FRICTION AS A SOCIAL PROCESS:

READING ERN MALLEY

David Musgrave and Peter Kirkpatrick

“We decided to carry out a serious literary experiment.”

James McAuley and Harold Stewart¹

Given the way in which he came into being by ceasing to be, it’s hardly surprising that critical discussion of Ern Malley has been preoccupied with reading the circumstances surrounding the celebrated hoax rather than with reading the text of The Darkening Ecliptic. Nevertheless, this has produced a paradoxical investment in the “figure” of Malley himself. Michael Heyward, for example, goes so far as to playfully begin his account of the Malley “affair” by describing the death of a supposedly real poet. John Tranter and Philip Mead, who anthologised all of The Darkening Ecliptic in their Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry, describe Malley as “a ghostly presence designed to self-destruct and take Modernism with him into the void”.² No-one has seriously attempted a detailed analysis of the text of the Malley poems, possibly because they remain unfriendly to older formalisms, and unuseful to contemporary cultural studies, so busily disowning its literary inheritance.

We offer both a textual and contextual analysis of Malley’s oeuvre that draws upon Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of a “minor literature”, a radical “deterritorialisation” of language that transgresses canonical or Major Literature by refusing to play by its rules. Minor literature emphasises the material nature of language over its “hidden” or metaphysical meanings, together with the libininal qualities that accompany this materiality. Compared to the practices of Major Literature, where hermeneutic gifts are distributed throughout a text like trinkets in a plum pudding, in a minor literature writing itself comes before content. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari elide the figure of the author via the concept of an abstract “writing machine”, an assemblage of linguistic and social forces whose heterogeneous, even revolutionary interaction can propel signification out of conventional channels onto unmarked space. As they write in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature , “Language stops being representative in order to move toward its extremities or its limits”.³

These movements may be characterised as “lines of flight”, points at which desire breaks free into new territory, generating change. For Deleuze and Guattari desire is an unconscious, productive energy which disperses itself in potentially multiple directions, a “dissemination” of sorts. It is not the product of psychic lack, à la Freud, but more akin to the Freudian concept of libido. In the case of the Malley hoaxers, McAuley and Stewart, the creation of The Darkening Ecliptic through a form of automatic writing can be said to have opened lines of flight normally blocked by their conservative poetic practice.

Bachelor Literature

The opening inscription of The Darkening Ecliptic is an “Old proverb” that advises “Do not speak of secret matters in a field full of little hills”.⁴ This injunction, at once obliquely arcane and vaguely obscene, suggests a multiplicity which threatens an even greater proliferation than that hinted at by the combination of two poets’ voices into one. It is as if we are warned against the uncontrollably generative power of this multiplicity, or to quote Deleuze and Guattari on Dali, “a pure multiplicity that changes elements, or becomes.” The context for this is Dali’s comparison of goosebumps to tiny rhinoceros horns, with their conclusion being such that “on the micrological level, the little bumps ‘become’ horns, and the horns, little penises”.⁵ So too the profusion of “little hills” in the “Old Proverb” establishes a landscape of desire that characterises The Darkening Ecliptic as a whole.

The opening inscription marks the departure point for a kind of sexual effusion with homoerotic overtones that characterises the more surreal aspects of the Ern Malley poems. The title of the poem “Sweet William” refers to the Australian variety of the plant, the flowers of which are a host of little pinkish-white trumpets. This is another multiplicity of little penises and it is an image which accompanies, in the later lines of the poem, what Deleuze and Guattari call “schizo-incest”:⁶ that is, a multiple, productive desire without telos.⁷

My blood becomes a Damaged Man

Most like your Albion;

And I must go with stone feet

Down the staircase of flesh

To where in a shuddering embrace

My toppling opposites commit

The obscene, the unforgivable rape. (75)

Elsewhere in the poems hosts of little penises are present, usually in motifs of becoming-animal: the dromedary (with two humps) that Ern finds himself to be in the twenty-fifth year of his age; the multiplicity of caterpillar feet, predictions which lead nowhere; the anopheles urged to “Sting them, sting them” in “Culture as Exhibit” (85).

In general, this multiplicity of little penises goes hand in hand, as it were, with schizo-incest: the “unforgivable rape” in “Sweet William” and the “mausoleum of my incestuous/And self-fructifying death” of “Egyptian Register” (86). This schizo-incest has, as one inevitable characteristic, a homoeroticism or, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, a “homosexual effusion” which “necessarily completes” it.⁸ In fact this homoerotic effusion is a product of several “frictions”, a take on the pamphlet “Friction as a Social Process” read on Ern’s thighs in “Culture as Exhibit”. These “frictions” are the result of the “interruptions” of collaboration, interruptions which, as Wayne Koestenbaum argues, invariably have an erotic nature. For Koestenbaum, collaboration or, as he terms it, “double talk”, is an “economy with all expense and no return, a way of discharging language in a masturbatory folie à deux”.⁹

The erotic nature of the Malley collaboration, however, may not just be the result of the collaborative process. Sasha Soldatow’s review of Michael Heyward’s The Ern Malley Affair in the UTS Review in 1996 confirms that Harold Stewart was in fact homosexual, and that “the writer Ian McNeil has always pointed out the fact that Ern Malley himself may have been homosexual, after all he was unmarried, had no children, lived with his mother and wrote poetry”.¹⁰ In her recent book, The Devil and James McAuley, Cassandra Pybus cites Amy Witting’s view that Stewart “was in love with” McAuley, and suggests that a love poem by Stewart published in Hermes in 1939 may well have been inspired by his friend.¹¹

The textual evidence for this homoeroticism in the Malley poems is substantial. In “Baroque Exterior” we have “Everyman arrests/His motives in these anthropoid erections” (83); and in “Colloquy with John Keats” we have the confessional

... I have lain

With the Lion, not the Virgin, and become

He that discovers meanings. (89)

But the “unforgivable rape” is ambiguous. It may not be (for 1943) an expression of homosexual effusion, but of a darker incest, the relation between Ern and Ethel Malley. A large part of the success of the hoax depended not only on the creation of Ern Malley and his poems but on the fictional creation of Ethel Malley as well. As Michael Heyward writes:

Ethel lent the hoax credibility by showing that Ern had flesh-and-blood relatives, and grounded the fantasy of the unknown, self-educated genius in the world of lower-middle-class suburbia that McAuley and Stewart had grown up in, and escaped from.¹²

In a part of the second letter which Ethel Malley sent Max Harris, there are hints of intimacy, the traces of undisclosed desire:

The weeks before he died were terrible. Sometimes he would be all right and he would talk to me. From things he said I gathered he had been fond of a girl in Melbourne, but had some sort of difference with her. I didn’t want to ask him too much because he was nervy and irritable.¹³

We can therefore trace in the poems, and even in Ethel’s letters the hallmarks of a bachelor literature, the kind that Deleuze and Guattari trace in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. But before the concept of a minor literature can be traced further, we need to turn to the structure of the poems.

The Ern Malley poems – sixteen in all (with the plaintive “So Long” excluded by Max Harris for appearing incomplete, constituting a seventeenth) – have, from the point of view of a conventional reading, only limited structural integrity. For example, there are the two “Night Piece” poems, one apparently an alternate, if not mirrored version of the other. Then there is the last line of “Sybilline” with the image of a

… figure that strode hell swinging

His head by the hair

On Princess Street (77),

followed by the first lines of “Night Piece” in which “The swung torch scatters seeds/In the umbelliferous dark” (78): another image of dissemination. Also, to some extent, certain repeated motifs – Shakespeare and other cultural icons, left-handedness, innuendo – give the poems a hint of a consistent structure despite the wild heterogeneity of the imagery. But to search for unity in the Ern Malley poems is to produce a reading which implicitly assumes the superiority of “Major Literature”, of unitariness and canonicity. In other words, an adequate reading of The Darkening Ecliptic would require the kind of “critical socio-linguistics of culture” of which Allon White writes that would break down the identification of structuredness with homogeneity.¹⁴

We can therefore read The Darkening Ecliptic as a work structured by the concept of friction as a social process. We have already referred to the friction of the collaborative process, with its erotic accompaniment, and the friction of schizo-incest. There is also the friction of the “heat” of slippage between boundaries to which Stephen Greenblatt refers:

[Gender] identity is at once made possible and dissolved by the slippage between these boundaries… it has equally to do with the friction between boundaries… Sexual warmth does not differ essentially from other warmth; it is only a particularly vehement instance of the principle of all animate life and therefore can be generated to some degree by food, wine, and the power of imagination.¹⁵

While Greenblatt’s comments strictly speaking pertain to Renaissance theories of gender, they are an appropriate description of the kind of wholesale investiture of desire in the act of representation that characterises a minor literature. In poems such as “Sweet William”, “Perspective Lovesong” and even “Colloquy with John Keats”, self and other mingle in an ecstatic friction, and this friction is by no means confined to a sense of rapture of the orgasmic, but also to a flowing out of the self, a removal from the confines of the self. In a discussion on Freud, Elizabeth Grosz writes that the ego is

not simply bounded by the “natural” body. The “natural” body, insofar as there is one, is continually augmented by the products of history and culture, which it readily incorporates into its own intimate space. In this, “man” must be recognized as a “prosthetic god,” approaching the fantasy of omnipotence, or at least of a body well beyond its physical, geographical, and temporal immediacy. If the ego is a mapping of the body and if the body is able to incorporate a host of instrumental supplements, the ego (or at least its ideal) aspires to a megalomania worthy of gods.¹⁶

This movement of incorporation is potentially reversible, perhaps exemplified best by the ekstasis of laughter: one is possessed by laughter, one is transported by delight. In terms of ekstasis, the self flows out of itself into that which, in terms of the ego, is incorporated. Ekstasis, therefore, approximates a fluid multiple identity, an example of the kind of “bodying” performed by minor literature.

Such a “body” as there is in The Darkening Ecliptic is continually in a kind of ekstasis which constitutes the structure of friction as a social process, an irruptive movement beyond the poetic self along a line of flight which produces surreal metamorphoses. In “Sweet William”, as already noted, we have “And I must go with stone feet/Down the staircase of flesh”; and in “Baroque Exterior”

The windowed eyes gleam with terror

The twin balconies are breasts

And at the efflux of a period’s error

Is a carved malicious portico. (83)

There is also “The promise of new architecture/Of more sensitive pride”. In “Perspective Lovesong” we have the shadowy landscape of death with “I have remembered the chiaroscuro/Of your naked breasts and loins” (84). In “Young Prince of Tyre”

… Nero

And the botched tribe of imperial poets burn

Like the rafters. The new men are cool as spreading fern. (87)

“Egyptian Register” asserts that

… what we are continues

In larger patterns than the frontal stone

that taunts the living life. (86)

In this architectonics of the body is a figuration of a social body, of desire forming a bewildering yet inextricable matrix, “scrubbing my few dingy words to brightness” (“Petit Testament”). Yet this friction as a social process is predicated on the elusive figure of Ern Malley himself. Even the “clues” to Ern’s non-existence with which McAuley and Stewart loaded the poems – as in “Sybilline”,

That a poet may not exist, that his writings

Are the incomplete circle and straight drop

Of a question mark

And yet I know I shall be raised up

On the vertical banners of praise (77)

– are themselves hidden incitements to desire. The friction as a social process of the poems, therefore, becomes a performative display of a schizo-incest, the multiplicity that emerges from the fusion of so-called unitary voices: McAuley and Stewart, Ern and Ethel Malley, publishers Max Harris and John Reed, Deleuze and Guattari — and even, in the case of the allusions to Pericles, Shakespeare and any one of his possible collaborators, Rowley, Heywood, Wilkins or Day.¹⁷ But the performativity of the poems is also bound up with the media’s frictional production of the hoax itself.

“There are ribald interventions”

The story of McAuley and Stewart’s deception and its breaking in Fact, the Sydney Sun’s Sunday magazine, on 18 June 1944 has been told numerous times. The productive nature of this exposure in the popular media has received no comment. Indeed, the argument has tended to be that Ern Malley was an embarrassment that somehow nipped Australian modernist poetry in the bud. Heyward argues against this,¹⁸ suggesting that Malley’s rapid rise and fall probably did relatively little to alter the directions of Major Literature in Australia:

Ern Malley demonstrates with peculiar force the impact of a fictional event on the people who believed in it; how they thought of themselves, how they lived their lives and made their art under the influence of this fiction. It cannot be reduced to a sequence of poems: the hoax was really a piece of performance art before the form was invented.¹⁹

Yet Heyward’s own semi-populist telling of the “affair”, coupled with the vigorous marketing of his book in the media, suggest how Ern’s fortunes continue to be inextricably bound up with popular culture. Heyward understands Malley-as-performance within high culture, but not how he was (and is) also socially produced by very different frictions issuing from below.

The editor of Fact was Colin Simpson, a poet himself in earlier days.²⁰ Like other journalists of his time – most famously Kenneth Slessor – he was the product of a particular social friction between high art and the daily grind of newspaperdom. Because he had a hard-bitten sense of what was at stake, the Malley hoax presented the editor – perhaps now embarrassed by the guardedly modernist effusions of his youth – with a useful metaphor of what was wrong with modern Major Literature. He could make “bad” modernist poetry into a media “story”.

Simpson thus arranged the hoax’s revelation as a kind of whodunit based around the “death” of the author as a missing person. One of the original suspects was in fact crime writer Michael Innes, the nom-de-plume of J.I.M. Stewart, Professor of English at Adelaide University. The story even ended on a cliff-hanger:

fact knows:

• Max Harris did not write the Ern Malley poems.

• Professor (Michael Innes) Stewart did not write them.

• The actual authorship.

A statement is being prepared for fact next week, which will clear up the “mystery,” motives and merit of “Ern Malley” and his poems.²¹

Because the autumn edition of Angry Penguins contained all the textual clues it became a best seller.²²

Without the publicity that Simpson gave it, Ern Malley would have been a storm in a Major Literature teacup. Malley was so popular that Harris and Reed could afford to print a thousand copies of The Darkening Ecliptic on its own in September 1944, half of which were exported. It sold out. Heyward suggests this succès du scandale was the product of a wartime “book famine” and “a general scarcity of reading matter”,²³ but we are not convinced by this argument based on lack. Rather, Malley was the product of excess, the ekstasis of carnivalesque laughter. To understand this we need to think about the popular economies of poetry.

By the time that Fact published the “truth” surrounding The Darkening Ecliptic, mainstream Australian newspapers had largely ceased to regularly publish verse. Neverthless it is evident that popular appreciation of poetry was maintained through oral performance, as recitations in school halls, eisteddfods, and the domestic parlour. Symbolising the popularity of performed verse was a famous sketch by the vaudeville comedian Roy Rene (Mo) in which he attempted to recite Milton Hayes’s well-known ballad of Empire, “The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God”, while being heckled by an offsider planted in the audience who would query the factual details of the poem. According to Alexander Macdonald, one of his scriptwriters, at the first interruption Mo would turn “a piteous, appealing eye on the spectators” and say: “Oh this is lovely! This is beautiful! A gentleman and a scholar can’t get up to resuscitate an immoral piece of poultry without being got at!”²⁴

“Ern Malley, the great poet, or the greatest hoax?” read the headline in Fact, making the question of Ern’s greatness or otherwise an immediate issue, and one that the newspaper reader is asked to judge. After summarising the alleged facts concerning Ern and Ethel, Simpson gave a few extracts from “Sybilline” and “Petit Testament”, including “There is a moment when the pelvis/Explodes like a grenade”, and the final line (misprinted by Max Harris): “I have split the infinite. Beyond is anything”. These extracts are offered to be read as nonsense, debunking the rhetoric of high modernism. Simpson is like Mo’s heckler, deflating the “serious” performance of the text through social friction. Malley, Fact and its readership then become comparable to Mo, his heckler and the theatre audience.

Like Mo’s heckler, Fact wanted to establish truths about the text. Max Harris was asked if he himself had written the poems, as some suspected:

Asked what would be his reaction if it could be proven that the writings of “Ern Malley” were nothing but obscurantist nonsense intended to test his critical judgement, Max Harris replied: “I hope not — otherwise I’ve been fooling myself for a long time.”²⁵

This is precisely what Simpson sought to show. It is as though, in the absence of an author, Harris was being set up as the public “reciter” of Malley. As their publisher Harris was also, in legal terms, the “broadcaster” or public performer of the Malley poems (this is why he and not McAuley and Stewart was later tried for obscenity). Fact translated this into the “resuscitation” of a non-existent author through the body of his publisher. Harris had instantly and ecstatically embraced Malley when the manuscript of The Darkening Ecliptic first arrived on his desk, but now, thanks to Fact , Malley aggressively embraced Harris. No longer would their two identities ever be wholly separate, as witnessed by Harris’s later editorship of Ern Malley’s Journal. Harris “owned” Malley and Malley owned him.

Mo’s sketch also existed in another version, based more closely on an original routine from English music hall. In this two pukka sahibs interrupt the recitation:

Mo “There’s a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of mad Carewe [sic]...”

Man 1 Tends the grave of who?

Mo Mad Carewe. He was an officer in the 33rd Drag-offs, I mean Dragoons.

Man 1 Stuff and nonsense! Carstairs and I were with the dear old 33rd, and there was no officer named Carewe. Was there, Carstairs?

Man 2 Definitely not, old boy. There was a Carruthers and a Carpenter and a Chumley and a Crespigny, but no Carewe.

Mo I can think of another C.

Man 1 What C?

Mo Suck it and see. (Kills himself) That’s one up against your duck-house.²⁶

In the original English version one of the military figures received the best laughs, but in Mo’s post-colonial adaptation the roughneck reciter finally wins out when the hecklers leave. The poem never needs to be finished because as an imperial text it is so well known. The sketch in fact serves to comically deterritorialise it.

Mo’s recitation needed interruptions for its effect, just as McAuley and Stewart needed to interrupt each other when composing Ern Malley’s œuvre, deterritorialising individual trains of thought. The productive friction of these processes might be seen as examples of the kind of force which Stephen Greenblatt has vaguely named “social energy”.²⁷ Harris became, de facto, a popular reciter of The Darkening Ecliptic and, like Mo, he was subject to what are arguably comic interruptions — in this case by the press and the South Australian legal system. Also like Mo, Harris effectively won out against them by having the last laugh.

That Harris acknowledged the carnivalisation of Malley is suggested by the publication by Reed and Harris in 1945 – the year after the hoax – of Playing with Girls, the collected poetical works of Julian Prang, “edited” by the actor Redmond Phillips. Prang was a modernist child prodigy who “at the age of 9 years… died of a slight chill following his total immersion in the Quillinandabun horse-fountain by the enraged citizens”.²⁸ (Like Malley, Prang made his appearance through disappearing.) His “night scene” is a comic echo of Malley’s two versions of “Night Piece”:

out there where the laurel hedge stood

there is a black wall

hiding in its whispering buttresses

a blind panther

and a mad monk crouching

and a terror that will take shape

the moment you turn around

the fingered form you see

edging around the corner of the tool shed

is dracula

frankenstein the witch of endor and

a couple of were wolves [sic]

are talking in whispers at the front gate...

this is what i say to

morris carmody

morris is a little thin nervous boy

he has been playing with me tonight

as mother and father are at the pictures

and he has to go home

by himself²⁹

That same year Reed and Harris also published Mo’s Memoirs, ghost-written by Harris and Elisabeth Lambert. The old master of slapstick knew very well the potential of those moments “when the pelvis/Explodes like a grenade”, but Malley’s vaudeville was always most explicit in “Palinode”:

There are ribald interventions

Like spurious seals upon

A Chinese landscape-roll

Or tangents to the rainbow.

We have known these declensions,

Have winked when Hyperion

Was transmuted to a troll.

We dubbed it a sideshow.

Now we find, too late

That these distractions were clues

To a transposed version

Of our too rigid state. (81)

Feminine Empowerment and Passive Mimesis

The Darkening Ecliptic begins with an eclipse of sorts. The poet writes

I had often, cowled in the slumberous heavy air,

Closed my inanimate lids to find it real (73),

thus invoking a triple eclipse — the eyes are closed revealing a vision of Dürer’s Innsbruck which has already pre-existed the poet’s own vision, reducing him to “an interloper, robber of dead men’s dream”. It is also a motif of the poet’s impending death, a reading carefully prepared by Ethel Malley’s letters to Max Harris. And lastly it is the general eclipse of meaning, as in the new Apocalypticism which was one of the intended satiric targets of McAuley and Stewart.

There is another dimension to the “darkening ecliptic”, and that is as an eclipse in progress, a progressive diminishing of the sun’s power and an increase in the influence of the moon. The moon in western iconography embodies the feminine (Diana, Cynthia, Hecate, Astarte), serves as an inspiration for lunacy and, for works like Tristram Shandy, serves as a subversive muse:

The rest I dedicate to the Moon, who, by the bye, of all the Patrons or Matrons I can think of, has most power to set my book a-going, and make the world run mad after it.³⁰

The “umbel of the dark”, the moon’s penumbra, indicates the increasing influence of the feminine and in terms of schizo-incest, with its homoerotic overtones, the “darkening ecliptic” signals a misogynistic empowerment of the feminine. (The revelation of the hoax in a newspaper called the Sun, whose logo was Apollo in his chariot riding a sunburst, takes on new implications!)

“Baroque Exterior” opens with the lines

When the hysterical vision strikes

The facade of an era it manifests

Its insidious relations. (83)

As is common with many satirical strategies, an hysterical femininity is empowered over the masculine: the moon is invoked for inspiration over and above the muses and the male is consistently humiliated by the female. While these strategies are ambivalent at best, at once empowering the feminine while also consigning it to a dangerous, subversive role, embodying weakness and irrationality, in the Ern Malley poems the misogynistic empowerment of the feminine signals a more complex relation to the thinking of the body and art in general.

Here the female body is invariably sinister, both in terms of something to be feared and desired, and in terms of its “leftness” (with obvious political meaning). In “Perspective Lovesong”:

Princess, you lived in Princess St.,

Where the urchins pick their nose in the sun

With the left hand. (84)

“Culture as Exhibit” plays upon the association of the feminine with evil, heterosexual desire with frustration or, at best disaster:

Knowst not, my Lucia, that he

Who has caparisoned a nun dies

With his twankydillo at the ready? (85)

Even in “Boult to Marina” the poet complains that

Part of me remains, wench, Boult-upright

The rest of me drops off into the night.

What would you have me do? Go to the wars?

There’s damned deceit

In these wounds, thrusts, shell-holes, of the cause

And I’m no cheat.

So blowing this lily as trumpet with my lips

I assert my original glory in the dark eclipse. (76)

The eclipse is therefore a madly ambivalent zone of homosexual effusion, as outlined above, and of misogynistic repulsion. These two, together with the ever-present schizo-incest, form a complex in which it is not possible to think of mimesis solely in terms of representation or truth, but rather as a function of minor literature, investing itself with multiple, productive desires.

In a sense this is precisely what McAuley and Stewart were trying to do. Donald Horne, in an article entitled “Angry Penguins: A Trifle Incoherent” from Honi Soit of 1942, tried to address the problems that Max Harris and his cohorts posed to the less radically minded literary types of the day:

All this facade of brave new words is just an elaborate phantastic [sic] defence mechanism, a neurotic system built up to conceal the fact that these men have as yet not come to grips with the problem of saying something, of revealing something of the nature of things.³¹

A mimesis that does not say (imitate) or reveal would, from the young Donald Horne’s point of view, not appear to be worth thinking about. Relating such a question to the Ern Malley poems makes sense not only from a consideration of the “Friction as a Social Process” of the poems, but also with regard to a letter from Harold Stewart to R.T. Dunlop circa 1942 in which he articulated a vaguely imagistic theory of poetry: “If poetry is the real thing, it feels like minor explosions of surprise inside your head.” These “atoms of astonishment”, as he describes them later in the letter, have little to do with either imitation or unveiling. Rather, they “are”,³² in the sense that Max Harris asserted that the poetry in Angry Penguins had “no rival to it. It is.”³³ Moreover, “atoms of astonishment” could serve as a description as to how The Darkening Ecliptic is generally to be read. In terms of the “isness” of Malley’s poetry, there is a certain mad surreality that may be said to characterise its presence. And yet there is no subject in terms of a poet who actively writes. Instead it is a case of the strangely possessed or inspired, for possession implies a subject absent from itself, particularly in the case of the ever-absent Ern Malley. In terms of mimesis then, as a resemblance or as an unveiling, an active subject is presumed; in the case of The Darkening Ecliptic, with an absent (multiple) subject we have what Lacoue-Labarthe terms passive mimesis.³⁴

In his essay “Diderot: Paradox and Mimesis” Lacoue-Labarthe concerns himself with a paradox spelt out by Diderot of the actor who acts with maximum artifice, a form, in the Aristotelian sense, of mimesis as a relation between art and nature. This is paradoxically contrasted with the actor who uses no artifice, who is “natural”, and yet is still engaged in the movement of mimesis, imitating only “in passion and passivity, in the state of being possessed or being inhabited. Consequently, only when they are subject”.³⁵ Here Lacoue-Labarthe distinguishes between mimesis and possession. By definition, mimesis is active, either an imitation or a revelation, an unveiling. Possession on the other hand, presupposes the malleable matter in which the imprint is stamped. In other words possession “presupposes a subject; it is the monstrous, dangerous form of a passive mimesis, uncontrolled and unmanageable”.

To this extent, the performative aspect of friction as a social process and the misogynistic empowerment of the feminine in The Darkening Ecliptic take on the form of an “aberrant spectacle of an alteration without force or energy… the spectacle of a role taken on passively”. After all, did Ern ever have a say in the writing of his poems? In fact, the epistemological confusion over the questions of authorial integrity, schizo-incest and multiplicity constitute, to quote Lacoue-Labarthe once more, “in the worst of cases, under the effect of a contagion, a sort of ‘epidemic disease,’… in which the social bond comes undone… the aberrant spectacle of madness”.³⁶ Perhaps we at last have an answer as to why, apart from the controversy which has raged over the publication of the poems, a reading of The Darkening Ecliptic has not been possible hitherto which does not have recourse to mere assessments of good poetry/bad poetry, modernism versus conservative reaction, and authentic art versus hoax.

There is also a further complexity to the role of representation in the Malley poems. David Lewis pointed out the similarity between Ern’s name and that of the Meinongian philosopher, Ernst Mally.³⁷ Lewis argues plausibly that McAuley could well have been acquainted with Mally through Bertrand Russell’s well-known article “On Denoting”. At the risk of over-simplifying, Meinong and Mally were philosophers of non-existent objects. Calling their fictive author Ern Malley can be interpreted as a statement by McAuley and Stewart, despite themselves, of the non-representational representational nature of their fiction as “friction as a social process”.

“Friction as a Social Process”, Ern’s “little pamphlet on my thighs”, indeed seems to encapsulate the problem of the poems themselves. In them, the body is irredeemably social and at odds with the thinking of mimesis that permits what we may call Major Literature. Instead we find, to quote Deleuze and Guattari one last time:

Production of intensive quantities in the social body, proliferation and precipitation of series, polyvalent and collective connections brought about by the bachelor agent — there is no other definition possible for a minor literature.³⁸

The performativity of the poetry as desire, in terms of passive mimesis, is inextricably linked with the performance of the mass media. The Ern Malley phenomenon reached its completion in the multiplicity of desire not only structurated throughout the poems, but in the multiplicity of another, mass-produced desire which assembled itself around the affair in the mass media of the time. While some academics find the poems interesting, even influential in parts, and others such as Les Murray find they have no particular merit, they remain “The introverted obelisk of night” that will continue to be an example of a minor literature, resistant to the syncretising, canonising practises of reading in Australian literature.

Notes

1 Cited in Michael Heyward, The Ern Malley Affair (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1993), p. 137.

2 John Tranter and Philip Mead, introduction, The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (Ringwood: Penguin, 1991), p. xxviii.

3 Gilles Gilles and Félix Guattari Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986), p. 23.

4 Ern Malley (pseud. James McAuley and Harold Stewart), The Poems of Ern Malley: Comprising the Complete Poems and Commentaries by Max Harris and Joanna Murray-Smith (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988), p. 70. All further references to this volume are given after quotations in the text.

5 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987), p. 27.

6 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 15.

7 See also Dana Polan’s comments in the “Translator’s Introduction”: “Deleuze and Guattari’s throwaway references to Kafka’s schizo-incest with the sister may well promote the male writer’s rejection of an Oedipal triangulation for the sake of a certain polymorphous perversity” (p. xxvi).

8 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 68.

9 Wayne Koestenbaum, Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 8.

10 Sasha Soldatow, “Where are the Phrases of Yesteryear?”, The UTS Review vol. 2/1 (1996), p. 198.

11 Cassandra Pybus, The Devil and James McAuley (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1999), p. 11.

12 Heyward, p. 103.

13 Cited in Heyward, p. 62.

14 Allon White, Carnival, Hysteria, and Writing: Collected Essays and Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 140.

15 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, (Berkeley: University of California, 1988), p. 84-85.

16 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1994) p. 38.

17 See, for example, F.D. Hoeniger’s introduction to his Arden edition of Pericles (London: Methuen, 1964), pp. xiii-xci.

18 Heyward, pp. 229-230.

19 Heyward, p. 235.

20 Simpson contributed the section “Infidelities” to the volume Trio (Sydney: Sunnybrook, 1931), which also included Kenneth Slessor’s “Five Visions of Captain Cook”.

21 [Colin Simpson], “Ern Malley, the Great Poet or the Greatest Hoax?” Fact (supplement to the Sunday Sun) 18 June 1944, p. 4.

22 Heyward, p. 132.

23 Heyward, pp. 132-133.

24 Alexander Macdonald, The Ukelele Player Under the Red Lamp (Cremorne: Angus & Robertson, 1972), p. 224.

25 [Simpson], p. 4.

26 In Fred Parsons, A Man Called Mo (Heinemann: Melbourne, 1973), pp. 84-85.

27 See Greenblatt, pp. 1-20.

28 Julian Prang (pseud. Redmond Phillips), Playing with Girls (Melbourne: Reed & Harris, 1945), p. 9.

29 Prang, p. 24.

30 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983; first published 1767), p. 15.

31 Donald Horne, “Angry Penguins: A Trifle Incoherent”, Honi Soit 2 Oct. 1941, p. 2.

32 Harold Stewart, letter to R.T. Dunlop, n.d. 1942 (manuscript in R.T. Dunlop’s possession).

33 Max Harris, “The Second ‘Angry Penguins’”, Angry Penguins 2 (1941), p. 7.

34 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, trans. Jane Popp et al, ed. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1989), p. 264.

35 Lacoue-Labarthe, p. 263.

36 Lacoue-Labarthe, p. 264.

37 David Lewis, “Ern Malley’s Namesake”, Quadrant vol. 39/3 (1995), pp. 14-15.

38 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 71.