Afterword: Sly Change

In May 2015 I learned in quick succession of the deaths of two fine Australian poets, Syd Harrex and J. S. Harry. I never met either writer, although I did engage in correspondence by surface mail with Harry, who always signed herself “Jann Harry”. Her opulent, generous poems will always be a part of me, even if I never met their author in person. Although I am fortunate to have met many of the Australian writers I have studied, there are many I have not met and will now never meet. Had I not gone to Australia, I would never have met Gerald Murnane; on the other hand Peter Carey came to me, as it were, in the city where I live. Until we had lunch at Songjiang University in Shanghai in July 2015, I had not met Ouyang Yu in person, but, from 1999 onward, I have exchanged more emails with him than with many close family members. Transnationalism does not mean that all is easy or symmetrical, or that communication is entirely unimpeded. The Australia one loves is always dying, always skipping away before us. Harrex’s poem “August Front” not only makes this elegiac point but also tacitly challenges the Northern Hemisphere reader to see August as cold and stormy:

Neoliberalism in the past generation can be seen as a form of sly change, an atmospheric convulsion – real, not metaphorical, in the case of climate change – that shakes up our awareness of where we are. But imaginative literature can counter that change, not by retreating into stability but by pivoting on instability, and by observing in the patient, sensitive, calculating way that Harrex does with such poise.

Transnationalism alters the terms under which we see literary works as transnational. In 1934, the British composer and musicologist Constant Lambert (son of the Australian painter George Washington Lambert) spoke of the possibility of “an absorption of national feeling in intellectually self-supporting form” that could resist both vulgar nationalism and an emaciated internationalism.2 This may have been right then, and even today there are writers of great national importance whose work has not yet successfully travelled beyond their own countries’ borders. But the old understanding of the transnational as a measure of success and of the national as a kind of second-rate achievement can be no more. In terms of sales and reviews, Eleanor Catton’s success has dwarfed Hannah Kent’s. But this does not mean that Catton is more transnational than Kent. Not only is Kent, in her first novel, transnational in subject but her work has travelled and been published in just as many locales as Catton’s, albeit on a smaller scale. Whereas in Lambert’s time the national stage was a kind of intermediate level between total inadequacy and splashing success, today that idea of the national as cordoning sanctuary has gone – as far as at least academic discourse is concerned – the way of the global middle class itself, into hurtling oblivion, as the world is polarised between rich and poor, success and failure. As anyone who has passed a border control can attest, the national still exists. But academia has decreed that, as opposed to the local or transnational, the national is no longer chic or trendy the way it was in previous generations, such as the era when organisations such as ASAL were founded. To eliminate the national as a middle level between local and transnational risks just this sort of melodramatic polarising.

Neoliberalism, indeed, is melodramatic in its sharp division of people into rich and poor, and it tempts its critics to respond in kind by positing a melodramatic division between evil corporations and virtuous hackers, and other such binaries. This is a trap that this book has tried to avoid, and which Australian writers themselves have tried to avoid. Winton and Tsiolkas, in particular, are exemplary in showing the effects of neoliberalism on a broad range of people. Even Eleanor Catton, the sharpest critic of neoliberalism included in this book, couches her critique not in shrill polemics but in ingenious narrative structures. The authors analysed in this book are of different generations, regions, heritages and philosophies. Yet they share a willingness to name the issues of the contemporary, to confront them, and to do so subtly and insightfully, militantly if necessary but craftily and self-critically when prudent.

I do not wish to make the argument that literature can or should be a privileged mode of resistance to neoliberal inequality. Certainly, in my view, literature is no more so than, say, music or art or, as argued in Chapter 7, architecture, or even the valor inherent in daily acts of living. These daily acts, in their affect and altruism, can contend that contemporary life can be about more than self-fulfilment and the exercise of individual rights. The British political thinker John Gray, a proponent of neoliberalism in the 1980s who later turned drastically against it, has said that

An ideology of rights has been used to confer legitimacy on a novel successor to American social democracy.

By restoring interpersonal responsibilities to their place alongside individual rights, the writers in this book challenge the self-aggrandising assumptions of neoliberalism. In all their idiosyncratic and tetchy abundance, they are committed to a purpose beyond self-gratification and entertainment, aware of urgent social and political issues yet not strident, extremist or overly preoccupied with passing fads. I may have been mistaken or deluded in seeing Australia, in the 1980s, as an antidote to all that vexed me about my own country and situation. But Australia, in the end, did not let me down, and Australian writers of today have not let their time down. With ingenuity and emotion, they have opened up the contemporary to the possibility of future sly change.