Perilous Adventures
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Pandora

 
 

David Foster and the Forests

by Susan Lever
 

Ancient Trees by William Robinson

Image: William Robinson. Ancient Trees

 

David Foster won the Miles Franklin prize for his 1996 novel, The Glade within the Grove, the culmination of a series of inventive, original books—including Mates of Mars (a satire on the loss of Australian warrior skills), and Moonlite (a satirical history of colonialism). The Glade is an extraordinary novel, full of wisdom and absurdity, lyrical writing about the Australian forests and rough comedy about Australian people. When he was writing the novel Foster told Erica Travers that he was looking for a religion to encompass a philosophy—a philosophy that might save the planet from the inevitable damage of human civilization: ‘The new ethics that will have to come about will be so revolutionary they may discount the value of human life. Perhaps the life of a tree might come to mean more than the life of a man.’  Like Simon Schama in his study of the place of trees and water in Western culture, Landscape and Memory (published about the same time) Foster saw Western civilization as the enemy of the forests. Indeed, he thought that the eucalyptus tree was the recalcitrant enemy of civilization, hence the ambivalent relationship of Australians to the native tree. Foster found a religion for this necessary philosophy in the ancient Phrygian devotion to the goddess Cybele, and the figure of Attis who was turned into a tree after self-castration. This religion was clearly a form of nature worship that recognized the destructive relationship of humans to the natural world. Its devotees performed annual Spring rituals of frenzied dancing and self-castration. Of course, Schama notes that the Christian devotion to the cross (even the Christmas tree) represents a similar acknowledgement that Christian civilization has destroyed trees.

The Glade is not a conventional novel in the sense of offering interesting characters and a clear narrative development. It is closer to the literary anatomy than a novel in that it is a long satire, a mix of opinionated rants, poetry, crude humour and learned philosophy. It fits Northrop Frye’s definition of the anatomy as an encyclopedic fictional form, with a digressing narrative, catalogues and lists, stylized characters, constant ridicule of philosophy, and so on. It belongs to the tradition of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and even Joseph Furphy’s Australian novel, Such is Life. To readers unfamiliar with the form it may appear chaotic.

Yet the mix of things seems appropriate to the novel’s philosophical position. Its unreliable narrator the retired postman, D’Arcy Doliveres, tells us about events he can’t possibly know about, gives his opinions on a range of contemporary failings, and translates classical texts into vernacular Australian. The other characters in the novel consist of a group of young Australians who set up a commune in a wild valley on the border of NSW and Victoria (based on the Errinundra Forest and the Morton State Forest near Foster’s home at Bundanoon) in 1968, and the MacAnaspie family who live on the ridge above the valley. The communards are sketchy figures—at least one doesn’t speak at all—but the MacAnaspies get lots of witty exchanges and exuberant description. At the heart of the novel, hidden in footnotes and throwaway lines, is the story of the communards discovering a grove of ancient trees and cutting them down to make a dome; as a result, the goddess of the trees has visited the valley seeking revenge and causing several of the men to castrate themselves. Attis MacAnaspie may have become a tree (‘the life of a tree might come to mean more than the life of a man’).

But the joy of the novel comes from its wonderful descriptions of the southeastern forests of Australia, with great catalogues of the multitude of tree species; or from its witty exchanges between the MacAnaspies; or from its virtuoso set-pieces such as the description of the contents of Horrie MacAnaspie’s shed, or Darryl MacAnaspie’s daredevil bike ride down the side of a mountain. While the novel has an overall atmosphere of lament for the loss of the trees—and its narrator dies before finishing his story—it counters this with the sheer excess of its humour, ideas and descriptions.

Like some other anatomies described by Frye, Foster’s novel includes a poem, The Ballad of Erinungerah, published separately to the novel. This is the work of one of the communard children, Timothy Papadimitriou (‘Orion’) and it gives another account of the Passion in the valley. The Ballad is explicitly anti-Christian, in that it seeks a pre-Christian, pagan relationship with the Australian forests, and Foster's whole enterprise in these books begins in the failure of Christian religion to speak to Australian experience.

The poem is a narrative—as Orion recalls the coming of the goddess to the valley of Erinungerah and the way in which she convinces Attis to leave his wife and emasculate himself, so that he eventually becomes a tree. It is a myth, both bloody and beautiful, but a myth firmly set down in an Australia we know. Foster leaps the gap which many Australian poets have tried to bridge—between the experience of the Australian land and the heritage of European myth.

The cult of emasculation represents an ancient, pre-Christian turning away from male destructiveness and lust—and the human fertility that has spread human populations and pollution throughout the world. It looks shockingly pagan to our civilized eyes yet it’s hard to deny the fundamental recognition that human fertility is destructive.  Foster is hardly offering us a social solution here—he can’t really expect readers to adopt a cult of emasculation as a means of saving the forests. But the myth of Attis allows him to explore the contradictions of human civilization—our longing for the natural world in all its purity, while our very success as a species means that we consume and destroy that world. Typically, he makes male fertility central, and the spiritual quest of the novel and poem is for male enlightenment through the abandonment of their sexuality. At one point in the novel, D’Arcy notes:

‘Make Love, not War,’ says Grainger’s guitar sticker, but you can’t make love and not make war. Wise up Grainger.
No one can be hip who is sexually alive! O Feminist, O Christian, O Buddhist, hear this truth. Stop torturing us. (343)

Foster’s point is that human fertility leads to war: a man with a wife and children ‘must fight for his rights, must maintain his lust, must defend his turf, must protect his child, his child’s child’. This is the kind of paradox that drives Foster’s satire. It may seem eccentric at best, or, at worst, horrifying to those who believe we can live in harmony with nature and each other. In his last novel, The Land Where Stories End, Foster tells a version of the quest for male purity as a fairy story in which a woodcutter sets out to find the secret land. His livelihood depends on cutting down trees and rearing domestic animals for eating, and he has fathered many children so he can never aspire to sainthood. Nevertheless, he meets a saint and manages partial enlightenment.

The philosophy and the religion that Foster presents to us might prove unpalatable. But Foster’s writing also offers a kind of worship of nature. Both the novel and the poem celebrate the beauty and variety of the Australian bushland, as if words can somehow conjure up the forests. While the novel and poem insist on a pessimistic outcome for human relationships to the natural world, its comic inventiveness and exuberant descriptions of the natural world counter that pessimism with a kind of hope. Perhaps we love all the more what we know we will destroy.  

Works Cited
Foster, David. The Glade Within the Grove. Sydney: Random House, 1996.
Foster, David. The Ballad of Erinungerah. Sydney, Random House, 1997.
Foster, David. The Land Where Stories End. Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 2001.
Northrop Frye. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1957.
Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. London: HarperCollins, 1995
Travers, Erica. ‘On the Philosophical: Interview with David Foster’. Westerly 37.1 (1992): 71-78.

About the Author

Susan Lever is the author of a study of the novels of David Foster, David Foster: the Satirist of Australia (available from Cambria Press) and, with Anne Pender, the editor of a collection of essays on the life and work of the playwright Nick Enright, Nick Enright: An Actor's Playwright (Rodopi, 2008). She is an Honorary Associate in English at the University of Sydney.

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