Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 9, Issue 5 by Debra Adelaide

Author:Debra Adelaide
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781922171559
Publisher: Review of Australian Fiction

Morrissey was rather slower than the others, who had now all finished. They waited, sipping water, as she came to the final page. Helen and Jonesy were murmuring something about the wet and the crowds. They must have been discussing the recent Torquay literary festival, thought the minister, not an event she cared much for these days, though it had been her initiative several years back. Like all literary festivals it had rapidly grown—not that this was a bad thing—but it was one of these festivals where the author was in danger of outnumbering the reader. If the Torquay trend continued, there would be a real danger of supply outstripping demand. Very bad textual economics.

Finally, Morrissey too was done. She leaned back in her chair, gently cracking a thoracic vertebra.

‘You can see we have a problem,’ the minister said.

Tim’s ponytail shook from side to side. ‘Tricky,’ he said.

‘As you all know, this was vital research. We were on a turning point with our policies. And now this threatens to undermine so much of what we do.’

Kendall took off his thick-rimmed spectacles and polished them. ‘Well, I dispute that,’ he said. ‘The political monopoly of knowledge should be challenged. All the products of the textual industry are flawed and indeed reports hitherto have proved that consumers accept this as part of the contract.’

‘Kendall.’ He looked up at the minister’s sharp tone. ‘You’ve spent far too much time on that UN committee. I know that liberation of the reading class is a tenet of your politics—’ Kendall was a partially unreconstructed Marxist with structuralist leanings ‘—but you’re among friends here, remember. This is the ministry for reading. We’re all about empowering the reader. We always have been. And the flawed text is a given. We had Culler et al to thank for that back in the eighties.’

‘But the report says…’

‘The report says inferior texts, not flawed. There’s a difference.’

‘Why, may I ask,’ Helen said, ‘Fossil Ridge?’

The minister had invited researchers from the International Brain Institute to carry out work on her former lending library readers. These results were recently consolidated with studies conducted in several other places, including the citizens of Frankfurt, undergraduate scholars at Cambridge, UK, and retirees who patronised the public libraries of Miami, Florida.

‘They are the perfect subjects, uncontaminated. And besides, the news is not all bad. Let’s first run through the positives.’

The results were crystal clear: not only did reading stimulate regions of the brain that were separate from the usual language-processing ones, but reading fiction aroused the sensory cortex. Stories stimulated the mind in every way. The IBI’s team had scanned brains of people who had read a short story or a sonnet. Their sensory cortices had lit up like Christmas trees when reading the line, ‘Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May’, while remaining dark and dormant reading the simpler, ‘The wind was strong during May’. Metaphor was the key here, unlocking the door, but it was narrative that threw it wide open. When

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