How I would use David Ireland’s The Glass Canoe as a related text for HSC English Extension 1, Module B, Ways of Thinking, Elective 1, After the Bomb

 

David Ireland’s The Glass Canoe (1976) depicts an archetypically alienated individual attempting to find meaning within a cold war context. The authorial persona in this first person narrative, ‘Meat’, relates a series of fragmented episodes drawn from a life revolving around the Southern Cross Hotel, a fictitious drinking hole ostensibly located in Northmead. In structure the novel is similar to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. The similarity is more than merely superficial, for both novels employ a disjointed narrative to convey the chaotic consciousness of their protagonists. we follow ‘The Great Lover’ on his peccadilloes; we barrack for ‘The King’ as he weighs into opponents with his fists and sometimes his “slippers”; we empathise with “Alky Jack” as he drinks himself to death; we share Meat’s love for his “Darling”; we worry about young Sibbley, the intellectual. Each character is the subject of one or two eponymously titled chapters. Where Heller gives us almost forty significant characters, Ireland limits himself to a score, yet the effect is similar. Meat’s story is punctuated by episodes of violence, alcoholic excess, work, love and pathos. One is reminded of the situation Simone de Beavoir described on visiting America in the late 1940s, where a celebration of individuality had given way to “repressing originality, both in itself and in others; rejecting criticism, measuring value by success, (leaving) open no road to freedom except that of anarchic revolt; this explains the corruption of its youth, their refuge in drug-taking and their imbecile outbreaks of violence” As Robert Merrill puts it in his analysis of Catch-22’s structure, “like such novelists as Dreiser, Steinbeck, and Wright, Heller dramatizes the crippling effects of our social system on the sensitive individual-witness his portraits of Yossarian, Dunbar, the chaplain, Major Major Major, Clevinger, Nateiy, and Snowden.” We might easily add Ireland to this list of authors, for his authorial persona and the ensemble of characters he describes are at once victims and product of the social system that emerged in response to the Cold War. Like Yossarian, Meat discovers that there is no centre, that to live in an age of anxiety is to be without certainty. In Meat’s words, he “didn’t want to be caught talking a lot of nonsense beginning with the two silliest words in any language: I believe.” Just as the reader is given insights into the nature of this social system through the device of Nately’s conversations with the old man, readers of The Glass Canoe are given an admittedly expository insight of Alky Jack:

The modern cult of violence and animalism,’— he looked down at his trousers, but said nothing. I looked too, but there was no sign there of violence or animalism—‘ is an admission of defeat. We can’t be men and resist or overthrow the monster that rides us, this way of doing things, this economy with its roots in feudalism, so let us go the other way and be barbaric. And since we can’t free ourselves from the past, let us use educated words for our defeat: alienation, cult of absurdity, realism, the beauty of the irrational, cult of cruelty.

The violence in The Glass Canoe, like violence on a global scale, is pointless, but at least the local violence was observable, representable. Baudrillard argued that nuclear warfare removed the possibility for spectacle while introducing a threat that was at once immanent and perpetually deferred: in the world Ireland describes the sort of psychic numbing that Daniel Cordle ascribes to a life lived under these conditions of powerlessness and suspense. The anxiety is best put by meat, who, despite his lust for life, longs for oblivion:

I remember I was thinking at the time what would happen if the sun blew up. It lives by explosions; who says they can’t get out of balance? It wouldn’t be so tragic if we all went together.

Like Yossarian, Meat is an anti-hero in search of resolution; like Estragon and Vladimir in Waiting for Godot, Meat and his fellow travellers are left eternally to wait at the beck and call of indifferent fortune and forces beyond their ken and control.