Anachronism, ekphrasis and the 'shape of time' in The Great Fire.(Critical essay)

READERS of Shirley Hazzard's fiction have long been familiar with the ways her densely allusive prose embeds her stories and her characters in European art and writing. While the plots of her novels follow the political and social dramas of the decades following the Second World War, their narrative detail is largely taken up with references to works of art and literature from centuries past, recalled, as it were, into the press of modern life. This signature practice--of combining the figures of an imagined present with the forms of an inherited past--constitutes a certain anachronism that underpins the structure and reach of Hazzard's novels. It signals an emphatic retention of European humanist values and forms across the sweeps of modernity that engulf and engage her protagonists, and marks with time the larger question of human volition in matters of fate and faith.

The publication history of Hazzard's most recent novel further enacts a very particular temporality of recall and consequence. After the enormous popular and critical success of The Transit of Venus, which won the US National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award in 1980, Hazzard waited for more than two decades to publish its successor, The Great Fire (2003). This novel won Australia's premier literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award, for 2003, together with the US National Book Award for Fiction (2003) and the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2005). (1) Hazzard's critics seem to have replicated this hiatus, with new scholarly publications virtually non-existent since the mid-1990s, despite continued interest in and respect for her writing. These are attested by Anita Brookner's Spectator review: 'This unusual and nostalgic novel comes from a writer whose last work, The Transit of Venus, remains as startling and effective today as it did when it was published in 1980.' This publishing history in turn reflects the more substantial understanding that The Great Fire gives us of the ways literary fiction, and the novel form more broadly, are itself always inflected with time.

Many of The Great Fire's reviewers noted that Hazzard's book constitutes an argument for the continuing significance of the novel form in the contemporary world, or as the Miles Franklin judges' report put it: 'The Great Fire is a reminder of why, in a digital age, the novel still matters':

 
   Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire is a novel out of time. Not 
   because it comes 23 years after ... The Transit of Venus, and not 
   because its setting, occupied Japan two years after the end of 
   World War II, belongs to the distant past (it doesn't). The Great 
   Fire feels as if it comes to us from another time, really, other 
   times--because Hazzard combines emotion on a scale we associate 
   with 19th century novels with language that has the freedom and 
   lucid precision of early 20th century modernism. (Taylor) 

In this essay I want to consider this preoccupation with time and the temporalities of the novel form, through a consideration of the image, in particular the visual image, in The Great Fire. I begin with a discussion of what might be seen as a persistent and knowing anachronism at work in Hazzard's fiction, the self-conscious sense it conjures of writing and reading novels 'in a digital age', and then outline the ways that literature itself is linked to visual art in this novel through questions of time. In the second part of the essay I explore the novel's conjunction of verbal and visual modes through the figure of ekphrasis, the formal term from classical rhetoric for the verbal representation of visual images. I argue that the tension that ekphrasis articulates between verbal and visual modes returns us to the preoccupation with time, and with literature as an ethical and aesthetic imperative, in The Great Fire.

Ekphrasis is conventionally associated with another classical form, the epic, where it operates as a decorative hiatus or parergon, a moment of relief or of framing, in the intensity of world-changing battle or heroic endeavour. Like many of Hazzard's narratives, The Great Fire is lightly inflected by the epic form in its depiction of world affairs, beginning as it does in media res, and tracing the exile and return of great individuals in a time of war and cataclysm. The hero, Aldred Leith, is, however, a writer, not a warrior; his epic challenge to the barbarism of the world around him takes the tangible but unexpected form of a commission to produce a written record of the impact of war on its victims, local Chinese, and later the Japanese victims of the Hiroshima bomb. The contemporary world of the novel--the aftermath of World War II--is thus rendered archaic, severed from the time of our reading through its epic dimensions, and at the same time drawn back into another ...