Christos Tsiolkas and the Fiction of Critique: Politics, Obscenity, Celebrity
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Christos Tsiolkas and the Fiction of Critique: Politics, Obscenity, Celebrity
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783084487 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Anthem Press |
| Publication date: | 06/15/2015 |
| Series: | Anthem Australian Humanities Research Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| File size: | 334 KB |
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Christos Tsiolkas and the Fiction of Critique
Politics, Obscenity, Celebrity
By Andrew McCann
Wimbledon Publishing Company
Copyright © 2015 Andrew McCannAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78308-448-7
CHAPTER 1
THE DOWN-CURVE OF CAPITAL: LOADED
The morning is ending and I've just opened my eyes. I stare across the cluttered room I'm in. I yawn. I scratch at my groin. I feel my cock and start a slow masturbation. When I'm finished, and it doesn't take long, I get up with a leap, wrap a towel around my naked body and make a slow journey downstairs.
I hear noises from throughout the house. A robotic voice is squealing over a bass-beat on the CD. The very narrow stairs stretch down before me. I walk past cobwebs, stains on the carpet, a biro on one step, a cigarette butt on another. In the lounge I grab a packet of cigarettes and light one. On the mantelpiece I notice an old family photo. I've forgotten this photo. My brother in a red shirt and black shorts has one arm around the old man and another around my mum. She looks like Elizabeth Taylor, or at least is trying to, and Dad is wearing a grey suit with a narrow black tie. He's trying to look like Mastroianni, or like Delon. The tie belongs to me now. I'm in the picture too. Sitting cross-legged on the grass, in a blue shirt, aiming a plastic gun at the camera. The colours in the photo are rich, bright. Colour photos don't do that any more. Technology makes things look too real. I turn away from the photograph and look at last night's mess strewn across the lounge room. It's not my place.
The opening of Loaded — the beginning, in fact, of Tsiolkas's career — has a certain artlessness about it that might also be described as immediacy: first-person voice, present tense, a consciousness that roves over the banal, empirical detail of what is simply at hand. There is little ability or willingness to determine which of these details has weight and which does not. If this produces a sort of reality-effect, it also runs the risk of reproducing for the reader the tedium of everyday objects and observations. In fact, before two pages have elapsed, Ari, the novel's narrator, declares that he is "already bored" (3). The feeling we get from these opening pages is that the proliferation of everyday detail is crowding out the conventions of narrative, if not the possibility of narrative itself. The "once upon a time" of storytelling, the moment at which plot is inaugurated, cannot quite release itself from a world that verges on the inexpressive and the formless. Ari's experience is, at least initially, at the mercy of the world that surrounds him, and it is not clear that this can provide the catalyst for a legible narrative.
Of course there is an element of scene-setting here: cobwebs, stains, a cigarette butt. And the family photograph that grabs Ari's attention no doubt foreshadows the novel's interest in the friction between the structures of heterosexual reproductivity and a dislocated, deterritorialized, emphatically queer consciousness that becomes more evident the further we read. But to try to explain the novel's opening in this way is to miss the significance of its meandering, disoriented tone. Loaded is, after all, a novel that spends an enormous amount of its time trapped in and overwhelmed by the details of the everyday. It is also a novel that explores the reactive forms of affect — boredom, anger, hatred, arousal, ecstasy — that accompany this sense of entrapment. If there is a central tension in Loaded, it does not really involve the obvious oppositions that are often used by critics to contextualize Tsiolkas's work: Greek-Australian/Anglo-Australian, queer/straight, or working-class/ bourgeois. All of these oppositions play important roles in the novel, of course, and they are absolutely central to the way in which it entered public discourse. But they are secondary to a much more fundamental opposition between the formlessness of the everyday and the possibility of a conceptual rubric that might allow Ari — or the reader, for that matter — to fashion a viable narrative out of the rubble of his fragmented, quotidian experience.
On the face of it, this might be thought of as a formal problem. The immediacy of what has been called "grunge fiction," which is often bound up with its autobiographical ambience, requires a departure from what now appears to be the artifice of structure and craft. But even by the standards of other grunge texts, Loaded's opening feels denuded. Unlike some of the works with which Loaded was initially compared — Andrew McGahan's Praise and Justine Ettler's The River Ophelia, for instance — there is not a central sexual relationship that can guide the narrative. And unlike the short stories in Edward Berridge's The Lives of the Saints, there is not the structural economy of the anti-epiphany to impose formal unity. Instead Loaded seems to subtract the conventions of narrative coherence in order to confront us with the very thing that narrative tries to obviate: the formlessness of the material world, the stuff, the detritus of the everyday that threatens meaning, or our ability to make meaning. The novel is ostensibly set over the course of a single day, but this does not enable it to coordinate complex relationships between characters or to impose much of a narrative structure. In fact Loaded's increasingly frequent introspective and retrospective digressions render this temporalframework largely irrelevant. There is almost no sense in which the episodes Tsiolkas recounts need to be read sequentially. That a day breaks down into interchangeable fragments of time, or moments of affect, is itself indicative of the novel's attempt to step outside of conventional narrative logics.
Nevertheless, the world Ari inhabits is, at least implicitly, organized around narratives: narratives that attach to work, marriage, reproduction, upward mobility, suburban normality and aspirational consumerism. Every time someone asks Ari whether he has a job, we get a glimpse of this world of tediously insistent narratives that threaten to subsume him. Ari's friend Joe, for instance, "has it all worked out": "He's got a job, got a girlfriend, got a car. Soon he wants to get married" (10). The story set out here — and the novel is very clear that it is a story, a work of fiction — is utterly alien to Ari. He encounters it from the outside, as a piece of the material world, not as a framework that he can use to process and order that world. It is as if the stories that enable characters to achieve their social integration have no more validity than the products they consume and the waste they leave behind. In fact the novel's insistence on apparently unfiltered observation correlates to Ari's aggressive refusal of the narratives with which he is confronted. This relationship comes into such sharp focus because Tsiolkas has also refused the sort of conventional structures that we usually associate with fiction: plot, character development, conflict and resolution. Ari's first-person voice presents the issue of narrative integration not as one simply bound up with the novel's formal organization, but as one embedded in his experience of his world — a world in which the narratives we have at our disposal are also tethered to the material or ideological reproduction of society. The problem of making meaning or producing coherence through narrative is thus a central part of the novel's content, and an important indication of its engagement with its historical context. It also marks the vexed relationship between the specificity of Tsiolkas's own background and what Loaded posits as the false universality of an aspirational, middle-class worldview — the worldview that was in fact fundamental to the development of narrative fiction in the late eighteenth century and then throughout the nineteenth century.
In this respect Loaded clearly presents itself as a sort of anti-Bildungsroman, in which conventional narratives of social integration and maturation are visible precisely because of the clarity with which Ari refuses them. This refusal can, in part at least, be explained by Tsiolkas's sense that he was formed by experiences that are largely antithetical to the processes of normalization associated with the Bildungsroman form. In a terrific conceptual history of the concept of Bildung, Pheng Cheah shows us how this notion of cultural education has historically implied the development of "natural dispositions or capacities" toward a reconciliation with a collective social or political body. It has thus functioned as a mode of maturation that forms the basis of a "collective existence," and this also gives it a regulative function. The term designates the "inner-directed formation of an individual in the image of a personality prescribed by moral norms." This also means that, as Cheah's discussions of Fichte and Hegel demonstrate, it enables the possibility of ethical action in a world that is exterior to the individual: civil society, the nation, an "existing articulated whole."
Bildung teaches the youth to renounce his revolutionary enthusiasm and submit to the existing world by recognizing its actual rationality, its existence as the substrate of his rational activity and not its obstacle [...] Bildung in this optimal sense is the individual's immersion and participation in objective spirit, that is, the shared customs and values, the ethical substance that enables meaningful reciprocal action in a collective setting.
It is for this reason, of course, that the form of the Bildungsroman was imagined as so central to literature's world-building capacity, but it is also unsurprising that the genre would become problematic in circumstances where difference disrupts or fragments the assumption of a consensually mediated "collective setting."
It is thus no surprise that both modernist and postcolonial fiction often registers a refusal of stable national and social identifications in what Jed Esty calls an "antidevelopmental temporality" that suspends or interrupts narratives of maturation. If, as Esty argues, the ultimate horizon of the Bildungsroman is a nationalism "based on an ideal of organic culture whose temporality and harmony could be reflected in the developing personality," then it also follows that the experience of "colonial modernity" would disrupt "cherished continuities between a people and its language, territory, and polity." In a specifically Australian context, the melding of immigrant, working-class and queer experience in a novel like Loaded effects a similar kind of disruption: national allegories that orient to the transition from adolescence to adulthood are disabled by experiences that resist social integration into what now reveals itself to be a false collectivity.
Tsiolkas, we know, is very precise when he talks about his political and cultural formation and the ways in which it alienated him from a putatively dominant Australian reality. Both of his parents were Greek immigrants to Australia and both were factory workers for much of their lives. Tsiolkas describes them as "peasants" partly in order to indicate their marginality to educational structures in the strife-torn Greece that they had left behind. In Australia they were both "trade-union people." This immigrant, working-class background was crucial to Tsiolkas's developing worldview, but it also meant that he experienced his own passage through higher education as entailing at least a degree of estrangement, both from his family and the society he was now approaching:
I think going to university, and coming from a working-class background, made me very conscious of entering a really bourgeois world; I was suddenly wrenched out of my particular class and found myself entering another class — this was a seismic experience. I became déclassé — an experience both empowering because it opened up opportunities for me, and also alienating as it separated me from the class I was born into.
Whatever the reality of Tsiolkas's own process of social integration, this sense of being "déclassé," of being marginal to prevailing narratives of identity, plays an enormous role in Loaded, in which Ari is continually confronted with forms of life that demand a surrender, or a declaration of identification that he is constitutively unable to give. But being Greek, gay or working-class does not provide the basis of an alternative identity either, though Ari's background does enable him to recognize aspirational bourgeois experience as a form of alienation. At the moment of the novel's publication in 1995, these concerns would have been especially topical. In the state of Victoria, Jeff Kennett's Liberal Party had been in power since 1992. As state premier, Kennett had delivered Melbourne in particular over to a narrative of cultural and economic renewal linked to privatization, the ongoing disorganization of the labor movement, gambling and public projects that combined monumentalism and featurist kitsch. Ari's non-involvement in narratives of social integration and mobility has to be understood against this broader context in which Kennett's brand of neoliberalism was materially transforming the character of lived experience with sometimes startling speed and visibility.
But it is not just that Ari refuses a dominant mode of narrative linked to residual notions of Bildung. He refuses narrative itself and any sense of character development that evolves through time. Without the possibility of a counter-narrative, what is one left with? How does critique manifest itself ? In Loaded, critique appears to be inseparable from forms of affect — anger, boredom and arousal — that register Ari's relationship to the fragmented materiality of the everyday. In fact we might even say that in Loaded critique is a form of affect; a gestural, highly emotive idiom that reverberates through Ari's voice. This might seem like a stretch: critique and affect are usually seen as very different registers. But their proximity, if not their simultaneity, in Tsiolkas's novel is, I want to suggest, an important index of how Loaded encounters its political situation. The fact that Ari's friend Joe has his "world worked out," means, of course, that he understands almost nothing about the social constitution of his own experience. Ari can clarify this, but not for Joe exactly. His mode of critique enters the text as part of an enclosed, reactive interiority:
We all have to sell ourselves. But you don't have to get married, you don't have to sell all of yourself. There is a small part of myself, deep inside of me, which I let no one touch. If I let it out, let someone have a look at it, brush their hands across that part of my soul, then they would want to have it, buy it, steal it, own it. Joe's put that part of himself up for the market and he would be the first to say it's because he can't put up with the demands. Parents, friends, bosses, girlfriends, girlfriends' parents, cousins, aunts, uncles, even the fucking neighbours. They all want to sell, buy, invest in the future. (10–11)
The negativity of this critical mode is not, for the most part, a way of communicating with other characters in the novel. It is a monologue, a rant, a particular form of commentary that derives its efficacy precisely from the ways in which it holds itself back from full-blown, public enunciation. If we can call this critique, there is also something petulant about the passage that forces us to qualify the term. It is clear in its refusal of an aspirational middle-class world, but it is also bound up with an adolescent rebelliousness that oscillates between the solipsistic and the nihilistic. The explicitly political component of this moment is evident enough to distinguish it from the other gestural idioms that fill the novel, yet only barely. If there is an expectation that critique at least implies a relationship to organizational or activist structures that belong to the realm of public, political life, then the more subjective, affect-laden version of it that we often encounter in Loaded confronts us with the shards of the political: the fragments, or after-effects, of a conceptual universe that no longer seems properly operative or readily available. Ari cannot integrate himself into a broader social horizon partly because that horizon itself does not exist in a way that can actualize a meaningful, critically engaged existence. The novel's refusal to release itself from the immaturity of its main character embodies this sense of a cognitive crisis. Loaded, I believe, is an important novel because it manages to inhabit the affective, gestural rubble of a world that seems to have sublimated the political into the multiple, private universes of its atomized subjects. In this respect the novel reflects the neoliberal disorganization of public, political life in which narratives of prosperity are channeled through a relentlessly individualized model of subjectivity bound up with private pleasure, wealth and security. In this sense Bildung already seems like a fiction. It is as if the passage from an immediate experience of the everyday to something that might count as collective historical or political experience has been blocked in accordance with a broader thesis about the neoliberal abandonment of history. Tsiolkas touches on this in his 2008 essay "On the Concept of Tolerance": "History — that sphere of knowledge most important to the left because in presenting it not as the linear and progressive triumph of great men (and now, occasionally, a few great women), it offers, instead, history as eruptive, disruptive, as a challenge to liberalism's suppression of the silences, violences and human misery on which this triumphalism is based — history has been abandoned."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Christos Tsiolkas and the Fiction of Critique by Andrew McCann. Copyright © 2015 Andrew McCann. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements,Preface,
Introduction. Pasolini's Ashes,
1. The Down-Curve of Capital: Loaded,
2. Inside the Machine: From Loaded to The Jesus Man,
3. The Pornographic Logic of Global Capitalism: Dead Europe,
4. In the Suburbs of World Literature: From Dead Europe to The Slap,
5. The Politics of the Bestseller: The Slap and Barracuda,
Conclusion. Aesthetic Autonomy and the Politics of Fiction,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,
What People are Saying About This
‘McCann deftly situates Tsiolkas in both his vernacular local context as well as defining the contradictory elements of his growing global appeal. Tsiolkas’s extreme fictions are rendered legible as much through references to Pasolini’s legacy of queer aesthetics as to Adorno’s critiques of mass culture. At the same time McCann delivers an incisive and breathtakingly well-informed assessment of the current state of cultural politics in Australia.’ —Sneja Gunew, University of British Columbia