Death of Australian Political Fiction meme

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If the Prime Minister were real estate: Mourning Liberal Democracy

Wendy Brown, Professor of Political Science at University of California, is always interesting to read. I've been reading her essay 'Neoliberalism and the end of Liberal democracy' again (properly) recently in an effort to better understand neoliberalism as a political rationality. Brown writes that,

neoliberalism is not simply a set of economic policies; it is not only about facilitating free trade, maximizing corporate profits, and challenging welfarism. Rather, neoliberalism carries a social analysis that, when deployed as a form of governmentality, reaches from the soul of the citizen-subject to education policy to practices of empire. Neoliberal political rationality, while foregrounding the market, is not only or even primarliy focused on the economy; it involves extending and disseminating market values to all institutions and social action, even as the market itself remains a distinctive player.

(from Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics, Princeton Up, 2005: 39-40 emphasis in original. [see sidelink for a related essay 'American Nightmare' in pdf form])

An illustration of how this political rationality operates in contemporary Australian broadsheet commentary is given today by David Burchell, a lecturer in the school of Humanities and Languages at the University of Western Sydney. Burchell admittedly is writing in the dominant organ of neoliberalism in Australia and would be shaping his language for this paper and its audience.Yet as a historian of the Australian Labor Party and also an academic intellectual his essay, perhaps surprisingly, participates in the operation of neoliberalism, as Brown defines it, by 'extending and disseminating . . . market values to all institutions and social action'.

In 'Intellectuals and Ideologues'Burchell begins his essay with the fantasy-analogy,

If the PM were real estate, he'd be in an auction. And there would be a bevy of anxious professionals, all rectangular spectacles, sharp haircuts and Calvin Klein leisurewear, their hands fluttering skywards as they fought off rival bids for those charming leadlight windows and the gleaming courtyard.
On one side of the nature strip, by the shrubbery, you'd find Robert Manne and his fellow contributors to that quaint epistolary novel, Dear Mr Rudd, all furiously trying to attract the auctioneer's attention so that they can "resume the conversation between public intellectuals and government". (Whatever exactly that means.) Over the way, beside the Sulo bins and recycling containers, you'd find the conservative columnists and the business writers, each lifting a knowing finger nosewards as they bid for a slice of Rudd's inherent cautiousness and conservatism.

That auctioning the PM is an idea that seems so reasonable is an index of the ascendance of neoliberalism as political rationality. That Burchell continues to employ the language of market-talk throughout the essay is indicative of the embedded nature of public intellectuals like Burchell (or maybe Burchell aspires to the ranks of those like Paul Kelly Guy Rundle has named power intellectuals [Arena essay link]) who seek to judge other public intellectuals by pretending that common sense is based on market valuations and all other judgement is elite moral vanity.

Burchell:
But government is a voracious and furious business that allows precious little space for critical reflection. When it does, it presents the universe in a different light to that refracted through the essentially negative cast of the academic mind.

I'm not sure if Burchell would meet those attributes of the power intellectual that Rundle finds in Paul Kelly: "Kelly constructs himself as the practical type, the empiricist, connected to power and aware of its complexities, over against the abstract and alienated intellectuals." Burchell would seem to be an aspirational power intellectual: not embedded like Kelly, but working in the same register of pragmatic, op-ed empiricism, and with a nose for the smell of elites both social liberal and economic rationalist. As Gary Sauer-Thompson writes today over at his Philosophy blog,

That 'hybridity' [of neoliberalism with social demorcay in Tony Blair's New Labor] sounds just like Rudd Labor in Australia. My judgement, after Rudd Labor's 100 days in office, is that the neo-liberal project is the dominant one.

The point of Burchell's essay is more acute than the focus I'm placing on the neoliberal language used in it. Indeed, Burchell argues that economic intellectuals are, like the social liberals in Dear Mr Rudd[pdf extract], ideologues too. Yet, in order to make his points Burchell, as Wendy Brown argues, naturalises the social analysis of neoliberal political rationality:
People can try to own a piece of the PM, in short, but it's not obvious why he would sell. He owes nobody anything. He's fully capitalised.

If the policy solutions to the social and economic problems that Burchell advocates are best left to the policy makers who are at the centre of selling solutions in the marketplace of Australian society then commentators like Burchell seem to believe their role is to promote the naturalization of neoliberal rationality, rather than to question its bases; to figure public discourse in terms of 'capital', 'buying' and 'selling': the only true means of determining value. The similarity with Paul Kelly's naturalisation of the market as the final arbiter of value is worrying.

Later in her essay Brown, switches from defintions of neoliberalism to the implications of its ascendance for the Left. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's notion of Left Melancholy [link to Brown essay from 1999 invoking Benjamin's concept], Brown sets out the psychology of the waning of Liberal Democracy for a Left that has always formed much of its identity in relation to Liberalism: its economic, cultural, social and political institutions and creeds. Brown argues that Liberal Democracy is becoming residual and that

[w]e are not simply in the throes of a right-wing or conservative postitioning within liberal democracy but rather at the threshold of a different politial formation, one that conducts and legitimates itself on different grounds from liberal democracy even as it does not immediately divest itself of the name. (56)

The ascendance of the formation of neoliberalism and the passing of that of Liberal Democracy produces a loss and,

a twofold challenge for the Left. First, it compels us to consider the implications of losing liberal democracy and especially its implications for our own work by learning what the Left has depended on and demanded from liberal democracy, which aspects of it have formed the basis of our critiques of it, rebellions against it, and identity based on differentiation from it. We may also need to mourn liberal democracy, avowing our ambivalent attachment to it, our need for it, our mix of love and hostility toward it. The aim of the work is framed by the second challenge, that of devising left strategies for challenging the neoliberal political-economic formation now taking shape and an intelligent left countervision to this formation. (57)

Burchell's essay does invoke the name of social democrat HC 'Nugget' Coombs as a better model for engaged intellectuals seeking to influence government policy. But if we take seriously Brown's analysis, then in the current conjuncture an imitation of Coombs' politics would be hard pressed to find the bedrock Keynesian-Welfare state ground upon which his liberalism worked. And in seeking to participate in the polemics surrounding the culture wars from an academic perspective by deploying the key motiffs of neoliberal political rationality Burchell undercuts any claims to produce vistas from which a left countervision might be seen: the social democratic values Burchell advocates are subsumed by the neoliberal language from which they are advanced and figured.

Rather than talking about governance in terms of "the health of the engine", as Burchell argues should be the goal of government, any Left Countervision might talk of the health and value of bodies: human, terrestrial, social, animal, of water. And a left countervision might be accompanied by a Left eurhythmia, where the moving human body is valued, rather than the growth-machine for which it is to be sacrificed, and spat out as waste.

Distant Reading: the fiction of Frank Moorhouse and Amanda Lohrey across the Long Labor Decade

[* See below for keys to graph, or click on graph for larger, clearer image]

The long Labor decade (1983-96 ALP in Government) has a pre-history: The Whitlam period and Whitlamism. I’m less concerned with the so-called New Right of the long Labor decade than with how the ALP talked to its Left wings: the New Left, the social movements, the academic and cultural left, the ex-communist Left. In particular I’m interested in how Gough Whitlam’s legacy was written and spoken about.

The Post-Whitlam period was a despondent time for the cultural and political left: Amanda Lohrey and Frank Moorhouse write about this time and write through the long Labor decade- both address it in a number of non-fiction pieces and I think they narrativise it in their fictions as that structure of feeling which is loss: Lohrey in The Reading Group and Moorhouse in Forty-Seventeen – both published around 1988-89.

It’s one thing to perform a close-reading of two novels by different authors published close together, and detect a structural homology. It’s another thing to track each author’s movement as a trajectory or trend-line through this moment in order to see how the loss, the work of mourning, does its subsequent work – and also to get a better idea of what it was that was lost. Rather than a close-reading, I’m producing what the Stanford University literary historian Franco Moretti calls a distant reading. So my version of distant reading is a graph that quantifies data in a way that invites an explanation. Answers to the question: What forces are impelling the shape of this graph?

But firstly, why these two authors? Frank Moorhouse was raised on the South Coast of NSW, emerges from a small business family and comes to the left-libertarianism associated with the late-Sydney Push. Alongside his fiction writing he continues his journalism and moves into international diplomatic work. As he crosses over from Left-Libertarianism to international diplomacy, he stands on the steps of the Sydney Opera House in 1975, alongside Gough and Manning Clark and admits that, yes, this government was actually a good one, and I want it returned. This is a turnaround for Moorhouse whose libertarian politics up to this point damned all political parties as authoritarian.

Lohrey is born into a 1940s working-class labourist family from Battery Point, is President of Young Labor in Tasmania, and marries a Labor politician before she moves into teaching creative writing. She has described the Whitlam period as opening up possibilities in the same manner as fiction. So, my introduction has a biographical backdrop, but it’s the politics in their texts that I’m interested in and how these politics change over time.

The Graph

So, what you can see is a fairly straightforward graph. The Moorhouse texts are represented by blue diamonds, the Lohrey texts by red squares. The horizontal axis is divided into years of publication – Futility and other Animals is published in 1969, Camille’s Bread in 1995. The vertical axis quantifies the ratio of the two poles of governmentality: the State and the Subject, or the social-individual. I give The Morality of Gentlemen a ratio of .7 (or 7 to 10) – the novel begins with a speech by Prime Minster Robert Menzies, and its focus on an industrial conflict traverses parliamentary and political institutions. Its politics are very public, although sections of the novel are centred around an illicit sexual relationship and domestic-family conflict. Camille’s Bread I’ve plotted as .3. Its politics are intimate, domestic and largely focused on the right way to feed and treat the individual body. Moorhouse’s The Americans, Baby (1972) is marked-up as .3. Its politics are largely those of a libertarian sexuality. Its Labor and anti-American politics form some of the focus, but these are satirized as confused and naive: the drive of party-politics to seize the state is here presented as a sexual will-to-power; another form of authoritarianism to be resisted. Moorhouse’s first instalment in his League of Nations trilogy - 1993’s Grand Days - plotted here with a .7 ratio, is fundamentally focused on the emergence of the international legal and diplomatic apparatus of the League’s attempts at an inter-state. His heroine’s bildungs is a forming of cosmopolitan sexuality and cultural education that emerges alongside the hopeful, idealistic, and diplomatic internationalism of the League.

From the graph you can see one advantage of a distant reading – these trajectories (which are here trendlines) of representations of governmentality cross-over: they emerge at opposite poles and then keep moving away from the initial pole toward the other. Why?

Some explanations then. Two novels gather around the years 1988-9, and, as the plotting of them indicates, I think they sit around the middle of the continuum in their equal focus on both state-based government and self-government. Both are also works of mourning: The Reading group an elegy for the post-Whitlam left intelligentsia; Forty-Seventeen for the character that will become the heroine of Grand Days Edith Campbell Berry. who, in her 70s, is killed by a stray bullet in Lebanon. Forty-seventeen’s work of mourning extends also to the narrator’s loss of his first wife, who dies of cancer, and loss of his youthfulness, which dies when his seventeen year-old girlfriend leaves him. The point at which each trajectory crosses the other, I think, can help us to better fix the nature of their lost objects of mourning: in other words what I’m arguing for here is that in order to set-up my thesis’s introduction, it’s important for me to have a literary history of that period against which the long Labor decade was most measured during the long decade: the Whitlam Government.

What then might the trajectories of these works of mourning have to tell us about the lost objects of Whitlam’s government? Why was The Reading Group preceded by a novel of state-governmentality and proceeded by one of subject-governmentality? Why is Forty-Seventeen preceded by novels focussed on techniques of the self – government of the self – and proceeded by narratives of the governmentality of the first inter-nation-state?

A short answer is that Lohrey’s labourism propels her through the narrative work of mourning to the emerging techniques of self found in East-Asian Medicine and food preparation, and propels her also to the classical and cyclic time of the Demeter-Persephone myth: the Mother-daughter plot. To take Lohrey’s trajectory further, her 2004 novel, The Philosopher’s Doll, indicates that literal birth – as the prime instance of physical human emergence – has become a contested discourse around which problems of control, timing and the reading of biological signals clash with professional careers, routines, and putative freedoms. If the long Labor decade saw the decline of the industrial citizen – valorised because productive as a wage-earner – Lohrey’s trajectory indicates that the loss of Whitlamism has been replaced by a reproductive politics of giving birth, nurturing, and re-making the political body from the inside-out.
Conversely, Moorhouse’s trajectory is from a Left-Libertarianism that initially disavows the positive role of state-governmentality and that performs its narrative politics in a formal pluralism mirrored in micronarratives of the problems of sexual freedom. This trajectory then tracks through the 1980s toward a sustained work of mourning: the League of Nations trilogy. The third novel in this trilogy, Moorhouse has indicated, is set after the World War II, and the heroine returns to Canberra to help build the city during its ascendance as a civil-service capital under the (really) Long Menzies hegemony.

What forces then are there in Moorhouse’s trajectory? The loss of youthful hopes invested in Whitlam are less significant for Moorhouse than the ghosts of a cosmopolitan and internationalist history that is buried. Much more of a loss than the cultural modernity, the cosmopolitan and internationalist sophistication, that Whitlam offered, the demise of the League of Nations and the destruction brought by the Second World War places a high premium on international diplomacy, international relations, the work of committees – a mix of internationalism and cosmopolitanism.

What can provide the conditions in which to practice the techniques of self that Moorhouse begins his fictional writing with and Lohrey progressively moves toward? Alternatively what techniques of self-government enable us to move into those public and civil spaces that are also traversed by the state’s governing techniques that Lohrey sets out from and Moorhouse moves toward?

I’m left without much of an answer to these two questions, nor a satisfying explanation for the cross-over in trajectories, except to say that rather than the long Labor decade being a loss of just Labourism in Australia, as Lohrey’s trajectory indicates, Moorhouse’s signals that Liberalism itself underwent a significant crisis in the 1980s. The rest of the thesis looks more closely at how a different generation, into the 1990s, writes the fiction of the long Labor decade and deals with this, perhaps, double loss and the possibilities such loss opens.

[From Postgraduate Work-in-Progress Day SEJEL, Utas December 2007]

Keys to graph:

*Governmentality: from the late period of
Foucault's research, meaning a political rationality
or set of techniques by which power is enacted,
which functions at the level of the state as
well as at the level of the citizen-subject. 'The conduct
of conduct'. Under neo-liberal governmentality:
'governing at a distance', 'self-management',
or 'the obligation to be free'.

The vertical axis measures the extent of
the text's representations of the two poles
of governmentality along a continuum:
from 1.00 for an exclusive
focus on state - centric institutions and their
personnel, to 0.00 for a focus on intimate ,
private-sphere relations and the politics of
the personal; especially where libidinal and bodily
forces are a primary focus.

Mania: Abel Tasman and Freud

In an essay that has become more analysed and used in this decade (amongst literary-cultural studies types like moi), Freud wrote about mania as being a failure to re-cathect (to re-invest) the libido to a new object of love. In the manic phase this failure is something like the actions of an old telephone-switchboard operator, grabbing one plugged-lead after another and making connections. But . . . the connections are ephemeral. Overheard conversations (intimate, bureaucratic) between other-people. The mania is in the flurry of connecting and in the electricity of the making of connections. An image of how I imagine the brain synapses are sparking during a manic episode.

What has been lost - whether ideal, artefact, person - must instead, Freud argues, be mourned. And this work takes time - new objects must replace the lost. If only it were that easy.

What then might it mean to reside in the meat-world in Tas-mania? A state of connective hits on the switchboard of global society? Tasman comes from Abel Tasman - Dutch explorer & mercantile scout. A small island state in a federation of states - the Commonweath of Australia. Is this state also one of loss - of overhearing the intimate and bureaucratic conversations of others?

Looking around where I live, a sort of village-suburbia not far from the capital city of Tasmania, the sense of loss is marked in the Bushfire memorial at the end of Beach Rd, Snug; in the Cemetry next to the small Catholic church; in the stories of the Carbide Works on the hill towards Electrona. More melancholy than mania. Although to look down my street towards some hectares that were farms, and see two disconnected, dead-end roads with kerb and guttering still fresh and large signs advertising lots with sold-stickers announcing the coming of more residences, shops. A sort of mania of development.

A rhythmics of dissonance? Arrhythmia?

Something is being lost here. And what is new has manic rhythms: iso- and ar-rhythmics, perhaps.

If Abel Tasman's name inaugurates this mania of development, these manic rhythms, then what might it mean to be in Eurhythmania?