Christos Tsiolkas and the Fiction of Critique

Andrew Mccann

Description

The first theoretically driven monograph on Tsiolkas’s full body of work to date, offering highly innovative readings and a critical analysis of the writer’s literary success.

Christos Tsiolkas is one of the most recognizable and internationally successful literary novelists working in Australia today. He is also one of the country’s most politically engaged writers. These terms – recognition, commercial success, political engagement – suggest a relationship to forms of public discourse that belies the extremely confronting nature of much of Tsiolkas’s fiction and his deliberate attempt to cultivate a literary persona oriented to notions of blasphemy, obscenity and what could broadly be called a pornographic sensibility. ‘Christos Tsiolkas and the Fiction of Critique’ traces these contradictions against Tsiolkas’s acute sense of the waning of working-class identity, and reads his work as a sustained examination of the ways in which literature might express an opposition to capitalist modernity.

Preface; Introduction: Pasolini’s Ashes; 1. The Down-Curve of Capital: ‘Loaded’; 2. Inside the Machine: From ‘Loaded’ to ‘The Jesus Man’; 3. The Pornographic Logic of Global Capitalism: ‘Dead Europe’; 4. In the Suburbs of World Literature: From ‘Dead Europe’ to ‘The Slap’; 5. The Politics of the Bestseller: ‘The Slap’ and ‘Barracuda’; Conclusion: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Politics of Fiction; Notes; Bibliography; Index

Sujets

• Literary criticism
• LGBT

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 15 juin 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783084487
• Langue: English

Extrait

Christos Tsiolkas and the Fiction of Critique
Christos Tsiolkas and the Fiction of Critique
Politics, Obscenity, Celebrity
Andrew McCann
Anthem Press An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2015 by ANTHEM PRESS 75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK and 244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
Copyright © Andrew McCann 2015
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McCann, Andrew (Andrew Lachlan), author. Christos Tsiolkas and the fiction of critique : politics, obscenity, celebrity / Andrew McCann. pages cm ISBN 978-1-78308-403-6 (hard back : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-78308-404-3 (paper back : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-78308-405-0 (pdf ebook) – ISBN 978-1-78308-448-7 (epub ebook) 1. Tsiolkas, Christos, 1965—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PR9619.3.T786Z75 2015 823’.914–dc23 2015007534
ISBN-13: 978 1 78308 403 6 (Hbk) ISBN-10: 1 78308 403 0 (Hbk)
ISBN-13: 978 1 78308 404 3 (Pbk) ISBN-10: 1 78308 404 9 (Pbk)
Cover image by Zoe Ali.
This title is also available as an ebook.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction. Pasolini’s Ashes
1.   The Down-Curve of Capital: Loaded
2.   Inside the Machine: From Loaded to The Jesus Man
3.   The Pornographic Logic of Global Capitalism: Dead Europe
4.   In the Suburbs of World Literature: From Dead Europe to The Slap
5.   The Politics of the Bestseller: The Slap and Barracuda
Conclusion. Aesthetic Autonomy and the Politics of Fiction
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Some parts of this book have already appeared in journal articles. Parts of chapter 3 have appeared in “Christos Tsiolkas and the Pornographic Logic of Commodity Capitalism,” Australian Literary Studies , 25.1 (May 2010) and in “Discrepant Cosmopolitanism and Contemporary Fiction: Reading the Inhuman in Christos Tsiolkas’s Dead Europe and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 ,” Antipodes , 24.2 (December 2010). Parts of chapter 4 have appeared in “Professing the Popular: Political Fiction circa 2006,” Australian Literary Studies , 32.2 (2007). I am grateful to both journals and their editors (Leigh Dale and Nick Burns) for permission to use that material here. I am also grateful to Christos Tsiolkas for his permission to reproduce the entirety of the poem “Pasolini’s Ashes,” from Jump Cuts (Milsons Points, NSW: Random House, 1996), in my introduction.
PREFACE
According to Tom Shone, Christos Tsiolkas was “plucked from semi-obscurity and set on the literary rock-star track by his fourth novel, The Slap .” This fairly innocuous comment appeared near the opening of a Sunday Times article that Shone had based on an interview with Tsiolkas, conducted in New York in 2010. The setting is important. Shone and Tsiolkas are on the roof deck of the “quirky” and “boutique” Roger Smith Hotel on Lexington Avenue. Tsiolkas is apparently awed by the Manhattan skyline. He is also fiddling with his cell phone and juggling other commitments in a way befitting for someone in the middle of an American book tour.
The article is fairly typical of the manner in which literary journalism introduces, or frames, an ostensibly new writer: the implicit approval of the marketplace is registered in an attention to the trappings of celebrity, while the distance between Manhattan and the suburbs of Melbourne, in which The Slap was set, also tells a story about international circulation that is a crucial part of a writer’s claim on our attention. As Pascale Casanova has suggested, literary value can be as much a matter of geography as it is textuality, and like it or not, Australia is still one of the suburbs of world literature. In fairness to Shone, his article does make passing mention of Loaded and Dead Europe , and it does list some of their themes: “history, migration, blood, belonging, poverty, refuge, anti-Semitism.” 1 The idea of plucking Tsiolkas from “semi-obscurity” might have made sense to a British or North American readership, but to anyone who had paid even fleeting attention to the Australian literary scene over the preceding fifteen years, during which time Tsiolkas’s fiction had become a staple of critical discussion, it was likely to be jarring. Nevertheless, the comment did highlight one of the most salient aspects of Tsiolkas’s career: even after the enormous Australian interest generated by his 2005 novel Dead Europe , he had a very limited international profile. In the divide between the local and the global—between the apparently insular Australian market and the market per se — The Slap seemed to appear ex nihilo , and Tsiolkas himself was somehow disembodied and decontextualized in a way that would have been unthinkable to anyone familiar with the political vehemence and visceral extremism of his earlier work.
I am dwelling on Shone’s article because it was at the moment I read it that I decided I wanted to write a monograph about Christos Tsiolkas. I had already experienced the difficulty of getting literary and academic communities outside of Australia interested in Australian writers. When I began working in the United States about a decade ago, some of my American colleagues had never heard of Peter Carey. And some had never heard of Patrick White. Confronting this merely reminds one that Australia is still, culturally speaking, a relatively small part of a global, Anglophone formation. From the perspective of the northern hemisphere, its literature tends to be either opaque or invisible. The dynamics of the field of literary studies have not helped. Scholars are professionally rewarded for working in established, and well trafficked, areas of predominantly British and American literature where relatively large academic constituencies facilitate citation and circulation. At the same time notions of cultural capital in the American liberal arts still orient to traditionally defined periods and the canonical texts that constitute them. Yet as Tsiolkas worked his way along the east coast of the United States, he seemed to be gaining a level of exposure that produced both visibility and a certain kind of legibility. People had heard him interviewed on National Public Radio. He seemed to be topical, and topicality, of course, is one of the things that a critic looks for as a way of justifying a project. But related to this was the feeling that his celebrity was raising some genuinely pressing questions about the fate of radical writing in the era of global capitalism. “I had no idea [ The Slap ] was going to take me to Lexington Avenue,” Tsiolkas tells Shone. “Trying to stand back, I’m interested in why it has proved so popular. I wonder what it says about contemporary writing—can you be popular without being populist?” 2 The composure of the self-questioning in this comment is quite different from the way in which Tsiolkas was speaking about global circulation earlier in his career. A passage from the 1996 Jump Cuts , a series of dialogues with Sasha Soldatow that forms a sort of joint autobiography, seems to question exactly the sort of success Tsiolkas was now experiencing: “Writing for the world is exciting, tempting, but I think it is an imperialist dream. There are people who can’t read, people who don’t much want to read, there are people who read in different ways to me.” 3 The comment echoes one he made at the Melbourne Writers Festival in 1995. Partly reflecting on the distance between his work and the milieu of his Greek-speaking parents, he said,
I do not believe there is a writing that speaks to everyone. I write in English, and my parents cannot read my work. And even if they could, my work is dependent on the cultural practices of queer, of experimental writing, of a popular culture and music which makes little attempt to speak to them. 4
Of course, coming up with an international bestseller is not “writing for the world,” or producing “writing that speaks to everyone,” but one still cannot help sensing a certain tension between the Sunday Times ’s vision of Tsiolkas gazing over the New York skyline, realizing his arrival at the heart of global capitalism, and this earlier distance from a globalizing ambition that seems sufficiently implicit in the act of writing that one might want to disavow it.
If there is a tension here—and perhaps there is only the semblance of a tension—it is one that occurs outside the ambit of authorial control or agency. Literary careers, strung between the private and the public, the interior and the exterior, are as much about an involuntary surrender to (or capture by) the dynamics of the public sphere as they are about the austere self-discipline of creativity. I imagine a great many writers routinely wake up to find themselves hopelessly misrepresented by the forms of publicity that are cent