by Luke Carman
The Melbourne-centred lit scene mobsters were quick to herald the responses of these writers as a watershed moment in Australian letters. Authors, this incident established, were now empowered to feel comfortable publicly refusing the ‘pulling of rank’ by righteous literary journals, critics, and academics – those institutionalised thugs who go about perpetuating hierarchical and ideological abuses against middle-class authors who just want to earn a crust in peace and in public. More troubling, however, was the emphasis placed by the anti-artists on a singularly polemical moment in Hayes’ response. In praising Hayes’ push-back against the Sydney Review of Books’ ‘war’ on the middlebrow, the anti-artists chose to focus on her dismissal of the journal itself as one specialising in ‘jerking off’ (by way of reference to Susan Sontag). This kind of caustic accusation of ‘wankery’ amidst an otherwise measured response to genuine criticism plays directly into the hands of the anti-artists – it reinforces Tierney’s observation that criticism and discussion surrounding literature is often de-legitimised by the accusation of being a giant wank. Literary culture, accusations of masturbation imply, should be driven by more meaningful, purposeful activity than shameful navel-gazing by critics and other unproductive members of society. After all, as Hayes asks, what are these ‘diatribes’ hoping to accomplish? The answer, of course, is nothing. It is the dogged moralising of the anti-artists that has perpetuated an ideology amidst our burgeoning writing culture that there is something other than an autotelic uselessness to be found in writing at all. Art, as the literary critic Terry Eagleton puts it, exists purely for its own self-delight. The anti-artists do their best to suppress this idea. In order to justify their positions on committees and in community groups and as festival directors, they need to create a powerful misconception that someone other than the artist is required to co-ordinate the manifest destiny of progress’s perpetual march towards utopia through the alchemy of culture and industry.
It would be disingenuous in the extreme not to mention here that Hayes’ final paragraph is one which draws me directly into the middlebrow debate. Accusing Luke Carman, Driscoll and Indyk of ‘savage rhetoric’, ‘empty intellectualisation’, ideological thinking, and ‘jerking-off’ (all things which I strenuously deny ever doing), Hayes asks, ‘What are we supposed to do with these theoretical assessments? Indyk says awards are middlebrow, Carman says festivals are middlebrow and now Driscoll says novels are middlebrow.’ Her reference to my view on literary festivals draws on a brief editorial I’d written for the journal some weeks earlier, and though it’s true that the article wasn’t exactly in praise of literary festivals, I didn’t mention the term ‘middlebrow’ at all.
At the moment, as I type out the end of this rather odd essay, a violent storm descends on my home in the western suburbs of Sydney. Rain is spilling over the guttering, thunder shakes the floorboards under my feet and the ghost-gums spreading toward the city are roiling in heavy winds. It’s an ominous scene and it fills me with a primal kind of dread. When I spoke to colleagues about the essay I was intending to write, they warned me that if I lashed out against the anti-artists in our midst, I’d bury my own career – I’d never, they said, be published by a literary journal in this country again. I’m not so sure about that. The massive cuts that have vivisected the literary sector have been devastating. It’s not an optimistic time for those fighting it out in our literary coliseum – but there is a silver lining: the anti-artists have taken hits too. Right now, the gatekeepers are off their game, and there’s never been a better time to burst out of their confines, and make your madding way in this strange world of lunatics, lovers and poets.
DIABOLUS IN FESTUM
This week, as the National Young Writers’ Festival kicks off, and the Wheeler Centre announces the launch of yet another literary-themed festival, I am reminded of the enervating words of Gilles Deleuze:
We sometimes congratulate writers, but they know they are far from having achieved their becoming, far from having attained the limit they set for themselves, which ceaselessly slips away from them. To write is to become something other than a writer.
Putting aside, for a moment, the begged question of what exactly the ‘something other’ is that one becomes when one writes, it strikes me that nowhere is Deleuze’s complex of ‘unbecoming’ more evident than in the proliferation of the literary festival. It is, after all, the subtle duty of literary festivals and their variants to assure writers, with a vague but potent authority, that they are – despite their knowing self-doubts and anxieties – ‘writers’.
Likewise, the audiences who fill the expectant rows of plastic chairs set out before ticketed, hour-long panel discussions on serious subjects such as ‘Morality, Money, Entertainment and the Truth’ and ‘Is History Recoverable?’ can assure themselves that they must be amongst that rarefied category of citizens who go by the epithet of ‘reader’, or at the least, consumers (and creators, why not) of some virtuous quantity called ‘culture’.
If this sounds a little cynical, a tad polemical, then allow me to distract you with an anecdote. At a recent festival, after a pleasant panel discussion on ‘How to Make It’ between myself and three (much better known) writers, I was escorted to a signing table. Lacking both a pen to sign copies of my book, and people interested in possessing either my book or my signature, I was well placed to eavesdrop on a conversation between a Miles Franklin winner and an author short-listed for the Booker.
‘That panel was all a bit of a wank, I’m not sure what the point was,’ said the former.
‘One might say the same of these festivals in general,’ the latter replied.
At this point, the conversation ceased, as both men began to engage with their timid but slowly thronging fanbase. It struck me, as the queues to meet these quasi-celebrities accumulated before my eyes into an embarrassingly large number of people who didn’t want to talk to me, that if two writers from the upper echelons of Australian letters were uncertain about the point of writers’ festivals, then there was perhaps no clear and present point to such events at all. Which is not the same as saying that literary festivals are without purpose – were writers’ and readers’ festivals truly without a reason for being, they would have at least that in common with literature itself. But alas, as a shameless festival-hopper, I can attest that there is something suspiciously purposeful about your average literary ‘festival’.
In my own, admittedly paranoid, view, festivals and their attendant events – though often advertised as opportunities for writers to connect and share their wisdom with their readers – are more akin to a form of trial in which the writer is put on stage to answer to the collective judgement of overenthused readers. I mean no disrespect to those reading audiences – their hearts are in the right place – and they gaze up at the writers in front of them with affirming smiles and encouraging, almost knowing, expressions. But nonetheless, those hapless writers who do not conform to the conventions of this abrasive trial-by-sensibility are in for a gentle public shaming (on the level of a thorough skin cleansing) and will be ‘daintily’ ostracised from the festival circuit and thereby exiled – even if only by their own embarrassment – from an increasingly significant dimension of the writerly life. Thankfully, this happens rarely, as writers are preselected from the population to be the most malleable, passive and desperate-to-please people in the land. Despite the spinelessness of the writing demographic, so-called ‘author talks’, in my reading of them, are powerful affect-driven ceremonies (we laugh for those we love, cringe and fume at those we don’t) that shape and reshape the writer according to the will of the market (which audiences have no choice but to stand in for at any given literary event).
The public performance of ‘writer’ that festivals and other literary occasions are set up to curate is an awkward amalgam of serious intellectual and clownish entertainer. Unfortunately, most book-makers – innocent vessels of linguistic reflex – are neither by nature.
Behind the curtains
of the literary ‘show’, young writers are a-tremble with nerves as they whisper to the panel chair, ‘It’s my first time!’ Luckily, a complete ineptitude for public performance (or even a total lack of character) is not as bad a handicap as the nervous young writer might believe: the dull medium of the panel discussion is its empty message. The curtain is pulled back, the young writer emerges into the glare of the spotlight and, after being asked about the origin of their debut work – a miracle: words, of varying degrees of coherence, flow forth. If the young writer pleases with her expulsions, then applause is sure to follow, and the transformation from scribbler to fully-fledged ‘writer’ is complete. The Emerging Writers’ Festival is perhaps best up to facilitating this painful transformation, its very name promising a gentle progression into that definite form which festivals ask inchoate scribblers to assume.
Such public ‘emergings’ – or in the case of established writers, mutations – are framed as enriching ‘cultural events’. This framing is somewhat suspect, but the way literary festivals typically describe themselves is outright duplicitous. One need only glance at the Sydney Writers’ Festival’s marketing to see that something doesn’t add up. On the press image for a recent festival, we see someone lying in what appears to be a field of barley, holding up an open book in the late afternoon sun. If the image is meant to evoke Sydney, then it is a side of the city unfamiliar to me, and certainly nothing to do with Walsh Bay, where the festival was held. Then again, perhaps that’s the point; reading is itself a kind of transportation, a movement between worlds. But that too is a problem, because the hands in the field belong to a reader, not a writer, and she is alone, as far from the festival as one needs to be in order to make the most of a book. In other words, the reader in the festival’s own image is able to read because she has given the festival a miss. But perhaps I am being pedantic, and should leave the reader alone in her field; and I would, but hovering above her is the tagline for that year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival: ‘It’s thinking season.’ What thinking has to do with the typical author talk or writers’ panel is a mystery to me, and there – I know for sure – I am not alone. Even the SWF’s hand-picked blogger, columnist and opinion-maker Benjamin Law, upon reviewing what he had learned from the festival in 2015, seemed only able to settle on the thought that he ought to be ‘watching more TV’.
Perhaps I am looking at things the wrong way around. After all, despite what appears to be a lack of meatiness in the ‘thinking’ done on panels, it must be noted that Twitterers seem wholly committed to sending almost anything a writer has to offer into the eternal orbit of the digital ether, accompanied by epithets such as ‘food for thought!’ or ‘#insights’. There must, therefore, be something appealing enough in the rehearsed answers and well-practised performances that ‘writers’ meander through on panels to deserve reproduction ad infinitum. It is increasingly in the endless re-hashing of such speech-acts on the whirling gyre of Twitter that literary festivals live and die. After any given panel, one can observe writers furiously tapping at their Twitter feeds, searching vainly for something they said to have been selected for dissemination. The Digital Writers’ Festival is perhaps the ultimate testament to this tendency for festivals to live on the internet, removing altogether the largely inconvenient and flabby necessity of festival venues, and running, instead, a series of online events that can be streamed live from writers’ bedrooms and offices and directly into yours – whoever you are.
At this point I hear an internal critic accusing me of blatant disingenuousness. After all, won’t I be knocking at the festival doors when they put out their calls? Won’t I be down at the Wharf sipping champagne, nodding my head in some awkward encounter with someone I’ve never heard of as I stuff canapés into ziplock bags for my son’s preschool lunches? Yes, indeed, I will. Come next year, I shall desperately await the invitations and the placements on panels – hopefully panels associated with a prize or two (another Premier’s Award would be wonderful). For whatever horrors there are associated with the mechanisms of the literary festival, they have carved their diabolical mark upon me, and from that, there’s no turning back.
A NORTHERN RIVERS ROMANCE
Tell all the truth but tell it slant –
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind –
EMILY DICKINSON
It was an email from Alice, the editor at my publisher’s office just up the hall from my own shabby desk that led me back to Byron Bay. Alice wrote: ‘Well, you tried to get out of the festival circuit but they want you anyway.’ Attached was an invitation signed by the director of the Byron Bay Writers Festival. Her letter read: ‘It gives me great pleasure to invite you to participate in our 2016 program. For the last two years we have had some extra funding to run a “5 writers” regional tour in the lead up to the main festival. We put 5 writers in a van and send them to 5 regional towns in the Northern Rivers in 5 days.’ Reading that first cordial offering – innocent as it sounds reproduced here – I saw the makings of a trap. It is difficult for me to explain the process that led to this suspicion, so I will stick to the associations and abstractions that occurred as I imagined what attending this affair might entail.
Admittedly, from a distance, to anyone unfamiliar with the inside baseball of the writing world, the opportunity to be flown, feted and paid to partake in a festival on the north coast of New South Wales might sound like a gift horse, so to speak – but there was doubt in my heart. For one thing, the timing was dubious: the email in question had arrived in the aftermath of an editorial I’d written on the devilish nature of the writing culture, with particular contempt for the hubbub of festivals and their sinister rituals. Powerplayers in the so-called ‘scene’ had come to my little office in Bankstown to assure me that blacklistings had been put in place to keep precisely these kind of offers and invites to me permanently off the table. Were these power-players mistaken? They’d seemed so self-assured. To make matters more suspect, there was the fact that I had no new book to shill, my own slim square volume having long ago exhausted whatever modest readership it had managed to propagate. There was something in Alice’s tone, too, that struck me as a clear and present warning – a subtle, but unmistakably imploring note of concern. Perhaps it was just her way of implying that I should not screw things up further than I already had with the industry; that I should make some friends for a change and stay off whatever high horse I might be tempted to ride. But one can never be too careful when reading between the lines. The sort of thoughts I’m describing here are paranoid fantasies. If I could have seen that at the time, sitting at my desk deliberating on the offer as the little delusions began to sprout, it might not have made much difference.
To weed out what was at stake in the director’s invitation, I began to imagine the landscape of Byron Bay, so as to rehearse in advance the pitfalls awaiting. For a setting: the vague image of a beach somewhere: a bright sun and a long curving beach populated by tourists in shorts and thongs, the air stinking of seaweed and sunscreen, a hot burning sensation spread across my cheeks, and sand between my toes. High to the right, I saw a limestone lighthouse on a hill, and seagulls rising to a background of clouds. This seemed a suitable conception of a beachside paradiso, one likely to fit some part of the bay’s picture. A memory intervened in this idyll: I remembered what it should not be possible to forget: for a while, at least, I was a married man, and had honeymooned deep in the forests of the riverlands of northern New South Wales, stopping and staying in Byron on the way there. Memories of our drive along the eastern coast of the country, as they reoccurred to me, and as I replay them again now, seem so estranged as to be the makings of a dream. The actors in these scenes look unfamiliar – they move in a watery motion that does not conform to
the wooden clumsiness of recent years, their details are half hidden in the gaps and shade. Is it nostalgia that makes them look so nimble, and light – or some other error of translation?
In was in this dreamy unreality of the past that my wife and I stayed in a treetop cabin resort off a dirt track which wound between the forests of Mullumbimby, with the sounds of strange birds rousing us in the morning and a fine gold light glowing in the room above the bed. An alternative version of myself pulls back the blinds on the way to the bathroom, half-dressed, and sits on the cold slate toilet across from tall glass walls open to the dense forest outside the cabin. This stranger appears, in my recollections, to be watching the high-topped trees flicker in a green and gold sweat while rare feathers sweep between their branches, knocking seedpods through the long leaves. It is impossible to intuit what this thin young man is thinking. His hair looks great, or at least there is more of it. When night comes, armed with flimsy eco-friendly torches, and by careful footsteps on mossy rock, the couple creep to a shallow riverbed splattered with the iridescent oozing of a glow-worm colony clinging to the earth above the water. The wife, her long hair invisible in the dark, smiles to discover that her thin husband believes the worms to be living creatures. ‘Just a conspiracy of impressions,’ she says to the stranger, in a voice swallowed up by the damp echoing forest.
The moon comes out loud above them and the wife strips down to climb out onto a fallen tree bridging the riverbanks. He cautions her not to go out so far above the water, but she laughs and her skin in the pale light looks a mirage in the night-woods. It is perhaps because of the illusions of body and landscape that he does not react when the log first shakes and twists under her weight. The image of her out on the dead tree, naked as a forest nymph, with her strong hands holding her high above the flowing waters as she slides along the grainy length between the banks forces me, at this moment, watching and recalling the pair as they play their game by the river, to wonder if there is any truth at all to this series of recollections. Who was this thin man and his Lady of Shalott?