He was as ful of love and paramour
As is the hyve ful of hony sweete:
Wel was the wenche with hym myghte meete.
(From ‘The Cook’s Tale’, The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer c.1387)

Although literature which invents – poetry, drama, fiction – is considerably younger than the earliest civilisations, oral tale-telling is much older: one hundred thousand years ago language, art and religious ritual were combining to propel homo sapiens sapiens on its singular journey away from other mammals. From about 8000 BC the practice of cereal cultivation, as opposed to cereal foraging, created the conditions for settled communities, one feature of which was an inevitable division into those who, through the accumulation of surplus food, were able to use it to control the labour of others. Such complexity required an explicable management system. It developed in the form of pictographs, which evolved into cuneiform, about 3000 BC. Cuneiform was a Sumerian invention, Sumer being one of the world’s first known civilisations – the area south of Baghdad between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, currently awash with Humvees, misery, deep anger and corpse trees, the red ‘fruits’ of which are body parts.

Wedge-shaped cuneiform signs were marked into soft clay with a stylus. They represented objects, words and latterly ideas and reached an unwieldy 600 or more. The term ‘fiction’ can be traced back through its Latin root to mean working in clay; perhaps fiction, creative nontruth, with its cerebral and abstract demands – the suspension of disbelief – played a role in the evolution away from cuneiform and hieroglyphics towards the greatly reduced alphabets of that part of the world.

The earliest recognisable ‘novels’ are Egyptian and date to about 2000 BC. (Sinuhe is about a shipwrecked man); the dates of The Iliad and The

Odyssey are as unknown as their author, Homer, and both texts derive from oral stories, so they may be the oldest fictions of all; Babylon’s Gilgamesh is also one of the earliest examples of the form.

The Greek alphabet introduced vowels (the Arabic alphabet has very few vowels, Hebrew none) and Greek novels were written from the fifth century BC, though few survive, and those that were translated continued to be read into modern times. These novels strongly influenced subsequent Latin writers – Cicero, Livy, Ovid, Virgil, Horace. Yet the more flexible language of the uneducated classes, Vulgar Latin, was to have greater influence on future Romance languages, one reason being that the plebeians, unbound by grammatical strictures, readily incorporated new words into their vocabulary.

Shades of English, the great borrower. Ever since Anglo-Saxon became Old English (449 AD-1100), which became Middle English (1100-1500), then Early Modern English (1500-1660), the language has absorbed words from everywhere. Affixation (prefixes, suffixes), onomatopeia, and free formation of compounds (thunderstorm, outback) also helped swell the vocabulary to over a million entries in the most comprehensive OED.

Writers in English, on most of the continents, have taken singular advantage of that size and flexibility. Arguably, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (1385?), although an 8000-line verse composition, has a psychological complexity to its characters rendering it the first English novel; likewise he may be regarded as the father of English poetry. But there is another reason for quoting him at the head of this editorial. We recognise ful, hyve, hony, hym. Six hundred years dead they may, yet a remarkably similar English offshoot is rapidly developing: eva, neva, wot, hav, bibi, are just a few samples of SMS-MSN vocabulary, a distinctly new kind of Vulgar English practised by millions of young people worldwide. Other words are organic abbreviations: jst, mst, dg, ppl, soz, jk, k cya (just, must, dog, people, sorry, joke, okay, see you); a third form replaces words with letters or numerals: y, r, u, b, o, 2, 4; a fourth combines them: b4, m8, h8, l8, l8r, sk8, g2g (before, mate, hate, late, later, skate, got to go); a fifth form inventively adds to the tradition of acronyms: nm, lol, brb (nothing much, laugh out loud, be right back). Are our poems and novels destined to once again resemble a kind of Middle English?

Perhaps. And, although this won’t please defenders of the Lyn Truss school of proper English, it may be that younger writers are going to break free of a literary tradition which, in Australia at any rate, now appears to be trying to break free of them. A comprehensive analysis of contemporary Australian literature published recently in The Age Review (August 14, 2004) makes disturbing reading. Almost without exception mainstream publishers are publishing fewer novels. Just 124 Australian novels were published in 2003 – proportionately far fewer than in the US and UK. In the article Text publisher Michael Heyward is quoted as saying, ‘There’s a terrifyingly small number of writers under 40 who are making their reputations’.

Why is this so? Over the past decade there has been a sharp, even dramatic increase in would-be novelists and poets, products of creative writing courses and units offered through universities, Tafe and Adult Education. These, at the very least, improve technical skills. Yet the resulting equation – more young writers = fewer young authors – is plainly illogical (though one could take the view that formalising the creative writing process somehow blunts originality). In the Review piece journalist David Marr, a Miles Franklin Award judge for three years, doesn’t hold back in his criticism of much of today’s fiction with its inner city settings. There is very little ‘good’ or ‘robust’ Australian writing, and hard political and social issues are avoided.

If our fiction is losing its originality in favour of being bland and urban, presumably to suit a bland, urban readership, that is, indeed, terrifying. At least we know that there’s a cyclical element to publishing, that today’s vogue (popular nonfiction) will fill tomorrow’s remainder bin.

This issue of Island leads with extended features on novelist Christopher Koch and poet and publisher Tim Thorne. Represented in another way, through the insert for his new book, is Geoff Dean. Koch and Dean are in their seventies, Thorne is sixty. The works of all three have been strongly influenced by Tasmania. Koch’s novels have achieved worldwide acclaim over twenty years. Thorne has had his poetry published, and he has published much by others, since the early seventies; Geoff Dean’s published short stories number in the hundreds (he is acknowledged as a founder member in the editorial of the first, 1979 issue of the Tasmanian Review, which became Island). Koch, Thorne and Dean are nothing if not robust in their commitment to their three different forms, the novel, the poem, the short story, and have been so for decades. Island is very pleased to salute them. Younger writers are coming through. Many will first be published in literary magazines. They too will go on to long and successful careers as writers. How vulgar their English will be, however, is not yet known.