ACL 1001
Reading Contemporary Fiction
Semester 1 2008

Lecture 4
Grunge Writing: Before and After

by Ian Syson

Grunge

The term Grunge literature, as I'm using it in this lecture, refers to a group of Australian writings that were published between the early and mid 90s.

This period starts with Andrew McGahan's Praise and ends around the time Christos Tsiolkas's Loaded was eventually removed from the shelves for the first time -- but before it was put back on the shelves in the wake of the movie, Head-On.

It began in 1992 with a quirky book about half-hearted ugly people who did drugs and screwed a lot. It finished in late 1996 after the publication of a frenetic book about a handsome Greek-Australian homosexual who did drugs and screwed a lot. In between there were eight to ten books and a number of stories and poems published which were largely about people who did drugs and screwed a lot.

It was a kind of writing that was big on detail, realist in mode (though some might say naturalist), and which kept overt narratorial moralism and plot to a minimum:

  • Neil Boyack See Through, p.6
  • Justine Ettler The River Ophelia

In 1996 I wrote an article in overland 'Smells Like Market Spirit', where I suggested that

grunge's time was almost over; it was a spent force; it had gone about as far as the marketeers could push it.

A number of reviews and articles (which made arguments similar to mine) were starting to develop an increasingly cynical tone about the whole grunge process.

This is a nice irony given the nature of a lot of the so-called grunge writing:

It was either about cynical characters or written by cynical middle class authors like Edward Berridge or Justine Ettler, who seemed more interested in what they could get out of it in terms of fame and money, than in creating an important new political/artistic movement.

Since 1996 we have seen few if any Australian novels marketed implicitly or explicitly as grunge writing.

In the late 90s there were a bunch of anthologies that seemed to try to cash in on and mop up the residual grunge desire.

  1. Pub Fiction, edited by Leonie Stephens.
  2. Blur: Stories by Young Australian Writers, edited by James Bradley
  3. Out West, edited by John Dale.

So grunge realism as marketing category is now very much a moment of the past.

But does this mean that people have stopped writing �grunge'?

It's clear, for example, that Clare Mendes has moved away from �grunge'. Berridge works in advertising. A number of the grunge writers have given up writing altogether.

Though I'm not sure they are representative. Melissa Lucashenko's Steam Pigs (1997) and Hard Yards (1999) Patricia Cornelius's My Sister Jill (2003) are just as emotionally and physically tough as those books produced in the early 90s.

McGahan's work has gained a softer focus and has matured somewhat but he still deals with tough issues.

And Tsiolkas has of course kept up his confronting style:

  • Who's Afraid of the Working Class
  • Jesus Man, his novel published in 1999. In it one of the main characters commits suicide by cutting off his own penis.
  • Dead Caucasians
  • Dead Europe

The two most successful grunge writers have developed into significant contemporary Australian writers

So far I have been using the term grunge a little loosely:

If the body of writing has any shared characteristics, they are

    • rawness,
    • vulgarity
    • explicit
    • spare realism
    • in your face

Grunge was a literature of anger and protest that came from younger writers alienated by mainstream publishing tendencies. What Berridge saw as the effete writings of the boring middle class elites.

But there was another side to grunge:

Grunge was also a label generated by critics and publishing companies to publicise and give a certain kind of credibility to an emerging trend in Australian writing. Paradoxically, a form of writing captured by mainstream publishing.

Within Grunge then, there were always at least two impulses, sometimes within the same book: radical and mainstream, even conservative.

The long history of Grunge

As I suggest in my article, there is a long history of Grunge. It just goes by other names at different times and places in history.

  • Naturalism
  • proletkult
  • social realism
  • kitchen sink drama and the angry young men in Britain
  • American realists like Henry Miller and Raymond Carver
  • dirty realism
  • neo realism

Kirsty Leishman in 'Australian Grunge Literature and the Conflict Between Literary Generations' disagrees with my position'. She argues that

While Syson's list of the qualities of characters inhabiting a history of Australian literature is irrefutable, what can be disputed is the assertion that the tenor of the relationship the protagonists have with the environment and society is the same as that depicted in grunge. (98)

For Leishman, Grunge was a significant new writing that mediated a whole new set of historically specific issues.

The New Writing

In the late 1960s and early 1970s a new phase of Australian writing seemed to begin. Peter Carey, Michael Wilding and their cohort represented a new perhaps even revolutionary phase of writing in Australia at the levels of both.
  • Form
  • content

Writers like Peter Carey, Michael Wilding, Frank Moorhouse, Vicki Viidikas, and Helen Garner, wrote stories and novels which shared a lot of the thematic characteristics of '90s grunge. like:

  • drugs
  • sex
  • alienation
  • ennui � weariness, discontent, boredom
  • generational conflict

Often influenced by new writing from America, they were responding to what they saw as a staid and boring realist tradition which very rarely explored beyond the edge of the ordinary. What Patrick White had referred to as "journalistic dun-coloured realism".

Even in its radical form this realism was narrowly focused on a simplistic kind of nationalist or working class politics to the exclusion of issues like race, gender, sexuality, drugs, Asia.

Important exceptions in this overall realist tradition include

  • Ireland; Harrower; Patrick White

While the outlined similarities are important, a significant difference between TNW and grunge lies in the mode or styles of writing adopted.

The New writing was also a response on the level of form

Perhaps Helen Garner aside, TNW tended to be more

  • surreal, absurd, postmodern, allusive and elliptical

However, the New Writing was a school of writing that, according to Michael Wilding, quickly lost the sense of radicalism that spawned it. It too easily became a protest literature which was merely protesting about the right to say fuck on the page, leaving behind a long developed sense in Australian writing of its strong relationship with the struggles and lives of ordinary Australians.

The rise of Aboriginal writing aside, very little of historical import happened in Australian writing of the 1980s. In the 1980s it seemed that Australian fiction was largely psychological dramas of the urban middle class. This is not necessarily meant as a negative. But writings about the working class or those on the edge seemed not to be important.

Exceptions Rosa Capiello Amanda Lohrey

During this time

  • Writers like Peter Carey lost their hard edge. Today Carey tends to write for a non-Australian audience.
  • Radical writers like Michael Wilding went out of favour. Helen Garner became more conservative. The Last Days of Chez Nous, the first stone and the more recent Joe Cinque's Consolation.
  • What began as a revolt against realism and conservatism ended up producing a writing mainstream seemingly more concerned with not being offensive: more concerned with not being vulgarly realist or didactic or angry than being positively about something.

As Mark Davis has pointed out in Gangland, the past 40 years is a period in which the generation which took control of Australian cultural production in the 1970s became conservative and cemented their places in the arts world. People who had to fight to be heard in the first place erected barriers like the ones they had demolished in order to preserve their newly obtained kingdoms.

They sewed up the public sphere for their own ends.

Writers like McGahan, Ettler, Berridge, Tsiolkas, Boyack were indeed shut out of the loop.

It is no surprise then that when they emerged in mainstream publishing that their writings too would represent a form of revolt. Like the New Writers before them, they wanted to talk about sex, drugs, music and alienation.

What I find interesting though is that their revolt usually meant, on the formal level, a return to the realism rejected over twenty years before.

After Grunge

What has come after grunge? What have been its effects and influences?

It's hard to say but I wonder whether Loaded contains some suggestions as to where Australian writing has headed.

On page 86 of Loaded a conversation occurs in a taxi

. . . The Polytechnic is history. Vietnam is history. Auschwitz is history. Hippies are history. Punks are history. God is history. Hollywood is history. The Soviet Union is history. My parents are history. My friend Joe is becoming history. I will become history. This fucking shithole planet will become history. Take more drugs. [We might add grunge is history!]

The historical reference to the Polytechnic: http://www.athena2004.net/Greece.htm

What is happening in that discussion? History is being contrasted with immediate gratification.

Who is speaking?

  • Ari the character?
  • Ari, the narrator?
  • Ari's unconscious?
  • Another character?
  • Tsiolkas?

Whoever it is is rejecting history.

Let's look at another piece of dialogue, on p61

A discussion about Marxism

. . . "I pour myself another drink. I'm not following the conversation which matters shit to me."

History is again contrasted with matters immediate self gratification. Indeed, I think this is one of the important figures or motifs in the book: the narrowing of the characters' horizons to the moment: no past; no future

Again who is narrating this?

If it is Ari, he is coming over as an unreliable narrator -- if he doesn't care about the conversation � and he admits that he isn't following it � then how does he get to record it � other than as snatches of words in a whole background of white noise.

Not only does Ari narrate the conversation, its sophistication is also recorded.

This is where the text ruptures : raising a number of questions

  • Authorial voice enters the narrative?
  • The book's politics get revealed?
  • We were mistaken to think there is a single narrator?
  • Are we reading a polyphonic text as opposed to one with just one dominant voice?
To explain why these questions are important I need to detour through a discussion of history or to give my own version of the history of the past 40 years.

Throughout your time at university you will often come across academics in the humanities or arts areas who look back in wonder or nostalgia at the late 1960s/early 1970s as a crucial moment in history for western intellectuals.

  • failed revolution in France
  • intellectuals were confronted with their own failure
  • fragmentation of once general and totalising beliefs
  • the development of relativistic and fragmented schools of thought

Marxism, which held a lot of sway, at least on the left, started to lose its influence in universities and in intellectual life in general.

Generally, Marxism asserts that the fundamental contradiction in society is based on classes: one (the ruling class) exploits the others (the working class and middle class). Marxism saw that the force in society which would create positive social change was the working class

  • it was the oppressed class
  • it created society's economic wealth
  • it therefore had both the reason and the ability to change society

Critics of Marxism felt that it was

  • too totalising
  • too sure of itself
  • too black and white
  • not prepared to see the social and political worlds in their full complexity
  • often as sexist, racist and elitist as the ruling class it claimed to attack

This collapse and fragmentation of the power of Marxism on the left produced new threads and strands of critique that were based on difference and diversity. Oppression and exploitation came to be analysed at local and sometimes microcosmic levels:

  • race
  • gender
  • sexuality
  • ethnicity
  • colour
  • locality

As you might realise, a good number of these issues relate centrally to Loaded.

And the contrast couldn't be starker with the kind of fiction that was usually produced in Australia before the late 1960s. Much of which (though by no means all) was about white anglo-celtic workers and their families—battlers—ordinary Australians.

While it might have represented aspects of radical behaviour and character, this representation was usually quite conservative.

The collapse of Marxism is intimately related to the demise of the battler genre in australian writing.

In Australia significant issues of the late 60 and early 70s were

  • Vietnam
  • the election of Labor in 1973
  • the rise of the peace/anti-nuclear/green movement
  • the rise of the 2nd wave of the feminist movement
  • gay and lesbian politics
  • aboriginal politics

The rise of these politics has meant that contemporary Australian history is one in which identities have sometimes been atomised and disintegrated. The certainities of the old order have been replaced by the uncertainties of the new.

This is Ari's world.

As a result Ari's alienation is inexplicable to himself because of the absence of histories that could explain his life. As a gay Greek working class man Ari has no narrative that can unite these aspects of his identity.

So this is one important aspect of Loaded: it is a novel about history told through the perspective of someone who doesn't care about the past or the future. Without the narrative fractures I mentioned before the book wouldn't be able to tell this story.

Moreover Loaded is a book that looks at histories (the waves of migration as Tsiolkas sees it) as opposed to history.

Loaded is also a spatially organised book about a character who doesn't care where he is.

If I haven't made the point already, Tsiolkas and his narrators have very different positions from Ari. Tsiolkas is trying to reinscibe this history into contemporary culture.

What the Grunge writers have done like so many radical literary movements before them is to lay bare some social and historical truths. A close examination of recent post-Grunge Australian fiction reveals a serious attention to Australian history on the part of a number of younger writers. This, I believe, is one important influence of the grunge movement.