Question 7

“Is it because we see our world only darkly that we surround ourselves with lies we call time, history, reality, memory, detail, facts? What if time were plural and so were we? What if we discovered we begin tomorrow and we died yesterday, that we were born out of the deaths of others and life is breathed into us from stories we invent out of songs, collages of jokes and riddles and other fragments?”

This quote establishes a key device that Flanagan deploys throughout the text. He is interested in cyclical time, inspired by the Yolŋu concept of the “fourth tense,” which can only be expressed in “fragments.” Question 7 is itself a series of fragments that aim to capture the concept of Memory, Understanding, and Forgiveness in a cyclical, plural time where events have happened, are happening, and will happen simultaneously.

“That kiss would, in time, beget death which would, in turn, beget me and the circumstances of my life that lead to the book you now hold, a chain reaction which began over a century ago, and all of which will lead to the unlikely figure of my father, unlikely in that he is to appear in a story with, among others unknown to him, H. G. Wells and Rebecca West.”

Flanagan draws inspiration for his text’s format from physicist Leo Szilard’s concept of a “chain reaction” wherein events trigger multiple other events in time. In this quote, he describes how one such initial action—a kiss between H. G. Wells and Rebecca West—culminated in the creation of the nuclear bomb, its deployment in Hiroshima, his father’s survival, the author’s own birth, and the text Question 7 itself.

“Experience is but a moment. Making sense of that moment is a life.”

Flanagan interrogates the meaning and purpose of life throughout Question 7. He traces Historical Connections Across Space and Time. This aphoristic expression of this idea is used twice in the text once to discuss his father’s relationship with his background to his convict and once in reference to his father’s possible Aboriginal heritage. Flanagan describes how his father felt shame about this heritage even as he did not take offense to “those who accused him as an adult of being ‘half-caste’” (227), demonstrating that his father accepted these connections to his ancestors.

“For memories too have their moment. There is a time for forgetting and a time for remembering and then even that time becomes a memory and, after a further time, nothing at all.”

As part of his reflections on the theme of memory, understanding, and forgiveness, Flanagan struggles with the fleeting nature of memory. He has a nuanced view of memory, as expressed here. On a personal level, he understands it might be healing to forget things, as when his father forgets his time in the POW camp. On a historical level, though, he recognizes the importance of remembering atrocities that were committed like the genocide of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people.

“Fiction may be only fancy yet reality is often no more than the enthusiastic answer we give to our dreams and nightmares.”

Flanagan recognizes that reality is not linear and logical. He describes in detail how H. G. Wells and Leo Szilard’s utopian visions of a rationally ordered scientific world resulted in catastrophe. In this quote, Flanagan uses Chekhov’s notion of irrationality to explain how “reality” acts in response to “our dreams and nightmares,” in this case, reality responded to dreams of a nuclear bomb and the nightmare of a nuclear apocalypse.

“The past then was different than the past is now; further away and harder to find, it receded more quickly and was little recorded in comparison to today, existing only in archives far away or sometimes not at all.”

Flanagan uses poetic language to express a philosophical reflection on the nature of historical connections across space and time. He alludes to the “silence or lies” about the Tasmanian Aboriginal genocide and the convict “slave” labor system (103). He suggests that due to the paucity of resources, it’s easier for people in Tasmania to overlook or “forget” the terrible things that had happened.

“Increasingly, I expect that in my final moments I will wake in the river dark, discovering I never left and am now to drown, and that the only novel I ever wrote was my life.

Perhaps this is a ghost story and the ghost me.”

Flanagan uses the motif of death throughout Question 7 to explore the nature of his personal history—and the interconnectedness of personal and global events. In this quote, Flanagan reflects on his own “death” in the Franklin River during a kayak accident when he was 21. He is still haunted by the trauma of that experience. Since he feels he died that day, he refers to himself as a “ghost” in the novel of his own life.

“Life is always happening and has happened and will happen, and the only writing that can have any worth confounds time and stands outside of it, swims with it and flies with it and dives deep within it, seeking the answer to one insistent question: who loves longer?”

Flanagan combines two of the organizing principles of the text, the “fourth tense” conception of time and Chekhov’s “question 7” to reflect on the nature of writing—a central theme in the text. Here, Flanagan describes his goal for what Question 7 will accomplish: to “confoun[d] time and stan[d] outside of it.” This notion explains the looping chronology and poetic language he uses to construct the text.

“Fiction was transforming into physics and physics into the future in front of the Southampton Row traffic lights, and he saw that future as the abyss that exists before birth and after death, an oblivion at the beginning and end of all human consciousness.”

In this quote, Flanagan describes Leo Szilard’s epiphany regarding nuclear chain reactions while observing the traffic lights in London. Szilard was inspired by H. G. Wells’s novel The World Set Free, to which Flanagan refers when he writes “fiction was transforming into physics.” Flanagan uses historical fiction techniques to give insight into Szilard’s mindset at this key moment.

“The paradox of Leo Szilard is that as his life progresses, this brilliant man with an almost mystical ability to see the future nevertheless seems to come under the spell of a mediocre novel so completely that at first the book appears to predict his life only to then mock it.”

As Flanagan explores the nature of writing, he grapples with its possible negative implications. In this quote, he notes the increasing divergence between Szilard’s utopian vision, inspired by H. G. Wells’s work in which a brilliant diplomat brings the world together to stop nuclear proliferation, and the dystopian reality of the historical events it catalyzed. Despite his lifelong efforts, Leo Szilard was unable to use diplomacy to enact the former and stop the latter.

“What if vengeance and atonement both are simply the lie that time can be reversed and thereby some equality, some equilibrium restored, some justice had? Is it simply truer to say Hiroshima happened, Hiroshima is still happening, and Hiroshima will always happen?”

In this reflection on memory, understanding, and forgiveness, Flanagan uses the “fourth tense” syntactical model to suggest that forgiveness or “atonement” is not possible as relates to historical atrocities like Hiroshima. Instead, he feels it is more truthful to simply understand and acknowledge that these atrocities are cyclical and continuously resonant.

“If we were to rise above it, above the mountains, and the island at the end of the world in which they sit, would we be able to see advancing from another direction Western time—with its insatiable greed and its monstrous appetite, Western time with its new machines, Western time that will shortly dam the rivers and gobble the rainforest—would we see all that, and with it the coming reign of those promoting infinite theft from a finite world?”

In this quote, Flanagan criticizes the capitalist system and its exploitation of natural resources, particularly in his home in Tasmania. He frames this critique with a repudiation of “Western time,” or linear, teleological development based on industrialization and quantification. Elsewhere in the text he frames such industrialization as a colonial concept that was imported by the British to Tasmania, a place that holds to a cyclical understanding of time and has traditions stretching back 40,000 years. Essentially, he argues that with the importation of “Western time” came Western capitalism and industrial exploitation of natural resources.

“What is a writer but a robber and what is the history of literature but a milky way of theft?”

As Flanagan reflects on his own writing practice, he admits that he stole his father’s line that “the written word was the first beautiful thing he ever knew” (158). Although Flanagan does not specify what he means precisely beyond this point, the quote alludes to the way that writers build on the words and lives of others, taking and incorporating elements into their own stories.

“There was no straight line of history. There was only a circle. Everything, finally, was as the ancient petroglyphs depicted it: a circle circling within circles, the island’s great idea of time formulated over 40,000 years of human experience.”

Flanagan argues that in Tasmania (“the island”), time does not operate according to the linear notions of “Western time,” but rather is cyclical. He connects this idea to the imagery shown in the circle patterns of “ancient petroglyphs” carved into rocks by Aboriginal Tasmanian people thousands of years prior, such as those depicted on these rocks that were returned to the Aboriginal community from Tasmania Museum and Art Gallery in 2019.

“Whatever Rosebery was, Rosebery was not literature. Rosebery and Tasmania with it were a world which had never really existed in novels. And denied the liberating lies of the novel, Tasmania tended to novelise its own experience.”

In Question 7, Flanagan reflects on the nature of writing and his own feelings of having told lies about his people and past through novelization. He seeks to rectify those past mistakes by retelling those stories in the creative nonfiction form of the novel. Elsewhere, he notes that the novel is a form from the imperial core (Britain) and that its “liberating lies” do not have bearing in Tasmania.

“Perhaps, inevitably, when anyone faces the apocalypse, the example of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people comes up. In Vonnegut’s telling in Cat’s Cradle, they were ‘hunted for sport’ by the first English settlers ‘who were convicts.’ The Tasmanian example is the ur-story of the end of the world, much imitated and never rivalled.”

Flanagan notes the way that the attempted genocide of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people is used as the “ur-story” for other genocides, underscoring his thematic engagement with historical connections across space and time wherein events occur cyclically and simultaneously. While he does not directly compare tragedies like Hiroshima and the genocide, he acknowledges their shared roots.

“Tragedy is sometimes understood as the conflict of one good against another. A more nuanced form of this idea is that tragedy is the conflict between what is perceived to be a lesser evil against what is perceived to be a greater evil. Tragedy exerts its hold upon our imaginations because it reminds us that justice is an illusion. Hiroshima is the great tragedy of our age from which we continue to seek understanding and yet can never understand.”

In this quote, Flanagan explores the relationship between memory, understanding, and forgiveness. He rejects moral binaries, instead acknowledging how human activities are interlinked and often morally gray. He suggests here that forgiveness and understanding of tragedies are essentially impossible.

“I realise writing this that memory is as much an act of creation as it is of testimony, and that one without the other is a tree without its trunk, wings without a bird, a book without its story.”

Flanagan reflects further on the nature of memory, understanding, and forgiveness in light of the fact that his father forgot everything about his time in the POW camp in Japan in his final years. He acknowledges that while memory is essential to understanding an event as a form of “testimony” it is also part of how people create their personal realities of their lives. In forgetting his POW experiences, Flanagan’s father was left only with a story of “love.”

“It was as if it were all finally a matter of question 7, of who loves longer, for white people had begun in some ways to think like black people. Despite themselves, they had begun living in the circles of time with which the Tasmanian Aboriginal people had once marked their island. They were not Aboriginal. Over time many became racist. But nor were they any longer European.”

Flanagan describes the hybrid culture that developed over generations in Tasmania. His own life story and orientation toward the imperial core (Britain) is exemplary of this. He discovers he may have Aboriginal Tasmanian ancestors and has adopted an Aboriginal understanding of cyclical time and the “fourth tense” to express his worldview.

“If I weary of the enormous Martian condescension, the endless Martian capacity for patronising, the unquestioned Martian superiority, the unending Martian arrogance that is always founded in an equal Martian stupidity and an unrivalled Martian ignorance, it is not because I think they alone are uniquely guilty.

It is because they cannot conceive—as Kafka could—that we all are.”

Flanagan draws a connection between the Martian invaders in H. G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds and the British colonialists in Tasmania. From this point, he uses “Martian” as a label for the British. In this quote, he expresses frustration about British feelings of superiority over the colonized (or formerly colonized) and their lack of recognition of their role in the atrocities, including genocide, perpetuated against Aboriginal Australians.

“I only write this book that you are now reading, no more than a love note to my parents and my island home, a world that has vanished, because over a century ago another writer wrote a book that decades later seized another mind with such force that it became a reality that reshaped the world. It was a story of horror that was his fear of love, complete love without measure or boundary, and he created in its place an idea of destruction without limit. In this way, the world begat a book that would in turn beget the world.”

Flanagan notes the dualistic nature of writing, arguing that Wells wrote a book that had destructive consequences out of a “fear of love.” Flanagan seeks to do the opposite with Question 7. He hopes that by writing from a place of “love,” he can use the power of writing to similarly inspire others, but this time to create a better world.

“The blessing of everything that lives everything that lives is holy. No comma no commas ever a world without punctuation fences gates trespassing signs for a time that’s where I lived there a borderless world there with stunned gratitude there.”

This highly poetic quote expresses Flanagan’s overwhelming sense of love, gratitude, and oneness with the world, its creatures, and the people he cares about following his near-death experience. The lack of punctuation is both a metaphor for the “borderless” world and an indication of the immediacy of his writing, expressed through stream-of-consciousness.

“In the depths of my soul there was simply before I died and after I died.”

Flanagan feels that he “died” in the kayaking accident and that he came back from death that day forever altered by the experience. He felt unable to express this feeling at the time, but he felt it “in the depths of [his soul].” In writing about his experience in Question 7, he gets at the nature of those ambiguous, personal things that are not easily quantified or analyzed, as illustrated in the Chekhov story “Questions Posed by a Mad Mathematician” from which Question 7 takes its title.