Visual disturbances: Four

On Saturday 5 July 2008 I walked from Central Station, having caught the train from the suburb where I lived, through Surry Hills to Paddington. I took 474 photos on my way to an art gallery to hear a presentation given about an exhibition of photographs, then more photos were taken in the gallery itself, and more as I walked to the city where I intended to catch a train for the ride home. In this post there are 61 photos taken between 12.31pm and 3.50pm, but my snapping started about 10 minutes earlier than that, when I was in the space beneath the railway viaduct over Campbell Street, near Central Station.

Oddly enough the National Gallery of Victoria had an exhibition of Petrina Hicks' photos on at the time this post was written. The show started on 27 September and would run into the following year.

In the previous post in this series I talked about how, after a certain age, you become invisible. It’s clear that I wasn’t invisible at the time the following photos were taken because there is one here that contains an image of me: my body’s reflection, as I stood on the footpath on Flinders Street, caught by the camera in the glass door of a passing bus. In that photo I am not wearing the suede-and-Nylon belt that I still use now, over a decade later.

The gallery I visited on the day no longer operates and the people who are in these photos are now somewhere else or, perhaps, they are no longer of this world except as physical remains. Even if these photos had been in focus, the people who are caught in them, if they are still alive now, would look different from how they looked then, so it is fitting that it is merely their movement through space, rather than their outward appearance, that has lasted. Only the ephemeral, spectral outlines of their shifts remain.

In any case, people change over time. We are but the ghosts of our former selves. I think I remember learning that the human body is completely renewed every seven years, every cell replaced by a new one that fulfils one of the essential functions that sustain life. As I walk down the street today, over 11 years away in time from that July day, I can wonder about who those people were and how their lives have since changed.

Book review: What Not: A Prophetic Comedy, Rose Macaulay (1918)

This dark comedy is very much of its time and so some of the plotting is a bit clunky. On two occasions, two people are seen together by a third person in awkward circumstances. The same kind of device is used in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s ‘Plum Bun’ (1928; I reviewed it on 2 March). In both cases this “danger” threatens to give away the secret that gives the narrative its impetus and, in this way, the authors keep the reader interested in their stories. This kind of plot device belongs to an earlier era than the one in which we are living now, so to find it used in these two novels – novels published so close together in time – is not surprising.

Having said that, Macaulay’s novel makes good reading and it deserves to be widely consumed. Its publishing history is complicated. It was finished in 1918 and then the edition had to be pulped out of fear of libelling a prominent person. So it came out in 1919, in a redacted edition. The version that is available now is the original one.

While the speculative political novels of others, notably Orwell and Huxley, have gained a great deal of favour in the years since then, Macaulay’s has been almost entirely neglected. This is a shame.

Her story hinges on a Ministry of Brains and the classification of people in categories that allow them to get married. Or prevent them from getting married. Eugenics, the “science” that this idea is based on, was ultimately discredited after the Nazis were defeated in 1945, but for a time it won favour with many people in a number of different countries. (I wrote about eugenics in 2008 in a review of ‘Body Culture’, by Isobel Crombie, which came out in print in 2004.)

Macaulay’s novel is not only a work of speculative fiction, it is also a love story. At the centre of it sits Kitty Grammont who works for the ministry in a clerical role. There are other, secondary characters who add colour and help to flesh out the writer’s themes. Religion is given a good look-in for example, and there are some lovely descriptions of nature when Kitty and the man she loves go on rural walks. The descriptions that show the two of them swimming in the sea off the coast of Italy are particularly fine.

The ideas the book retails in are, like its style, of their time, and Macaulay does a good job of describing the world at the end of WWI (known in the novel as the Great European War; the service medal of my great-grandfather that I possess calls it the Great War for Civilisation). This is especially true of the way people thought about such things as (what we now know as) genetics. At the time, Darwin’s theories had been disseminated but the mechanism by which they operated was not known. There was also a strong antisemitic undercurrent at the beginning of last century – this was true not just in Germany – and Macaulay highlights this in her story.

Macaulay does a competent job of describing the public sphere in this book, from the opening scene where a woman is travelling on a commuter train to get to work, to a populist news editor trying to get a confession from a public servant, to a protest in the streets. The experience of protest and of controversy that derived from WWI, when there was a lot of disagreement about the war in the community in Britain, influenced Macaulay in profound ways, and this novel is the result.

The other thing that strikes the reader is the lack of awareness in the community a century ago of the effect of poverty on such things as educational attainment and intelligence. So you have a nation coming to terms with both a legacy of inequality and the promises of modernity. And while Macaulay shows through her plotting and characterisation that she is dead against the regulations of her invented ministry, she is also, at times, critical of parts of the community. This is the beauty of this work of fiction: its complexity and the nuanced way the author tries to deal, in a novelistic fashion, with ideas that were current in her day. Highly recommended.