The Murray Talk 2024
The Great Beauty
By Christos Tsiolkas
This is the Murray Talk, named after both the river and the poet, Les Murray. If you allow me, I want to begin with an acknowledgement of the river and an apology to the poet. The Murray is the name given to the river by the British colonisers of this land. An older name for the river is Millewa. And I know there are many more names. I don’t personally have a connection with these waterways, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise. But I do have friends who have grown up here. They have told me stories of sadness and tragedy connected with this land and this river, but also stories filled with beauty and joy. My father too talked of the river; not of Millewa, but further upstream. He first saw it when he came as a young man to this country. After 48-days at sea, he was taken to the migrant camp in Bonegilla, near Wodonga. From there, literally off the boat, he was then taken to work in quarries in central NSW and then to labour on the hydro-electric scheme in Bronte, Tasmania. On one of his returns to Bonegilla, he and a few mates visited the river. My father, who grew up in a mountain region where ghosts roamed, told me that it ‘the potami’ – the Greek word for river - was beautiful, of how lying on its banks with his friends, all young people from southern and eastern Europe, the river was a respite from the overpowering harshness of the Australian summer. He was describing that time to me and my brother, and he told us that there were ghosts everywhere on that land and on that river. ‘But, boys,’ he added, ‘I couldn’t communicate with them, I didn’t know their tongues.’ That happened a long time ago, but I want to believe that in this instance my memory is sound. My father spoke of tongues, in the plural. As a man now older than he was when he spoke to me of it - and also as a writer - I understand the importance of what he said. This is the acknowledgement I want to make. The river and this country and its history speak in many tongues.
I met Mr. Murray once, when I was a neophyte writer at a writer’s festival like this one. Unfortunately, I hadn’t read any of his poems when I met him, and I was a bolshie young man, so sure of my righteousness, that I was superciliously dismissive of him. I thought him one of the old white farts of Australian letters, and a conservative to boot. I remember he had the shyest and most winning of smiles, and that he proffered that smile to a young naïve man. I don’t think I was rude to him. One of the gifts I was given by my family was a respect for elders and I am so very glad of that gift. Of course, sometimes there are those monsters or cruel people who don’t deserve that respect. But I was taught that older people have lived longer than I have, and to paraphrase words of the old spiritual, you can never know the troubles they’ve seen. So, you must, as a beginning, start with respect.
So, I do hope I wasn’t rude. But I was ignorant and opinionated, and back then, I didn’t understand the grace in patience. Years later, discovering his poetry, I was moved by the muscular yet gentle power of it, the economy of language, of how much of life there was in his verse and his song. That doesn’t mean that he and I wouldn’t have had a good long argument about politics. But I no longer confuse ideology with imagination. Last year, for Christmas, my gift to the young people in my life, my nieces and nephews, was to compile a small ‘booklet’ - let’s call it a fanzine - of favourite poems. Cavafy and Owens and Akhmatova. The first poem in that collection is by Les Murray.
Brutal policy,
like inferior art, knows
whose fault it is.
I was making amends, for my own brutality as a young man. I was making an apology. My cavalier and unenlightened dismissal of Murray was an early lesson in how creed and ideology, no matter how galvanising or seemingly morally righteous, can impede empathy and obstruct understanding.
I’m meandering, like the river. But it’s an apology of wanted to make for a long time. This seems the right place to make it.
A few months ago, switching on the radio as I was washing up after breakfast, I heard a commentary on an issue dominating the news cycle, and I experienced a profound sense of nausea. It wasn’t a physical sickness, though it did have physical manifestations: the premonition of a headache, a distasteful sourness at the back of my throat. The best way to describe it is that listening to a journalist in conversation with a colleague, their words stopped making sense. I could comprehend their words, could follow their argument, my cognitive abilities were not at risk; but I found that I was distrusting the very context and structure of the discussion. They were mouthing platitudes I’d heard too often before, and they were interjecting short pithy but ultimately crude statements into their conversation that I was sure they’d found that morning on their Instagram or x feed. It was as if the journalists were performers in a radio play, reciting from some absurdist script. My gloved hands were washing cutlery, I was looking down at the suds, and I distinctly remember telling myself: this is nausea. I knew immediately why this particular word came to mind. Nauseais the title of Jean-Paul Sartre’s remarkable debut novel of existential isolation. In the novel, Antoine Roquetin is confronted by objects and people that are familiar to him, but these personages and things become completely estranged to him. And I don’t think it is any accident that in this state of confusion I found myself wondering if I was in a play, a play by Samuel Beckett, say, or the latter work of Carol Churchill, works by artists trying to make sense of being in a world where language itself has become meaningless.
I should add - and this is crucial - that the issue being interrogated by the journalists was one that is very important to me. I should probably also add that the program I was listening to was on Radio National, and that it wasn’t part of a quick news grab, that the journalists were knowledgeable, engaged. I’m not going to tell you what the issue being discussed was. That’s not out of fear or raising a controversial topic in this talk, not an evasion on my part. I want to speak about a breakdown in faith, in my faith, in the language of our current moment. The issue could be the tragedy of what is happening in Palestine and Israel. It could have been a conversation regarding sexual assault and the misogyny of our institutions. It could have been a discussion on the abject failure of this country and its governing institutions to deal with the consequence of the no vote in the referendum on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, and our subsequent moral feebleness in addressing the question of how to move on and forward from that result. Only the day before listening in to the radio program, I had been discussing the very same issue with my mother over her kitchen table. I didn’t experience nausea in that conversation with my mother. She is a working-class migrant woman in her mid-eighties, who did not have the privilege of education, and whose understanding of the world is refracted through her on-going struggle to make herself understood when she has always felt the exclusion of language. She started to cry as we talked, and I held her hand.
So, as I was listening to the radio, as I was doing the washing up, and as I was being confronted by this deep disbelief in the authenticity of what I was hearing, I couldn’t help but reflect on that discussion with my mother in her kitchen. And I became aware of the rising of an emotion, deep from within my belly, an emotion that was laced with and deepened by disenchantment. I was becoming angry. There was a mercilessness to the arguments of the journalists, and also a conceit, an assumption that they were speaking to an audience that felt and experienced the world in exactly the same terms as the journalists did themselves. They were using words such as justice, recompense, responsibility, and they were talking of human rights and colonisation and decolonisation, but the words and phrases were unconnected to human feeling or human experience. It was as if they were ticking boxes. When such critical words and concepts become unmoored from empathy, they do indeed become nonsensical. Furious, I turned off the radio.
One of the words they used was ‘nuance’. It’s a good word, an important word, and there’s not one of us here today who hasn’t struggled with how to express ourselves in a digital media age which valourises the spontaneous over the considered, immediacy over patience. Yet why did I distrust their use of that word? I thought back to the conversation with my mother. She firmly, sometimes furiously, believes in what is right and what is wrong. She has a strong moral code, buttressed by her religious faith but also by her own experiences. Yet what she doesn’t believe is that the world can be divided easily into the good and the bad, and she certainly doesn’t believe that we always act rightly. Nuance isn’t a word she’d ever use - I don’t know the Greek word for it. My parents were both children of Occupation and civil war, born into peasant poverty. Their fate, to survive, was to migrate to a country where they knew neither language nor custom. They taught me that not only was the world unfair, but that it was complex and difficult, and that there are questions that we will never know the answers to. My mother and father’s generation felt sorrow, and they felt humility in relation to the question of what struggle is. They could both be bigoted and prejudiced, racist and sexist. But they never thought the stranger was lesser than themselves. My father’s family was anti-communist in Greece and my mother’s family communist, and so they both had knowledge of the deadly cruelty of what political righteousness could do. They strived to understand each other. Loving each other and listening to one another, required the difficult, heartbreaking acceptance that their own kin, their own heroes, their own kind and tribe were capable of cruelty and savagery. They and their friends, the elders around us, never directly spoke of that cruelty and savagery to us as children. I only heard the stories creeping towards the kitchen when I couldn’t sleep, hiding behind the corner in the living room, surreptitiously listening in to the stories of war and poverty, of heroism and vengeance. Often a memory was stirred, a violence remembered, and there would be a deep and profound silence. That silence terrified me as a child, often I’d call out, make my presence known, have my mother or aunt rush into the room to gather me up, make the world right again. Only now do I comprehend that in that silence was an acknowledgement that words and ideology and morality sometimes fail. Now I know that silence may be the most critical and empathetic response to pain and contradiction. Nuance, that fine word, can also become meaningless when it is abstracted from empathy and sympathy, when it becomes another word we jabber to fill in the space. That’s why I turned the radio off. The conversation, so full of humanistic and principled words, was pitiless.
I then did the worst thing I could have done. Instead of sitting in silence, I allowed my anger to direct me to my phone, where I started scrolling across news sites. The urge was as poisonous and mechanical as any addictive urge. It’s always there, in my pocket, on the bench, tempting me with an immediate kick. And of course, after all those wasted hours scrolling and reading through endless text filled with opinion and righteousness, my anger was heightened and all I felt was contempt. Bile was rising to my throat. The world was meaningless, argument was redundant and all attempts at reconciliation and understanding were undermined by all of us acting in bad faith. When my partner, Wayne, came home, he could see that I was tense, wound up. I cooked dinner, but I was spoiling for a fight. Not with him, but with all those who had written their self-righteous comments on a viral feed or at those activists who seemed so sure of what to do and how to do it when all I felt was impotent rage. I raised the issue the journalists had been discussing on the radio with him and Wayne looked at me warily. Gently, but firmly, he counselled me that he was not prepared to have a conversation over something so important when I was so clearly wound up. Knowing my love of cinema, he suggested we watch a movie. ‘You choose’, he said. As he was clearing up after dinner, I looked at possible choices on one of the streaming platforms. I came back into the kitchen. ‘Okay’, I said, ‘Let’s watch The Great Beauty.’
Paolo Sorrentino’s film, La Grande Belleza, was released in 2013. I was completing a novel over that period, working on the final edits and the marking-up, and I missed the film at the cinema. Wanting to see it on the big screen, I had resisted watching it on the TV. But this night, having felt repelled of the world all day, having felt this nausea, I decided: Let’s just watch it!
I think I am going to be grateful to that film for the rest of my life. It is sometimes described as a contemporary retelling of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Both films are enraptured by the city of Rome, and both films are set amongst a class of ultra-bourgeois intellectuals and fashionistas. They are both films by directors in love with the medium, with the technology of movies, with the possibilities of what movies can do. Yet I think Sorrentino’s film is less jaded than the Fellini, much warmer and ultimately more compassionate. That doesn’t mean that Sorrentino is uncritical. He satirises and mocks the materialistic and shallow post-Berlusconi Romans. The main character, Jep Gambardella, played with exquisite charm by Toni Servillo, is turning 65 years of age. In his youth he wrote one well-regarded and critically successful novella, and he’s been coasting on his reputation ever since. He’s a writer who has lost his faith in the novel and he fills his time hopping from one grand party to another. In a remarkable scene, at a party on a balcony that overlooks the Colosseum, one of his exes, a woman still committed to her socialist principles, derides him for his apathy, for his selling-out. Jep in turn accuses her of an equal betrayal. She like him has swapped commitment for cocaine: her activism now consists of picking arguments at the socialite dinners she attends.
If Sorrentino had left it at that, made this mocking movie about the self-righteousness and ennui of elites, it would still be an exciting film. The camera glides and makes palatable the crumbling archaic grandeur of the ancient city; the editing is superb, at times a kinetic rush of images, but also knowing when to stay still, to keep both the sordid and the beautiful within the same frame. However, Sorrentino isn’t merely content to expose the disillusionment and enervation of his characters. Jep is lazy and Jep is smug, but he also knows that he has betrayed his talent. How can you not know that, in a city such as Rome, with the evidence of generations of labour and sacrifice to the great beauty all around you? Jep knows he is ridiculous.
Late in the film, we are introduced to another character, Sister Maria, a centenarian nun, played by Guisi Merli, who is venerated as a near-saint. The Cardinal who is keeping careful watch of her is pompous and venal, and Sorrentino is clearly having fun exposing the hypocrisy and greed of the church. Sister Maria herself speaks in tired homilies and in Merli’s sly performance we glimpse a steely coldness to the nun. We are primed to equate religious faith as being as meaningless and as shallow as the spent ideologies and literary theories of Jep and his circle. But Sister Maria is in Rome to climb the steps of a spiritual sanctuary, and we cut to a scene where the withered old woman, on her hands and knees, using only the will that comes from her faith, ascends to the top of the staircase. As we watch her mounting the stone steps, her breath wheezing, her face and her hands contorted in the pain of her ferocious effort, Sorrentino is asking us to contemplate the ridiculous and the profound simultaneously. Sister Maria’s faith in her god is as preposterous as Jep’s youthful faith in the promise that art, that a novel, could change one’s world. As preposterous as his faith once in something called love.
Throughout the film Sorrentino uses music as both counterpoint and as exaggeration. We hear banging Eurotrash techno, folkish acoustic laments, post-punk disco and moments of stillness and reprieve in selections from Arvo Pärt and Bizet. Throughout, there is the return to a quietly rousing piece of music, ‘The Beatitudes’, composed by the Russian composer, Vladimir Martynov, and played by the Kronos Quartet. In the film’s final moments, and one of the greatest end-credit sequences I have ever seen, our point of view is from a craft gliding along the Tiber River. The boat weaves under the bridges, and we glimpse the natural world and the sacred world, the ancient world and the contemporary world, and they are all existing in the one moment. ‘The Beatitudes’ soars and in my lounge-room at home I was weeping. And my nausea was gone.
Faith and hope and love. Ridiculous. But without them we can’t go on. Without them we miss the great beauty of this world.
Martynov is a composer born in a nation once called the USSR and now lives in a nation called Russia. As a young man he played in a rock band, and as a scholar he diligently worked at cataloguing and advocating for the music of peoples from the Caucuses and from Tajikistan. His great passion has been for composing music that speaks to the yearning for the spiritual. One of his most beautiful pieces is called ‘Opus Posthemum’ that takes as its guiding inspiration the notion that “a human touches the truth twice. The first time is the first cry from a newborn baby's lips and the last is the death rattle. Everything between is untruth to a greater or lesser extent.”
If I’m honest, I don’t know where to sit with his words. I have been at the death of a parent, and I do believe in the sacredness of that moment of final breath. In that moment, all else falls away. I’m not a parent, but I know that friends who have been there at the first cry of their child speak of an equally profound moment of understanding at that first sound. Yet between that first cry and that final rasp, there is life. Mad, intoxicating, violent, wonderful, tragic and sorrowful and pleasurable life.
Watching The Great Beauty, I found affirmation that there is still the possibility for language that is not hollow, that there is still belief that is not mere ideology and that there can be a striving for truth that is not bad faith. That affirmation girds my faith in something called art, something called literature. At my most pessimistic, I can deride that faith as well, consider art spent, and the novel useless. But just as watching Sorrentino’s film reminded me that great art can be solace and can be knowledge and can be truth and can be comic and can be all that makes us human, I discover that anew reading Melissa Lukashenko’s Edenglassie or Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional. And I know that this is ridiculous and I know that this is possibly even heretical, but in that immersion in the intricate refraction of time and place and memory that is Melissa’s novel or my moving my lips to the clearsighted cadences and rhythms of Charlotte’s words, experiencing her astonishing wrestling with questions of solace and retreat in the very act of reading, I am both the fifty-something male Christos Tsiolkas but I am also in the bodies and souls of the characters that the writers have created for us. This is not bodysnatching: the character and I are walking side by side. Just as in watching ‘The Great Beauty,’ I am Sister Maria struggling, battling to ascend the cold stone steps, and I am also the jaded writer coasting on reputation and losing himself in frivolous slight pleasures and intoxication to evade the terror of wondering if he will ever write anything of substance again. As readers, as viewers, as listeners, it isn’t that we cease to exist. I don’t disappear but the boundaries of my own place and my own history and of my own identities become blurred, porous, and I am walking alongside a stranger that I recognise for the running-time of the movie or in the hours or days it takes to finish the novel; and I grasp the possibility of what it is to live in a body that is not mine and to experience a world that I have been ignorant of. Sometimes this obliteration of boundaries can be upsetting, even terrifying. But if even the most despairing of visions are tethered to a truth or to an insight of what makes us human, then that experience too has an element of liberation.
This is the very opposite of the experience I had listening to the journalists. So much media these days, amplified by the technological wizardry of the digital age, sequesters us in our boundaries, reinforces the walls of our own biases and preconceptions. Drying my eyes after that exquisite ending to The Great BeautyI I was no longer feeling nauseous. Great art allows us to breathe another’s air.
‘Keep one’s own shadow out of the picture; leave the mirror clean of the mist of one’s own breath; take only what is most essential and durable in us, in the emotions aroused by the senses or in the operations of the mind, as our point of contact with those who, like us, nibbled olives and drank wine, or gummed their fingers with honey, who fought bitter winds and blinding rain, or in a summer sought the plane tree’s shade; who took their pleasures, thought their own thoughts, grew old, and died.’
Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar
I think there’s another reason why I responded with such joy to Sorrentino’s film, and that was because there was nothing of Protestantism within it. I want to be clear that I am not wishing to be cynical or dismissive of religious faith or of a religious tradition. One of the greatest experiences of my writing life was working on a novel, Damascus, that was in part an exploration of Saul of Tarsus, who we know as St. Paul, the writer of a large part of the Christian Bible. As one of the Apostles, Paul is central to all the Christian sects, but he is of pivotal importance to the writings of Martin Luther and then of John Calvin, of all of those theologians who were to use Paul’s letters to argue that faith alone guided our relationship to Godhead, and that communion with the sacred did not need the intermediary of an institution.
I have been in a long struggle myself with Protestantism, a struggle that persists long after I abandoned religious faith. Though raised Greek Orthodox, when I was a person of faith it was the Protestant theologians that most animated my exploration of the sacred. And even when I no longer called myself a Christian, Protestantism was threaded into the radical politics that I was immersing myself into during late high school and at university. So much of progressive politics has subterranean roots that dig deep into Protestant soil. The Abolitionists and the Suffragists emerged from Protestantism and that essential connection between Protestantism and the politics of progress is illuminated in that wearisome and beleaguered word, Woke: the Great Awakening. To be born again. There is a wonderful and enticing promise in Protestantism: that one can be made whole and be one with spirit, whether that spirit is perceived as a god or in more secular language, as Enlightenment. But along with that promise there is an ominous forewarning. What if you are not one of the Elect? What if you are not worthy? What if you are not one of the righteous?
I’m too much of a sensualist to be one of the righteous, and I may be too much of a fatalist. Orthodox Christianity, which is eastern Christianity, was the first experience I had of the sacred, and those roots also go deep. So, while I understand and respect the iconoclasm of Protestantism and its secular offshoots, I have a nostalgic attachment to the incense and the chanting and the sensual colour of the Orthodox Church. I love looking upon the stern premodern icons staring down at me, reminding me of impermanence and the inexorable wheel of time: creation and destruction in a perpetual cycle. It was my mother who first taught me the word, justice, (δικαιοσύνη) and it is my mother who also first taught me the word for fate (μοίρα). She is a fierce believer in both, still ready to decry any example of injustice she witnesses, and still humbled by the vagaries and unfairness of fate. Unlike me, she has a strong religious faith. Yet I have never heard her talk of the afterlife. One of the ways in which Orthodoxy differs from Protestantism and from western Catholicism, is that the Book of Revelations is not part of the canon. My mother would say that the Apocalypse has never stopped happening.
I am moved greatly by the words of Martin Luther King Jr. when he said that ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.’ I love the hope in it. But I can’t commit to it. If it is true, too many have been annihilated and crushed for the future to reach its apotheosis. What The Great Beauty reminded me of was the importance of stopping and being witness to the beautiful, the tender and the hope in the here and now, without always waiting for it in a future world to come. I don’t mean to argue against the hope for a better future, the struggle of writers and activists to envision it and strive for it. But in that dance between justice and beauty, I don’t want to be negligent of the beauty in the present. The scent of my partner when he awakes in the morning. The joy of a young person rushing to the dance floor to throw themselves into a song they love. The beauty of my friend, Nam Le’s poetry, the awe I feel in his love and challenge and labour to explore what the English language can and cannot do.
That dance between justice and beauty is what every single one of us who are readers of fiction and who are writers must negotiate and settle for ourselves in this present time. Understanding the dance, seeking both beauty and justice, is what we do as artists in the world. Some of us will seek the former and some of us will strive for the latter, and most of us will attempt a reconciliation. I think what created the nausea for me listening to the journalists debating on Radio National was that they were unmindful of beauty. They were looking only at the world to come and neglecting the small signs of hope that are here in the world now. There was no doubt.
That’s the greatest gift I received from my long wrestle with God and with religion. I learnt the importance of doubt.
Some years ago, BC – before Covid – I had the great fortune to be invited to speak to a group of writing students in Mumbai, in India. It was exhilarating. We argued, in genuine good faith, over that dance between justice and beauty that I have been describing. I had read to them an excerpt from Kusamakura, a fin-de-siecle novel written by the Japanese author, Natsume Soseki. Soseki had studied British literature, and he loved the literature from those islands. But he was born into the world of the Meiji Restoration, when after centuries of isolation, Japan was opening itself up to the West. Kusamakura (The Glass Pillow), is a book that cautions against the colonisation of Japanese culture by Western standards and western notions of art. He intuited that the power and triumphant aggression of European mercantile culture would prove a corrupting temptation. The novel describes a retreat an artist takes up a mountain to contemplate the meaning and truth of something called art. I thought it might be interesting to hear the responses of these young Indian writers and students to Soseki’s words. Like me, they too were citizens of a nation forged in the cauldron of colonial violence and exploitation.
There is no avoiding suffering, rage, flailing, and weeping in the world of humankind. Heaven knows I have experienced them myself in the course of my thirty years, and I have had enough of them by now. I find it exhausting to be forced to experience these same tired stimuli yet again through a play or novel. The poetry I long for is not the kind that provokes this type of vulgar emotion. It is poetry that turns it back on earthly desires and draws one’s feelings for a time into a world remote from the mundane. No play, however brilliant, is free from human feelings. Rare is the novel that transcends questions of right and wrong. The characteristic of these works is their inability to leave the world behind. Particularly in Western poetry, based as it is on human affairs, even the most sublime poem can never aspire to emancipation from this vulgar realm. It is nothing but Compassion, Love, Justice, Freedom – such poetry never deals with anything beyond what is found in the marketplace of the everyday world. No matter how poetic it may be, its feet stay firmly on the ground; it has a permanent eye on the purse. No wonder Shelly sighed so deeply as he listened to the skylark.
Happily, in the poetry of the Orient there are works that transcend such a state.
By my eastern hedge I pluck chrysanthemums,
Gazing serenely out at the southern hills.
Here we have, purely and simply, a scene in which the world of men is utterly cast aside and forgotten. Beyond the hedge there is no next-door girl peeping in; no friend is busy pursuing business deals among those hills. Reading it, you feel that you have been washed clean of all the sweat of worldly self-interest, of profit and loss, in a transcendental release.
- from Kusamakura, Natsume Soseki (quoting Tao
Yuanming – 365-427AD – poem, “Drinking wine”)
The subsequent conversation did prove illuminating. I won’t ever forget it, and I know how fortunate I am to have had that experience. There was maybe around thirty people attending the workshop, and it was roughly an equal spread of women and men. What emerged from our discussion was a divide between those in the room who found themselves excited and buoyed by Soseki’s privileging of the delicate and the immediate and the beautiful above all else, and those who wanted to interrogate and argue against Soseki’s vehement disregard for the social and political possibilities of art and the novel. I listened to the conversation ricochet back and forth, marvelled at the articulate directness of these young people, their willingness to challenge each other and their generosity in being prepared to listen attentively to an opinion that was not their own. I was overjoyed by watching their immersion in the dance. What is writing? What is reading? What is beauty? Is it enough? Unlike those journalists on Radio National, they weren’t assuming that we all thought the same way and that all we need to think in the same ways. It was the opposite of nausea: it was an intoxication. Of course, these were largely wealthy or middle-class students. We were, after all, arguing in English, which in India is one of the national languages, but in its use and its currency is as much a demarcation of class as is the work one does or the caste one is born into. Yet engaging in this discussion that day and doing so in a country that was not mine, brought home to me that the complicated seesawing between beauty and justice is a live question for so many artists across the globe now. There will be some of us who will champion the novel that changes the world or attempts to do so, and there will be those of us who want simply to create art for the sake of the object itself. And for most of us, we will lurch from one to the other, the currents of history, the struggles arising from living life, dictating the direction in which we strive. We should have this argument, and we should rush into this dance, as readers and as writers. However, in our prioritising of one – of beauty, of justice – should not involve the maligning of the other. To allow that partisanship to affect how we read and how we write would be truly deleterious to our literature.
I think of my fellow writers at this festival this weekend and I know that they are involved in this dance. What an honour to be dancing with them this weekend. But I hope I will be excused if I finish by returning to cinema, in homage to how watching Sorrentino’s film reminded me of the importance of imagination and pleasure, of questioning and struggle; and yes, of indulgence. A few weeks ago, I watched a short film by a Canadian director, Andrew Ing, made in 2022 called Jill, Uncredited. It is about a woman, Jill Goldston, who appeared as an extra in over 2000 films and television shows. She is there dancing with Warren Beaty and Diane Keaton in Reds, as a nurse offering a scalpel to Anthony Hopkins in The Elephant Man, dressed as a conductor in a canteen scene in On the Buses. Ing, wordlessly, composing his own elegiac score, places Jill front and centre of this kaleidoscope of clips, reminding us that art is also a collaboration and that none of these cinematic works of art or entertainment (or both) could have been possible without the labour and involvement of all those who remain uncredited, at the edge of the frame. It’s a work of restorative justice, reminding us of gender and of class. As the film began, as I watched scene after scene of a life’s work that has gone unnoticed, I experienced a melancholy. Yet the power of Ing’s film is that he doesn’t let us sit in that despondency. As his camera glides across the frame, and as he makes Jill Goldston the centre of our attention, we see a young woman age and we see her laugh and we see her smile and we see her dance and we see her sit in silence and we are witness to the whole of life. We see her joy and her love of cinema. We see her beauty.
So much of this world makes us nauseous now. The pitiless denunciations on social media, the terrifying threats of a changing climate, the relentlessness of violence and war and racism and hate, the dehumanising of working-class people, the ruthless and seemingly inexorable march of avarice and greed. And the frightening charge towards retribution and vengeance arising from so many justifiable resentments. Art can hold all this, but it can also hold the smell of a lover’s scent in the morning, the first cry of a child, the final rattle of the one we love. It can speak to us of love of the stranger. The river outside of us here will keep flowing long after all of us are gone. As my father taught me, there are ghosts all along this river, those uncredited and unseen and denied. But those ghosts also sat on its banks and contemplated the rushing flow, the touch of a rising sun across the surface of the water. They made love on these banks, they raised children, they buried parents. They danced and they felt joy as well as sorrow. It is as crucial to remember that joy as it is to remember the sorrow. To sit by the river and to breathe, to put away the phone, to really see it, is to partake in the magnificent now. We are human and we ache for meaning, we ache for a transcendence that reminds us that we are not in isolation, that we are in communion with each other and with the world. I love the novel and I love film and I love poetry and I love it when it rages and when it storms and when it roars. But at this moment, I need the novel and film and poetry the most, when it reminds me – hope against hope – that there is also beauty.
Christos Tsiolkas
