Death of Australian Political Fiction meme

There were a slew of death notices that were issued for the politically-engaged Australian novel in the earlier years of this century. Journalist and non-fiction writer Mark Mordue asked “Is the novel dead?” and answers: “Fiction is dead. Long live non-fiction” (par. 1). Novelist and memoirist, Drusilla Modjeska, similarly argues that

the fiction we were producing [in the 1980s and 90s] was either too post-modern, too self-referential, too badly edited, leached of feeling, or pitched to an international audience. As fiction turned its face elsewhere, detaching itself more and more from local realities and local experience, there was a space waiting, an opening. It was filled by writing that wasn’t fiction. As if in response to distress, there was a return to the narrative of lives and the exploration of experience that could make sense of – of just raise – questions of identity and responsibility that were coming back to vex us after years of being dismantled and reconfigured. (206)

Literary biographer, commentator and journalist David Marr’s attempt to resuscitate the political edge of contemporary fiction wanted it sharpened so as to cut conservative prime minister John Howard from the Lodge due to Howard’s devaluing of “the currency of language” and manipulation of “race fears to hang onto power” (Modjeska: 207, Marr: par. 11). For Marr, fiction has let Australia down:

I have a simple plea to make: that writers start focusing on what is happening in this country, looking Australia in the face, no flinching, coming to grips with the fact that we have been on a long loop through time that has brought us back almost – but not quite – to where we were. Few Australian novels [. . .] address in worldly, adult ways the country and the time in which we live. (Marr: par. 23 my emphasis)

Writing back to Marr’s lecture academic Julianne Lamond argues that his elision of such political novelists of the previous ten years as Andrew McGahan, Amanda Lohrey and Christos Tsiolkas speaks to the real terms of this debate: “form and genre, race and nationhood” (83). Indeed, how do we read the fiction of the present, which Modjeska and Marr both lament as largely disengaged and apolitical, when the avowedly political fiction of the recent past has, in many ways, been poorly read?

Novelist and current editor of the literary journal Meanjin, Sophie Cunningham, responded to Marr’s provocations by observing that the novels of McGahan and Tsiolkas “in the early to mid-1990s were set in the present [yet] were quickly herded into the “grunge” corral and left in the mud” (cited in Lamonde: 85).

Grunge novels have been poorly served by sections of the Australian literary field. Their politics of literary form have been disavowed and elided. At the end of Tim Rowse’s Australian Liberalism and National Character in a section titled “Populism as Literary Form,” Rowse argues that “[t]he New Critics’ [Craig McGregor and Donald Horne] concern with everyday life is a development, in a [. . .] ‘literary’ direction, [of the] shift from an explanatory mode to a more evocative rendering of the Australian outlook” (1978: 257). For Rowse, the language of politics in the 1970s was shaped through these innovations in form in the 1960s.

In focussing so fixedly, as Marr and Modjeska do, on the experiences that political fiction is meant to engage, the lessons of analysis like Rowse’s of the literary forms of populism have been forgotten and subsumed by the demand that literary fiction enact a type of moral critique. Is it any wonder, then, that when the literary form of politics is disavowed, the politics of literary form is similarly abjured? Rather than look to fiction to offer up journalistic-style experiences for fashioning a conscience and consciousness from which a moral critique can be advanced against political hegemonies like Howard’s, it is to literary form as itself an historical and sociological phenomenon that we should first look for such resources.

Watching the Treasurer Reconfiguring the Boundaries of reading Grunge fiction

[Final part in a series of introductory posts on the critical reception of Australian Grunge fiction]

Part of what is abject about Grunge fiction is its status within the Australian literary canon. It is both inside and outside the canon, a topic in Australian literary history that proceeds, as we saw above when discussing Salzman’s writing on Grunge fiction, under erasure. Before moving into the theoretical section of this introduction it is worth dwelling on a powerful reading of a text from within the genre that could more justifiably be called the abjected form of Australian letters in the 1980s and 1990s: poetry.

John Forbes’ poem “Watching the Treasurer” is the basis for a reading of Australian political culture through the mediated figure of the treasurer of the poem’s title, Paul Keating. While what Forbes and Morris have to say about Keating is formally distant, each draw attention to the utopian effects that were invited by Keating’s rhetoric. For Morris the utopias of Keating’s economic fundamentalist discourse enable an ecstasy for those who speak it. This ecstatic response, however, has its abject. Citing an evocative phrase from Pusey’s work that is cognate with Grunge, Morris writes that economic fundamentalism is “ a philosophy that treats society as a by-product (“Sludge”) of market forces tempered only by the actions of an elite cast of experts [who practise] a furious rhetoric of Reason” (1998: 180-1). What is abjected by “that utopia/ no philosopher could argue with, where/ what seems, is & what your words describe/ you know exists” are the “political alignments of a century [and] even those “new social movements” most critical of Laborism [sic]—feminism, anti-racism, environmentalism—[which] found themselves recast by its decline as “entrenched” and “vested” interests obstructing radical change” (Forbes cited in Morris 1998: 158, 178).

While the four frameworks for reading Grunge fiction analysed above offer unorthodox boundaries on which to work new textual affiliations, Morris’ reading of Forbes’ poem, above all others, models the direction that this thesis heads in. What is exemplary about Morris’ reading is: how it is anchored by a critical analysis of her own affective and intellectual investments in the subjects of her essay; how a close–reading of a literary text can at once be promiscuously horizontal and focussed; and how it can be psychoanalytic and socio-historical, practicing rhetorical analysis and political-economic theory as it moves from one section to another. Above all Morris’ interests in Keating overlap with mine.

There is a dense network of tracks through which Keating’s textuality circulated. Morris’ essay travels over this dense network in ways that make the four framework essays analysed above appear suburban. Yet Morris’ essay nowhere mentions Grunge fiction, which is not on her horizon. Her practises of boundary work, while exemplary, do not articulate Grunge fiction to the largely media and theoretical texts that she moves through to form her reading of Keating and Forbes’ poem. Moving toward Morris’ practices requires the four modes of boundary work analysed above to be both pushed further into their existing zones, and shifted into new interdisciplinary zones. In these new zones, especially, our understanding of Keating’s rhetoric and textuality can take soundings of Praise’s poetics and textuality, and interpreting Praise’s feelings of structure will assist in explaining the structures of feeling that Morris and Forbes, for example, hear in Keating’s talk. This understanding, interpretation and explanation are what will be performed in chapter 3.

The boundaries on which the four frameworks through which Grunge fiction has largely been received are in need of being reconfigured so that Grunge fiction can be read in ways that approximate Morris’ reading practises. The literary generationalism that Davis and Leishman detect and critique has been understood as a trope which has worked to deflect and displace public debates about, and new responses to, new social, economic, and political conditions. While Leishman brings Bourdieu’s sociology of the literary field into the ambit of her reading of Grunge fiction, Davis argues that postmodern practises of knowledge have been marginalized by the culture war use of generationalism. For Davis we need to push the trope of generationalism aside in order to hear what these young novelists had to say, while for Leishman we need to understand what these young novelists have to say through the notion that the inevitable turnover in literary generations is a battle of content and form, as much as of personnel. On both accounts Grunge fiction is innovative: neither old nor new dirty realism, but a new type of realism.

Both authors seek to divert us from the trope of generationalism in the name of experiences and practices that this culture war figure has worked to conceal. Yet, Grunge fiction can also be read as using the specific cultural forms of generationalism to present a problem in the dominant models for becoming-adult, or coming-of-age, circulating in the culture. In other words, rather than bypass the trope of generationalism in order to access the real meaning of Grunge fiction, reading Grunge fiction with and through the symbolic form of youth as a transition period on the way to becoming-adult – which has been a literary chronotope since Goethe’s Bildungsroman, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (Moretti 2000a: *) – further opens up the practises of boundary work and the range of texts that can be affiliated with those of Grunge fiction.

Syson’s boundary work reads Grunge fiction through the changes he detects in the political economy of the literary publishing industry. The fragmenting and alienation of working class identity during a period of market intensification and dismantling of the forms of historic compromise in Australian political culture – conducted, ironically, under a Labor government – is most clearly registered for Syson in the economy of the literary field. He reads these changes back into Grunge fiction, which returns his soundings in the form of “the rumblings of a structure of feeling that is being demolished at its deepest levels” (26). His central and influential claim is that Grunge fiction is a form of resistance and critique, responding to “a growing economic rationalist spirit,” a predatory capitalism that “is about ransacking communities and their cultures and patterns of behaviour in order to commodify and privatise them” and “the prosecution of the Thatcherite dream of destroying society and replacing it with a world of consuming individuals” (23 and 26).

While Syson’s boundary work is suggestive his dismissal of Grunge musical form is symptomatic of the persistence of the generational trope. As I argued above, there is an occasional deafness in the Australian literary field when it comes to thinking sound. My reading of Cobain’s guitar solo in “Smells like Teen Spirit” sought to open up a boundary across which the sociological concepts of Fordism and post-Fordism can be used to articulate Grunge fiction and Grunge musical form. Syson’s refusal to take Grunge music seriously as a cultural form is a symptom of a conflation in which cultural forms about youth are dismissed as youthful cultural forms which are further reduced to commodities. What is occluded in this way of reading is analysis of the specific, meanings of the symbols of youth that are operative in the local culture, and that cultural forms like Grunge fiction and Grunge music are working with, on and against. Taking Grunge cultural form as concerned with the problems of making the transition from youth to adulthood in conditions of post-Fordism raises questions about the precise nature of the historical conditions of society in the 1990s. Syson’s allusion to Michael Pusey’s historical sociology of economic rationalism in Australia indicates one text through which to make these historical conditions more precise, more local, as Morris does in “Ecstasy in Economics”. Morris’ further boundary work, however, takes us into the human capital theories of Chicago School economist Gary Becker, reading these back into Keating’s talk. As her textual affiliations are more promiscuous and horizontal than Syson’s it is toward Foucault’s theories of Neoliberalism, rather than the concept of Thatcherism or economic rationalism, that this thesis will affiliate with the literary and non-literary texts considered below. Such affiliative boundary work, however, will require a sustained consideration of the textualisation and historical conditions of the period in Australian political culture that Grunge fiction emerges from and through. This consideration will be conducted in chapter one.

Finally, the theme of the abject in reading Grunge fiction was analysed and these readings were placed into a dialogue with Morris’ claims about the abjected waste that economic fundamentalist discourse both produces and construes society as and as it ecstatically travels into areas previously protected from market rationalities. Placing Morris’ reading of Neoliberal ecstasy, and its sludge by-product, into the zone of Brooks, Muller and Kirkby’s more individual and psychological readings of abjection in Grunge fiction, shifts the boundaries across which Grunge fiction can make textual affiliations. This shift provides the openings for aligning Grunge fiction with fundamental changes to Australian political culture that can be interpreted and explained through a more historically specified, and more sociologically localised, set of texts than were available in the 1990s when these writings emerged.

Abjections

[Another in a series of posts taken from the revised PhD thesis. These posts are from the introduction, and this is the last in a series of 5 which have been analysing four frameworks that are commonly deployed to interpret and make sense of Grunge fiction]

Abjections

Joan Kirkby’s chapter “Literature”, in Americanization and Australia, is one of the few discussions of Grunge fiction to present an argument for its commensurability with Grunge musical culture. For Kirkby, the “distinctive rough, ‘dirty’, ‘sludgy’ sound” of bands like Nirvana were “in defiance of the comfortable, easy listening style of mainstream rock bands and were directed at a young generation disaffected with lifestyles no longer meaningful or available to them” (230). Kirkby builds her genealogy of Grunge fiction through an etymology of the term, finding that it is a US slang term: “a back formation of the adjective grungy [. . .] deriving from ‘a blend of GRIMY, DINGY & grunt, childish euphemism for defecate’ and as slang meaning ‘dirty, mess, disreputable, etc.; unpleasant in any way’” (229-30). In the Australian context Grunge is defined “firstly as ‘a substance of an unpleasant nature, especially dirt, scum or slime’ and secondly as ‘a guitar-based form of heavy rock music’” (230).

Kirkby works on the boundary where Grunge as musical culture meets the term as ‘sign’ to argue that “it is a useful term in the Australian context,” in part because it “arises in response to cultural issues that are both local and global [and] is part of a larger phenomenon characteristic of post-industrial, urban cultures” (233). It is also useful as it “is closely related to the abject, Julia Kristeva’s term for a visceral identity crisis in which the insides of the body erupt within signification in an obsessive imagery of ruptured bowels and wombs and excrement and slime, rendering unstable the subject’s sense of social and symbolic identity" (233).

Kirkby interprets Grunge fiction through the concept of the abject as a social and psychological process. She argues that “grunge [. . .] might be defined as the abject made conscious, owned, integrated and demystified” and that “[i]n The River Ophelia the narrator completely owns and demystifies the abject; in Praise the abject is no longer abject; and in Loaded the abject is powerfully manipulated as a social critique” (233, 235).

Kirkby’s essay has not been the only one to use Kristeva’s social-psychoanalytic concepts of the abject and abjection to read Grunge fiction with. While Kirkby argues that Praise “demystifies the abject, becoming an affirmation of the everyday and of bodies as the basis of subjectivity” (238) Vivienne Muller treats Praise to a

social protest reading [in which] the signifiers of the abject and grotesque pimpled bums, bleeding skins, flabby bodies, misshapen flesh, drug altered bodies and minds would appear to collectively symbolise revolt against the deterministic socio-cultural institutions (bureaucracies, hospitals, schools, police) with their moral directives towards the corps propre. [. . .] Such a reading of the grotesque body in Praise would also yield it as a site of contestation of the ‘official’ discourses of good and proper bodies with their ‘healthy’ imperatives of employment, heterosexuality, marriage, monogamy and parenthood. (152-53)

Unlike Kirkby’s reading of Praise Muller opens her interpretation to the social dimensions of identity formation, offering a reading of McGahan’s debut novel that permits it to be a critique of contemporary techniques of the self; a critique of, what Foucault calls, forms of governmentality. The abject, polluted, sexually faulty body of Gordon is contrasted for Muller to the “healthy body in middle-class terms [which] is also the employed body” (153). So, while Kirkby reads Praise’s thematisation of abjection on a purely psychological level, Muller is prepared to consider that this thematisation enacts a “postmodern scepticism towards the unified subject signalling a current crisis of identity for the young” where the “nihilism in grunge is read as a sort of refusal of the hegemony of the dominant capitalist ethic” (152).

Different again is Karen Brooks’ use of the term abject to chart readings of Grunge fiction. Brooks explicates a psycho-geography of the movement and becomings of characters across and on the interstitial zones between the city and the suburban. While Muller situates Praise within the time-space of global modernity and late capitalism, and Kirkby tightens the interpretive lens of abjection to bore down on individual identity formation, Brooks argues that in Praise and other Grunge novels “an understanding of the [human] subject is contingent on an interplay between the psychosocial, the body and the physical environment” (89). For Brooks the “characters who embrace the ambiguous, liminal and abject spaces that lie within and between sub/urban living become spatial vessels that are able to cross and recross the boundaries of institutional power, geo-political, psychosocial and psychosexual boundaries” (98). This reading of the possibilities of movement and spatial identity enabled by proximity to abjection in Grunge fiction is both libertarian and optimistically utopian.

What all three readings that use Kristeva’s concept of the abject as an interpretive instrument open up is a boundary on which Grunge fiction becomes an object of primarily psychological literary signification. Yet the genealogy of the concept of the abject also comes by way of Georges Bataille and Mary Douglas’ anthropology (Kristeva 64-66, 69). For Kristeva, Douglas argues that “filth is not a quality in itself, but it applies to a boundary and [. . .] represents the object jettisoned out of that boundary, its other side, a margin” (69). The materiality of the abject is secondary to the social fact of the boundary. Indeed, Douglas writes: “[m]atter issuing from them [the orifices of the body] is marginal stuff of the most obvious kind. Spittle, blood, milk, urine, faeces or tears by simply issuing forth have traversed the boundary of the body. [. . .] The mistake is to treat bodily margins in isolation from all other margins” (cited in Kristeva 69). The call to consider the social existence of the boundaries across which abjection occurs works to remind us that alongside “abjection [being] coextensive with social and symbolic order, on the individual as well as on the collective level [it also] assumes specific shapes and different codings according to the various “symbolic systems”” (68). Abjection is historical, as it “varies according to time and space, even though it is [also] universal” (68).

*

Part of what is abject about Grunge fiction is its status within the Australian literary canon. It is both inside and outside the canon, a topic in Australian literary history that proceeds, as we saw above when discussing Salzman’s writing on Grunge fiction, under erasure. Before moving into the theoretical section of this introduction it is worth dwelling on a powerful reading of a text from within the genre that could more justifiably be called the abjected form of Australian letters in the 1980s and 1990s: poetry. John Forbes’ poem “Watching the Treasurer” is the basis for a reading of Australian political culture through the mediated figure of the treasurer of the poem’s title, Paul Keating. While what Forbes and Morris have to say about Keating is formally distant, each draw attention to the utopian effects that were invited by Keating’s rhetoric. For Morris the utopias of Keating’s economic fundamentalist discourse enable an ecstasy for those who speak it. This ecstatic response, however, has its abject. Citing an evocative phrase from Pusey’s work that is cognate with Grunge, Morris writes that economic fundamentalism is “ a philosophy that treats society as a by-product (“Sludge”) of market forces tempered only by the actions of an elite cast of experts [who practise] a furious rhetoric of Reason” (1998: 180-1). What is abjected by “that utopia/ no philosopher could argue with, where/ what seems, is & what your words describe/ you know exists” are the “political alignments of a century [and] even those “new social movements” most critical of Laborism [sic]—feminism, anti-racism, environmentalism—[which] found themselves recast by its decline as “entrenched” and “vested” interests obstructing radical change (Forbes cited in Morris 1998: 158, 178).

While the four frameworks for reading Grunge fiction analysed above offer unorthodox boundaries on which to work new textual affiliations, Morris’ reading of Forbes’ poem, above all others, models the direction that this thesis heads in. What is exemplary about Morris’ reading is how it is anchored by a critical analysis of her own affective and intellectual investments in the subjects of her essay; and how a close–reading of a literary text can at once be so promiscuously horizontal and focussed; how it can be psychoanalytic and socio-historical, practicing rhetorical analysis and political-economic theory as it moves from one section to another. Above all Morris’ interests in Keating overlap with mine. Reading Keating as a figure of textuality which is situated by a specific historical sociology and in affiliation with Grunge fiction, forms the central section of this thesis. We will leave Forbes’ poem here and return to the “elegant apostle of necessity” below in chapter one (Forbes cited in Morris 1988: 158).

New or Old Dirty Realism?

(another in a series of introductory posts on grunge fiction)

New or Old Dirty Realism?
While one result of the Demindenko affair was the ascendance then fall of Helen Dale’s (nee Darville) literary reputation, the stakes in The First Stone debates were built on Helen Garner’s already considerable reputation as a novelist of 1970s inner-urban realism. In 1995, Garner’s claims to author-ity – her position in the Australian literary field – had been established on a string of novels, short stories, and novellas, that enhanced the consecrated status given to her debut novel Monkey Grip (1977).

Monkey Grip is a realist representation of youthful inner-city communal share-house life, involving graphic depictions of drug-taking and sexual experiment that is structured by the search to find a moral position from which to reconcile libertarian practices with the responsibilities of autonomy and parenting. Unlike Dale, whose reputation remained contained within the scandal that broke around her text, the life of Garner’s Monkey Grip appeared to mirror that of Garner as mother-feminist sorting out the wayward-feminist daughters who are her targets in The First Stone.

Monkey Grip became a germinal, or mother, text for those critics and literary historians looking to dismiss the claims of innovation in form and content that were made on behalf of Grunge fiction. Margaret Henderson and Shane Rowlands argue that “[o]ne main problem with using the label ‘grunge’ is that it reinvents the wheel and thus obliterates other alternative, relevant, and politically engaged antecedents [including] Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip” (3). In a more recent essay Jean-Francois Vernay writes that “Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip (1977) may well be seen as the pioneering grunge novel” (146) and that a “libertarian literary movement was initiated by Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip” (152). Monkey Grip, on these readings, is interpreted as a founding novel in Grunge fiction, with the corollary that Monkey Grip is to The River Ophelia what older second wave feminists are to younger postmodern feminists. Or as Garner has grown up now, when Grunge writers grow up they too might write as well as her.

This form of generationalism takes one model of literary politics, one model of literary development, and consigns all others to apolitical, underdeveloped or youthful writing. In terms that resonated throughout The First Stone debates, one reviewer made this level of discourse clear when she wrote: “It’s tremendously difficult for me, at 40, to hike through these two longish novels about a boy and a girl (respectively) stumbling through their twentieth year . . . I just want to snarl “For god’s sake, grow up!”” (Veitch cited in Davis, 1997: 130).

If Monkey Grip was old dirty realism, to follow this line of argument, Grunge fiction was the new old dirty realism. Critics like Davis and Kirsty Leishman have argued, on the contrary, that new experiences and knowledges were brought into Grunge fiction and that these have been dismissed and disavowed by the discourses of generationalism. Leishman claims that “the knowledges informing the values in these [Grunge] novels and short stories proved to be incomprehensible because they were not part of the habitus of [those] encumbent [sic] elites” of the Australian literary field that Davis identifies (96). For Leishman Bourdieu’s concept of habitus – a “second nature” or “second sense” “set of dispositions which generates practices and perceptions” – helps to explain the almost unconscious disavowal of the innovations in Grunge fiction enacted by the dominant position-holders in the Australian literary field (Bourdieu cited in Leishman 96, 95). For Leishman the primary innovation of Grunge fiction is its new response to the dominant narratives of Australian identity; narratives which operate on the traditions codified in the Bulletin stories of the 1890s and in Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend (97).

I think this is a very limited reading of those narratives of Australian identity that circulated in the late 1980s and early to mid 1990s. Leishman’s rhetorical gambit of contrasting Grunge fiction to these traditions of the Bush myth is clearly to establish an argument in which there are ruptures in innovation of Grunge fiction without considering the writings of Peter Carey, David Malouf, or Kate Grenville – to name but a few – who have successfully complicated these literary traditions. Indeed, by the time Grunge fiction is a literary event the Australian prime minister who best represented the larrikin, easy-going matey ethos that Leishman outlines – Bob Hawke – had been replaced by a more complex, ambivalent figure in Paul Keating. Keating’s story of Australian identity, and indeed his governmental practices of Australian character and identity, exceed the national fictions Leishman wants to pose as the foil to Grunge’s experiments in “‘a lived philosophical commitment’” (Graeme Turner cited in Leishman 97).

Leishman’s boundary work brings Bourdieu’s sociology of the cultural and literary fields into the analysis of Grunge fiction’s critical reception. Her further claim is that Grunge fiction presents a generational break with the old forms and narratives of a hegemonic Australian identity. I agree with the direction of Leishman’s argument, but you only need to read Murray Bail and Frank Moorhouse’s parodies of Henry Lawson's "The Drover’s Wife" to know that the Bush-Nationalist narratives of identity had long been unsettled prior to Grunge fiction’s arrival.

The issue of a ‘lived philosophical commitment’ that the narrators of Grunge fiction present as the alternative to dominant narrativisations of Australian character is a more complex one. Leishman’s thematic reading heads through the literary text to a mimesis of philosophical conduct. This level of explanation gives Grunge fiction a political project. Yet the aesthetic, or formal, level at which Grunge fiction practises its philosophies are elided in Leishman’s explanation. Rather than position Grunge fiction in contrast to questionably hegemonic narratives of national identity, I will take her boundary work and re-position it between a set of political and governmental texts that are contemporary to those of Grunge fiction. Leishman’s foray into the reading of Grunge fiction against a limited array of narratives of national identity misses the opportunity to make more horizontal and promiscuous textual affiliations. Rather than contrast Grunge fiction to the mythologies of Australian character that Bob Hawke embodied and aroused, the textualised figures of Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating will be affiliated with key texts of Grunge fiction in order for a different ensemble of narratives of national identity to be placed into the ambit of Grunge fiction.

Reading on the Boundaries

(More revised thesis introduction)

Reading on the boundaries


The analysis of the Bird and Salzman interpretations of Grunge fiction offered above [see post three below] would appear to indicate that the novels have been subjected to plural approaches. Literary generationalism, marketing hype, possible innovations in form, and the theme of abjection are used as frameworks through which the interpretation and explanation of Grunge fiction is conducted. Such apparent pluralism, however, is no guarantee that this fourfold hermeneutics crosses any significant boundaries in seeking to affiliate Grunge fiction with contemporary texts, political culture or other cultural forms. Of course, choosing two survey-styled entries that can only give little consideration to Grunge fiction because of space restrictions might be seen as too little and too selective a sample from which to make any firm evaluations. So, while the Bird and Salzman passages do reveal the working of a set of frameworks, it is to a more detailed analysis of key writings of Grunge fiction that this thesis will turn, in order to re-engage with and interpret the gaps, silences and contradictions that these writings inscribed. The crucial writings of Mark Davis, Kirsty Leishman, Ian Syson and Joan Kirkby on Grunge fiction codify significant aspects of the frameworks that Bird and Salzman use, and also attempt to push through the cultural and political boundaries within which their own readings of Grunge fiction and its historical context are structured. Each of these four texts on Grunge fiction is a kind of boundary work, and this concept now needs to be explained before moving into analysis of these influential forms of boundary work on Grunge fiction.

The concept of boundary work derives from social epistemologist Julie Thompson Klein’s studies of trans- and interdisciplinary knowledge production and was introduced into Australian literary studies by Robert Dixon (2004). For Dixon, Klein argues that “at present new knowledge is most often produced by boundary crossing in the form of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural research, and that this tends to be located in the shadow structures – the dynamic, informal networks and collaborations that form beneath and across the surface structures’ (32). These boundaries “are open, their cognitive border zones ragged and ill-defined” (32). Dixon points out that,

[Klein’s] preference is for a field in which boundaries are not dissolved, but maintained and at the same time constantly transgressed. [. . .]. The term “boundary work” as Klein uses it [. . .] does not simply mean either the policing of disciplinary boundaries or their collapse, but is meant positively to embrace the sum-total of all boundary work, including boundary crossings, especially between disciplinary neighbours. (33)

Dixon’s explication of boundary work as a shuttling between, rather than dissolution or fervid defence of, disciplinary boundaries provides a productive model for approaching the interdisciplinarity of the four influential texts analysed below. My purpose here is to delineate the terrain of the framework invoked and then to unpack a key passage from both sides of the boundary on which concerns from within the literary discipline meet those from within the political, sociological, economic, epistemological and the psychological disciplines.

Literary Generationalism c1995

(Another revised section from the thesis intro)

Literary generationalism

Literary politics holds a central place in Mark Davis’ Gangland: Cultural Elites and the New Generationalism. Davis’ forensic tracking of the networks of Australia’s media and cultural elite extant in the early to mid 1990s is given an explicitly literary focus through two moments in 1995 when the Australian literary field and literary works became flashpoints in the Australian instantiation of the culture wars. The publication of Helen Darville’s award-winning historical novel of Ukranian complicity in the Jewish Holocaust, The Hand the Signed the Paper, and Helen Garner’s new-journalist account of a sexual harassment case at Melbourne University’s Ormond College, The First Stone, pushed Australian literature and position-holders in the field into areas of the public sphere normally held by politicians, reviewers and media in-house commentators. Both texts involved young women whose practices of authenticity, speaking position or institutional politics were causes for polarising debates and attacks that left in their wake a striking “reorganisation of public space” (Davis 1997: 210).

The Demindenko affair raised two key issues. In a time when official multiculturalism was under sustained conservative attack, the revelation of the author’s non-‘ethnic’ identity gave succour to those critics who thought the bestowal of the prestigious Miles Franklin on the novel was an act of political correctness. For these critics the fraud Darville perpetrated exposed and mirrored the fraud that multiculturalism was. The novel’s complex representation of anti-semitism also prompted a heated public debate where claims about the freedom and rights of the literary imagination were subjected to counterclaims about an author’s duty to historical truth and definitive moral judgement.

The debates over Garner’s work intersected with those active in the Demindenko affair through the trope of political correctness. In the case of The First Stone the flashpoint of political correctness was sparked off from claims that feminism had reached its end-point by achieving the conditions for formal gender equality and that a new, puritan and punitive victim-feminism was gaining institutional support. This new feminism was seen by Garner and key position-holders in the literary and public spheres as unfairly disadvantaging, and in some cases destroying, men. It was also seen as derailing the gains that second-wave feminists, like Garner, claimed to have made. The debates over the issues that Garner’s work brought to the surface of the mainstream public sphere were often played out in the terms of conflicting generations: mothers and daughters; old and new feminists, fighting over the direction of feminism’s projects, and over who had the proprietorial rights to this direction considering “the unsuitability of young women as heirs to the feminist tradition” (84).

Garner’s The First Stone set up the generational trope in Australian feminism as a key form through which debate was to proceed. Few voices entering this debate were able to step around and outside the powerful symbolism of older Mother feminists – who had wisdom to impart and the experience on which such knowledge was based – instructing and fretting over newer, daughter feminists – who had new forms of knowledge and experience that second wave feminists lacked. To see feminism cleave through such polarising public talk only confirmed conservative views of the self-interestedness of its claims: feminism had gone too far because it was, like any lobby group, or ‘industry’, serving its own interests.

In contrast to these two literary events of 1995, Davis gives less analysis to the other minor literary event of the year: Grunge fiction. For Davis the trope of generationalism is again active in the literary public sphere reception of grunge fiction; structuring how liberal literary coteries responded to the dirty realism of Tsiolkas, Ettler, Jaivin, Berridge and McGahan’s fictions.

What links these three events of 1995 is how young voices were lost in the welter of debates that mark the ascendance of the Neo-conservative backlash to Neoliberalism in the form of the culture wars. Yet rather than see these young voices – Tsiolkas and Darville’s narrators and the young women of Ormond College – as expressing and acting on the basis of new experiences and knowledges and bringing these into the literary public sphere, I contend that the cultural form of the youth-to-adulthood period of transition – the period of an individual’s coming-of-age – is inseparable from what is at stake in each of these three events. In Gangland Davis opens up this line of analysis, working on the boundaries between politics and culture. His discussion of Grunge fiction is less concerned with literary form and narrative technique than with the terms on which it was received. Here again we find that the tropes of generationalism structure the critical response. Yet if generationalism is a cultural form that is clearly highly charged in Australian political culture in the early to mid 1990s then the fiction concerned with one of western modernity’s primary flashpoints of human generationalism – the coming-of-age period – demands to be read as fiction that is also about, rather than merely expressing, the dominant cultural forms of coming-of-age. The boundary work I am arguing for here involves reading Grunge fiction again as metafictions on the literary form of coming-of-age.

Reappraising grunge fiction

Below is writing towards a revised introduction. Any comments would be appreciated.

Reappraising Grunge Fiction

[G]enres arise in response to particular predicaments, particular needs, particular cultural logics, particular choices. These are the kinds of things a good literary history accounts for. (Gelder 2008: 76)

Grunge fiction has an uncertain and precarious status in Australian literary studies. This precarious status can be seen by analysing the ways in which Grunge fiction has been embedded or treated in Australian literary studies and history. These analyses and stories of the emergence and critical reception of Grunge fiction have been told through four main frameworks, which all emphasize different theoretical approaches to the debut novels of Andrew McGahan, Christos Tsiolkas and Justine Ettler. These frameworks seek to place Grunge fiction into either a contest of literary generations fought over the conception and validity of new experiences and styles; into established traditions of ‘dirty’ or social realism; to situate, and often to thereby dismiss, it within a moment of marketing hyperbole; or to read Grunge fiction as a genre centrally concerned with the depiction of the abject.

Sometimes aspects of more than one of these four frameworks are present in a single entry or essay on Grunge, which often serves to place the term under a kind of Derridean erasure: Grunge fiction (Spivak lxix). This typical way of representing Grunge fiction is found in the recently published survey of Australian fiction After the Celebration: Australian Fiction 1989–2007. In the chapter focussed on women’s writing Paul Salzman gives three paragraphs to Grunge fiction for the purpose of framing his criticism of the representation of ‘the abject body in grunge fiction written by women’ through Ettler’s The River Ophelia in particular (Gelder and Salzman, 2009: 205). Salzman compares Ettler’s novel unfavourably to Mary Fallon’s Working Hot – which, unlike Ettler’s, radically rewrites its literary-sexual context – and Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting – which has for Salzman, at least, a redeeming black humour (205-6). But it is how Salzman uses the frameworks about Grunge fiction to set up his criticism of Ettler’s novel that is of particular interest as all four are brought into play in his three paragraphs. Salzman effectively places Grunge fiction under erasure by, on the one hand, valorising the term by employing it, and, on the other, by consistently de-legitimising any claims that the term has to describe and name singular literary phenomena. Salzman achieves this de-legitimation through ascribing the motives of grunge authors to a cynical exercise in ticking abject subjects off a list of ‘grunge bases: drugs, vomit, shit, rough sex, a youth culture that embraces a certain chic poverty, and a barely suppressed misogyny (possibly as an ironic reflection on the characters)’ (204). The link between abjection and the sort of niche marketing list Salzman parodies is reinforced by his initial historical evaluation of ‘grunge fiction [as having been] fashionable in the early 1990s [and] practic[ing] a kind of épater le bourgeois’ (204). The story of Grunge fiction Salzman is telling here is one of a younger generation of apprentice writers who, or critics on their behalf, made false claims about their novels’ innovations in form and content, and who sought to create a reading market through narratives that were told with vulgar language and that depicted abject bodies and graphic sex (204-6).

The precarious place of Grunge fiction is clearly on display in this recent Australian literary history. Salzman takes the four frameworks used to position, interpret and explain Grunge fiction and turns them to the service of reducing the sub-genre to a moment in marketing hyperbole that clothed itself in literary generationalism as a means of aspiring to claims of consecrated literary status or symbolic capital (Bourdieu 122-23 and 255). The validity of Grunge’s newly-found concern with abjection is dismissed by Salzman on the bases that ‘there isn’t anything new as such about the depiction of the transgressive body in fiction’ and that such concern is, again, ultimately designed to shock an older readership (205).

As a second symptomatic example of where and how Grunge fiction resides in Australian literary history we will consider Delys Bird’s chapter on ‘Contemporary Fiction’ in The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature, which was published in 2000. Bird gives a paragraph to Grunge fiction. She writes: ‘[it] became the new fiction of the 1990s, labelled in this way to appeal to the youthful reading audience to whom it was marketed’ (206). She lists what have become the central Grunge authors and their primary work in the sub-genre: Christos Tsiolkas’ Loaded, Andrew McGahan’s Praise, and Justine Ettler’s The River Ophelia. And she observes that the writers are young, ’often products of writing schools,’ that their work has an ‘explicit, sometimes relentless focus on sex, drugs and life on the margins of society’ and that the fiction ‘may also be preoccupied with generational conflict with authority figures’ (206). Here in this chapter’s penultimate paragraph, residing within a sub-section titled ‘THE NEW PROFESSIONALS,’ we can again see both the precarious inscription of Grunge fiction into Australian literary history – shunted into the end of the chapter like an afterthought – and the thematics through which it has been critically received working to situate Grunge fiction on the border-line of Australian literary history: literary generationalism, marketing hype, inner-urban dirty realism, and youthful writing.
The theme of abjection that is central to Salzman’s critique, is missing in Bird’s critical-description. In its stead, however, is praise for McGahan’s Praise and 1988 which ‘are interested in the political and personal implications of grunge living, giving his writing a dimension this fiction often lacks’ (206). With this evaluation of McGahan’s early fiction Bird firms the sub-genre’s toehold on the monolith of Australian literary history through the concept of ‘grunge living’. She implies that his novels legitimately narrativise these techniques of self in such a singular way as to have their own name. While not mentioning abjection, the ‘grunge living’ that Bird finds in McGahan’s early novels cannot be separated from the diseased and abject bodies of Gordon Buchanan and Cynthia Lamonde in Praise in particular.

This fourth framework – of abjection – arrives into Bird’s consideration of Grunge fiction to give the sub-genre a sociological and existential authenticity that firmly de-formalizes the early work of McGahan and Tsiolkas. It is then only a short step in the arguments that are routinely made about Grunge fiction to link the authenticity of ‘grunge living’ to the callowness of the writer and the writing, as Salzman does when he asserts: ‘If grunge really was so age-specific, perhaps it makes sense that as writers get older they leave it behind. Given the passage of time, it is also easier to see the limitations of the nihilism and repetitiveness of many of these novels’ (205).

It is no surprise, then, that Grunge fiction is situated within Australian literary history in this precarious way. The four frameworks through which it has mostly been interpreted police the limits of what these texts might mean for us, and what we might do with them, at a time when they have become literary history; at a time when the first wave of their most intense period of production, distribution reception is surely over. As Grunge fiction moves into the textual terrain of Australian literary and cultural history there are opportunities to push at the limits of the four hermeneutic frames and to reappraise novels like McGahan’s Praise and 1988, and Tsiolkas’ Loaded. There are cultural and political boundaries in these hermeneutics that have proscribed the textual affiliations that can reasonably be made with Grunge fiction. These hermeneutic frameworks are themselves symptomatic of the cultural politics and, indeed, political culture that not only has shunted Grunge fiction into the remaindered punk bin of Australian letters, but has more importantly struggled to offer a literary history and practices of literary criticism that detect and analyse the emergence and dominance of Neoliberalism in Australian political culture.

Such proscriptions and impasses forestall the traversals and connections enabled by a ‘horizontal and promiscuous, not vertical and monogamous [reading of] the cultural field’ within which Grunge fiction circulated(Gelder 2008: 72). The occlusion of such boundary work in regard to Grunge fiction has been at the cost of a critical discourse, a potentially public debate, on the cultural forms through which Neoliberal techniques of the self became embedded into Australian political culture in the 1980s and 1990s. It is the central contention of this thesis that Grunge fiction both registers and attempts to resist the narrativisation of Neoliberal rationalities and techniques into areas of Australian political culture.

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In order to build and put the arguments for these claims this thesis will move through the following structure. The next section of this introduction will take four critical texts that codify the four frameworks for interpreting and explaining Grunge fiction and critically analyse the theoretical bases of these four approaches. My purpose in this section of the introduction is to begin to push against the cultural and political boundaries that are encoded into these approaches, and to begin to multiply, through a horizontal promiscuity, the textual affiliations of Grunge fiction. These four frameworks are: literary generationalism; marketing hype; literary traditions and innovations; and the theme of abjection.
The next section of the introduction will detail the literary and cultural studies theoretical apparatus which enable these initial movements through the orthodox frameworks for writing about Grunge fiction. Then, the introduction will present the thesis’ central theoretical concepts which are taken from Franco Moretti’s and, to a lesser extent, Fredric Jameson’s, historical sociology of literary form. Here I will argue that the effective application of the methods of Moretti’s literary history to Grunge fiction demands that a locally and temporally specific historical sociology needs to be presented. And finally, in this introduction, I will introduce the model for this late twentieth-century Australia-inflected historical sociology: Peter Beilharz’s long Labor decade.

The subsequent chapters of the thesis are structured through this initial horizontal and periodising movement. Beilharz’s periodization of Australian political-cultural modernity – the long Labor decade – emerges out of his hermeneutics of the texts of, and concerning, the Australian Labor Party in government: 1983-96. Beliharz’s melancholic and mournful work of interpretive historical sociology provides the structure upon which the thesis' chapters are formed. Thus the first chapter, after establishing the key terms of this historical sociology – labourism, social-Liberalism and industrial citizenship – moves into three studies of key figures and texts in the period.

The first study focuses on the traditions that the ALP prime minister Gough Whitlam encapsulated for some writers on the Left during the period. The keynotes of this genre of writing were expressions of loss and betrayal, often mounted as accusations, against the Hawke-Keating Governments, which were defined in opposition to the Labor traditions that Whitlam and his Government were claimed to have embodied. My interest here is in the narrativisations and texualisation of Whitlam and Whitlamism, for Whitlam becomes, I argue, a ghostly figure that haunts the long Labor decade, as a spectre of a lost tradition and of a lesson in mis-management.

The second study hones in on the figure of treasurer, then prime-minister, Paul Keating. Here I analyse the richly imaginative rhetoric of Keating alongside the biographies and memoirs of Keating.

Thirdly, I seek to draw back from the central figures of the period into analysis of what can be regarded as its central text: Paul Kelly’s The End of Certainty.

The final section of chapter one defines, and explains how I will use, Michel Foucault’s concept of Neoliberal governmentality throughout the thesis’ remaining three literary-focussed chapters. I situate the historical emergence of these new forms of liberal government within the period ending the dominance of the social-liberal Keynesian techniques of government, and ending the articulation of these social-liberal techniques to Labourist ones. This period is characterised by the re-emergence of global finance capitalism, best signalled by the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of financial regulation and the growth of floating national currency exchanges.

Having established the non-fictional texualisation and narrativisation of the period, the remaining three chapters of the thesis jump tracks and move back into a literary critical and literary historical mode that is structured by the hermeneutic model Beilharz proffers. Thus chapter two reads the oeuvres of Frank Moorhouse and Amanda Lohrey against the loss of Whitlam and Whitlamism and the emergence of Neoliberal forms of government. It also reads two of their novels against the post-Whitlam sense of mourning and loss.

Chapter three returns us to Grunge fiction. Now we are ready to read Praise, 1988 and Loaded with the armoury of textual affiliations and openings across cultural and political boundaries that were closed and occluded in those readings analysed in the introduction.

Chapter three uses the reading made in chapter one of Kelly’s use of the Bildungsroman form to narratively embed Neoliberal governmentalities into Australian political culture as the basis on which to read three novels which also invoke this period and these generic conventions. Perlman’s Three Dollars, McCann’s Subtopia and Macris Capital, volume one are interpreted and explained as responses to the embedding of Neoliberalism into Australian, and indeed Global, political culture. While Three Dollars is disabled and disfigured in its response, Subtopia and Capital, volume one use sophisticated politics of literary form to both resist and point to ways out of Neoliberalism.

The thesis concludes with a short survey of other fiction of the period and a brief outlining of areas for future research suggested by the thesis.