Forms of Freedom
Forms of Freedom: Marxist Essays in New Zealand and Australian Literature by Dougall McNeill. OUP (2024). RRP: $45. PB, 248pp. ISBN: 9781990048760. Reviewed by Dani Yourukova.
Lately, it seems like everyone wants to talk about endings. The end of winter. The end of term. The end of the year. The end of the world. The end of my employment contract. The end of the asparagus that’s been sitting in my fridge for slightly too long. Or, in the case of the first year poetry class I’m TA-ing: ‘the endings of poems.’ More specifically, the strategies we employ to take all those movements and resonances generated over the course of the work and release that momentum into the great wide space that lives down the street from the final line.
We all have our favourites. There are technicians who like to be swayed by the symmetry of strict form, rhyming couplets or circular endings. Then we have lovers of the Stanley Kunitz school of endings, who prefer to end a poem with an image and not explain it. Most of us enjoy reaching for an act of rhetorical virtuosity; a synthesis of the previous argument resulting in new insight, which a poet friend casually calls a ‘volta’ ending, and which one of my students pithily calls ‘the mic drop.’ My own opinion is predictably unsettled (how can you know what ending you’ll need until you get there?), but I think my sympathies might lie with the ending that implicates the reader.
Dougal McNeill’s Forms of Freedom: Marxist essays in New Zealand and Australian Literature opens with an attentive response to just such a literary implication. Specifically, a moment in Mununjali writer Ellen van Neerven’s poetry collection Throat (UQP, 2020) which asks the reader to sign their name on the page in a treaty of ‘shared power.’ It’s a move that demands not only the reader’s recognition and acknowledgement of truths about the colonial violence of the Australian government, but that the reader physically enters a relationship with the text. A relationship where they must literally write back to it, transformed from observer into active participant.
It is this startling of the reader, this act of making the reading relationship reciprocal and active that McNeill uses to frame the preoccupations of his complex and carefully wrought book:
‘It is not a question of deploying literary texts to illustrate some theoretical claim or other, nor is the purpose to mine literary texts for the value found in their content. Instead, texts are placed alongside theoretical questions from the Socialist tradition to see what one might learn from the other.’
To strip the question to its barest essentials, McNeill’s book asks: ‘Can politics and literature enrich each other?’
McNeill’s case for reading as a form of freedom imagines us performing a particular kind of reading that is attentive and imaginative, sensitive to aesthetic form. A kind of reading that cultivates a relationship with the text, instead of torturing the meaning out of it. So although literature is capable of offering us liberation, literature makes demands of its own. We have responsibilities to consider as readers. We are implicated.
‘These are the jolts into recognition from which insight is gained. But to feel them we need to learn how to pay attention, how to be good custodians of story, how to share power between author and reader.’ (29)
Forms of Freedom makes its own sort of demand. It’s not entirely a scholarly text and there is plenty here for non-academics to engage with and enjoy, but it demands work. Each chapter takes turns being accessible, granular, profound, and extraordinarily dense, moving fluidly between literary theory, socialist history, close readings, global crises, and just the occasional slip of personal anecdote. The prose is rich and personable, and McNeill adeptly connects theory and close reading with contemporary concerns, from finding a way to social reproduction theory through Dorothy Hewett and the Covid-19 crisis of what constitutes our idea of ‘essential labour,’ to connecting climate disaster with Amanda Lohrey’s The Reading Group. This latter chapter includes a resonant personal account of McNeill waking up to the Australian bushfire skies that hung over Otago in 2020, and I want to share a short section in appreciation of its lyricism:
‘As I crawled out of my tent and stood in the paddock where I’d slept, it was impossible to tell if it was dawn or dusk, so grey and lifeless was the sky. […] a dry, insubstantial greyness, like a shroud.’
Rather than accessible, I think ‘generous’ is the word I would use to describe McNeill’s text. It’s a text that respects the reader, and challenges them, without ever wanting to leave them behind: ‘my flourishing comes through commitment to the flourishing of all.’ This generosity is one of Forms of Freedom’s most charming qualities. I found that, even if I happened to be in a fugue state at one in the morning and not quite able to articulate what a dialectic of negativity actually was, I always earnestly felt McNeill was doing his best to illuminate me, and was reassured that our effort to understand and enrich one another as author and reader was a collective one.
Forms of Freedom is divided into two parts, with the first section focused on literary ancestors such as Dorothy Hewett and Hone Tuwhare, as well as the context of socialist history in Australia and Aotearoa. For example, McNeill strives to offer ‘as full a sense of the community of dissenting ancestors as [he] can’ in “The Burns Example,” which documents competing readings of Robert Burns and his poetic legacy across and between socialist newspapers, working class readers and writers from the 1800s, Labour MPs and civic statues. The 1954 Mazengarb Report and resulting moral panic becomes a jumping off point to consider the radical treatment of gender and sexuality in the work of NZ-Australian writer Eve Langley, while the silence of Elsie Locke becomes an act of resistance in the face of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and informs Locke’s subsequent break from the Communist party of New Zealand.
The second section, “The Communist Horizon,” looks instead to the work of contemporary writers like Emily Perkins, Alice Tawhai, Pip Adam and Patricia Grace, and orients us more firmly in the political realities of today. I was much more familiar with these source texts, but I still found myself consistently surprised and enchanted by the lenses and attentions applied to the work. McNeill makes a compelling case for reading Perkins’ The Forrests as science fiction, for listening as a form of ‘free speech,’ and in comparing Pākehā notions of darkness, void and lack to the much richer and more active darkness of Te Kore to illuminate the gaps and silences of Tawhai’s narratives.
Each chapter is a self-contained essay that can, theoretically, be read in any order. Though each essay is convincing on its own terms, I did find that the historical grounding through the first section was a pleasure to take into the second, and as much as I enjoy the quiet upending of hierarchy I might enact by disrupting my own reading order, it felt appropriate to be conscious of the past as I read into the future: ‘“politics must become disaster politics,” the Salvage Collective tell us. Similarly, all literature is now disaster literature.’
Speaking of the future, let’s talk about endings. As McNeill states in his introduction, he is not aiming to craft a cumulative, diagnostic argument. There is no virtuosic flourish at the end of Forms of Freedom, no grand narrative to unite the individual project of each essay into a single sweeping theory. No rhetorical ‘mic drop,’ as my student might say. Instead, the conclusion, “Books for burning times,” refocuses on collective concern—inaction on climate change, extractive capitalism, and the perils of the future we all share:
‘If I have spent this book trying to convince you of the value and power of literature’s forms of freedom, only now to insist that our pressing task lies elsewhere, I do so in part to to find a way of making possible a future where literature may have its place.’
And so, in its final move, Forms of Freedom turns towards the reader. A collection of essays is, by necessity, more formally conservative on the page than poetry. It doesn’t upend our perspective so viscerally as van Neerven does in Throat. But what it does do is invite us to participate. Now that we know what we know, where are we going from here?
With its thorough, thoughtful readings, Forms of Freedom alerts us to ways that literature might offer us liberation, and the efforts we might have to exercise to find them. It suggests that we recognise ourselves not as impartial observers but as ‘readers,’ with all of the attending questions, responsibilities and challenges that this relationship provokes. It offers us solidarity. It offers us ways to imagine futures beyond capitalist realism. It offers us a chance to be startled into more reciprocal relationships with our texts, and with each other. Into relationships of shared power.
‘To that end, let us read together.’
Dani Yourukova is a poet, reviewer, and amateur occultist. Their poetry and essays have been published in places like Sweet Mammalian, The Spinoff, bad apple, and Turbine | Kapohau. Their debut poetry collection Transposium was published by Auckland University Press late last year.