Jugulating torrents

Gregory Day’s new novel

Michael Winkler

There are frequent echoes of Patrick White, notably the third section of The Aunt’s Story and Memoirs of Many in One. In that amusing final novel, White wrote: ‘Some of the dramatis personae of this Levantine script could be the offspring of my own psyche.’ The final sentence of Day’s author’s note is, ‘It is perhaps worth mentioning too that not all of the ingredients that have gone into the novel can be described in words or even heard in the conscious mind.’

The Bell of the World

by Gregory Day Transit Lounge $32.99 hb, 408 pp

Early in Gregory Day’s new novel, Uncle Ferny reads Such Is Life aloud in a Roman bar. His niece Sarah observes listeners’ ‘confusion, amusement, their disdain, their curiosity, and also their rapture’. A similar range of responses might be manifested by readers of The Bell of the World

This is a novel in which Ferny’s extolling of Joseph Furphy’s genius erupts in a ‘jugulating torrent’ of words. There are characters called Sarah Hutchinson and Sara Atchinson, two women called Maisie, and three males called Joe. Plot threads rise and disappear like floodwater. There are florets of poetry, both conventional and concrete, and skeins of wild philosophy. Jugulating, indeed.

The constant is Sarah Hutchinson, returned from boarding school in England and travels in Europe to live in the fertile region south of Geelong, first with one of the Maisies and later at Ferny’s property Ngangahook, at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. The narrative is arranged less around plot and more around shifting foci: conflict over a planned belltower; the co-binding/ combining of Such Is Life with Moby-Dick to form a ‘compounded epic’; an extended epistolary relationship between Sarah and John Cage foregrounding mushrooming and avant-garde music.

This is a book of much-too-much, and views on whether that is its glory or its failure – or indeed both – will vary. By page five I was looking up ‘epizeuxis’ and ‘diacope’, seeking a name for the prose tic Day was employing, but the technique is abandoned several pages later and does not return. Elsewhere, Day becomes bewitched by twinning, not just with character names but through pairs of waterfalls, hallways, other phenomena, before again moving on. The authorial restlessness intoxicates; it can also infuriate.

In an interview several years ago Day said, ‘In a way, literature is a type of compost and we’re all rewriting each other’s books and the books of the past.’ The Bell of the World can be approached through the literary equivalent of synthetic chemistry, inviting the reader to isolate and identify references and resonances. Doubtless I missed myriad connections, but antecedents that appear to be referenced include: Walt Whitman, not least for his poem on the composting process that ‘gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last’; Iris Murdoch’s The Bell, for the central motif and the sexual triangulation of two men and one woman, but especially for the use of plot as vehicle for philosophy; Ezekiel, chapter one; Brideshead Revisited, with Uncle Ferny as an antipodean Sebastian Flyte, similarly gregarious, intellectually daring, wilfully unconventional; Helen Garner’s This House of Grief

Some of the describable ingredients include a pyramid of dead cockatoos on a prepared piano, Zen Noh plays, the skull of Gellibrand, Wadawurrung culture and disappropriation, Daphne du Maurier, Henry Cowell, the velar nasal, Luigi Russolo’s theories of noise, and a sproutness of mushrooms.

Recent ecological hypotheses about mycorrhizal networks –that mushrooms are the visible fruit of deep underground webs connecting trees and other organisms through linked threads of mycelium – undergird the book’s primary philosophical preoccupation. ‘We are both perceiver and perceived, without beginning and end, Ourself and the Other; we are hybrids and One, here in the breathable atmosphere, the zone of life.’ There is a lot of this sort of thing.

Another theme is art versus nature. Day seems to be arguing for unmediated experience, while wholly immersed in the full efflorescence of culture. ‘We grab for things the sounds remind us of … rather than letting them be the sounds they are.’ He writes of the magic lantern’s singular power ‘not to render but to dilute the reality of our thereabouts’. Literature, however, can illuminate and intensify. The mad possibilities of the interpolated Furphy and Melville tomes – literal intertextuality – are adumbrated but never fully explored: ‘One book intoned on the profound depths of the swirling blue paddock, the other on the vast interior of this dry continent, which it occurred to me, was a natural terraqueous counterpoint.’ The Furphy–Melville link was first made in 1929 by C. Hartley Grattan, who said they had ‘the same capacity for mingling the most abstruse speculation – discursive essays in history, sociology, morals, anthropology, and Shakespearean criticism – with veridic glimpses of actuality’. Douglas Stewart referred to ‘Furphy’s intolerable discursiveness’, not necessarily as a negative, and a similar assessment might apply to Day’s novel. Stewart likened Furphy to Cervantes, but argued that ‘the novel is not a crossword puzzle, and whimsical fellows have no right to lead their readers up a gum-tree’. Some readers, of course, do not mind transportation into the branches of a eucalypt, especially if veridic glimpses of actuality are provided.

At a time when terse, functional prose is ascendant, Day’s elaborately brocaded sentences, cascading nouns, and thesaural calisthenics are restorative. John Kinsella’s description of Day as ‘a singer of place’ is borne out repeatedly through his intricate, entrancing writing of the natural world.

Contemporary commercial publishing is choked with inessential fiction that does not go hard enough, does not risk enough, and has no meaning beyond saleability. Day’s unconventional novel, bristling with bravura prose, stands against that and should be welcomed accordingly. It is, however, an almighty tangle. A tough editor could have carved something superb from this material, rampant with the spirit of the bookbinder Jones of Moolap who possessed ‘the profound good sense to know that he therefore had to fall properly. To fall thoroughly. To fall into Art.’ g