Christina Stead by Jennifer Gribble (OUP, $18.95 pb), Janet Frame: Subversive fictions by Gina Mercer (UQP, $19.95 pb), and The Ironic Eye: The poetry and prose of Peter Goldsworthy by Andrew Riemer (Angus & Robertson, $14.95pb) are three very different books on three very different writers. I guess you could say Frame and Stead are more alike as they are both writers who delight in excess and whose positions in national canons are still being defined and explored (if not resisted).

The books on Stead and Goldsworthy are each around 120 pages of criticism (Gribble’s book has an extra ten pages of notes, bibliography, and chronology), whereas Mercer on Frame has some 250 pages of criticism with some forty pages of notes, bibliography. Each critic provides a reasonable account of their methodology or aims and each approach and style is different. And the covers are all appropriate for the books: here the publishers enter the critical arena, selecting images, artwork, design, and layout which will complement and project the books. Oxford’s is a close-up photo of a rather stern Christina Stead; UQP has chosen to vary its standard plain cover and instead uses a woodcut by Barbara Hanrahan of a girl doing a handstand.

Although it is usually accepted that books of criticism are written, in fact they are just as importantly commissioned and published. What this means is that writers are usually invited to contribute something within certain parameters, usually with a particular house style or perspective. Publishers give to criticism a particular shape or tone or orientation. So books of criticism are very much ‘co-authored’ by publishers. Mind you, the role of publishing in Australian literature has always been prominent. Look at the role of British publishers in shaping Seven Little Australians, and the influence of the Bulletin.

Jennifer Gribble’s book is a familiar kind of critical handbook largely aimed at students and teachers. Bearing the Oxford imprint, it comes as part of an ‘authoritative series’ under the editorship of Chris Wallace-Crabbe. It is a product of the critical establishment, and consequently projects a slightly patrician air.

Gribble’s intelligent and generous study of Stead attempts to ‘explore … the continuing experimentation and renewal of [her] development over five decades’. Her critical approach is the traditional academic discourse which tries to anatomise the oeuvre – to find a way to describe and account for Stead’s particular and significant literary output. In particular there is an implied defence of Stead against charges of formlessness and uncontrollable excess. In the introduction, Gribble judiciously points to Stead’s well-known ‘resistance to classification’. She suggests that attempts to classify Stead ‘will inevitably reflect the assumptions, and the particular historical moment, of the critic’.

Gribble argues that the movements in Stead’s novels towards ‘consolation’ or ethical resolution are resisted by a preference for ‘open-ended and interrogative possibilities of narrative’, a distrust of ideologies and by the vitality of characters who, while accountable, ‘will always remain to some degree inscrutable and mysterious’. Above all, there’s a delight in narrative, and a ‘love of excess’; Stead sees ‘sexual energy not only as an analogy for, but as a source of, art’.

Gribble’s introduction sets up a number of key concerns and then examines the novels chronologically, mostly in terms of narrative, character, theme, style. She agrees with some criticism but resists the definite lines of most particular critical assessments. While the book ends somewhat abruptly, without having offered us a neat summary view or a paraphrasable theoretical account of Stead, Gribble’s account resists the formulations of new criticism and contemporary theorising. Indeed Gribble’s balanced, well-informed, and moderate assessment clearly flies in the face of Stead’s belief that ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’.

This is a perceptive and generous book which, in a sense, resists the ‘authoritative’ mantle by opening up what Kate Llewellyn calls Stead’s ‘garrulous’ texts.

Gina Mercer’s book is a familiar kind of book too, though in a way it is narrower, even if part of its methodology is to reject narrowness, particularly of the ‘traditional linear and phallocentric structure’. Mercer’s critical methodology is to enunciate key theoretical positions (in this instance French feminist ones from Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray) and use them ‘to read or hear the voice of the feminine’ in Janet Frame’s work.

After an introduction in which Mercer, as is the fashion, claims that her reading is partial, incomplete, and not absolute, she argues that because Janet Frame has always written as an outsider, she can be said to be a ‘most fertile site and repository of the other’s potential to survive, defy and overcome oppression … a celebration and exploration of all the multiple possibilities, or many-folds, of that which French feminist theorists term “le feminin”’. While Mercer acknowledges that ‘le feminin’ is not an essentialist term nor exclusively related to women, much of the force and energy of Mercer’s arguments invoke the female body, particularly its ‘sexual and reproductive anatomy’ with its ‘various cracks, crevices, gaps, hollows, pleats’, as a source of creative power and way of apprehending. The structure of Mercer’s book will be, she says, ‘that of a folding screen with many angled panels’.

I like this analogy, and Mercer provides us with a stylish critical fan-dance, but I find the language and theorising a bit predictable, repetitive (for example the pun on many-fold/manifold is pushed at the reader three times in the first six pages), and hectoring (that male critics in general are linear, traditional, closed, rational, phallocentric, and so on is simply not true). Despite this, Subversive Fictions is an exciting and inventive book in which Mercer does approach Frame’s texts, in a playful, thoroughly researched, celebratory way.

This reminds me of an essay topic given to my students, and what one response, that of Lissa Paul, suggested:

Male-order criticism is pointed towards the one penetrating strategy that removes even the last G-string of mystery and lays bare the text. But that doesn’t quite work; the emperor’s magic new clothes degenerate into a lowbrow skinflick. Bare texts don’t allow for the kind of intellectual play upon which readers (especially critics) thrive. Feminist criticism, on the other hand, is about keeping the voyeur’s attention and imagination engaged while the clothes are being taken off. Critical interest centres on the play of meaning, not the sadly naked revelation of meaning.

I think Mercer would agree. She surveys the critics on Frame, finding many otherwise perceptive males just too caught up in ‘conventional expectations’ really to see, as in Owls Do Cry for example, ‘other possibilities, especially the sensitive, emotional, imaginative, spiritual and creative possibilities found within the repressed feminine’.

Each chapter focuses on a particular book and in each the angle is different, the critical perspective varies, mingling imagined critical voices as in a subversive symposium. Mercer’s virtuosity reaches a peak (I was going to say ‘climax’; I guess both are equally obvious) in the amazing chapter thirteen, ‘Living in the Maniototo: A Maze of Many-Folds’, in which she anatomises the critic as a circus performer. Mercer then goes on to invoke a ‘dance of seven triangles’ (and there they are on page 206) – a complicated and interesting schematisation of critical possibilities.

Even Mercer’s Appendix note detailing the difficulties she encountered with permission to use and quote from Frame’s typescripts becomes part of the critical context. There were misunderstandings resulting in Frame’s formal embargoing of ‘all material in question until fifty years after her death’.

Mercer’s book is concerned to apply a particular cluster of theoretical positions to the very complex oeuvre of Janet Frame and to illuminate or ‘read’ it from that perspective. Nevertheless, Subversive Fictions is a scintillating, energetic, endlessly stimulating book which opens up both Frame’s work and its own critical methodology to the delight and consideration of the reader.

The University of Queensland Press’s role in supporting new criticism is well known. Its titles have several times won the Walter McCrae-Russell Prize awarded annually by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. UQP has fostered a whole new interest in and awareness of Australian writers, often by academics who’ve not published a book before. Gina Mercer’s book on Janet Frame is a spectacular and worthy fellow to those others.

Perhaps the most surprising of these three books is Andrew Riemer’s book on the poetry and prose of Peter Goldsworthy, The Ironic Eye. It heralds as ‘literary journalism’, and has no bibliography or notes. Goldsworthy is still a ‘relatively young man, and this book was initiated by A&R HarperCollins as a money-making venture (which I suppose they all are). To cap it all, the cover is a quirky, primitivist design featuring a painting of Goldsworthy, looking even younger, pink-faced, open-necked shirt, doctor’s couch behind, a Tasmanian tiger inkwell in the foreground. Very nice.

The publisher is to be commended. It commissioned members of ASAL to write and edit books on Sally Morgan and Tim Winton, too, so it is interested not only in newly significant writers, but also newly significant critics. Even more than the Oxford series, this book is aimed at the intelligent ‘general reader’ (I suspect the university student will be irritated by the lack of bibliography and references), and is far less constrained than either of the other two books by traditional academic protocols and discourse.

The overall effect is of being taken on a guided tour of Goldsworthy’s work by one who is knowing, wry, bemused and, though he pretends some surprise and uncertainty, nevertheless offers shrewd, subtle, and suggestive insights into Goldsworthy’s work, Australian culture (of a kind), and its links with and differences from Europe. I remember Riemer as a gifted, earnest lecturer and I can hear his voice here. His shift from the English Department of the University of Sydney to the literary editorship of the Independent Monthly indicates a transition in cultural criticism that other academics have made; it is natural, sustains an educative role, and benefits an often abused Australian intelligentsia.

Wisely, Riemer realised that ‘Goldsworthy’s fiction would have to occupy a greater space’ than his poetry but he didn’t want to make it appear ‘secondary or even possibly irrelevant’. So the book begins with the poetry and then looks at the short stories and novels roughly chronologically. What Riemer finds in the poetry he also finds pervasively in the prose and vice versa. The poetry, he suggests, is characterised by precision, grace, irony, and lack of excess. The early prose is seen as a ‘Mapping of the Suburbs’. Maestro, is where Goldsworthy’s writing tries to ‘achieve authenticity’, mediating between Australia and Europe. Like Gribble and Mercer, Riemer sees his writer as occupying a position of alienation, and attempts to define a language which will accommodate or read that isolation back into a community of acceptance.

But if the way is, in Maestro primarily realistic, in Honk If You Are Jesus and Little Deaths there are explorations of the miraculous. Again as Gribble and Mercer do, Riemer suggests that there is no ‘resolution, no easy formula’ by which the complex tensions of the works can be full patterned. Riemer’s similarity with Gribble on this issue is that much of the critical enquiry depends on traditional notions of theme, character, style, and tone. They differ from Mercer, whose critical enquiry is a new kind of orthodoxy.

None of the three critics assumes the reader is male or anglo-celtic. All books show the impact of feminism and post-structuralism, though these are foregrounded only in Mercer, giving that book some of its power, vitality, and sense of the contemporary. Gribble conjures up current theory only to place it along with more traditional approaches as one among many. This gives her book what might seem like an uncertain, remote quality, but also its poise and even-handedness. Riemer’s book doesn’t foreground methodology but is keen to get on and tell its story, and this contributed enormously to my desire to keep reading. While the academic trappings were irritatingly absent, there was no mistaking the book’s sparkling and earnest desire to both teach and delight its readers.