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Article Excerpt
A few months on from the Tampa affair, just before the November 2001 Federal election, the Sydney Morning Herald published David Malouf's acerbic essay on language and style under Australia's present Coalition government. At one point, Malouf elaborates on his inspired idea that Australian political leaders may be divided into the dry and the moist:
Curtin, Chifley, Evatt, Caldwell, Gorton, McMahon, Fraser were dry, Menzies and Whitlam moist. That leathery old crocodile Bob Hawke, whose moist nature was always good for a public flooding of the tear ducts and a manly sniffle, was amphibious. Where the electorate has real difficulty is when it has to choose between degrees of dryness, as between Keating and Hewson or Keating and Howard. Howard is the very essence of dryness and has left Beazley high and unnaturally dry by making even a hint of moistness, this time round, a fatal error of style. (1)
The surge of public approval in early 2004 for newly elevated Labor Opposition leader Mark Latham--surely of the 'moist'--corroborated Malouf's terms. Voters were thirsty after eight years of Coalition government. In the event, however, Australians elected to remain safely high and dry. In 2007, Malouf's description seems once again resonant as we enter another election cycle, rendered dramatic by Labor's latest (arguably both wet and dry) 'dream team': Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. In the interlude, the metaphor of a drying Australia has become even more compelling, with the omnipresent signs and burgeoning social consciousness of global warming. The driest of Australia's politicians are now perforce preoccupied with water.
That eloquently barbed analysis, back in 2001, of the shrinking and drying out of Australian culture under John Howard was, for Malouf, uncharacteristically partisan--published as it was just before polling day. What interests me most, however, is something in the essay's tone: a sense of outrage provoked by the unsettling of a presumed cultural consensus and, flowing from that, a shocked recognition of symbolic impotence--of an inability (amid the attempt) to reach or stir the broader public mind:
After five and a half years in which the Howard Government has pretty well put us all to sleep--at no time in my memory has the country seemed so quiescent, so recessively dug in behind the walls of Pinchgut Australia--we are having the sort of sleepy election campaign that will neither shake us awake nor shock us with sudden daylight. (2)
Malouf's essay pits itself politically and energetically against the gloom descending upon Australian cultural elites (a variably scornful post-1990s catchall designation for urban-dwelling, tertiary-educated cosmopolitans) against whom the ideological tide had, in 2001, evidently turned. (3) In the mid-1990s, the authority of some of Australia's literary writers, their capacity to speak and to be heard in public debate, had seemed temporarily in the ascendant. Les Murray, Helen Garner and David Williamson were among those who captured the media spotlight on matters of 'political correctness' or 'culture wars' and performed as public intellectuals. Those debates now seem long ago. Indeed, in a chilling diagnosis of the near total subordination of Australian literature to the dictates of 'the market place', Andrew McCann has proposed that the literary sphere in Australia is now little more than a dwindling, marginal enclave. (4) Consequently, it seems, the power to engage or influence public opinion once wielded by eminent literary writers is being swept aside by the combined forces of globalised markets, new digital cultures and conservative ideology.
Yet narratives of decline--also typical of debates about the broader category of public intellectuals (5)--can be distorting. While arguments such as McCann's can be persuasive, an overemphasis on decline can also simplify the past and recycle assumptions about the natural authority of a now (allegedly) demoted literary sphere. For instance, the relation between the literary writer and public life may be--and may long have been--replete with contradiction. I use that slippery term literary--an impossibly chameleon category--as it's defined by Ken Gelder: the most constant feature of the literary is the writer's attitude, posture or intention towards readerships, which often manifests itself as discomfort with or refusal of the exigencies of mass readerships and the market. (6) The literary attitude signals detachment from the market and its commodifying demands. An abiding contradiction arises here, since literary writers must simultaneously seek access to and disavow processes of recognition and reward for their endeavours. Gelder's discussion owes much to Pierre Bourdieu who suggested that, in western modernity, high cultural production wraps itself in the illusio of economic or worldly disinterest. (7) To be taken seriously by peers, the literary writer must, at the very least, maintain an appearance of distance from the market, and from institutional or worldly power. This is the structuring logic of art, of the literary game: at stake are honour, respect and public credibility, if not the integrity of creativity itself. Yet things are not really so simple: many writers adopt highly nuanced strategies to project the illusion of distance, responding within the contexts of postmodernity and the professionalisation of the field. These conditions, however, obtaining since at least the 1970s, have not cancelled the tendency of the refined literary personality, subjectivity or (as Bourdieu would say) habitus to reproduce itself. As Richard Nile points out, the 'profession of writing' is one that has 'reinforced concepts of individuality ... in pursuit of that most alluring, attractive and seductive of all prizes--recognition'. (8)
It is with such perspectives in mind that I will focus on Malouf's fictional and non-fictional prose as interventions strongly concerned with cultivating Australia's national imaginary. My aim, here, is to consider Malouf's writing as expressive of a refined literary habitus, and to ask--critically and sympathetically--what this means for understanding his interventions as a writer who is also, and consequently, a widely respected public intellectual. Further, I wish to examine how, and with what effects, a specifically literary orientation such as Malouf's addresses certain readerships, and to think about the political limits and promise of the literary in light of these issues.
What is the nature of the space within which literary writers address themselves to matters of national interest or public debate? In the context of the...
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