- with apologies to G. Orwell
A bit of a follow-up to the Peter Craven edition of Pseuds Corner a while
back. A few things have been pointed out to me by the Stage's 5.5 readers that
bear on the Craven case and I think are worth repeating.
The argument from one quarter was that the Special Edition
neglected to give the impression that Mr C
can at
times write better prose than what was on display in the 7 extracts I picked on a few weeks ago. This recent op-ed piece was cited as an example:
"Would that politics in this country were as well run as the ABC's political panel show Q and A - on a good day. Television transforms our apprehension of politics by its vividness, its accuracy and the sense of occasion with which it presents it. - Q and A began only last year, but is already essential to the political landscape. It presents a panel that includes a member each from the government and the opposition, a couple of journalists or intellectuals, perhaps someone from business or a think tank - five in all plus the presenter (Lateline's Tony Jones) - and subjects them to live questions from the audience plus a sprinkling sent in electronically. The format works superbly, highlighting both the political skill of our politicians and the fact that there is a lot more to the governing of a country than mere party political differences." (Peter Craven, "Question: What makes tv great? Answer: Q and A"
The Age)
There's no doubt it's better written, though I'd hardly say that makes exhibits (a)
through (g) from the Special Edition any more excusable, either from the point of view of Craven as a writer or that of his editors.
The argument from another quarter, precisely along these lines, was that the
case against Craven's writing made in the Special Edition actually
didn't go
far enough. James of Coburg made the point that if
he had submitted
a single line of the prose from exhibits (a) through (g) to the editors of any
of Australia's major literary publications then he would probably have been told straight-up that he was writing
unpublishable drivel.
In the case of submissions (a) through to (g), professional editing would
have meant refusing Mr Craven column space on the grounds of egregious lack of
merit, coherence and substance, though some exceptions, James suggested, might
be made for exhibits (c), (d) and (e), which, to quote James himself,
"are more in the nature of a gossip column". (Decide for yourself
whether the Lilian Frank persona Craven adopts for his
Australian Spectator column
is innocuous or intellectually offensive. I'm happy to concede James's point:
lowering literary standards is fair enough if the only point of a piece really is to let Peter let the world know he saw Eddie and Carla Maguire at the latest
Mary Poppins production.)
James's more important point though is that Mr Craven is being
seriously
indulged by many of the major editorial powers in the land, who, in
publishing material of the - to use a Cravenism - loose baggy monstrousness of
exhibits (a) through (g) are
effectively refusing to edit. In this, I
have to say, I agree. Like James, I find it hard to believe that a sane editor
who'd been set the task of exercising his/her professional skills on exhibits
(a) through (g) - from behind a veil of anonymity for instance - would have
failed to apply the red pencil to every sentence even vaguely like this one:
"The easiest way into Rothwell is via
Another Country, because that
book makes clear without any overwhelming baroque turbulence that we are
dealing with a cultivated sensibility, all but flypapered with the culture of
Europe, the kind of bloke who jumped on a plane to see, as soon as possible, a
newly rediscovered Titian in eastern Europe, who is steeped in the literary
power of the 19th-century Australian explorers and is alive not only to his own
desire for illumination and the potential for personal enlightenment and
spiritual excruciation that comes from exploration (in all its literal and
metaphorical ambivalence); but who is also, in a worldly sense, open to the
fact that "spiritual tourism", like the taste for Aboriginal art, is
a growth industry and a collective sussurration of which his own whispering is
a part." ("Appointment with the sublime",
ALR)
I also agree with James that there are aspects of grotesque awfulness to Mr
Craven's prose - and his general mindset - that I actually left out of my
initial collection. The
list
of excesses and foibles I started the Craven edition of Pseuds Corner with
wasn't meant to be exhaustive and I now think I could've come up with a better
list. At the top of it would have to go Craven's love of
superfine
comparisons between the works - or even the whole literary oeuvres - of his
favourite literary geniuses - sometimes 4 or 5 per paragraph. To quote the
above splurge about Nicholas Rothwell again:
"Of course, putting it like this is unfair to Rothwell, whose work is as
moving and eloquent and imaginative (and as willing to stare down the truth no
matter what mesmerising abyss it lurks in) as contemporary writing can be. But
he is at the same time at an edge of artifice and distinctiveness where a lot
of wise heads and smart money are liable to reject him. What was it that Dr
Johnson said of Milton? That, as Ben Jonson had earlier said of Spenser, he
writ no language, that he wrote a Babylonish dialect? And wasn't it Joseph
Conrad, himself a latter-day Homer of the sea, who said of that most Miltonic
of prose epics,
Moby Dick, that it didn't have a single line of
sincerity in it? - This is the hyperbole of the anti-hyperbolic. . . Rothwell
is a remarkable writer and he has the exorbitant pretentiousness that goes with
everything that is exquisite and mandarin and expectant about his whole
endeavour. - Whether he's waiting for God or Godot in the desert doesn't
matter, or only to him. His Northern Territory is a kind of junkyard of the
detritus of a formidable if decadent European cultivation, but who could
object, that's how Dostoyevsky saw the West and its gaming tables: with cold,
engrossed eyes."
"In one way it's a form of landscape novel writing in which the world of
characters in an ongoing drama is replaced by the brooding consciousness of the
narrator who, by necessity, arrogates to himself whatever more or less
Wordsworthian fascinations interiority and its thousand minute modulations
might disclose. - V.S. Naipaul's
The Enigma of Arrival is one kind of
locus
classicus of this kind of writing, the fiction of Gerald Murnane is
another. It is, in any case, a form of documentary fiction-making that realigns
fiction (or non-fiction, because it confounds the distinction) with the long
backward arch of Romantic poetry. You can no more argue with Sebald's
The
Rings of Saturn than you can with Wordsworth's
Prelude or - if you
want to change the game a little - with T.S. Eliot's
Four Quartets and
Rilke's
Duino Elegies." (Peter Craven, "Appointment with the
sublime", Australian Literary Review,
The Australian)
Prima facie, what we have here is a species of literary name-dropping, which
was something I
did suggest Craven did a lot of, along with (a) invoking
High Art as a quasi-metaphysical value, (b) theatrically purporting to explain
himself without explaining anything, (c) coining bizarre metaphors (d) badly
imitating the earthy side of Robert Hughes and (e) referring to God for
rhetorical effect. In a more rigorous survey of Mr Craven's prose-style though, the
superfine comparisons and general analogy-mongering, I can see now, would belong in a
different category to the vulgar "met Charlotte and Cate for
lunch"-style shop-talk.
The reason why material like the ghastly Rothwell review belongs in a category of its own will be obvious to anyone who's ever opened the arts pages of an
Australian newspaper looking for a critical interpretation whose basic line of thought he can follow: all the huff and puff about great
writers in Craven's reviews endlessly defers the point where he has to
justify his responses, as opposed to giving his readers unargued demonstrations of
his own overwhelming knowledgeability. Yes, the tone is so snobbish it's ridiculous, based as it is on the premiss that normal readers of the
The Australian could mentally reference the nuances contained in a library-worth of books with the ease that Craven appears to be able to do so. But much more important than that is the fact that writing like
Craven's bears very little thinking about. Read it and imagine yourself
putting the question to Mr C "How would you actually
flesh out that
grand-sounding analogy between St Paul and Montaigne, Nicholas Rothwell and
Milton, Mahler and Cormac McCarthy, Kodi Smit-Macphee and the patriarch Abraham
etc etc etc?" What could Craven possibly say? All I can imagine is a sort
of authoritative pre-discursive groan, signifying something like "CAN'T
YOU SEE I'M VERY CULTURED! (Get you gone.)"
However, bad writing created by a desire to seem
massively well-read is
maybe only part of Craven's problem. The other half of the problem is the
result of a bad mental habit and here again more needs to be said about how Craven gets himself into it. My sense is this. For Craven, the basic game of
reviewing is to indicate in a roundabout way what the aesthetic experience of a
book or a film reminds him of, which turns out to be another aesthetic
experience. The reviews then spend much of their time joining the dots between
these singular points of personal aesthetic experience without communicating
the least part of the content of that experience to the reader.
Another grave problem for Craven that I didn't mention in the Pseuds Special
Edition are all those
sentences choking on linguistic fetish-items: the
"rich and strange" stock-phrases that read like the first things that
enter Mr C's mind rather than fully-formed subject-plus-predicate-style
thoughts about the matter at hand. When Craven is at his worst, the bold metaphors
simply get thrown together to create a sort of chaotic high-toned poetry:
"In that respect, as in others, McCarthy is the heir of Hemingway, with a
thundering command of action that enthrals, though his cadences are stately and
artful and the feeling that runs through his books encompasses the pity and the
terror and
the tears in things. You begin reading
All the Pretty
Horses, which opens his Border Trilogy, thinking that you are experiencing
the
Platonic idea of escapist writing because you are enjoying a cowboy book
for the first time since you were ten only to discover that this is no
reanimation of the delights of childhood. It is a [sic]
Kindertotenlieder.
. .
From the outset, the film [of McCarthy's
The Road] skilfully
establishes the moral gravity that underlines the horror-style narrative
momentum. The father's narration tells us that if God's voice does not come
through the child, then he never spoke a word. And so it goes as father and son
move over the bleached and devastated landscapes of
some rural Pennsylvania
or Oregon of the mind, some Montana that may be coterminous with a world
where
men rove like wolves."("Baby Dante and Apocalypse"
ABR) [my
italics. Ed]
What is
basically at issue in
McCarthy as a novellist and in the film versions of
The Road in particular? What are the basic themes here? Isn't that
the simplest question that the reader of a review might expect to get an answer
to? Can Mr C answer it? Well, he can run through the plot of
The Road,
throwing in semantically unmotivated references to Platonic ideas,
"literary high-jinks", the "tears of being", a
"Montana of the mind", seeing various things through a glass darkly,
"all that is red and tooth in claw" - oh and "the
ineffable" (which he proceeds to say an eff'ing lot about).
But how does McCarthy's novel actually
work? How does McCarthy's
literary apocalyptic or Hillcoat's film version of it relate to the reality of
our present world or that of the future? Admittedly these aren't the most
sophisticated literary critical questions. But if as a reviewer you can't even
give a vague sense of an answer, your review just doesn't belong on the arts pages of a broadsheet newspaper. The trouble
with Mr C as a reviewer is that he rarely answers any of these sorts of entry-level
questions about structure or significance and the constipated prose-style is
part of the reason why: Craven habitually spends so much of his time in most of his reviews chewing and
re-chewing the same pet phrases that he fails to give a critical impression of a book or get across a coherent line of
thought about it.
If we were just talking about a literary tic that we had to ignore in order
to get to the analysis,
interpretation and evaluation that form the essence of any really substantial
criticism then maybe it'd all be worth it. But in Craven's case, the reviews
seem to be all tic and no text. On a good day, Craven can indicate, in a
roundabout way (roughly as he does in his response to Q and A) whether he thinks something is good or bad, pointless or worthy: the evaluative bit. But most
of the time, he's so busy tweaking silly phrases that analysis, interpretation
and evaluation are nowhere in sight.
*
Six months ago, Gideon Haigh sparked medium-level controversy in the
literary world by suggesting that Australian criticism is nowadays light-on and
uninspired. Book reviews in particular, according to Haigh, are increasingly
being farmed out to general staff writers who, in the absence of special
knowledge, drown the reader in vague impressions and almost never venture
strong-minded critical opinions. Yet while it's true nowadays
that Australian literary editors seem to have a preference for favourable
reviews, especially of local fare, there's a double-edge to this particular
sword and I'm guessing Haigh is aware of it. The trouble is that there's something
far worse than reviewers giving everyone who managed to get into print an encouragement award. And that's reviewers giving what they don't like an unargued
critical caning.
"Bestial metaphor abounds in Shakespeare's tale of sexual jealousy. Director
Peter King takes his cue from it, entering the jungle of physical theatre to
deliver a production canopied by a writhing tableau of carnal play. . . [Annie] Last's Desdemona carved out an unlikely wedge of dignity for herself. King's
work, as he puts it, ''continues to disdain naturalism, whatever that may be''.
- It's the kind of statement that makes naturalism seem like pornography: you
can't describe it, but you know it when you see it. - In fact, Shakespeare is
both naturalistic and not. To the extent that the burgeoning sensuality of
King's conception accentuates the trauma at the heart of Othello, it's fair
enough. - But this production seems more interested in playing with itself than
to the audience, and some of its rude tricks seem to be compensating for a lack
of technique." (Cameron Woodhead reviews "Othello" at fortyfivedownstairs,
The Age)
Ignore the wretched word painting. (Anyone up for a ticket
to a production "canopied by a writhing tableau of carnal play"?!) There's
another thing that Craven and his protégés are very good at. And that is
filling out reviews with casual put downs. Take the pointless sneer from Mr C
himself at the end of this paragraph:
"With the passage of the years Waiting for Godot has come to seem less like a
shocking paradigm of absurdity and more like the deep sad comedy of a
continuing condition (call it human if you must). As with Eliot’s Waste Land,
the brilliance of the comic surface has almost outlived the existential
insecurity it is shaping. - Sean Mathias’s quietly brilliant production takes
this fact as its opportunity by constantly emphasising the mature human face of
the grinding rituals through which his two ageing tramps wait and wander
(wittily and witlessly) as Godot puts them through their paces in his failure
to come. McKellen and Rees, in contrasted ways, have the rueful stoicism of
age, and their comic embrace of catastrophe — McKellen’s boggle-eyed and
flailing, Rees’s dapper and wincing — is light years from the contorted angst
of young actors with the world before them as an enigmatic agony." (Peter Craven
reviews Sean Mathias' "Waiting for Godot",
The Spectator)
Off we go again. The stars of Craven's literary canon twinkle brightly. In
the foreground phrases get made, phrases get murdered, the storehouses of the
English language are laid waste in the search for a maximally colourful figure
of speech or an intermediate term in a world-historical literary analogy. The
Craven caning that comes at the end of the paragraph is a model of how
not
to proceed as an intellectually responsible critic: spend most of your time cueing your
readers as to how well-read you are, denigrate your critical
object by rhetorically screwing up your face - never put it in a context in
which its failings become comprehensible from a broader point of view.
The
vague swipes are more than faintly insulting to artists and readers alike. And perhaps the only excuse Australian arts editors have for filling out review
pages with tepid positivity is to avoid the negative consequences of
badly-written reviews that attitudinise instead of arguing in just this style. Tepid critical praise for every work has one advantage
over nasty pseudery. It avoids everyone involved in the arts, including your
newspaper's dwindling readership, from feeling
justifiably offended.
*
Now, there are people in the Australian arts world who are willing to call
Craven on his sloppy intellectual habits and the poor standard of his writing.
From memory, Gideon Haigh didn't single out Mr C for special treatment at
Readings six months ago. Alison Croggon by contrast has
been consistently willing to do so, for instance in
this
hard-hitting reply to Craven.
For the sake of background, here's a moderately pseudish snippet from the
comment-piece by Mr C that got on Croggon's nerves:
"Naturalism and disruptive high jinks: the theatre needs both. Yes, we need a
writer's theatre that is also an actor's theatre, where the director serves the
text and highlights — and disciplines — the strength of the actor. We need Rush
and Steve Sewell and a director such as Kate Cherry, who can quietly find the
music in a Hannie Rayson play. Maybe in the end we need it more than the
declamatory atonal music of Andrews and Kosky. - Half the trouble with
Australian theatre is caused by talented directors who feel they are above
realism and well-made plays. Often they cut their teeth with student theatre
and have been too narcissistic to grow up. It's much easier to treat student
actors like puppets and to improvise a text than it is to treat Judy Davis like
that. Most cut-and-paste postmodern tinkerings with classics make Joanna
Murray-Smith look like Racine on a good day. But for every production such as
Osage, there's hand-me-down cardboard rubbish of the traditional kind. - We
want the best actors commanding the respect of directors who will allow the
best of our playwrights to take their places alongside the Pirandellos and
Greeks. A theatre which is ancient and modern, classic and cutting-edge,
Australian and internationalist, with a deep instinctive sense that to make it
new, you have to have a theatrical eye for the glitter of the old. Where is
naturalism in all this? Well, we need a theatre that has emotional truth, and
we need a theatre that understands the magic of its own artifice." ("The
trouble with Australian theatre",
The National Times)
As ever, the main argument gets lost in the muddy swirl of tenuous comparisons. It shouldn't take a paragraph with fifteen proper names to tell us that in Mr C's opinion Australian theatre needs to strike a balance between
naturalism and experimental disruption. However, without a definition of his main terms (naturalism//"disruptive high jinks",
mainstream vs experimental theatre, emotional truth vs deconstruction of
traditions), even that relatively simple point evaporates into thin air. The run-through of recent productions by major Australian theatre
companies in
the rest of the piece contains plenty of examples that seem to fall on both sides
of the apparent divide between naturalism and "disruptive high
jinks", so you fast end up wondering what the complaint that there's too
much "disruption" really amounts to.
Croggon's point is essentially the one about definitions and it's very well taken: surely no one who had thought a little about the term "mainstream
theatre" would be silly enough to claim that most mainstream products are
particularly "naturalistic", or that the popularity of mainstream shows follows from any notable adherence to
"naturalism". In short, Craven - to the extent that he is arguing
anything at all - is re-hashing an age-old debate between naturalism and its
opponents - a debate which any sophisticated critic ought to know is completely
unresolvable when framed in these simplistic terms. For anyone who didn't do
Aesthetics 101, let it be said that in the Nineteenth Century, the advocates of
aesthetic naturalism extolled naturalism as an escape from arbitrary
stylisation, while the advocates of aesthetic anti-naturalism condemned it as a step backwards from the reality-sublimating and
reality-subverting functions of art itself. Anyone with a rough grasp of the
history of criticism can see that insisting on a "theatre of emotional
truth", as Craven does, loads the dice against art which doesn't take
truth or emotion as the measure of aesthetic significance. More than that, arguing
for naturalism in this simple-minded way overlooks the relatively obvious point
that naturalism is itself a form of artifice - one which in some circumstances
becomes less than fully aware of itself and under the conditions of mass
cultural spectacle often leads to nothing but the repetition of emotional cliche's and psychological stereotypes.
In any case, the sort of ideal Australian theatre that Craven manages to
build out of his insistence on "emotional truth" is so vague as to be
largely meaningless. A theatre with a "deep instinctive sense that to make
it new you have to keep an eye on the glitter of the old"? A theatre that
"understands the magic of its own artifice"? What on earth would that
amount to specifically? I suppose here at least we can be glad that Craven's
pseudo-ideal is captured in a sentence with a beginning that relates to its
middle and end according to a principle other than literary free association. Still if the actual content of the ideal would make a meaningful difference to theatre programming or theatrical
practice, then Craven leaves us clueless how.
If I had to guess what Mr C is trying to say at this point - it's that he wants to be
emotionally moved when he goes to the theatre - that Great Art is deeply
moving and so could be truly popular if it weren't being screwed up by "narcissistic" avant-gardists. Let's take
it that that's what Craven
would be
saying if he weren't beating about the bush. Let's also take it that Mr C's
desire to be moved by the theatre is basically irrelevant until it's raised
from the level of a personal hankering and made part of some sort of meaningful
critical discourse about the place of emotion in our responses to theatre. What
of the idea that Great Art could potentially wow the masses - if not quite with
the success of Mary Poppins - because of the way it invests spectacle with grand
pathos? This is obviously the topic that's hidden behind the crotchety debate
about Arts Festival programming. However, it's a topic that needs the attention
of someone who's prepared to argue in a sustained way about the relation
between art and wider society - a true critic, in other words - not a drunken
phrase-maker with a license to kill.
There's no doubt that the position of
art in society is changing radically in today's world; high culture in
particular is fast turning into a kind of niche product and in the process fast ceasing to be what it was until recently - a much more
coherent medium of enjoyment and self-understanding for educated people who saw
themselves as setting the cultural tone of society. With high culture, and
indeed art in general, transformed into a cultural commodity, a lot of arts
journalism exists - in spite of whatever good intentions its authors might have
- to spuriously glamourise the product. And this is what Craven, in refusing to
communicate intelligibly about art, becomes the ever more tireless, tiresome
producer of: bizarre glamorisations of an aesthetic tradition that has come
into almost entirely new relations to the society it used to be so central to.
The deeper reason why Mr Craven can't write starts to become clear: because
the great - and admirable - high-mindedness he wants to bring to the role of
the arts writer becomes ridiculous when it comes into combination with the Arts
Industry as it exists in the present day and age, with its anti-critical and
an-aesthetic imperatives: maintaining an artistic star-system,
depositing small references to the arts in as many places as possible, bringing
the occasional controversy to the boil and artificially maintaining that aura
of sublimity we all know art loses when it is
rigorously subjected to the
logic of sales-volumes and bums-on-seats.
Question: What happens
when the imperative to glamourize the artistic product becomes the
practical-social driver of your activity as a writer about art? Well, unless
you drop the pretence of great critical grandeur, then at the very least the
strain starts to show: above all, your language goes on an extended holiday - a
round-the-world cruise maybe, on which adverbs go fly kites of their own,
assonance runs riot, half of what you say sounds like it comes from a tourist
brochure or a real estate catalogue and
everything
smells heavily of alcohol and sex:
"The novel pulsates with the portent and momentum of revelations Tranter
either foreshadows to the point of obviousness or keeps putting further and
more far-fetchedly [sic] out of reach. This makes the book's endless foreplay
between its thriller elements and its loftily conceived moral dramas and
soaring [sic] realism a little bit of a tease. But
The Legacy retains a
lot of magic along with its roughness. Full of suave and stunning [sic] evocations
of Sydney and Manhattan, this sparkling and spacious [sic] novel captures the
smell and sap [sic] of young people half in love with everyone they're vividly
aware of, and groping to find themselves [sic] like the answer to an erotic
enigma." (Peter Craven reviews Kirsten Tranter,
The Monthly)
Oh dear. Let's hope there's an editor out there who still has the courage to
call this stray ship back to port. The captain's drunk and is doing weird stuff
on the bridge. The whole thing's totally sic!
