Not being particularly attracted to the 5am start required to experience yesterday’s opening ceremony nor much enamoured by a jog around Lydiard Park with world championship triathletes, it wasn’t until today in the more comfortable and convivial setting of The Arts Centre that my Festival experience began.
Festival organiser Matt Holland delivered the Kaye Franklin Memorial Lecture on the role of Literature in life and did so with his usual blend of humour and obvious passion for the subject. And it was a talk as much of literature as it was about literature, employing jokey, folkloric anecdotes, poetry and other, more famous quotes musings on the nature of literature from the likes of Plato, Lorca and that “slightly screechy German” himself, Nietzsche.
After a brief insight into his own path from being “definitely not one of those kids who was always lost in a good book” to having the door opened by works such as Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, we got to the heart of the matter. What is Literature and what is its role? A very useful tangent came into play at this point explaining why this annual event is called a Festival of Literature rather than a Literary Festival. If the latter is a celebration of books then the former is a celebration of good writing, in all its forms, and examining the difference between the two goes someway to examining the role of Literature itself. Whilst a celebration of books would probably include very popularist works, Rowling, Brown or worse…Stephanie Meyer, a festival of literature is by its nature more discerning but it is also an argument, which can only really conclude that the matter is both highly subjective and very personal.
Matt’s examination of what Literature should be able to provide the reader delivered some interesting results, many of which conformed to most people’s consensus; entertainment, information, personal experience and more aesthetic qualities such as poeticism and beauty, but also, in his opinion, the ability to “disturb” the reader, a word choice which was eagerly discussed in the short Q&A which followed the main part of the talk.
Literature, at its best, also explains life to us, as through the thoughts and actions of others, real or imagined, we often see parallels or are provoked into thinking more about our own deeds and choices.
One interesting quote, which formed a minor point of reference, also resonated with me long afterwards for slightly less favourable reasons. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” Socrates defence of his decision to chose death over exile as reported by Plato has always had the whiff of elitism about it. Is the examined life the noble way, one that elevates such you above the hoi polloi and those with time only to make ends meet as they struggle through life. But Matt, I’m sure would be happy to have that debate over a lingering glass of something and in a very civilised fashion or it might become the title of one of next year’s talks, you just never know. And maybe that is the point. What ever you think of as good literature, it is about communication, discussion, debate, argument, empiricism as well as experience and a hundred other actions and emotions, and Matt Holland’s opening salvo reflected that perfectly.
