John Forbes and the Lure of the Heroic Journey

This year is the twentieth anniversary of the death of the Australian poet John Forbes. Perhaps, then, it’s opportune to revisit his legacy. This was done, to some extent, in 2002 with the publication of Ken Bolton’s homage to john forbes, which includes an essay by Ivor Indyk titled “The awkward grace of John Forbes”. Intrigued by Indyk’s titular oxymoron, I read it with a bit of head-nodding in places, but ultimately with a sense of discomfort at the way Indyk was steering the essay towards what now appears to me to be an invalid conclusion, namely that awkwardness, as he perceives it, is a dominant stylistic feature of Forbes’s poetry.

Indyk begins with a rather thin interpretation of the Forbes poem “To the Bobbydazzlers”, which has the Forbes persona in pain because of the vernacular—“I see stars / instead knocked / out by your poems”—ignoring the clear delight, and relief, the discovery of a new aesthetic path affords the young poet. It’s what Forbes called a stick poem; thin itself. It could, I thought, considering the way his collected poems create a gestalt—the parts being the poems, and the whole gaining some underlying narrative force—be read from a Jungian perspective. Where, perhaps, a Perseus figure finally equipped for his voyage steps into a quest that is essentially twofold: the establishment of an authentic modern Australian voice, and the concomitant glory that would attend such an achievement.

 

To the Bobbydazzlers

 

American poets!

You have saved

America from

its reputation

if not its fate

& saved me

too, in 1970

when I first

breathed freely

in Ted Berrigan’s

Sonnets, escaping

the talented earache of Modern

Poetry.

Sitting

on the beach I

look towards you

but the curve

of the pacific

gets in the way

& I see stars

instead knocked

out by your poems

American poets,

the Great Dead

are smiling

in your faces.

I salute their

luminous hum!

 

The cartoonish elements, à la Wile E. Coyote, in “To the Bobbydazzlers” demonstrate a preference in Forbes to reference popular culture as valid poetic material. He was, after all, part of the first generation to be immersed in televisual culture. For some, this immensely powerful medium represented cultural impoverishment, but for others it became an opportunity to critique; albeit from a position of spectatorship. Animated cartoons invest heavily in alternative realities, chaos and the absurd. And let’s not forget slapstick.

Indyk goes on to establish his contention that Forbes’s poetry is largely characterised by what he calls “pratfall and recovery”. Ignoring the less literal connotations of “knocked out”, and the manifold, “I see stars”, he claims here that awkwardness and grace are the defining qualities of Forbes’s work on the whole.

While the idea that grace imbues the works of Forbes is itself questionable, one can’t help but agree that the comic intentions of Forbes are strong, and generally successful in a self-deprecating manner. Yet while there may be slapstick elements in “To the Bobbydazzlers”, awkwardness is not a feature I readily recognise. Much the same way a description of Charlie Chaplin as an awkward man would be wildly deficient. For instance, while the “curve of the pacific” Indyk refers to in the poem may initially seem like an obstacle, it is, in fact, carefully not denoted as “horizon”, as claimed by Indyk, with its implication of limitation. Forbes has, in fact, constructed the metaphor to expand, whereupon now the night sky seems to be the limit: inviting a neat, yet modest metaphysical gesture to bring the poem towards a somewhat militaristic closure. Rather than “a sense of election”, as Indyk writes, where “god chooses you”, this moment in the poem seems more like an enlistment to a cause.

This is not to say that Forbes didn’t see himself as the owner of a vocation; but it was a calling where he understood the difficulty of the challenge in a land that still clung to the pastoral, as customarily representing something essentially good about living in the bush. Forbes’s sense of recruitment here is quite plausibly an example of what Joseph Campbell would call the threshold position of the heroic journey. Having made the commitment, the hero must now enter a new world; in this instance, one shaped by the fresh artistic energy emanating from the USA, full of reflexivity, intertextuality and exotic stimuli.

Indyk follows with an elaboration on what awkwardness as a “style” actually is, suggesting that Forbes’s poetry comprises an “intractable medium”, one that readers shy away from because of its difficulty. An alternative view could hold that the complexity of his work was, in fact, its deepest appeal; that what allowed Forbes to “breathe freely” was the sense of direction he gained from poets like Ted Berrigan and eventually the New York school of Ashbery, O’Hara and others.

Indyk is interesting on this point if only because he employs an imperial view of art in general: that great nations produce great art because they have a powerful sense of identity. This has its political equivalent in Machiavelli, where might is right, or that, ultimately, the end justifies the means. That say, poets like James Baxter or Pablo Neruda, or even Kenneth Slessor, as satisfyingly representative as they may be, will forever be sidelined by the forces of history because they wrote in the wrong hemisphere; whereas Jung and Campbell would argue that the archetypal experience is egalitarian, drenched as it is in mortality.

If, as I suspected, Forbes saw that part of his quest was to slay simulacra wherever he found them, where narrative becomes a collateral loss because of suspicion over its Romantic associations, perhaps we could see Forbes in mythic terms: the hero, constrained to encounter danger, chaos and absurdity as a generating artistic force. Certainly not the intractable landscape Indyk was suggesting. However, the critique continues with a cursory look at “Egyptian Reggae”, where the focus is now on the image of “an airline bag full of bottles / whacked against a bus”. Following a glib announcement that such an image won’t be found in Virgil or Lucretius, Indyk seems to become defensive of the classics; protecting them from the likes of Forbes who may be, he insinuates, brain damaged; preferring, this time, to take the pratfall seriously. So to bolster the parade of homage in Bolton’s book, I thought I’d take another look at two of the poems Indyk investigates, namely “TV” and “Topothesia”.

Heidegger posits a twofold approach in accounting for the philosophical and artistic viability of poetry: namely, the prophetic and the commemorative. If there is a prophetic element to Forbes it’s possibly in the way he creates a sense of suspicion of a media that has self-interest at heart and a growing arsenal of weaponry in the promotion of consumerist values, as supported by the capitalist simulacrum. Yet, a prophetic poet could also be described as Romantic. And it’s true Forbes was keen to distance himself from that kind of indulgence.

We can see this quite clearly in “TV”, one of his better-known poems, which at its root amounts to a destruction of narrative. It begins by somewhat wearily remonstrating with us not to tell about the programs, but to examine the casing of the television itself. “The white strip of stillness” around the screen rapidly becomes a watering hole down to which beasts have come for sustenance.

 

TV

don’t bother telling me about the programs

describe what your set is like the casing the

curved screen its strip of white stillness like

beach sand at pools where animals come

down to drink and a native hunter hides his

muscles, poised with a fire sharpened spear

until the sudden whirr of an anthropologist’s

hidden camera sends gazelles leaping off in

their delicate slow motion caught on film

despite the impulsive killing of unlucky Doctor

Mathews whose body was found three months later

the film and camera intact save for a faint,

green mould on its hand-made leather casing.

 

The open-ended irony of this poem gathers so much momentum that by the end the reader is engulfed by a tsunami of narrative that has simply washed away the original intention: to focus on form and not content. The seductive nature of story telling, then, has undermined our intention, dissolved our will and put us in a state of amnesia. This distraction can then be seen as destructive, as something feeding our false consciousness. Or, for cultural theorists, it can be seen as a clear statement about the hegemony of televisual culture and its role in constructing simulacra.

With narrative so deftly excised from the arena of Forbes’s poetry, we are left with an intricate conglomeration of speculation; of association and abstraction that somewhat depicts Forbes as, perhaps, the Hanged Man of modern Australian poetry, forever distanced from the reality depicted in front of him, ensuring his spectatorship as his view inverts and irony becomes the defensive posture.

The death of the grand narrative leaves all other narrative tainted and further pressurises the need for expression while simultaneously preventing it. Hence the paradoxes of surrealism which dilute what we would traditionally call commitment. This is dazzling stuff for a heroic travail, and I would argue characterises a good deal of Forbes’s writing, in particular, the odes. It’s not till the later work of Damaged Glamour that feelings, connected to the human struggle, begin to flow tearfully, as the hero returns to the quotidian world and the journey begins to close.

While some theorists might argue that there are only seven fundamental forms of narrative, it is also clear that great poetry, more often than not, uses it to inject the human (and its supernatural projections) into the adventure. At a very basic level of narrative interest we must have, at least, the hero and some sense of tribulation. And I would argue that this is, indeed, what we get in Forbes: insofar as the persona is almost relentlessly in some symbiotic exchange within consciousness, and the figure quite often has the tonal posture of a sniper, tagging ideas and images as they fall at his feet. Sometimes I feel I could sense this as a deep narrative, running like a hum throughout the collected poems; but like atmosphere music in a David Lynch movie that you only notice when it stops.

Of course, having a fixed narrative element certainly sharpens the competitive spirit. “The Best of All Possible Poems” is certainly tongue-in-cheek, yet could also be read as an early-stage heroic posture: a sense of invincibility: an iron-clad confidence in one’s ability to complete the task ahead. The persona in this is, not unusually in Forbes, submerged (at other places in his work the Forbes persona is muffled, encapsulated, and seen exiting claustrophobic chimneys). While this poem bristles with a supreme youthful arrogance, it may also echo what Harold Bloom has categorised as the American poetic tradition of gorgeous solipsists. From Emerson onwards, he argues, most of America’s great poets have grown through such rite of passage as the Crossing of Solipsism, where the central figure wonders if he can love and live in the real world. One could speculate on a relationship between solipsism and an aesthetic that suborns narrative, reducing it to a deal that allows fundamental cause and effect only insofar as it contributes to a continuous cascade of ideas and images, all of which resist narrative collusion by heavy contact with surreal associations, with extended metaphor, reminding us of those past heroes related to Forbes by an apotheosis of the rational—the Marvells and Popes and Donnes, where a regular bonfire of vanities kept the Romantics at bay for at least a century.

In poems like “Topothesia” (as well as “A History of Nostalgia” and “Ode to Doubt”) Forbes has, with great finesse, invented a vernacular whereby each poem competitively says, “At the very least I am theoretically valid as a formalist poem, and my emotions will remain buoyant because shielded by nihilistically enhanced wit, swathes of irony and a definable heroic impulse.” Yet, “Like any poet avoiding myth and message to fake a flashy ode”, as he writes in part 6 of On the Beach, the hero will encounter seemingly beautiful objects, like the model of Australia he envisages: “a block cut from the ocean / with gradually deeper shades of blue”. An image that dissolves into nothingness as soon as a narrative framework begins to attach itself, with accretions of “milled day-glo ephemera” and instances of billabongs.

Topothesia, in literary theory, is a halt in narrative for the sake of exposition, the connotation of place indicating a stoppage of time to investigate the phenomenological self. This self becomes an object outside of any narrative time to be objectified and examined. The opening tone of “Topothesia” is measured, amid a rhetorical juggling around with “we”; inclusive as its intentions are already, “we” become aware, as we collude with the Forbes persona, of the need for this heroic, yet solipsistic figure; his obscure loneliness creating the correct arc of an heroic quest to stop time and create the place where his consciousness can be examined. The choices he throws us into at the start are more than an echo, but a further unravelling of Joyce’s “ineluctable modality of the visual”, with its implication of consciousness as a sin and punishment; this time we have an intertextual layer to ramify the potential of such guilt-ridden phenomena.

 

Topothesia

How we see things determines how we act and even

who “we” are, as the fragile temper of our acts

breaks like a bubble from the drowning mouth and into

the air, shaping these identities to begin with.

For as their escape traces like a machine the pattern of

our doubts on to the future, it’s obvious something’s

got to give and keeping the sun over our right shoulder

so the shadow of the past is always in our minds

doesn’t solve the dilemma but merely divides our needs

further from our pronouns so that our whole being

ends up with this double aspect, and hence the idea of

time—our best because most subtle, delusion about

the meaning of these incessant apologies. Far better

to remain in the tense we first thought of, for though

blame spreads evenly across the entire body like a

typing error where “inconsequential” and “trembling’

seem to blur and merge, it’s scarcely a disaster. And

if we glance back at the panorama) and you can bet

we will) which our fatigue and cigarette smoke frame

into well earned images of self esteem that border on

wonder at our avoiding the issue, the whole landscape of

tiny details fit together. So suddenly, what once

loomed seemed trivial—a high remote jigsaw puzzle we’ve

solved by standing completely still. But the vestige of

a smile this picture implies might well have been saved

until the walk from the valley floor tot his noted

beauty spot and scenic lookout had been accomplished.

For to merely blink our eyes thinking this disclaimer

has the problem staring us in the face once more

like the hint of a mirror in the alpine lake, a

riddle forever unless everything is indeed beautiful

in its own kind of way—for us in the national park

and in the distant farms and villages as well,

as an opinion poll had been left out for months

in the weather and elsewhere thousands of separate

people were breathing.

 

Borrowing the tenor of Hamlet’s great soliloquy, the Forbes persona begins formalistically by examining the concept of act/action as a concomitant of having a view, or an interpretation. Yet whereas Hamlet examined being, Forbes is examining seeing. The self represented in this poem seems entirely contingent and the emission of bubbles can be seen to represent expression, or poetic emerging from the deep. Nonetheless we are conscious of being drawn into and maintained by a machine-like process. Language locks us into a perception of time that works well in the productive world, but it seems the phenomenological world conspires against us as well.

So if no narrative will do, and perception alone is all we have, perhaps it’s here that the collective unconscious chooses to intervene, with form of its own, with prophecy for strength in the battle for meaning, using myth, powerful, clear mythical frameworks that set out the tragic condition: the hero confronted by vast, projected fields of reality, with a vow to find authenticity in abstraction: something that can be returned to the page. And so I would ask, is there not indeed a mythic quality to the Forbes collection that tells the story of what it’s like to be a world-class poet working in Australia?

In “Topothesia”, where gesture replaces narrative, we can feel the hero being stripped down as we sense an increase in pressure with the announcement, “it’s obvious something’s got to give”. We can’t agree that it is indeed obvious. But we should acknowledge that this is the poem’s rub, so to speak, as the hero plunges onward from the existential angst of a Hamlet drowning in choice, to a modern even more anxious version: Kafka’s In the Penal Colony, with its assertion that not only will language paralyse your will, but it will torture you to death. And when he invents a modern Australian vernacular to speak easily on such matters and restates the opaquely obvious “something’s got to give”, we wonder if it’s not, indeed, the body itself in question impaled on the ineluctable logic of a grammar that treats “now” like something fleeting, as language, reified, bursts into the flesh of its victim. The larrikin in Forbes ups the ante on Kafka and offers a slice of black humour, which foreshadows a genetic ending to the whole affair. For not having committed the necessary verbicide, our punishment is that “yesterday” is still with us, casting its pale shadow of doubt, ensuring that “resolution is sicklied o’er”. And how does our hero respond? We meet a self ready to cut his losses. Zen-like, now he gains in revelatory power. Having surrendered to the past, the present offers its explanations and suddenly the Forbes figure is shot into an Empyrean of meaning; a diorama of understanding.

If, as Heidegger has suggested, one function of the poet is to commemorate, then personas like Forbes have the particular difficulty of commemorating a simulacrum. Where predicaments can be experienced as “a high remote jigsaw puzzle we’ve / solved by standing completely still”. Where life, like a great Newtonian puzzle, clicks into place. But now at least we can get a rational grip on what the “dilemma”, the “issue”, the “problem” (if not the rub) is specifically leading to. For now the mock Romantic hero ascends the great plinth as it thrusts out into the sublimity of nature, at “this noted beauty spot” the figure reinforces his solipsism, like John Donne facing off against the sun:

Thy beams, so reverend and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink.

The tenor here suggests that, unlike the Romantics, the Metaphysicals understood that nature is not pantheistic, but more like a competitor. Yet all is not lost, for following on from this momentous blink is the hint of a mirror suggesting that for the embattled self, self itself is the problem. And here is what may be an attempt by Forbes to commemorate, in the Heideggerian manner, a continuous sense of self that is essentially heroic in dealing with time that continually attempts to divide our consciousness.

The penultimate lines of “Topothesia” modulate into what appears to be a comment on a lucky country sadly contaminated by endemic complacency. However, even this narrative is quickly extinguished with the obscure poignancy of “elsewhere thousands of separate people were breathing”. Could this be cold comfort for the solipsist? Some consolation for the isolated self, knowing that there are many more of you out there?

So what might well be described as a battle against nihilism, facing particular foes and conditions—entrapped in a phenomenological world, with its arcane machinery for deluding the senses, bound in Moebius strips, themselves anchored in paradox, generated by the machinery of language—is in fact the heroic quest: to fulfil the vow of vocation, no matter how ridiculous things get. Forbes then, can be read from a Jungian perspective; as a serialisation of encounters with the poetic, as time and again the archetypal tales of self are evoked and perhaps at other times invoked, as a sponsor of poetic taste: certainly not clumsy, intractable or awkward, but stimulating, intelligent and heroic.