One of the rather egregious questions on last week’s Q&A asked the panel to comment on why there was no contemporary political fiction of the stature of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s. As with a lot of the queries posed on Q&A, it’s a bit of a silly one, but it did remind me that we discussed political fiction here at LP a while back, and to give folks the heads up that American speculative fiction writer and anthologist Jeff VanderMeer is blogging about political fiction at The Huffington Post.
[VanderMeer, along with regular guest bloggers, writes regularly at Ecstatic Days.]
Didn’t watch the show myself, but was wondering why the question was ‘particularly egregious’?
Thought this might resonate:
“There was a piece in The Australian recently by a columnist called Greg Sheridan attacking Australian wiriting – saying how dull it was. It didn’t deal with any of the big issues. It was all about middle-class people looking at their navels. It was quite clear he had a political agenda to push, and this may connect with the fact that there is a section of Australian society at the moment that wants to dismantle the Literature Board and the Australia Council. And it was also quite clear that he hadn’t actually read anything much in contemporary Australian writing.”
Amanda Lohrey, 1989.
I quite liked Andrew McGahan’s Underground.
Sheridan wouldnt care for it tho!
No contemporary political fiction of the stature of Alexander Solzhenitsyn?
Well…not strictly speaking fiction, like ‘ A day in the life…’, but what about
‘ Wie alles anfing’ by Bommi Baumann?
What about ‘ Bad’ by James Carr?
Or locally ‘ Neddy’ by Neddy Smith?
Think ‘ Prison genre’ Fiction by other means… and who needs fiction anyway, when we have the Liberal and National parties.
‘And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, …’
Lefty E — so did I — thought it was hilarious and very clever.
Can anyone tell me if here were any interesting answers to the question?
Love the Amanda Lohrey quotation. Like her, I wonder how much Australian fiction Greg Sheridan had actually read. I also wonder whether he knows anything about the history of the novel. If he thinks fiction about ‘middle-class people looking at their navels’ is bad fiction, or if he thinks fiction can’t take that as its subject matter without also addressing questions of (say) poverty or race or power relations, then presumably he dismisses Anna Karenina, Middlemarch and pretty much all of E.M. Forster just for starters. (Actually Forster is a good example. A Passage to India is probably still one of the best novels anyone’s ever written about empire, colonialism and race, and that’s got navel-gazing middle-class people in it right and left, not to mention several navel-gazing high-caste Hindus.)
Fiction works through analogy, allegory, metaphor and metonymy. It can still be intensely ‘political’ but it almost never works as fiction if it’s just a mimetic representation of politics, and it’s not supposed to be polemic or propaganda. For that, we have non-fiction.
AW at #1, I think it’s a silly question because Solzhenitsyn wrote as he did because of the circumstances in which he found himself – which are hardly comparable to those of Australia in 2008. Perhaps the better answer might be to consider whether some Indigenous Australian fiction evokes the same sort of depths of political affect.
I loathe Sheridan. I do think he’s right, in that I believe there is definitely a literary establishment in Australia, dedicated to pushing a certain type of fiction (notably, the fiction written by said establishment itself).
However – no offense at all intended PC – if you only limit yourself to the books that get reviewed in the paper or nominated for the Vogel or whatever, you are doing yourself – and hundreds of authors – a pretty grave disservice.
Furthermore, despite my belief in said establishment, it’s an awfully big brush to try and tar an amorphous group of people with. The idea that they can turn out the odd gem (much as it pains me!
) shouldn’t be so revolutionary.
I don’t know, when people grizzle about books in general, or fiction in general, or a particular genre in general, being shithouse, I like to think the reality is this: Most books, most of the time, are shithouse, or at least badly average. Ever was, ever will be.
I think that’s fine – that leaves me with more excellent books than I’ll ever be able to read. Furthermore, it gives me great hope – in readers, and writing. If shit like this can get published, I think, then the good stuff will surely always shine through and if readers – bless em, we all do this sometimes – are so desperate for narrative, for stories and characters and make believe, they won’t just suspend belief, they put it on a low-orbit satellite and push through writing so chunky it makes Chum look like consomme, than I have no fear about the future of books.
OMG! Was Sheridan writing way back in 89? Does this mean we’ve got to put up with 20 more years of him a la Frank Devine? Let’s hope the death of the newspaper long precedes the death of the book (which I think will never happen).
It sounds to me like the question was a reformatting of that delightful old staple, ‘where are Australia’s Nobel Prize winning novelists?’ ‘Stature’ is the giveaway.
The novel just is a middle-class form, and looking at one’s navel is the only way to understand where one came from.
I’m just reading Frank Moorhouse’s 1988 novel Forty-Seventeen at the moment and it’s middle-class navel-gazing at its finest. As Dr Cat mentioned on the previous political fiction blogging thread the third in Moorhouse’s League of Nations trilogy is coming soon, and set partly in Canberra. I’m looking forward to it.
I read Andrew Hutchinson’s Rohypnol and Malcolm Knox’s Jamaica last summer and enjoyed both as explorations of the class divisions amongst strata of Australian white bourgeois men.
Let’s not forget working class navel gazing – Frank Hardy?
There’s an interesting question about the perceived class affiliations of writers and indeed the status of the writer lurking around in the interstices of all this, as well as one about class and cultural taste.
Quite right too. Good thing one does not thus limit oneself, eh?
This isn’t snark either, it’s a real question: apart from the fact that there is some kind of ‘literary establishment’ everywhere that there is literature, what (else) is that belief based on?
Actually, the whole Greg Sheridan thing is all coming back to me now. Lohrey was right, there was an open attack around that time on the Australia Council in general and the Lit Board in particular. As I recall it was summer and a particularly slow news month; the whole kerfuffle was a beat-up based on a piece of misinformation, if I remember rightly.
No great contemporary political fiction?
So I take it nobody in those parts reads William T. Vollmann. That’s too bad, you’re missing out on some astonishing stuff.
I can recommend Jose Saramago’s ‘Seeing’. Its an hilarious account of the state’s descent into authoritarianism following an election which no voters turned up to!
I dont know how much you folks follow the Portuguese lit scene – but obviously – in ine with certain other obsessions – I do. Saramago is a Nobel prize winner, and one of me fave auths.
I knew there was a book I was looking for, thanks Lefty E! Now I have the author. All I could remember, after reading a review some time ago, was it was something about not seeing, and the vote.
j_p_z – Vollman? After “Whores for Gloria” and two-thirds of “The Ice Shirt” I gave up and went back to Pynchon. Is he worth another try given my antipathy for his interminable novel about people being vile to each other in Greenland or am I likely to be similarly irritated?
I also feel SciFi has ended up as a political genre, if it wasn’t always (Ken McLeod, China Mieville, even arguably Iain Banks).
No worries Grace! I think you’ll like it – though its a master writer toying with the craft – and has some pitfalls as a result. He takes the piss a bit.
Better regarded is Blindness – an earlier novel of his in which the entire popualtion of a city goes blind. I havent read that yet – but Im told its grouse.
I think you can make a good case that it was, among other things.
Oh I didn’t mean to imply that you did that at all PC! I was just clumsily trying to say that basing your reading only of what’s reviewed in the papers would be a disservice, and was worried you would take offense for the obvious reason.
I didn’t mean to imply that you do that – you definitely don’t.
Well, I can’t speak for anywhere else, it may very well be true everywhere else, but I’ve only been here. I base that statement off a few different things: my four years or so of arts + festival reporting and the incessant reading of other writers on lit in Aus at the time, my tangential involvement with two state writers centres, my brief tenure as a book reviewer and involvement w/ publishers through that. So I’m not coming out of nowhere on this.
I know it’s old hat, but I do think Davis’ Outsiders made some relevant points. The Meanjin crowd [shudder] is the establishment I’m thinking of. I would supplement that with the relentless promotion of some Australian authors over others that don’t ‘fit the theme’ (I would point to Malcolm Knox as one of these, Richard Flanagan arguably).
Getting into more subjective territory: Writers writing about other writers. Garner on Carey, Carey on Barnes, etc. etc. Class porn – bourgeois writers that wouldn’t know a prole if they trod on one in their spats writing in the most condescending and unrealistic way about poor people, criminals, etc.
The complete disregard for genre in Australia – unless it’s a ‘literary’ author slumming (See McGahan, Andrew). Compare that with the States and the UK: say what you like about Rankin and Pelecanos (personally I don’t rate Pelecanos), but they are critically acclaimed and regarded as intellectual equals to your Eggers, or Safran Foers or whatever. Don’t even get me started on other genres. You can see this disregard in every token 50 word review that gets posted on these books in the paper, because somehow a genre become isn’t worth the intellectual space of a real review – unless it’s a literary author. You can also see it in every Australia Council grant that has to go to genre writers with literary pretensions/delusions (see Armano, Venero).
I guess what I’m saying is that I see literature as an adjective, not a genre, and in my opinion Australia is the complete opposite. Utter shit that a nine year old could read (if they could stand it) gets promoted as literature – particularly Oz literature – because it ticks the right boxers (writer is a weirdo of some description, book about poor people, must be a _sad_ story, preferably some crime and/or abuse. If you can jam the country in there, so much the better, and a serving of colonialism would be nice, ta).
Meanwhile, writers that I feel are genuinely talented just get on with the job of writng books, getting cracker reviews overseas, and reasonably or in some cases indifferent reviews here. I don’t like it, it’s PR in the worst sense.
I think we’re all underrating Shamahan -and the Organ generally – as skilled exponents and patrons of fine political fiction.
Its only cos its serialised that you OZ Council funded snobs aren’t including it, right!
Hardly anything but English seems to be considered here. Is there n one who has read any recent Grass? Or Martin Walser? Or Elfriede Jelinek?
Incidentally, one of the best-ever Australian political novels is D H Lawrence’s Kangaroo. He really understood the creepy suburban right-wingers who still infest the place.
Agree on Kangaroo, 06 – a classic, documenting the brief, crazed rise of the New Guard.
I would however point out that Jose Saramago is Portuguese.
… I believe there is definitely a literary establishment in Australia, dedicated to pushing a certain type of fiction (notably, the fiction written by said establishment itself).
Of course, but that’s inevitable in a country with as small a literary output as Oz. And it’s not only true of Oz – try being a successful writer in the UK without licking the right arses. And they have much less excuse.
Most books, most of the time, are shithouse, or at least badly average. Ever was, ever will be.
Absolutely true, too. There’s the rub – life is too short to waste on bad books. But how can we find the gold among the dross without relying on the recommendations of some sort of literary establishment? That’s why I don’t get so annoyed at the thought of neglected masterpieces as at the thought of crap being successful.
Apologies in advance for long reply to patrickg
I’d be wildly OT if I addressed this point by point (I agree with you about some of them, though am not sure who you mean by ‘the Meanjin crowd’ — does Meanjin have a crowd? What it does have is a new editor but I’m guessing you may be going further back than that) so I’ll go for one general thing I notice about your comment, which is the use of the passive voice — you don’t say who it is that you think is doing all this nefarious stuff.
Much of it is the work of busy literary editors on newspapers, many of whom have been appointed precisely because they are journalists rather than ‘literary’ people and there is pressure on them to stay in the ‘Is it news?’ mindset, and of course ‘news’ is recognisable names. I’m not saying I like it, just that there are reasons for it other than conspiratorial ones. Also, there are fairly high turnovers in those jobs (except at the Age) so it’s not as if power-and-influence are being grasped and held by a small number of people. They also have extremely limited space and the amount of space is determined by how much advertising space it is carrying.
I suppose what I noticed in your original comment was the suggestion, albeit faint, that there’s some kind of conspiracy theory. I see the literary establishment (such as it is) as much more haphazard than that, lots of different centres of power and influence, lots of people at each others’ throats, etc. And I know for a fact that there is wide variety and rapid turnover (sometimes excessively rapid. Ahem) on the prize-judging committees, of which there are, these days, many. I don’t think it’s a Mafia of shadowy sinister figures in cahoots, more your chaotic barnyard — full of dogs chasing cats, bulls getting into the cow paddock, roosters fighting, and leftover vegies being peddled off a barrow by the side of the highway.
So to speak.
I know what you mean about genre fiction, but surely crime (at least) gets a decent run here, at least these days? Corris, Maloney and most of all Peter Temple are much admired by even the most serious highbrows as far as I can see, not to mention the ‘crossovers’ like McGahan and Dorothy Porter. But I don’t think we could really get down to brass tacks on the negatives without naming names, which I most certainly am not going to get Mark into defo-related trouble by doing. Again, some of this is structural — this time it’s the publishing houses who ascribe genre categories and put the ‘literary fiction’ label on things.
That is cruelly accurate enough to be very funny. But again, ‘gets promoted’ by whom? If you mean the publishers, well, it’s their product and they want to sell it; stands to reason they would promote it. They like their authors to be young, outgoing and good-looking, too, for the same kind of reason. But from what I’ve seen, the writers who continue to attract readers over more than one book are attracting readers because people like to read their work, not because they’re getting a lot of promotional hype.
Who are you thinking of in particular? Naming names is safe if it’s praise!
Oooh, good response PC! my response will probably be as equally long – sorry! I actually think we’re agreeing on most things in a a way (didn’t know about Meanjin new editor, your guess was accurate).
It was my reference to Davis that twigged the conspiracy thing, wasn’t it? That’s something I actually disagreed with him about. I view it more as a, hmmmm, hegemony isn’t quite the right word, but do you know what I mean?
For example, when I was freelancing, I was under certain pressures to write a certain way, about certain things. This wasn’t always the case, and there was rarely anything overt (sometimes there was however); it was more an understanding. I could write about things another way, sometimes, but it would be a lot more difficult for me, and I believe that if I kept that up, I would have been asked to move on (or rather not asked to contribute).
Now, everybody knew about these pressures. I did, the editors did, the subjects did and the promoters certainly did – and they would help facilitate the kind of articles/reviews/whatever that they wanted.
I say “they” there, but I mean me, also. I was a working writer. God knows waiting on a cheque is bad enough; I needed the money more than I could afford to push too much, or disregard the unspoken brief.
And much as I disliked it, I regarded all the other people in this chain in the same way: not motivated by a desire for evil or what have you, but with their own priorities, that usually didn’t feature the reader prominently.
The costs for not playing were reduced access, more useless responses, etc. etc. I’m sure you’ve experienced some of this, though your stature is infinitely greater than mine ever was.
So you had all these people, essentially working in a kind of tandem to sell things under the guise of articles and interviews, reviews more rarely. Sometimes this was fine, and the aims didn’t clash at all, but when they did, my experience was integrity would suffer.
I mention the absence of the reader; people were reading the articles, but most of them were people involved in the means of producing it – or something like it – in the first place.
Which is long way of saying I believe that in Aus literature, there is a perceived vested interest to promote a certain type of book/story, regardless of merit. The kind of book that will get picked up by the critics, who are also writers, who have had the same publisher for 20 years, that sponsors the writing festivals, etc. etc.
In this kind of environment, I feel that there is essentially no difference between editor/writer/author, etc. because they are all working to the same aim, and I would add a certain type of reader in that assessment, too.
What makes me feel bad about it is that – by lieu of their persona/subject, these writers are getting a (almost) free ride on their books, and foisting wheelbarrows of dogshit on the public in the process, turning legions of regular people away from ‘literature’, because they are led to believe it can only be rubbishy stuff appropos my description above, when it can be so much more!
Not very articulate or clear, do you see where I’m getting at though? I would tie this into ideas of a ‘culture industry’ in a way, also.
Writers who are domestically under-appreciated, off the top of my head:
Lit: Malcolm Knox
Richard Flanagan (I reiterate, to a degree; critically he’s regarded so-so)
Shirley Hazzard
In popular fiction: Max Barry
Fantasy: Garth Nix
This is just off the top off my head – the cruelty is we’re not aware of some of the great domestic writers we have because they don’t get a guernsey locally because they don’t fit the rules in one way or another.
This is a really quick comment from work and I’ve got a class to teach in half an hour, but I wonder whether some of the difference in perception here isn’t an inside/outside thing. If you’re on the inside of anything (for instance, a government department, or a University Arts Faculty) you’re in the middle of all the swirls of factionalism, sheer fuckups and incompetence, favouritism, agenda setting, etc (and of course all the good things). But from the outside, maybe the literary gatekeepers of various kinds (publishers, editors, mags, newspapers, funding bodies, marketers etc) appear somewhat monolithic. The two perceptions can both be true.
That’s not to diss absolutely anyone, just a hypothesis based on being on the inside of some other things.
Ps – re E M Forster – there’s a review in the latest NYRB discussing his radio talks and the perception of him as a “middle brow” writer. For mine, he’s fabulous, and as well as the many virtues of Passage to India, Howard’s End in particular does astonishingly well in capturing the way social change positions and inflects individual lives – among other things.
Mark up above at #6 is quite right to point out the problems of using Solzhenitsyn as a touchstone in this regard; the extraordinary circumstances, etc etc, and perhaps we should be thankful to live in a society which is not so extreme and adrift as to engender the circumstances that produce a man like that.
The question is also weird for its impatience; the fact is, English-language literature of the 20th-century was up to its eyeballs in great political fiction of every kind. We have become so impatient for a new genius every few months, we expect a generation-defining work to happen roughly five times per decade. But the truth is sometimes literature has a bit of down-time; we might go a few decades, maybe even a century, before a true masterpiece pops up, and it wouldn’t mean the end of the literature, just a pause.
There’s also the question of, What do you want or expect of “political fiction”? Do you want it to painstakingly catalogue the factual truth of a political situation, as Solzhenitsyn’s work did? But we have a free press and journalists and blogs, so maybe we don’t need fiction per se to do exactly that. Besides, I wouldn’t trust the idea of getting one’s political views from a made-up story, if more factual means are available. Or do we want the mysterious frisson and meditative quality of Art, simply deriving its matter and materials from the world of politics, like you get from say Graham Greene or “Gravity’s Rainbow,” which tells complex poetic truths in dream-forms, that don’t necessarily map accurately against a historian’s archive, but which we sense are saying something artistically “true” about humans?
“Stories we can understand are just badly told.” — Bert Brecht
There’s also the case of a writer like say Tom Wolfe, who is as fine a political observer as there is writing today, but who says a lot of things the bien-pensant class doesn’t care to hear, and who is thus dismissed as a guy who “doesn’t really count.” There are plenty of great “Denisovich”-like novellas to be written about topics that might make a high-minded social democrat very uncomfortable indeed.
FWIW, I think another fine political writer who isn’t mentioned often enough is the playwright Wallace Shawn, who wrote the fine political plays “The Fever” and “Aunt Dan and Lemon,” as well as the scary masterpiece “The Designated Mourner.” Good heavens, I saw Shawn and Andre Gregory do “Designated Mourner” in an abandoned building in lower Manhattan a few years ago, and it was days before my blood un-froze.
There’s a lot of good political playwriting going on (and REAMS of bad stuff, too!), if you stretch your idea of the “political”; Suzan-Lori Parks comes to mind, for instance. Tony Kushner, from years ago (what on earth is he up to these days?), and others.
Dr. S — w/r/t Vollmann, I think you’ve had the misfortune to try two of his three least satisfying books (the third being the mad, nigh-unreadable “You Bright and Risen Angels,” which however is worth looking at just to read the insane last two pages with the drawings, one of the craziest passages I’ve ever seen in a novel.)
What I’d recommend is “The Rifles” (weird and difficult, but very beautiful), and the story collections “The Rainbow Stories” and “Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs”. He’s also recently published some sort of gigantic thing about world politics, but I’m afraid to look.
You. Lucky. Bastard.
PatrickG, I’d have said all the writers you named were doing just fine – not overlooked or under-appreciated. The majority of them get face-out shelf space in A&R.
Meanjin is interesting, actually. If there could truthfully have been said to be a ‘crowd’ around that journal (and I doubt that, actually, given how much different writing each issue typically contains) then it is right now in the middle of an extensive changing of the guard. Mark Davis is a member of the editorial committee, btw (as am I).
Literary scenes in Australia are like a Venn diagram that overlaps so extensively that there are almost no portions that don’t belong in several sets. Novelists work in publishing and sit on funding body committees, short story writers judge nonfiction prizes, academics speak at writers festivals, poets write book reviews and place bookseller orders, literary festival organisers edit anthologies and teach sessional creative writing courses. Small pond etc. You see this described as, variously, incestuous, backscratching and so forth.
My impression though is that everyone except the very powerful and ambitious people at the top of the various pyramids would prefer that there was greater separation between the different spheres. It’s hard and awful having to judge and rank and generally distinguish between the general worthiness of your colleagues and comrades.
If there is a strong separation along genre lines, then I think it is not enforced or observed by writers/editors/reviewers, but by publishers and marketers, whose interests are the only ones served by making sure a category of books only needs to be promoted to one narrowly defined ‘market.’
But Laura how can you say this, when you pick up the paper and read the reviews of “lit” versus the tiny genre sections, that are not in fiction, but packaged as “genre”.
When genre writers at festivals are regularly (not 100% I grant, but majority) shunted into the ‘genre’ panels, as if they wouldn’t have anything to say about characterisation, etc.?
When the writers, as you say, are the editors, are the reviewers, etc. The publishers and marketers – for all their power – aren’t putting guns to anyone’s heads. Everyone participates and perpetuates this, imho. I can understand – I did it myself – but sometimes I think it’s all too easy to blame evil publishers for everything, whereas the system creates a lot of winners, as well as losers. It’s just I feel the reader is the particular loser here.
Does that make any kind of sense? I know I’m not being very clear here.
Btw, it will be interesting to see how Meanjin progresses. I didn’t mean to single it out so!
Moderators do please feel free to tell us to knock it off and get back on-topic. This is just a digression into the politics of publishing fiction but some of its issues are worth pursuing.
If I were still a literary editor I think my answer would probably be that genre fiction (crime, fantasy, historical and chick lit, at least) has a HUGE readership and doesn’t stand in need of any more critical attention than it already gets. This kind of argument runs all through all the arts, I think. (Should we fund country music? Yes/No (tick one).)
It also feeds into general arguments about tokenism v ghettoisation, of the kind we used to have when we were trying to sneak one or two books by women onto the university literature course in the late 70s and early 80s. Not that women got many books published back then, so there wasn’t that much to choose from. Hard to believe now, I know.
There are some specifics we probably do need to get down to, if we are to get any further. I know one needs to respect people’s privacy and so on, but I think you need to say what city you’re in, at least, because this sounds kind of odd to me.
Which paper(s)? Which genres?
Which city? Adelaide Writers’ Week does maybe one panel like this (probably not even that any more) and then puts the genre writers on all sorts of others based on other criteria — character, theme, social issues, moral issues — and many of them also get a spot to themselves where they can talk about whatever they like. But then, we were the first and remain the best.
*Ducks*
I do however know what you mean by this –
– but I only ever give it serious thought when it involves a writer I personally dislike.
I wrote a long answer about your list of neglected writers and the computer ate it, but then Laura answered it much as I would have done. Just an extra point on Hazzard though — she has not lived in Australia or had any connection with it since she was sixteen, as she is the first to point out. She nonetheless won the Miles Franklin in 2004 for The Great Fire and was extremely surprised, repeating that she didn’t think of herself as particularly Australian. Two of the other people on the shortlist were Carey and Coetzee — and there was also Elliot Perlman who also gets far better treatment OS than he does here but who on the other hand is a ‘literary’ writer so I don’t know where you’d put him. Flanagan’s won lots of prizes and when he got viciously trashed (as did Perlman) by Peter Craven, a number of Aust Lit heavies sprang to his defence in print.
Also, I need to know more about these wheelbarrows of dogshit of which you speak. It occurs to me that naming titles rather than authors would be fine — which books do you think belong in this barrowload category? We may simply be getting down to personal taste here — you cited Venero Armanno as one of your dislikes but I thought his novel The Volcano was quite wonderful and badly underrated everywhere except in his home state. So maybe we’re now just talking taste.
Can I just say that it’s never occurred to me to think of reviewing as promotion, and have only very rarely had a sense from editors that promotion was what they wanted me to do.
This is a good digression!