Xavier Herbert. Requiem for Genius

Russell Mcdougall

doi:10.5130/csr.v23i2.5821

Abstract

In today’s global celebrity culture it’s hard to imagine a word more over-used and abused than ‘genius’. It is a slippery word with a long and contradictory conceptual history. Yet, in the Land of the Tall Poppy, self-confessions of genius invariably have paved a broad road to public ridicule and denigration. Xavier Herbert’s notion of genius was not static. It changed throughout his life and it evolved through his writing. He agreed with Carlyle that the first condition of genius must always be a ‘transcendent capacity of taking trouble’ and on this foundation he built his own concept of genius, as the unending ‘capacity for loving’. This article explores what genius meant to Xavier Herbert and how it translated into his fiction, before considering how our sense of genius today influences the way we respond to his most challenging fictions of love and hate, 'Capricornia' and 'Poor Fellow My Country'.

Highlights

Xavier Herbert’s notion of genius was not static. It changed throughout his life and it evolved through his writing. He agreed with Carlyle that the first condition of genius must always be a ‘transcendent capacity of taking trouble’ and on this foundation he built his own concept of genius, as the unending ‘capacity for loving’
This article explores what genius meant to Xavier Herbert and how it translated into his fiction, before considering how our sense of genius today influences the way we respond to his most challenging fictions of love and hate, Capricornia and Poor Fellow My Country
In 1935, in a private lament written in the agony of waiting and wondering if Capricornia would ever be published, and thinking over how he had already ‘half-killed himself for his genius’, Herbert came to a startling conclusion: ‘My genius is not I.’59 This was a moment of self-othering, in which he recognised ‘the god within’—the driving force of his originality and individuality—as a stranger

Summary

Introduction

Genius is a word Herbert used in every one of his novels, in different contexts and with different shades of meaning—four times in Capricornia, eight in Seven Emus (which is a much shorter book), seven in Soldiers’ Women, and twenty-six in Poor Fellow My Country.

Results

Conclusion