Westerly Volume 63 Number 2, 2018 New Writing from 63.2 Western Australia Notice of Intention Publisher Fiction Westerly has converted the full backfile of Westerly Centre, The University of Western Australia, Australia Creative Non-Fiction Westerly (1956–) to electronic text, available General Editor to readers and researchers on the Westerly Poetry Catherine Noske website, www.westerlymag.com.au. This Essays work has been supported by a grant from Associate Editor the Cultural Fund of the Copyright Agency Josephine Taylor Limited. Editorial Advisors All creative works, articles and reviews Cassandra Atherton (poetry) converted to electronic format will be correctly Rachel Robertson (prose) attributed and will appear as published. Elfie Shiosaki (Indigenous writing) Copyright will remain with the authors, and the Editorial Consultants material cannot be further republished without Delys Bird (The University of Western Australia) authorial permission. 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Westerly is published biannually with assistance from the State Government of WA by an investment in this project through the Culture and the Arts (WA) division of the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries. The opinions expressed in Westerly are those of individual contributors and not of the Editors or Editorial Advisors. A Unique and Necessary Form David Malouf has written and chronology altogether, where the past is forever ‘once upon a time’ and published novels, short stories, the opening address of the Australian the future ‘ever after’. This, surely, is not just one of our earliest pleasures poetry, essays, memoir and for but one of our earliest and most enduring forms of psychological healing: Short Story Festival, 2018 theatre. He won the International this stepping into a place where our deepest anxieties and fears can David Malouf IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 1996 for his novel Remembering be embodied and faced, and what appears to be fate can suddenly be Babylon. He has also been reversed. Where rescue and recovery, and even rebirth are possible, and awarded the Neustadt the most elusive forces wrestled with in the form of giants, or genies, or International Prize for Literature goblins, or trolls, or wolves—even if we have never in fact encountered (2000), the Australia‑Asia such creatures in the world around us. We see in the small children we tell Literary Award (2008), was stories to—and in the children we ourselves once were and recall—how shortlisted for the Booker Prize powerfully, how easily but mysteriously this works. Children, without ever and received the Australia Council Award for Lifetime having been told of such a world, already know it, as the earliest humans Achievement in Literature (2016). did, from dreams, and from the archetypal images and events that belong, as Jung saw, to inherited memory and our collective consciousness. A long history of such story-telling, and of the stories told, comes down This speech was delivered as the Opening Address to us in what we know, here in Australia, of Indigenous story-making. In of the 2018 Australian Short Story Festival. The Greek myths and the animal fables of Aesop. In Scandinavian legends of event was supported by the Institute of Advanced Baldur the bright and beautiful. In stories from the Arabian Nights like Ali Studies, The University of Western Australia; Baba and his ‘open sesame’, and the adventures of Aladdin and Sinbad the Gallery Central, North Metropolitan TAFE; and Sailor. In the fairy-tales gathered in the seventeenth century by Charles Silverstream Wines. David Malouf was an invited Perrault—‘Cinderella’, ‘Bluebeard’, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, ‘Sleeping guest and speaker at the Festival, which took place Beauty’, ‘Beauty and the Beast’ and ‘Puss in Boots’—and in the folk-tales at the Centre for Stories in Northbridge, WA. In gathered half a century later by the Grimm Brothers: ‘Hansel and Gretel’, 2019, the Festival will be located in Melbourne— ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, ‘Rapunzel’ and ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’. see: https://australianshortstoryfestival.com. These stories belong to our communal life. Long before they were gathered and written down, they were told and listened to in company, Institute of and their shared and endlessly repeatable events and formulae—‘once Advanced Studies upon a time’ and ‘ever after’—create in us a shared response. As for the moment of communal story-telling itself, we get examples of that in such self-conscious literary works as The Decameron of Boccaccio and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in the fourteenth century, Story-telling, the pleasure of sitting in close company and listening to and a century later, The Heptaméron by Marguerite of Navarre: formal a story, allowing oneself to float free in the moment and enter, both occasions of story-telling in which we come face-to-face, in each case, in the senses and in imagination, into the story’s events so that the with the story-tellers and their fellow listeners themselves. All of which story becomes our own, must be one of the oldest and earliest of our is a useful and perhaps even necessary place to begin. pleasures—a function of that uniquely human faculty in us, the capacity But the stories we have been considering are very different from short to step beyond the actual into the possible. story as we know it today. There, the exchange of telling and response To step out of our own skin and know what it is to experience the between writer and reader is an individual and private affair, that involves world as ‘another’. To step free of the bounds, the bonds, of chronology, a more intimate engagement and tone, and has for the most part a quite and the ways in which we are bodily subject to it, into another version of different subject and range of interests. The world this modern form of 10 | Westerly 63.2 11 | David Malouf short story deals with is the immediate world, or a close mirror of it. The Intimacy of tone, economy but intensity of detail, a pace that demands events it presents us with are unique and actual rather than archetypal, slow and attentive reading, is what characterises a form that is meant to though the story as it unfolds, I’d suggest, may uncover archetypal images be taken in at as single reading, then re-read: as opposed, I mean, to the that arouse, even in a modern reader, archetypal responses. Much of the novel, with its longer arc and more leisurely pace, and a looseness that reader’s pleasure, and why he or she is drawn back to it, may have the leaves room for what Nabokov calls those ‘lovely irrelevancies’ in which, same liberating and healing quality as that older form of ‘listening’ we often enough, a novel’s deepest truths are to be found. The short story is have already alluded to. Certainly, the same quality of imagination is at closer to the poem in the sparseness and necessity of its detail and the work in it. intensity of its language; in its slower pace, and the depth of attention it So, what do we mean by the ‘modern’ short story, and how and when demands, line by line, in the reading. did it evolve as a unique art form? In the one hundred and forty years of its existence, the modern short The immediate trigger was the emergence in the late 1820s, simul- story as I have called it—in the shorter works of Henry James and Conrad; taneously in the United States, Great Britain, France and Russia, of a new in Kipling, Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, form of publication, the monthly magazine, and the short story, in its first V. S. Pritchett and William Trevor in Britain; in Stephen Crane, Hemingway, publication, has continued ever since to be associated with the literary Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, Raymond magazine. Think of