Question 7 | Richard Flanagan (1)

After chatting with both Kim and Lisa about their reading progress through Richard Flanagan’s latest book, Question 7, I was prepared for two difficulties. Firstly, it would be almost impossible to take in everything Flanagan was posing in one reading and two, it would be extremely difficult to review the book. It only took me a handful of pages for their dilemma to become mine as well.

As a result, I have decided to tackle Question 7 one provocation at a time, over several posts. This may not be tidiest way to proceed, but it feels like the right way for me to gather my thoughts as I attempt a contemplative read of the text. Hopefully by the end I will be able to pull them all together into a cohesive response.

These Question 7 related posts will assume that you have read the book. If you have not and plan to, you may like to save them for later. So let me start at the very beginning.

The Epigraphs:

_{The author has not given his effort here the benefit of knowing whether it is a history, autobiography, gazetteer, tragedy, romance, almanac, melodrama, or fantasy. It may be myriad, it may not. The question is put, but what is the answer?}

Hobart Town Mercury, reviewing Moby-Dick, 1951

This tickled my fancy straight away. As many of you know, I completed a #slowread of Moby-Dick a number of years ago. I finished up by saying “I realised that this was a book all about the journey. It’s about all the stuff we learn about ourselves and the world as we travel through it. It’s about working out our purpose in life. It’s about obsession.”

I’m only about 25 pages into Richard Flanagan’s book, and I could say the same of Question 7 already.

The idea of a myriad of genres describes both Moby-Dick and Question 7 perfectly, although I suspect our Hobart Town Mercury reviewer didn’t necessarily mean it as a compliment. Moby-Dick is clearly more fiction than fact while Question 7 is clearly more interested in trying to get to the facts via fiction. In so many ways, Flanagan is also on a personal quest for his own white whale of truth and understanding, even when he tells us that ‘there is no truth. There is only why.’ (p4) he is still silently hoping (I believe) that the questions, the questing will give him some kind of answer or illumination by the end.

In The Conversation | Dan Dixon | 6 Nov 2023, Dixon states that this myriad approach “appears to derive from Flanagan’s anxiety that autobiography is necessarily fictitious. The desire to document one’s life accurately, he suggests, is made foolish by the ephemerality of language, the unreliability of memory, and the unaccountable contingencies of history.”

In his Conversation with Richard Fidler in the Theatre Royal in Hobart, Flanagan also talks about how ineffectual the words of a book are, whereas ‘the drift’ is everything, and ‘the soul of the book’ is what you find yourself searching for instead. He also talks about Indigenous time and an essay he was sent by a Yolnju woman, Siena Stubbs, ‘about the use of a fourth tense in the Yolnju language.’ Acknowledgements – p277

This aside led me to Flanagan’s piece in the July 2023 issue of The Monthly where he quotes some of Stubbs’ essay “The past is in the present is in the future. Our ancestors were here, are here and will be here.” It is worth reading in full if you have the time. When I read Stubbs’ words, I realised that she spoke to the idea I was grasping to explain in my recent reread of A Christmas Carol when Scrooge talks about “I will live in the Past, the Present and the Future.“

In this eloquent essay (which was Flanagan’s Closing Address for the 2023 Sydney Writers’ Festival) he also spoke powerfully about the Voice to Parliament and the idea of creating an Australian literature, an Australian voice and imagination that does not try to be a copy of the European or American idea of who and what we are.

_{We need to bring the Yolngu fourth tense into our thinking – into our literature, into our dreams, into our national affairs – honouring those who have lived before us and those who will live here after us, making of many countries one nation. The fourth tense is one that is sung and we need singers whose tongues are not torn out to create the new songlines we so urgently need, connecting this world to the spirit world of our many countries, black to white, past to present to future, honouring all that we are, so that we might finally go forward as the nation of which we dream.}

Which leads me to the second epigraph.

_{No, this is not piano. This is dreaming.}

Duke Ellington

As with some music, when you truly get lost in a beautiful arrangement, ‘life is always happening and has happened and will happen‘ p99 all at the same time, like a dream, where it all makes sense in the minds eye but is almost impossible to capture in words. It is these swirling, fleeting fragments of memory, story and experience that Flanagan attempts to corral, with a variety of tenses. into bite-sized paragraphs and little nuggets of chapters.

Time, place, memory, what we choose to forget, what we choose to remember, the stories we tell, our hopes and dreams, the people who populate our lives, those who journey with us long or just for a while, the love we have and to give. ‘What if we discovered we begin tomorrow and we died yesterday, that we were born out of the deaths of others and life is breathed into us from stories we invent out of songs, collages of jokes and riddles and other fragments?’ p11

I am reminded of the Ancient Greek image – the ouroboros – of the serpent forever swallowing its own tail, the infinite cycle of renewal and death that always has happened, is happening now and will always happen.

Opening Lines:

_{In the winter of 2012, against my better judgement and for reasons that were not entirely to do with writing – much as I said they were – and which even now are not clear to me, I visited the site of the Ohama Camp, Japan, where my father had once been interned.}

And so we begin…

• Lisa @ANZ LitLovers DID find a way to write about her ’emotional experience’ with Question 7 here.
• Question 7 (1)
• Question 7 (2)
• Question 7 (3)
• Question 7 (4)

This post was written on the traditional land of the Wangal clan, one of the 29 clans of the Eora Nation within the Sydney basin. This Reading Life recognises the continuous connection to Country, community and culture of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. They are the traditional custodians of the lands, seas, and skies on which we live and they are this nations first storytellers.