Cirrus@Austlit

'Ken Gelder’s notion of a ‘proximate reading’ provides a conceptual methodology for a side-by-side, transnational reading of James McAuley and Harold Stewart’s Ern Malley poetry collection The Darkening Ecliptic (1944) and Max Aub’s apocryphal biography Jusep Torres Campalans (1958). While often seen as representing a setback to Australian modernism – as ‘an Australian outcrop of literary fashion’ – here the poetry of Ern Malley is read in terms of its deconstructive potential. Jusep Torres Campalans is a little-known but fascinating text which represents a ‘provincial’ response to modernism from the margins. Writing in Mexico about an exiled Catalan artist, Aub’s novel challenges the conventional periodization of modernism through its suggestion of an alternative history of Cubism, its inclusion of a unique set of important events in an extended Annals listing, and Campalans’ scorn of theory as ‘pure nonsense’. Aub’s text ‘decomposes’ the art monograph, and playfully undermines the authority of a figure like Aub (as writer, intellectual) to capture the essence of a Catalan artist who has withdrawn from the world to live among the indigenous people of Chiapas. McAuley and Stewart similarly invent a reclusive poet whose work can be read as a poetic conversation with Anglo-American modernism. In reading the two apocryphal artists together, the intention is to recontextualise the reception of Ern Malley within a transnational frame, a ‘black swan of trespass on alien waters’, which resonates beyond Australian shores.'  (Introduction)