"Province spoke instinctively to province" : international Australians and universal Catalans. Volume 1, Exegesis

Abstract

This thesis is comprised of two components: an exegesis, which compares the literary representation of Catalan and Australian artists in the 1930s-1960s, and a creative work, the novel The Phantom Surrealist, which tells the life of a fictitious 1930s Australian artist who disappeared in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War from the perspective of a somewhat idiosyncratic Australian researcher. The work of fiction draws on the three forms of writing explored in the exegesis: autobiographical fiction, art biography, and the literary hoax. The exegesis opens with a short survey of the development of modernism in the 'provinces' and the means by which the artists under study connect through their exploration of exile, expatriation and home. The research responds to both Robert Dixon's call to explore cosmopolitan connections in "Australian Literature-International Contexts," including literature from "non-Anglophone traditions" (2007, p. 17) and Susan Stanford Friedman's example of a "collage of pairs" by placing Australian literary texts alongside Catalan counterparts. Given the devastation of the Spanish Civil War and its impact on the writers and artists included in the exegesis (Juan Goytisolo, Joan Miró, Max Aub), the juxtaposition to Australian writers and artists (George Johnston, Russell Drysdale, James McAuley and Harold Stewart) is not intended to conflate the experiences, or expressions of modernism. It is, however, responsive to Friedman's contextualising of the "modernist exile and expatriation" within "a newly constituted homeland of the imagination" (2015, p. 12). My creative work The Phantom Surrealist has the subtitle "The Strange Beauty of Surrealist Art", purported to be the title of narrator Christopher Giffen's PhD thesis, based on his research into the "lost" Australian surrealist, Robert J. Wake. In the story, Wake's contribution to the London Surrealists is neglected-as an artist from the Antipodes among Europeans-and his active support of the Spanish Republic in the years 1936-1938 is ignored; were he a real artist he would be ripe for the contemporary "recovery" work of scholarship in modernist studies (Friedman, 2010, p. 492). The use of a self-reflexive biography form, with its characteristic playfulness about invention and research, connects the writing to the apocryphal biography of Max Aub's forgotten Catalan painter Jusep Torres Campalans (1962) and James McAuley and Harold Stewart's 'discovered' Australian modernist poet, Ern Malley (1943). Rather than being presented as an 'authentic' biography of a fake artist, however, Giffen's thesis includes 'real' conversations as part of a false narrative methodology.

Date of Award	2022
Original language	English