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.

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.

*

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.

Three Dollars and Economic Times, Subtopia as Grunge Bildungsroman

Versions of the sub-chapter cut from my PhD thesis -- below -- have appeared in various guises on this blog previously. This is the 'final' version, subject to examiners' assessments, prior to setting the work in stone. Anyway, below is a reading of two novels that are concerned with Australian and even global political economy of the 1970s through to the 2000s. Each novel is also connected to the Bildingsroman form. Pairing them still seems a good way of contrasting the strengths and weaknesses of each, although the novel I'm most critical of -- Elliot Perlman's Three Dollars -- is also the one given most consideration. This is because it is more insiduous, and an attractive work of semi-social realist critical fiction that reads less well on subsequent readings.
NB: it's a long read for a blog post - about 6,700 words.

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Franco Moretti argues that in the classical Bildungsroman the formation of Goethe’s character Wilhelm Meister, among other heroes of the genre, is to be conducted outside of the realm of work. Moretti notes that “[t]here is one point on which Lukács and [Georg] Simmel seem particularly to agree: that it is fairly difficult for modern ‘personality’ to reach its goal in a professional occupation alone, that is to say, in work” (2000a: 41). Part of the problem with seeking the formation of personality in work is, Moretti argues, because

[c]apitalist rationality cannot generate Bildung. Capital, due to its purely quantitative nature, and the competition it is subject to, can be a fortune only in so far as it keeps growing. It must grow, and change form, and never stop: as Adam Smith observed in The Wealth of Nations, the merchant is a citizen of no country in particular. (26)

The problem with this quantitative and endless growth for the classical Bildungsroman is that it is essential to build a ‘homeland’ for the individual, [as] it is also indispensable for time to stop at a privileged moment. A Bildung is truly such only if, at a certain point, it can be seen as concluded: only if youth passes into maturity, and comes there to a stop there. (26)
As we saw in Kelly’s The End of Certainty the perpetual movement of the international markets, especially those financial markets trading in currency, are placed into this Bildungsroman of nation through the evaluative authorial position. This narrativization of finance capital has a homology in Goethe’s germinal Bildungsroman. Near the end of Wilhelm’s long romantic and theatrical journey he discovers that his life has been the narrative property of the aristocratic Society of the Tower, who had written his life script in advance and determined his course toward settling and marrying into their community (Moretti, 2000a: 29, Slaughter, 2006: 1411-12).

Unlike the world into which Wilhelm can settle, in which time can stop and space enclose him thus enabling the completion of his Bildung, the time-space of the long Labor decade is traversed by the logics of finance capital and Neoliberal forms which ecstatically fuse spaces previously considered contained and protected from markets and capitalism. In one sense Neoliberalism is, to borrow a well-known phrase, the cultural logic of finance capitalism. Indeed, based on Mitchell Dean’s theory of Neoliberal governmentality as being, in part, practised as “’culture-governance’ or governance through the ethical culture or cultivation of the individual” a central strand of this thesis’ argument is that a Neoliberal Bildung, a Neoliberal cultural formation of the self, is what can be seen in parts of the textuality of the long Labor decade (2007: 61).

The ramifications of such a Neoliberalisation of culture is evident in Frow and Morris’ opening paragraphs to Australian Cultural Studies: a Reader:

[d]uring the past few years the word ‘culture’ has come to be used by Australians in a sense that seems far removed from anything to do with artistic and literary texts. When Australian Labor Party Senator Stephen Loosley declares that ‘resetting industrial policy is really a matter of reshaping cultural attitudes’, he is not defining culture as a domain of aesthetic pleasure, as a set of masterpieces, or even as an expression of national identity. Nor is he speaking in economic terms of culture as a major industry which (the Sydney Daily Telegraph Mirror assure us) ‘fills Aussie tills’. He is referring to a complex of social customs, values and expectations which affect our ways of working.
So, too, was Rupert Murdoch in an interview screened on ABC-TV in 1990. Just as the worst company crash in Australian history ended an era of financial mismanagement and entrepreneurial crime, the Melbourne host of the ABC current affairs program 7.30 Report asked Mr Murdoch what ‘we’ should do to save our economy. Mr Murdoch replied perfunctorily, ‘Oh, you know: change the culture’. Unlike Senator Loosley, Murdoch expected us to ‘know’ that he was quoting a formula of the neo-liberal rhetoric now broadly shared in Australia (as elsewhere) by bureaucrats, politicians, economists, journalists and financiers as well as union and corporate leaders, namely: economic problems have cultural solutions. Culture in this sense is not just a topic for specialized debate by an esoteric caste of interpreters (‘critics’). On the contrary: ’changing the culture’ is a shorthand but expansive way of challenging the conduct of others people’s everyday working lives – whether within the framework of a single company (’changing the culture is not a quick process in something as old and as large as ARC’, says a chief executive of Australia’s main producer of concrete reinforcing steel); of an industry (a marketing expert offers a paper on ‘changing culture for service: how to effect a change to the service culture ion shopping centres’); or an entire national economy (‘Professor Hughes said Australians had relied on the “lucky country” attitude for too long [. . .] ”We have got to cultivate an export culture”’). (vii-viii)

Yet this understanding of culture, as practices and meanings, that is to say, as techniques and rationalities, contradicts Moretti’s assertions above about the non-work and non-capitalist sphere through which Bildung is to proceed in the novels of the nineteenth century. Clearly we are far from then. But the substantive point is that under conditions of Neoliberal governmentality the formation of the civilised self cannot proceed in a sphere which might have been, or was at least imagined to have been, decontaminated from work and capital in earlier times.

The sorts of self-formations that can be made in the long Labor decade are ones which are not only perpetual, rather than final and complete, as they are in the classical Bildungsromane of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Pride and Prejudice, but ones also faced with the dominance of capitalism and the commodity form (Moretti, 2000a: 67-73). This thesis has argued that Neoliberalism is best considered as political rationalities: as techniques and practices of self and state, households and small businesses, that are saturated with forms of knowing and calculation, languages and vocabularies of rule, and regimes of truth (Dean, 1995: 560). These forms of conducting conduct, of governmentality, are practised through the twinned processes of a technique and a form of thought by way of which the technique has a method, an aim, and an object (564). In the Neoliberal form of governmentality these political rationalities work to conduct a range of selves, groups, institutions, corporations, states and inter-state bodies in ways that form the self, for example, as an enterprise or entrepreneur, or the self as risk-management agent. Yet in considering both Kelly’s Bildungsroman of the long Labor decade, and in anticipation of analysing the three fictional texts below, the spectre of capitalism demands a more sustained explication as a fundamental force shaping those aspects of the textuality of the long Labor decade that this thesis has so far analysed.

The mourned for tears and disjunctions in the Labourist-Social-Liberal continuum of governmentality that were explored and interpreted in chapter 1 and the atopic, arrhythmic, and abject irruptions of bodies presented in chapter 2 point to a fundamental discontinuity in the forms of governmentality that reside in the texts of the long Labor decade. In the first section of this chapter the discussion shifted to Kelly’s influential political history of the long Labor decade, where the analysis moved into a consideration of this text as a use of the narrative form of the Bildungsroman to explain, and seek consent for, the necessity of discarding the institutions and practices of government which were part of the Labourist-Social-Liberal consensus. I argued that Kelly’s tome narrativises, in a homologous manner authority positioned in the pre-destined life-script that Wilhelm receives from the Society of the Tower, the evaluative judgements of the international financial markets into the minute-by-minute writers of the life-script of Australian political culture. Indeed, the defining political act of the long Labor decade was the decision to ‘clean’ float the currency (Kelly, 1994: 76, Bell, 2004: 25-30, Capling et al, 1998: 47). If Australia was to become more youthful, experience healthy growth, pick up the pace and open itself up, then the floating of the currency released forces into the continent that forms of governmentality had both prepared the way for, and could only respond and react to, rather than act on.

When the forces of global finance capitalism, articulated to Keynesian forms of governing national economies, broke the Labourist-Social-Liberal consensus in 1973-4 as the price of oil quadrupled and simultaneously high unemployment and inflation put paid to the Keynesian macroeconomic techniques of government, new forms of government, such as Friedman’s monetary targeting, were adopted (Bell, 2004: 32-37). The emergence then of new forms of finance capital and the new forms of Neoliberal governmentality through the 1970s and into the 1980s presented problems for textual representation, and posed acute problems for fictions that attempted to represent this sweep of historical time. As we saw above in the previous section, Kelly’s story of the long Labor decade depicts it as the time in which the crises of the 1970s were understood as the response of a redundant political-cultural-economic settlement to changed international economic and geopolitical conditions. But for writers working on the Left in the literary field, such a triumphal narrative of Neoliberal modernisation could not be accepted. How then to present a resistant or counter-narrative to Kelly’s? Of course, no Australian novelist read The End of Certainty and consequently set about ‘writing back’ to Kelly’s text. That is not the level of argument being pursued here. Instead, what I’m arguing for is a historical sociology of Australian political culture in which symbolic cultural, and indeed literary, forms, like the Bildungsroman narrative form, can be understood as being drawn upon and put to work in a culture in order to use the form’s resources for a specific project of modernisation. It was the unstated, albeit implied, argument of chapter 2 of this thesis that Keating’s marshalling of tropes of youth, health and mobility were organised by a Bildungsroman structure. Explicit, though, were the readings of the Grunge fiction in chapter 2 as contestations of the organically developmental, modernising logic of Keating’s story of the long Labor decade. Kelly’s story of the period, about which Keating said “I am inclined to almost entirely agree with”, also has its fictional contestations, though unlike the Grunge fiction considered above, these contestations rally on terrain closer to the duration of the classical Bildungsroman (Keating, 1996: 3).

*

Certainly the most popular explicit fictional critique of ‘economic rationalism’ in the period I am analysing is Elliot Perlman’s Three Dollars. Unlike the Grunge novels considered in chapter 2, any proximity to the atopic or abject is nearly completely absent from the body of the novel’s narrator-hero, Eddie Harnovey. Three Dollars has a temporal span of over twenty years and traverses the 1970s, 80s and 90s as Harnovey tells the story from the time in his adult life in which he and his nuclear family are almost destitute: having only three dollars. Perlman’s novel is a celebrated one having won the The Age book of the year award, being shortlisted for the Miles Franklin, and was, in 2006, voted best novel about Victoria in a poll conducted by the Victorian State Library (Steeger). A film adaptation was released in 2005 and it was at this point that Three Dollars began to act out its metafictional aspiration of becoming a literary narrative through which a critical-rational discussion of economic rationalism would be staged. Neoconservative cultural critic Keith Windschuttle used the novel to argue for the privatisation of the ABC as one way to close down the sort of cultural elitism that he argued Perlman’s novel represented, while another neoconservative journalist and occasional cultural critic, Greg Sheridan, in The Australian, pointed out how unrealistic this realism was when its hero could go from a reasonably comfortable middle-class existence to one of almost homelessness in the space of days (Windschuttle, Gelder, 2006: 54-56). On the other hand Gelder has argued that while the novel is “one of only a few that might [. . .] be claimed by the Left” as the closest recent example of a critical political realism, its resolution is conservative, with Eddie returned to his wife and child, safe and with the prospect of a job, high up in the human resources department in an un-named bank, after being sacked from his Federal government job for leaking to the media his rejected critical report on proposed Smelter development (54).

Unlike the highly compressed temporal spans of Praise, 1988 and, especially, the twenty-four hours of Loaded, Three Dollars spans over 20 years, and its critique of Neoliberalism is both explicit and profoundly disabled by its formal politics: the politics of its poetics. The central problem with the novel is that it adopts the Bildungsroman convention of a future-anterior narrating position from which to tell a story not of the hero’s formation, but of the hero’s integrity, while the Australian public sphere is de-formed by Neoliberalism (Slaughter: 1415). Eddie is not presented as emerging along with history, as Bakhtin argues is central to the Bildungsroman, but as already formed through the civilising culture of what appears to be an Arnoldian-Leavisite project enabling Eddie to retain a clean ethical grasp on his sense of civilisation and integrity: “no one we met in those early days at university read Wordsworth, Keats, Eliot, Robert Frost or A.D. Hope” (41). The novel presents a self-conscious display of ‘literariness’ where the story of the early years of Eddie’s life can be interrupted by lines from a Gerard Manley Hopkins or Wordsworth poem (16, 33). In many ways Eddie represents the values that Davis argues are embedded in the ‘pre revolutionary’ forms of literary theory” which

continue to play as guiding forms of public knowledge. Such ideas inform the “popular critical consciousness” in so far as popular discourse about the humanities remains dominated by modernist critical paradigms such as Leavisim and New Criticism, even underpinned by a throwback to a residual Arnoldianism. (2007: 8)

Indeed, Eddie explicitly eschews such “post-revolutionary” theory when he tells us,

I was always suspicious of the bush balladeering sentimentality of, say, the Jindyworobaks and its more recent socio-political manifestation, that type of often unyielding, unscientific, dogmatic, and bombastic environmentalism that does for society’s habitat what the followers of Foucault and Derrida did for the promotion of literature as a source of sustainable enjoyment. It takes the people out of the equation and leaves it so much the poorer. (260)

The metafictional depiction of Eddie as a figure steeped in the civilising values of this paradigm of Australian literary-Liberalism is present in the novel’s allusion to the Hamlet revenge-plot, including a visit from the Ghost of the record store owner, Old man Williamson, proffering advice, while Eddie’s decision to leak his report on the environmental hazards of a development enacts a revenge on the rapacious, developer-father figure whose daughter he had been prevented from associating with as a young boy (Davis, 2007: 9, Perlman, 1998: 226-31, 286-87).

In Three Dollars Perlman’s narrator effectively takes on the narrative temporality of the future-anterior using it to narrate from the fantasy of a universal and transcendent humanistic culture that is capable of providing the means for civilising capitalism. As Terry Eagleton argues in The Function of Criticism “[w]hat Scrutiny [Leavis’ journal] represented [. . .] was nothing less than an attempt to reinvent the classical public sphere, at a time when its material conditions had definitively passed” (2005: 75). Three Dollars doubles a melancholic longing for the classical literary public sphere that Leavis also struggled to revive, propelling it into zones of reactionary politics such as Eddie’s blunt refusal to entertain his, at the time, girlfriend Tanya’s plan to play the role of Hamlet: “’Listen Tanya, Shakespeare wrote him as a man, a young man, with all the attendant oedipal hang-ups that young men keep somewhere between the head and the heart’” (50).

While the classical public sphere relied on a belief in a naturalised and strictly policed distinction between economy and culture, Neoliberalism functions through an enculturation, or formation, of the subject as entrepreneurial, flexible, productive, self-managing, and accountable (Eagleton, 2005: 26-27). Culture, like the state, becomes an object of market political rationality in the 1980s and 90s and in Three Dollars nearly all the main characters, except Eddie, become subject to this emergent structure of feeling, which manifests itself, most strongly, in Eddie’s wife Tanya’s depression (145-47). The link between Tanya’s illness and her doctoral work is made through the juxtaposition of, on the one hand, the defence of her thesis and her advocacy for “’a return to the Keynesian economics of the forties, fifties and sixties’”, and on the other, a bout of Tanya’s “’not uncommon’” depression which follows chronologically from that scene in the novel where she most vehemently mounts her defence of Keynesian governmentality (143, 146). Tanya struggles with the onset of Neoliberalism both as managerial practice at University and as the subject of her unfinished doctoral thesis “’[t]he death of political economics’” (125). While Tanya’s experience of Neoliberalism is felt as depression, it is their child Abby’s epileptic-like fit that signals an analogy with what Kelly calls the “convulsions of the 1980s” (1994: 1). Indeed, Abby first has an epileptic seizure after Eddie dallies with a female friend, Kate: even Eddie’s small indiscretions are punished. Helpless, as Abby moves into a fit, Eddie watched as “[s]he bounced. She appeared to be bouncing. Her back was arched unnaturally and her arms and legs stiffened and then relaxed arrhythmically. It was no rhythm at all but a violent madness in her, no rhythm I could recognise” (236).

In terms of the sufferers of illness in the novel there are two others whose depression is so severe that they commit suicide and who are positioned in terms of economic and geopolitical events that, like Tanya’s doctorate thesis, make an explicit link between mental and economic illness. In the case of Eddie’s Uncle George, who “had stories from the depression”, a desire to endow his younger wife with goods leads to financial speculations that bankrupt him, and his ensuing depression moves him to suicide (7, 12-13, 29). The connection between George’s decline and that of the Keynesian period, in which the Australian Labourist-Social-Liberal consensus held sway, is evident here. Similarly, Tanya’s father, like Abby an epileptic, was a theatre troupe leader who had fled Czechoslovakia for Australia after World War II, and who “thought that Shakespeare was the font of all wisdom” (149). On tour in a rural Australian town he causes a sexual scandal by sleeping with the town mayor’s daughter and two days later kills himself, a long battle with depression exacerbating the guilt over the scandal (150-51). Tanya’s father is proximal to World War II, which emerged, in part, from the Great Depression. What is also of interest here is the allusion to Wilhelm Meister who, like Tanya’s father, “had long wanted to start his own theatre company, one which would travel the country offering a mixed repertoire of light comedies, drawing-room farce and, of course, Shakespeare” (Perlman, 1998: 149). Moretti has drawn attention to the central role that Hamlet plays in Goethe’s germinal Bildungsroman:

According to the text, Hamlet is thirty years old: far from young by Renaissance standards. But our [western modern] culture, in choosing Hamlet as its first symbolic hero, has ‘forgotten’ his age, or rather has had to alter it, and picture the Prince of Denmark as a young man.
The decisive thrust in this sense was made by Goethe; and it takes shape, symptomatically, precisely in the work that codifies the new paradigm and sees youth as the most meaningful part of life: Wilhelm Meister. (2000a: 3)

These allusions to Goethe’s novel are accumulative and odd. The Hamlet plot mentioned above is doubled by the performance of the play in which Tanya seeks to play the Prince during that time in her and Eddie’s lives when they are both experimenting with personas and considering their options: this is a time of youth so it makes allusive sense for Hamlet to appear at this point in the story. What also appears at this point in the novel’s historical time is “an apocalyptic epileptic Mancunian Sinatra” – Ian Curtis lead singer of postpunk band “Joy Division” (42). In an effort to maintain Tanya’s wavering attention Eddie affects the manner and look of Curtis, becoming “a post-industrial parody of myself” (42). At this point in the novel Eddie and Tanya are momentarily recognisable as being in transition, as emerging along with history, in a process of becoming. They are at this moment engaged in Bildung.

Eddie’s dalliance with “Joy Division” and Tanya’s with playing Hamlet mark the moment in which their earlier, passionate romance evaporates and they separate. If Tanya and Eddie are momentarily emerging along with the world then the sudden end to this period of experimentation which finishes with their reuniting and committing to careers is both a missed opportunity in the novel and is symptomatic of the contradiction that Three Dollars attempts, but fails, to resolve. This contradiction is between the novel’s address to, and metafictional longing for, an imagined classical public sphere and the new form of governmentality: Neoliberalism. In other words Three Dollars aims to hail a reader who having read Eddie’s story of middle-class un-protection is armed with the subjective but realist life-narrative that builds a moral-aesthetic force into arguments in the political public sphere: arguments ultimately aimed at a Social-Liberal civilising of capitalism through an ethical-state that regulates the private market sphere in line with universal humanist ethical values. These ethical values, Three Dollars argues, arise naturally from the intimate human-ness of the private domestic sphere when an ordinary, middle-class, patriarchal and heterosexual family is supported by the state. Near the end of the novel, and the plot, Eddie, who has been downsized, and whose family is about to lose their home, tells us: “I understood that secular humanism, liberalism and social justice had not abandoned me [. . .] it was just that everybody had abandoned them” (345).

And here we come back to Ian Curtis. In the novel there are three chronotopes of economic time represented. The major symbol of time-space is Eddie’s childhood friend Amanda Claremont. “Every nine-and-a-half-years” they cross paths and every meeting finds him with only three dollars. Amanda’s mother removes the lower-middle class 10-year-old Eddie from Amanda’s life because, Eddie thinks, he will stain her with his lower social standing (1). I read this economic time or rhythm as symbolising the boom-bust business cycle – cyclic and inevitable, requiring the Keynesian macroeconomic regulation regime to even out the highs and lows (Capling et al: 8-10). The second chronotope attached to political economy in the novel is Depression. Tanya’s endemic depression is exacerbated by her struggle to write a political science doctorate on the death of political economics which she plans to bolster with a defence of Keynesian economics, an illness which is accelerated by her tutoring contract finishing at her campus. Tanya’s depression runs on a deeper cycle than Amanda’s nine-and-a-half year appearances. Along with Tanya, Tanya’s father and Eddie’s Uncle George both suffer from depressions that result in suicide. It is also significant that both these bouts of depression and suicide are structured, within the novel’s moral economy, as being caused by abnormal sexual acts or desires that conflate sex and money. Uncle George’s suicide due to a depression is coterminous with the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, the oil shocks and stagflation of the early 1970s – stagflation being the death knell for Keynesian macroeconomic demand-side regulation. Tanya’s father’s depression runs back to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The third chronotope is never as explicitly figured as being economic as the first two are, and this brings us back to Bakhtin’s notion that the Bildungsroman presents human emergence alongside historical emergence. What sort of historical emergence, then, might be represented in the disease of epilepsy? Rather than the deep temporal return of the dystopic seventh wave of depression, and unlike the more regular, troughs and peaks of the business cycle that the middle class are largely insulated from, epilepsy is a convulsive, shuddering and highly compressed oscillation that makes its victims unconscious. Ian Curtis is one of the novel’s epileptics and so is Tanya and Eddie’s daughter Abby. What I’m suggesting here is that Three Dollars, while structured like a Bildungsroman, disavows the primary category of this key narrative form of modernity: a transition between youth and adulthood.

Youth in Three Dollars can’t emerge because in the universe of the novel history is disappearing; it is contracting rather than expanding. The figure of epilepsy, however, that awaits Abby’s teenage years, as we imagine, since her grandfather also suffered from the illness, and which inflicts itself on the postindustrial poet of punk, Ian Curtis, functions as an ideologeme of the novel operating in its political unconscious. Rather than history contracting and returning to 1930s Germany as the novel’s tropes suggest, the temporal logic of the epileptic seizure is such that its regulation, to extend the reading here of how to govern an economic condition like this illness, requires a flexible, micro-timed support and release regulation-deregulation regime. To paint this reading in bolder strokes: at its ostensive level Three Dollars presents an Arnoldian-Leavisite cultural formation as a civilising bulwark against the philistine culture and psychology of economic rationalism. Economic rationalism cannot be presented as historical emergence because its culture is regressive and, as the novel makes clear, so are those characters that inhabit its discursive regimes. But Three Dollars cannot, however, resolve its own contradiction that the civilising foundations of the Arnoldian-Leavisite literary paradigm are based on a nostalgia for a classical public sphere that despite its self-advertised universal address, was always restricted and was structurally transformed as the domestic private sphere itself became more and more of a space of commodification and cultural industry colonisation. The contradiction here is that digital finance capital and its cultural logics – one form of which is Neoliberalism – does convulse like epilepsy and that this epileptic temporality of light capitalism is historically emergent and produces new structures of feeling. James Ley is half-right when he argues that Three Dollars is an anti-Bildungsroman (2006: 36). The novel’s Bildung is in the barely repressed epileptic figure of illness. A figure for the cultural logic of finance capital:

Tanya predicted that the day would come when people would have difficulty remembering a time that movements in the stock market were not reported more frequently than the road toll or air pollution indices. She was right. The interminable repetition of sharemarket indices thereafter did not leave us unchanged. I would call Tanya at work and get a quotation of her ‘all ordinaries index’. Was she up or down today? ‘Slightly up but coming off a low base’, she might say. (87-89)

By employing the narrating position of the Bildungsroman in a first person narrative, Perlman’s novel attempts to overcome the historical emergence of Neoliberalism by annihilating his narrator’s moment of transition. Eddie doesn’t need to grow up – to experiment, to go through a formation or apprenticeship, to complete the two tasks of Bildung: a precarious becoming of autonomy and socialisation. Eddie’s almost innate maturity is a judgement performed from the future-anterior of the story’s end, so that Eddie’s human-ness, his ethical sensibility, his acts of kindness to strangers, are obviously and always already the right act at the right time. And this sense of Eddie’s kairos gets us closer to the challenge of an emerging arrhythmia that would normally be presented through the transitional sequence in a novel, but here must be abjected. Neoliberalism is not necessarily a regression or return, to Germany between the world wars for example, and the spaces of cultural autonomy from which this rationality is mis-recognised as being a capitalism that can be civilised in the same ways as Keynesian Social-Liberalism attempted to civilise capitalism, are themselves becoming marketized, made productive, efficient, flexible.

*

The ending of Three Dollars, where Eddie is huddled in the bosom of his nuclear family in his own home, is a neat act of narrative closure that echoes the ending of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship: at home, with loved ones (Goethe: 373). While Three Dollars largely eschews the period of youth-to-adulthood, and uses this ‘period’ in which to set out the novel’s gender conservatism and moralistic physiogomies, Andrew McCann’s Subtopia (2005) directs the reader immediately toward the novel’s self-conscious metafictional disavowal of Bildungsroman conventions:

It’s not much of a way to conclude. I should have grown up, come to my senses, come of age (as you do), or fucked off for good. Warsaw, Vilnius, Riga. I was pushing thirty, for Christ’s sake. But in the end, so the cliché goes, there is no end. At least not anything we can own up to. A bit of self-indulgent bullshit about perpetual becoming or mutual understanding, a nice rhetorical flourish and no one seems to notice just how inconclusive our experiences really are, which is not to say that they aren’t also full of danger.
I guess I could have done with some of that bullshit. Sick, angry, unattractive. Liver out of order. Even as a ten-year old I was a pain in the neck. And out there, in the wide flat suburbs of Melbourne’s south, you had to concentrate hard to effect even the most minimal kind of transformation. I think that is what we longed for most, Martin and I: transformation, metamorphosis, negation. That’s why I was drawn to him in my timid, half-arsed way. He was ready to demolish things if they didn’t measure up, and finally he was ready to demolish himself. (9-10)

Subtopia is a metafictional Grunge Bildungsroman. Much like Dante in David Malouf’s 1975 Bildungsroman Johnno (1975), Subtopia’s narrator-hero Julian Farrell grows up in the shadow of a more transgressive and engaged childhood friend, Martin Bernhard. Julian’s teenage years are lived in proximity to both Martin and his father’s brother’s family headed by the gauche “Silver Fox” who “worked in real estate and development, and was something of a local celebrity at the yacht club, where he raced a boat called Moby Dick” and whom Julian introduces us to by witnessing him sexually molesting Julian’s younger sister Connie (13-14). This graphic sexual honesty, reminiscent of Grunge’s pornographic writing is a structural feature of the novel. Like McGahan’s Gordon, Julian’s sexuality is problematic and proximate to diseases, violent fantasy and pornography (17).

Like Eddie in Three Dollars Julian emerges from the Melbourne suburbs, or subtopia, and his story begins in the 1970s. He lives on the periphery of an authentic encounter with a self he finds reflected in the returned gaze of the more dangerous, proto-punk, Martin Bernhard. Julian’s lust for a violent transformation, for that moment in which to make the revolutionary leap into authenticity, is hampered by the clean-ness of his suburban desires and frightened by the abject proximity of the rodent-like Martin:

even when he didn’t turn up, he was still close by, the smell of him, a sort of physicality against which sexual fantasies of the glossy porno-magazine variety would dissipate or collapse into something that seemed much more bestial. I was almost neurotic about it, driven into little rituals of cleanliness and mental discipline by the superstitious presentiment that if I didn’t wash him out of my thoughts, I might turn into him, the Mongrel, an abandoned creature precariously perched on the border between the human and the animal. (55)

Julian’s 1980s are spent at university, studying English and hanging around on the periphery of a post-Nick Cave/ Birthday Party scene near St Kilda. The spectre of revolutionary Berlin haunts this milieu; Berlin being a ‘spiritual home’ for Lou Reed, and for a time housing Iggy Pop and David Bowie. Nick Cave also spent time there. For Julian, however, it is the ghost of Ulrike Meinhoff, from the terrorist Red Army faction, that draws his political and libidinal desires to Berlin. In 1977, The Red Army Faction took hostages, and hijacked a plane. Meinhoff was captured the year prior, and died suspiciously. Julian, after finishing his study, follows Martin and Martin’s partner Anja to Berlin, and he arrives just before the fall of the wall, where Julian’s fear of carcinogens is put on hold while he falls into revolutionary lust with the mentally-ill, possibly terrorist, Ingrid Guttman. He leaves Berlin, knowing that Martin has a taste for heroin, and reunites with his ex-girlfriend Sally in New York who is succeeding in establishing herself as an academic there. Julian again becomes obsessed with friable asbestos and the carcinogenic properties of late capitalism, before heading back to suburban Melbourne then onto Berlin where he discovers Martin has died from a brain tumor.

As is signalled in the novel’s opening metafictional negation of the Bildungsroman, Julian’s emergence is not one completed by a single transforming moment, nor a series of accumulative epiphanies, but rather is a sequence of episodes all polluted or diseased by some doubt, shame or proximity to a dangerous border. The intention of the novel, like McGahan’s Grunge novels, is to use an orthodox generic form, refuse and negate it, so as to populate the narrative with disturbing and abject bodily techniques and actions. Where Eddie in Three Dollars is at a remove from transgressive sex, drug use, disease, Julian is proximate to these tropes of the abject body and abject bodies. Reflecting, enviously, on the circle of his more dangerous friends, Julian feels that

[t]here was something real about them. They were the types I’d imagined tearing away at the social fabric. They had the capacity for dissidence that wasn’t laboured. They seemed to have no interest in finding out who they were and how they fitted in. They’d already given up on that. And they seemed to know how to seek each other out. They were what I had imagined in my vision of exploding bus stops and suburban terror. They were mutants. Free radicals breeding in cells. At the back of my mind I had worked out a system that explained these differences: because they were mentally outside the corpseworld, exceptions to it, the mutants would survive its banality, while those within it, like Sally and me – examples of good, law-abiding citizens, our own psyches crushed flat against a two-dimensional surface – we were always going to be prey to the malignancies of society, and of our own frustrated fantasies: hungry cells and dammed-up energy turning against their host. (102)

This sense of lacking self-authenticity is connected in the novel to the sense of belatedness; of coming, for example, to Berlin in the aftermath of its ‘revolutionary’ heyday:

It was a nondescript, desolate corner. Everything was too big, too wide for the trickle of traffic and the sparse pedestrian population. It could have been Nepean Highway in Moorabbin. The Ice Age version. Life running down in the dead of winter, a few people surviving to ghost through the frozen streets. (131-2)

Belated, morbid, melancholic. Subtopia has a similar mix of affects to Praise and 1988, and presents similarly sick and beaten bodies. Yet like Loaded it “manipulates abjection as social protest. Primarily the novel engages with abjection to demonstrate the obscenity of capitalism” (Kirkby, 1998: 239). Thus when on the streets of inner Melbourne Julian depicts the city and his body as diseased:

[d]irty plastic, neon, capitalism gone derelict. I imagined cells in my throat turning cancerous. Pink, then brown, then black. Somewhere in the distance I could hear the sound of bagpipes. And when the tangled fugue faded, I knew I’d be back in the void of the suburbs, miles of brick veneer, asbestos and scalloped roof-tiles spreading to the bay on one side, and to swampy, semi-rural wastelands and landfills on the other. (65)

The effect of using the Bildungsroman form, as McCann does here, without completing the hero’s formation and by drawing attention to some of the conventions of this genre, is to enable a reading that can raise questions about a National coming-of-age which appears to have already been written by the investment projections of the international financial markets: Neoliberalism’s version of Wilhelm Meister’s Society of the Tower writing his life-script. By derailing the teleology of a naturalised formation of self pulled into the future, other more unsettling chronotopes are given the time to work into the narrative. Set against a metafictional negation of a Bildungsroman the foregrounding of these Grunge tropes raises the question of whether or not the emergence of Neoliberalism, as techniques of self, is able to be represented in conventional Bildungsroman form. Indeed, as I argued above, Three Dollars, for all its insights into the quotidian experiences of the emergence of Neoliberalism is disfigured by its abjection of those diseases, which resides outside of Eddie’s body inhabiting instead his wife’s and child’s. The attempt also to repress the period of coming-of-age I argue forces historical emergence into the novel’s most intriguing ideologeme: the epileptic fit. As I write this the global financial system is caught in a series of rolling crises. The international markets that Kelly placed at the organising centre of his Bildungsroman of nation, and which he endowed with the evaluating power to judge Australian political culture from the historical future, are having, what might be called, an epileptic seizure. Whether or not this is our historical future the times will tell.

________________________________________________

Works Cited

Bell, Stephen. Australia’s Money Mandarins: the Reserve Bank and the Politics of Money. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.

Brooks, Karen. “Shit Creek: Suburbia, Abjection and Subjectivity in Australian ‘Grunge’ Fiction.” Australian Literary Studies 18.4 (October 1998): 87-100.

Capling, Ann, Mark Considine and Michael Crozier. Australian Politics in the Global Era. South Melbourne: Addison Wesley Longman, 1998.

Davis, Mark. “The Clash of the Paradigms: Australian Literary Theory after Liberalism.” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 7 (2007): 7-31.

Dean, Mitchell. Governing Societies: Political Perspectives on International and Domestic Rule. Berkshire: Open UP, 2007.

Eagleton, Terry. The Function of Criticism. Radical Thinkers 6. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 2005.

Frow, John and Meaghan Morris. Introduction. Eds. John Frow and Meaghan Morris. Australian Cultural Studies: a Reader. St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1993. vii-xxxii.

Gelder, Ken “Politics and Monomania: the Rarefied World of Contemporary Australian Literary Culture.” Overland 184 (2006): 48-56.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Ed. and Trans. Eric A. Blackall with Victor Lange. Goethe’s Collected Works. Vol. 9. New York: Suhrkamp, 1989.

Keating, Paul. “For the New Australia.” Edited transcript of speech to University of NSW, 11 November 1996. Accessed: 24.10.2007.

Kelly, Paul. The End of Certainty: Power, Politics and Business in Australia. Rev. ed. St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1994.

Kirkby, Joan. “Literature.” Americanization and Australia. Eds. Philip Bell and Roger Bell. Kensington: U NSW P, 1998: 228-45.

Ley, James. “How Small the Light of Home’: Andrew McGahan and the Politics of Guilt.” Australian Book Review 280 (April 2006): 35-39.

McCann, Andrew. Subtopia. Carlton: Vulgar, 2005.

Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: the Bildungsroman in European Culture. New ed. Trans. Albert Sbragia. London: Verso, 2000a.

Perlman, Elliot. “The Human Cost of Economic Rationalism.” Robert Connolly and Elliot Perlman. Three Dollars: Screenplay. Strawberry Hills: Currency, 2005: xi-xxvi.

___, Three Dollars. Sydney: Picador, 1998.

Slaughter, Joseph R. “Enabling Fictions and Novel Subjects: The Bildungsroman and International Human Rights Law.” PMLA 121.5 (October 2006): 1405-23.

Steeger, Jason. “Tale of Tough Times in Melbourne Resonates with Readers.” Age (23 February, 2007): Accessed: 25.06.2008.

Windschuttle, Keith. “Vilifying Australia: the Perverse Ideology of our Adversary Culture.” Earle Page Memorial Oration 22 June 2005. Accessed: 16.06.2006.

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.


___________________________________________________________________

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.

*

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.

*

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.