds me most of Dirt Music but it is so much more haunting – as a story and not just in key passages of the most miraculous writing and contrasting generic shifts. The haunting presence of Australian history is felt through the shifting meanings, tied to mirage and ‘illusory’ visions of all kinds of the landscape around a salt-lake, a source of preservation for mere meat at one level (he goes there to seek a means of keeping his ‘kill’ of wildlife better) and at another the meanings given it by its native inhabitants in white Australian pre-history and the history of exploitation in mining thereafter. Modern Australia has no ‘dreamings’ like these – perhaps the latter are just the product of cannabis which plays its part in the history, as a sad version of how and why illusion must be sought whilst in the void of contemporary meaning where there is no God or substitute thereof. Yet the novel itself bears the weight of a second coming and a resurrection: where ‘you are in your beginning, and here am I near my end. (135)’
Meanwhile the ways in which that search for, and simultaneously conceal, meaning (in and out of books and Fintan is a reader) is conveyed – in the inquisitive looks of a ‘curious fella’ (128) that both throw at each other - are just as remarkably realised (and yet full of the everyday) in writing as it is possible to make them.
And that’s it. For the longest bloody time, that’s all. After a while the smell of the roasting meat gets going but nothing else happens. He just sits there. Reading his bastard book with that poochy, puckered look on his face. Like it’s a hello funny book or he’s just happy he’s got a hunk of goat in the oven. …
So I don’t know what to think.’ (103)
Sharing of looks alone can reveal and conceal meaning. Once a meaning is recovered (as it is in the novel), we know it may not last. However, what we do know is that Jaxie holds onto Fintan’s books. Hence the fabulous nature of this novel. A metaphysic of deep and central meanings is merely hinted by exchanges of looks, smells, touch (but rarely touch) and sound – remains elusive except that the reader help build it too (as in all of the best writing?
Over to you!
‘Whatsay?’ You’ll find this quotation at lots of lovely places.
All the best
Steve