Literary politics in the Anthropocene

Below is a fairly unaltered copy of a paper presented mid-year at the Australasian Association for Literature's  'Literature and Science' conference. Seeing Ian McEwan's Solar in a bookstore window, recently, reminds me of this paper and one of its central purposes: to place Solar against Andrew McGahan's much more interesting novel about the connections between climate, libido, madness, magic realism and sublime geological experience. 

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Can we understand the geological sublime? Ian McEwan's Solar and Andrew McGahan's Wonders of a Godless World.

A quick precis before offering the detail of this paper. Firstly, I’ll outline historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s recent essay on the challenges to historical practice posed by anthropogenic global warming, and focus in particular on his argument that placing human species history in conversation with histories of capital—a conversation or dialogue that he claims is necessitated by climate change—is an exercise in probing the limits of historical understanding.  In the second part, I’ll draw on one of the central arguments in Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative: which is that whether in fictional or historical form, narrative can work with, and on, the aporia produced by thinking cosmological and phenomenological time together. The hypothesis that is built out of the first two parts of the paper is that fiction’s capacity to refigure time provides distinctive resources in pushing the limits of understanding.

The third and final parts test this hypothesis against two recent novels that take climate change as a central subject: Ian McEwan’s Solar and Andrew McGahan’s Wonders of a Godless World. Finally, running through these last two parts will be my claim that in spite of it not being explicitly concerned with anthropogenic global warming, McGahan’s novel more successfully addresses itself to the ways that fiction can partake in the politics of climate change because its key characters are intimate with geological time and have degrees of geological agency. Effectively, they have understandings of dimensions of geological time and space that might usually be experienced as sublime.

1. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Climate of History.

Chakrabarty’s essay “The Climate of History: Four Theses” is a series of cumulative arguments which set out the ramifications of climate change for human histories. I’ll quickly outline the first three theses, before unpacking the fourth a little more.

Thesis 1: Anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse between the Age-old distinction between natural and human history.

Chakrabarty argues once you accept anthropogenic global warming, or other human-induced causes for climate and geological change, then the human history/natural history dichotomy collapses due to human species being considered geological agents: a force of nature in the geological sense akin to those events when there has been mass extinctions of species. So, rather than nature being portrayed as the unchanging, seasonally cyclic backdrop to the theatre of political or social history, these backdrops have come to life and must be presented as more dynamic and enmeshed in human history than before.  The inverse is also true: that natural histories that cover the last 250 years need to take our geological agency as a species into account.

Thesis 2: The idea of the Anthropocene, the new geological Epoch when humans exist as a geological force, severely qualifies humanist histories of modernity/ globalization.

For Chakrabarty humanist histories of modernity and globalization place freedom at their centre. The story of the last 250 years of human civilization is, he claims, thematically centred on the development and spread of freedom. Yet, the last 250 years has also been periodized as the new geological epoch of the Anthropocene. The previous epoch of the Holocene, stretching back around 10 to 12, 000 years, provided a rise in temperature conducive to agrarian civilization. But since the onset of the industrial revolution, the affect on the earth of fossil fuel use has shifted it into a new set of conditions in which human species are geologically potent. To place geological and human time scales together like this is quite unsettling, and one implication of this polyrhythm is we are led to conclude that, to quote Chakrabarty, “The mansion of modern freedom stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil fuel use.”

Thesis 3: The geological hypothesis regarding the Anthropocene requires us to put global histories of capital in conversation with the species history of humans.

The argument here is that it is at the level of species, and not nations, for example, that humans have become geological agents in the last 250 years. This argument, however, is not compatible with global histories of capital in which uneven development and intra and inter-national inequality mean that the benefits of industrialization have not been enjoyed in a just manner. Similarly, within recent histories of globalization the problems posed by climate change are a matter of a crisis in capitalist management. Chakrabarty poses the question “If capitalism were to mutate beyond its current forms or even to end, would climate change still pose a problem?” His answer is that it would and it does because there are certain boundary or parameter conditions, such as temperature bands, which once crossed spell the end of the species, whether our dominant system is capitalism or not. We therefore can’t subsume species history of humans to histories of global capital but instead need to place them in dialogue.

We are now at the fourth and crucial thesis, which is

Thesis 4: The cross-hatching of species history and the history of capital is a process of probing the limits of historical understanding.

This cross-hatching or conversation between species history and history of capital throws up the enormous problem of historical understanding. Chakrabarty is using understanding here in a technical sense, derived from the hermeneutic tradition, where the primary technique of interpretation in human sciences, like history, is the practice of re-imagining or re-enacting the life experience of others based on your own life. Humanist history is also based in the technique of explanation—a technique it shares with the natural sciences. But the argument here is that while we can give explanations for what caused, say, the depression of the 1930s, and while we can understand what it might have been like to have lived through those times—explanations and understandings that are available to us in histories of capital—we can offer only explanations for how human species are and have become geological agents. The reason we cannot understand ourselves as human species is because we can never experience ourselves as a species. Chakrabarty: “Even is we were to emotionally identify with a word like mankind, we would not know what being a species is, for, in species history, humans are only an instance of the concept species as indeed would be any other life form. But one never experiences being a concept.” As he also puts it: “ There can be no phenomenology of us as a species.”

2. Time and Narrative

The problem Chakrabarty develops is dealt with on a more general level in Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative. Ricoeur wants to know, alongside other questions, if we can reconcile our lived or phenomenological experience of time with what can be called, objective, cosmological, or universal time. These two forms of time map fairly neatly onto the problem that Chakrabarty puts his finger on: namely, how can we reconcile phenomenological time—the time of understanding—with human species and geological time—the time made available through quantification and explanation? Ricoeur’s response is that narrative can figure time in ways that enable degrees of understanding and explanation, which help us to bridge these two poles of time. Ricoeur makes a series of distinctions between historical and fictive time, two of which will help make the transition in my argument here toward its discussion of Solar and Wonders of a Godless World. Unlike narrative historical time, fictive time removes a set of constraints on the narrator who as historian needs to re-inscribe lived time onto cosmic time through reference to such temporalizations of time as calendars, generations, and archival traces. Secondly, and related to the first point, fiction can explore new figurations of lived time that can be related to cosmological time in new ways. Freed from some of the constraints of historical time, fiction can, perhaps, assist us to imaginatively understand what a conversation between human species history and a history of capital can be, or to understand what the geological agency of human species might be like to experience.

So, the hypothesis built here out of the first two parts of the paper is that fiction’s capacity to refigure time provides distinct resources in probing the limits of understanding. I now turn to the third and fourth parts of the paper, which will test this hypothesis.

3. Solar 

Ian McEwan’s Solar, published earlier this year, takes climate change, its politics and economics, as its central topic and focus for a comic satire. Its central literary techniques are narratorial irony and synecdoche, in particular the fleshing out of the central character—Noble prize winning physicist, Michael Beard—as a despicably, all-too-human assemblage of sins and flaws which is part of a whole humanity unsuited to the altruism called out by the challenges of climate change. His is a part of the glutton-ness, slothful, proud, lustful, greedy, wrathful and envious whole. A whole beholden to Neoliberal capitalism with little altruism to recommend it. McEwan’s narrator focalizes the narration through Beard and his numerous adventures, varying the level of irony to achieve satiric effects, and to oscillate between a distancing and drawing close to Beard who we are invited to both despise and empathize with. This oscillation in narratorial distance combined with its satirical aims, make Solar a realist comic apocalypse novel. Again, the apocalyptic allegory runs through Beard, whose appetites—one too many sandwiches or packets of chips, one too many sexual affairs—are speeding up his own end, which we are encouraged to think of as an allegory of the end of the species. His appetites are, however, not tragic but comic flaws, for in spite of his sinfulness, he has some redeeming attributes, and is himself sometimes victim to the sinful drives of others.

Solar’s presentation of technological innovation, biophysics research, institutional (bureaucratic, academic, state) politics, and capitalist entrepreneurialism, provide both the novel’s targets for satire and its pathway through to a more redemptive and hopeful opening, emblematized in the central character, Beard’s, ambivalent ‘final’ feeling: an intensely strong emotion, which is either a last heart attack/stroke, or his paternal love for his young daughter, whose long future, his efforts—almost as a by product of his drives/sinfulness—in the field of photosynthetic energy production, might well ensure. 

Solar has been received and marketed within the framework of the politics of climate change. McEwan appeared on ABC’s Lateline commenting on the Copenhagen Conference, for example. But how, if at all, does it refigure time? Does it help us to understand the sublime dimensions of a geological time that is now affected by human species activity?

Solar offers one figuration of time with which to develop an understanding of the relationship between human species time and geological time. This scene comes at the start of part 2 as Beard’s plane prepares to land at London, in 2005. As it descends, Beard has a geographically wide-angled and longue duree vision of the city and its surrounds which juxtaposes key events, relationships, places and concerns in his life with the rise of industrialization and modernization. “The hot breath of civilization. He felt it, everyone was feeling it, on the neck, in the face. Beard, gazing down from his wondrous and wonderfully dirty machine believed in his better moments that he had the answer to the problem. At last, he had a mission, it was consuming him, and he was running out of time. “ (Kindle version location. 1756-63). The central metaphor in this scene is his own apartment, which is full of spore-infested food and unwashed dishes. This trope becomes an emblem in the final passage of this section, when he wonders “how could we ever begin to restrain ourselves? We appeared, at this height, like a spreading lichen, a ravaging bloom of algae, a mould enveloping a soft fruit – we were such a wild success. Up there with the spores!” (loc. 1833-47). Human species spreading over the rocks as lichen. It’s a nice image but not one that really opens up a way of understanding geological agency in the Anthropocene.

Solar doesn’t really help us to understand what living in the Anthropocene means, except that human species, in spite of ourselves, might have a future by virtue of a liberal techno-scientific-capitalism that we hope will function to produce new energy sources. The logics of physics and the market seem to lie outside this comically corrupted human species, and these are, it seems, what we might best place our faith in. Solar’s comic apocalyptic mode, avoids the fatalism, even biocentrism, of some ecological discourse, and provides a more pluralistic and provisional set of openings to the problems of the Anthropocene than a novel written with the conventions of a tragic apocalypse. But unless you can stretch the allegory so far as to see Beard’s body as an emblem of the geological body of the earth, I don’t see how Solar can be read within the problematic that Chakrabarty draws attention to.

4. Wonders

Andrew McGahan’s 2009 novel Wonders of a Godless World—which will be shortened to Wonders—is oriented around the relationship between madness, geological human agency, and geological phenomena. There are very few comic moments in this mix of science fiction and magic realism, and it treads a more tragic apocalyptic generic terrain than Solar. Its central literary techniques are the use of alternating third and second person narrative voices, which are crucial in how the novel’s characters become able to experience and communicate sublime dimensions of geological phenomena and time. 

The plot involves a young woman known as the orphan, who is on the cusp of coming-of-age and who works in an unnamed island hospital with a range of mentally ill patients. A mysterious, almost constantly unconscious figure enters the hospital and her life—the Foreigner. The mythically titled characters extend to Four other inmates, all suffering from different forms of trauma-based madness, are given similarly mythic or archetypal names: the Duke, the Witch, the Archangel and the Virgin. The reason for these mythic and even fairytale-type names is that the orphan is almost completely aphasic: unable to express or understand speech and text. She has some linguistic facility, but cannot remember names. The third person narration of the novel is, somewhat magically focalized through her subjectivity, her thoughts. And here is where the plot develops, for the Foreigner, it transpires, can make himself understood to her and understand her through a type of psychic communication, which he performs in the second person narration of the novel. The Orphan’s possible madness becomes an undecidable question in the novel: is she hallucinating the dialogue with the Foreigner, who lies unconscious for much of the time of the novel, or is he engaged in a type of education for her which is a cover for a more menacing project?

The plot thickens when volcanic activity near the hospital is experienced by the orphan as a range of vibrations and felt forces, which she has the capacity to read in ways that are precise and predictive. If her linguistic aphasia is a form of madness, then this madness might be due to her astonishing geological literacy. The Foreigner is quick to detect these skills and begins his seduction of her, which includes a type of biospheric travel, where he and the Orphan leave their bodies, and travel together as shadow selves or ghost bodies to the freak climate and geological events that have caused him to die and be reborn 4 times.  In this string of 5 lives, the foreigner lives each life, motivated by his drive to either avenge or transcend his initial rejection by the earth, in a particular manner—as a rapacious mining venture capitalist, as a Gaia-worshipping conservationist, as a New Age transcendental Guru and solitary island dweller, and as an astronaut. In both these travels and in the stories the Foreigner re-enacts for the Orphan, we see phases in the history of capital, and see them start to act as geological agents. Indeed, the plot trajectory of Wonders is toward the Foreigner stoking then violently taking over the Orphan’s latent powers of geological telekinesis to enact his revenge on a malign earth, 

an immensely powerful beast. I saw the hard, carved faces carved faces of the continents, and the inexorable currents of the oceans flowing. I felt the atmosphere humming with electricity, and the inside of the planet bursting with suppressed heat. I sensed what a savage thing the world really is—strong, hot and driven by systems so vast that they dwarf mankind and all his works to nullity. (237)

In the final scenes of the novel, geological agency is embodied in these characters. Back in third person narration the Orphan attempts to act on the local volcano’s magma to assist in her benign scheme to thwart the Foreigner’s plot, by accessing

the aura of life enfolding the whole planet. So it wasn’t a matter of squeezing the power from herself, it was a matter of shaping her mind into a conduit through which the energy could pass—and then of inviting the power to flow from the planet’s vast supply.

The orphan took a deep breath, considered the magma once more. Then she breathed out, opened her mind, and asked . . .

And the living world answered.

Ha! It was like being accelerated to an incredible speed while standing still, it was like being lifted by a thousand warm hands. It was wonderful. And as the energy burnt though her, she turned it and focused it upon the underground reservoirs. The magma turned livid gold. And then to white hot, bursting upwards. (301)

In interviews McGahan has said his original intention was to write a novel with no human characters; only weather and geological events. Finding such a task outside the realm of the novel form, McGahan’s compromise is a novel where geology and climate are not so much ‘characters’ as intimately proximate and understandable phenomena. Finally, the Orphan’s “understanding” of natural energy systems seems to be based on principles (and feelings) of how phenomena act across dimensions of time-space different to those made available in the natural or human sciences. Her understanding, perhaps, is situated at the boundary between geological times and human species time(s).  She crosses that boundary, aided—for us as readers—by the Foreigner’s and the novel’s narrator’s narration of her thoughts and feelings, which push a fictional sense of understanding toward forms of madness that, in Aristotle’s theory of poetics, are a probable impossibility. 

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Seemingly locked into the closed circuitry of capitalist realism, a sustained political and cultural response to the challenges of climate change hits a number of walls. Understanding, rather than just explaining, that human species have been geological agents since around the time of the invention of the steam engine--for at least the last 250 years--confronts those fundamental liberal political rationalities that capitalist realism and its latest neoliberal phase are based in: that freedom is a function of the limits of the sovereign's or the state's capacity to promote security and growth; the corollary being that civil society and the 'market' are the spheres that 'naturally' produce security, growth and freedom. All three of these values of liberalism (biopolitics--the turn to life) are threatened by climate change: the physical conditions on which the life of human species depends are seriously under threat as temperatures rise. Liberalism's long rapprochement with a fossil fuelled capitalist economy is, it appears, unsustainable and no guarantee of the freedom, growth and security of the human species. Belief in the natural genius of the market, which is what underlies Neoliberalism's faith in non-government solutions to challenges, is what has led us into the anthropocene. Understanding that we have been in this new epoch for a while is surely a first step in forging a realignment of ethics and politics: new environmentalities, perhaps. 


Accepting the explanation of climate change in anthropogenic global warming, challenges our understanding of human and natural time, human and natural histories. Fictive narrative, myth, and even Big History provide ways into new realisms. These promise alternatives that can exceed the possibilities offered by the Neo-Lib/Neo-Con thinking that informs McEwan's glib, capitalist realist satire. 

Gordon's Boils: 1988 and the body of Australian writing

It being Australia Day, I've posted below an excerpt of my still being exmained PhD thesis that touches on some of the resonant themes arising out of Andrew McGahan's often 'misunderestimated' second novel 1988. The excerpt is from the second chapter and follows sections on McGahan's Praise, Christos Tsiolkas' Loaded, which both come after an analysis of former prime minister Paul Keating's language and story-telling.

The link between these political and literary readings is the argument that a close-reading of Keating's language divulges a narrativisation of Neoliberalism via the tropes and narrative structure of the coming-of-age genre: the Bildungsroman. This embedding of Neoliberal rationalities of government into Australian political culture is resisted through the Grunge novels of McGahan and Tsiolkas, among others -- resisted through refusing a successful coming-of-age. And in such refusal Grunge novels refocus the expectation of narrative closure around a successful maturation towards forms of 'development' that are diseased, drug-fucked, perverse. No development at all, but rather forms of time and space that are abject, atopic and arrhythmic.

1988, McGahan's wry 'prequel' to Praise, gets funnier with each subsequent reading. Yet its humour is presented in an Australian voice: taking the piss, laconic, not up itself, bordering on farce. Lacking sentimentality it offers a self-parody of the limits of the white body of Australian writing circa 1995 which is still relevant today.

There are a number of pasts that crises, like the current financial crisis, call back to in order to make sense of the present. The 1930s and the Great Depression and New Deal response in the USA is one. The moment in 1995 when Grunge literature emerged in the wake of the 1990-91 Recession is another. Its dismissal as marketing hype and immature writing, submerged beneath the Demindenko hoax and First Stone culture wars also of 1995, buried the consideration of aspects of Grunge fiction as employing youth-to-adulthood narrative form as a politics of literary form. The politics of such negation and refusal of literary coming-of-age is not mere rebellion but resides in the understanding of what neoliberalism abjects: a making of waste as is now more than apparent.

Australia day 2009 marks a point at which storms are gathering around tenets of Australian exceptionalism: that Australian trade was directly coupled to the decoupled Chinese economic growth miracle; that the contagion of financial collapse was contained over there . Unemployed, underemployed, and employed, it seems to me, are the identities that will increasingly come to define the next few years. When unemployment last reached 10%, in the wake of the 1990-91 Recession, Neoliberal techniques of governing conduct were intensified. Grunge fiction presents this intensification as forming the self: as Bildung. As unemployement grows, we could do worse than turn back to Grunge fiction for some cues as to the insiduous embedding of some Neoliberal techniques of governing. And how to understand and resist them.


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I had nothing else to do. I sat there thinking about time. It was 1988. Australia’s Bicentennial year. The country was two hundred years old. I was twenty-one. (McGahan, 1995b: 42)

I was a writer, not an economist (144).

If the long Labor decade was in Paul Keating and Paul Kelly’s narratives of nation the time when Australia came of age, the two-hundred-year anniversary of the physical settlement of British Australia in Sydney in 1988 was an event and year potent with similar meaning. 1988 is a significant year in Australian history. There was a mass media and government-directed set of celebrations, focussed on 26 January (Australia Day) commemorating the Bicentennial of British settlement (Bolton 1990: 282-86, Turner 1994: 66-92). These celebrations were met with protests against the legacies of what has become known, since 1988, as Invasion Day (“Invasion”). In cultural studies and critical analyses the Bicentennial year has been framed in terms of its representations and elisions of the violent legacies of colonial settlement and changes to the technology of national broadcast media and political economy that are present in the Australia Live: Celebration of a Nation television spectacular (Turner: 83-8, Morris, 1993).

These events and the investments made in them by Government prompted the selection of the year as a periodisation end-marker in a variety of histories. The fifth volume of the Oxford History of Australia, The Middle Way: 1942-1988, first published in 1990, terminates with the Bicentennial year, which Geoffrey Bolton presents as both a moment for reflection on the ambivalences of Australian modernity, and affirmation of a wary optimism: “there might in time arise a decent self-confidence in national identity” (291). The Penguin New Literary History of Australia (1988) was “assisted by The Australian Bicentennial Authority to celebrate Australia’s Bicentenary”, its ‘New-ness’ having to do with methods of literary history based on a “consciousness that it is written out of the present, and that the needs of the present must cause us to reassess ways of looking at the past (Hergenhan: ii, xii). Thus in the theory of history to be practised in this collection we can see a need and desire to revise Australian literary history on the basis of challenges that recent, new cultural forces pose. These new forces are also present in Ken Gelder and Paul Salzman’s The New Diversity: Australian Fiction 1970-88 (1989). The Bicentennial year is inscribed into the title alongside a description of the period that is reflected in its heterogeneous eleven chapters. Here a diverse assemblage of themes and forms results in some novels reappearing through different guises when placed under another interpretive rubric. The effect of this technique of literary history is to multiply interpretations; to pluralize any monologic narrative of literary progress. Instead the progress of Australian fiction is itself toward pluralism.

These three ‘Bicentennial year’ histories share an optimism concerning the prospects for an Australian future that is pluralised: ethnically, culturally and textually. This optimism was tied into the sense that the nation was modernising in ways intensified by the reconsideration of White beginnings and Aboriginal endings two hundred years prior. Ken Gelder writes, “200 years on, every white Australian must confront this [Aboriginal] other, recognize it, listen to it and [as represented in Aboriginal writing] read it” (1989: 205).

This optimism in a pluralising Australia, however, sat atop an ambivalence over the social and cultural implications of the changes in economic government of the federal state under the Australian Labor Party from 1983:

Australians [. . .] had a strongly developed tradition of equity which tempered many of the harsher manifestations of modern capitalism in difficult times.
This tradition of equity seemed in danger of eroding during the 1980s. As the gap grew between poorer Australians and the very rich no major political party seemed able or willing to curb the process. This was in part a reaction to the uncertainties of the world economy since the early 1970s, which had impelled corporations into multinational growth and nations into more strongly organized trading blocs. Australia’s traditional economic strengths and skills no longer seemed sufficient to ensure relative security. Unable to deliver prosperity, many public figures contended that Australia could no longer afford the redistributive policies which created greater equity: the less well-off must practice restraint in order that the powerful might succeed better in their attempts to create wealth. (Bolton, 1988: 290)

This was a pluralizing then also of structures of feeling. Specifically there was an optimism signalled by 1988 as the period marker of an ending for Australian colonialism, and thereby beginning of post-coloniality, that was articulated to a manic manifestation of that ‘ecstasy’ released by the enacting of Neoliberal political rationalities that Morris explicates. A more pessimistic structure of feeling centred around losses ranging from that of the political and cultural centrality of white working class men, to the hopes invested in Labor by a bloc of social formations which carried a nostalgia for the previous Labor Government and especially its leader, Gough Whitlam (Morris, 1998).

1988 is also the year when the 1987 radical reforms that Michael Pusey speaks of became embedded in bureaucratic cultures. In 1987 “a minor revolution” occurred with “Prime Minister Hawke’s Bastille Day announcement of sweeping structural changes to the administration of government” which reformed the structure of the federal Treasury and Finance departments (1991: 146-53). These changes centralised decision-making power within these departments and thereby enforced leaner and more efficient budgetary controls on what were seen as plump ministerial portfolio areas, such as the Higher Education sector, and increasingly inflicted codes of managerial practice on the administration of government (146-53). In late 1987 the Efficiency Scrutiny Unit, set up to report to Prime Minster Hawke on the status of the Public Service Board (that body that had for generations functioned to select and train all public service appointments), began its report with a preamble that rehearses the now familiar terms of the Neoliberal critique of government:

[t]he unit advised that reducing and removing unnecessary controls and interventions would generally enhance the competitiveness of the economy. It recommended that this problem needed to be addressed in a fundamental way after the election [11 July, 1987] and that the public sector, as one of the major areas of the economy which was generally sheltered from external pressures, must play its part in the adjustment process.
[T]he concepts and principles employed by successful private sector companies in becoming more competitive by becoming leaner, reducing excessive layers of management and decentralising decision making should be applied to the public sector. (cited in Pusey, 1991: 152)

For Pusey what his survey and questionnaire respondents considered to be emergent and “’mainly cosmetic’” shifts in the style of administration in aspects of the Federal Bureaucracy around 1985, had, by 1988 and 1989, become “fundamental shifts in the normative and structural foundations of public administration” (153). 1988 was thereby the year in which Neoliberalism continued its march through the state as well as through the citizen-subjects that comprised the population it Governed and secured.

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Andrew McGahan somewhat oddly authored not the next instalment in the life of his Praise hero, Gordon Buchanan, but the story of the episodes prior to Praise by taking this ‘epic’ year as a focus for his second novel. On the surface this decision to present a prequel leads to an expectation that some explanation for Gordon’s lethargy and fatalism would be revealed. 1988, however, is, like Praise, a novel wherein generic expectations are refused not simply as acts of literary rebellion but so that other elements of the narrative can come to the foreground. If Praise is like a sequence of episodes in a larger failed Bildungsroman then 1988 holds the promise of placing this failed fragmentary unbecoming-of-age novel into a longer chronological sequence by way of which a pattern of development emerges. Indeed, hints in Praise about Gordon’s literary past are given fuller exposition in 1988 as Gordon’s attempts at writing are a central part of this prequel’s plot. 1988 is generically a künstlerroman: an artist formation novel. It is also a negation of the genre, as we read 1988 through its historical future when Gordon’s writerly ambitions have been left behind. 1988 is thus formally a double refusal: of the artist and the man. These refusals direct our attention toward those discourses surrounding the Bicentennial year that themselves lean on temporalizations of completed formation and organic development. The politics of form in 1988, taken together with those of Praise, focus our attention toward what lies at the edges and limits of the dominant narratives of the Bicentennial year: what times, spaces, bodies, elements and stories lie in the liminal zones of this year of national coming-of-age. If Praise is a de-formation novel, a highly compressed failed Bildung then McGahan’s prequel, 1988, is a failed künstlerroman: a failed artist formation novel. Like Praise, 1988 takes a narrative form, and uses an un-becoming temporal structure through which to bring forth a series of liminal and problematic cultural themes and concerns. Illness again is a central trope of the narrative, but here mobility is thematised alongside the freedom that Gordon and his weather station co-worker Wayne attempt to attain. This is an inversion of settlement, and the encounters with the Asian invasion at the novel’s opening and with the Aboriginal settlement near Cape Don are both emblems of 1788 and 1988 and two key narrative themes of Australian European settlement. McGahan uses conventional narrative structures, which set up expectations – of a successful formation, or becoming an artist – only to negate them. But his purpose isn’t nihilist. Into the negation, rather, is placed Gordon’s techniques of self – Gordon’s attempts at avoiding normalised ways of becoming an adult white Australian male – the industrial citizen, or the Bush type – which require that he upset and unsettle these modes of formation.

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In the earlier section of this chapter I read Gordon and Cynthia as symbolic of the national economy. 1988 parodies and probes at the limits of the territorial nation, its White history and textual archetypes. It is a novel concerned with the textuality of White Australian modernity: invasion and settlement; Aboriginal communities; fears of Asian invasion; the bush myth; industrial citizenship; and the land itself, subject to weather that has complex temporalities. Again, the limits of the bodily self are placed alongside those of the territorial nation. Importantly there is a failed artist formation, or künstlerroman narrative in this novel, inviting us to read Gordon’s six months at Cape Don, including the trip there, as an allegory of a failed novel of nation: as a failure to write the novel of nation as a story by a formed artist. And yet metafictionally the fact of the novel itself is an argument for reading 1988 as a narrative of the Australian nation produced by an artist-writer in the form of McGahan.

As a Grunge novel 1988 rehearses the familiar representations of a failed formation of youth, here presented in the form of a failed artist-formation, as well as graphically depicted sex scenes, and sick bodies, with Gordon smote with boils alongside his asthma condition. The grunge tropes and chronotopes have a similarly unsettling effect on the narrative to those in Praise and, in part, in Loaded. As I argued in regard to Praise, a particularly productive way of reading the bodies in McGahan’s fiction is to read them as allegories of the national economy. Here I will argue that McGahan’s primary concern is metatextual: he is interested in the body of writing that constitutes the narrative of nation. If James Ley is right when he suggests that McGahan’s “novels can be seen as attempt to break down Australia’s recent history into its basic structuring narratives” and that he consistently “symbolizes [. . .] guilt [. . .] as a kind of disease” then we can see that Gordon’s duplicating boils are a type of emotional displacement and sometimes release for his failure to write at the same time as they symbolize blots on the body of the National text: “something huge inside me. Something dark and tight and swollen. A giant boil. Pus-ridden with denial. Pain was the only way to burst it, get rid of it forever” (Ley, 36, McGahan, 1995b: 298).

1988 is clearly a novel concerned with the legacies of colonialism and Aboriginal modernities. In order to make a case for this point I first need to draw the connection between Gordon’s failure to write and his development of boils. This connection is arguably established in chapter twenty eight when Gordon says,

[w]e were in our own limbo, stagnating under the dry season’s sun. Wayne wasn’t painting very much, I wasn’t writing at all. I slept and read and smoked. The smoking was my only form of progress. I’d mastered over ten cigarettes a day, and I was only enjoying them a little now. I’d acquired some style. My only worry was the asthma. I kept waiting for the attack, the deathgrip, but it never came.
Instead I developed a boil. It was on the back of my knee. (193)

Here the recent decision to begin smoking, brought about by frustration over his lack of writing and shame at having masturbated and fantasised about Eve, the partner of the Aboriginal ranger couple also living in the compound, is itself a displaced symptom of the failure to write and shame over his sexually violent and debasing fantasies. Thus the development of the boil on his body is a symbol and symptom of a diseased body of writing. The boil is a trope representing part of the political unconscious.

Late in the novel after Gordon’s attempts to write have failed, he ends a long day of intoxication, drinking beer and smoking joints, by entering the ranger Vince’s house, one of the three houses within the Cape Don Lighthouse and weather station compound, and with some self-loathing and envy begins to direct his hatred at the books on the shelf: “I suddenly felt an utter hatred for every writer who had held on long enough to finish something. I never would. The hatred was physical, it was a sickness” (238). Due to the “five active boils” that made “[t]he sheets of my bed [. . .] spotted with blood” Gordon has stripped for comfort, and after unsuccessfully attempting to masturbate himself to climax, catches sight of his body in the bathroom mirror:

I was hideous. Huge and round and white. Streaked with grime. My erection poked out from under my belly. It was tiny. Ludicrous. There was a bandaid tangled in the pubic hair. And there were boils everywhere. Red pus oozed from their heads. My eyes were pink, my face covered with a dirty, ginger fuzz. It was disgusting. I was a monster. (239-40)

Terrified of the monster he’s become, and full of self-disgust, Gordon returns to the run-down house he shares with Wayne and tries to sleep. In the morning he awakes to some noise and goes to the verandah: “I stood there, naked, boil-ridden lost. I realised who it was. Allan Price. Chairman of the Board of the Gurig National Park. ‘Excuse me,’ I said. Then I went back inside to get some clothes”(241). In this scene familiar tropes from Grunge fiction are present: the sick body in an abject state, porous and open, and excreting pus, intoxication mixed with sex, albeit of the solo kind. Also located on the territorial edge of Northern Australia Gordon is both on the border and in the abject zone. And it is here that Gordon at his most abject is naked and diseased before the effective ruler of the Gurig National Park: Allan Price. The novel’s textual encounter between the white, young male narrator and Aboriginal statesman is presented through Gordon’s boil-ridden body: the body that gets written rather than the novel. If Gordon’s body is symbolic of the body of Australian writing then its boils are that illness caused by his failure to textualise the Gurig Aboriginals and caused by the violence of his sexual fantasies.

To some extent this reading of Gordon’s boils complements the sentiment and main ideas behind Keating’s “Redfern Park” speech. A key section of the speech, which was given on 10 December 1992 to launch the Year of the World’s Indigenous People, is this passage:

It begins, I think with an act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us. With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds. We failed to ask, how would I feel if this were done to me? As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us. (cited in Watson, 2002: 288-89)

Although not an apology and delivered four years after 1988, Keating’s speech was, in the words of its primary author, based on the principle “that the problem could only be solved by an act of imagination” (289). For Watson, “[t]he speech did not say that our history was a story of unutterable shame” as some took it to mean (290). Nor did it imply “that the modern generation does or should feel guilt about what had happened” (291). Like Gordon’s boils, Keating’s Redfern Park speech put the problem of the invasion and its long aftermath into the body of Australian writing in an indirect and ambivalent fashion.

McGahan also parodies events in the national story. The novel begins with a domestic Asian Invasion where two Chinese students moving into a small apartment Gordon shares in Brisbane grow such that “[i]n the end we had nine Chinese students living there” (10). On arrival at their Cape Don house Gordon and Wayne survey their new vista, and Gordon invokes the failed Bush free-settler myth: “[t]here was no sea breeze, no taste of sea air, no sound of surf or seagulls. It didn’t feel like we were anywhere near the ocean. It felt like we were on some back lot scrub block. One that was going broke” (99).

By subverting the künstlerroman through Gordon’s failure to complete, or even substantially write, his planned novel, this structuring plot-line is cut loose and other temporalities emerge. One temporality usually given minor status in narratives of the Australian nation is that of the weather surrounding Cape Don, which Gordon and Wayne are employed to textualise: to encode cloud and other weather patterns. Writing the weather during an approaching cyclone presents a narrative of nation that is opened to more than flows of trade:

The first thing I did was check the wind meter. Maximum gust, 91kph. What would 180 be like? 220? Then it was to the barometer. I peered at it, blinking drops of water out of my eyes. 976. Four points in three hours. That was about as fast as a barometer could drop. That was plummeting. (139)

Arriving back in Brisbane after his six-month stay at Cape Don, Gordon is unsettled by the development in Brisbane, especially on the Expo site, and around New Farm which is beginning to be gentrified. The novel ends with Gordon working at the Capitol Hotel as he meets Cynthia working at the bar. The prequel has formed a continuum with Praise. But we know how that ends.

*

To hear Keating’s voice is to hear one tonally certain, commanding, and seductive. The voices of Gordon Buchannan and Ari Voulis are honest and holding to a structure of feeling expressed in their tone but never presented as a positive programme for their futures. In the case of Praise Gordon’s voice presents a structure of feeling that seeks to hold steady while the waves of Neoliberal practices of self-formation roll into his life. In Loaded Ari’s voice is held together by his refusals and angers, and by the passions of his sexual desires. Drug intake in Loaded is thematized, being the means by which rhythm and tempo are manipulated towards the end of an interlocked layering of mind-body, or psychic-somatic, speeds and beats. The voice remains constant, not as in the Bildungsroman where the narrator, in the past tense, tells the story of the successful formation and development of their self from the temporal perspective of the completed formation (Slaughter, 2006: 1415). Rather, in these Grunge novels, there is no certainty of voice that comes by way of being issued from a historical present in which the past that the narrative is recounting has already been settled in the favour of the present narrator (Bakhtin, 1986: 23). This is the advantage and disadvantage of the fusion of the organic passage between youth and maturity, and the twin tasks of achieving autonomy and socialisation, in the Bildungsroman form. It is an advantage in so much as the fact of presentation of the backward-looking narrator who has achieved autonomy and socialisation by virtue of telling a story of development, stamps the nature of the development, the nature of the coming-of-age as successful. As Joseph Slaughter argues, this is a teleological tautology: a technique for narrativising forms of governmentalities, forms of the conduct of conduct, through the organic symbolism of human maturation fused to those governmentalities prescribed as, tautologically, mature (1415). We will come to a more extensive analysis and set of explanations for the use of the Bildungsroman form in embedding and contesting Neoliberalism below in chapter 3.

Grunge fiction is too temporally compressed to be considered as Bildungsromane. Ari’s story in Loaded occurs over the period of twenty-four hours, while Gordon’s stories occur within the period of a year in each novel. Compared to the durations in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, and even in David Malouf’s Johnno, Grunge fiction is closer in form to a three-minute pop song than the epic and symphonic duration of the coming-of-age novel. And yet it is precisely this temporal compression that makes Grunge fiction a potent contestation of the symbolic forms that are being narratively embedded into Australian political culture.

Reviewing the reviewer: Delia Falconer on James Wood

Novelist, essayist and reviewer Delia Falconer has a generous, incisive and, er, critical review of US uber-critic James Wood's How Fiction Works in last month's Australian Literary Review here.

In light of the recent !!death of literary criticism!! meme circulating through the internets Falconer's review questions the work that 'the real' does for Wood and the seemingly static and heavyhanded grasp this ground has in mapping modernities that are experienced as fragmented, discontinuous, or as proliferating mises en abyme (the period formerly known as post-modern):

While another critic might see the impulse towards jam-packed, baroquely hyperreal novels as a legitimate and thoughtful, albeit varyingly skilful, response to our postmodern world (a mimetic reflection of the different status of information in an age of instant and indiscriminate communication, say, or an attempt to "wake up" a form whose traditional gestures are now the cliched staples of Hollywood cinema), Wood could only read this new "genre" as a kind of perversity or, worse, a showing off. (He has chastised DeLillo elsewhere for turning the novelist into "a kind of Frankfurt School entertainer, fighting the culture with dialectical devilry".)

This episode exposed a fundamental weakness of Wood's criticism: the fetish status it accords to the "real". It is clear, reading Wood's wider oeuvre, that he has a deep-rooted impatience with books that go outside a certain psychological verisimilitude; nor does he care for writing that usurps the critic's job by incorporating elements of commentary into a more self-conscious narration. Instead Wood places the naturalistic realist writing of Anton Chekhov and Gustave Flaubert at the centre of his pantheon; writing in which the authorial presence never breaks the tranquil surface of the book.

Falconer's seems to be a Walter Benjamin rather than Georg Lukacs based reading of the dialetic between cultural (literary in this case) form and historical change. Lukacs mourned the victory of modernist form over 'life' in his writings on the historical novel, and was antipathetic to Brecht's estrangement techniques. Benjamin sought to align historical experience with cultural forms that were responsive to changes in technology and modernity. Wood would appear more on the side of Lukacs than Benjamin in Falconer's estimation.

One question arising out of this death of literary criticism meme is whether or not literary criticism should seek to model its evaluative criteria on the affectiveness of the reading experience in promoting a moral-emotional thinking that rings with truth, or seek to model these criteria more on how effectively the form mediates such content whereby both form and content are affectively and sociologically alive to the milieux of the novel's circulation. Falconer and indeed James Ley, I would suggest, tend toward the second method.

Pavlov's Cat has praised Ley as one of the best practitioners of the art of fiction reviewing at the moment. Falconer's often more meta-critical reviews operate in a different space to Ley's although both inflect their criticism and reviews through a Benjamin-esque knowledge of the historical instantiations of forms of novelistic realism. As Peter Osborne in The Politics of Time argues,

In Benjamin . . . we have the beginnings of an account of the temporalization of history as cultural form. This enables us to concretize our previous depiction of historical time (the temporalization of history by the anticipation of a timeless end, a historical death), in terms of a series of culturally specific representations of ends constituting history in a variety of different ways - as ethics (Levinas), tradition (Gadamer), chronology (historicism) or modernity(Heidegger and Benjamin), respectively. Furthermore, insofar as these forms are themselves the products of historically specific practices, they are possible objects of transformative practice. We are thus able to begin to give a more concrete meaning to the idea of a politics of time. A politics of time is a politics which takes the temporal structures of social practices as the specific objects of its transformative (or preservative) intent.

Ley's ABR essay on the politics of guilt in Andrew McGahan's fiction uses Leavisite and New Critical close-reading techniques to turn the finely grained registering of the emotional imprint of McGahan's novels on the reader toward a consideration of how this affective-moral level of the novels is re-figured by the narrative forms in which it is presented:

The essence of McGahan’s art is narrative. His recent novels have turned towards genre in part because of his skill at shaping them at a macro level; they seem familiar because they are so solidly and traditionally constructed. Significantly, the move toward genre is also a move toward self-consciousness: the moment of recognition when a narrative is exposed as a purposeful, self-contained structure with its own internal logic that works to shut out conflicting viewpoints. The Irish writer Colm Tóibín once remarked upon the similarity between his nation’s history and a work of sentimental fiction, ‘full of love stories with ill-fated lovers dying with a smile’. There are times, he argued, when ‘the crucial moments in Irish history seem more like a nineteenth-century novel in which the individual, tragic hero is broken by the society he lives in’. The point of his observation is that once this generic quality has been recognised, it opens up the possibility of transcendence: it becomes possible to understand history in other, more realistic and nuanced ways; it becomes possible to see how history is not like a sentimental fiction. This is part of the motivation behind The White Earth’s attempt to incorporate some of the prominent themes in recent Australian history within the overarching framework of a gothic narrative. The novel wants to make us aware of these ideas’ generic qualities, the manner in which certain ways of perceiving are perpetuated, and how this influences the shape of contemporary public debate.

This is an insightful and elegantly expressed argument about the politics of literary form. Ley manoeuvres his close-reading of the emotional tenor of McGahan's oeuvre into an argument about the politics of narrative genre. This is less self-consciously theoretically informed than Falconer's reviews, and the argument here insinuates itself more because of a voice that moves at a slower pace over less texts (one effect of close-reading)which buttresses the assuredness of any judgements. I like both reviewers for different reasons. Ley for the intimacy of the voice, Falconer for the movement between a theoretical and close-reading focus.

Anyone who witnessed Peter Fitzsimmon's contribution to the ABC First Tuesday Book Club last night and was reminded of the debates about the historical-ness of historical fiction that Kate Grenville's The Secret River roused would find essays by both Ley and Falconer on this subject instructive. [Falconer's essay 'Historical novels' is in Eureka Street 13.2 (March 2003) and reprinted in the Black Ink. Best Australian Essays 2003 anthology. Ley's is here: "When the Past isn't Past: a Role for Fiction in Australia's History Wars" .]

However, Ley's voice doesn't always persuade by insinuation. Sometimes the snark must be let loose. Here's a choice cut - harsh but fair - from early in the same piece on McGahan's fiction:

Writing politicised literature can be a treacherous business. It is not the first task of a work of prose fiction to act as a vehicle for a narrow political message. Novels that attempt this are regularly disfigured by their sense of moral self-importance. Elliot Perlman’s Three Dollars (1998), for example, is so distorted by its politics that it develops, absurdly, into a kind of anti-Bildungsroman, in which a naïve young man discovers that he is right about everything. There is a strong tendency in a work that takes sides in some specific political controversy for it to leach the humanity from those characters who represent the unfavoured viewpoint, and to paint them as fools and knaves. Even the best-intentioned narrative inevitably warps reality to conform to its agenda to some extent, but when this is crudely done it stifles the dissonance that is the lifeblood of fiction. The novel shrinks into itself, starts to believe in the imperviousness of its own rhetoric, and ends up being effective only if it tells you exactly what you want to hear. This renders its fictional qualities redundant: Perlman wrote a novel, but everything he had to say might have been adequately expressed in a terse letter to the editor of The Age.

Ouch!

But the point, though sharp, is well made: Perlman's novel (love the personification of the text here by Ley) is disabled by the politics of its form. My critical readings of Three Dollars run along a similar track to Ley's although I spend a lot more time unpacking the anti-Bildungsroman structure of the text.

My main criticism of Perlman's debut novel is that its adoption of a social liberal and Liberal-Leavisite moral-aesthetic position on the ascendance of neoliberal governmentalities is a nostalgic, and thereby reactionary, response to what it mis-diagnoses as classical liberalism. While there are some wonderful moments in the novel, not least the parody of bureaucratic managerialism and the infiltration of the lanaguage of finance capital - all ordinaries - into everyday life, it is its politics of form, and thereby of time, that blunt any claim it has to critical force. And this formal failure is also one of cultural-historical form: the neoliberal reality that we live with, and that Perlman's novel responds to, can't simply be fought back from the ramparts of civilised heroism, as this monstrous ideology is not purely out there, perpetrated by fascist corporations, immoral merchants and their philistine lackeys.
The new liberalism is how we conduct ourselves; it is part of our freedom - it is formative and forming. It is the dominant mode of Bildungs. Novelists who grapple, formally, with this 'reality' are therefore closer to the truth than those that abject our own complicities in this formation.

Falconer and Ley, I think, help us to better see this changing reality and truth. And even Perlman too through the effort and courage to attempt a literary fictional critique of economic rationalism.