The Best Australian Essays 2015

by Geordie Williamson

  Knausgaard apparently first thought to publish his magnum opus as a memoir, but went along with the Norwegian publisher’s proposal to call it a novel. This may have been a commercial decision, since he was already known in Norway for his novels. In My Struggle, he literally writes himself into celebrity, attracting a larger following with each volume. The use of celebrity to sell books is one of the most striking developments in the contemporary book business. Knausgaard’s account of the minute details of his life creates the conditions under which these very details become interesting to readers hungry for the ‘truth’ behind celebrity façades. Obsession or addiction is a common response among Knausgaard devotees. Zadie Smith tweeted that she needed his next volume ‘like crack’. Another critic confessed to sharing the communal ‘sick obsession’, unable to stop consuming Knausgaard’s volumes with both ‘horror and delight’. The reader becomes a crazed stalker of sorts – though we have access to endless details about Knausgaard’s daily life, we are insatiable, wanting more, depending on him for our pleasure.

  Reading as voyeurism, then, or what Helen Garner refers to as ‘perving’. And she would know. Since the publication in 1977 of her first highly autobiographical novel, Monkey Grip, Garner has alternately been praised as honest and criticised as ruthless by readers and critics, most recently for basing her 2008 novel, The Spare Room, on the life and death of her close friend Jenya Osborne. Not only that, but critics like Robert Dessaix have found it galling that Garner calls her books novels. ‘But they are not novels,’ Dessaix wrote in his review of The Spare Room. ‘They are all of them fine works of art and innovative explorations of literary approaches to non-fiction, every one of them an outstanding example of stylish reportage, but none of them is a novel. So why does Helen Garner at the very least collude in having them called novels?’

  Dessaix also notes the persistent criticism of Garner’s fiction that has dogged her from the very beginning of her career: ‘random jottings, they seemed to be saying, about emotional entanglements in dreary suburbs with the odd thought about the meaning of life thrown in don’t make you a writer’. So why, I wonder, when Knausgaard publishes random jottings about emotional entanglements in dreary suburbs with the odd thought about the meaning of life, is he not howled down for colluding in calling it a novel?

  Knausgaard has been called the founder of ‘New Man existentialism’ and ‘one of the great writers about male frustration’, and praised for portraying ‘with savage honesty the challenges of being a man of genius who is also expected to be thoughtful, sensitive, unmonkish’. No wonder, then, that many female writers have admitted to me that they share my annoyance at the lack of acknowledgement by reviewers – and by Knausgaard himself – that he has essentially appropriated a mode of expression long used by female writers, who have a history of forensically depicting the subterranean war between the banalities of domestic life and the transcendence of artistic life. Why does Knausgaard trace his artistic heritage to Proust but not to Virginia Woolf, who experimented with blending memoir and fiction to explore exactly the same subject matter – the dangerous tug of recalling the past, and the limits that an author’s domestic situation places on her artistic life? One author referred to the Knausgaard phenomenon as ‘First World fathers having the chance to experience their own Betty Friedan moment’, expressing the simultaneous joy and ennui of parenthood, and how it can be both source of and poison to creativity. ‘Nobody wants to deny the New Men their moment,’ she said, ‘but give the ladies who’ve cleared the way a little credit!’

  Another foil for Knausgaard is the contemporary British-Canadian author Rachel Cusk, who has also published the intimate details of her domestic and artistic life: becoming a mother, surviving a divorce, being a writer. Her books are filled with the same Knausgaardian mixture of the stultifying daily routine, ruthless revelations about intimates, and digressions on art and death. The difference? She calls hers memoirs, not novels. And she has been viciously attacked, not lauded, by reviewers (both male and female), one of whom won the Hatchet Job of the Year award for harshest review, describing Cusk as ‘a brittle little dominatrix and peerless narcissist who exploits her husband and her marriage with relish’ and who ‘describes her grief in expert, whinnying detail’. (To be fair, the Hatchet Job runner-up was Zoë Heller for her scathing review of Salman Rushdie’s 2012 novelised memoir, Joseph Anton; she calls him out for dismissing anyone who is troubled or hurt by a work of fiction as having an ‘unsophisticated’ or ‘crude’ understanding of how literature works.)

  Even Helen Garner, who is by no means a shrinking violet, seems to have internalised the suggestion that a woman who uses her own life as the basis for her fiction is somehow illegitimate, unworthy of being called a novelist, nothing more than, to quote one critic, a lowly ‘user’ or ‘scab picker’. It doesn’t seem entirely coincidental that her ex-husband, the novelist Murray Bail, is withering about ‘the age of narcissism’, calling it a contemporary problem ‘worse than global warming’. (Garner has joked that every time she writes a book she loses a husband.) Garner is more timid than many of her male peers about the legitimacy of this mode of writing, and describes being haunted by questions about whether ‘a real writer’ shouldn’t be ‘writing about something other than herself and her immediate circle’, and worrying about the inevitability of the damage done to people close to her, and the ongoing ‘ethical problem’ this sort of writing poses.

  Garner tentatively justifies her decision to write what she calls ‘auto fiction’ by hoping that she writes it well enough that her ‘readers will be carried through the superficial levels of perviness and urged into the depths of themselves’. Knausgaard voices the same justification more assertively, saying: ‘The books are an experiment about the relationship between reality and writing,’ and ‘to reach readers is everything I wanted’. My Struggle does seem to elicit an intense kind of recognition from the reader: as one reviewer put it, ‘[Knausgaard] reveals plenty about himself and his loved ones, but the people we learn most about from My Struggle are ourselves.’ This strong identification seems to arise from what readers experience as the truth, veracity, frankness, honesty, authenticity or sincerity of Knausgaard’s writing. These terms have a complex history that I don’t have space to delve into here, except for noting J.M. Coetzee’s point in relation to Rousseau’s Confessions, that sincerity in writing is an effect of rhetoric – of literary style – and ‘an invention of devilish ingenuity, in that it claims to stand outside all systems of rhetoric’ and to produce ‘an art that is above art’. Any dream of an unmediated relationship between writer and reader is bound to fail because realism is no more than a convention that produces the effect of verisimilitude. And the readers who identify so strongly with the protagonists of autobiographical fiction are, no less than readers of fantasy, engaged in a kind of willing suspension of disbelief – deliberately not seeing the writing for what it is.

  Perhaps the status of autobiographical fiction today can be understood in relation to the dominance of photorealism in painting in the 1970s, which was a response by visual artists to the encroaching attractions of photographic media, an attempt to undermine and outdo the photographic image by producing a ‘realer than real’ effect in painting. Could this be what autobiographical fiction represents in an age of oversharing? Robert McGill thinks so: it is now considered normal, he says, that ‘people are publicly disseminating personal narratives all the time’. He sees the currency and power of contemporary autobiographical fiction as resulting less from its revelations and more from its ‘strategic ambivalence: the simultaneous disguises and confessions it offers reproduce a broader social ambivalence about public disclosure and private life’.

  This ambivalence might also be a result of literary theorists and critics being out of touch with the realities of the commercial world of book publishing and the expectations of lay readers. The critic Kate Douglas points out that several generations of literary theorists have been raised on the n
otion that the biography of the author is irrelevant to the text, yet in the contemporary publishing world authors are expected to cultivate a personal brand by putting out endless performative and promotional ‘paratexts’ (the French theorist Gérard Genette’s term) in the form of interviews, profiles and public appearances, which readers often avidly consume alongside the book. In a networked world of mass and social media, it is difficult to read a work of fiction without knowing something of the private life of the author. Literary fiction in particular is now more often than not read autobiographically, whether or not the author intended to write autobiographical fiction.

  So is autobiographical fiction a critique of our confessional culture – and the kind of extreme narcissism it expresses – or merely a symptom of it?

  For McGill, the ethics of autobiographical fiction are unquestionably related to its erotics. He sees this kind of fiction as mediating an intimate relationship of mutual desire between author and audience. Authors who are prepared to ‘cheat’ on their real-life intimates by betraying them in their fiction invite the reader into a love triangle of sorts. There is a thrill, but also suspicion on the part of the reader that if the author is prepared to cheat with you, he may also be prepared to cheat on you. His affections are unpredictable. Above you, above everything, he values his freedom of expression, his right to say whatever he likes – and to question that hierarchy of values would make you as reader seem petty and moralistic.

  Authors tend to make grand claims about the subversive power of fiction, and insist on their status as iconoclasts, refusing in and through their fiction to be bound by conventional ethical codes. Yet sometimes that means they are blind to the powerful and privileged position they occupy in having the means to publicly disseminate their words. As McGill warns:

  [for] authors of autobiographical fiction their framing of interpersonal infidelities as acts of social protest could be considered equivalent to adulterers calling their affairs ethical acts of rebellion against the oppressiveness of marriage … the pleasures as well as the politics of betrayal must be kept in mind when considering authors’ claims to rebel status.

  Knausgaard has variously been described as revolutionary, subversive and heroic. The narrator Karl Ove says, ‘Ibsen [was] right … relationships were there to eradicate individuality’, and Knausgaard as author heroically asserts his freedoms as an individual by ripping out the foundations of those relationships – relationships that constitute his most valuable sources as a writer. He laments his status as a domesticated twenty-first-century male, but takes advantage of it too. The apparent rebellion in his writing feeds on precisely that against which it rebels.

  Coetzee has noted that as readers we like to think ‘we admire a writer because he opens our eyes, when in fact we admire him only because he confirms our preconceptions’. Our literary culture admires male writers who rebel against domesticity, who cheat on or publicly punish those close to them, who tell us how they really feel, while women who do the same are judged by a different standard. To me, what is truly radical about Helen Garner’s decision in the ’70s to start to write about her own life in her fiction is not that she was prepared to betray her intimates. It was that she was daring, as a woman, to ask readers to pay attention to fiction based on how she really felt, and how she experienced her life – to claim and hold their interest without apology. In The Spare Room, there is a powerful moment where the dying friend, Nicola, bursts into tears, unable to keep up her brave front, and admits to the author-protagonist, Helen, ‘But you see, all my life I’ve never wanted to bore people with the way I feel.’ I have to admit this is another component of my reluctance to write autobiographical fiction: a lurking fear that my life and thoughts as a woman could not possibly command anybody’s interest, a terror of being found boring. I’m not sure that even the most forward-thinking of the New Men existentialists like Knausgaard understand this inherited burden many women writers carry, whether we want to or not.

  While I was reading Knausgaard, I tried to keep in mind Garner’s explanation that she started writing about her own life ‘helplessly’ – explaining what she meant by citing an aphorism attributed to the painter Georges Braque: ‘One’s style is one’s inability to do otherwise.’ In other words, the art wants what the art wants. But I kept being distracted by my own horror at what Knausgaard was doing, slashing away at his world, and by the overwhelming feeling that it would cost him too much as a human being. I googled his wife, his uncle, his mother, even his children, fixating on the walking wounded surrounding the living author. And I kept returning to the unfashionable but affecting words of Adam Phillips, a psychoanalyst and essayist, in a recent interview in the Paris Review:

  Often one hears or reads accounts in which people will say, Well, he may have treated his children, wives, friends terribly, but look at the novels, the poems, the paintings. I think it’s a terrible equation. Obviously one can’t choose to be, as it were, a good parent or a good artist, but if the art legitimates cruelty, I think the art is not worth having.

  The Monthly

  The Meeting that Never Was

  Matthew Lamb

  1.

  One day in February 1945, in Paris, George Orwell waited at the cafe Deux Magots, where he was to meet Albert Camus for the first time. But Camus, suffering from tuberculosis and exhaustion – because of which he was currently on leave from his editorship of the resistance newspaper Combat – didn’t show up. They would never again have the chance to meet each other. Five years later, Orwell died, in England – from an illness related to his own tuberculosis.

  This may very well be one of the great missed opportunities in twentieth-century European letters. But although Orwell and Camus were two of the most intriguing political and literary figures of their time, they are rarely considered in relation to each other, and when they are, it is usually not to any great depth. There are superficial similarities between them that tend to distract from looking for deeper affinities, albeit buried beneath significant antimonies. Although, politically and intellectually, they drew many of the same conclusions, these were, more often than not, arrived at from very different starting points, or via different routes. And that is, ultimately, why Orwell and Camus are so interesting to consider together. In a sense, the life and work of each man acts as an independent variable to confirm the truths and the doubts revealed by the life and work of the other.

  Even their similarities, if prodded gently, reveal telling differences. Take, for example, the most iconic, albeit the most superficial, similarity between Orwell and Camus: their obsessive cigarette smoking. Orwell rolled his own cigarettes, from the cheapest shag tobacco he could find – the type used by the British working class. Camus smoked Gauloises, a pre-packaged, unfiltered cigarette, very popular among the French intelligentsia and artistic community. For each man, their preferred cigarette was a symbol for the world they tried to inhabit, but which was never really their home. For Camus, it was the French intellectual scene, a far cry from his poor Algerian origins. For Orwell, it was the British working class, very different from his middle-class upbringing, his public schooling, and his service in the Imperial Police. Each cigarette they smoked was both an act of solidarity and a calmative against not entirely fitting into their chosen worlds.

  They entered each of these worlds as writers, however. But they had very different approaches and attitudes toward writing. They both considered writing as a vocation. Yet Orwell also saw it as an occupation. For him, to be a writer meant earning a living from your published work. This is why Orwell early on set himself a goal of writing and publishing one book every year. It is also why he wrote so many articles, and did so many book reviews (and later film reviews, even though he hated doing so). His freelance writing was to support his book writing. And his book writing was to support his living.

  Camus also made a decision early on regarding his own career. But he felt that writing was not an occupation. It was not something to earn a living fr
om, and so he sought out other employment. In his youth, he was struck by the romantic argument that money tainted art. But as he got older, and his romanticism faded, he worked more out of necessity. His university education was geared toward him becoming a schoolteacher, but his tuberculosis made him ineligible for the role. He had tried various odd jobs, both during and after his university study. He was a meteorologist assistant, for example. An uncle even wanted him to take over the family butcher shop, and to teach him the trade. But Camus eventually fell into journalism. Even here the writing aspect was always only a part of other more menial tasks, like typesetting, or more laborious roles, like editing and proofing or seeing someone else’s work through to print.

  Orwell and Camus also approached their own writing differently. Orwell was only able to work on one project at a time. So when he had reviews to write, or a series of commissioned articles to complete, he would put aside his book manuscript, sometimes for months at a time. Even on those rare occasions when he did have a job – such as in the mid ’30s, when he briefly worked in a London bookshop, or when in the late ’30s he and his wife, Eileen, opened a village grocery shop in Hertfordshire – he made the job fit around his writing, and always saw it as something secondary. Running a grocery shop didn’t, for example, stop Orwell from travelling to Northern England to research his book on working-class life, or to Spain to fight against the fascists. But when a job became all-consuming – such as when he worked for the BBC during the war, and then as literary editor of Tribune – his own writing all but stopped. Starting in 1933, Orwell published one book every year up until 1939. His next book, Animal Farm, was not published until 1945. He would look back on these years in between as wasted.