Autobiographical Preface to

The Angel of Luxury and Sadness (The Emergence of the

Normative Ennui Cycle)
By Ian Irvine (Hobson)

copyright Ian Irvine (Hobson) 2000 all rights reserved. [This edited version published by Mercurius Press, Australia, 2013]
NB: A slightly different version of this piece appeared at the beginning of the print version of The Angel of Luxury and Sadness (Booksurge [no Amazon] publishing, USA, 2000).

This work was conceived many years agoin 1982 to be exactas I sat down in the Auckland University library to read a peculiar little book called The Castle by Franz Kafka. At that time I was eighteen and had an apparently bright future ahead of me in professional cricket. I was also studying commerce and it was assumed that this would be my back-up career if the sports option failed. In retrospect it was not Kafkas classic work that wrecked my commitment to the idyllic life mapped out for me. A subversive force had been pushing me to attend literature lectures in the Arts faculty for months. Likewise, I was inexorably drawn to the fortnightly student poetry evenings hosted by a pub close to the University. I was also undergoing a number of typical late-teenage life-crises: relationship problems, lack of a decent income, plucking up the courage to leave home, etc . On top of all this there was my involvement in politics. At that time there was a lot going on in New Zealand: controversy over whether to allow US nuclear ships into Auckland Harbour; concern over the insidious anti-democratic stance of Robert Muldoons conservative administration; ongoing debate over whether to allow the All Blacks to play Rugby against the South African Springboks, and the ever-present feeling among many young New Zealanders that a nuclear or environmental conflagration was just around the corner. Perhaps it was my involvement with the New Zealand Labour Party which made me feel these issues more strongly than many of my friends. Alternatively, perhaps it was the writer in me stirring even before I knew of his existence. I read a lot during that period of my life: Ken Keyseys One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest; Thomas Pynchons Gravitys Rainbow; Robert Graves The White Goddess. I was also getting into New Zealand poets and writers such as Sam Hunt, Alistair Campbell and Frank Sargeson. Likewise, this was the period in which I first encountered Orwell, Jung, Freud, Laing, Janov, Reich, and many other canonical writers and thinkers from any number of disciplines. I was also studying mythology in my spare time and had the usual late-teenage addiction to Tolkiens work. In a sense then, the epiphany that came with reading Kafkas dark little book was clearly the end-point of a long process. During the four hours it took me to read The Castle the darkness of the world around me converged with the darkness of the world within me and I had a series of realizations which in retrospect had probably been coming for quite some time. From the perspective of this current book this was the moment when the problem of disenchantment first struck me. I noticed that there was something peculiarly dark and pessimistic about much of the best modern literature. This mood was especially obvious when I compared the works of Eliot, Kafka, Camus, Orwell, Sartre, Beckett, Dostoyevsky and Pychon with the general mood of traditional literatures from virtually anywhere in the world: Maori, Aboriginal Australia, Hindu, Celtic, Ancient Greek, etc.. Such an observation would have been a merely intellectual problem except that something in those works spoke to me about the truth of my own condition. There was no ignoring it, the themes of modernity were my themes, and one of those themes was the ubiquitous problem of alienation (in its most general sense). A question struck me: Why were so many modern writers and poets obsessed with this phenomenon? This question eventually led me down strange pathwayspathways far from the world of international cricket and conformist wealth accumulation. Suffice to say that by the age of twenty-three I was a University drop-out living in a caravan park in a foreign

country. I had no job (and no capacity or desire to work) and was far away from virtually every aspect of the life Id known. Id also given up professional sport. By any reckoning I had fallen a considerable distance in my attempts to be true to myself. On top of everything else, Id decided I was a writer. My family and former friends probably thought I was mad. During this period, however, I seriously began to explore the numbness and joylessness Id discovered at the very core of my being. Though my progress was slow and patchy at times, the new path I was ona path fuelled by that original questionwas my path. Eventually it led me to a more authentic and personally satisfying way of being in the world. When I eventually returned to University to study Arts in 1990 I was determined to deal with the alienation issue in a formal way. I eventually chose it as the subject of my Ph.D. research. By that time Id faced important aspects of my own alienation experience. Nevertheless, there was more to do. Over twelve years had passed since the question of the modern soul sickness had first occurred to me. I knew more about the world and more about the way in which social and cultural institutions and value systems could act to damage the internal lives of human beings. The problem had shifted from a personal issue to an issue of relevance to society as a whole and maybe even the species. By this stage in proceedings alienation seemed a too narrowly sociological term for what I was dealing with and so I seized on a like term Id come across in George Steiners great work In Bluebeards Castle: The Great Ennui. This term had a literary (rather than a sociological) ring to it, and thus it freed me to concentrate on the emergence of the problem as a major literary and philosophical problem during the Early Modern and Post-traditional periods. The Angel of Luxury and Sadness is the result. In the original thesis there was a large section on proposed treatment programmes for both the personal and sociocultural forms of the malaiseI intend to publish that section in reworked form later this year.

Author Bio (as at April 2013)

Dr. Ian Irvine is an Australian-based poet/lyricist, writer and non-fiction writer. His work has featured in publications as diverse as Humanitas (USA), The Antigonish Review (Canada), Tears in the Fence (UK), Linq (Australia) and Takahe (NZ), as well as Best Australian Poems (Black Ink Books) and Agenda: Australian Edition(2005). He is also the author of three books and currently teaches in the Professional Writing and Editing program at Bendigo TAFE (Bendigo, Australia). He also teaches in the same program at Victoria University (St Albans campus, Melbourne) and has taught history and social theory at La Trobe University (Bendigo). He holds a PhD for work on creative, normative and dysfunctional forms of alienation and morbid ennui.