Larvatus Prodeo

Well, as I noted on another thread about Germaine Greer, I’ve bought and now read On Rage. I’d like this post to stick to discussion of the merits of her arguments, which I continue to think has been something largely absent from most of the debate to date. I also think that very few people who’ve rushed into print have actually read her book, and instead taken the odd comment here or there that she’s made in the course of promoting it and projected all sorts of things onto her.

Even those who have seem to be reacting to parts instead of the whole – for instance, Marcia Langton, describing the remarks about her in the book as an “astonishing attack on me”. That’s quite odd, because Langton is being challenged rather than attacked in the book – challenged to agree with Greer’s view that – on the basis of the evidence – the literal appropriation of Indigenous women’s bodies by white men, something Greer documents with footnoted citations from both historians and contemporary sources – is part of the reason for Indigenous male rage. All the rest of what Langton says – accusations of “a 1970s style argument”, a “panoply of protest slogans deployed as social theory” and so on – unless I’m missing something, appears misdirected, or at least based on inference rather than the text itself. On p. 88 of the book, any reasonable reader would see that Langton is not the one being accused of “collusion” with the state, what she took umbrage at, and that in fact the point being made is that the differential impacts of gender on the colonised is still used by whitefellas as a lever to avoid responsibility and to divide people. There’s a disagreement of view, but not an accusation, and it hardly justifies Langton’s claim that the essay is “racist”.

What Greer is doing in On Rage is a provocation to the degree that it’s asking a range of people differently positioned within Australian culture to reflect on the totality of what has occurred and how ineffectual slogans are – and there are slogans within the talk of the “responsibilities” crew as well – in the absence of both understanding and a genuine coming to terms with the parade of extraordinary horrors that is the story of Indigenous dispossession. Greer’s essay doesn’t make for comfortable reading, and that’s the point. Langton may be justified in taking umbrage at some of the things Greer has said in the course of promoting it, and I can quite understand that, but I think in this instance it’s vital to separate the force and quality of the argument in the text itself from the personality of its author. Much of what has been published and said elsewhere, for instance in Greer’s Sydney Morning Herald op/ed adds to (and in a way detracts from) the argument in the book, rather than reproduces it. Greer might be her own worst enemy in this case, but that doesn’t absolve her interlocutors from reacting with their own rage, or at least spleen.

Continue reading ‘On Rage: Germaine Greer reviewed’