Beowulf in Brisbane [Bus line of new rabBi Remix]

by Ashley Hauenschild

“That was a dramatic start,” he heard himself saying.

“Is that what you told the pre-sex marital student?” asked a girl at the back -sympathetic chuckles.

Belinda made a sound of choked off rage. “No - it wasn’t!”

The automatic response after years of experience was to go into conciliation mode: “Well, look, I agree with you.”

Oh shit. Complete silence.

In a nutshell, the trouble with this exercise is that they have probably read it before - no uplifting analogy or laboured joke. It’s just a stream of consciousness ramble about not very much on a single afternoon. Before you compliment the student on this observation, note that metafiction is a well-worn path these days. So we should wrestle with monsters in the form of very short novels and slay dragons by unlocking their secrets. To begin:

Heathcliff dug his sweetheart from her grave. She glared at him. He could, like you said, make an extra effort to make Belinda feel more comfortable. But only if you doubt enough. Instead, Heathcliff laughed savagely. He opened the document where he had started writing, saw a woman standing on a pier lashed by waves.

Okay - okay now - back to the lecture.

“Reading these books will help you understand others better - to live in their shoes for a while. And it will tell you things about yourself too.”

He believed he’d said that in the very first lecture. And two hundred faces had looked back at him with scepticism. Many promises had been made to them. They wanted proof. It was a congregation without a binding faith - it was only that fair.

He had read from the lecture: “And in this subject, just like the warrior Beowulf, you will long for your warrior’s gold, pleasure, and insight. But the world’s best writing will be the reward.”

They looked intently at him, as does Beowulf. Why add to the procession of dancing dogs, standing on their hind legs at book launches? In writing the lecture at 1.00am it had to be found - that good answer.

“And of course, being a better writer will make you a better reader.”

And he repeated how you can’t just sit down at a piano and expect to be Mozart playing jazz. The words went out into the large lecture theatre and fluttered to the ground, perhaps to rest on a shoulder here and there like dandruff. He too wondered if anyone had dandruff these days. It was unlikely. In a digital age, what was certain was precious few would dream of their name on a book in a bookstore. To see at least a few of the most creative students smiling was motivating - even the writing was.

The text today was Wuthering Heights. The lecture before the tutorial had been going well - the Kate Bush music video (they liked the music, laughed at the choreography - he pointed out that she was sending herself a genius), the PowerPoint images of the moors and Haworth, the Romantically suitable lives of the four siblings, the return of Heathcliff as avenging entrepreneur in shiny boots to take over the Grange. Then, while mentioning the overlap of Gothic novels and vampire movies he had made an off the cuff joke about two bits of wood stuck together:

“Amazing how ferocious vampires sounded when we were 19, and capable of acquiring enormous amounts of castle real estate in a very competitive castle market - not to mention being immortal and having superhuman strength and intelligence.”

Students are supposed to run away whimpering when confronted with small injustices, but the promising mood of the lecture hall was shattered by generous laughter. A slightly thin young man of about 25 in a white shirt and dark tie stood up and shouted: “Stop laughing! This is blasphemous!”

The Great Books pointed at him (twenty sat chatting in small groups on the blinding blue carpet outside the tutorial room) and called him a whimsical moment of wisdom… but you shouldn’t make jokes about things that are evil.

The young man stood there rigid with intensity for a few more seconds. Then he grabbed his knapsack and walked quickly up the steps and out of the theatre. I’m sure the man was mocking religion. He certainly didn’t mean to, but no one here was laughing at exotic superstition.

A semester started and began to build.

“Emily Bronte uses elements of Wuthering Heights to create the Gothic genre. Gothic atmosphere, for example, is not a novel.” The light of the sterile lecture room flashed with images - Emily standing in the rain at Branwell’s funeral, Cathy’s bleeding wrists, the young man’s trembling anger (he conspired to ignore them and the class).

*

The girl at the back said, “Oh Virginia, if only your talent had a fraction of your disciples.”

It could be another false start, or it could be the distant city lights bright and serene.

The other girl at the back answered her. “But what about when you rubbed real life against unpredictable literature? The results were sparks, John Fowles, an orange plastic chair scraping along the concrete.”

Nodding - sounds of strong agreement.

“Universities are about questioning your beliefs.”

“Yes - there are,” he answered, grateful for this small solidarity. “But I’ve had a student refuse to have pre-marital sex.”

More chuckles - but also some wariness.

“What did you do?” asked a laidback boy with long hair.

“I met Bishop Spong and asked him what I do when students refuse joys on religious grounds. I guess some of you heard of Spong - he’s a progressive American theologian - his books are best sellers. I thought Spong would say something like ‘you have to respect their views’ - but he said ‘tell them not to.’ I thought that was intellectually lazy, more or less.”

“There’s lots of fundos on campus,” the laidback boy said with forced levity to the tutorial. “Anyway - how many of you enjoyed reading Wuthering Heights?”

Almost all hands went up.

He said, “Great! What snippets of their diverse stories suggested a semi-circle?”

Murmur.

“I’m interested to hear from creative writing students…”

They stared at him.

“I thought it really sucked.” A girl near the front had spoken with quiet but clear vehemence. A girl who always looked unhappy in these tutorials - who until today had said nothing, for all his coaxing.

He turned and addressed the class, “It’s not an easy read for students reared on a school diet mainly composed of fragments. Did any of you find the novel made you think about how love is romantic, obsessive, and destructive of people? Or did you think it represented social norms and taboos as transcendent of love? Or both.”

Belinda spoke again, “I think the novel doesn’t want us to see right or wrong as everything. It wants us to suspend judgement.”

“Okay - fair enough. But remember we talked about Belinda. What was the main criticism of her?”

Belinda stared insolently at the class.

“She read a novel clearly, because it managed to rekindle the original animosity that had propelled her into expressing an opinion.”

He had heard that one at his past tutorial…

“That sucked,” he said, and gave them a glass of wine each to calm them down. “Make some friends while you can.”

Her face was flushed. Had she experienced the consequence of another’s selfishness? Had a clumsy mini-Heathcliff crossed her path? She glared at him defiantly.

The tutorial took a detour around the impasse, revived, discussion flowed. Belinda did not speak again. They did a writing - a short passage of description where nature is wild and alien to Lynton, but using Australian landscape elements. Several scenarios were read aloud to general clever acclaim. They mimicked the novel’s gusto with language. Belinda did not volunteer to read her work, though she had written some heart broken lines.

When the sun had almost gone, and black branches of struggling trees laced the horizon, an accountancy tutor (her students lined up neatly behind her) knocked on the door: “Thanks, but the hour is up.”

*

Cathy and Heathcliff went to a relationship counsellor somewhere in Brisbane. At this time of year a gusting wind tugged at the hedges - not the sort of weather you could lose your soul in. The path skirted Yorkshire, Hrothgar, Bronte, but the hardy brick-dwellers at last arrived.

The counsellor lit two candles. Heathcliff drank his in one big gulp (cheers) and kept scowling.

Cathy said, “I think it destabilises us - trying to do that.”

See, in totally identifying with another person, books become self-absorbed, a little tedious. The MA novel wouldn’t even make it that far. Could it be that characters love a world of judgement? Something more than whether we liked them or not? A reminder that real people, anchored to a selfish historical backdrop, could leap up and set realistic goals! The idea was benevolent, less threatening than academic staff and their fundamentalist cheer. An exhortation to characters who had illicit sex, or witnessed murder, or discovered a family secret - something likely to produce surprise and intimacy.

Thank you, and next?

Heathcliff hated Cathy. Cathy was just selfish.

The counsellor: “You guys have a weird lifestyle. You need to get out more. Escape from the Grange - capitalism is bad for you.. Avoid big black dogs.”

*

Beowulf rubbed his eyes and turned from the screen. Outside it was dark. He was attempting fiction for the first time - the kind of novel he liked to read himself, as well as the kind that won awards.

Or just dull grinding? The image haunted him. There was something of fire there - but the street noise, the rumbling sullenness of trucks, made courageous narrative just another point of view. He checked his emails, a bundle of letters composed of half-digested and second-hand ideas. But all he could see was his own moving face.

The Bus line of new rabBi Remix by Ashley Hauenschild is licensed under a CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia licence. It is a derivative work of Philip Neilsen’s CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia licensed story. The original is available at http://www.remixmylit.com/storiesremixes/beowulf-in-brisbane-by-philip-neilsen/. For details on how you can reuse the original and this remix see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/au/