What I had in mind was that among the enemies of the imagination in Aus­tralian writing may be the cult of fiction (even more, art fiction) as being the exclusive form of imaginative writing in prose – and, even worse, the faith that ‘imagination’ in general happens only in ‘the Arts’ (narrowly defined) and has nothing much to do with anything else. In referring to nineteenth-century novels I was thinking of four of the strongest sources of imaginative power in some of the best of them:

1. The ability to project the idea that there is a whole, complex ‘society’. (It was done by Manning Clark, at its best, in a myriad of tableaux, ironic juxtapositions, rapid scene-shifts and illuminating dead ends that came out fresher than the heavy overall themes he used to push his story along.)
2. The ability to give credibility to the idea of a ‘personality’ – the idea, in novelist’s terms, of ‘characters’. (In this case the personalities, at their best, were presented as arenas of conflict and chance. And the public figures were, almost necessarily, failures.)
3. The belief, as Saul Bellow put it in his Nobel Prize lecture, that there was a connection between literature and a sense of ‘the main human enterprise’. (Although Manning Clark could make this connection with more than a touch of banality.)
4. The questioning, as Manning kept on saying, repeating it to the point of tedium (and with help from Dostoievsky), of ‘what is it all about?’ (This could lead him into prophetic emptiness but it could also mean, as Alan Atkinson has said in a recent essay, ‘A Great Historian?’ a subtlety in clothing his personalities and episodes with ‘the disparate certainties and realities appearing to each’.)

I am using ‘imagination’ in a sense related to how it goes in popular speech, which is also, as it happens, how it’s used by John Passmore in his splendid book, Serious Art (although I’m going to put this partly in my own way).

Passmore fences in the idea of being imaginative between negatives. On one side the imaginative is not banal, commonplace, conventional, academic, derivative. On the other side it’s not gimmicky, fanciful, pointlessly innovative, or kitsch. OK that’s fine. But he goes further: being imaginative can be seen as making an advance on what we normally know, expect or can arrive at by following the normal rules, or it reworks within the rules. And this can refer to the work of scientists, technologists, policy makers and so forth, as well as, of course, scholars, artists and intellectuals.

As to writing – being imaginative with words goes beyond fanciful similes and fine writing. (One might now add fashionably grunge writing.) Being imaginative is serious – it’s a form of work, says Passmore, overcoming difficulties and solving problems of a kind fancifulness evades. And it can be imaginative in this way even where it is also seen as ‘entertaining’.

The very idea of shaping and ordering that is often seen as giving art its special authority can go beyond the specialist idea of ‘Art’. It can be extended to philosophy, history, essays and, for that matter, policy plans. Existence doesn’t spell out meanings for us. We create them.

This was one of the great functions of nineteenth-century novel writing. That’s what Oscar Wilde meant when he said that Balzac created the nineteenth century. An even better example comes in the next generation with Zola. Once you strip away from his work the rubbish about ‘naturalism’ that he wrapped it up in, you can understand the enormous acts of imagination that went into, for example, giving a local habitation to the idea of the class struggle (as he did in Germinal) or to the idea of a metropolitan underclass (as he did in L’Assommoir). Mentioning Zola is an ultimate challenge to fiction writers who see themselves as liberating us from ‘realism’. Those of them who’ve still heard of him hate him. Yet a ‘realist novel’ such as Zola’s can be a great act of imagination. There could be more imaginative release in one of Zola’s books than in a fistful of fabulist novels.

With this approach, we can move from Zola back into a minor key and see Manning Clark’s imaginative step as beginning in the 1950s with the two volumes of documents he produced before he started on his A History of Australia.

Imagine you are Manning Clark faced with all that paper in the archives – almost all of it unknown. You want to demonstrate that Australian history is worthy of scholarship. (A matter on which there is great scepticism.) You also want to suggest it is worth reading. (A matter on which there is equal scepticism.) What do you do?

What he did was to use the scholarly device of selecting some of the pieces of paper and sacralising them as ‘documents’ of the kind that made Australian history respectable. Then he organised them into themes in a way no one had tried before. He arranged them so that they appeared to ‘tell their own stories’ (and he wrote little bits in between, like a tactful guide in a museum). By this, he showed a possible approach to Australian history that was to set people thinking. It was the beginning of a process of imagination ­extending so ‘organic’ – one thing related to the other – that you might say he created better than he knew.

Then when the time comes for his big book – in a period when practically no one had been enticed into reading a decent book on Australian history, big or little, he takes another imaginative step ... He puts his book together in an idiosyncratic way, which achieves the objective of interesting some of the Australians who read big books into reading a big book on their own history. And he is followed in this a few years later by Geoffrey Blainey’s The Tyranny of Distance. Blainey’s central thesis wasn’t much good, but its descriptive passages imaginatively ‘brought to life’ bullock teams, whalers, gold clippers, seal clubbers, railway navvies and other aspects of material advancement in ways that hadn’t been brought out before. In fairness to fiction, I should add that, at about the same time, Peter Mathers, a kind of fabulist before fabulists were absolutely fabulous, was also using an eye for material detail to put together, in his novel Trap, in a now­-you-see-it-now-you-don’t way, a new model of Australian ‘society’.

The cult of fiction manifests itself in an extreme form in the word ‘non­fiction’, as if all prose writing is categorised by whether it is or isn’t a novel or a short story – when it would make as much sense to divide all prose work into history and non-history or into philosophy and non-philosophy. Yet if you took this seriously, it would mean that were you surveying eighteenth-century English literature, you wouldn’t include the essays of Addison and Steele, the history of Gibbon, the philosophy of Hume, or the journals of Boswell as works of general imaginative power.

It would also mean that you would fail to see the imaginative charge in Aus­tralian works such as Beverly Kingston’s My Wife, My Daughter and Poor Mary Anne, Hugh Stretton’s Ideas for Australian Cities, Bernard Smith’s European Vision and the South Pacific, Eric Rolls’s They All Ran Wild, Bob Connell’s Which Way is Up?, Henry Reynolds’s The Other Side of the Frontier – and all those other books that, over the last few decades, have opened our minds to ideas of a quite different Australia. As has, I must at once add, the fiction of, say, Frank Moorhouse or Helen Garner – and, of course, many others.

(I am not knocking fiction. Reading novels was for me a large part of my education. What I am knocking is the cult of fiction – the idea that fiction is the only true vehicle for imaginative writing in prose.)

I chose Moorhouse and Garner because they have relatively simple (although, no doubt, carefully contrived) prose styles. I also chose them because, if you are concerned with imagination in the sense in which I’m using it, then does it matter whether it’s fiction or non-fiction? Frank Moorhouse or Henry Reynolds? Beverly Kingston or Helen Garner? What does it matter? Of course there are differences between how fiction does it and how other kinds of writing do it ... But those are not differences in imaginative power. They are differences in category. Each category allows things to be done that the other categories can’t do. There are things that fiction can do that philosophy or history can’t do. But it’s also the other way around. Can’t we respect them equally, fiction and the rest, for what they can, in their own ways, do at their imaginative best?

It was due to the cult of fiction as the imaginative part of prose-writing that some members of the literary world spun around so aimlessly in the Helen Demidenko affair. The problem was:

There are ways of talking about novels ... There are also ways of talking about history ... If a novel is talking about history why can’t it, to that extent, be assessed not only as a novel, but as history?

(In this episode there was also the poignancy that this is history whose blood is still on our hands. It is purporting to [as Mary McCarthy put it] ‘tell the news’ about events related to our present condition and it evoked the despair that future generations might get it wrong.)

The problem is not only that the idea of ‘imagination’ can be confined to make­believe. (Why should being able to make things up, necessarily, seem meritorious?) It is also that in appraising the imaginativeness of style, cultists of fine writing could sometimes seem to see only elaborate confections, many of them, in my view, unimaginative, in one of the Passmore meanings – gimmicky, fanciful, pointlessly innovative – and this could be at the expense of fiction written in a less confected style, as well as of general writing. Many of the Old Masters of the nineteenth-century novel didn’t, by modern Australian fine writing standards, write very imaginatively. And no nineteenth-century Old Master of literature affected the fancifulness in literary style that became, to some of the cultists, the better part of imagination – poeticisms, strained figures of speech, special effects in descriptive writing, for a while, even scattered commas and hanging modifiers, and more than a tremor of meretricious portentousness as we moved on the long march back from dun-coloured realism to purple prose. Neither Balzac nor Stendhal would have won a Miles Franklin. Nor, for that matter, have Helen Garner or Frank Moorhouse.

I’ll go back to Manning Clark, briefly, to raise the subject of style and prose that isn’t fiction.

I think the usefulness of his six volumes as a way of interesting us in Australian history has probably ended. What remains valuable is its technique of tableaux, ironic juxtapositions, rapid scene-shifts and illuminating dead ends (although I don’t know if this has been preserved in the abridgment.) This was helped by the literary technique of putting together many of the catchphrases of the period so that you could imagine you were thinking, or at least speaking, as various kinds of people seemed to think, or at least speak, at the time. This provided an underlay to the structure by giving the book a lot of voices. Or, as it is now technically put, it ‘polyvocalised’ it. (It isn’t helped, however, by the notorious inability to stop piling it on so that whole passages can sound like a bad translation of the Bible, and the wilfulness in mixing this up, even in the same paragraph, with the contemporary voices, so that from sentence to sentence you don’t know whether it is a colonial notable who is speaking or St Manning who is sermonising.) However, the point I want to make is that, so far as I know Alan Atkinson, in his essay, was the first person to go over the style of Clark’s big book with any care; he was the first person, (in his words) to ‘move from word to word and paragraph to paragraph’ and see what was happening. It was in this way that he unearthed its ‘polyvocalism’ – although, graciously, he did not use that word.

I don’t think there is anyone in Australia now who pays regular attention to the style – or the structure – of prose works that aren’t fiction. Where are the reviewers, for example, who have a strong critique of construction and style to apply to a book that falls into the literary editor’s non-fiction bin? ... Who lectures on these books in the literature departments of universities? (One might add: which history departments bring fiction into their courses and, even more, which history departments provide courses on the styles and constructions of history writing? Which sociology departments provide a course on nineteenth-century novelists as creators of a ‘society’? Which economic de­partments examine how the prose styles of, say, Adam Smith and J.M. Keynes affected their economics?)

Yet it is style that can be the most valuably imaginative part of prose writ­ing that isn’t fiction (as it can also, of course, be of fiction) so that the ‘style’ – the characteristic mood and approach, the tone, the characteristic questions asked – becomes the better part of ‘content’. More questions: Why are imaginative stylists in journalism rare? In particular, why is imaginative style lacking in all the comment that surrounds us on politics and economics –when this is best and most realistically done, I believe, in a style that conveys surprise only if something actually comes out more or less as intended – and in which nothing happens ‘for the first time’? Is there one intellectual journal that now has a characteristic sense of style? I know that any form of writing is a style – but why is so much of the intellectual style of intellectual writing in Australia so untouched by imagination? In Passmore’s sense, why is so much of it banal, commonplace, conventional, or academic?

All this becomes part of an even wider concern: Consider the dangers of trying to corral ‘imagination’ into an area fenced in as ‘the arts’, so that imagination is a fancy that we might escape into when we’re not doing something more useful. Doesn’t this contain sore and tender reminders of the cramped colonial imagination in which Australia was seen as a place, apart from a few exceptions, that did not need any ideas of its own? And of a besieged utilitarian mentality that saw ideas as ‘bullshit’?

Yet we live in uncertain times in which to change is risky, and not to change is risky. That is why we should be considering the importance of imaginativeness and a love of ideas, and spreading that perception – recognising that imagination is not something you get only with an Australia Council grant and ideas something you get only with an Australian Research Council grant (however essential these two kinds of grants may be and, indeed, they are).

When, forty years ago, Manning Clark was hovering around the problem of how to interest his fellow Australians in Australia, he hit on an approach that seemed to work. But things may have been easier then.

Now the writing of Australian history has been transformed by scholars, university and independent, so that there are many new studies, many of them opening up whole new perspectives, most of them written intelligibly, in the intellectual vernacular, some of them written with distinctive style. But in schools, the teaching of any kind of history has been partly abandoned, and what there is is likely to be impaired by emphasis on activity approaches, individualised project work, current affairs discussions, special angles (gender, race, ethnicity, community in particular). It is likely to be limited by cultural relativism and by overemphasis on process rather than content, and it has become fashionable to make unrealistic depictions of our history as uniquely evil. At universities the value of ‘grand narrative’ is questioned (even if ‘grand narratives’ are as much part of the human condition as having only one head), and there has sometimes been a failure to teach Australian history as part of a more general European story.

The times would seem to demand a collective outburst of imagination, able to temper the old stories with new perspectives, to advance on how we see our past, shaping and ordering its presentation in a new way. Is such a change now possible?

This is an edited transcript of Donald Horne’s keynote speech at the Second National Book Summit, delivered in Melbourne on August 31, 1995. It is printed here courtesy of Donald Horne and the National Book Council.