Nicolas Rothwell: On fragments and dust

As a journalist, Nicolas Rothwell has travelled to the Americas, Western and Eastern Europe, all parts of Australia (central and northern especially), and the Middle East. In 2005 he was The Australian's correspondent in Iraq. He passed through the ruined landscapes of a country at war and visited the ruins of past civilisations, such as the capital of Queen Zenobia and the basilica of a fanatical Christian from the 5th century. When he came back home to Darwin, he travelled again to the desert, to the Kimberley and Pilbara, which is a landscape he's been travelling through for many years as a journalist and a writer. He has written about these desert journeys in novels and in essays, the latest of which is called 'On Fragments and Dust'. It's in the  Monthly magazine. Nicolas Rothwell joins us from Darwin.

Nicolas Rothwell: Good morning, Ramona.

Ramona Koval: Even though you were reporting on the Iraq war for The Australian newspaper in 2005, in this essay you write about the ancient civilisations of the region and the ruins you came across. Tell me how you came across them. In what context were you travelling?

Nicolas Rothwell: I spent a lot of time in the Middle East travelling by road because it was probably safer, on balance, and so profligate is the detritus of the past in that part of the world that it's really genuinely hard to drive down a highway for ten kilometres and not go by some former citadel or church or temple. While I was immersing myself in the politics and warfare of my daily tasks, I found it helped to preserve my sanity a little if I could duck away from that for a moment and see this set of ruined splendours which were, on the whole, lying unvisited and un-signposted and just spread out before one's eyes.

Ramona Koval: What are the ruins of Queens Zenobia's capital like, and who was she?

Nicolas Rothwell: Zenobia was quite a pacy woman and she's famously known as the rebel queen. She was the queen of a vassal city of late Roman Empire called Palmyra which is very well known for its beautiful funerary sculpture and its dramatic temples which seem to be a high point, a kind of fusion of the classical style and oriental influences. The Palmyrian alphabet, for example, is also very beautiful. The city is extremely well preserved. It lies in an oasis in central Syria called Tadmor. Zenobia in fact staged an uprising against Rome which, like most of those uprisings against the Roman Empire, did not go well.

But she left behind her an extraordinary record of beautiful sculpture, because it was the Palmyrians' habit to lavish special attention on their dead. They seemed to have loved their departed very strongly. So underneath the desert surface there's a honeycomb separate city of the dead with extremely personalised sculptures showing the deceased and all of their belongings carved in very soft, beautiful white stone. And they generally have little vases or perfume holders which they hold next to their eyes to catch the tears which flow from them so constantly.

Ramona Koval: It's a beautiful image. You also went to the ruins of the basilica of St Simeon the Stylite. Tell me about him.

Nicolas Rothwell: St Simeon is well known to Christian history because of his unusual feat of endurance; he remained on a pillar for 38 years, I believe, in a state of holy meditation, and this inspiration was much followed. There were many other Stylites who sprang up in his wake, and indeed the whole tradition of desert hermit existence was well advanced in the early Christian era. And after he'd died, a very beautiful and spectacular church was raised around his pillar, not far away from the modern city of Aleppo, and it has a very beautiful prospect to this day.

Ramona Koval: And what's the inscription on the column he lived on?

Nicolas Rothwell: The inscription I refer to in the essay that you're talking about is a Greek inscription which puts in very blunt Greek terms the famous judgement of the Jewish god in Genesis upon Adam. He says, 'For dust though art and unto dust thou shalt return.' But in fact in the Greek it's much more profound and violent. He says, 'For you are earth,' not even dust, but just 'earth', and the violence of that sentiment made an impact on me as I was travelling around and feeling rather close to a state of disintegration and dust in those difficult days.

Ramona Koval: So these ruins, this dust, can you talk a bit about your ideas...the ideas that they generated in you around the loss of a divine narrative that once shaped people's lives?

Nicolas Rothwell: There are a few ideas chasing each other around in connection for me at the moment, and one of them is indeed the notion of the loss of God or of wholehearted, sincere, profound belief among the Western intelligentsia in the divinely ordered world which, I think everyone would agree, is a belief which if it lingers on, lingers on with difficulty now. We could almost probably pinpoint the time of its slackening to somewhere in the late 19th or early 20th century. And I'd be very tempted to tie those dates in to the terrible geopolitical events of the time.

Equally I see a kind of fragmentation in the way that we make art and our sense of art as being something beautiful and canonical and ordered, and I see across the arts—in music, in painting, in fiction and in poetry—a pulverisation, a new quest for order from what is broken and fragmented. Those kinds of ideas were very much in my thoughts when I was travelling around beautiful ruins of lost civilisations. And then when I came back to Australia and tried to reorient myself in the deserts and in the northern country which, as you know very well, is itself the home territory of a civilisation which is not as intact as it once was.

Ramona Koval: On your way home from Iraq you pass through Istanbul where you found a copy of a book that you read as a student, Mimesis by Erik Auerbach. Tell me about this book and what it meant to you as a student.

Nicolas Rothwell: Auerbach's book is very well known and very much regarded and loved. It's always been esteemed. It's one of those books which has, from its first appearance, seemed definitive. It was both comprehensible by laymen like myself and at the same time profound. It had an unusual history, it was written by a majestic scholar of language and literature who was German, Jewish, exiled, writing in Turkey in WWII, on the periphery of disaster and contemplating what he could see was the destruction of the glorious long tradition of European writing and civilisation. There's another book which he wrote on Dante in which he literally says that he is writing at the end of European civilisation, a terrifying thought. When I first read Auerbach's book as a young man, I can't say it really registered with me. I remember thinking it was rather difficult and the splendour of his prose went by me completely.

But by some strange chance I coincided in my passage through Istanbul on my journey away from Iran, as it happened, with a little foreign-language bookshop very close to where he was writing in his exile. It happened to have a 50th anniversary edition of Mimesis on its shelves, rather a beautiful edition with a picture by Max Beckmann of a king departing into exile on the cover, if I remember. On reading it I found that all of my own long laborious peregrinations through the meanders of literature had really brought me to a place I could have got to when I was a teenager by reading Auerbach. He had taste which was rather similar to the one which I'd managed to equip myself with.

What he had to say...it was a very persuasive narrative for me. I'd previously formed for myself the idea, which may be well or ill based, that forms of literature and art are at their strongest when they're first conceived. In this book of his, which I'm pretty sure was intended as a popular book and which he wrote without reference to any archival sources because he was cut off from his own tradition, in this book he tells the story of the rise and decline of the narrative form and the novel form, and he ends, I must say, with some skepticism, discussing the great works of high modernism, which were much closer to him that they are to us; Proust, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, I believe.

And he comes to dark conclusions and judges this high point for many of us of the narrative tradition as being willfully obscure, self-destructive, using the tools of intelligence, I think he says, to attack the achievements of the civilisation that produced and nurtured the critical and humane intelligence that he prized so much. And he then ends by providing a brief afterward, and I think that was written too at the time of the final implosion of the Nazi nightmare in his own country. He says, 'I hope that this set of words will do something to keep alive the tradition, and I dedicate it to my friends, those who may still be living, for whom this tradition still perseveres.' That very beautiful and poignant sentence seemed to sum up whole world of coming into being and destruction, and it resonated very strongly with me then.

Ramona Koval: So we have this pairing idea of the death of the divine and the demise of the narrative or the novel, and you come back to Australia and you go back to your beloved deserts and other regions that you travel in. You go to the western desert, the Kimberley and the Pilbara, and you think about the Australian landscape when you're travelling through it, and you say something that surprises me really, it's really about the idea that this landscape in Australia that you're travelling in is a landscape where the novel doesn't sit well and it's more a place for tales, you say, for deep hidden meanings and fragments. Tell me the difference between a narrative and a tale, a story and a tale.

Nicolas Rothwell: I guess this is the meat of the argument of this essay, and obviously when a forensic questioner like you pulls out a thin vulnerable thread and holds it up to the light, one feels somewhat exposed. Perhaps I was hoping that this almost preposterous claim might be able to slip by without your singling it out. But I do feel in some way that the novel is a form which comes from the past and persists beyond its use-by date. It's a powerful form, it's a seductive form, it has this extraordinary capacity to provide us with the consistent illusion of occupying another being's psychic and emotional space, and that is its calling card. But it is also something that relies on coherence and on the pre-fragmentary tradition, and even novels that are fragmentary are, in a sense, parasitic on the notion of wholeness.

I've always felt in the Australian bush, which has done a lot of healing of my discontents and troubles, I've always felt that patterns are different, that one's not in a world of progressive narrative which goes straight like an arrow to the end and the resolution, but that things circle round. And that's very much what I pick up on in the domain of indigenous story and legend making, and it seems to me often that that's what writers in the north and the centre tend to gravitate towards. I know I do. I don't see any directed narrative for me there, and the idea of writing a completely conventional novel set against that backdrop doesn't really seem to strike any sparks for me. So I've found myself pushed out to a different kind of form where there are repetitions and partings and returnings to themes, and one is talking about a set of fragments where the joy of the fragment is almost the animating energy. I don't know if that rings any bells for you.

Ramona Koval: But why should it be so? Why should a landscape have such penetrating effect on the kinds of stories we may tell each other or ourselves?

Nicolas Rothwell: I guess I would like to argue that other landscapes where Western writing has thrived are very much socialised landscapes where we have placed back into the landscape our own beliefs and ideas, whether they be Christian or Islamic or whatever they may be, they are very much more landscapes which have a monotheistic religious structure which implies a kind of directed and purposive approach to life.

What I sense in the bush is much more a circling pattern of being, and I feel that very strongly. I can't perhaps express it with the kind of logical bullets that I should bring to the task, but it's something which seems to me almost inevitable that one feels in the scale of the Kimberley or the Pilbara or the western desert or indeed the tropical savannahs, one feels the tremendous insignificance of the human narrative, and other forces come to the fore. Man's place and role and involvement is somehow caught up in a different symphony.

Ramona Koval: I'm trying to picture those Middle Eastern deserts, the vast tracts of sand and the ruins, and surely that would make you feel the same thing about the insignificance. You know, the story about man as dust...does that not conjure up a similar small voice in you?

Nicolas Rothwell: I guess that's a perfectly reasonable point, and my acquaintance with the deserts of Arabia is much less than my acquaintance with Australian deserts, so I wouldn't want to be getting into any comparative study of them. But certainly the sense that one has of encroaching sand and dunes and camels and caravans in the Middle Eastern deserts is much more one of an occupied space, where trading has been going on and where man's stamp has been much more boldly and aggressively placed than in the Australian deserts where, until now, I tend to feel that the Aboriginal civilisations which have been implanted there for a while have somehow sought to match and speak to and engage with what they found rather than drive roads through it or regulate it and place their temples across it. That's one thing. The other thing of course is that the Christian and Judaic tradition of the desert is right there, that's where the action happened...

Ramona Koval: So the stories are around you.

Nicolas Rothwell: Absolutely, and the desert there has almost a metaphysical meaning, it is a quite different space from the desert that I as an outsider find in the Tanami or the Gibson or the Victoria or the Simpson desert, these are places which have, for me, a completely different emotional weight, one which is much more disquieting and hard to immediately reduce to its component meanings.

Ramona Koval: I know you're a great linguist, but might it be that your familiarity with the languages of the regions that you're travelling in in Australia mean that those big stories are not as open to you as they would be if you were schooled in them or from those cultures.

Nicolas Rothwell: You're coming right up against a big thing; to what extent can Australians living in the cities take on or be part of the totemic stories which have been animating the deserts for centuries and millennia? And I've always felt a kind of reticence and unwillingness to seek to know a very great deal or to imagine that those stories could ever be mine. Perhaps that's the wrong attitude, but it's one that I've always felt since I first started trying to come to some sort of accommodation with the landscape, and gradually realised that the landscape was not just the landscape but the people in the landscape as well.

Ramona Koval: You took some books with you when you went to the Australian desert. They're not novels, are they.

Nicolas Rothwell: No, they're not. Look, it's not as if I'm down on the novel. I long to read novels which will lift my heart and open my eyes, but it just so happens at the moment that I seem to be in a phase where it's different kinds of narrative which have much freer and more elusive connective structure that speak to me. I list in this essay three such books. One of them is actually a work of anthropology or study of material culture by Philip Jones who works in Adelaide in the museum there and I think has just been listed for Kevin Rudd's first prize for non-fiction for an account in this book, it's called Ochre and Rust, and he describes eight or ten objects in the South Australian museum collection and their stories. That's a pretty loose set of connective threads for a 500-page book.

Another is a book from a part of the world you know well, a book called Healers of Arnhem land by a psychiatrist called John Cawte. He's not hugely popular among anthropologists in far north Australia these days, but I must say I find it a miraculously humane and tactful book. It just tells the stories of the Yolngu cultures of north-east Arnham land, and in a very subtle way goes quite deeply quite rapidly into that strange thought world.

And the third, if I remember, was a book called The Red Centre which I've always admired and thought was, in some sense, perfect. It's by a man called HH Finlayson who was one of the great early 20th century naturalists of central Australia and who I spent a lot of time with recently because I've just been writing about him in another context. He conjures up the moods of the landscape of the western deserts. Perhaps that was a kind of literature that was particularly attractive to me during these travels, which were really travels in which I was trying quite programmatically to expunge some of the tensions and the sadness that I'd seen during that time in areas of conflict in the Middle East from myself and, if you like, put myself back into those parts of Australia which have always welcomed me in.

Ramona Koval: The essay is called 'On Fragments and Dust' and it's in the latest Monthly magazine. Nicolas's most recent other book is called Another Country which is published by Black Inc. Nicolas Rothwell, thank you so much for being on The Book Show today.

Nicolas Rothwell: Thank you very much for asking me.

Nicolas Rothwell’s Another Country is published by Black Inc.
His essay 'On Fragments and Dust' is in  The Monthly magazine.