But just as we must resist the temptation towards analogy and of the easy gesture of ‘elucidation’—of an image by its object, one text by another, Divine Comedy by La Divina Comedia, Kinsella by Dante—so too we must resist the notion that the world of the poem is subject to some structural formula, however complex, in which prosody and semantics are made to correspond in the facile sense of a ‘code.’ That is to say, in such a manner as to reinstate the notion that the ‘meaning of the work’—even of its formal ‘aspects’—necessarily draws upon some anterior co-ordinate object.

This at least is one implication of the term ‘distraction’ (each canticle in Kinsella’s Divine Comedy, for example, is subtitled ‘a distraction’ on one of the canticles of Dante’s text; e.g. ‘Purgatorio: Up Close. A distraction on Dante’s second canticle of the Divine Comedy‘). Insofar as the term ‘distraction’ appears to speak to allegorical assumptions about textual illustration, it also speaks to an allegory of text. ‘Distraction’ derives from the Latin ‘to draw’ or ‘to pull,’ and the word ‘tract’ encapsulates various aspects of this. We might think of a part of a working system—the intestinal tract, for example. Of an epigrammatical piece of writing—a religious tract or a philosophical tractatus. In this sense, ‘tract’ is related to ‘strophe’ (from which the term trope derives). On the one hand, the tract is an agrarian unit defined by the furrow produced by plowing; on the other, the strophe is the movement of the chorus in a Greek tragedy from one side of the stage to another, thus a ‘turning’ (just as the tract is defined by the turnings of the plough). The work of all this turning is a type of prosody. We might say, then, that in ‘dis-traction’ we encounter a prosody of détournement or, again, enjambment (a measure or line which, as a semantic unity, does not conventionally ‘come off,’ as Kinsella says; it turns in advance of resolution, which is thereby suspended, deferred, distracted.).

There is perhaps a play here between the work of ‘distraction’ and the notion of ‘un-doing’ (undoing what has been done by means of ‘atonement’ and ‘redemption’). But in place of the spiritual allegories in Dante, we have the burden of responsibility—as it were—of Divine Comedy to ‘account for’ its doppelganger, La Divina Comedia, by way of Kinsella’s reversioning, or un-doing (the task of writing to respond to, or for, its other—hence distraction and responsibility interact here on the level of an ethic vested in language itself. That is, at least insofar as it is bound to any work of poiesis—of bringing-forth, open-endedly—and of a certain techne—of so-called mechanical reproduction, refashioning, reinvention; the one mirroring and anticipating the other; mutually constituted. ‘[W]e have made our purgatory,’ Kinsella says, in the form of the fatal discourses we inhabit daily, ‘and have to unmake it to survive’ [5]). ‘It is the poet and his/her poetics,’ we are reminded, who ‘are the true schismatics’ (266).

And there are other modes of responsibility at work here, too. The doubling, for example, between the ‘theme’ of regional geographies (Kinsella’s topical preoccupation with a highly localized ‘wheatbelt region’ of Western Australia)[ref]’The wheatbelt is a specific area, but its extremes are far apart …’ John Kinsella, ‘Myths of the Wheatbelt,’ Contrary Rhetoric: Lectures on Landscape and Language, eds. Glen Phillips and Andrew Taylor (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2008) 163.[/ref] and poetic locality—both in the sense of ‘poetic geography’ (as expounded upon by Vico—a geography of transpositions) and of the ‘location’ or rather ‘locus’ of poetic sense (hence also a ‘political’ geography, as whenever we talk of sense we are really talking about ideologies).

While the schemato-tropic economy of Kinsella’s text mirrors the micro-macro organization of its ‘themes’ to the extent that the topology of the poem itself is nothing that can be situated—it is rather the situation itself; language in its universal ramification. Note: universal rather than total. Meaning, that the poem constitutes a cosmos—local-global—the one returning within the other, as what Buckminster Fuller once called ‘evolutionary complementation,’ and for which transcendence, as Kinsella says, ‘is conceptual, not real’ (267).

For this reason, too, there is nothing straightforward about the political economy of Kinsella’s work. Its whole mythos is one of dislocations, displacements, détournements, projected through the prism of locality onto Dante’s vision of a ruptured ‘finite universe.’ Where Dante’s text circulates between visionary pathos and a mass mechanization of the interior ‘polis’ of Renaissance Christian man, Kinsella’s is motivated by dispossession.[ref]See Kinsella, ‘Myths of the Wheatbelt,’ 162ff.[/ref] The grotesqueries of Dante’s intricately worked-out punishments, assembled into a vast, bureaucratic vision that fails, doubles the failed ‘beatific vision’ of Kinsella’s antipodean landscape, equally disfigured by past discourses of Romanticism, Enlightenment, Economic Rationalism, and Liberal-Nationalism—from ‘Australia Felix’ to a ‘place of nuclear abomination, pesticides, land degradation and political horror’ (267; alluding, among other things, to British nuclear testing at Maralinga; state and federal agricultural policies long dictated by petrochemical dollars; and Australia’s recent contributions to the global history of the concentration camp).

To this end, it is possible to read Kinsella’s Divine Comedy as an essay on ecology and the ideological struggle over the idea of nature and of the idea of ‘natural justice.’ A struggle which, like the political-economy at work in Dante’s Comedia, equally binds the idea of an ‘individual soul of man’ and the ‘nation state’—as Kinsella says, ‘hierarchically connected.'[ref]Kinsella, ‘Loyalties,’ Contrary Rhetoric, 248.[/ref]

And yet there can be no natural justice any more than there can be, in Blake’s words, natural religion (see ‘Canto: Polystyrene Soliloquy’). In each we are confronted with the failed allegories (of redemption? miraculation? the beatific vision?) on which utiopianism has always fed. Each term doubles back on itself; redemption always necessitates (and not merely implies) fundamental violence. The work of salvation, a brutalization (the endlessly self-righteous ‘missionary’ projects which, over two centuries, sought to Christianise the indigenous inhabitants of Australia out of existence—the ‘remainder’ of this racialist programme commonly referred to as ‘fringe-dwellers’).[ref]Kinsella, ‘Myths of the Wheatbelt,’ 164.[/ref]

Here Kinsella touches upon a difficult point—the vexed relation of logics and discourses of ‘redemption’ and the task of ‘restoration’; of conservation and the conservatism native to any status quo (i.e. the voice of the minoritarian ‘moral majority’ [the Western world’s analogue to Bolshevism]). Dispossession—the dispossession, for example, of the first Australians by their British usurpers—affects more than simply the metaphysical ‘status of man,’ and yet in perverse ways it is this metaphysical status which bears most heavily upon the experienced realities Kinsella ‘records’: above all, in the body of The Law (throughout Divine Comedy, the infamous law of ‘terra nullius’—which declared the pre-1788 landmass of Terra Australis to be empty, uninhabited—looms large).

Unavoidably, redemption and restitution are bound up with a particular discourse of negation (‘this southern hemisphere / they called ‘purgatory’’ [‘Canto of Antipodean Emergence—12—12.15pm from Greenhills to Doodenanning (34),’ 402]). By way of the law—of both civil and religious codes, of cultural norms, and so on —language itself is in a sense dispossessed of the capacity to affect any type of redress that is not already ‘compromised’ ahead of itself. Language is here ‘methodized.’ But just as Kinsella’s use of (regularized) stanzaic form may be said to be critical—to assume a form and by assuming, discredit it—so too the discourse of redemption, from Dante, is—by simulation, appropriation—critiqued: its terms exposed as being in fact contiguous with dispossession. To the extent, indeed, that we may see dispossession as the underwriting principle of all myths of the ‘individual soul of man’ and the ‘nation state’—which is to say, of all individual and collective property.

If we suppose that Kinsella’s Divine Comedy is, in effect, an appropriation of Dante, a type of ‘plagiarism’ as it were, then Kinsella’s entire text must also be viewed as a critique of the very idea of property—above all, the concept of property vested in the notion of ‘ownership’ of discourse—of law, of history, of topography even (landscape, of course, and especially ‘nature’ are owned concepts—to the extent that they are contested, and consequently contestable). And within this system of ownership we are obliged, too, to include literatures—specifically, works of literature such as Dante’s Comedia, which have become a particular type of cultural property—whose status, let’s say, is held to be beyond criticism.

Kinsella’s ‘distractions,’ then, require an additional consideration: that here ‘distraction’ implies a necessary task, a specifically critical task, of drawing Dante’s (but not only Dante’s) text out from behind the veils of canonicity. And this implication is vast. It necessitates a recognition, in the first place, of a whole other language. As in Rauschenberg’s ‘drawings,’ something in the very structure of ‘the image’ touches upon the visible where before there was, so to speak, nothing. The invisible armature of discourse is thrown, in some way, into relief. We are no longer concerned with two antecedent objects in juxtaposition, but with the objecthood of the juxtaposition itself. How terms like land/scape operate, for example, in that seeming gap between nature (so-called) and the beatific vision which transforms ‘it’ into paysage moralisé; the ‘aestheticisation’ of something with no categorical value into something that works—whether as an object of contemplation, of agriculture, or of any other form of property (‘old maps with their absences / remake hemispheres’ [‘Canto of Antipodean Emergence…,’ 402]). It is no accident, for Kinsella, that the pastoral introjects a certain missionary project into the framing of geography as something redeemed from a kind of oblivion (‘paddocks’ from ‘salt-water and krill’ [7])—whether by means of ideology alone, or by ‘genetic modification, hybridizing, cloning …'[ref]Kinsella, ‘Myths of the Wheatbelt,’ 169.[/ref]

They dream ocean currents here: landlocked,
low-rise valley, foot of purgatory
tidal and exposed to the drag of planets.

['Dream Canto: Egotistical Sublime,' 7]

In short, it veils the proximity of an abyss—’the Inferno,’ as Kinsella writes, ‘of the psyche, of the imagination, of how we perceive …’ (265).