ACL 2009
Australian Literature
Semester 1 2014
Lecture 3
The Mis-education of Christos Tsiolkas
by Paul Mavroudis
In this lecture I’m going to be referring to several texts from this unit you may not have read yet, as well as texts outside this unit which I think are relevant to this discussion.
1. Who is Tsiolkas?
The short version of the story is that Christos Tsiolkas is a gay Greek Australian writer, the son of working class migrant parents, born and raised in Richmond, which was then a working class suburb. He studied at Melbourne University, and was editor of the student union magazine Farrago. Until his recent success allowed him to become a full time writer, he had worked in a supermarket, as an archivist, a vet nurse, as well as having attained his Diploma of Education.
Apart from his novels and occasional short stories, he has also written or contributed to plays, film dialogues and written often for various magazines and journals, and he's a frequent guest on panels at literary festivals. He's also a pop-culture enthusiast, particularly with regards to film and music. To that end, he also co-hosts a radio show on Triple R.
He can be an abrasive, shocking, even obscene writer, taking readers to the extremes of the human condition. Yet, he can also create moments of tenderness and sympathy. Unusually, the novel we’re looking at contains little of his customary extreme depictions of drug use and sex scenes. I agree with Rosemary Sorensen’s review of Barracuda, that ‘Tsiolkas is more a polemicist than a stylist’(Sorensen 2013), though he certainly yearns to achieve the latter.
Readers and critics are often divided as to the merits of his work, so if you don't like his style or if you disagree with his conclusions, you are not alone. However, it's important to remember that in a subject like this, it's not just a matter of like and dislike, it's about arguing your point and using evidence to back up your claim. Remember also, that even if you think what a writer has done in a particular passage is stupid, or that a character is unlikeable, you must consider that the decision to make them that way was intentional, that there was a purpose behind it. (Vasilakakos 2013, p. 103).
Tsiolkas’ first novel, Loaded (later made into the film Head On), burst onto the scene during the so-called grunge era of Australian writing, which also had its counterparts in overseas writing, such as Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, (it's surely no coincidence that in Barracuda Danny ends up in the Edinburgh suburb of Leith, where Trainspotting is set)
His second novel, The Jesus Man, was a critical and commercial failure. In my mind, it is the novel which bears the most similarity structurally to Barracuda. His third novel, Dead Europe, was Tsiolkas critical breakthrough. It won The Age book of the year, and was shortlisted for several prizes, while also being criticised for being anti-Semitic, and also of being histrionic and absurd (a criticism often made of his work).
His fourth novel, The Slap, which was made into a television series, was Tsiolkas' popular breakthrough, selling 800,000 copies worldwide. Where once in this lecture we would have emphasised Tsiolkas' status as a successful literary novelist rather than as a popular one, the success of The Slap arguably launched Tsiolkas into the realm of someone like Tim Winton, who is successful as a novelist both critically and commercially. For one thing, it allowed Tsiolkas the ability to quit his job as a part time vet nurse and focus exclusively on writing.
And where once I would have once argued about his relative obscurity within the wider Australian reading public, last year after I had bought Barracuda and was reading some of it on a train, a woman next to me, who was a little bit drunk it must be noted, started a conversation with me about his work and her anticipation of Barracuda coming out (she turned out to be a Pakistani Muslim lesbian who had recently done a teaching qualification at VU – which when put like that sounds like a Tsiolkas character)
What are some of the key themes he covers?
Tsiolkas' interests are wide ranging, but a few themes keep popping up in his work. These include, but are not limited to:
- Class
- Identity
- Sexuality
- Ethnicity
- Hybridity
- Transgression
Class is at the heart of Tsiolkas’ work. Thus far, all of Tsiolkas’ novels are an attempt to deal with the end of the Cold War and its aftermath. The end of the Cold War signals the so-called end of history when the ideological war between capitalism and communism was over, and capitalism, victorious, would ride off into the sunset unchallenged.
The Left’s loss of this ideological battle coincides in Australia with a severe economic recession and the end of a particular way of doing things. Factories, which were once integral parts of the suburban landscape, are shutting down; the notion of a job for life disappearing; attacks on the welfare state unchallenged.
This era coincides with what many of Tsiolkas’ characters see as the end of the illusion of working class solidarity. Everyone turns further inward and becomes more selfish. The working class and their movement become splintered. The chardonnay socialists turn towards a more libertarian, trendy Leftism, while the traditional working class turn towards a more reactionary Leftist ideology of protectionism, nationalism and xenophobia.
Tsiolkas is an exceptionally sensory writer and this is something worth paying attention to. His writing isn't just focused on sight and sound, but also on touch, taste and smell. It's fair to say he's obsessed by them. This sensory focus extends to an obsessive fascination with the human body. In every novel of his there are graphic and extensive paragraphs dealing with everything a human body goes through, both ordinary and extraordinary. In fact, it’s a little odd that it has taken so long for Tsiolkas to deal with sport in such a thorough manner.
This pre-occupation with the sensory and the physical come through most clearly in his depictions of sexuality, which is a constant and provocative theme throughout his work. Unlike the now fairly orthodox straight/gay binary which dominates our way of thinking on the matter, he sees people’s sexuality as a very fluid part their lives. In addition, the sex that exists that in Tsiolkas’ work is often built not on love, but on lust and desire.
This leads into his overarching fascination with transgression. This is not limited only to those exceptional people who by their very nature have broken free of societal conventions to transgress in all sorts of ways, but also the way ordinary people cross boundaries all the time. Hence his vision (which several people dispute) that drug taking is far more prevalent in the community than is often given credit for; that people fantasise and desire sexual experiences well outside of those accepted in polite society; that people’s religious and spiritual experiences and can often transcend the realms of logic and modernity.
Greek and other Migrant representations
Fractured, unreliable and unstable notions of identity are a cornerstone of Tsiolkas’ work. Reflecting his own working class migrant upbringing with all the complications that brings, Tsiolkas is perhaps Australia's foremost novelist when it comes to multiculturalism and the migrant experience. He covers these angles from first, second and third generation points of view, and increasingly from the point of view of those who come from mixed marriages. It’s therefore important to place Tsiolkas into the context of the popular perception of migrants at the time of his emergence as a writer.
He emerged during an era of broad comic stereotype of ethnic communities, created both within and outside of those communities. It is arguable that we have not left these stereotypes behind. The comedic team behind Acropolis Now and Wogs Out of Work – who created the dominant narrative for migrant life in Australia at the time of Tsiolkas’ emergence - spawned several more projects, including the two Wog Boy movies, the heinous Greeks on the Roof and a recent stage show. The next generation following them created the Pizza series. You can also see that kind representation carried on in the Super Wog internet series.
There were also of course the more earnest ethnic dramas, such as the Heartbreak Kid, and scores of SBS produced dramas from that era where the fairly standard narratives of the children of second generation migrants are again covered – the clash of cultures, the clash of generations, and the tightrope walk of being neither Greek nor Australian. This concept of hybridity is central to understanding Tsiolkas’ characters, who are often caught between two or more crises of identity, as society (in their perception at least) attempts to force them to choose one identity to the exclusion of all others.
Still, most representations of migrant Australians in our popular culture either tend to omit them entirely, or use them in stereotypical roles. Some of you may have seen the discussions a couple of years ago, particularly in The Age, about the lack of diversity on Australian television, especially in our drama productions.
Having said all of that, not everyone agrees that the stereotypes are flourishing. Dean Kalimniou, a lawyer and long-time columnist for the Greek-Australian newspaper Neos Kosmos, in 2012 wrote an essay entitled 'Death of a Stereotype', where he discusses the dissolution of those old assumptions.
http://diatribe-column.blogspot.com.au/2012/09/death-of-stereotype.html
It is also important that we do not equate Tsiolkas with all Greek-Australian or other Australian migrant literary writers or artists. Though he is currently the most well-known and prominent, there are others such as the novelists John Charalambous and Nicholas Kyricacos, and the poet Pi O, who cover similar ground in different ways, or decide to cover issues apart from migrant stories. There are others, as we’ve seen, who would rather celebrate than question the migrant story. While Ian Syson has in the past emphasised Tsiolkas' goal of shocking mainstream Anglo audiences out of their complacency, he is just as important for destabilising the myths that migrant Australians tell about themselves.
Tsiolkas is important to me, because he was the first writer that I encountered where I intimately recognised the world and the characters of a novel. That is not to say that I necessarily agree with his conclusions or that he does not exaggerate circumstances – I find the amount of drugs taken to be absurd, but perhaps that's just my sheltered upbringing coming to the fore - but at the same time, the Melbourne that he describes fits far more into the Melbourne I grew up in than many competing narratives.
2. Education and Class
Education in literature
When one goes through a history of literature, you can be surprised how much the theme of education pops up. Indeed, when this theme was proposed for this lecture, I was a little bit concerned that there may not be enough material to cover it in depth – but when I started thinking about some of the books that I’ve read over the last few years especially, there it was again and again – education and the role it plays in transforming or failing the life of a narrator or central character - which in turn is deeply connected to class consciousness.
While this is especially true I believe in working class Australian writing, those who have done some of the other subjects available here will have also seen it come up in other texts. In Dickens’ Great Expectations, Pip’s transformation from lower/working class nobody into a man of the world is entirely dependent on his being educated and removed from that working class environment – and the fact that the convict Magwitch rather than Miss Havisham is responsible for that funding is also of vital importance.
Likewise, in Emile Zola’s Germinal, which some of you may have studied in Working Class Writing last year, Etienne’s superior (though not great) education gives him an advantage over his co-workers (who often can do no more than write their own names), and leads them to trust him – but it also in part leads to his downfall, as his higher education levels also create a gulf between himself and the miners, where he sees himself as superior, and even in a different class because of it.
Ideas about class and education are therefore very much linked to ideas about class consciousness – that is, being aware of which class you belong to and why – and concepts such as class warfare, social mobility and gentrification. You can see with those last two terms – social mobility and gentrification – how education plays a huge role in the way that a physical landscape can be influenced.
While in Melbourne we like to think we don’t have the same physical socio-economic divide that is so prevalent in Sydney, in his work Tsiolkas demonstrates that such divides do exist, even if there isn’t a physical boundary like the Harbour Bridge to mark the border. In Loaded, via his protagonist Ari, Tsiolkas is at pains to point out the physical, cultural, social and class boundaries that abound in Melbourne. In The Jesus Man, the uneducated working class are fed to the burgeoning economic rationalist machine, with the working class becoming split between those who are for a more progressive politics and those who yearn for an imagined and stereotypically mono-cultural Australia.
In The Slap, the notion of working class solidarity is sundered once and for all. At the same barbecue where the slap of the novel’s title occurs, several of the adults become engaged in a debate about private vs public schooling. Harry, a formerly working class man who now lives a nouveau riche lifestyle and is planning to send his son to an expensive private school, tries to justify his stance – he supports public education and would love to send his son to a government school, but he doesn’t think that the ones around him are good enough. (Tsiolkas 2008, p. 23)
Barracuda then, is the fleshing out of these arguments, exploring what happens to a working class kid and his family as he goes through the elite private school system. While on the surface at least, Barracuda is about failure, and what happens to young aspiring sports people who fail to reach the elite echelon they’ve aspired to and relentlessly trained for, for me Barracuda is about something much more important.
It’s about the condition of what could be called ‘otherness’, a recurring theme in Tsiolkas’ work. Usually, ‘otherness’ is evident in Tsiolkas’ work as a manifestation of the place the children of first generation migrants find themselves in, where they belong neither to one place or culture or another, in a place void of identity.
In his quest to therefore set up the concept of otherness, in Barracuda, Tsiolkas sets up several binaries for his characters to fall between such as:
- Working class vs upper class
- Physicality vs intellectualism
- Street smarts vs book smarts
The notion of ‘escaping’ your class
If there is one thing that is consistent about the depiction of the working class’ relation to education, it’s the notion of an escape. Think about every ‘teacher saves the children’ movie from the United States for example. It’s all about an aspiration of getting out of where they are right now, both in terms of class, but also in terms of location.
In Tony Birch’s Shadowboxing, the narrator Michael becomes acquainted with Jack, a scrap and second hand furniture dealer who it also turns out is a bit of an autodidact, which basically means someone who has taught themselves. He implores Michael to study hard and read so he can ‘get out’, even though Michael does not know exactly what he means. (Birch 2006, p. 129). The nature of jack’s cultural conditioning though, is that he always doubts himself – he claims to know nothing, as well as finding that he is estranged from and unlike other working class men.
In his own life, Tsiolkas brings up the cultural dangers of a working class person going to university, and the warnings he was given on two separate occasions by two different people – ‘if you ever forget where you come from, fa se sfaxo [I will slaughter you]."(Tsiolkas 2010)
So, the education of a working class person and their removal from working class culture does not come without consequences. As we’ve seen in the cases of Pip, Etienne and Jack, even the smallest amount of education creates a cultural gulf between working class individuals and their roots.
In Barracuda this is manifested in the character of Danny, the son of a truck driver and hairdresser, who ends up being offered a sports scholarship to an elite private school. From the very first day Danny feels as if he is a transgressor at his new school. He is not supposed to be there, while everyone else is. Of course later on we find out that others, too, are struggling with the transition; that those who naturally 'belong' are actually a far smaller elite than Danny realises, such as Morello, who only in adulthood is able to admit his own sense of shame at lying about his family.
To go to this school, Danny must wear new clothes which separate him from his family. His sister wears an ugly and generic public school uniform, while he has a tie and suit that he must take care of at all costs. Even his bathers initially separate him from the other boys – remember, he's wearing cheap Forges bathers while the rest are wearing Speedos. (Compare this also to page 323, where Danny looks at his grandparents wedding photo – and he thinks of the women as being uncomfortable in the clothes they are wearing, and the part/role they are supposed to be playing.)
Soon enough, Danny becomes ashamed of his working class routes – it is a shame born from his naivety, having not imagined that such a school and such wealth existed so close to him. He seldom hangs out with his former friends. He’s ashamed of his mother and her woggy, working class sense of style, as compared to the prim, refined and WASP-ish mothers of the wealthy students.(Tsiolkas 2013, p. 9)
The boys, too, look and behave like no boys Danny has seen or knows of. Think about when he talks about his fight at school later on with Demet, how having now seen them, he can't imagine Demet being able to imagine those boys as real people. Think also about his reaction to his first meeting with one of the prefects
To cope with this conceptual fracture, Danny begins compartmentalising the different parts of his life, but try as he might, the pieces do not fit together. (Tsiolkas 2013, p. 105) He is constantly made to remember that he does not belong there, by the words of the upper class (‘ we don't know them mother' (Tsiolkas 2013, p. 117), and his lack of familiarity with their world (he has no idea how to deal with Emma for instance). Think also about the comment that Martin’s grandmother makes to him at her birthday:
‘I’ve always admired the working class, my dear, always. Like us, you know exactly who you are. But look at them… They have no idea how abysmal they are. Lord, How I detest the middle class.’(Tsiolkas 2013, pp. 124, 5)
Is her statement true though? Is Danny that much different from the middle class Virginia, and her attempt at pleasing/impressing the upper class? Virginia has neither noble upper class blood, nor working class street cred, and thus apparently has no legitimate or worthy cultural grounding. But once Danny has shed his working class authenticity – or had it taken off him as the case may be – what does he have left? He even starts thinking like an upper class person, and starts using their language and putting forward their value systems – using the word slovenly to describe his sister, acknowledging that the uniform he wears signifies him as being better than her and the rest of the family.(Tsiolkas 2013, p. 219)
Where his father would see vanity, Danny sees envy, and when Danny calls his father a ‘shitkicker truck driver’, that internal transformation is complete – it’s not until later on that he acknowledges that his father is skilled, that he knows how to drive all sorts of vehicles, as well as pull them apart and fix them (Tsiolkas 2013, p. 242), that most importantly, his father is a good man (a complicated term in its own right, as Lamond notes).
However, even his best friend is not immune from this transformation. Demet ends up going to university, and soon realises that she, too, has lost something. Remember Clyde's challenge to Demet about her supposedly mistaken idea of what it is to be working class? Demet seems to acknowledge that she has been corrupted or changed by her university education. (Tsiolkas 2013, p. 407)
The notion that something has been lost in making that transition is really important. That trading in physicality for words means that a certain kind of working class nobility or authenticity has been lost, and to aspire to a educated career which does not have an obvious vocational aspect – say a doctor, lawyer or accountant – is an even greater betrayal.
Education for the working class therefore not only in Tsiolkas, but also in scores of other depictions of working class life, is not a situation where something is simply added to what was there before. It involves in some respects, if not quite an exchange of values and social position then at the very least a forfeiture of the place a working class person once had in working class society and culture. Tsiolkas acknowledges this of his own life, that he is now bourgeois.
This concept of aspirational forfeiture of authenticity comes up in several examples of Australian writing dealing with the role of education in a working class life. You may recall Geoff Goodfellow’s line about how after his accident, his doctor told him to pick up nothing heavier than a pen.
In David Ireland’s Glass Canoe, set in Sydney in the mid-1970s, the mostly working class patrons of an inner city pub are distrustful of the one character who is educated and who just as importantly, doesn’t drink, who treats them as if they were a different, lower species.
In Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip, every character in the 1970s post-hippie artistic community situated in Carlton is poor, but they are also educated and progressive, and they see themselves at odds with or set apart from other working class/lower class people.
In Alice Pung’s Unpolished Gem, think about the way some migrants put pressure on their children when it comes to educational expectations, and the schism it creates between the generations. In her memoir, Alice, a bright student of Chinese-Cambodian refugees, ends up in a somewhat prestigious private school.
Yet, as much as her parents wish that Alice becomes more educated, her mother is also dismayed by the cultural boundaries that come between the two generations because of this. At one point, Alice’s mother complains about the absurdity of the expensive blazer her daughter is expected to purchase. How is that going to make her learn better she asks, and not without legitimate incredulity.
Likewise her mother is dismayed when Alice, the de facto translator as is so often the case of children of migrants from non-English speaking backgrounds, can’t explain things like bank statements (Pung 2006, p. 142).
The working class intellectual falls into much of the same socio-cultural space as the children of immigrants. They don’t belong to the world they’ve left behind, but neither do they belong to the world they’ve been pushed towards. Imagine as it were, that this was compounded as is so often the case in a Tsiolkas text, by also contending with cultural hybridity in terms of culture, ethnicity and sexuality.
Tsiolkas brings this up in terms of his own life experience. While these days he is quite comfortable in describing himself as a writer, in his youth there were apparently few role models for those of his background to look up to or emulate. Writing, when looked upon as an artistic pursuit, is looked down upon in the working class world – it is distrusted because of its lack of physicality, of obvious signs of labour. Real work takes place on a building site, in a factory, but not in a writing space. Recall how Danny’s grandfather Bill, despite displaying a fair for learning languages as a child, was not allowed to dream about an education? (Tsiolkas 2013, p. 34). And then think about Danny’s revelation towards the end of Barracuda:
“Being working class wasn't about words, it could only be expressed through the body” (Tsiolkas 2013, p. 419)
Is this true? Can working class culture only be expressed physically? Is there no way to reconcile getting an education with retaining your working class identity? We’ve discussed briefly how Tsiolkas is a very physical, sensory sort of writer. For much of Danny’s adolescence, only swimming brings him comfort. Pay attention to the way the way Tsiolkas inserts countless descriptions of swimming not just as an activity, or a job, but as a vocation, a calling if you will. Losing swimming is not just like losing a job for Danny, but something akin to losing his religion. Immediately after his failure and breakdown, the only kind of work which makes sense to Danny is his job in the supermarket – repetitive, solitary, physical labour.
This may even get to the heart of Danny’s problem. Why is Danny Kelly at the school? Why is it that they have offered him a place ahead of other boys? Is he there as a physical labourer, to work for the school, to win them championships and later on Glory as an Olympian? If so, is he much different to the gardener?
What would have happened to Danny if he didn’t go to Cunts College? Kalinda Ashton’s The Danger Game, (for which Tsiolkas adds a supportive quote for the blurb), we see the opposite side of that ideological divide. One of the central characters, Alice, is a demotivated teacher at a rundown inner suburban school. Due to supposedly declining enrolments and poor results, the school is being threatened with cuts to its funding, meaning it will either have to abandon its teaching of VCE or even close entirely.
Have a think about kind of impact that would have not just on the individual students, but also on the entire school community. All of a sudden a working class community, however dysfunctional, will be sundered. The bright kids will be absorbed by a selective school, and the slightly more well off will probably end up in a lower echelon private school; the poorer students and those who struggle academically will end up where exactly?
If an entire system becomes geared to allowing certain elements of the system to cherry pick the best and brightest (academically and/or physically), leaving the so called dregs behind, what happens to those left behind?
If this sounds like too much bleeding heart carry on, it’s because in a lot of ways that‘s where both Barracuda and The Danger Game end up. Now you’re most certainly allowed to disagree with those sentiments, and I’d like to see how one would rationalise the existence of such a system. Do some parents and the elite private schools they send them to, in addition to whatever educational benefits they think exist there, also seek to try and boost their class position via this decision? If the answer is yes, and if Australia is supposed to be an egalitarian society, what are the implications of such policies?
As an aside, when you come to the two week block later on which looks at writing for and by Aboriginal people, think also about the way that the different writers present education, and the different value systems they use to evaluate the role and effect of a western style education and culture on Indigenous people.
To conclude this portion of the lecture, here are the questions that are at the heart of this issue
- What is the purpose of education for different classes?
- Is the pursuit of an intellectual, non-physically demanding career or lifestyle by its very nature antithetical to the status of being working class?
- If so, what implications does it have for the future of the working class in Australia – is their existence based entirely on opposition to learning, to intellectual betterment, and maintaining a geographical, social and cultural distance from the middle and upper classes?
3. Suburbia
Tsiolkas is very much a Melbourne writer. Yes, there are passages in most of his novels which deal with other places, but it is Melbourne's geography that he is most interested in, and he's particularly interested in trying to set down demographics based upon regions and suburbs – while fully being aware that it is a dubious practice. Remember when Danny throws out the epithet 'Templestowe wogs' – what is that trying to do other than stereotype an entire suburb and its demographic, and make Danny feel better about himself for not being one?
And then think about how his feelings change later on, after he wins the Australian under 16 championships. Demet offers to take him to Bell Street Maccas, and he feels embarrassed about it. All of a sudden he is becoming aware of his otherness, his belonging to neither the old world, nor the new, and yet turning towards one away from the other -his change in circumstance opens up new worlds, new suburbs to him, while closing off old ones.
His geographic disconnect begins very early on in Barracuda. Have a look at the way the scenery changes on the drive to school. The school itself is unlike any school Danny has ever seen. Think about how this new environment compares to the Coburg Pool and Danny's feeling when he returns there for the first since going to Cunts College.
And remember, too, that even the rich have their own suburban biases – there's Jew Street, Portsea vs Sorrento, Portsea vs Dromana, Rye and Rosebud. Just as Danny struggles to take in the opulence of his new surroundings, there’s just as little comprehension from the wealthy about what exists outside their geographic and cultural sphere. Think about Emma’s feelings of being trapped both in and by Toorak.
References
2006, Shadowboxing, Scribe, Melbourne.
Pung, A 2006, Unpolished Gem, Black Inc., Melbourne.
Tsiolkas, C 2008, The Slap, Allen & Unwin, Corws Nest.
—— 2010, 'My Greek Grandma', Sydney Morning Herald, July 17, 2010.
—— 2013, Barracuda, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest.
Vasilakakos, J 2013, Christos Tsiolkas: The Untold Story, Connor Court, Ballan.