Tina Makereti on the revolutionary thinking inside Dougal McNeill’s Forms of Freedom: Marxist essays in New Zealand and Australian literature. 

I wasn’t sure about writing about Forms of Freedom: Marxist essays in New Zealand and Australian Literature by Dougal McNeill because I don’t know enough about Marxism. But then I thought maybe I was the ideal person to write about this book because I don’t know enough about Marxism. And the book, while entirely being about what it says on the cover, is also so much more. Forms of Freedom gives us multiple examples, multiple ways in, multiple channels to meet a compelling set of writers. It is a surprisingly accessible book, though unsurprisingly to anyone who knows McNeill, it is also a deeply complex, erudite, challenging book, and while I found myself enthusiastically and easily slipping into conversations about writers I know well and also writers I have only glancing knowledge of, I also found good chewy, gritty sections I will need to read a few more times to really understand. 

Dougal McNeill is senior lecturer of English Literatures at Victoria University of Wellington and is known by students and colleagues alike for his intellectual rigour, so it is not unexpected that this book is very clever. Perhaps it is less expected, though not at all without precedent, that this is a book with great heart. It is a book concerned with how we sustain our humanism, and indeed our humanity. It is a book concerned with the present moment we find ourselves living through right now. The weekend before the launch of this book there were hīkoi mō ngā tamariki throughout the motu, combining the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa, Toitū te Tiriti, Trade Unions and climate activist groups, demanding the government show any care at all about genocide, ecocide, or tangata whenua rights and wellbeing. In the UK, anti-racism counter protestors swamped far right anti-immigration riots, although those attacks continued. In Wellington, the government axing of over 6000 public sector jobs has left a trail of destruction in its wake: hospitality and retail jobs disappearing rapidly, businesses failing and the creative sector losing the part-time work that sustains it. 

I can’t say this moment even feels out of the ordinary, since it seems like we have continuously been in this escalating ‘moment’ for many years now. One of the questions for readers, writers, protestors and workers is, how does literature intersect with the moments we are facing right now? Forms of Freedom is scattered with such distinct moments. Chapter Nine opens with New Year’s Day 2020, an unsettling quiet as “a dry, insubstantial greyness, like a shroud” enveloped the East Otago sky that Dougal’s family woke to, only later discovering that the deepening “lurid sepia tones” of that sky came from Australia’s bushfires. At the same time, demonstrating the intimate connection between the lives we lead and what we read, the author is that morning reading Amanda Lohrey’s 1988 dystopian novel of a future Australian city, ringed by fires. “All literature is now disaster literature,” the book concludes, but novels also “offer forms of solidarity”.

Forms of Freedom is committed to a humanist vision where, “my flourishing comes through commitment to the flourishing of all.” One of the ways we know we are flourishing, the book contends, is reading:

“Imaginative literature invites a kind of reading without any particular purpose…”; and

“Literature, then, can be the promise of unalienated labour.”; and

“Literature is liberation, in one banal but vital sense: it takes time to read. Reading and writing, as practices of sustained attention, rely on creative human labour, labour not easily reducible to the needs of capital. Time to read and write creatively is, in however muffled a form, a demand for the reduction of the working day.”

Banal or not, this is perhaps the first time I have properly recognised reading as an act of resistance, a reclamation of humanity. Yes, we need work to sustain us, but we also need space for creativity and the imagination.

So, a bit of an origin story. I wrote something of a rant in 2020 titled “Bleeding on the Page” and indeed it was probably a bit overwrought, certainly bleeding something. I was having a hard time in 2020, and gosh who wasn’t, but in this case, I was having a hard time in particular with what Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life and Booker Prize shortlistee, calls the sometimes “oppositional relationship between authors and their readers…” In an essay titled ‘Emotional Support Trauma Plot’ Taylor describes this as “The way that people read fiction these days, on the hunt.” And goes on to describe “one of [his] creative writing teachers [who] used to describe the kind of attention he wanted to bring to workshop as reading like a prosecutor.” My essay was prompted by how tired I was of people reading like prosecutors. I wrote:

“I find myself resisting the reading that sees only the politics of a piece, the representations, the symbolisms. What then happens to enchantment?”

It is very flattering that anyone might take this as a starting point for actual, serious scholarship, when my original essay might be described as “Tina going off on one”, but I understand that the question “What then happens to enchantment?” was one of the starting points for Forms of Freedom. I also have a confession to make as well, which is that I kind of stole this idea around enchantment from another writer whose work Dougal teaches. In 2012, at Writers and Readers Week, I interviewed Juan Gabriel Vásquez and Kim Scott in a session that was meant to be about politics. But both Juan and Kim resisted all my questions about politics in their writing and insisted that their writing does not come from politics, that writing fiction from a political starting point would not result in very good writing. Kim kept saying “it’s about enchantment, it’s about enchanting the reader, there’s nothing enchanting about politics”. It was a lesson not easily forgotten.

Dougal describes the oppositional method of reading like a prosecutor as “configuring the text as unconscious and criticism as consciousness.” “Time to try something different”, he says, what about criticism “focused on the experience of literature”, a kind of ‘cultivation’ meaning a sustained practice of attention. “Rather than knowledge production, these essays are recordings of experience,” and offer a different way of doing criticism. This is an “aesthetic education – a training in the senses and in feeling itself.” The objective here is to “share power between author and reader.” This is what makes the work exciting, innovative and transformative. “What does it mean for readers and writers to share power in the negotiations of meaning…?” Dougal asks, describing the book as “the chance to think with a literary text…”

In Part One – Lost Leaders, we find ancestors, forebears, whakapapa. When Dougal sees Hone Tūwhare’s artistry and activism in Tayi Tibble’s 2019 essay on Ihumātao, we are reminded of the important role of the literary critic/historian in being able to trace the movements and echoes across generations. What returns, how and when? What meaning does this have? What is the history that stands before us, drawing us towards that communist horizon so boldly proclaimed in Part Two? Lost Leaders reclaims Bobby Burns as a lost leader of socialist striving; reminds us that queerness and queer form in literature have always been here through Eve Langley’s open, fluid, complex, resisting, trans, narrative slipperiness; thinks through the silence provided by Elsie Locke’s unspoken resistance; examines the connections between paid and unpaid labour, the domestic and the political alongside Dorothy Hewitt.

In Part Two: The Communist Horizon, Emily Perkins’ novel The Forrests presents science fictional estrangement; the vā and the potential of tradition as a source or a trap is thought through with Albert Wendt; Amanda Lohrey is “unafraid to have aesthetic and moral goals”, her writing like “sending a message in a bottle” to the reader; Pip Adam is read with Theodor Adorno “as a way of thinking with her work to discover ways out of the traps she narrates.” With Patricia Grace and Chappy, we learn to listen. Finally, in an evocative chapter on the potential for light and positivity in the double-negativity of Alice Tawhai’s work, I was personally moved to meet one of my own first teachers, Robert Jahnke, still teaching us how Te Kore is both void and potential, how there can be no dark without light. 

I am struck too by the language in Forms of Freedom. Here, writing isn’t something that exists passively on the page; here literature is a thing warranting the most active of verbs: Tuwhare leaps and kicks, Langley runs against fixed identity of all kinds, Adam shudders, splits and doubles. In these readings, literature is living its most active life, sometimes coming at us from angles we hadn’t considered, sometimes giving us a new way into a text we thought we knew.

Forms of Freedom, while being a very serious exploration of “how the creative literary imagination can influence progressive social change in the real world”, is also an argument for pleasure and connection and relationships.

I am grateful for this book as a Māori writer and reader who has been thinking a lot about freedom and how literature can allow for it. I don’t know if I have experienced true freedom in writing for a long time. I feel the demands of this moment in history too perplexing and demanding and draining to allow much freedom, and yet I know that the next place to go, the only place that really matters, is the place where the imagination, and the pen, are free. How do we make space for that? How do we even conceive of it? Forms of Freedom gives us some ancestors, some visionaries, some clues:

“Literary works – specifically poems and novels – represent the possibility of liberation, a way of reading otherwise to the world. Fictions fabulate; lyrics sing; makers make. Literature is of our world, but it points beyond it and is produced in unexpected places.”

Tīhei mauri ora!

Forms of Freedom: Marxist Essays in New Zealand and Australian Literature by Dougal McNeill ($45, Otago University Press) is available to purchase from Unity Books.