My Year with Bluestone: Interdisciplinary Anxiety

I was very happy to start writing my book last Thursday. I have drafted the first thousand words of a chapter which will mostly be about prisons. I have lots of ideas and lots of materials. So far so good.

And then I had a momentary anxiety as I was thinking about structuring the next section/paragraph. It was an anxiety that took me back to my work on the Order of the Garter, when I would sometimes ask myself, "where's the text?" Trained as a literary critic, I am always most comfortable when I have a text to organise myself around. But as with the previous book, I am happy to think about the emotive language used about these bluestone buildings and natural formations; and indeed, that is the main concern of this book. I'm also getting better at reading images, and applying my discursive analytic skills to texts (journalism, reports, histories) that aren't obviously "literary." So I'm pretty confident of my general approach in this book.

But I recall one particularly aggressive review of the Garter book that chastised me for calling that book "a vulgar history". The gist of this review was that non-historians like me should stop using that word "history" so loosely (and also stop writing studies that weren't proper historical ones).

Undaunted, I am thinking of a comparable subtitle for this bluestone book. Bluestone: An Affective History is my working title. So I will be treading into same disciplinary hot water. Similarly, although I have some training in historical method, I won't be writing a "straight" history in the sense of a sequential, comprehensive narrative.

I've also just been reading readers' reports on an essay going into a book collection where most of the other authors are historians. Apparently my essay sticks out a bit because it is based on a single text. Nor does my essay deal with broader social movements like the others do. (That's because it's based on a single text.)

So here are my questions.

• How does interdisciplinarity really work in practice between Literature and History? There are some brilliant examples in medieval literary, cultural and historical studies, but what about in other, later fields?
• Do we police our respective territories with equal vigilance?
• Should we be trying harder to respect each other's starting-points and assumptions? 
• Should I use "history" in my subtitle?

The new G-G

Australia has a bit of a recent history of being embarrassed about its Governors-General. The office itself is a bit embarrassing, of course: the incumbent represents the Queen, as our head of state, and tends to make the news only when things go horribly wrong. Kerr dismissing Whitlam's parliament, disgracing himself at the Melbourne Cup; Peter Hollingworth having to resign after the mess left by his handling of church sex scandals. Even my most abiding memory of William Deane, who is widely regarded as the best and most popular G-G in recent times, is a picture of him standing with an expression of utmost compassion next to the parents of some Australian kids who had died in a canyoning disaster somewhere in Europe, having brought branches and sprigs of wattle to throw into the rushing waters.

But overnight the office seems to have been renewed, with Rudd's announcement that Quentin Bryce will take over from Michael Jeffrey in July. I don't know all that much about her, but her CV is impressive, and the appointment has been widely praised. It's as if no one can imagine how Howard could possibly have overlooked her unless he had been an old patriarchal retrograde....

It's also fun to see someone of such extraordinary elegance in the role:


But I'm even more struck by her remarks:

"I grew up in a little bush town in Queensland with 200 people, and what this day says to Australian women and Australian girls is that you can do anything, you can be anything. ... It makes my heart sing to see women in so many diverse roles across our country in Australia."

"It makes my heart sing." Wonderful! I think this is discourse that belongs to the second-wave feminism that Bryce grew up with, and stands for. It's probably still women's language — do men in public office speak like this? — and what a buzz to hear it spoken from this position.

There's a fair bit of speculation around this morning that Bryce might be our last governor-general. The buzz seems to be that Australia might be happy to serve under Elizabeth, but that Charles' accession might push the republican movement along a bit faster. I'm not so sure: I suspect we would be so enthralled by the public mourning and the public celebration of a coronation that we would forget to be republicans. And then I suspect we would fall in love with William. So if we're going to become a republic, we should disconnnect the movement from the question of the personality of the monarch. What about Quentin Bryce for President? Huh?

How to Write a Book

The way books (or theses, for that matter) get written never ceases to amaze me. I'm always intrigued by the different ways my graduate students go about putting words together, and how they strike their own balance between reading, writing and talking about their work.

For me, the most fun part by far is the writing. I'm dreadful at the filing and organising my notes; and often put off the necessary reading, too.

The book I'm writing now is a little like my book on Chaucer, in that it runs from the fourteenth century through to the present, but this time it ranges over much broader cultural fields: literature, ritual practice, costume, religion, historiography, tourism, etc. My shorthand answer to the question "what's your book about?" is to describe is as a cultural history of the Order of the Garter, but it also stems from my interest in how the medieval is figured and re-figured as the point of origin of this more or less continuous form of ritual practice.

I gave my first paper on this topic way back around 2001; and have only just recently locked my chapter structure into place (I've nearly finished drafting the fifth of seven chapters, so there's still a way to go). How am I going to balance the imperatives of chronologies and histories against the thematic threads I want to draw out? I think I have a solution; and am grouping the first three chapters into one section, "Ritual Histories"; and the next four as "Ritual Practices". Neat, eh?

But this struggle has taken place in a part of my brain that has repressed a memory. In the latest edition of Studies in the Age of Chaucer, I've reviewed David Wallace's Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aprha Behn. The title alone will give you an idea of the scope of this book, if you're not a medievalist. If you are, it's certainly come across your horizons. In part, I wrote:

Wallace’s practical method is dizzying, as he moves through what must be an extraordinary archive of filing-cabinets filled with photographs, maps, references and allusions to events, emotions and memories of these six locations across several centuries, and from many different kinds of writing. He lays a rich and fascinating wealth of material before us in this book, as he traces the patterns of remembering and forgetting that influence the cultural histories of place and period.

This is not a narrative strategy without risk, however. Premodern Places is a wonderful and practical exercise in the multiple temporalities invoked by postcolonial criticism, in critiques of periodisation, and especially by scholars working in the fascinating territory between the late medieval and the early modern, a problem neatly solved by the inclusive “premodern” of its title. It is a book preeminently concerned with the shaping power of broad cultural forces, and many will find it an inspiring, even liberating project in uncovering multiple forgotten histories, places and voices. Wallace is interested, after all, in the way literary scholars can sometimes fall silent, and let texts speak “in the past’s own idiom”; indeed, he gives the last word of his book to the pseudonymous poet “Tryphossa”, writing in 1973, in the hybrid language Sranan: “Èn beybi-Jesus krey a fosi: yè-è-è.”

Nevertheless, the book depends on an extraordinary mastery in marshalling and organising its materials. Wallace’s narrative voice is engagingly candid and modest, but the hand of the compilator remains firmly in control. Moreover, the impulse to write of the superego and the id of the Renaissance, for example, to speak so broadly of what history, or cultural history represses, skirts dangerously close to re-instituting the unfashionable grand narratives of modernism and colonialism. Perhaps it is impossible to write this kind of long history without such perspectives. Premodern Places will undoubtedly stand for a long time as a important test-case for this method.

Apart from my propensity to over-use the word "extraordinary" (an early draft had a third usage in these three paragraphs), what strikes me only just now are the obvious similiarities between David's book and what I'm trying to do in mine — though my prospective publisher has indeed suggested I take Premodern Places as a model for a book that might appeal to a somewhat broader audience than a narrow specialist one. This is daunting indeed.

But perhaps the filing cabinet I had in mind when I wrote the review is my own. I have drawers and drawers of Garter stuff: books, articles, pamphlets, photographs, newspaper cuttings, even a drink coaster.

So my questions are ones about mastery. How do we master these vast and complex archives without re-instating master narratives over them? Or perhaps a master narrative is appropriate here? Does the last paragraph of my review speaks more to my own anxieties? And perhaps they are more about my fear that I won't be able to find a grand narrative.

So as I often say to myself, Beckett-like, when writing: "I can't go on. I'll go on."

A Spy in the House of History

The Melbourne Writers' Festival this year is host to eminent historian, David Starkey, and he's also giving several talks at the university this week. I first came across his work on the late medieval royal household many years ago when I was working on Wynnere and Wastoure, and was keen to go along and hear him now that I am once more working on English court culture.

On Monday night I felt a bit like a spy.

The talk was hosted by the History Department. Starkey gave an extraordinarily fluent and practised performance, without a single piece of paper in front of him. He is a celebrity Tudor historian in Britain and in Australia; his "Elizabeth", sold, he said, 500,000 copies in the Commonwealth (not sure if this was TV series or his book). The emphatic burden of his talk was that while history was flourishing in popular and public culture, academic history was destroying itself in post-modernism and textual scepticism. He drew attention to the relative novelty of history as an academic discipline, and to the various vogues (for example, economic history) that set trends in history at different times. In apocalyptic vein, he threatened the death of academic history, amid the continued flourishing of popular history.

Hmm. As if the two aren't now completely inter-dependent.

Anyway, the historians were very polite. In addition to the general seduction of an audience by clever asides, funny stories about the Queen, there was certainly a vocal chorus of approving murmurs and laughter, and a few Dorothy Dixers in question time. But I know that many of my colleagues in my sister-department weren't in agreement with him. And I know that most of them are not afraid to speak their mind. So I thought they were extraordinarily polite. And I began to wonder about the different social cultures between English and History. My own department-that-was (before our recent re-structure) would have shown no mercy. (One example: I remember a colleague asking a British Council-funded visitor who kindly explained semiotics to us in the early 1990s how he would account for his "neo-naïve" position.)

Starkey kept saying, provocatively, that he expected to be shot down in flames; and yet the discussion was really quite docile. It's true the talk was more in the nature of a polemic than a reasoned, argued academic paper; and so perhaps the historians felt there was no point engaging. Anyway, a fascinating glimpse into the meeting of two worlds: popular and academic history.