Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Miscellaneous frontmatter
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction: Writing Patrimony: The Son's Book of the Father as a Sub-genre
- Part I Challenging Authority
- Part II Memorialising Self-Denial
- Chapter Three ‘Words to Keep Fully Amongst Us’: Honouring the Father in Raimond Gaita's Romulus, My Father
- Chapter Four ‘I Really Was the Son of Such a Man’: Replacing the Father in Richard Freadman's Shadow of Doubt: My Father and Myself
- Part III Performing Masculinity
- Conclusion: The Turn to the Father in Autobiography
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter Three - ‘Words to Keep Fully Amongst Us’: Honouring the Father in Raimond Gaita's Romulus, My Father
from Part II - Memorialising Self-Denial
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Miscellaneous frontmatter
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction: Writing Patrimony: The Son's Book of the Father as a Sub-genre
- Part I Challenging Authority
- Part II Memorialising Self-Denial
- Chapter Three ‘Words to Keep Fully Amongst Us’: Honouring the Father in Raimond Gaita's Romulus, My Father
- Chapter Four ‘I Really Was the Son of Such a Man’: Replacing the Father in Richard Freadman's Shadow of Doubt: My Father and Myself
- Part III Performing Masculinity
- Conclusion: The Turn to the Father in Autobiography
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I say all this as his son, and because I say it at his funeral, I am conscious of the fact that many of you will believe that what I have said is, in the circumstances, an understandable and forgivable exaggeration. As God is my witness, I speak it as the truth about this singular man.
—Raimond Gaita, ‘Romulus Gaita: Turnings of Attention’It is only with Renunciation (Entsagen) that Life, properly speaking, can be said to begin.
—Thomas Carlyle, Sartor ResartusPolus. So you'd prefer to suffer injustice rather than do it?
Socrates. For myself I should prefer neither; but if it were necessary for me either to do or to suffer injustice, I should choose to suffer rather than do it.
—Plato, Plato's GorgiasRaimond Gaita and Richard Freadman have been quite explicit about the reasons for writing patriographies. In the acknowledgements of Romulus, My Father, Gaita discloses how it originated from the eulogy he gave at his father's funeral, which was subsequently published in the journal Quadrant. The book's closing pages briefly recount the act of giving this eulogy, a task he performed because ‘There was no one else who could do it’ (207). Gaita quotes from the conclusion of his funeral speech, summing up what has been a major task of his work: to define his father's distinctive and admirable form of decency. Gaita writes, ‘He was truly a man who would rather suffer evil than do it’ (208).
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- Chapter
- Information
- Australian PatriographyHow Sons Write Fathers in Contemporary Life Writing, pp. 61 - 86Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2013