AustLit

'‘My mind doesn’t work in those regions,’ Wallace Robson, my tutor at university, is reported to have said when asked about aesthetics. My own response was much the same when I was asked to contribute to a symposium on ‘Realism’. ‘Realism’ has never been something I have understood as an aesthetic or stylistic issue. It is more a moral issue. It represents a shorthand term for telling the truth in writing, which for me is what writing is about. Understanding, not mystification; discovery, not obfuscation. In part this has its aesthetic implications, a matter of seeing the object as it really is, describing characters as they really are. As they really are? Yes. For me the most interesting novels and stories are those that are based on real people rather than on fictional constructs. They are the ones I return to. When you read the work of Jack Kerouac or Christopher Isherwood or Katherine Mansfield or Anthony Powell or Christina Stead or Evelyn Waugh you are encountering characters drawn from the life, from observed experience. Of course some writers adapt the life models more than others. The strength of Christina Stead’s writing was the closeness of her observation: her characters were closely based on originals, and the wisdom and value of her work comes from the wisdom of her observations about people. Other writers will combine aspects of more than one person into a fictional figure. I have done this myself. The advantage is that you can always say that this character is a composite, not a libellous portrait. The disadvantage is that you can end up with someone like a police identikit portrait, someone who is a combination of known features yet unlike any known living being.' (Introduction)