/lit/ - Literature

We certainly do have a high culture in this country, but it all revolves around the rather esoteric fact that our nation is fundamentally an awkward and unsuccessful attempt at transplanting European forms into a land that simply doesn't suit them and rejects them like a bad transplant. Currently I'm doing research into Hardy Wilson and his own attempts at grappling with this problem, which eventually led him to reject Europe entirely and embrace Chinese culture wholesale as the only thing that could provide the aesthetic production needed to structure consciousness in a workable way. By the end of his career, he was experimenting with the use of Chinese grammar rules, which came to fruition in his last work, 'Kurrajong Sit-Look-See', published in 1954:
>Centre of world now lies in Pacific.
>One side is China representing Asia; other is America representing Europe. Between lies Australia representing East and West.
>This meeting is joining of creative arts which are basis of civilization.
>Italian observation became photographic about 1500 A.D. Grecian observation ended 3rd century B.C. when their outlook became photographic.
>All Australian Artists are insular. Insularity cannot be overcome by desire to become creative-minded. Instinct requires generations to breed effective union. East and West cannot join in creative arts without overcoming barrier of Asian simplicity. Children born of East and West will be without esthetic barriers in succeeding generations.
This work is a very bizarre, basically incoherent analysis of contemporary (1950s) politics in terms of his highly idiosyncratic vitalism that sees history as a kind of aesthetic dialectic in which consciousness and historical events generate culture, which in turn facilitates further growth.