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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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.

The sick machine: Paul Keating's discourse and Praise

Over the last couple of weeks the skin of the Australian mass media has tingled and shivered as Princess Mary and her Prince were breathed in and sighed out: our collective lungs happy for the hint of her fairydust and reminder of the magic wand of serendipity. Less welcomed were another set of figures which felt more like a rash or a tightening of the chest as the Reserve Bank raised interest rates and a string of national accounts and economic indicators sent out a more anxious shiver through the body politic. Statistical data seemed to come in a jumbled rush: record Current Account deficit, a blow-out in the Foreign debt, low consumer confidence, inflation low, slowing Gross domestic product growth, low unemployment. After the statistical symptoms were examined the diagnoses began: bottlenecks, speed bumps, supply-side constraints, skills-shortages, inflationary pressures, infrastructure roadblocks, a light touch on the brakes. Amidst the prognoses, assurances and cures, from a time of another fairytale Princess, an older semiotics, seemingly ready made for times like these, announced itself. With talk and images of Banana Republics and "The recession we had to have" this older discourse seemed to act as temporal compass points against which to locate when we are.

Just as he had done when he issued the 'Banana Republic' warning in 1986, in another time of ill figures, Paul Keating spoke again to John Laws on radio, a few weeks ago, his rhetorical skills still sharp:

LAWS: It seems to me the government is absolutely paranoid about deficits.

KEATING: The problem was, I inoculated a whole generation of state treasurers with a surplus needle and none have found the antidote - that's the problem."

Keating continued, offering his own diagnosis and cure for the problems with the economy:

It's like an old car, you've got to keep servicing the motor. . . If the government decides they can just keep running and putting petrol and oil in, but never give the car a service, you know we'll end up with less performance.

Throughout his public life Keating has invoked figures like those of 'inoculation', 'antidote' and the 'family car', to diagnose, economic and social problems and prescribe economic solutions. In the 1993 election campaign he called a vote for John Hewson's GST:' like a vote for influenza . . .a debilitating, parasitic tax.' In his 1988 Budget speech he stated that, 'While the balance of payments deficit is Australia's number one economic problem, inflation remains Australia's number one economic disease' and he also said, 'markets can be an efficient mechanism for all sorts of economic and social purposes.' This aspect of statecraft, or political rhetoric, was employed by Keating to explain, convince and persuade mainly the domestic, polities, publics and markets, and also, the international markets and polities, that something was sick and broken down in the Australian nation, or that his political opponents would infect the social body. The corollary of this was that Keating and the ALP, would make this something that was sick, become healthy by overhauling and re-engineering key economic and social institutions.


The 13 years of ALP Government from 1983 to 1996, was the period when Australians seemed to become vastly more economically literate, understanding how, for example, inflation related to the exchange rate and how to read the economic indicators. It was a time of macro- and micro-economic reform where the post-war Keynesian model of regulation allied to a project of government nation-building and welfare state expansion gave way to deregulation and privatisation of government controls, services and businesses, the accelerated removal of trade protection, the creed of budget surpluses, the floating of the currency and the deregulation of the banking and finance sector. It was also a government that installed Medicare, and had wages and income accord agreements with the trade union movement and the corporate sector. It presented itself as a Labor Government who put forward and implemented a plan to reform the economy along economically rationalist lines, without sacrificing its social justice beliefs. More than anyone else in that 13 years, first as treasurer, then Prime Minister, Paul Keating came to embody that dual project of economic rationalism with a social democratic heart. Meaghan Morris reads Keating's television performances as an attempted fusion of this dual project at the levels of form and content:

Any treasurer can promise the economic discourse has a magic power of "closing the gap that separates language from the experience it encodes", in order to satisfy longing; such closure is the aim of policy. However, the gap between Keating's hypercoded Labor vocality and his managerial language paradoxically also promised that his discourse could narrow the gulf between the social values (egalitarian, solidary, compassionate) mythically upheld as national ideals in white working class popular memory, and the realpolitik of economic rationalism - elitist, divisive, competitive.

(Ecstasy and Economics)

To some extent this attempted fusion in the dual project that Keating embodied can also be read from his linguistic metaphorics; his deployment of analogies within his discourse that appear to congeal around two distinct sets: metaphors of the body and metaphors of the engine. What I'm going to do now is explore each in turn before heading on to explore something similar operating in Praise.

Metaphors of the engine

The idea that an economy is analogous to a machine, an engine, and especially a motor car, seems almost a natural one. Like a motor, an economy has mechanisms, working parts, it can be kick-started, slowed, fine-tuned, overhauled, powerful, efficient, productive, overheated. The engine in the private car can perform, turn, accelerate, crash, stall, grind to a halt, hit a speedbump. Governments can pull its levers, steer it, touch the brakes, add fuel, change the gearing, read the dashboard instrument panel. Cars can be economical. A car leaves somewhere and arrives. It promises mobility and can carry passengers. It can be safe, protective and absorb shocks. Perhaps it can also be sick and healthy: cars after all have bodies too.

In Keating's discourse the engine and car metaphors are analogues of the utopian economy that economically rational reform will achieve: a productive, efficient, powerful, high performance engine. The old, inefficient, spluttering motor that the ALP Government must work on when they come into office, is transformed, in Keating's discourse into something new :

[we'll] get the economy ticking over like it should with the new motor Labor had given it, get the republic, get reconciliation, get everything wrapped up into a really nice little society to go with the economic motor.

Not long after he became Prime Minister in late 1991, Australia still in recessionary conditions, Keating tabled the 'One Nation' statement in parliament: a set of policies designed to continue with the economic reforms of the 1980s, but with some measures for the unemployed, and a big increase in public spending, especially for building infrastructure for transport links throughout the nation. While there are policies and sympathies expressed for the struggling and unemployed, the statement is mainly an acceleration of economic reform expressed in terms of a nation-wide, interconnected transport grid, that will 'speed recovery' with, "Measures big enough to kickstart the economy and get things going."

The statement is peppered with terms like: 'speed', 'energy', 'efficiency', 'big', 'strong', 'spark', 'moving',' closing the gap', making 'links', 'among the fastest growing economies in the world.' One reading of this statement is that the motor that the ALP government has built, can overcome recessions that are necessary - the recession we had to have - if it can be bigger, more interconnected, travel faster, more productive.

Keating's metaphors of the engine portray an unswerving utopian faith in the economically rational model:"Labor believed that markets can be an efficient mechanism for all sorts of economic and social purposes."

It's not that Keating appears to abandon what could be called the policies and values of Labourism or, his social democratic soul. In areas like Medicare, the Accord, the Mabo legislation, his Creative nation funding, family support payments, aspects of Labourism survive. But perhaps that something alluded to in the metaphors of the economic machine, has a logic of its own that Keating's discourse can't quite excise,

it was an unprecedented period of deliberate and often brave reform in which the government and the people strived to make Australia a first rate country - a place with a powerful economic engine and a soul to match.

Metaphors of the body in Keating's discourse.

In 1993, not long before Keating would defeat the Coalition leader John Hewson, the man Bob Ellis dubbed a 'feral abacus', Don Watson recounts in his Keating biography,

Earlier in the day I had tried to persuade him to tell an audience that voting for the GST was like voting for influenza. He liked the idea but he wanted to say cancer - that it would eat the white blood cells of the country. He wanted to say that the GST would be the 'killing fields' of the Australian family.

(Recollections of a Bleeding heart: a Portrait Paul Keating Prime Minister)

In this example, Keating seems to be playing with the metaphorics of cancer, stretching it into connotations with Pol Pot's regime in Cambodia, with the implication that Hewson, and his GST, would do what Pol Pot had done. This is quite a rare metaphor of illness from Keating in that it affects a murderous, painful dystopia. Most of his metaphors of the body, however, are of more general, curable illnesses, which sit within his big picture narratives.

One class of Keating's metaphors of the body operate within his ALP Government legacy narratives - not so much the big picture, but the big story - the national story. These stories, told after 1996, share a similar structure: heroic major reform was necessary because the social body was terminally ill prior to 1983. This reform made the nation healthy by opening it up, getting it moving, flexible and getting some air into its lungs. These metaphors of the body are not so much about specific diseases, like cancer or influenza, but rather some unameable condition close to death:

When I look back on those thirteen years of Labor government I think of the period after the summit as the intensive care ward.

I think we can . . say that in opening Australia up, in peeling the tariff wall away and removing exchange rate controls and giving the country some real breath and life inside it, we have turned Australia to our neighbourhood, reoriented it to the world.
Eschewing the closed and closeted approach, with a sclerotic financial market, and a country ring-fenced by tariffs, the Labor Government 1983 to 1996 opted to peel back the layers of introspection and protection.

And so began the ambitious program of opening Australia up. Of internationalising the economy, internationalising the financial and product markets and seeking competitiveness the real and genuine way - by a marked upward shift in productivity.
And productivity could only come from a competitive structure - one in which we had true flexibility within and between sectors; with an open financial market, with competition and innovation coming from the great financial centres; and, in the product area, with the astringent, tonic effects of competition from imports allowed freely into the economy, without needing to jump an arbitrary domestic price hurdle.
We finished with a more healthy and robust country and a Labor Party that would never be the same again.

The key body metaphors here are 'peeling', 'breath', 'opening up' - corresponding to skin, lungs and the cavities or porous openings of the body. I want to return to these metaphors of the body later in regard to Praise and suggest that the ill bodies in Praise can be read back into this process of reform.

In these 'ALP in Government' legacy narratives, Keating's discourse not only invokes the analogy of the body politic, or rather, the social body, he is also aligning its health to economic reform. The health of the social body is an effect of economic health. One reading of this story is utopic - the government finds the social body in a dystopic condition: closed in on itself, underdeveloped, overprotective, lacking energy, almost sullen, hiding from the world, in terminal decline. Over those 13 years, the ALP Government, makes it grow up and develop, lose it fears, gain energy, become flexible and responsive, become confident, face the world and compete in it: let the world in. The promise of economic rationalism is that this new energy and openness is how a settler culture like Australia, which has never industrialised to the degree of most western nations, can finally grow up: by instilling the disciplines of the global marketplace.

In this utopic narrative the recession of the early 1990s is a necessary 'growing pain', but Keating slowly comes around to acknowledging, again through metaphors of illness, that the health of the social body may not entirely be an effect of economically rational health,

When market economies are left alone in a recession, the economy's influenza becomes pneumonia for a proportion of the unemployed. And for some of these there is no quick cure when the winter is over for the rest of us.

There was a lacerating recession which bore down heavily on people who deserved better, many of whom had accommodated the economic changes, seized the new economic opportunities, who had put their faith in us.

Again, Keating is talking in particular about the lungs and the skin - influenza, pneumonia and laceration. Placing these 'recession' illnesses, against the 'peeling', 'breathing', and 'opening up' curatives of economic reform, also featuring the lungs and skin, produces a kind of metaphoric dissonance; a kind of wheezing, or rash. Less like influenza or laceration which are acute events and can usually be healed. But something more of a mixture of the chronic and acute: more like asthma or eczema.

Keating:

I mean, what was Labor, really in economic terms, before 1983? As a party, it believed in regulation. It believed in regulation of the banking system. It believed in regulation of the exchange rate. It believed in tariffs. We had abysmal rates of productivity, of labour productivity and factor productivity. We had low profits, therefore low investments. We had high unemployment. I mean, what did we abandon? It's like losing an eczema.

The GST would apply to 'even the things that people rely upon to give them that comfort like asthma medication ventolin.


It could be argued that it's the recession of the early 1990s that starts to produce this dissonance in Keating's metaphors - a sort of rupture in the utopic movement of the grand story of economic reform. This story as Don Watson, writes, was not quite seamless in the early 1990s:

Keating said the previous ten years was a story of bravery and collective goodwill that had saved Australia [and the other story, to be told after the election win, was] the 'inclusive' story, the big picture with people in it . . .the emerging story of an Australian Republic in the Asia-Pacific. . . .He said the two stories were really one. They joined somewhere in the middle with the recession, but the recession was not so much a chapter as a diversion, a lengthy footnote or appendix.

Praise

In this period of the footnote, the recession of the early 90s, another story was circulating in the social body, although this one was hardly addressed to a mass public like Keatings' was: Andrew McGahan's 1992 novel Praise. Praise is generally considered to be the first example of Australian grunge fiction, and has been variously evaluated as 'typing - not writing', 'young, sexually charged, contemporary, angry, ahistorical, amoral, nihilistic writing', 'all action, no consequences' and a 'novel of the bored, middle-class university dropout'. Told through the first person lens of 23 year old asthmatic, Gordon Buchanan, Praise, reads like a sequence of realist journal entries, which describe, in a quite flat, yet wry and very graphic prose, Gordon's gritty life on the dole in Brisbane, and the torrid, doomed sexual affair he enters into with a recovering heroin addict, Cynthia Lamonde.

Gordon, an asthmatic, aspires to be a writer, but in spite of already writing a novel and short stories, has little ambition for anything but depressing poetry about sex and violence. He is marked by a sense of sexual failure He has moved to Brisbane from his family home in Dalby, a rural town outside of Brisbane, in order to attend university, from which he soon drops out. Along with the old Holden Kingswood that he has inherited from his parents, he also brings to Brisbane a torch for his grand teenage love Rachel, who lived on a property near his family's and also now lives in Brisbane. She is part of his circle of friends that drink and take drugs together, at pubs and parties and nightclubs in Brisbane.

Atopic diseases

Cynthia, who is also 23, suffers from atopic dermatitis, or eczema, a condition related to asthma, and is from the southern metropole of Sydney . She has come to Brisbane with her parents to escape the sex and drug addictions of her life there and worked at the same pub as Gordon did, the Capital Hotel, before a dispute between staff and management led to a mass walk-out. Cynthia quits, while Gordon, after discovering that he is expected to cover the shortfall by working extra shifts, quits as well. Her father is in the army and about to be transferred to Darwin when she calls up Gordon and invites him over for a drink. They quickly exchange frank personal and sexual histories and proclivities, and details about their diseases, including how they both fail to avoid allergic substances, how Cynthia's cortisone has severe side effects, and how they both exacerbate their conditions by smoking and drinking. They fall asleep that night and Gordon awakens with an asthma attack which he medicates with ventolin, followed by a cigarette, while Cynthia's face and skin is livid red, and bleeding. They rise, eat breakfast then take a drug called Catovits, a prescription drug for Cynthia's depression, which is an amphetamine, and then back to drinking beer. And so their warts, literally, and all affair begins. They move into Gordon's flat in a run-down boarding house, full of older men who drink all day, steal each others belongings and occasionally beat up the weaker amongst them. The communal bathroom in the boarding house is never cleaned, and in an early scene Gordon and Cynthia, after injecting heroin, sit in the filthy bathtub there for hours, and then have sex in one of the dirty cubicles. This is all described in frank, clinical detail as is the violence and other diseases, like cancer, that start to appear. Their relationship progresses then deteriorates.

Praise creates a kind of literary bohemia, but one without the poetic epiphanies and moments of transforming transcendence, normally associated with an artistic underground. Gordon and Cynthia move through the marginal and liminal zones of Brisbane and their bodies, experimenting with desires, sex and drugs. But there is no romantic transportation in Praise. Their derangement of the senses leads to less, rather than more, insight, more danger, more disease. There are momentary glimpses of utopia in Praise, but these are narcotic and hallucinogenic experiences which fail to transcend the dangers to and diseases of their bodies which grow and accelerate.

Gordon eventually pulls out of the relationship by refusing Cynthia sex. He wants to stop the increasingly unregulated derangements and desires within which he oscillates in widening, less balanced and more violent arcs and cycles. He finds that he swings from being a passive masochist to an active sadist, becoming more depressed, more diseased, more prone to asthmatic attacks; more consumed and violent: more out of control.

Freeing himself from Cynthia, he and his utopian teenage love, Rachel, start to move toward each other. But unlike Cynthia, Rachel is too rational, too regulated, too mature for her and Gordon to manage their sexual and romantic exchanges. The economy of their relationship can't find a common currency. She won't invest anything in Gordon, because he has nothing to offer her but his presence. They fail to move forward together.

The penultimate scene is set at a bacchanalian party after which Gordon' s body crashes. His body is choked by a near terminal asthma attack. His luck runs out. Someone had put dishwashing liquid in the cocktails:

There was no air . . .Nothing went in. I was over the edge, I was going. . . .I became deeply annoyed. My body was letting me down. I wasn't going to make it on my own. I was going to have to seek medical help. [p269]

I still couldn't breathe, but I wasn't worried about that now. It was out of my hands. The system was taking over and for once I was glad. [p271]

The sick machine

Gordon's bodily crash has an homology with the figure of his car - an old Holden HZ Kingswood from the 1970s - an old motor from the time before the ALP installed the new one. This car has been handed down to him through his large rural family - it's his family inheritance - a link with the Old Australia: the National car from that different era of protection and tariffs, nation-building and regulations.
The Holden car carries two very different meanings in Australian culture. On the one hand it is symbol of a successful Australian manufacturing industry aligned with Ben Chifley, the ALP Prime Minister who spoke of the Light on the hill and also tried to nationalise the banks. On the other hand it's a symbol of a set of more troubling myths of Australian identity: masculine, aggressive, pragmatic, white.


In Praise, Gordon's Kingswood becomes a metaphor for his body:

I knew nothing about my car. I neglected it. I drove it badly. I let drunken fools do what they wanted with it. And yet it kept on going for me, mile after mile. Year after year.

In one scene, Gordon and Cynthia go on a joy ride while hallucinating on LSD. Cynthia is driving, as they head out of Brisbane:

Cynthia picked up speed. Eighty, a hundred, a hundred and twenty, a hundred and forty - it was as fast as the old Kingswood could go. We were on a road that rolled up and down the hills. We bounced along. I stuck my head out the window. Sucked in the air.
Cynthia said, 'Watch this.'
We hit the top of the hill. I could see the road stretching down. Then Cynthia flicked off the lights. She floored the accelerator. We roared down in pitch darkness. I screamed. Cynthia screamed. The car bottomed out and started climbing. Cynthia flicked the lights back on. We were on the wrong side of the road, verging on gravel. Cynthia righted the car and we breasted the hill.
She pounded the wheel. 'This car has wings.'
Down we went and out went the lights. This time the road, in the moment I'd seen it, hadn't looked so straight. It curved. It curved ninety degrees.
'Turn the f ing lights on!' I screamed.
Cynthia laughed, a banshee laugh. I looked at the speed. A hundred and fifty.
'TURN THE F-ING THINGS ON!'
She did it. We were off the road, two wheels in the dirt.
'Shit!' said Cynthia. She braked, swung the wheel. The back slid out. We were spinning. I felt the car tilt, knew it would roll. I clutched onto the door. We went round once, twice. We started round again and then it stopped. We were on the road, facing back the way we'd come, clouds of dust billowing past us.
Cynthia was laughing, shrieking. 'Did you see that, did you see that!'
I let go of the door.
'You crazy bitch. You f-ing crazy bitch.'
'Oh shut up, we're all right.
'All right?!'
She turned the ignition, hit the accelerator.

On another joyride Gordon's car eventually crashes:

We crawled home. By the time we hit Brisbane it was almost dawn. The engine was overheating and the wine was all gone. We drove to Frank and Maree's house and parked. . . .I looked at the Kingswood. It was depressing. The only thing, perhaps, that I truly loved without question - and there it lay, dying in the cul de sac.

Gordon's Kingswood survives the crash, gets stolen and found again, its body slowly getting more damaged, but still reliable: an old motor still ticking over in spite of the powerful economic engine Keating has installed.

What I want to suggest is that Praise can be read not so much as a dystopian footnote to Keating's utopian stories of the grand adventure in economic reform: the powerful economic engine producing the healthy economic and social body, but more as an atopian one - economic rationalism isn't so much a dystopia - it's more of an atopia - like asthma and eczema.

Atopic conditions, like asthma and eczema, effectively displace and defer the acute events of skin disease and suffocation: diseases of the lungs and the skin. Atopic conditions are quite singular. They are neither terminal nor acute and temporary. They can be mostly, conditions of infancy and childhood, but also, increasingly in the developed world, conditions of adults. There is a mystery surrounding these atopic conditions - sometimes they are genetic hypersensitivities to antigens that others have no trouble accepting into the body; sometimes it's the antigens themselves that trigger the attack . Atopic conditions, are so named because the symptomatic event - the rash and sores, the asthmatic inflammation and suffocating, the choking of lung deflation, is not caused by direct contact with the antigen - the cause is from nowhere/ no place - the cause and the effect is displaced and sometimes deferred. Another interesting factor is that stress, psychological factors, can exacerbate the conditions - as can the conventional treatments - ventolin and cortisone.

Interestingly, asthma and eczema, are more prominent in childhood, hence Keating's allusion to 'losing an eczema'. But, contra- to Keating's eczema metaphor, in which the ALP engineers a developed, mature, grown-up economy, eczema and asthma are singular in that they are diseases on the increase in the developed world - especially America. Reading the two metaphorics against each other, seems to produce another dissonance: losing an eczema is mature deregulation, in Keating's dicourse- but eczema is more a disease of the developed world than the undeveloped. Maybe there is something childish in late-capitalist consumer culture : not so much a maturity in the developed world but a profligacy, a wantonness and wastefulness - a libidinal desiring machine that is addicted to pleasure, stimulants, and easy finance capital. A consumptiveness that defers costs - we'll pay for it in the future - and displaces costs - they'll pay for it now, or in the future, it's not global warming, it's just climate change.

One way of reading these atopic bodies is to thread two aspects of the reforms of the ALP government through them. Cynthia - the peeling of the skin. Cynthia is the subject of the opening up of the economy - the borders are opened to goods and services, the pores are opened up - they are bleeding. Cynthia is affirmation of desire - she consumes and possesses Gordon, she dominates him. She introduces him to injecting heroin - the most powerful narcotic. Cynthia is out of control - diseased. Cynthia is the external accounts - the BOP, the foreign debt, the CAD - she spends her energy, she honours her libidinal flows, she is open to the world, she likes to be penetrated, or rather uses the world to penetrate her - she is addicted and addictive.

Gordon on the other hand, is passive. He has low energy and low motivation - he is not so much closed in on himself, but is very much the pre-1983 Keating model of the terminal,unhealthy economy. He refuses work, lives with relics, the detritus of the those who didn't make the translation to the new economy. He abuses the welfare state. Gordon, doesn't like efficiency, rationality, clarity, reciprocal exchange - he prefers violence, debasement, degradation, entropy. Gordon is un-masculine. Gordon is about passive regulation and occasionally, active negation. To some extent he is a symbol for the major lever of the regulation of finance capital - the Reserve Bank - key symptom: inflation. While in the Keynesian model the Reserve Bank focussed on unemployment, primarily and also inflation, the goals of the Reserve Bank altered in the ALP govt period from exchange rate interventions, to Current Account Deficit to inflation: effectively controlling the lungs of the economy by choking it and releasing it. This movement can be seen as a response to the shaping of the world economy by the needs and demands of finance capital - which displaces and defers its costs, thereby insulating itself from risk - what the economists call a situation of 'moral hazzard'.

Nearly 22 years after the Australian dollar was floated, when Australia plugged and intermeshed its financial markets into those of the global system, and a new cultural logic started to move through society, we still believe in fairytales of utopia, that our luck will hold, that we are healthier now than ever, and that the car won't crash.

As Kate Jennings, writing in 2003, puts it:

We need rules of the road; why not rules for the financial markets? The financial markets are no longer the equivalent of a manageable two-lane highway; we're talking a hundred lanes or more. One person or firm careering down that highway or even just driving distractedly can cause a god-almighty pile up. (from Speech to the Sydney Institute)

Toward a sound theory of Australian Grunge fiction

______________________________________________________________

If we understand Grunge simply as some ephemeral moment of literary fashion or nihilistic rage then we sell it short. And, while the age, ethnicity, gender and sexuality of its various authors is crucial, the various works are not limited to authorial designs or single issues. They articulate the rumblings of a structure of feeling that is being demolished at its deepest level.1

What the hell is Grunge anyway? I think I know what Grunge music is. It’s the child of punk, thrashing out pain and despair and alienation . . .But what is Grunge in the literary context?2

Liner notes

One of the marginal themes to emerge from the debates over so-called Grunge fiction in the Australian literary public sphere was how literary critics, academics, even those writers who themselves were placed within the Grunge genre, thought and wrote about musical Grunge culture. Creeping out from the literary journals the more public debates over what Grunge fiction named occurred from mid-1995 and into 1996 when a slew of new Grunge novels were published.3 In the wider media-sphere sustained articles in the national broadsheets The Weekend Australian, The Australian and metropolitan The Sun Herald surveyed and attempted to discern what might be an emerging generic and generational rupture in the Australian literary field.4 While attempts to interpret these novels oscillated between prior generic labels (Beat, punk) and the more damming critiques which centred around accusations of adolescent literary concerns and technique allied with cynical marketing pushes by the publishers (The Great Grunge fiction Swindle?), the notion that Grunge fiction and Grunge music might name a shared response to significant currents in (western) global political culture is an absent one in these broadsheet surveys. Instead, the question of whether any connection between popular musical culture and fiction has any hermeneutic value was voiced most clearly in the more contained world of the Australian literary public sphere.

Michael George Smith’s 1992 review of Praise produces the most engaged attempt to ‘sympathetically’ think this homology between the musical and literary fields.5 Considering that Smith was at the time associate editor of the Sydney musical street press newspaper, The Drum Media, such an attempt to ‘read’ Praise, as springing from the same psychological and sociological conditions as a musical sub-culture, is understandable. The problem, though, is that Smith’s chosen musical sub-culture is not Grunge rock, but instead a particular reading of Punk musical culture. Beginning with an epigram from cultural historian Jon Savage’s 1991 England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock : “In this gap left by the failure of hippie idealism . . . a new kind of vicious teenage nihilism was breeding” what is most striking in Smith’s deployment of a fragment of Savage’s text is also what is most symptomatic about how Smith and other critics and commentators think and write the question of any homology between musical and literary culture: the elision of large chunks of political-cultural history, and the promotion of a discourse of rock as authentic/ expressive realism at the expense of other understandings of rock and pop music which hear and see it as artifice and knowingly sophisticated in its use of form, image and text.6

For to return Savage’s elided quote to its textual context produces an entirely different meaning to the one that Smith uses to draw a (highly compressed) linear genealogy between a stiffly socio-psychological reading of punk and Praise’s transparent, repeated reflection of this 1975 moment of teenage nihilism, vacancy and boredom. The original quote (here restored to its paragraph) reads:

In a fragmented market, Bowie made an ambitious attempt to codify a new pop generation: the artificial, trebly shriek of the Spiders From Mars deliberately alienated the older hippie audience. Apart from the wish-fulfilling power of Ziggy Stardust, his most resonant record was as producer of Mott the Hopple’s ‘All The Young Dudes’. In the gap left by the failure of hippie idealism, so its script went, a new kind of vicious, teenage nihilism was breeding: ‘Is it concrete all around or is it in my head?’7 (emphasis added)

While I could be accused of also taking this quote out of its context8, to know that Savage is here talking about one of the key manipulators of 1970s pop, Bowie, and, more specifically, a song lyric rather than a psycho-sociological reading, undercuts the notion that punk musical culture can only be read and heard as an authentic expression of teenage alienation, anger and boredom, rather than also being an artificial and formally innovative response to the political-cultural environment of its time.

A second citational example from Smith’s review of Praise again performs a de-contextualising move that shuts down a key component of Savage’s hermeneutics of punk: the thinkers in punk were engaged less in nihilism than negation. Smith’s second Savage citation appears in the context of his first paragraph, a discussion of the song Blank Generation written by the New York ‘punk’ Richard Hell, which Smith interprets as “an anthem for a generation of young people [that] seemed to sum up the feelings of disillusion in a world that had quite obviously not been changed by the ‘Summer of Love’.”9 Smith continues, drawing the Sex Pistols, the emblematic punk band, into his frame,

In England too, the optimism of youth had soured into what would become the punk movement, whose anthems came with titles like No Future and Pretty Vacant courtesy a band called The Sex Pistols [sic]. As Jon Savage elaborates, their songs and others like them seemed to present a new aesthetic, “the attractions of vacancy: not just of being bored, but the deeper vacancy of the subconscious.”10 (emphasis added)

Again it’s worth placing this quote from Savage back into its textual context, because to do so reveals the extent to which Smith, either consciously or not, is promoting a specific discourse of punk – as authentic, unmediated youth revolt:

Early in 1975, Hell wrote a protean song of escape. The idea was borrowed from an early sixties beat cash-in, Rod McKeun’s ‘Beat Generation’, but Hell was ambitious, attempting to turn fake culture – for what, in the saturated 1970s, was not mediated, and therefore suspect? – into real culture. ‘Blank Generation’ laid out the attractions of vacancy: not just being or looking bored, but the deeper vacancy of the subconscious. In one chorus, Hell removed the word ‘blank’, leaving a pause before the following ‘generation’: nothing was defined, everything was up for grabs.11

The final sentence in this paragraph makes it clear the Savage is specifically not discussing the Sex Pistols, and more importantly that here ‘vacancy’, or ‘blankness’, is less an unmediated reflection of youth alienation, than it is an invocation, staged in pop music, of the possibilities of negation. What Smith misses or elides from Savage’s text is the notion that punk nihilism can be a script (“so its script went”) framed by negation. This distinction is critical, as Greil Marcus makes clear in his writings on the Sex Pistols,

Nihilism means to close the world around its own self-consuming impulse; negation is the act that would make it self-evident to everyone that the world is not as it seems – but only when the act is so implicitly complete it leaves open the possibility that the world may be nothing, that nihilism as well as creation may occupy the suddenly cleared ground. The nihilist, no matter how many people he or she might kill, is always a solipsist: no one exists but the actor, and only the actor’s motives are real. When the nihilist pulls the trigger, turns on the gas, sets the fire, hits the vein, the world ends. Negation is always political: it assumes the existence of other people, calls them into being. Still, the tools the negationist seems forced to use – real or symbolic violence, blasphemy, dissipation, contempt, ridiculousness – change hands with those of the nihilist.12 (emphasis added)

What, then, is at stake here in this close reading of what is at most a marginal critical review of Praise? Two things. Firstly, Smith’s realist discourse of punk operates to frame Praise as passé pop, positioning McGahan’s novel as a simulacra of a failed revolution (punk); not so much untimely as anachronistic. For Smith Praise is a punk novel, at least 15 years too late,

Not that the pervasive boredom consequent in that sense of vacancy [see Smith quote above] is ever specified or extrapolated [in Praise], but it’s there, the legacy of the ‘punk revolution’, the last significant social movement to spring from that nebulous and increasingly fragmented entity society lumps under the category of ‘youth’. Where a case could be made for a claim of some residual sense of innocence in the sixties, for all the media hyperbole of the ‘sexual revolution’, cynicism has been embraced by more and more young people as the nihilistic icons of punk and its successor styles have displaced those earlier pop icons.13

Secondly, the realist discourse of punk operates in Smith’s review to interpret Praise as authentic youth revolt: attempting to shock the parent culture with a nihilist and cynical delinquency, that is born out of alienation. Praise here is read, again, as teenage sociology, rather than fiction,

Gordon Buchanan’s ultimate failure to gain appreciably any emotional growth or insight from his experience in some ways places him as the latest addition to another longstanding literary tradition, that of the classic picaro. His is, however, an emotional retardation increasingly symptomatic of today’s cynical youth.14

Smith’s review is worth such a close reading as it is one of the more articulate attempts to read a Grunge novel through musical culture. That Smith’s sense of cultural history in this review rarely moves out of the 1970s is not so much problematic as curious. Where did the 1980s go to?




While Smith is operating prior to the label ‘Grunge’ being attached to new Australian novels, the debates in the Australian literary public sphere after the suicide-death of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain in 1994, have more reason to at least allude to the ‘Grunge’ musical-fiction homology.

Linda Jaivin, in 1995 also curiously evacuates the 1980s when she responds to the question, “What the hell is Grunge anyway?” by stating that “It expresses a revulsion towards the over-blown overdrive of bands like Kiss, who lift rock heroism and commercialism to self-parodying proportions.”15 That Jaivin would assert that bands “like Kiss”, whose high point of popularity is marked by the 1979/ 80 success of their Dynasty LP and “I was made for loving you” single, might be the object of Grunge revulsion points to, again, a strange instance of temporal compression that misses the obvious objects of opposition for Grunge rock, such as Guns’n’Roses, or Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Prince, and instead summons up the sort of stadium glam act that punk groups from the 1970s would’ve listed as being reason to revolt against. Like Smith’s review, we are stuck again in a 1970s script. And like Smith Jaivin, takes on the “punk as authentic realism” discourse, this time assimilating Grunge music to this discourse’s version of punk:

I think I know what Grunge music is. It’s the child of punk, thrashing out pain and despair and alienation.

So, Nirvana and bands like it have put a flannelette shirt around every waist and the word ‘Grunge’ on every pair of lips. The absorption of the punk aesthetic by the mainstream has meant that Fiona [McGregor] and I can get our hair done at any number of inner city salons.16

And while Smith goes to a decontextualised Savage for his interpretive authority in seeking homologies between musical and literary culture, Jaivin, in seeking to answer the question: “But what is Grunge in the literary context?” cites from the canonically rockist journal, Rolling Stone,

I’m not sure that we really have anything that’s quite the literary equivalent of Nirvana’s Grunge classic ‘Smells like Teen Spirit’. This is a song about which writer Anthony De Curtis observed in a June 1994 Rolling Stone:

A political song that never mentions politics, an anthem whose lyrics can’t be understood, a hugely popular hit that denounces commercialism, a collective shout of alienation, it was ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ for a new time and a new tribe of disaffected youth. It was a giant fuck-you, an immensely satisfying statement about the inability to be satisfied.It was also about a brand of deodorant, but that’s another story.17

Here Jaivin moves beyond a ‘Grunge music as realist punk’ discourse, and promotes one of the fundamental rockist interpretive moves: that not only is Grunge a spectral return of punk, but that, ultimately, all roads and train lines lead back to the Rolling Stones, and that these British Rolling Stones are themselves adepts in homage and a fidelity to the electric Chicago blues of Muddy Waters, the British band taking their name from one of Waters’ songs.

Again, in the context of a discussion of how to think Grunge fiction we find an attempt to articulate the limits and concepts of a homology with popular music – this time more firmly engaged with Nirvana and the label of Grunge music. While Michael Smith, presciently, and perhaps influentially, heads to a particular reading of punk (See Simon Frith and Horne on ‘punk realist discourse’ in From Art to Pop) from which to frame and think McGahan’s Praise, Jaivin has the opportunity to engage with the congealed musical generic term of Grunge, and yet appears to follow in Smith’s ‘punk realist discourse’ steps, seeking to further reduce Grunge music to a simulacra of the Rolling Stones. Nirvana’s Nevermind is loosened from 1991/92, to be re-located back in time and place to London 1977 (where it actually makes sense), only then to be dis-anchored once more towards 1965 as the echo of ‘Satisfaction’ (where it really actually makes sense).18

Jaivin, however, is defining Grunge music to a different end than Smith, who wants to draw Praise and a realist discourse of punk together as a hermeneutic tool towards a sociology that seems frozen around the mid-1970s:

The things most disturbing for me in Praise is that the attitudes and even lifestyles described seem barely to have changed since the late seventies when Javo stuck a needle in his arm in Monkey Grip.19

Jaivin, reads Grunge culture through a discourse from the same script as Smith’s punk realist one, and De Curtis’ rockist moment of roots authenticity, so as to distance her definition of Grunge music from her fiction. For Jaivin, the label Grunge, in the literary sense is “completely irrelevant.”20

I have focussed so heavily on a close reading of these two discussions of Grunge fiction and its possible homologies with musical culture because I think it might be interesting to begin again, and attempt to answer Jaivin’s initial question, “What the hell is Grunge anyway?” through alternative hermeneutics. Instead of a ‘punk realist discourse’ it might be more productive to think Grunge through punk as pop art, or punk as avant- garde discourses. It might also be more productive to resist the urge to re-locate Grunge back to prior, supposedly more fully present, moments – 1977 or 1965 London – instead letting the popular force of Nirvana’s moment remain in that two years of the First Gulf War, of the collapse of the Soviet Union, of the aftermath of the late 1980’s recessions, of the rise of the internet and Microsoft.


While it is undeniable that the naming of a sub-genre in the Australian literary field – Grunge – smells of market spirit 21, it is equally undeniable that posing apparently meaningless questions about musical and literary homologies, and then being surprised by how meaningless the question is, grounds a line of hermeneutics that might proffer a sound theory of Grunge fiction. Re-asking Jaivin’s question from her ‘Grunge Unplugged’ paper: “But what is Grunge in the literary context?” Syson sets up the straw man thus:
“Maybe it’s a bit like trying to work out what the difference is between realist and modernist electric guitar solos – the question doesn’t make any sense.” 22 & 23

What doesn’t make sense, for Syson, is that form in pop(ular) music warrants any serious consideration: that “the rumblings of a structure of feeling that is being demolished at its deepest level” might just as substantially be ‘heard’ in pop music as read in literature.



Endnotes
1 Ian Syson, ‘Smells like Market Spirit,’ Overland 142 (Autumn 1996): 21.

2 Linda Jaivin, Linda Jaivin on ‘Grunge Unplugged,’ Australian Book Review 177 (December 1995/ January 1996): 29.

3 These included: Christos Tsiolkas’ Loaded, Justine Ettler’s The river Orphelia, Claire Mendes’ Drift Street , Linda Jaivin’s Eat Me, Andrew McGahan’s 1988 and Edward Berridge’s Lives of the saints.

4 Murray Walden, “Lit.Grit invades Ozlit.” In The Australian Magazine, The Weekend Australian, June 24-25, 1995: 13-17; Barry Oakley, “Disappointed generation finds a voice.” In The Australian, September 20, 1995:1; and Marjory Bennett, “The grungy Australian novel.” In The Sun-Herald, September 24, 1995: 118-119.

5 Michael George Smith, ‘Compulsive reading: the attractions of vacancy, Overland 128 ( 1992): 87-88. (The definition of “homology” employed here is: the condition of being “similar in position, structure and evolutionary origin but not necessarily in function.” The Oxford Dictionary of English)

6 Smith 87.

7 Jon Savage, England’s dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk rock, (London :Faber and Faber, 2001) (revised edition): 76.

8 Interestingly, the wider textual context here is a discussion of the pre-Sex Pistols criminal life of guitarist Steve Jones, who, in a bizarre form of homage and necessity, stole musical equipment from one of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust Hammersmith Odeon concert, which was to be filmed by D.A. Pennebaker. Savage argues that Jones’ criminal gang, which included future Sex Pistols’ drummer, Steve Cook, “had stolen from the groups they wanted to be like: their criminal catalogue illustrates the sort of pop that was attractive to working-class males in 1973.” Savage 75-6.

9 Smith 87.

10 Smith 87. While Smith does qualify these anthems as being ‘aesthetic’, the sense that the Sex Pistols had aesthetic ideas isn’t carried over into the sociological interpretation he performs on Praise. That ‘vacancy’ might be a pose, an artifice, is not considered here.

11 Savage 90.

12 Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A secret history of the Twentieth Century ( Berkeley: Faber and Faber, 2001): 9.

13 Smith 88.

14 Smith 88.

15 Jaivin 29.

16 Jaivin 29.

17 Jaivin 29.

18 Nevermind, displaced Michael Jackson’s Dangerous at the apex of the American long play record charts in early 1992. Sex Pistols’ ‘God save the Queen’ reached number 2 on the British singles chart in mid 1977. ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ was a trans-Atlantic number one 45 r.p.m. record in mid- 1965.

19 Smith 88.

20 Jaivin 30.

21 Syson 21.

22 Syson 21.

23