If globalisation can lead to hype and inequality in literary reception, as shown in the previous chapter, the two earlier chapters, on Stead and Harrower, have shown that there can be no return to the deadlocked reassurances of late modernity. One cannot, in other words, simply lament the free market and indulge in a nostalgic wish for the era of the welfare state; that era, even if it was better than Stead and Harrower unsparingly show it to be, is gone forever. Instead, I am proposing that, rather than any sort of polemical antidote to neoliberalism, the solution to the problems of the contemporary lie in affect: in conditions of feeling that can fight back, albeit indirectly, against contemporary inequalities. Affect here occupies an anomalous role, as it is not primarily a social or political condition, but finds itself operating in the social and political spheres by virtue of the discursive unavailability of other, more obvious alternatives. With writers unable or unwilling to affirm a more rousing but naive vision, affect assumes an unexpected role: feeling takes up, imperfectly and asymmetrically, the ethical burden previously borne by more direct modes of social comment. The three emotions I examine in this section, rancour, idealism and concern, contradict but also complement one another. They are not the only possible literary emotions, but, I will argue, they are the main ones that Australian literature is using to fight back against the problems of the contemporary.

In the next three chapters, I will explore states of affect in contemporary Australian literature. Sianne Ngai has explored “aesthetic categories” that are unpleasant, ambiguous, recalcitrant or, in Ngai’s terms, “minor and generally unprestigious”, and usually seen as troubling.1 The work of Vilashini Cooppan has linked affect to ideologies of globalisation. Cooppan’s idea of “worlds within” limns intermediate identities between the personal and the global, “ambivalent forces of desire, identification, memory, and forgetting”. Her model defines affect as a border zone between sovereignty and desire, individual will and social force.2 Such intermediate constellations of identity, between the individual and the social, can have an effect on how literature manifests feeling. In an era when the only opponents of the neoliberal consensus are on the political fringe, modes of affect become the most palpable and constructive imaginative response to the cruelty and inequality promoted by the dominant socioeconomic mode.

Emotions straddling the line between the individual and collective can reveal aspects of literature distinct from those rendered by either traditional close reading or the various practices of distant reading, whether they be in the style of the statistical analyses of Franco Moretti, or older practices of ideological critique, which, in a cruder way, attempted a strategic distance from the weave of the text.3

Emotional analysis stands in a sort of middle distance between text and context, lingering in a zone that cannot entirely be evidence-based, as both close-reading and distant-reading practices are. As Kathleen Stewart argues, affects are “the varied, surging capacities to affect and to be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences”.4 Affect is a realm between the specific and the general, a realm of the radically experiential that is generalisable into theory, yet not a synthesis or a concrete universal. It is an indefinite realm of emotions where, as Christine Berberich puts it, “the haptic and the critical” can fuse.5 This is especially true, as both Ngai and Cooppan note, of the current era, in which the hyper-marketisation of value and the destabilisation of accreted identities give middle-distance emotional categories a relevance they lacked in more hierarchical days. The three emotions I will explore, rancour, idealism and concern, are all laden with such ambiguities. They are not easy to see as unambiguously good or bad, and in that way escape the simple market moralism of winners and losers.

Of these three emotions, rancour may seem the least ambiguous. Paradoxically, this is not because it is uniformly negative, but because it seems determinate. To hate someone or something is almost invariably to reduce, to be inflexible, to see something in only one way. It is the argument of this chapter that rancour need not hew to one firm viewpoint; it can be open, creative, and through the very force of its anger and spite spur dialogue. This chapter discusses rancour in Australian fiction, beginning with A. D. Hope, who, though of an earlier period, is crucial in defining the affect of contemporary rancour with which the chapter is concerned, and continuing with writers who in different ways are both major writers in today’s Australia yet outsiders in relation to the mainstream Australian literary world: the novelist Christos Tsiolkas, the poet and novelist Ouyang Yu, the poet John Kinsella, the novelist and essayist J. M. Coetzee, and the poets Pam Brown and Jennifer Maiden. These writers are all willing to use anger and contumely to speak truth in the face of contemporary piety. The emphasis here will not be on rancour as a mode of spite or of denunciation so much as rancour as a refusal to be a genial dinner guest at the table of culture. By refusing to be happy with the way things are, rancour can destabilise our sense of winners and losers, of what it means to succeed and to fail in contemporary culture. Andrew McCann exemplified this in his 2004 Overland essay, “How to Fuck a Tuscan Garden”, a splenetic exception to the inculcated Australian, and Australianist, habit of barracking for any sort of literary success regardless of the implications for literary standards.6 Rancour interjects discord into literary debate in order to maintain some awareness of those standards.

True Hope Is Swift: Australia’s Great Satirist

The work of A. D. Hope embodies this idea of rancour as an emotion that at once puts paid to the idea that Australia has escaped the maladies of the world, and yet sustains, within its spite and contempt, a deep resilience. In the hands of Dryden, Pope, Swift and Johnson, satire became the premier mode of English poetry, as these generally conservative satirists inveighed against the fashionably meretricious thought of the day. In Pope’s hands, satire became a form of literary criticism, skewering bad writing. The fiery indignation (saeva indignatio, a phrase associated with Swift) of these writers illustrates one of the key paradoxes of satire. Satire irreverently attacks current institutions and modes. Yet, in doing so, it eulogises an old order that these satirists implied was far superior to the current one. As Michael Seidel points out, satire in this era often redeployed ideas of violence from epic, making them seemingly less consequential but keeping their rancour and instability.7 Furthermore, as Robert Elliott asserted in The Power of Satire, the form’s potential for critique is so powerful that whatever its overt nostalgic aims, it has the potential to be a catalysing rhetoric.8

Hope’s work was urbane and neoclassical. But it was also harsh, rancorous and rebarbative. This did not dim its popularity or appeal. Indeed, in an age when little attention was paid in America to Australian poetry, Hope gained some traction in the USA, where poets writing in a similar mode, such as Yvor Winters, wielded influence in the 1950s and 1960s. It is not to downplay Hope’s ability or appeal to speculate that his surname may have had something to do with this. The Australian literary scene was often bewilderingly non-navigable for American readers, but the word “hope”, with its promise of idealism, had a resonance, whatever the rancour of the actual poetry. Hope was not above playing on his name, as is seen in his appropriation of these lines from Shakespeare in the dedication of Dunciad Minor:

Hope also rhymes with Alexander Pope, the poet Hope most tried to emulate. Yet although classicists valued Hope’s work, they were not the only ones. Harold Bloom, who more than any other critic is associated with romantic ideals of creative genius, not only approved of Hope but ascribed to Hope’s evocation of Christopher Marlowe’s “argument of arms”: this was the vital inspiration for Bloom’s sense of influence as a battlefield, an epic struggle.10 In a 1987 interview with Imre Salusinszky, Bloom perhaps surprised some readers by speaking positively of Alexander Pope’s poetry, praising the energies in it as romantic by other means.11 Similarly, Hope’s satire is not mechanical: it is full of verve.

This was recognised by Kevin Hart, the contemporary Australian poet most enthusiastically embraced by Bloom. Hart wrote a book about Hope that praised his Orphic drives, something not normally associated with a cerebral classicist.12 The sense of Hope as a romanticist in classicist garb, or someone who made classicism a mode of emotion as expressive as romanticism, can also be seen as a way to reconcile Bloom’s later, more humanistic and generalist work with his earlier, more arcane and antithetical production. That Bloom’s later writing, widely seen in the USA as a defence of traditional canons, garnered praise in Australia from Robert Dessaix as “multicultural”, shows how in Australia, rancour and idealism, contempt and enthusiasm, are not always easily distinguished.13

Ann McCulloch comments that Hope’s satire “is made less polemical and more ambiguous by his irony”.14 This is true of Dunciad Minor, a work that tries to duplicate Pope’s rendering of what Ngai termed “stuplimity” – an amalgam of stupidity and sublimity – on the Australian scene of its day. Robert Darling, Hope’s most faithful American exegete, used the word “rancour” to describe Dunciad Minor.15 Darling was an arch-formalist and did not see Hope in the nuanced way that Bloom did. One might expect that Dunciad Minor, an Augustan critique of modern follies, would have garnered Darling’s approval. But au contraire: he saw it as a distinctly minor and unsatisfying work, and barely allotted it two paragraphs in his critical book on Hope.

The key here may be Darling’s remark that if the deconstructionists had been around when Hope wrote the poem, Hope would have made mincemeat of them. But the deconstructionists were not around then, or at least were not yet part of the academic canon, although Derrida’s early writing was indeed published when Hope was at the height of his acclaim. The people Hope satirises, F. R. Leavis among them, were often invoked as the humanistic precursors – and sane alternative – to the deconstructionists. Rather than letting himself be conscripted into an anti-theory mob, Hope hewed to his own critical line, and in his 1992 memoir Chance Encounters again identified Leavis, rather than critical theory in general, as his main opponent.16 It is interesting that Hope’s principal contemporary proponent has been Hart, a confirmed deconstructionist. Hope had an animus against modern innovation. But it may be more useful to see his use of rancour as a refusal to participate complacently in a dutiful celebration of modern innovation. He resisted the mid-century habit of praising Joyce, Woolf and Eliot not out of genuine enthusiasm, but because they were considered current and acceptable.

Graham Huggan compares Hope’s “vigorous challenge” to modernism with the “experimental fiction” of Patrick White.17 This is a notable instance of how time smooths all oppositions, for Hope had memorably excoriated White’s fiction as “pretentious and illiterate verbal sludge”. In his essay collection The Cave and the Spring, Hope deplored “activist” poetry, poetry that “requires the writer to write in such a way that he promotes something”.18 Yet his willingness to associate poetry with argument is strikingly activist. Hope did not remain in a formalist cocoon. He observed that “many of the greatest works of literature have a perfectly deliberate social or religious or artistic purpose”. Although in part Hope’s essay was an attack on left-wing literary activism – he particularly singled out social realism – he was too broadminded to reduce it to a simple matter of left versus right. Indeed, in many ways the hero of the essay is Shelley, a poet who was a radical political activist, but whose work soared beyond that into “something beyond any possible anticipation”. Nor did all of Hope’s didactic poetry warn against modish pretension. “The Cetaceans”, as Tracy Ryan points out, is an early instance of an ecological poem.19 Hope’s argumentation is plural and polymathic.

In his essay “The Argument of Arms”, Hope takes a line from Marlowe’s Tamburlaine – spoken by the great conqueror himself, when he stabs his once pacifist son Calyphas in order to prove his dedication to a warrior ethos. Tamburlaine is an activist if ever there was one. Hope finds admirable, in Marlowe’s language, “a poetry so splendid as to compel understanding”, the same opulent relentlessness with which Tamburlaine enunciates his rhetoric of conquest.20 This points to a self-identification between Hope and Marlowe, as between Marlowe and Tamburlaine, even though Hope’s own poetry directs its energy towards tearing things down, not building things up.

Moreover, Hope comes close to naming himself in his own essay. Tamburlaine announces his intention to “cut a channel” to “both the Red Sea and the Terrene” (the Mediterranean),21 foreshadowing the Suez Canal, whose eventual completion in the nineteenth century connected Australia to the British imperial polity more directly. Moreover, Tamburlaine speaks of “our antipodes” (although here he means South America, not Australia, since he is in Persia rather than England). Tamburlaine presaged the British imperialism that would one day lead to a man named Alec Hope living in the twentieth century in the Great South Land.

Hope himself accentuated this sense of challenge to the consensus. His iconic poem “Australia” vindicates a continent the poem had previously scorned as desiccated and derivative, conjecturing that “still from deserts the prophets come”, evoking an almost Byronic tone. Dunciad Minor also enacts this sense of being an outsider, although in a secondary and deflective fashion. Dunciad Minor is in fact longer than Pope’s Dunciad, and tries to be more of an epic than a mock epic. It is also dialogic. Hope uses mock footnotes attributed to “A. P.” and “A. A. P.” – the Augustan Ambrose Phillips and the twentieth-century Australian critic A. A. Phillips, who coined the phrase “cultural cringe” – in which they dispute with the main narrative. In addition, Hope himself, most unlike Pope, cites his own classical and modern sources. The book is as much pedagogical – Hope was a famed teacher – as satiric. Mikhail Bakhtin might have described it as “double-voiced”. Even today, the open-ended quality of Hope’s rancour is notable. He is not attacking a single target, but using rancour to expose the contradictions in his world. Even less than Pope, who as Bloom observed often exhibits a conflict between his ideology and his poetic passion, is Hope a dogmatist.

Hope was modern even as he virulently criticised the modern. He could not conceive of modernity as being vulnerable to annulment or repeal. In “The Argument of Arms” Hope writes, “kings have fallen into such disrepute that to aspire to sovereignty over others has come to be regarded as a disgraceful if not actually a criminal ambition”.22 To us, there seems an innocence in this sentence. Hope was writing from within modernity, from within the welfare state, from within an egalitarian consensus – a consensus he did not necessarily like or accept, but whose existence he perceived no alternative to acknowledging. In his poem “Observation Car”, the routine conformity of modern transportation is at once seen as a limit and a condition; train travel, with its lack of charm and loss of individual sovereignty, acts as a classical restraint on the poet’s extravagant desires. In the twenty-first century, however, as the work of Giorgio Agamben attests, sovereignty has returned with a vengeance, as a “power which decides not between the licit and the illicit but the originary inclusion of the living in the sphere of law”, a force that arbitrarily decides whose humanity will be recognised and whose will not be, who wins and who loses.23

Even if this contemporary sovereignty does not literally take the form of a monarchy, the powerful can coerce the powerless through the exercise of status. From refugees in detention centres to the unwaged and minimally waged precariat, what Simon During calls “unstable and diverse conditions of deprivation and insecurity” proliferate in the contemporary era.24 Hope, on the other hand, perceived his own era as an age of egalitarianism. He may have mocked this egalitarian consensus, but he accepted it as real, and perhaps even fostered it in his role as a caring supervisor of graduate students at the Australian National University, many of whom were first-generation university graduates. Hope may have been a conservative, but he was not a reactionary.

This is seen in Hope’s interpretation of Marlowe’s protagonists as not dynastic or aristocratic but self-made and meritocratic. Hope’s “Argument of Arms” shows that the coercive exercise of power by such self-authored individuals can if anything be even more menacing than that exercised by dynastic hegemons. But Hope did not envision this mentality returning; indeed, it was omening so far in the past that modern people, living in a radically different life-world, inevitably misunderstood Marlowe’s poetry.

As theorists of satire like Elliott have noted, rancour must come from a minority perspective to be cogent; otherwise, it is simply the consensus enforcing itself through spleen. In Hope’s day, his attitudes were beleaguered by trendy social optimism; in a later era, social optimism was itself beleaguered. Hope’s satiric protest was directed against a modern or late-modern world of egalitarianism, formal experimentation, and the welfare state. The next generation of Australian satirists, especially those who used rancour more broadly to protest against social conditions, were reacting against a different world: one of rampant capitalism, bimodally distributed status, and a resurgence of sovereignty, although sovereignty exercised only by certain privileged individuals and the state formations that served them. In this milieu, rancour was not an alternative to social activism, but an example of it, and the satiric pressure came, broadly speaking, from the left, as it was the left that was now out of power.

Rancour and Competitiveness: Christos Tsiolkas

If Hope embodied this sort of enabling rancour in his own, late-modern, generation of Australian writers, in subsequent generations the baton was taken up by migrant and ethnic writers. While many rather stereotypical accounts of Australian landscape, such as Nikki Gemmell’s Alice Springs (1999), were launched on the world market in the 1990s and early 2000s, it was paradoxically the often confrontational work of Christos Tsiolkas that garnered world acclaim. Tsiolkas is the grumbling guest at the party, rancorously reminding us of what is still wrong, making no concessions to genteel taste. Nor does he assume the role of “the submissive foreigner” that Toula Nicolacopoulos and George Vassilacopoulos argue is often expected of Greek-Australians.25

Tsiolkas certainly defies this stereotype in his 2013 novel Barracuda, in which he takes on the world of privileged achievement in Australia. He does so through Danny Kelly, a half Scottish, half Greek boy who, despite his migrant origins, bears an iconically Australian name, and whose ascribed identity has more to do with class than with ethnicity or sexuality. Danny’s homosexuality is not problematised or highlighted, and Australian society is not depicted as particularly homophobic. Danny’s straight friends accept his sexuality. Andrew McCann, writing of Tsiolkas’s Dead Europe (2011), described Tsiolkas’ dual themes as “the disintegration of left-wing politics in the face of consumer culture and neoliberalism” and “the confluence of sexuality and power”.26 Barracuda, while not forgetting the latter, decidedly emphasises the former.

Danny is hazed and discriminated against because of his ethnic and working-class origins. He tells himself, and is told by others, that if he is an outstanding swimmer this stigma will go away – that extraordinary achievement will dispel the threat of what Rob Nixon calls the “slow violence” of neoliberalism.27 But if excellence is necessary to avoid discrimination, where does that leave working-class ethnics who do not have an exceptional talent? Even for Danny, all the skill in the world only serves to neutralise society’s disdain for where he comes from; he is tolerated but not embraced. To be considered a viable person, an outsider must excel; to qualify as “ordinary”, he must be extraordinary. This is what happens when equality of opportunity is considered the only important equality, and when the only social solidarity is one of mutually self-congratulatory winners.

Danny becomes unhinged and commits the assault that will send him to jail when Martin Taylor calls him “a fucking loser.”28 This is the biggest insult, the most stigmatising ignominy. At the peak of his promise, Danny may be a winner, but that status is always vulnerable. Like financial investments, social status fluctuates; it can never be presumed to be permanent. Being called a loser hurts Danny so severely because his entire identity is built upon being a winner. He is not a failed meritocrat who pursued achievement because of a conscious choice, or an aristocrat who desired to earn his own spurs. Nor is he a “loser who wins”, a beatnik, bohemian or poète maudit. Winning is Danny’s only way out of a condition of inferiority. The advocates of meritocracy have it right that exceptional achievement is a way out of disadvantage. But it is wrong that it should be the only way out.

The only way someone from Danny’s world can have even a normal life is if they achieve excellence. For them it is, to use the old Australian saying, “Sydney or the bush”: total victory or total loss. Neither patience nor luck offers an alternative route. Unlike in a Dickens novel, where a loser can become a winner through luck and pluck, Martin’s comment to Danny renders being a loser an ontological state of being, in the same way that gender, ethnicity and sexuality are often ontologised. Martin says, “You know what we thought? We thought you were a loser. You didn’t have the balls then and you don’t have the balls now. That’s why you’re not there tonight, that’s why you’ll always be a fucking loser” (250). Danny’s status as a loser makes other people uncomfortable, especially when they have to see him or speak to him. In the pub, Danny feels that the other people there “wanted to be celebrating, having fun” but cannot because of their sense of embarrassment, their discomfort that a loser such as Danny is in their presence (228).

Danny, for all his athletic potential, does not make it to the 2000 Sydney Olympics, and does not have the drive to follow through on his aspirations as a swimmer. But in calling him a loser, Martin is not criticising a wrong decision or an opportunity missed. He is implying that Danny is a loser innately. This is strangely antithetical to the doctrine of the free market, which lauds mobility and justifies inequality with the promise that those less well off can hope to move up. It is also antithetical to the very idea of sport, which recognises that even talented athletes often lose; mathematically, for every winner there must be at least one loser, and merit alone does not guarantee winning. But, in Martin’s judgement, nothing can ever clear Danny of being a loser: he is a loser in the same way that one is a woman or an ethnic minority or a homosexual. He is inextricably bound to a subordinate identity. Martin’s calling Danny a loser is in one way a socially acceptable substitute for such offensive terms as a “wog” or a “reffo”; in another way it represents the displacement of all anterior ethnic, racial or gender differences by the one universal binary of winners and losers.

Martin calling Danny a loser might be said to be the epicentre of critiques of neoliberalism in contemporary Australian literature. In past eras, Danny would have been denigrated for reasons of class or ethnic origin, for his sexuality or, like a Patrick White character, for simply not fitting in. In respect to Nietzsche’s dichotomies examined in Chapter 1, if one is “bad” or “evil” one is always that. But if one is a loser presumably there is a hope of one day being a winner. In the world of Barracuda, however, being a winner or a loser is predestined, like Calvinistic grace. It is because Danny is condemned to this eternal category that he snaps and pummels Martin with rage, responding to Martin’s “slow violence” with a more traditional fast violence.

Tsiolkas, as Andrew McCann has pointed out, is a consummate excavator of the “fissures and inequities underpinning notions of cosmopolitan freedom”.29 It is a major fissure, if not a gulf, that even as the identities – gender, ethnicity, sexuality – that traditionally kept people back have been eliminated or stripped of their old significance, a new, equally oppressive category has emerged. There is no affirmative action for losers. But, as with those other categories, being labelled a loser can enrage those who stake their identities on being the opposite. For Martin and the other young men in the pub, the physical presence of a “loser” injects rancour into their celebration. It is an impingement on those who suppose themselves winners. Just as attacks on gay men are sometimes committed by macho assailants who panic that they, too, might be homosexual, the very presence of a loser makes winners worry that they might, in fact, be losers as well.

As Liliana Olmos, Rich Van Heertum and Carlos Torres have argued, the United States has seen “education as a panacea for its social ills for most of its history”.30 In Danny Kelly’s Australia, the situation is becoming much the same. The welfare state has lost credibility, and government-led solutions to inequality are no longer de rigeure; in 2012 Joe Hockey, then shadow treasurer, declared “the end of the age of entitlement”.31 Hockey, born in 1965, is an exact contemporary of Tsiolkas, and their generation did not grow up with an expectation of universal social welfare as the generation before them did. As early as the late 1940s, when the transition from modernity to what we are calling late modernity began, education became the preferred way to ameliorate inequality. In Australia in the 1970s, the Whitlam government accentuated this with the introduction of free tertiary education. As Ashley Lavalle points out, however, even by 1978, when Whitlam had been out of office only three years, he was already arguing that this reform would not have been possible any later than the early 1970s; the “changed economic circumstances” concomitant with the perceived failure of late modernity would have precluded it.32 Yet education rewards excellence, not ordinariness. If education is to replace the welfare state as a social panacea, only those who are excellent, or who are judged excellent within the self-reinforcing parameters of the system, can expect social mobility.

One need look no further than J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (referenced in Barracuda, when “a toy model of Hogwarts” is mentioned) (255) to see the apotheosis of the selective school as an arena for self-definition, in an era theoretically open to the potential merit of all but still committed to hierarchies of excellence.33 Ronald A. Manzer, speaking of the intersection of “educational regimes” with “Anglo-American democracy”, notes that, in New South Wales in the 1960s, “reform shifted the organisation of public secondary schools from tracks defined by occupational classes to ability grouping by subjects”.34 This message of mobility also applied to private schools, which, despite their elite associations, were seen as aiming to reach out to the underprivileged and deserving. William Empson famously read Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” as being about the lack of a “scholarship system”. If there are “mute inglorious Miltons” in a world that offers scholarships to talented boys and girls, it will be, unlike in Gray’s eighteenth-century world, because they have tried and failed, not because they never had a chance.35

Or rather, they will be said to have tried and failed, for what Tsiolkas makes clear in Barracuda is that competition to define excellence creates its own self-justifying rules. Danny’s involvement with two institutions in the book – his elite school and the prison – suggests that these two systems have more in common than it might at first seem. Both are intended to sort, to confine, to rank. Both are about winning and losing; the implication is that if you do not fit into the categories of the elite school, in a society in which fortune is bimodally distributed, prison is your only other option. Of course, the elite school as a setting is hardly new to Australian literature. Danny’s fall from grace is no more terrifying than that of Laura Rambotham in Henry Handel Richardson’s The Getting of Wisdom (1910), when she is frozen out by the other girls for making up stories in order to make herself look better. In Richardson’s time, however, a general belief in social progress could palliate these specific belittlements by giving hope that they will eventually be redeemed; for Richardson’s Laura, the adult world, after school, promises something better. For Tsiolkas’ Danny, the neoliberal adult world can only offer more of the same: hypertrophied, self-sanctioned complacency.

Tsiolkas is dissatisfied with institutions – old and new Europe, youth culture, the family in all its various configurations, the elite school – that we are often told define our culture. As James Bradley has commented, for Tsiolkas, fiction is about confronting society with “unpalatable truths, disrupting consensus”.36 Ali Alizadeh’s searing poem “Letter to Adam Smith” speaks of the “historically inevitable boredom” of neoliberalism, the way a capitalist utopia creates a “fantasmatic” that is “too harmonious”. Only crisis can disturb this. Only “subtraction / can lead to attraction”.37 Disharmony of Tsiolkas’ sort forestalls this phantasm of the false fantastic from gelling into irrefutable dogma.

Tsiolkas categorically asserts his Greek identity in Barracuda. Danny’s mother is Greek, and one of Danny’s most pleasant exchanges is with a woman of Greek background named Mila, meaning “apple”, with all its connotations of fertility. In a male Anglo world that values competitiveness and excellence above all, both the Greek and the maternal stand out and are difficult for the mainstream to accommodate.

In Tsiolkas’ 2008 novel The Slap, the slap given by Harry, a Greek-Australian, to the misbehaving young Anglo child Hugo at a barbecue disrupts several assumptions about the contemporary: that people of all ethnic stripes and backgrounds are getting along, and that we can all unite around how wonderful today’s children are; that their well-adjusted temperament represents a new utopia, a different and redeemed humanity. The slap is at once emblematic of and resistant to the neoliberal order. It is resistant to neoliberalism because it represents an old-fashioned parenting style, one in which corporal punishment is routine and adult authority unquestioned, recalling the punitive patriarchal regime in Harrower’s novels, rather than the more permissive attitude of today, which is represented in the novel by Hugo’s parents, Rosie and Gary. The slap can even be seen as an instinctive response to the deliberate disorganisation sown by neoliberalism, a disorganisation used to disguise the arbitrariness of the search for personal excellence and success. Yet Harry’s slap is also emblematic of neoliberalism. It symbolises how, for all its rhetoric of freedom and transparency, neoliberalism retains a residual and fiercely enunciated sovereignty. The slap enacts Giorgio Agamben’s sense of sovereignty, which entails, as Aihwa Ong puts it, “the exclusion of living beings not recognised as modern humans”.38 That Harry is a self-made entrepreneur drives home the way the slap can be a metaphor for the hidden exercise of violent force by the self-proclaimed winners of society. Compulsion and violence underlie neoliberalism’s rhetoric of autonomy. Harry is of Greek descent and his wife is of Serbian background; Tsiolkas does not suggest that being non-Anglo-Celtic automatically means one is subversive or dissident. But mainstream society’s reaction to the migrant often is analogous to its reaction to dissident lifestyles or ideologies.

Tsiolkas follows in the vein of many classic Australian novels, both highbrow and lowbrow, in which the migrant is a magnet for trouble. This is as true of Zlinter in Nevil Shute’s The Far Country (1952) as it is of Himmelfarb in Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot (1961), both middle-aged men forced into manual labour in their new country. As a young athlete with a premium education, Danny Kelly at first seems to have avoided this fate, although trouble eventually finds him. The migrant reminds Australians of truths they would prefer to avoid.

But Tsiolkas does not romanticise Europe as a locale of cosmopolitanism and tradition. It is a paradox of settler colonialism that the intellectual elite most likely to resist an unthinking attachment of the country’s British or European cultural origins are the likeliest to privilege, in Bourdieu’s terms, the “distinction” of travelling to Europe or acting “European”.39 Dead Europe contends that the only European tradition still prospering is that of vampirism, as Isaac, the young protagonist who at first hopes serenely to photograph post-1980 Europe, emblematising himself as a member of the new, blessedly post-communist generation, becomes someone who preys on other people’s blood. The radiant future is not only haunted but despoiled by the ghosts of the past, and Europe, in a prescient anticipation of the political problems of the mid-2010s, is less revived by the post-communist era than zombified by it. In Barracuda, Danny travels to Glasgow, but it proves not to be the solution, as his Scottish boyfriend, Clyde – named with blatant metonymy for the Firth of Clyde on which Glasgow sits – is, in James Bradley’s phrase, a “privileged cosmopolitan”.40 Clyde discerns the hypocrisies in Australian professions of egalitarianism. But in dismissing Australia, he is himself wielding his status. Clive, who as a Scotsman could be Danny’s fellow subaltern, is instead a snob, one of many in the book who fail to understand Danny because “for them, working at a supermarket was tangential to life” (254).

Clyde has fallen into the “lifestyle” excoriated by Les Murray in his poem of that name: “Once it was unions … now it’s no carbohydrates”. Clyde channels “all his regret and disappointment” into “snide, bitter attacks on Australia” (434), a country which, for Danny, is home. Danny, the person in the book who suffers most from the inequalities in Australian society, nonetheless holds on to a positive idea of Australia. He does not have the social mobility to disidentify with Australia in favour of more cosmopolitan climes. This is reminiscent of Les Murray’s posture in “The Suspension of Knock” when he asks, “Where will we hold Australia, / We who have no other country?” Murray, in this poem, indicates that it is all very well to chide white Australians for stealing the land from Indigenous people and disadvantaging their migrant brethren – but where have they to go? Tsiolkas and Murray are admittedly odd poles of comparison due to their generational, political and affective differences. But here they seem of like mind.

For Danny, Australia, like it or not, is home. He does not love it, but he knows he cannot escape from it and this gives him a commitment to it that his more sophisticated peers, who assume they need only travel or migrate to shed Australian problems, do not. It is this paradoxical defence of Australia that frustrated some reviewers, who tried to see the book as a critique of Australian xenophobia and small-mindedness along standard left-of-centre lines. Tsiolkas is no fan of these problems. But, like Murray, he does not think meritocratic elitism alone can solve Australian xenophobia or small-mindedness; indeed, he sees the hegemony of the winners as the root of them. Tsiolkas – gay, Greek, willing to slap the face of public taste – cannot be seen as a conventional tick-the-boxes leftist.

Expatriation is not a solution for Tsiolkas either, as Dead Europe makes clear with its acrid portrait of post-1989 Eastern Europe. In Barracuda, by setting the diasporic sections in Scotland, a place also struggling to come to terms with a postmodern nationalism, Tsiolkas makes clear that the internationalism of today has not yet categorically supplanted nationalism. Expatriation does not mean sophistication or social justice. For Danny, an Australian face can still inspire affection, despite his disappointment in Australian institutions. Julieanne Lamond comments that Danny “feels uncomfortable about the criticism his left-leaning friends heap upon his country” and mentions his “resistance to the progressive politics of most of his friends and family (and of Tsiolkas himself in his published essays and interviews)”.41

I would argue, however, that Barracuda ultimately opts for the virtues of community, and turns away from a possessive individualism to incarnate solidarity. Danny’s swimming coach at the elite school leaves him a small legacy and shared use of his house. Danny does not take the money and run. He uses that legacy to build a community. Danny realises the coach left the money to him, and to a few others, because the coach trusted these people not to use it selfishly. The coach makes a deathbed swerve from encouraging competition to fostering cooperation. Such an ending, which stresses the reliance of human beings upon one another, may risk being called sentimental, but one of the virtues of rancour is that it can inoculate a text from such an accusation. As a rejoinder to the neoliberal “cruel optimism” chronicled by Lauren Berlant, Tsiolkas evinces a sort of kind pessimism, a caring that is both visceral and disillusioned.

Ouyang Yu: Freelance Antagonist of the Complacent

Although he so far has not had Tsiolkas’ mainstream success, Ouyang Yu also throws down a rancorous challenge to the twenty-first-century consensus. This is not to say that all other multicultural Australian writers are meek assimilants into the mainstream. Even writers who might seem middlebrow and media-friendly in their approach – Randa Abdul-Fattah in her multicultural chick-lit, for example, or Merlinda Bobis in her largely realist depictions of the Philippine diaspora – have made clear that they see their work as a critical project. Writers such as these employ popular genres to try to spur awareness of cultural plurality among readers who might otherwise not encounter such a message. Ouyang is less concerned with reaching a wide readership, although this is not to say he is a hermetic writer. John Kinsella has observed that “when the Anglo-Celtic majority does a mea culpa in terms of European colonisation in Australia, it does so to emphasise its own power”.42 In this atmosphere, the consensus will accept a multicultural writer it feels it can control; the mainstream will applaud ethnic voices for contributing to the diversification of society, so long as they play by the mainstream rules.

Ouyang’s poem-cycle The Kingsbury Tales (2012) looks unromantically at the contemporary Australian scene. “An Aboriginal Tale” shows the speaker meeting an Aboriginal person, “an old lady who I saw get on a train”, which prompts a “white lady” to get up and find a spot “more relaxed and comfortable”.43 This leads the speaker to an encounter with an Aboriginal musician who wanted to become a teacher but was turned down because he did not conduct himself “by the book”, and did not grow any facial hair. Yet there is no multicultural solidarity here; the speaker and the Aboriginal man lose touch as the Aboriginal musician does not have access to the internet, and the speaker’s last recourse is to vow never again to read Xavier Herbert, with his problematic representation of Indigenous people, a gesture at once adamant and futile. This is pure Ouyang: a scoring of existing social conditions and prejudices, and a searing pessimism about any single individual’s ability to countervail them other than through small acts of reading, writing and, in this case, not reading.

Also characteristic is the half-gesture towards Anglophone tradition in the title of The Kingsbury Tales, which echoes Chaucer. But the collection has a disaffected and intransigent tone, far from Chaucerian rambunctiousness. While upbraiding the intolerance and presumption of white Australian society, the speaker expresses unhappiness with China as well. He wants China to be stronger geopolitically, but also to stand for positive ideals, including the rights of indigenous people.

The speaker of The Kingsbury Tales interacts with both Sinophone and Anglophone authority, but is not particularly respectful of either. Furthermore, Ouyang writes in two languages, and maintains residences in both Australia and China. He has translated both his own work and that of others, from English into Chinese and vice versa. With this deep immersion in two languages, one native, one acquired, the very idea of language itself is contingent: if a thing can always be said as well or better in another language, language is freed from adequacy to float towards heedless, impulsive, ad hoc creativity. Normally stable notions of the authorial body and language thus become fungible. This is particularly true given that Chinese and English are two of the world’s most widely spoken languages. Ouyang’s snarling voice and vigilant, deadpan gaze are in many ways exemplary of Australian writing: he both navigates the currents of transnationalism and stands in the way of them overpowering the individual voice.

In Ouyang’s novel The English Class, a Chinese truck driver, Jing, looks to learning English as the solution to all his problems.44 Although Jing – or Gene, as he is later called when he goes to Australia – over-idealises English, the novel genuinely admires his curiosity in attempting an utterly strange mode of communication and seizing it incipiently as his own. Chinese speakers may be learning English as a means to gain prestige and global success, but at least they are learning it, as opposed to the teacher of Jing’s class, Mr Wagner, who does not deign to learn a syllable of Chinese. Jing eventually runs off with Wagner’s wife, Deirdre, and goes with her to Australia, showing how the second-language learner can abduct the language and spirit it away from its native speakers. Jing eventually feels that he is being, as it were, unfaithful to Chinese in concentrating so much on speaking English: the root etymological sense of translation, after all, is betrayal. The novel plays all this for laughs: although his humour can often be savage, Ouyang is, along with Michael Wilding, Linda Jaivin and David Foster, one of the genuinely comic writers active in Australia today. But the book is also a critical reflection on the role language plays in personal and national identity. Necessarily, the language taught in the book is the very language in which we are reading it. How well do we, the reader, know English? What exactly is our English? Where does it come from? Who taught it to us?

Ouyang, of course, is not Jing, a naive learner of English as a personal fillip. Ouyang is a sophisticated, savvy artist and a respected cultural figure in both linguistic spheres. Yet the theme of English as a second language adds extra brio to Ouyang’s writing, especially in the descriptive passages, in which a lyrical sprightliness is permitted to rove unchecked, giving a sense both of the exuberance possible in English and how a foreign eye can envision that exuberance differently than someone confined in the language since birth. The book’s first two epigraphs, from Rilke and Neruda – the latter of whom, as Ian Campbell has pointed out, has a considerable Indonesian afterlife in terms of influence, and is thus more than usually relelvant to Australia – interject third and fourth languages into the mix.45 They make the point that the Chinese–English encounter is not just between a migrant and his new country, but part of a wider negotiation among multiple world tongues. But they also give the sense of a new language as a desired, distant other, a horizon whose very remoteness renders it tantalisingly appealing. These vistas, however, cannot just be conquered on a whim: they can only be reached through hard work. Jing’s occupation, driving trucks, involves mobility, yet is also prosaic and menial.

In a poem related to The English Class, “Bad English”, Ouyang depicts a foreigner teaching English in Australia who receives an email from a student apologising for his bad English.46 Unlike Wagner in The English Class, this teacher understands that as he does not speak his students’ language, he can hardly reproach them for speaking his badly. The poem tacitly argues, however, that in today’s world, there are not really any categorically good and bad Englishes; that the English of the Chinese student is a new kind of English but also communicates and makes real thoughts and emotions. Phrases that are ungrammatical in English, such as “on that day’s noon”, are highly poetic in a surreal way. Misprisions reveal conceptual fault-lines: “We must uphold human tights” – where the substitution of “tights” for “rights” upbraids Westerners’ imposition of a humanitarian agenda into Chinese life, while slyly insisting that human rights must in fact be upheld. These are mistakes, but they enlarge our field of perception. This is a rejection of perfection. If bad English is also, in its own way, a new English, the world cannot simply and categorically be split between winners and losers.

Ouyang’s two major works are The Eastern Slope Chronicle (2002) and Loose: A Wild History (2008). The latter, a sprawling work that is among the most daring novels published in Australia in the twenty-first century thus far, is set between 1999 and 2001, but utterly abjures euphoric celebration of the millennium and the Sydney Olympics, or any foreshadowing of 9/11.47 With a complicated spiral structure containing both a progressive narrative and a series of diary-like jottings, Loose is fierce in its criticism of both Western complacency and the Chinese government’s authoritarianism. The narrator, at once adorable and disconsolate, stays unattached, at the cost of often feeling alienated. Loose tells a history away from the mainstream, and far from a Eurocentric axis. Whether describing Beijing high-rises or Melbourne literary gatherings, Loose subverts the official cultural narrative of progress. Like Barracuda, it is set largely in 2000, the year that was supposed to be the acme of Australian expectation, the consummation of the country’s emergence onto the world stage. Loose is a sour visitor at the self-congratulatory spree of the millennium.

That Ouyang is so adamantly uncowed by consensus should not obscure that he is a master of the gritty quotidian. Witness this description of Melbourne weather in his most accomplished novel, The Eastern Slope Chronicle: “It was a typical Melbourne day. Clouds were rolling over the grey Melbourne sky. Trees outside the window stood still as if frozen. The only living thing was a stray dog that kept running in the front yard.”48 This is a realism of subject matter but not a realism of angle, as the narrator simply refuses to accept that anything he sees is inevitable, or so surprising as to deserve a fuss. Ouyang is not a satirist. Satire presumes a solidity of attack from which somebody of Ouyang’s generation would no doubt shy away. Born in 1955, he is of an age to have experienced the horrors of the Cultural Revolution. Yet Ouyang’s work speaks from the declared vantage point of the satirist.

Ouyang, as the Asian-American critic Timothy Yu has argued, is as much an Asian Australian as he is a diasporic-Chinese writer.49 But he is also an example of an Asian-Australian writer who does not look chiefly to the UK or USA but to China; he demonstrates that there can be another Anglophone cosmopolitanism, one with a Sinophone centre. This Sinocentrism does not mean that Ouyang does not draw upon other literary traditions: the lyric asperity of the Kingsbury poems owes a decided debt to the poems of Thomas Hardy, of whom Ouyang is a great admirer. This insistence on plurality has a cost: a writer who refuses to defer to expectations of what he should be risks missing out on canonisation. Although Ouyang Yu is widely regarded, with Brian Castro, as one of the leading Asian Australian authors, he has never developed a popular readership, even though general readers might well find his work enjoyable. Ouyang is not averse to his work being recognised, but he will not cater to institutional tastes. That being said, along with Castro, Ouyang is probably the most academically studied Asian-Australian fiction writer of his generation, followed in the next generation by the Vietnamese-Australian Nam Le, who would certainly be the most well known internationally. Le’s sense of Australia as one destination in a wider global diaspora goes beyond Castro’s and Ouyang’s acceptance of an Australian element to their work. Ouyang writes from within Australia but castigates Australia for not judging him totally of it. Ouyang’s homeland is not, as George Steiner once observed of the Jews, the text, although Brian Castro’s might be.50 Ouyang does not claim a purely literary genealogy, nor does he see his diasporic identity as any more literary than cultural.

Ouyang’s attitude has inevitably meant that he has missed out on some acclaim and awards that he might otherwise have enjoyed. The very theme of The Eastern Slope Chronicles – that Chinese identity cannot simply be confined for Australian readers into a convenient box – has thwarted his reception. But Ouyang Yu has also thwarted the canonising agencies of millennial world power. He is in the largest sense a dissident, in all the various contexts which he inhabits and addresses.

John Kinsella: Against “The Bloodiest of Values”

John Kinsella attained success at an extraordinarily young age. By the time he was thirty-five he was already known across the world; by the time he was forty, he had obtained significant academic positions in the UK and USA, at Cambridge and Kenyon College respectively, as well as the support of eminencies such as George Steiner and Harold Bloom; by the time he was forty-five, he had composed a body of work equal to that of poets who lived a full life, and then some. Kinsella achieved this by being a conspicuously avant-garde and experimental poet. He shares much with Les Murray, including a feeling for his own rural district and an identification with its people: a sense that locality can be a basis for genuine poetry. Yet Kinsella, although as capable of traditional formal operations as Murray, was far more consciously experimental. In his early years as a poet it was possible to distinguish between a “dark pastoral” aspect to Kinsella – a corroded, disillusioned but nonetheless cohesive lyric voice that savagely and rancorously lamented the erosion and exploitation of the Australian landscape, seen in collections like The Silo (1995) and The Hunt (1998) – and a more referentially diffuse experimental mode, in dialogue with international Language poetry, exemplified by collections such as Syzygy (1993). Since about 2000 or so, this dichotomy has become less sustainable. Kinsella’s poems are always animated by a strong lyric impulse, yet are always decentred. They are not prone to balance, nor to telescope the meaning of the verse into a single node. “I cannot take the many paths towards the valley’s centre”, Kinsella says in “Retired Reservoir”, and there is in his poem a refusal to gravitate to a fixed position of authority.51 In “Strobe: The Road from Toodyay to New Norcia”, he describes

The road runs from a wheatbelt market town to the Benedictine monastery famed for its wine, ostensibly out towards the sea and civilisation, but there is no trajectory, only an ambiguous stasis: “The interior sun is a calmative red”; nature is neither a recourse nor an enclosure to be escaped. The same sun that fires also calms. Equally, Kinsella’s anger fuels his contemplation, but he renounces the idea of a centre of sapient judgement that was so indispensable to the poetics of A. D. Hope.

Kinsella has not just received recognition in the USA and UK but actively operates as an editor, anthologist and galvanising agent in these countries, as well as writing convincing and idiomatic poems about their landscape (no British poet has written better about the fens of Cambridgeshire than Kinsella has). Yet Kinsella has continued to anchor himself in Western Australia, if anything in recent years strengthening his ties to the state by taking up an academic position at the University of Western Australia. He lives at Jam Tree Gully near Toodyay in the wheatbelt, a region surrounding Perth and standing between it and the outback. This region is fertile yet fragile, economically vital yet socio-politically marginal, ranging topographically from the height of Mount Bakewell to the serpentine valley of the Avon River to the sloping hills of Jam Tree Gully where Kinsella resides. The wheatbelt is rural but on the verge of the urban. It grounds Kinsella’s work while providing a side arena in which to roam; Kinsella’s poetry, as Tony Hughes-D’Aeth has argued, reveals both the promise and the peril of the contemporary natural world.53 The wheatbelt for Kinsella is a place of “fault-lines and earthquakes”, of “repetition, imprint of incursion, and memory, unwinding daily”. It is where “trees blacken / into thin wisps, spinifex fires / and white cockatoos. Strangled / in telegraph wire, hang / dry and upside down”.54 Kinsella relates to the wheatbelt with a threefold respect: for its ecology, with the “drifting sand” that does not “lend itself of description”; for its local inhabitants and their distinct regional history (“just outside York a memorial to an ex- / bikie who became a JP and the best loved / citizen of the community”); and for its Indigenous heritage: “The rainbow begins or ends / on the Wagyl tracks, and there’s / nothing romantic about it”.

Kinsella is so insistent on this respect that he is willing to discipline himself to make sure his art remains within these criteria. Moreover, Kinsella is frequently blunt in his anger at corporations, greed and white privilege in general. Notwithstanding, there is exhilaration in how he depicts the wheatbelt, a sheer delight in its incongruities and the intimacy of his relation to the land, its shape and story. Speaking in “Quellington Road” of the town of Meckering, which had to relocate itself after an earthquake in 1968, Kinsella writes, “the back-way to Meckering cuts fault-line, earth-rip, roads never thin as they look”.55 It is landscape he knows well: both the landscape of childhood and adulthood; of primordial memory and quotidian life.

If one tendency of Kinsella’s poetics of rancour is spite at the object of its critique, another tendency is a sense of implication. The wheatbelt is an interstitial place between Hope’s “five teeming sores”; it might not be the full plunge into the interior but it is not simply hugging the coast. In the wheatbelt, Kinsella is implicated (in the etymological sense of “folded in”). Kinsella does not claim to be one with the region’s people as Les Murray might. He shies away from the mantle of the region’s ambassador to the world as Seamus Heaney sometimes did for the bogs of Northern Ireland. Yet his critique of Australian life is enabled by the way he is half embedded in it. For all of Kinsella’s uninhibited polemicism, there is a casual serenity in his poetry that never lets ideology get in the way of observation. Even when its convictions are fiercest, it keeps its eye on what is being depicted, usually a corroded version of what Gerard Manley Hopkins called the “sweet especial rural scene”.56

Also in “Quellington Road”, Kinsella surveys the land and is filled with fury at its misuse by generations of settlers:

There is an ecological agenda here, but also a socioeconomic one: the paddocks and the bushland are victims not just of corrosion, but also of avarice. Kinsella has spoken of his “vegan anarchist” politics. His radical ecological critique also has in mind the institutions of capitalism and global governance themselves. Yet Kinsella is aware that his poetry, published in metropolitan centres by international houses, circulates on the social and cultural currents concomitant if not entirely parallel with those of financial capital. Furthermore, he knows that his own presence upon the land is occasioned by acts of unfairness. Kinsella auto-historicises himself; he reckons, as far as possible, with his own contingency. Thus his rage is one of implication as much as severance, and his polemical fervour is sharpened by his self-questioning:

Kinsella critiques his own mobility: “these excursions we make / these sightings we keep largely to ourselves” at once elegise and intensify the deterioration they lament. Yet Kinsella is a romantic not so much in subject or in presupposition but in his belief in the possibility of poetry to be meaningful to a wide range of communities beyond a coterie of reviewers. If there is an alternative to the “wells struck where water won’t flow / plant machinery touching off no memories” it is in poetry, “the best prayers for human effort I can manage”, even if here they are, self-deprecatingly, “desiccated lines to the road”. He is talking about poetic lines, but also about the lines on the road. Between voice and subject, enunciation and enunciated, the line is vertiginously thin:

This is neither an encomium to a pioneer, nor vitriolic denunciation, but a tragic awareness of how a benign act for public health – supplying gold miners with water from the Swan–Avon river system – was also an act of violence in dislocating Indigenous people. Kinsella’s own artistic representation of the region is both a furtherance of and an atonement for this violence.

Kinsella’s most ambitious recent work is Divine Comedy (2010). This book has Dantean parallels, but the tercet form is handled nimbly; the length of the canto allows Kinsella to range further than the conventional lyric would, without being epic. Instead of an upward journey of redemption, the order here is Purgatorio, Paradiso, Inferno. The stark differences between heaven, purgatory and hell heighten the range of emotion Kinsella brings to landscape. In “Canto of the Doubled Terraces” Kinsella speaks of poachers trying to profit off the burl of a gum tree, used as finely grained wood for furniture:

“To constitute as souls” is the key phrase: financialisation implies that even the beautiful aesthetic effects of natural intricacy are galvanised by greed; that our contemplative response to them is plagued by a sort of cognitive guilt, something that pains Kinsella as much as anyone as he is so responsive to their beauty. The burl is shaped by nature, yet employed in human shaping, and Kinsella is intrigued by patterns that hover just below consciousness, that violate humanity’s rage for order by possessing pattern but not intention:

This is from the “Purgatorio” section, and the predominant note is one of suspension, a viscous meditation, a world of semi-life whose shape is reinforced by verbal patterning (“pulpy”, “point”, “pap”; the analogous networks – quasi-rhizomatic – of tomb, nexus, branch). This death-in-life melding is frustrating for the perceiver but it is all that is left of life now, and all that can be left in this place and time. Its pulpy plenitude is vividly contrasted to the severe rhetoric of economic rationalism, as represented by the former federal treasurer, Peter Costello, here pictured by Kinsella as speaking in the first person:

Kinsella’s treatment of Paradise is the most striking turn in the book. Instead of making Paradise into a second Hell, or merely inverting the affective qualities of Paradise and Hell, Kinsella renders Paradise as genuine a paradise as one is to find, in this part of the world, given the prejudices imposed by Western optics. But the title to Paradise is in question. As Philip Mead observes, “paradise is land stolen from others, the Ballardong Noongar people”. Kinsella’s Paradise may be, as Mead argues, “ruptured … sideways”.59 Yet even if it were unsullied in its purity it would still be stolen. So, in general, might the pleasures and splendour of the neoliberal era be stolen, appropriated through what Nixon calls “slow violence”, abstracted through an economic division in which there is heaven for the few and hell for the many, with no purgatory to split the difference or to offer succour.

The “slow violence” depicted here is everything that Kinsella loathes. To combat it, although he is infused with the environmental sympathies and populist-aesthetic delicacy of a Judith Wright, Kinsella needs the prophetic, satiric rage of an A. D. Hope. There are other sources here. Kinsella is, as of 2015, editing the collected poems of Aboriginal poet Jack Davis, who, like Hope, died in 2000. Addressing the 2014 Perth Poetry Festival, Kinsella ended his speech with these lines from Davis:

This splenetic parody of the twenty-third psalm was written in 1977; today Davis might say not “the government” but “the market”, or “what the government privatises”. But Davis was prophetic in seeing wealth as the be-all and end-all of the contemporary, the dead centre to which all rational roads travel.

Kinsella’s rage, however, does not assume the tone of leadership projected by Davis’ voice. Kinsella withholds himself from complicity as far as possible, aware that no one today can do so completely. It was far easier to have Kinsella’s radical epistemology in a previous generation, when, for example, the New Zealand poet James K. Baxter could practise an idiosyncratic spiritual ecology, live on a rural commune, and be acclaimed. The era of late modernity prized such a dissenting posture as it seemed the only way to avoid regimentation. Neoliberalism, however, exalts urban dynamism and is sceptical of rural retreats. Furthermore, the claim to unmediated association with the land that Baxter put forth, even though he was sympathetic to Māori land claims and identity, would seem imperialistic now. Kinsella as a landscape poet has had to operate within far more strict protocols – most of them imposed by himself – about how territoriality can be evoked in language. Kinsella has spoken of his “dramatic shift to the overtly political voice” over the course of the past twenty years, a sharp veering towards the polemical and the angry.61 Kinsella has attained a rare perspective on questions of land and territory precisely by his blatant willingness to disturb the peace – his own peace, and that of the world consensus.

The Bad Years of J. M. Coetzee

To continue writing after winning the Nobel Prize is rather like being an ex-politician: you do not have to campaign any more and are free to say what you think, limited only by expectations of gravitas. J. M. Coetzee has taken full advantage of this unusual freedom, buttressed by his moving to a new country virtually at the same time as he won the Prize. Coetzee rose to fame as a South African writer, first coming to world awareness with Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), abstract, modernist parables of a South Africa on the brink of either change or explosion. Later books such as Foe (1986) and The Master of Petersburg (1994), rewrites of such canonical figures as Defoe and Dostoyevsky, critically reappraise the past in a way familiar in Australian literature in works such as Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1998). Since moving to South Australia in 2002 Coetzee has reinvented himself as an Australian writer, assuming a stance as simultaneous sage and provocateur. Coetzee is the first Nobel Prize winner to in effect establish a new national identity after winning the prize (as opposed to writers already living in exile or straddling two national identities, which has happened a few times). Perhaps as human beings live longer and become more mobile and transnational, Coetzee’s situation will become more common; but for now, it is an intriguing one-off. Few writers have come into a national situation with as much leverage to criticise existing conditions.

Coetzee has exercised this leverage not just to criticise the neoliberal consensus of contemporary Australia but also his own authorial position, which since Elizabeth Costello (2003), his first Australian book, he has teased, performed and improvised upon. He has even defied the expectation of gravitas. His later books are unsettlingly pessimistic and (self-)lacerating. They are not what one would necessarily expect of a writer who has achieved unassailable world stature and acclaim. But Coetzee has seen Australia, like South Africa, as a nation plagued with a past it would prefer not to examine, and in the present falling well below its manifest ideals.

Diary of a Bad Year (2007), like Dunciad Minor, is a savage indictment of the times and mores confronted by the writer, which in turn does not exempt his own sensibility, or the stability of the writerly position, from that irony. The book is a general critique of neoliberalism. But Coetzee partially destabilises any predominant authorial voice by featuring three characters – Señor C, a Coetzee-like famous author; Anya, the young woman from the Philippines he employs; and Alan, her businessman lover – and by splitting the story between Señor C’s official “Strong Opinions” and his more intimate account of his relationship with Anya.62 Coetzee’s ironisation of his own views in an authorial persona is reminiscent of Hope’s questioning of his own neoclassical auctoritas using supplementary footnotes and inquisitions. The aim is not to negate the author’s own viewpoint but to ramify it and make it more manoeuvrable. Coetzee sympathises with the prophetic style of late Tolstoy but points out that it did not prevent Tolstoy from being read in a deconstructive manner by the Russian formalists. Morality and aesthetics are not necessarily at loggerheads.

Nor does Coetzee’s textual irony prevent him from evincing clear opinions about his adopted country. When Señor C first came to Australia, he admired the way people conducted themselves in their everyday dealings:

It is the “atomistic faith in the market” that brings out the neo in neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is more than a belief that one will improve one’s lot in life by “hard work and saving”. It is a financialisation of all of human life. Señor C even goes so far as to despair of democracy itself, coming close to the line pursued by contemporary speculative Marxists such as Alain Badiou, that the democratic process cannot be trusted to produce moral leadership. Coetzee’s persona is not that of someone who zealously works within the system to change it, for whom the election of a reform-minded leftist will decisively tilt the arrow. The solution is not a restoration of late-modern top-down conformity but a creative, humble, emancipatory individualism, much of the sort Coetzee himself, with necessary idiosyncrasy, practises.

As Paul Giles has noted, many South African critics who previously lauded Coetzee for his parables of oppression and resistance in apartheid-era South Africa have been less than laudatory since his move to Australia.63 David Attwell is quoted by Giles as speaking of “the light-touch quality” of Coetzee’s relation to Australia; Attwell sees Coetzee’s Australia-based work as “metafiction”.64 Yet Diary of a Bad Year is a plea from an agonised, riven heart, and it is fundamentally political and economic. As Giles relates, Coetzee has distanced himself from the United States.65 His choice not just of Australia but of Adelaide, by no means the most metropolitan of Australia’s cities, represents a move away from the sophisticated centre. Yet Coetzee’s Australia is not just a peripheral sanctuary, chosen simply for its distance. Coetzee values Australia, as much for what it once was – the egalitarian society of modernity and late modernity – as for what it is now, just another society reeling from neoliberal excess.

Neoliberalism in Diary of a Bad Year is not merely a political tendency, but an all-pervasive climate. The market, as Alan puts it, explicitly citing Nietzsche, is “beyond good and evil”. Coetzee, like the contemporary American political philosopher Corey Robin, sees neoliberalism’s excesses as an extension of Nietzsche’s call for going beyond good and evil.66 Yet it is questionable whether Nietzsche wished for a dichotomy between winners and losers. In a sense, that is exactly what Nietzsche blamed Christianity for: dividing the world into winners and losers and embracing the losers. Neoliberalism is an inversion of this: it divides the world into winners and losers and embraces the winners. But this is a far more binary vision than anything Nietzsche outlined. Thus even Alan’s eidolon of the market has a saving neutrality, as “beyond good and evil” is still more open-ended than a narrow division between winners and losers of the sort from which Danny Kelly suffers in Tsiolkas’ novel.

But it is still decisively different from late-modern Australia, which Coetzee is aware of but which he only personally experienced in what turned out to be its dying vestiges. That the early twenty-first-century consensus either ignored or co-opted any certitude of it, is, for Señor C, because an intellectual apparatus marked by a conscious knowledge of its insufficiency is an evolutionary aberration. Señor C is not a “heteronym”, designating a persona substantially different from Coetzee. He hovers near to but not coincident with Coetzee’s own implied stance, meaning that we can take his opinions seriously, but are aware that, however percipient in their critique, they also perch on the edge of the trough of absurdity into which all they critique has already fallen.

Coetzee’s career intersects with Australian literature at an unusual angle not just because of his anterior eminence but because his is a case of South to South migration, even if the South Africa in which he grew up was, like Australia, a white-dominated society, albeit one with different demographics. Such South–South connections have been the Holy Grail of a subversive Australian internationalism, but the magnetic pull of metropolitan hegemony has tended to short-circuit these aspirations. Still, Coetzee – who with the very name of “Señor C” gestures towards Latin America, another part of the Global South – is used to writing, in an abstract sense, from the periphery. As James Ley puts it, Coetzee “has often been moved to reflect on the problems that arise from the distance of the postcolonial artist from the centres of cultural authority”.67 Coetzee has a fundamental scepticism, a lack of credulousness about alternatives, in common with other South African-Australian writers such as John Mateer and Marcelle Freiman. In these writers, there is a place for the negative, or even the blank, as in Freiman’s “Seven Ways of Mourning”:

Here forgetting, despite the renunciations it entails, is affirmative, and also perhaps inevitable. Rancour – and this must have been a tough pill for the precedent-minded A. D. Hope to swallow – has little place for history; its discontent is too present-at-hand. Rancour, as in Coetzee’s critique of neoliberal Australia, may rage at a society that has lost its moorings, but in its own rhetoric jettisons those moorings in order to rage with potential recklessness. Rancour needs to forget or to reduce so as to shake off any last remnants of hope, leaving rage as the only option. In Mateer’s “Pinjarra”, Indigenous people are too afraid of destruction, too taken up with survival to be spiritual, to find aid in the traditions the white observer assumes they have:

The South African-Australian writer tends not to assume white privilege – the active malice, rather than passive complacency, of such assumptions having been proven in their homeland – and also not to be simply Anglophone in aural terms: witness Mateer’s interest in Portuguese and Indonesian as potentially “Australian” languages in the broader sense. Yet Diary of a Bad Year, despite all its potentially global vectors, is strangely local, not just in its setting, but in its centring around three people whose relationships to one another are constrained. From the poetry of Hope onward, rancorous pessimism makes a stand, assumes a sarcastic local redoubt against global orotundities. Ironically, while the euphoric Australia is the more global one, issues of global import – refugee detention centres, struggles to come to terms with Indigenous dispossession, growing social inequality – are oddly localised, played out within Australian space, as if the world does not want to hear bad news from Australia. Rancour thus shifts from the tacitly right-wing angle occupied by Hope. This is not just because the era of neoliberalism assumes the centre-right as the consensus, much as Hope’s era of late modernity assumed the centre-left. More abstractly, pessimism became the more measured option and the more empirical one, an attitude local and habited.

Diary of a Bad Year is worried we have lost our moorings. It critiques the “anti-social, antihuman turn” as seen in the introduction of mechanical measurement into horse racing (here Coetzee takes a slight turn in the direction of Gerald Murnane) (75). Coetzee, or his fictional counterpart in his “Strong Opinions”, perhaps goes beyond critiquing neoliberalism and casts a quizzical eye on such contemporary academic practices as actor-network theory and distant reading. There is something of the old-fashioned humanist in Señor C’s stance, and Alan goes so far as to criticise the book as a “morality play” (7). This old-fashionedness both ironises Señor C slightly – as the reader begins to see the persona as slightly crotchety – and humanises him, as his anger, like that of the speaker of Hope’s poems, is a testament not only of bitterness but of inadequacy. Even as the speaker assumes the mantle of prophetic authority, the path of emotion both slows him down and softens him. He is a grumbler, but a grumbler who has chosen the parish over the world, the periphery over the centre. That Señor C’s self outside the “Strong Opinions” – perhaps practising weak thought, pensiero debole, in Gianni Vattimo’s term – seems readier to compromise with the world reflects the Achilles heel of rancour: it must assume a hyperbolic rhetorical position in order to resonate.

“The world into which we are born, each of us, is our world,” Señor C ruminates. Is it our world to seize, or to acquiesce in? In a perceptual matrix in which “a secret is an item of information” (23) everything becomes referential, awash in a sea of fragmentary irony: we do not know what to take seriously and what to see as persiflage. Where discerning attitudes necessarily turn misanthropic, there is little room for exaltation of a global centre. Señor C exhibits a species pride that “one of us” could write Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony (45). This corresponds with a shame that one of us could perpetrate the detention camp of Guantanamo. The twenty-first century is not an improvement over the twentieth – and it is notable that Coetzee chooses an early twentieth-century symphonic work here, one associated with the liberation struggle of a small nation, rather than a more abstract or transnational figure such as Schoenberg or Stravinsky, or one associated with modernist difficulties both technical and ideological, such as Shostakovich. The Sibelius Fifth is stark, forbidding and recalcitrant; its complexity, even if more emotional than intellectual, is hard for the naive listener to puzzle through, as if creative power can still awe us, but can no longer (if it ever could) aid us. The Sibelius Fifth is romantic, but it is a romanticism with only the grandeur left; it is vigorous, but this is a vigour no longer subtended by any sustaining or animating vision, one that refuses to stun, to console or to be wistful. In Sibelius, as ardently national as he was, as much as he epitomised the liberation struggle of Finland from Russian political and Swedish cultural dominance, the national marks a difference but not an essential difference.

Coetzee similarly does not presume upon his own life experience in an essentialist way, preferring instead to interrogate it. Coetzee has lived through the supreme liberation struggle of the late twentieth century in South Africa, but now, in the contemporary sanctuary of neoliberal Adelaide, he still seems to feel the need for some subsidence in the local, even if it is necessarily lacerated with scorn, contempt and disgust at the vulnerability of self and other to the devaluation of all values. Señor C realises that both his physical location and his social situation give him greater insight than the other two characters, Alan and Anya, who are immersed in neoliberalism (Alan to the point of defrauding the eloquent but gullible Señor C) but do not think about it. Their reality is coextensive with their sex lives and their instinctual level of gratification, and they would acquiesce in whatever cultural climate they found themselves in. The alphabetical twinning of Anya and Alan, combined with C not just potentially standing for “Coetzee” but also being two steps on in the alphabet, posits the two lovers as primary, the garrulous, splenetic writer as not only secondary but, true to his initial letter, tertiary, signifying a higher level of ordinality and reflectiveness. Yet Señor C, however dissemblingly removed from experience he is, at least thinks about it, even if he is prone to intellectual arrogance and self-certainty, like a prophetic Amos or a satiric Juvenal without the wind of tradition behind him. To be truly resonant, the oracle of contemporary rancour must admit that tradition in any viable sense has been relinquished, and that local shards of resentment are all that remain upon which to stand. Diary of a Bad Year concerns one year in its explicit scope; in its implications it argues that the contemporary is a whole slew of bad years.

Speaking Truth to Piety: Pam Brown and Jennifer Maiden

The subject position rancour presumes is undoubtedly gendered. All the prophets who have books named after them in the Bible are male; so are all the Roman satirists extant. In the era of Pope and Dryden there were some female satirists: Anne Finch, who wrote of “Woman, armed with spleen”, and Anne Killegrew, who longed to “speak the truth” as Cassandra does in Greek myth. But they were few and far between.70 This has changed both because women have a lot to be angry about and because of a shift, presumably caused by the larger and more impersonal scale of modernity, in the target of rancour. Instead of denouncing individual malefactors or a corrupt state of affairs, rancour now stands athwart a consensus. It is now not so much a malcontent guest nursing a grudge from within the party as a gate crasher, uninvited and angry. Pam Brown’s poetry profits from its lack of clarity: just enough of the picture is provided for the reader’s impression to gel, but not so much so that the author’s presence becomes dogmatic or monologic:

Lyn McCredden has described Brown as “one of Australia’s lesser-known great poets”, both “philosophically and technically rich”.72 The idea of rancour as a recalcitrant party guest is here vividly enacted. In the “ecocide ceremony”, there is an uncomfortable proximity between the ecological and the ecocidal, as the easy transferability of “just change meadow to paddock” denotes. The “atavistic circuit” could in other circumstances connote a reassuring back-to-nature romp, and the royal tartan blanket an avatar of a rural Highland fling. But these easy solutions are ruled out from the start. All that is left is the individual voice, and this is the characteristic operation of rancour. It retrieves the initiative of individualism away from the appropriation of free will by the free market. Rancour reclaims the genuinely personal, albeit in a state of extreme outrage, from the metronomic individualism of free-market economics.

Ecocide can despoil, but a cleaned-up world is that destruction’s hellish antipode. In “Pique”, Brown viscerally evokes a neoliberal dystopia, a world in which all idiosyncrasy is eliminated, the urban grit of late modernity all washed away so that the centre has been vacated by both people and meaning:

“Silent not spiritual”: the late-modern deadlock evoked so powerfully in Elizabeth Harrower’s fiction might have been thought to be soluble by an eruption of spirituality, even of the parodic sort, as instanced in the crucifixion of Himmelfarb in Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot. But this silence is antiseptic, eviscerated; it is what Brown calls “the tedium of the blessed”. Against this tedium, one could muster all sorts of polysyllabic critiques gleaned from Continental theorists, from Jacques Ellul through to Bernard Stiegler, but none would pack a punch emotionally: for this one must turn to Brown’s compressed, utterly disillusioned rancour. And utterly disillusioned she is, as neither the past nor intellectual activity brings recourse or respite.

Nostalgia offers no alternative; remembering a time when things were otherwise provides only empty solace. For a poet like Hope, his own cultivated rage was the only redemptive feature in the frame, but this poet does not offer herself that way out.

Yet rancour also leaves room for declared opposition. In 2005, a couple of years into the war in Iraq, I read Jennifer Maiden’s “Costume Jewelry”, a poem attacking the then US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, to an audience at New York City’s hip Housing Works secondhand bookshop. I had included Maiden in a selection of contemporary Australian poetry in Philip Fried’s Manhattan Review. The audience was politically left-leaning, the scruffier hipster descendants of the Howards in Harrower’s In Certain Circles. They were not pro-Bush or pro-war. But one member of the audience found the end of the poem truly outrageous:

The audience member, a young, white male whose clothing denoted vaguely countercultural affectations, objected to the play on Rice’s first name in “con dolcezza”, a verbal gesture he considered derogatory in a personal sense, maybe even racist, as Rice is African American. He averred that it was not that Rice was not starving that was the problem; it was her policies that were wrong, and many wealthy people had opposed the Iraq War. He was reading Maiden’s poem as primarily an attack on certain policies or politics, when in fact it might have been an attack on neoliberalism as such. To be a decision maker in the twenty-first century, someone who decides whether or not to wage war, is to be privileged, and the writer of rancour undermines that privilege in the same way that Pope and Hope undermined the privilege of the poetasters, sycophants, trendies and imposters they disliked. The excess that made even a young hipster man who was politically unsympathetic to Rice object to the ferocity of the poem was precisely the point. The unabated nastiness is what gives Maiden’s voice the appalling, unpalatable vigour to burst a desiccated consensus. As Jal Nicholl comments, Maiden’s “fascination is not with world historical figures but with their epigones”.76 The same could be said of eighteenth-century satirists such as Pope, and inevitably produces rhetorical excess. Epigones, derivative followers, can only take so much venom, while world-historical figures can absorb venom infinitely.

But the young New Yorker’s critique of “Costume Jewelry” did, in a larger sense, signal the limitations of rancour as a mode. Rancour may have a savage, visceral appeal. But its shelf life is short, and satiric anger has seldom been a sustainable mode: its venom is contingent on timeliness; its polemics, if not ad hominem, are directed at passing rather than permanent aspects of the human condition. The American critic Brooke Allen, reviewing the essays of Muriel Spark (whose The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie we will see influence Eleanor Catton in Chapter 9) quotes Spark as objecting to literature of “sentiment and emotion” (what in the next chapter I will call “concern”) and advocating instead “the arts of satire and of ridicule. And I see no other living art form for the future. Because we have come to a moment in history when we are surrounded on all sides and oppressed by the absurd”. Allen comments sagely: “Each generation seems to think its own to be uniquely absurd; each has been wrong.”77 This delusion extends to Hope, who thought the “chattering apes” of modernism were sillier than average. It is why the Augustan aspects of his work have paled, and the Orphic ones have had to redeem them. It is why rancour, for all the achievement of the female writers discussed here, is still associated with a male-gendered posture that seeks rhetorical strength through heroic, solitary dissent.

Why then the salience of rancour with respect to Australia? Because the Australian literary condition, as constituted by the world and internalised by Australia, has to promise reassurance in order to overcome marginality. The world does not look to Australia for bad news, or accept bad news from Australia in the way it does from, say, France, from Zola to Sartre to Houellebecq. The world gets, or is willing to receive, so little news from Australia that there is immense pressure for what news does get through to be good news. Rancour allows Australian literature to deflect these expectations.

The danger of this global complacency regarding Australia is especially acute when it comes to Indigenous issues. Anita Heiss, in Am I Black Enough for You? defies conventional stereotypes of Aboriginal identity.78 She travels to world capitals and paints the town red, writes stylishly self-conscious “chick-lit”, is glamorous and flirtatious – all while making clear that she is not forsaking an activist agenda. She does a lot of direct community work and sees her other activities as community work by other means. In refusing expectations of what a black woman should be – self-sacrificing, stoic, suffering – Heiss is at once an Indigenous activist and a with-it prognosticator, both Wiradjuri and, through her father, Austrian, but she seeks no consolation in hybridity. Whereas whites often look to non-whites either to preserve an “authentic” version of an imagined pre-neoliberal era, or to embrace the commercial imperative of neoliberalism all the more for not being white, Heiss dwells within consumer society and revels in its pleasures, but is neither bound by it nor takes it too seriously. Although neither satirist nor prophet in the sense of some of the other writers examined in this chapter, Heiss is unafraid to speak truth to power, or to piety. She notes that the “success of Aboriginal authors” – she names some of the most prominent – in “getting French translations of our work is partly because some French people are quite comfortable to slag off the Brits for their own colonial exploits. But to consider their own, well, that’s another story”.79 The usual pious Australian attitude to the transnational is gone; in its place there is a frank acknowledgement of the motives of those who embrace Australian Indigenous culture, even if it is unseemly; yet, as in Tsiolkas, there is a certain Australian patriotism, even if it manifests itself in a refusal to see other people as inherently more altruistic than Australians.

Much like Ouyang Yu, who disdains the Asian Australian roles the broader society assigns him while remaining a passionate and much-admired advocate for Asian Australian concerns, Heiss can express such challenging opinions because her activist bona fides are unquestioned. Many of the figures in this chapter have, despite their rancour, also been constructive: Hope as a devoted teacher and mentor; Kinsella in his environmental activism and his fostering of worldwide poetic communities; Brown in her editorial and critical work. To use rancour to see through the ludicrous pageant of life’s posturings can be ascetic. But it is not necessarily destructive. Through its ability to challenge consensus, rancour can go beyond critique to offer contemporary Australian writers an alternative to cruel inequality.