Reads like teen spirit: Australian Grunge Fiction

It’s difficult to listen to Nirvana without hearing omens of Kurt Cobain’s suicide. Suicide floods songs, and other art forms, with meanings that explain the emotions and symbols in song lyrics, in the way the song is sung, in its timbres and tempo. Jim Morrison from the Doors – an accidental death, or overdose – Ian Curtis from Joy Division – suicide by hanging: two figures whose baritonal excursions into the dark side are given an endorsement by their early deaths. This is the End – ahh, of course! Love will tear us apart – chilling, full of foreboding. Listening to and watching Cobain, Morrison and Curtis we feel we can know and feel that they are expressing suicidal emotions and obsessive thoughts of mortality.

It’s hard then to go back to the moment of Nirvana’s global emergence. Back to 1991 and the song Smells like teen spirit. You might remember the video: the band is set up in a high school gym, various subgroups of American teen culture in the bleachers, cheerleaders shaking their pom poms, one with the Anarchy symbol on her top, Kurt Cobain in a striped long sleeved T-shirt his bleached-blonde hair long and stringy, covering his eyes, as the band grind out the heavy verses, moving into overdrive for the anthemic chorus: Here we are now, entertain us. By the video’s end there’s a riot going on: the gym floor has been invaded, the drums are being attacked, and Cobain is screaming ‘No denial’.

It’s an angry song, even one of desperation, but hardly a premonition of suicide. There’s something else going on in that song and I don’t think this something else can be explained by Kurt Cobain’s suicide. In fact, the meanings that we make of songs like Smells like teen spirit might be less guided by the expression of the artist’s soul, and more by our own needs to find a form for making sense of the world we live in. Smells like teen spirit is, I think, a perfect example of a form that helped a mass of people make sense of the world. Not by explaining the world, but more by providing four and a bit minutes of song which performed the feeling of the contradictions of teen spirit.

What do I mean by the feeling of the contradictions of teen spirit? Just a touch of theory by way of explanation. One of the founders of Cultural Studies, Raymond Williams, argued that culture was not only ordinary - that you didn’t need a degree in fine arts to consume it in galleries because culture was how you walked and talked everyday - but that its expressions were structured feelings: or producing a structure of feeling. This is Williams:

“[I]t was a structure in the sense that you could perceive it operating in one work after another which wasn’t otherwise connected – people weren’t learning it from each other; yet it was one of feeling much more than thought – a pattern of impulses, restraints, tones.” [from Politics and letters: Interviews with the New Left, London New Left Books, 1979: 159 ]

What a great way of defining a genre like grunge: ‘ a structure operating in one work after another which wasn’t otherwise connected.’

Smells like teen spirit read this way, as structure of feeling, is an ambivalent text that oscillates between a sludgey spaced-out futility, and a dense, explosive anger that accelerates, then brakes, accelerates again. It veers between slowdown and speed-up: the vocal tone moves from sarcasm to sincerity; a hatred directed both inward and outward and an idealism that is blocked. Lyrically, and more importantly in Cobain’s timbre, is a feeling of abjection, of something debasing that he’s reached deep into himself to eject but can’t - it remains stuck in his throat and belly. A denial, that can’t be blasted out through speed or power.

The lyric of Smells like teen spirit has as its central subject youth culture: the teen spirit that the form of the song is so ambivalent about. The lyric demands that youth culture be about more than entertainment: that was a central promise of rock music, and punk in particular. But in the end, well whatever, Nevermind.

Nirvana try to breathe their teen spirit into one of post-war youth culture’s key forms: the rock song. But here youth as a symbol of speed and revolt is rendered in a deeply ambivalent text that also presents youth culture as a sludge-like state that is too slow and thick to storm the barricades. Let’s trash the gym then go to the mall for a cheeseburger deluxe with fries.

Smells like teen spirit sounds like a last gasp call to arms for a dominant version of youth culture. Has rock progressed since Grunge? I don’t follow the game closely enough anymore, but the song sounds like the last rebellion in the line that runs from the Velvet Underground through the Stooges to Joy Division: Nirvana stage a revolution that is exhausted before it begins.

So, Nirvana’s smells like teen spirit as a structure of feeling – a form of song, a structure with a conventional verse/ chorus/ solo format – that provided a compelling aural text for feeling your way into the world in 1991-92. Grunge becomes a buzzword and a subculture in the West.

In the same year Brisbane based novelist Andrew McGahan writes Praise which is retrospectively nominated as the germinal Australian Grunge novel. Late 1991 is also the time, in Australia, of growing unemployment queues: the aftermath of the recession of 1990. If youth is a key symbol of modernisation, of speed, then what happens to this symbol in a time of slow-down or recession? What happens to teen spirit as an idea, as a feeling, when an economy gets ill and decelerates?

This slow-down in growth was diagnosed, by the newly minted Prime Minister Paul Keating, as being caused by endemic blockages in the economic body. There were clogged, sclerotic arteries in need of clearing so as to get the financial blood flowing quicker. The prescription was for more economic reform: more flexibility, open-ness, youthful vitality.

So, I’ve taken a leap into a strange hybrid of economic and medical discourse here. Not much of a leap when you consider that the current economic crisis – the sub prime crisis based in the US– is often referred to as a contagion that might infect other economies. Bodies that get ill can also be filled with teen spirit and, I’m arguing, these symbols of youth become highly contradictory and problematic in the period of the early to mid 1990s.
This problem emerges in a stream of art and popular culture: grunge – grunge music and grunge fiction. And it emerges with some force because the youthful speed demanded for further economic reform clashes head on with a strain of youth culture that had operated in terms of its own superior cultural and social speed pitting itself against the authority of the state and the commodification of the markets.

What then happens when the state authorises a speed-up in the process of commodification through the symbols of youth? In other words if youth is the symbolic means by which economic modernisation is promoted by politicians like Paul Keating, by the youthful Bill Clinton, then where does teen spirit go to in order to rebel. I think you can hear the sound of this grinding of the gears in Nirvana’s song which speeds up and slows down in turn.

Four years later, in 1995, a new genre of Australian fiction emerged under the name of grunge. Christos Tsiolkas’ short novel, Loaded [adapted as the 1998 film Head On], was one of a number of these novels marketed and debated within a critical literary discourse which tended to interpret these novels as autobiographical and realistic representations of an urban youth culture that was out to shock and that had lost its way. Loaded narrates twentyfour hours in the life of 19 year old Ari Voulis, as he tells us about his journey and experiences through the four corners of suburban Melbourne. A first generation migrant, who is jobless and gay, Ari’s day is fuelled by a constant ingestion of drugs, of masturbation and sex in backlanes and beats, endless fights, flights and refusals, the tentative beginnings of a romance and a soundtrack that accompanies his movements and dancing throughout the city and its places.

The pace of his day matches his main drug choices: speed for acceleration and aggression and marijuana for relaxing and slowing down. His fundamental tone is one of refusal and sarcasm but this is mixed with moments of tenderness and sincerity, especially for his family and his best friend Johnny, a transivestite. His hatred is directed both out and inwardly. And he thrives on abjection, seeking it in sex and also from the insults of his father.

Loaded is a more complex text than Smells like teen spirit, but it too is deeply ambivalent about teen spirit or youth as a symbol. Ari is torn in three directions: a wog who hates wogs, gay but afraid of being identified as a faggot and working-class in a time of residual solidarity. Ari begins the novel waking at his brother’s student share house in East Melbourne, and ends it in the West in his family-home on his bed, exhausted, waiting for sleep. He has moved and danced through the four corners of suburban Melbourne, but hasn’t developed or really gone anywhere. Rather than self-formation Ari’s self is internally split three ways; rather than integrating into the world, Ari thrives on its abject sites and refuses its basic demand: that he get a job and settle down. Although a highly compressed narrative Loaded is a failed coming of age novel: a de-formation novel. It reads like teen spirit in crisis.
So, reading grunge fiction as though it is the expression of authentic adolescent feelings, misses another way of interpreting that reads through structures of feeling, and that reads youth as a symbol rather than as a fact. We can read Kurt Cobain’s suicide into his songs, into his singing performances, but this can’t explain why Nirvana were so timely, so instantly, globally embraced. When grunge is read against a dominant national and international response to recession that speeds up the processes of reform and uses the language of youthfulness to persuade the polity to modernise the economic body, such a reading suggests that what this modernising body abjects or expels enters the symbolic field of youth. Grunge seems like a pretty accurate name for this return of the abject body, during and after a recession. Ari the narrator in Loaded says:

“There is a last, and very cherished, urban myth. That every new generation has it better that the one that came before it. Bullshit. I am surfing on the down-curve of capital. The generations after this one are not going to build on the peasants’ landholdings. There’s no jobs, no work, no factories, no wage packet, no half-acre block. There is no more land. I am sliding towards the sewer. I’m not even struggling against the flow. I can smell the pungent aroma of shit, but I’m still breathing.” (Loaded 144)

Is this teen spirit, or does it just read like it?

[From a paper presented at Utas Postgraduate Conference, 21 September, 2007]

Reads like Teen Spirit

(Another extract from the revised PhD intro)

Before moving to consider the fourth dominant framework through which Grunge fiction has been received [Grunge as focussed on the theme of abjection], it is worth dwelling on the role that Grunge as musical culture plays in Syson’s influential essay. A shared musical and literary boundary is one that is inscribed into the term Grunge. Yet it rare for the both sides of the boundary to be given a concomitant and serious analysis. Grunge music is often positioned in essays on Grunge fiction as the truly teenage and commodified world against which ‘adult’ cultural forms are contrasted and Grunge is defined as a marketing exercise. To take Grunge music seriously seems, somehow, unthinkable; a boundary not to be crossed. As an initial crossing, Syson’s essay is a good place to start, not least because Nirvana’s “Smells like Teen Spirit” forms the basis of his title.

Syson despatches Grunge as a cultural term – shared by both literary and musical culture – by fixing its etymology to the “sentimental teen spirit” that Nirvana express (21). He has no interest in considering Grunge as a term for a cultural movement that encompasses both musical and literary form for reasons to do with the teenage-ness of Grunge music and the fundamental incommensurability of pop/rock musical and literary form:

At the 1995 Melbourne writers’ festival, Linda Jaivin made a point in the session on Grunge that might have laid the label to rest. She asked, “But what is Grunge in the literary context?” 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. (21)

On the surface the incommensurability of Grunge musical and literary form is prefigured into the analogy that Syson chooses to underline his point. But this apparent disjunction is based on a romantic discourse of musical form in which all rock music is understood as expressive of subjective authenticity: whether it be teenage or African-American alienation and rebellion. The distinction Syson is unable to voice is that between Fordist and post-Fordist electric guitar solos; between the guitar solos that made sense during the period Zygmunt Bauman characterises as heavy capitalism and solid modernity – Fordism, and that of light capitalism and liquid modernity – post-Fordism. Indeed, one way to characterise the electric guitar solo heard in Nirvana’s “Smells like Teen Spirit” is to hear it as both imitative of the vocal melody – and thereby expressively realist, because imitating the lyrical song – and to hear it as post-Fordist, because while it is sonically redolent of overdriven Chicago Blues solos, and hence alluding to rock’s Fordist period, it is also treated with chorus and phase-shifting effects, which take the solid and heavy Fordist timbres and bent blues notes and liquefy and lighten them. Difficult to hear is the sustained final note of the guitar solo which is held through the beginning of the final verse. This last section of the guitar solo morphs from its imitation of the vocal melody into an electronic pulse that becomes spectral and ethereal. In one guitar solo Kurt Cobain offers a rich aural text, moving from Fordist realism into an uncertain and haunted post-Fordist timbre and sonics. Read and heard together with the musical video and the lyrics, “Smells like Teen Spirit” is a complex work of art that combines situationist politics in its video and a form of punk-Adorno-esque negation in its lyric and vocal grain. Nirvana are both expressing teen spirit and attempting to get outside it, to negate it and turn its commodified conditions from a spectacle into a situation.

The hermeneutics of Grunge musical culture and form is a curious aspect in the reception of Grunge fiction. Syson’s disavowal of Grunge as a musical form signifying anything except sentimental teen spirit appears to be based on a misreading of Nirvana’s signature song, which he parodies in his essay’s title. His suggestive claim that Australian Grunge fiction is a literary response to the demolition of structures of feelings in Australian political culture, closes its ears to similar demolitions of structures of feeling being responded to in American musical culture. Is Grunge fiction also post-Fordist and practising negation to attempt to move outside a teen spirit that is corrupt, no longer a source of radicalism or resistance? What social and political forms are the equivalent of Fordism in Australia? If Fordism was an historic compromise between male manufacturing wage earners and the owners of industries like Ford, then how did the historic compromises function in Australia? What was happening to these compromises, or settlements, in the period when Grunge fiction took shape?

Literary Generationalism c1995

(Another revised section from the thesis intro)

Literary generationalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Narrativising neoliberalism: Australian Bildungsromane of the Long Labor Decade.

One powerful way that the govermentality of neo-liberalism happens, and is contested, in Australia is through the narrative genre of the coming-of-age novel, or the Bildungsroman. In particular it is journalist, editor and historian Paul Kelly’s 1992 journalistic-history of Australian Federal politics in the 1980s – The End of certainty in which a narrativization of nation is written through key conventions of the classical Bildungsroman form, and which persuasively carry the discursive temporal forms of neoliberalism. Next I will suggest that the publication of the germinal Grunge fiction novel – Andrew McGahan’s Praise, in the same year 1992 - signals a literary fictional attack on the classical Bildungsroman form in a period when this key narrative genre of modernity and modernisation is being redeployed in the service of neo-liberalising Australia. Alongside Praise, Christos Tsiolkas’1995 novel Loaded also performs a failed bildungs, and both novels present symbols and figures of abjection and atopia – disease, drug trips and transgressive sex. These figures of illness and transgression can be read as symbolic forms complicating such tropes of neoliberalism as a healthy, growing, flexible economy or the clean float of the Australian dollar. The third part of my argument places Elliot Perlman’s 1998 novel Three dollars into a comparison with Kelly’s text, and I will argue here that Three dollars is ultimately unsuccessful in providing a literary fiction critique of neoliberalism because the ground from which its critique is issued has disappeared. The last section of my paper attempts to bring these four texts together, and argues that Andrew McCann’s 2005 novel Subtopia is a grunge Bildungsroman that in presenting its narrator/hero as deformed by disease, drug trips and transgressive sex – three key symbolic forms of grunge lit – decompresses the historical emergence of neoliberalism in the 1980s and early 1990s so that we might read how this now dominant mode of governmentality can deform the narrating subject’s life narrative.

So, neoliberalism as a mode of governmentality. For Wendy Brown, drawing on Foucault, Neoliberalism :

Is not simply a set of economic policies; it is not only about facilitating free trade, maximizing corporate profits, and challenging welfarism. Rather,neo-liberalism carries a social analysis which, when deployed as a form of governmentality, reaches from the soul of the citizen-subject to education policy to practices of empire. Neo-liberal rationality, while foregrounding the market, is not only or even primarily focused on the economy; rather it involves extending and disseminating market values to all institutions and social action, even as the market itself remains a distinctive player. (‘Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy’)

As Brown’s definition puts it, neoliberalism is not to be confused with the laissez faire economic liberalism of Adam Smith’s self-regulating invisible hand of the market, nor with the widely popular view that neoliberalism amounts to the deregulatory, dessertion of the economy by the State. Rather, neoliberalism is a mode of political reason or rationality that refigures the state, the social and the subject as entrepreneurial, and able to marketized. Nikolas Rose sums up neoliberalism’s key slogan as ‘obliged to be free’, a phrase which captures something of the redirection of regulation by an Ethical state which civilises and ameliorates the effects of capitalism, as Marian Sawer argues is the legacy of Social Liberalism in Australia, to one that engages in the formation of subjects who are self-managing, and self-regulating.

This sense then that neoliberalism operates in the formation of subjects would suggest that the shift from a social liberal and largely Labourist political culture informing a Keynesian project of macroeconomic management throughout much of the post world War II period in Australia, the shift from this culture to a neoliberal one is a shift that happens at the level of subject-formation, or bildungs.

In Paul Kelly’s The End of Certainty this bildungs is tracked both at the level of the key events of the 1980s:including the financialisation of the Australian economy; the rise of the New right and its associated Think tanks; the Prices and Incomes Accords, the dropping of Tariff protection – and, more importantly, this formation of neoliberal governmentality is narrativized in terms of the whole post-federation period. For Kelly,

The story of the 1980s is the attempt to remake the Australian political tradition. This decade saw the collapse of the ideas which Australia had embraced nearly a century before and which had shaped the condition of its people. The 1980s was a time of both exhilaration and pessimism, but the central message shining through its convulsions was the obsolescence of the old order and the promotion of new political ideas as the basis for a new Australia. The generation after Federation in 1901 turned an emerging national consensus into new laws and institutions. This was the Australian Settlement. Its principle architect was Alfred Deakin.

In Kelly’s post-federation story, the 1980s is the moment when the Deakinite, or as Kelly influentially rewrites it, the Australian Settlement, is being dismantled by the force of international markets, especially in finance, and provides the moment in which the nation can finally come of age:

Two trends coalesced during the 1980s – the internationalisation of the world economy in which success became the survival of the fittest; and the gradual but inexorable weakening of Australia’s ‘imperial’ links with its two patrons, Britain and America. The message was manifest – Australia must stand on its own ability. Australians, in fact, had waited longer than most nations to address the true definitions of nationhood – the acceptance of responsibility for their own fate.

The obsolescence of the old order is documented. Since Federation Australia has failed to sustain its high standard of living compared with other nations. Australia’s economic problems are not new; they are certainly not the result of the 1980s, the 1970s, or the 1960s. The malaise stretches back much further to the post Federation Settlement. Australia’s economic problem is a ninety-year-old problem. The legacy of the Settlement has been relative economic decline throughout the century. Australia is a paradox – a young nation with geriatric arteries.

Now, these quotes are from the introduction to Kelly’s book in which he sets out his framing-argument for the long-overdue modernisation of the Australian economy and political culture. This introduction expands on his key heuristic – the Australian Settlement Which is repeatedly accompanied by verbs such as remaking, demolished, dismantled in the text. Kelly’s story of the 1980s is widely circulated and has come to serve as a definitive story of the inevitable, necessary modernisation of the Australian economy in the 1980s is due to more than just the power of Kelly’s rhetoric and key position in News Limited’s national broadsheet, I think it’s due also to his skillfull deployment of the poetics of the Bildungsroman form.

What is interesting in this narrative genre is the time and space from when and where the historian/ narrator looks back on a youthful life – a young nation - making the transition into adulthood – coming of age. Knowing the self that has become what it was always going to become, gives the narrator, telling the story of the hero’s’ emergence into maturity, the vantage of an Olympian certainty with which to make evaluative judgements on the younger self. In Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, which Bakhtin considered to be the germinal novel in this genre, this narrating position is metafictionally presented in the text as being occupied by the Masonic, Aristocratic Society of the Tower. After his youthful wanderings, theatrical experiments, and brief romances, Wilhelm discovers that he has been engaged in an apprenticeship that has been directed and written by this Aristocratic Society. It is as though his formation, while presented in the novel as precarious and dramatic, was in fact scripted well in advance of these experiences by being written in this life-script. This narrating position has been described by Joseph Slaughter as a teleological-tautology: the hero is what she will become. Slaughter also calls this narrating position, narrating from the future-anterior.

In Part II of Kelly’s The End of Certainty ‘The economic crisis’ chapter 11 ‘The Banana republic’ the critical dramatic apex in the story is presented. Kelly writes:

The ‘Banana republic’ was a dose of shock therapy for the nation which for a while left a legacy of crisis which Labor could have utilised to impose tougher policies upon the nation. Labor felt it was heroic enough – its decisions were draconian by orthodox standards and its advisers were pleased. Hawke and Keating depicted themselves as bold warriors. But history will record that the times demanded more and would have given more.

It’s the strange mixture of temporality, history and times here that points to the position of Kelly’s evaluative voice as being issued from a future anterior, or in the mode of a teleological-tautology. Kelly is writing a history yet he defers his evaluative judgement of the policy responses of Hawke and Keating to the Banana republic crisis, to a history in the future, which Kelly knows with certainty will make the definitive evaluative judgement about what the times demanded: which is more. What I think is happening here is that this economic crisis, indexed by a 40% devaluation of the Australian dollar over eighteen months, is for Kelly a valuation judgement on the Australian dollar by the global currency market, whose demands about the future are registered in the investment decisions it makes in the present.

Kelly’s future anterior narrator shows its hand as being guided by neoliberalism’s market judgement. Effectively what Australia will become is to be judged by the degree to which neoliberal governmentality meets the needs of the international markets.

Michael Pusey has called economic rationalism a locust strike, and just to mix metaphors in an attempt at a segue, Pusey has also described economic rationalism as the process where the social is cast as a stubbornly resisting sludge that market rationality must be driven through. And so to Grunge.

If as, Franco Moretti argues in his study of the classical Bildungsroman from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship to Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education, that this genre uses youth as a symbol for modernity and modernisation because with the French and Industrial Revolutions Europe is plunged into modernity but lacks a culture, then Kelly’s text can be read as personifying the nation as a youth on the cusp of modernisation – of providing the nation with a narrativisation of formation - as a means of insinuating the culture of neoliberalism into an Australia culture still, in parts, stubbornly resistant. This shift in the poetics of politics, as Jenna Mead succinctly sums up a critical approach to this field of textuality, I argue is met with a politics of poetics in the form of grunge literature – which I’ll refer to as Grunge lit. I’m just going to very quickly set out the three main characteristics of grunge lit that I want to pick up again at the end of this paper.

Grunge Lit is concerned, as Joan Kirkby and others have argued, with abjection. In both Praise and Loaded the narrator/ heroes are both young men on the cusp of adulthood –prime subjects for the Bildungsroman. However, both Gordon and Ari, break the first rule of neoliberalism by refusing to be obliged to choose a job. If it is healthy to have a job, then this refusal is the first sign of illness. Disease is central to Praise and its romantic leads, Cynthia and Gordon both have atopic illnesses: Eczema and Asthma. Atopic disease symbolises the deferred and displaced effects of pollution and waste; capitalism’s abjected and used-up by-products. At the end of Loaded Ari reflects on his life in the sewer, amongst the sludge and waste. The second chronotopic set in grunge lit revolves around drug experiences. Gordon’s main drug is the stimulant nicotine, but he and Cynthia move through heroin, LSD and lots of alcohol. Loaded, as the title suggests, is structured around scoring and taking drugs – from marijuana to ecstasy to speed. Apart being transgressive these representations of drug experiences present accelerations and decelerations of tempo. The decelerations play against the speed up of modernisation, while the rapid acceleration of stimulants performs a battle to outrun and think compressed time. Thirdly, both grunge novels figure pornographic sequences. The effect here is to transgress a simple and dominant heterosexuality. The central point here is that in Grunge lit the narrator never abjects these contaminating and arrhythmic phenomena from their narrative. As there is no successful Bildungs or formation in either novel, these abject and atopic symbols remain threateningly proximate to both the heroes’s body and to their futures.

This proximity to the atopic and abject in Grunge is nearly completely absent in the narrator/ hero of Eliot Perlman’s novel of 1998, Three Dollars. Three dollars has a temporal span of about 30 years and traverses the 1970s, 80s and 90s. Eddie Harnovey, the hero and narrator, tells the story of his life from the moment in and at which he and his nuclear family is almost destitute – having only three dollars. Perlman’s novel is a celebrated one, having won The Age book of the year, shortlisted for the Miles Franklin and was recently voted best novel about Victoria (or maybe Melbourne) in a poll conducted by the Victorian State Library. A film adaptation was released in 2005 and it was at this point that Three Dollars began to act out its metafictional aspiration of becoming a literary narrative through which a critical rational discussion of economic rationalism would be staged. Keith Windschuttle used the novel to argue for the privatisation of the ABC as one way to closed down the sort of cultural elitism that he argued Perlman’s novel represented, while Greg Sheridan in The Australian pointed out how unrealistic this realism was when its hero could go from a reasonably comfortable middle-class existence to almost homelessness in the space of days. On the other hand Ken Gelder, in an Overland essay last year, invoked Mark Davis’ call for a genuinely popular critique of neoliberal marketisation; Leigh Dale also supported Davis’ call in an ASAL panel on postcolonialism. In this essay Gelder argues that while the novel might be taken up on the Left as the closest recent example of a critical political realism, its resolution is conservative with Eddie returned to his wife and child, safe and with the prospect of a job, high up in the human resources department in an unamed bank after being sacked from his Federal government job for leaking to the media his rejected critical report on proposed Smelter development.

Unlike the highly compressed temporal spans of Praise and especially Loaded (24 hours), Three Dollars spans around 30 years, and its critique of neoliberalism is both explicit and profoundly disabled by its formal politics – the politics of its poetics. The central problem with the novel is that it adopts the Bildungsroman convention of a future-anterior narrating position from which to tell a story not of the hero’s formation, but of the hero’s integrity while the Australian public sphere is de-formed by neoliberalism. Seemingly without irony Eddie tells us that ‘I understood that secular humanism, liberalism and social justice had not abandoned me . . . it was just that everybody had abandoned them.’ Eddie is not presented as emerging along with history, as Bakhtin argues is central to the Bildungsroman, but as already formed through the civilising Culture of an Arnoldian-Leavisite project enabling Eddie to retain a clean ethical grasp on his sense of civilisation and integrity: a capacity for ethical judgement which is metafictionally founded on Arnoldian touchstones like Shakespeare and the Hamlet plot that Eddie inhabits. Perlman’s narrator takes on the form of the future anterior but uses it to narrate from the fantasy of a universal and transcendent humanistic culture that is capable of providing the means for civilising capitalism. As Terry Eagleton argues in The function of criticism ‘What Scrutiny [the Leavis’s journal] represented . . . was nothing less than an attempt to reinvent the classical public sphere, at a time when its material conditions had definitively passed.’ Three dollars therefore doubles this melancholic longing for the classical literary public sphere that Leavis also struggled to revive.

While the classical public sphere relied on a naturalised and strictly policed distinction between Economy and Culture, neoliberalism functions through an enculturation, or formation, of the subject as entrepreneurial, flexible, productive, self-managing, and accountable. Culture, like the State, becomes an object of market political rationality in the 1980s and 90s and in Three dollars nearly all the main characters except Eddie become subject to this emergent structure of feeling, which manifests itself, most strongly, in Eddie’s wife Tanya’s depression. Tanya struggles with the onset of neoliberalism both as managerial practice at University and as the subject of her unfinished doctoral thesis on the death of political economics. While Tanya’s experience of neoliberalism is felt as depression, it is their child Abby’s epileptic-like fit that signals an analogy with what Paul Kelly calls the convulsions of the 1980s. But the diseases in Three dollars are always distant from Eddie, whose bildungs is not neoliberal but Leavisite, and therefore is able to redeem his family from its proximity to neoliberalism by staying true to his humanism and remaining unstained.

Finally, Andrew McCann’s 2005 novel Subtopia permits its hero/ narrator Julian Farrell to be proximate to the three aspects of grunge lit I mentioned before. Also a Bildungsroman that spans the 1970s, 80s and 90s, Subtopia is haunted not by the spirit of Leavis but by Adorno’s aesthetics. The novel begins with the story’s chronological ending, denaturalising the future-anterior of the classical bilduingsroman:

In the end, I had the disconcerting sense that I had started to outlive myself. I suppose that’s how I knew it was the end. It’s not much of a way to conclude. I should have grown up, come to my senses, come of age (as you do), or fucked off for good. I was pushing thirty, for Christ’s sake. But in the end, so the cliché goes, there is no end. At least nothing we can own up to. A bit of self-indulgent bullshit about perpetual becoming or mutual understanding, a nice rhetorical flourish, and no one seems to notice just how inconclusive our experiences really are, which is not to say that they aren’t also full of danger. (Subtopia)

As in Praise and Loaded disease, drug use and pornography are prominent and proximate symbols of: the abject and atopic; time-tripping and here the libidinal charge of terrorist-revolutionary politics, represented in the narrator’s sexual fascination with Ulrike Meinhoff and a mentally ill Berliner. Unlike Eddie in Three Dollars Julian’s attempted transitions from youth to maturity are never achieved.

The effect of using the Bildungsroman form, as McCann does here, without completing the hero’s formation and by drawing attention to some of the conventions of this genre, is to enable a reading that can raise questions about a National coming of age which appears to have already been written by the investment projections of the international financial markets: neoliberalism’s version of Wilhelm Meister’s Society of the Tower writing his life-script. Also by derailing the teleology of a naturalised coming of age pulled into the future, other more unsettling chronotopes are given the time to work into the narrative and perhaps provide ways to think around or even through neoliberalism’s dominant hold on culture.

[from ASAL July 2007 Conference, UQ]