Intimate Antipathies

by Luke Carman

  Hearts a-flame with envy, bearing gifts of suppression, control, and a contagious spirit of nihilism, the social arts hopeful perceives themselves as an inherently creative djinn. Their existence is itself a miraculous creative act, and they secretly scorn those who bother to make things in earnest. Writers, in the minds of these ‘change-makers’ are block-headed toddlers playing in the sandbox of culture. The arts dreamer has larger game in their sights. Rather than fiddling about with the ephemera of fiction, they are busily revising cultural institutions; rather than piddle with obsolete publishing fancies like novels and the like, they are pulling the strings in funding decisions. Forget revolutions of thought and consciousness, these visionaries are drawing together the next generation of writers from the dust of our collective cultural vacuum! Given enough support, these ‘king-creators’ transcend the literary landscape, they become gods capable of making and unmaking from on high. As the cowardly writers of poetry and prose peek meekly out of their share-house windows between deleting and repeating their maggot-minded sentences or stanzas, those dreaming of positions on funding panels and advisory boards take up the call and make real, meaningful decisions about what will and will not be in our nation’s literature. The problem is, these guardians of the culture view art as a means to power. In order to ensure their claims on their positions, they invariably screw down in the direction of a populist consensus within the arts community. They do so because they’re political animals in a way that writers usually aren’t. Artists are uncommonly indifferent to power, which is why they so often struggle to thrive without aid. The arts dreamer, a natural politician, lusts for the small power of the cultural now. They aren’t necessarily powerful people – often all they possess is opinions – but opinion counts for a great deal when working with something as elusive as quality in the arts. Opinion, besides, can be traded for authority if one has an eye for cultural economies. In a few short years, with the right reparations, anyone without a shred of originality or integrity can be holding court, and dictating terms for an art form to which they contribute nothing but their lordly presence. The question of talent, of course, never comes into the opinion-shaper’s equations. The general consensus of our culture is that there’s no legitimate basis for determining the value of literary talent in the twenty-first century, so possessing it is superfluous – likely a hindrance, since it will probably make the rest of whichever literary clique one settles into suspicious of your wilfully un-egalitarian nature.

  Much of the blame for creating the chasm in our culture from which these deluded demi-gods of arts management have risen must lie with the universities – and the corrupting influence of ‘creative writing’ courses which serve as cash cows for their beleaguered and fatigued humanities departments. A recent Onion article titled ‘Creative Writing Professor Takes Time to Give Every Student Personalized False Hope’ spread through the halls of my university. Its barb, obviously, was the betrayal of the young and wishful by the peddling of insincerities and fantasies under the banner of creative writing. Every student who sits in on a tutorial is encouraged to believe publication is only a degree away. It is a cruel lie, perpetuated by the complicity of tutors and lecturers who have no recourse but to toe the line. The directive to avoid the truth – formerly, I’m led to believe, of some concern to the humanities – is driven by the perpetual commandment from upper management to commericalise or perish. The arts and humanities might do well if only they would invert themselves and become something else. Enrolment numbers, meanwhile, are looking better than ever, and those hopeful students who just want to know how to get their novel or their poetry collection published continue to be seduced by a watered-down exposure to literary criticism, and kept slyly away from the reality that a high distinction in a creative writing course is no indication of – indeed, equally as likely to count against – their chances of ever being published. The average undergrad remains blissfully unaware that the slush piles of publishing houses groan with the weight of rejected submissions from creative writing lecturers. Many students, after being ushered through the most adequate training money can buy, have their first real-world encounter with the publishing industry when their doctorate-cum-fictionalised autobiography – a work they’ve spent ten years writing – is rejected by an intern who has happily never heard of René Girard’s mimetic theory, or been interested in how the author has subverted the ‘immolated victim’ trope through an account of middle-class disorder in rural New South Wales. As an aside, it’s astonishing how all the post-structuralist literary theory on earth suddenly seems like froth and fury when it crashes up against the stolid indifference of a rejection letter.

  Little wonder then, in a sector of the arts populated by lunatic fantasists presided over by scholars enslaved to the demands of corporate universities, that the small masters of today who lust for power over the literary world are able to infiltrate our most sacred spaces completely unimpeded. And here I might as well drop all pretence – the social climbers of the arts – dragging their legions of Twitter followers behind them like some chain-link serpent’s tail – are not merely ambitious arts workers: they are anti-artists in human form. They are incorrigible frauds and fakes. Since it will be called reactionary drivel to say so in the current climate, I might as well pre-empt accusations of Mark Latham-levels of bilious filibuster and borrow Holden Caulfield’s refrain: these people are phonies – and our literary scene is corpulent with the weight of them.

  Since it is all too easy to throw around the vague and self-serving assertion that there are vampires in our midst without offering any means by which to spot them, I offer this provisional guide for discriminating the fakes in our lit scene from the genuine article. Simultaneously freewheeling and coherent, the hucksters are nonchalant pundits on every cause and effect in politics and culture. They make wonderful guest spots on Q&A. They tread the boards of public spaces, making off-the-cuff speeches as effortlessly and gracefully as actors, and so they ought; though they lack the good genes to break into popular entertainment, they are born public relations agents for their own brands. Observe their capacity to charm crowds online and in-real-life without once stepping outside the bounds of accepted bourgeois-liberal consensus like angels twerking on a pin. Their every character trait, from mental illness to class background, is worn as an adornment of generic brand identity. Need an expert on the working class rural writer? They have one of those. Want someone to stand in as a borderline personality spokesperson? Speak to their agent. As the vibrant antithesis of the genuine, atrophied artist, they inhale and expand the increasing performativity of our literary culture with a gluttonous delight in their smiling eyes. Lastly, these devious characters can be identified by the breathtaking fervour with which they do nothing at all – and their insistence that anything they do not like is unmade. Only their own private vision of the world deserves life. Anything else is an abomination. Through the rigorous exercising of cultural opinion, they seek to decide who, what, where – and when – the flowers may grow in the garden. What they can’t nip in the bud, they denounce as a weed in the blooming. To say these types hold nothing sacred is not to accuse them of being profane – they are merely quotidian proponents of a status quo that suits their slimy interests. To be subversive radicals would require them to believe in something other than themselves, and they do not – with the possible exception of their friends. What they mean by friendship is, however, some nightmarish Zuckerbergian conception of human connection. Their work, their brand, their audience, their reason for being. From the centre of their synapse-like social media webs, the vibrations of growth potential and social mobility are the only readings to which they are not completely numb. It would be one thing if these culture-creepers were merely usurping an unjust amount of the literary stage for themselves – after all, who really cares about the who’s who of books? – but their repressive influence is one that poisons the lot of us – writer and reader alike. As the pall of their infiltration spreads over the n
ation, the atmosphere in the literary scene turns from disillusionment to despair. Speak to almost anyone in the fragile literary ecology: the spell of defeat is as thick as fog. This might seem hyperbolic, but the sheer magnitude of the malaise they have brought around our heads is a fatal one.

  So then – having endured my jeremiad – you might well ask what proof I have that these malignants even exist. Admittedly, the evidence is difficult to produce. I don’t have the nerve to name names, which would be the quickest way to make the case – but I can tell you where they are likely to live. It will come as no surprise that the largest infestation of these noxious weed-lingerers is to be found in the City of Literature itself – in a state with more literary festivals per capita than anywhere else on earth. This is not to suggest that every writer or writing organisation based in Victoria is the spawn of Satan – but Melbourne is known for proliferating mobsters, and its writing scene is no exception. The Melbourne literary mafia may have little ‘real-world’ potency, but that’s not their game. Instead, they rely on an invidious power of suggestion that gnaws its way into the consciousness of young Australian writers. Their grim visage solidifies in the minds of our future writers, creating enough fog and smoke to overwhelm the victim and blind their common sense. In ‘Right Time, Right Place: How the Melbourne Voice Shuts Writers Out’, Jonno Revanche – an Adelaide-based writer – describes the internalised influence of the ‘Melbourne Voice’ on wannabe writers. Confronting the amassed cultural capital of the ‘romanticised’ City of Literature as a young outsider with aspirations of making it in the world of letters, Revanche describes a common feeling of despair: ‘I would continually beat myself up over “not being contemporary enough”, and felt like my honest words simply weren’t valuable.’

  Revanche’s account of the Melbourne Voice’s ‘oppressive’ influence paints this literary clique-hole as a cultish cabal holding the country’s literary ‘stakeholders’ to ransom. It is an astonishingly implausible exaggeration of the power wielded by Melbourne’s lit mobsters, but since it played directly to the vanity of these anti-artists, they were quick to laud Revanche’s article as ‘an important and necessary provocation’ – the usual descriptor the clique-lords use to describe any opinion piece with which they agree. By contrast, Brigid Delaney’s response piece in The Guardian, which suggested that the so-called ‘Melbourne Voice’ was a paper-thin mythological irrelevancy perpetuated by an insular crowd of insufferable literary-baristas, was dismissed by the anti-artists as a self-serving ‘think piece’ – the descriptor typically used to delegitimise any opinion piece with which the anti-artists and their disciples disagree. For what it’s worth, there is, of course, no such thing as the ‘Melbourne Voice’, and the disenfranchising forces against which Revanche and Delaney are unwittingly united are the stateless anti-artists themselves. At the centre of the incestuous literary vortex – which outsiders such as Revanche and Delaney denounce with a kind of consoled envy – sit the anti-artists in residence, with their centrifugal charisma bending the world of Australian letters to suit their narcissistic whims. Though they have undoubtedly accumulated quite a presence in Melbourne – a particularly useful place to live if you have your heart set on squirming up the wobbly ladder of the community arts sector – their reach and their connections stretch beyond geographical borders.

  James Tierney expressed the growing level of anxiety in the literary scene under the conspiratorial influence of our anti-artists in an article in Kill Your Darlings titled ‘What Australian Literary Conversation?’ Tierney characterises the titular conversation as ‘one of long silences, punctuated by the occasional loud thud’. Contemplating the spasmodic silence of our critical dialogue, Tierney remarks: ‘If there is a public literary conversation going it must be well hidden.’ The kind of chatter about arts and culture that Tierney claims we ought to have a great deal more of is apparently exemplified by Slate’s popular ‘Culture Gabfest’ podcast. It’s an interesting point – why can’t we manage to be as open as our American friends? Why are we so intolerably shy whenever the conversation turns to culture? Perhaps unintentionally, Tierney provides an insight into the reason for our muted literary character when he considers Ben Etherington’s combative ‘Critic Watch’ column in the Sydney Review of Books. Tierney praises Etherington’s ‘sharp gaze’, one which – unlike much else that Australian literary criticism has to offer – managed to spark ‘a lot of informal, private responses’ within Tierney’s hearing. It is apparently a rare thing that anyone in Tierney’s earshot is roused by a bit of the old lit critique. Nevertheless, despite recognising Etherington as a decent critic who managed to stimulate at least some kind of literary chatter, Tierney feels compelled to share with us the ‘concerns’ he has ‘heard’ about Critic Watch, namely ‘that it risks becoming a navel-gazing exercise – that to publicly and polemically consider the craft and broad judgment of Australia’s critical culture could be both self-indulgent and self-regarding, the critical equivalent of a selfie.’ Having slipped these concerns into print, Tierney then dismisses them as unpersuasive. There is, in this odd pulling of the punches thrown without any evident provocation, something bizarrely Australian. The critics assailed by Critic Watch are wrong, why worry about their anonymous misapprehensions – particularly if, as Tierney suggests, the whole thing is taking place in a vacuum of apparent indifference? Can it really be a coincidence that the only example of a critic who does what Tierney wants our critics to do is the one about whom he feels compelled to publish ‘concerns’ of ‘self-regard’? When Tierney asks ‘what conversation?’ the answer is not the one taking place in print – it is the clandestine dialogue that is forever taking place on the periphery – real or imagined.

  As a people, Australians are perhaps uniquely sensitive to the kind of censure that Tierney’s projection establishes – it runs deep in our blood to be afraid of ‘navel-gazing’ and ‘self-interest’, derivations of the damning charge of being a wanker. Since Europeans stamped their dubious authority on its soil, this country has been an anxious, uncertain colony of a far-flung centre – and our literature (our literary condition) has reflected as much. Our predisposition towards an almost paranoid conservatism about arts and culture has perpetuated the idea that these things are inherently isolated from ordinary life, whatever that might be. Exclusive, repressive, and generally ashamed of itself, literature in this country has been shamefully abandoned to cultural guerrillas without a cause – who seek nothing but to further their interests even as they defuse the miasma of self-censorship and trepidation amongst our authors and readers as they ascend to power.

  It’s an old trick of the Australian cultural consciousness – every expression, no matter how legitimate, no matter how substantial, can be tossed to the winds by claiming that the person behind it has a hand down their pants. Our collective fear of our own awkwardness, our vestigial cringe at our own culture, is a powerful weapon in the anti-artist’s arsenal.

  The charge of wankerism was one that punctuated the climactic end point of a recent imbroglio over so-called ‘middlebrow’ literature. Ivor Indyk’s editorial on literary prizes in the Sydney Review of Books kicked-off the controversy, arguing (with deliberate irony) that since the responsibility of discerning a prize-winner from any given sample of literary works is a duty too great to be entrusted to anybody at all, the money on offer might be better put to other uses. Hardly a contentious claim, and there might not have been any hand-wringing on the matter, had it not been for Indyk’s embroiling of the middlebrow’s influence into the mix. Indyk suggested that judges might be beholden to ‘the whine of popular disappointment insinuating itself into their brains’ when considering giving the nod to works that are ‘challenging or innovative’. His ‘target’ was the nihilistic heckling from the peanut gallery – both real and imagined – which holds the language and imagination of a nation in a thrall of self-restraint.

  Unsurprisingly, the prodding of this subterranean consciousness brought a slumber
ing neurosis roaring to the surface. But what turned the furore into a frenzy was a second ‘middlebrow’ piece published in the Sydney Review of Books by academic Beth Driscoll. Using novels by Susan Johnson, Antonia Hayes, and Stephanie Bishop as exemplars of the genre, Driscoll – author of The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the Twenty-First Century – discussed the fluid and complex modes of literary appreciation that intersect the contentious terrain of the middlebrow. According to Driscoll, the works of these three authors offer readers, critics and publishers ‘manifold pleasures’. Johnson, Hayes and Bishop did not take this compliment lying down. In their rejoinder the authors were ‘as one in rejecting’ the label of middlebrow – not to mention ‘startled and offended’ by Driscoll’s ‘collective dismissal of any discriminating powers of intellectual application to our respective works.’ There’s no act more gratifying an author can perform than sticking it to a critic – though this avenging trio demonstrates how much more satisfying it is to do so as a team – and the arguments Johnson, Hayes and Bishop make are persuasive. Hayes, for instance, points to Driscoll’s ‘vague definition of middlebrow’, Bishop is concerned the piece ‘unwittingly quarantines and belittles middle-class women writers, their books and a female readership’, and Johnson – whose response is the least vexed of the three – just seems depressed by the whole affair.