Spiritual Vertigo: Illness, Affect and Modernity in Prelude to Christopher

Spiritual Vertigo: Illness, Affect and Modernity in Prelude to Christopher

In Eleanor Dark’s unpublished play draft, Mr Robinson [1942], Evan, a medical doctor, despairs of what he sees to be the inevitable future of psychological collapse. ‘I see it in my practice every day,’ he says, ‘and so does every other doctor’:

Nerves. Hysteria. Depression. Chronic tiredness. Anxiety. Neuroses of every kind […] And I give him a tonic and send him away, and all the time I know that what’s wrong with him is life – life that won’t give him any sense of peace or serenity, life that doesn’t make sense, life that won’t keep steady … I tell you, Mother, it’s only a matter of degree – we’re all psychologically ill – we’re all suffering from a sort of spiritual vertigo …

In another unpublished work, ‘Magic Wands’, Dark again notes that ‘any psychiatrist, I think, will agree that the only things which are harmful to all minds are certain emotions – fear, guilt, hatred, anxiety, jealousy and so on ...’ In this essay I want to think about the way in which this ‘spiritual vertigo,’ this sense of pervasive psychological distress as a result of negative affect, is explored as a modern condition in Dark’s novel, Prelude to Christopher (1934). The work is often said to be Australia’s first modernist novel, and indeed in Barbara Brooks’ coda (1999) to the Halstead Books publication of the novel, she uses the term ‘risk’ three times to describe Dark’s modernist experiment, arguing that ‘It’s a book that lives on the edge, a book about arguing passionately for your beliefs and rights, about taking risks and saying no to blind conformism’ (186), that it contains ‘an argument about the risks of a scientific model as a basis for controlling human behaviour’ (189), and that it is part of a ‘continuing story’ in a tradition of Australian women’s writing ‘about taking risks, asking questions, about women, especially, who refuse to conform’ (189). In this essay I will argue that Prelude to Christopher not only constitutes an extraordinary experiment in its form but, I will show, in the way it positions emotion itself as a risk to the stability of the nation. In its attention to the threat of madness, the novel articulates an anxiety about the future to come: the risk of psychological and cultural collapse, the uncertainty about the child to be born, and the hazards associated with the construction of a new nation. In its perilous implication that ‘we’re all psychologically ill,’ Prelude to Christopher suggests an inevitable dystopia, a sharp critique of the idealisation of the nation and thus marking the beginning of modernist social critique in Australia.

Files associated with this item cannot be displayed due to copyright restrictions.