Blokes: The Bad Boys of British Literature
By David Castronovo
Continuum, 2009.

David Castronovo’s Blokes is a study of four more-or-less blokey post-war British (indeed English) writers: the poet Philip Larkin, the novelist Kingsley Amis, the playwright John Osborne, and the critic Kenneth Tynan. Castronovo is an American academic, and in some ways his American-ness – or at least his non-Britishness – shows. He is under the impression, for example, that “ratbags” is a singular term, like “jackanapes.” He also believes that Philip Larkin wrote a poem called “Sunny Penstatyn.” (The place is called Prestatyn.) And several times he uses the hideous epithet “cheesy” to denote general awfulness. It’s depressing to learn that even highbrow Americans have started using this crass term. Americans are entitled, I suppose, to invent an orange product that comes out of an aerosol can and call it cheese; but to proceed to coin a word suggesting that cheese is an inherently shitty substance is going a bit far. Those of us who enjoy the subtler varieties of the fermented curd must resist the internationalisation of this term at every opportunity. Has Castronovo never savoured a slice of barbecued haloumi, or carved himself a wedge of Brie? He is writing, remember, about a country in which the Ploughman’s Lunch is a justly celebrated staple.

But these are side issues. The main question is this: how well is Castronovo able to conceal, or transcend, the fact that he is an academic, writing an academic treatise? We know what books like this can be like. Amis himself, in Lucky Jim, cruelly nailed the properties of the publish-or-perish endeavour: the selection of the “strangely neglected” topic; and then the article itself, with its “niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-inducing facts, the pseudo-light it [throws] upon non-problems.” I should say right away that Castronovo’s book isn’t as bad as that. On the whole it’s well written and judicious. Refreshingly, Castronovo doesn’t seek, at least not much, to arraign Amis and Larkin for their private misdeeds. And if there are places where his thesis about his subjects’ “blokishness” begins to feel a little artificial, for the most part he doesn’t try to stretch it too far. Mainly the book supplies a straight account of each man’s work, embedded in a sketch of his life and cultural habitat. In the cases of Amis, Osborne and Tynan, this approach yields readable results, although there are times – when you’re reading Castronovo’s brisk summaries of the plots of Amis’s novels, for example – when you wonder what you’re getting from Castronovo that you couldn’t be getting, in a much more entertaining form, from the books of the blokes themselves.

In the case of Larkin, though, Castronovo’s biographical approach has the effect of muffling, rather than enhancing, his understanding of the works. Since Larkin’s death, we’ve heard a lot more about Larkin’s bleak private life than we’ve heard about the work, and his reputation as a poet has suffered. The job of the sympathetic critic, right now, is to disinter the poems from the rubble of the Larkin “debate,” and remind people why Larkin was able to establish a reputation in the first place. Castronovo, on the face of it, is a sympathetic critic. But the thesis of his book obliges him to keep hammering the proposition that Larkin was a “bloke.” And there is far more evidence for this proposition in Larkin’s letters and life than there is in the poems. So Castronovo, depressingly, keeps the trend going: before we get to the poems, we must hear about the wartier aspects of Larkin’s biography. We get quotes from the letters: Larkin, some time around 1945, bitches about having to pay for dinner “WITHOUT BEING ALLOWED TO SHAG the woman afterwards AS A MATTER OF COURSE.” We’re told about affairs that “reveal him in all his blokish awfulness and honesty.” We even get the cynically inserted blade of a bracketed exclamation mark: one of Larkin’s girlfriends “would later remember that gentleness and consideration (!) were also mixed in with his self-absorption.”

With all this stuff fresh in our heads, our reading of a poem like “Church Going” is bound to be prejudiced. Here, in full, is Castronovo’s analysis of that poem.

A clueless modern Brit enters a church, removes his ‘cycle-clips in awkward reverence,’ walks around, and encounters a thousand years of Christendom. While inspecting a spiritual place that has never meant anything to him, he achieves his own recognition. Larkin makes his clumsiness and vague boredom ways of understanding. And there’s something ironically humorous about the ignorance and insensitivity. As the tourist lets the door ‘thud shut’ (all bluntness intended), we laugh at ‘there’s nothing going on’ and the weary phrase ‘Another church.’ The ‘holy end’ and the ‘unignorable silence, / Brewed God knows how long’ are rude and uncomprehending, but the language wakes us up. Plain bloke-speak leads somewhere important: in wondering what to look for, he discovers his own spiritual sense. What is to come when belief is ended, superstition has come and gone, and even disbelief has grown old? He has ‘no idea / What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth’ yet he is strangely pleased to be in it. Larkin’s honest doubter – someone who refers to the believer as a ‘Christmas addict’ or ‘ruin-bibber’ – is busy doubting himself. For someone ‘bored, uninformed,’ he’s very interested: the silence which existed for God knows how long gives pleasure. With an awkward, groping vocabulary, he blurts out his recognition: the church is a place where ‘someone will forever be surprising / A hunger in himself to be more serious.’ The wonderful alliteration makes the line epigrammatic, a piece of spiritual wisdom. It should also be said that the poem has travelled the distance from flippancy to seriousness. But without the blokish language (including church going, like movie going) the poem would be a dry meditation.

Apart from one clear misreading – the ruin-bibber isn’t a believer, but someone who scours derelict churches for antiques – this analysis isn’t outright wrong. But it’s subtly infected by the notion that Larkin was as “blunt” and inconsiderate in his poetry as he was, allegedly, in his life. “Rude”, “weary,” “clueless,” “insensitive”? Read “Church Going” with a cold eye, and see if those adjectives spring to mind. What is so “weary” about the phrase “another church”? Read in context, the phrase does nothing more than signify that the poet is in a church, and that he goes to churches often. To hear weariness in it, you need to be equipped with the preconception that Larkin was a serial whiner. Castronovo believes that he was, in both his life and his poetry. In fact, he thinks that Larkin rather overdid it: “Larkin, after all, won tremendous recognition for a small body of work, enjoyed such honors as an honorary degree from Oxford, went to Buckingham Palace for his CBE (with Monica [his girlfriend]). Yet in ‘Party Politics’ he writes ‘I never remember holding a full drink.’”

Well, Larkin did write that. But the rest of that poem (“What next? Ration the rest …?”) makes it reasonably clear that his drinks haven’t started off half-full: they’re abbreviated because he’s always taken an initial sip of them. So there is a heavy dose of self-deprecation, even whimsy, in Larkin’s complaint. On the whole Larkin’s grumblings were a lot more good-natured than Castronovo, and a lot of other critics, give him credit for.

The chapter on Larkin is the weakest part of the book, so in a sense it’s unfair to focus on it. But Castronovo’s readings of Larkin demonstrate the general hazards of the biographical approach. If you push that approach too far – if you forget that a piece of literature is at least partly an autonomous and refined thing – you will needlessly limit your understanding of the work. If Larkin criticism is to progress, it needs to get to grips with the paradox, which really isn’t all that hard to understand, that Larkin was a man who lived an ugly life but wrote beautiful poems.

24-08-10

We welcome comments, corrections, arguments, attacks, enquiries. Write to us at mailbox@theember.com.au.

Anthony Lister - Macmillan Mini-Art Series No. 13
Ken McGregor and Jenny Zimmer
Macmillan. $Au 35.00.

Ben Frost – Lost in the Supermarket
Boutwell Draper Gallery

Franck Gohier – Produkt
Ray Hughes Gallery

Ladies and gentlemen, Anthony Lister: “Mankind is a product of its own reflection being fed to the masses through television. All of my life I have been educated by Americans on television in Australia. The cinema has replaced the church as a common ground where we can gather as humans and listen to stories and compare our simple lives and beliefs with those that are more worthy of fame than ourselves.”

Is Lister thinking of stories like X-Men and The Dark Knight? Maybe Gladiator or Troy? Or is he thinking of Great Man biopics like Ghandi? Perhaps it doesn’t matter - whatever it is he’s thinking of, that little phrase ‘more worthy of fame’ is troubling. It smacks of a conservative, hierarchical approach to ‘worth’ which sees fame as something earned (and therefore deserved) and which places the famous on a higher plane than the schmucks who look up to them. This is a failure of vision, and it’s one that tells in Lister’s work – it fails to take into account the socially constructed and artificial dimensions of fame and adulation.

Lister grew up in Brisbane where he was one of the city’s pioneering stencil and street artists. He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Queensland College of the Arts and he also has a mentor - New Zealand artist Max Gimblett. Gimblett is based in New York and in 2003 Lister joined his mentor there to further benefit from his guiding influence. Lister has had solo exhibitions all over the world and is represented in the National Gallery of Australia, and a survey of his work from 2005 to 2009 has been gathered together by Ken McGregor and Jenny Zimmer for volume 13 of Macmillan’s Mini-Art series.

You’d have to presume Lister loves the television shows that raised him (his cheerful artworks are full of them) and yet he seems somewhat anxious about the same thing being fed to ‘the masses.’ It’s the attitude of a cultural commissar, or a born censor at the very least - the masses must be protected from getting what they want. But you have to wonder, was televisual pap ‘fed’ to young Lister, or did he devour it avidly? Has it reduced him to a consumerist zombie, or did he manage to see through the gaudy appeals without losing his eye for their many charms?

Lister’s work contains the effluvia of the digital media age which, it would seem, is a stylised reiteration of the effluvia of every other era within the ongoing epoch of Capitalism. Here are mutations of Captain America, Wonder Woman, Superman, Batman, Wolverine and The Hulk. An eleven year-old from 1965 could be expected to recognise most of the figures in Lister’s work. The child might be a little disoriented, though, by the emphatically over-inflated torsoes and by the loose lines and intensified colours of Lister’s superfolk.

So times have changed a little. Black outlines over three-colour halftone separations were machine language – restrictive. Comic art needed more energy, more edge. Higher quality paper and a market that could support the cost of better quality printing opened avenues for more exacting artists to further cultivate a more engaged audience. This was an audience that could appreciate and sustain the idiosyncratic and expressive brushwork and inking of signature artistes. Lister’s touched up icons are the ancestors of that shift, they go back to Frank Miller (Ronin, Daredevil, Sin City), to Bernard Krigstein, to Paul Pope. Lister’s aesthetic is the result of all manner of gradual shifts away from the basic origins of consumer print media – and sadly those origins are all but effaced in his work.

For an artist who has had his own billboard to work on, Lister seems to barely engage with the visual conventions of printed mass communications. Sure, he’s a child of the digital age, but there’s no trace of the pixel either. OK, so there’s no romance with seminal print techniques – so be it. You get the sense though that Lister has turned his back on traditions and constraints that would galvanise his work. The images are overblown where they might have been pared back and elaborate where reticence might have yielded better results. Lister’s own claim to merely reflect the media, the age, is disingenuous, his works are a synthesis, a palatable pastiche – Lister talks of holiding a mirror to society but the ‘reflections’ in his work are thoroughly designed. Lister’s composite figures distil multiple symbols and signs into one coherent, palatable whole. They offer easily digested, decorative realism.

Through his superhero figures, Lister is exploring the role of the virtual avatar and engaging with the symbolic function of mythic saviours. Virtual reality platforms like Second Life allow users to construct an ideal self-image, and more often than not, in bodily dimensions and costume, they resemble Lister’s biologically superlative grotesques. If you believe the advocates, Lister’s work asks how this aspirational visual symbolism will effect self-esteem, self-image, collective values and goals in the future. Christ was an avatar. Batman and Superman - more avatars. Is Lister’s chained up Batman (equal parts portentous pessimism and whimsy) another kind of crucifixion? Has the sacrifice been chosen? Batman, Superman, Spiderman – personal lives martyred to the higher good, they die for our sins every time they don the spandex, the cape, the cowl. And to eliminate any confusion on the matter (ambiguity is so inert) one of Lister’s characteristic diptychs sees Captain America hoisted onto a solid looking crucifix.

‘I’m not trying to change the world’ says Lister, ‘I’m just reacting to the world that’s trying to change me.’ Lister does change the world though, because his reaction is to refine and synthesise chaotic appeals into a coherent, composed whole. Place Lister’s work alongside Ben Frost’s ‘Lost in the Supermarket’ canvasses and you see how mannered and conservative his reaction to the realities of US-dominated, digital mass-communication really is. Lister is a stylist not a realist. The same goes for Frost, but Frost’s work gives a greater sense of what it’s like to be in the belly of this whale we’ve all been swallowed by. In Frost’s paintings all the signs and appeals are there, superimposed, juxtaposed and ever-more cluttered. Lister’s work typically represents these same massed forces in a single, hybrid figure standing out vividly against an all but empty canvas. Frost presents a visual static that’s both diffuse and pervasive; Lister celebrates and amplifies the candy colour hooks and the T&A glamour with which the digital mass media screams ‘Buy!’ Frost, like Lister, is a former street artist making increasingly profitable inroads into the gallery marketplace. Frost was self-conscious about moving onto canvas and into the gallery, and no doubt Lister had his moments of doubt too. Can street cred survive in the gallery? Culture jamming mash-ups with street cred can attract a hefty price, but can street cred survive the translation to studio practice and the gallery wall?

Lister’s precursors – Elizabeth Peynton, Jamie Hewlett, a touch of Schiele, a touch of Whitely – all share his commitment to the real (at street-level) and to the direct appeal of mass aesthetics (Schiele sits apart from the lavishly decorative Klimt on the basis of subject matter - death, prostitutes, ‘real life’ - rather than style). And like his precursors, Lister’s reality is fashion conscious, stylish and selective. Compare the ‘Grocery’ of 2009 to the supermarket series of 2006 and you get the sense that Lister has begun to paint for an audience with a very sweet tooth. You get that sense even more so after a quick glance through the catalogue of Lister’s current 2010 show – the candy coloured avatars heroes, ripped and racked, are still in ascendance. Market forces say no more dozy grayscapes. Lurid pop-inflected grocery stores, yes (at a pinch), but serene, whimsical monochrome must go.  It’s a shame. Lister’s misty interiors are more subtle and more satisfying than his figures, and they also acknowledge the social dimension that persists in these temples of consumption. Lister’s supermarkets are also a highly romanticised location. While the dominant grey, the low contrast and the absence of colour insist that this is a generic and lifeless environment, they also generate a kind of twilight mystery. This may be a site of coercion and control, but the reliability, the familiarity and the promise of this modern market place generate a kind of narcotic calm. Perhaps this is a smothered, underwater calm, but it is calm nevertheless. Maybe that calm is the sleep of reason, and maybe it comes at the cost of real choice, but aren’t there also traces here of an Arcadian peace?

Maybe not. Lister makes sure we don’t forget this peaceful vision is a tool of commerce – the one splash of colour, the beauty spot, is reserved for the ‘Sale’ flags. But for all Lister’s connection to the now, this version of selling is a quasi-mystical abstraction.

So unless you believe the supermarket is a temple, this version of selling is a lie. For Ben Frost, the supermarket is life now, and life now looks like this:

This is not a temple – there are icons aplenty but their potency is dissipated by accumulation and conceptual discord. Frost’s true vision is as subjective as Lister’s, but his quotations from sign writing, advertising, branding, commercial print design, graphic art, cartoons and pulp media are exact. Frost’s appropriation of the real thing along with the resonance he generates between so many mutually confounding and contradicting signs, give his works an aura (deceiving perhaps) of subversion and protest.

For Frost the supermarket is a trap – it is an environment in which coercive marketing strategies mimic entertainment and information, transforming individuals into components participating in a collective enterprise of consumption. It’s a bit much – there’s plenty of humour in Frost’s visual associations but not much in his sense for the power that these signs really hold. If we can laugh at their clumsy insistence, if we can see the common language shared by the soft-serve ice-cream boy and the page three girl, then can’t we also say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to their appeal under our own volition? Frost relishes the vernacular but there’s an anxiety that runs through his accumulations: What if we can’t differentiate, turn off, cut through? What if even the strategies of ironic homage, knowing appropriation and low-brow sanctification can’t nullify the brand power stored up in the visual idiom of our commodified existence?

So the hard sell is ubiquitous to modern visual communication, and along with craven manipulations and lowest-common-denominator production values, it also generates energy and vitality, glorious absurdity, crude efficiencies and primitive appeals. Packaging and advertising are transmitting coded messages to the tribal mind. That, at very least, was the objective of the designers. Supermarket shelves are a rich and strange world, as much for the ill-conceived and the outmoded as for the representative and the telling.

Franck Gohier’s most recent exhibition was branded ‘Produkt’ – the title is Soviet retro, but Gohier’s work draws on the whole-page ads that were liberally shuffled into colour comic books to further disseminate the capitalist ideals through the cultural colonies of the USA in the sixties, seventies and early eighties. Gohier is faithful to the look, the clumsy appeals and the cheerful stereotyping of these unforgettable campaigns. Gohier is playing pranks - ramping up latent sexism, racism, exploitation and moral hypocrisy – but there is a potent romance taking place between the artist and the basic language of four-colour halftone print design. And there’s another romance too, a nostalgia for the innocent, malleable child’s eye, imprinted with these crudely vivid appeals.  Produkt seems to revisit the inception of an appetite for the image, while also seeing through the images with the eyes of experience.

Gohier’s work is steeped in print culture. Before he made paintings he made prints – he is a practitioner of the line and fill and a devotee of blunt and efficient visual appeals. At first glance, Gohier is pure pop, but an editorial or polemical dimension has been overlaid - where pop was cool, aloof, Gohier is hot, human and involved. Gohier’s satirical familiarity with the pop style suggests he is on more easy terms with this language than many of the iconic pop masters. Gohier’s images are free of false poignancy, mystery or sanctification.

Gohier’s satire is overt, and so is his enthusiasm for the absurdity and energy of the language he has co-opted. There’s Dali with the Chupa Chup logo he designed. Art for selling, artist for sale - but Gohier is sardonic about populist engagement and about the subservience of image making to commodity culture. Frost and Lister seem paranoid about life in the supermarket, but in their work this paranoia only plays out as another dimension of product, while as an attitude or ideology it has reached a dead end. There’s something premature about Lister and Frost, as if they’re not quite sure they really hate the forces they demonise. Lister claims to be parroting the American media images he was drip fed through childhood by Australian commercial TV and consumer culture. He also hopes, you feel, that his avatar images will convey a rhetorical question to the viewer – Where are we headed? Are these really worthy ideals? Is this a healthy way to understand good and evil? But this rhetoric feels like an afterthought. The real pay off in Lister’s work, and the reason for his increasing popularity, is his anabolic inflation of familiar symbols. If Lister is trying to present these representative avatar figures as essentially problematic, he is failing. From the straightforward expansion of scale, through to the subtler messages conveyed in medium and technique, Lister’s treatment of these subjects validates them as a vivid, vibrant and legitimate force.

12-08-10

We welcome comments, corrections, arguments, attacks, enquiries. Write to us at mailbox@theember.com.au.

On the third floor of the Victoria and Albert Museum, along from the sacred silver and the wall tapestries, there are five interconnected rooms housing row after row of head high wooden sample cabinets. You can stop there in the ambient gloom and browse through the back pages of textile history. Screen-printed, block printed, roller printed, woven, dyed, embroidered, hand crafted or industrial, exclusive or populist, abstract, figurative, subtle or bold – an encyclopaedic multitude of styles. The mounted swatches are not just museum pieces either – along the walls, tilted copying desks fitted with dim reading lights beckon. Every panel can be slid out of its wooden rack and laid out for closer examination. The V&A is committed to sustaining the traditions and stimulating the evolution of the decorative arts and design. This commitment is fairly plain in the way the collections are curated. The V&A functions well enough as a conventional museum, with emphases placed on preservation and display, but it also works hard to present itself as a living resource for contemporary designers. With the V&A Pattern series, the museum has vastly increased the reach of its benevolent design evangelism. No need to make the pilgrimage to South Kensington, there’s an abundance of stimulating and edifying reproductions in each title from the ongoing series. The most recent additions have been collected together into a four-piece box set.

Owen Jones, whose Grammar of Ornament (1856) became a highly influential seminal resource for his contemporaries and for designers in every subsequent age, warrants his own volume. Jones’ geometrical studies and improvisations on the decorative mosaics and the tessellated pavements of the Alhambra provide an essentialist gravitas that is complemented in this set by a collection of novelty prints. While V&A Patterns - Owen Jones showcases the absorbing, pulsing effects of intricate mathematical pattern making, V&A Patterns – Novelty Patterns showcases a more frivolous and directly evocative style. Bright colours, carnival images and familiar scenes of commonplace leisure are front and centre here, exemplifying the light-hearted and winsome design style that developed alongside the demand for lightweight Summer leisure lines. Cotton takes first place under the sun. Fabrics with prints that reinforced the wearer’s recreational frame of mind were being produced for play clothes, resort wear, beach rompers and tub frocks. Boats and beach scenes, pageantry and domestic idylls.

Alongside such relaxed and cheerful populism, the traditional and more formalised symbolic language showcased in V&A Pattern – Kimono is a reminder of the role textiles can play in communicating status, influence and affluence. Although the complex levels of meaning that traditionally ran through kimono imagery and motifs have been diluted by the influence of modern western design and dying technology, the kimono remains an enduring symbol of Japanese culture. Delicate, evocative renditions of plants, animals and landscapes mingle with scenes from classical literature and popular myths. Particular colours and motifs were linked to specific celebrations and occasions and could also be used to convey the character of the wearer.

Humans have always been resourceful in compensating for nature’s oversights. Rare and exotic furs and plumage have a well established prominence when it comes to the ornamentation and display of our comparatively unadorned bodies. Similarly, when it comes to decorating our domestic interiors we appropriate images and motifs from a natural world that is ever more remote from modern urban and suburban life. In wallpapers, upholstery fabrics and in textile homewares, the garden floral is omnipresent. Flowers and foliage lend themselves readily to designs that contain both the satisfying visual symmetries of abstract pattern making and the direct emotional appeals of figurative images. V&A Patterns – Garden Florals, draws on designs produced in the last two decades of the 19th century and in the lead up to the first World War. The influence of William Morris and Walter Crane, the influx of Japanese textiles and porcelain in the late 1860s and the semi-abstract exaggerations of Art Nouveau are all apparent in the many different treatments of botanical imagery. While some designs flaunt the stylisations and manipulations which have fitted natural forms into the strict regularity of a repeatable panel, others strive to disguise artifice and repetition behind the naturalistic impression of an uncultivated massed planting.

Read the fine print of course, but designers are encouraged to make use of an accompanying CD containing jpegs of all the patterns featured in each title. The discs contain instructions for tracing and tiling the patterns, so in theory they are ready to be put to work. And that seems to be what the V&A wants – they promise to deal quickly with requests for permission to use the images and close with a humble plea that their intellectual property be respected. No punitive threats here, and though it’s made clear that any commercial purposes must be approved by V&A Images, you do get the feeling that the people in charge of this quite amazing resource understand that litigating these patterns into artefact status would be a much worse outcome than having the odd unauthorised rendition showing up in some corner of the great global bazaar.

Owen Jones founded his design practice on exemplary principles drawn from a wide range of cultural traditions. He examined the decorative and architectural principles of Islamic, Chinese and Renaissance traditions in the hope of discovering common strategies which he could follow in his own work. Jones sampled freely, but always with the intention of reinterpreting his sources. As you make your way through the V&A Patterns series, poring over the built up colour effects, the fine detail, the compositional balance and the heft or finesse of the repetitions, the spirit of Owen Jones implores you: sample, then reinvent.

The patterns collected in these samplers are a small selection from the V&A’s vast and growing print and textile archive which you can browse here.

We welcome comments, corrections, arguments, attacks, enquiries. Write to us at mailbox@theember.com.au.

The Good Soldiers by David Finkel
Scribe. 287 pages. $Au 35.00.

In the final sequence of HBO’s Iraq War mini-series, Generation Kill, the troops from Bravo 21 gather around a laptop. Their deployment has come to an end and the mood is celebratory. One of their number has just finished editing together a retrospective package from the footage he’d shot on his handi-cam during the battalion’s time in theatre. Not everyone in the squad is keen, but the majority assemble excitedly. To the accompaniment of Johnny Cash’s octogenarian end-time rumble, the grainy cut and paste of troops skylarking, bonding, waiting, shooting and smiling begins to play. At first the assembled troops embrace the mood of relieved and cheerful reminiscence but gradually, as fallen comrades grace the screen, then don’t, as the images revisit travesties and disasters, and as ubiquitous squalor and destruction, civilian terror, trauma and tragedy crowd out the small screen, the group-high falters and the digital revisitation loses its savour. One by one the troops move away.

Generation Kill was written and produced by David Simon (The Wire, Homicide: Life on the Street) and closing proceedings with this kind of musical montage is something of a signature move. Direct, astringent tunes are paired with poignant, summary footage to generate an emotive sign-off – the characters we’ve followed in such close detail are transferred into the mythic blur of their inevitable, symbolic futures. In Generation Kill, there’s an extra dimension – as we watch the closing music-video pastiche, so do the characters who feature in it. And as they watch, they respond. There’s a double manipulation here – first we imbibe the media package, the accepted unit of current affairs significance, and follow the emotional cues of adventure intermingled with atrocity. But as the discomfort of the soldiers begins to register, we are being prompted to consider another dimension. The soldiers respond to this YouTube realism with hurt, shame, guilt and something like a sense of professional decorum. While the clip puts the soldiers at the centre of horrific scenes, their reaction to the clip is a concise way to evoke the burden of living in the aftermath of active service. The excitement and mortal jeopardy of battle is also the gateway to a lifetime of doubt and revisitation. Simon’s is not the lightest of touches but this closing scene makes a fairly powerful challenge to the viewer. In contrast, David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers is simply words on a page - no apocalyptic soundtrack, no adrenalin metal, no video game devastation and no jackass bonding. Finkel offers mere reportage, mere journalism – but he also calls on his own rhetorical alchemies to produce an equivalent polemical effect.

But first, some details. David Finkel is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who has covered the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo for The Washington Post. From January 2007, Finkel was embedded with Battalion 2-16 for the duration of their fifteen month deployment as a part of George W. Bush’s ‘Surge’. In The Good Soldiers, Finkel tracks the battalion’s experiences and morale as they work to blunt insurgency in occupied Iraq.

Finkel’s main source of information and context during his time with battalion 2-16 is Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Kauzlarich. Kauzlarich aspires to be a good Christian and pacifies himself again and again with his threadbare mantra “It’s all good.’ Finkel characterises Kauzlarich as a man who gets on by accepting the limitations of his intellect and surrendering to the dogma and protocols of army command. When the line from the President is ‘we’re winning the war’, Kauzlarich reflects on all the contradictory evidence in his day to day experience and seeks a way to see them as the material signs of imminent victory. Kauzlarich is an upbeat but emotionally ineloquent leader. He offers consolation to his troops, grieving at a service for a dead comrade, with this fairly brutal analogy: there is a bullet, he tells his men, that has been assigned to each one of us, and for each one of us that bullet has already been fired. The intention is plain enough, but there’s something sociopathic in the choice of time and place for such a fatalistic memento mori. Kauzlarich’s bovine fatalism (alternatively a staunch refusal to doubt) makes him the perfect foil to Finkel’s savvy and more sceptical soldiers.

Finkel’s project is partly explanatory and informative, but his primary aim is to convey the individual experience and social dynamics of the battalion. He wants his readers to learn about the role of the infantry, but more importantly he wants them to engage with the soldiers’ situation. This is where those rhetorical alchemies come in. Here is Finkel’s opening, an efficient piece of foreshadowing leading to an evocative metaphor for the psyche of the occupying forces.

[Kauzlarich’s] soldiers weren’t yet calling him the Lost Kauz behind his back, not when he began. The soldiers of his who would be injured were still perfectly healthy, and the soldiers of his who would die were still perfectly alive. A soldier who was a favourite of his, and who was often described as a younger version of him, hadn’t yet written of the war in a letter to a friend, “I’ve had enough of this bullshit.” Another soldier, one of his best, hadn’t yet written in the journal he kept hidden, “I’ve lost all hope. I feel the end is near for me, very, very near.” Another hadn’t yet gotten angry enough to shoot a thirsty dog that was lapping up a puddle of human blood. Another, who at the end of all this would become the battalions most decorated soldier, hadn’t yet started dreaming about the people he had killed and wondering if God was going to ask him about the two who had been climbing a ladder. Another hadn’t yet started seeing himself shooting a man in the head, and then seeing the little girl who had just watched him shoot the man in the head, every time he shut his eyes. For that matter, his own dreams hadn’t started yet, either, at least the ones he would remember – the one in which his wife and friends were in a cemetery, surrounding a hole into which he was suddenly falling; or the one in which everything around him was exploding and he was trying to fight back with no weapons and no ammunition other than a bucket of old bullets. …

Finkel’s straining a bit here (“perfectly alive”?) but in that bucket of old bullets he has struck upon a poignant symbol for the soldiers’ experiences in Iraq.

The good soldiers, to begin with, are models of efficiency and prudence:

They were finding stockpiles of weapons before the weapons could be used against them. They were getting shot at but not hit. Training and standards, Kauzlarich said – that was the difference. Other battalions were getting rocked by IEDs, but not them, and Kauzlarich kept saying, “It’s all good,” and that’s who they had become as March moved into April. They were the good soldiers.
On the FOB, they were the only ones who wore gloves as they walked around, always ready for the just-in-case, and whenever a convoy rolled out of the wire … the soldiers always drove slower than fifteen miles per hour, because slower improved the chances of finding an IED. Other soldiers in other battalions who had been around longer sped; but not them.

And then, over fifteen months, things change. It’s not only the good soldiers that are brought to their limit, it’s the great soldiers as well. Finkel writes of a soldier who had been “the one who never complained, who hoisted bleeding soldiers onto his back, who’d suddenly begun insisting on being in the right front seat of the lead Humvee on every mission, not because he wanted to die, but because that’s what selfless leaders would do.”  For Finkel, this soldier’s path from dutiful efficiency to manic despair serves as a kind of gauge for the physical and psychological stresses brought to bear at the front line of the occupation.

He remembered the initial invasion … “I mean it was a front seat to the greatest movie I’ve ever seen in my life.” He remembered the firefights of his second deployment. “I loved it. Anytime I get shot at in a firefight, it’s the sexiest feeling there is.” He remembered how this deployment began to feel bad early on. “I’d get in the Humvee and be driving down the road and I would feel my heart pulsing up in my throat.” That was the start of it, he said, and then Emory happened, and then Crow happened, and then he was in a succession of explosions, and then a bullet was skimming across his thighs, and then Doster happened, and then he was waking up thinking, “Holy shit, I’m still here, it’s misery, it’s hell,” which became, “Are they going to kill me today?” which became, “I’ll take care of it myself,” which became, “Why do that? I’ll go out killing as many of them as I can, until they kill me.”

“The amazing thing,” Finkel continues, “was that no-one knew. Here was all this stuff going on, pounding heart, panicked breathing, sweating palms, electric eyes, and no one regarded him as anything but the great soldier he’d always been.”

A 24 year old Lieutenant Showman, the intermediary between the “it’s all good” Kauzlarich and an increasingly disaffected troop body confides “I think it’s difficult for them, and difficult for me, to hear about these strides we’re making, these improvements we’re making, when we know – when I know – for a fact, that this place hasn’t changed a damn bit since we set foot here in February.” And so, with a leadership in denial, and with an enemy continuing to inflict serious wounds, the disaffection intensifies.

Finkel’s reportage carries the narrative propulsion and verbal facility of a polished page-turning suspense writer. He judges well when to offer up fine detail and precision and when to draw back and let allusive profundity stimulate the reader’s emotional imagination. Finkel is a journalist, and The Good Soldiers is a record, a piece of reportage. But the record of what? This is not the political or military history of the Surge, this is an empathetic and involved response to the conditions and experiences of individual troops. Finkel does gesture to the various versions of the war, but the gestures are something of a formality.

There were just so many ways to describe this war, that was the thing.
Congress had needed two days of hearings.
Protesters had needed a die-in.
George W. Bush had needed just three words: “We’re kicking ass.”
Now Kauzlarich managed to do it in one. “Unfortunately,” he typed as he started the next sentence, and in the truth of that word, a bad day came to an end.

“Unfortunately” (Kauzlarich is breaking the news of another soldier’s death) is a vast understatement and an evasion. Nevertheless, of the many ways to describe this war, Finkel’s approval of this particular one reiterates his commitment to the close up account. In Finkel’s  version of war, casualties are not just tactical expediencies but individual soldiers whose deaths will always leave an unfillable gap no matter how readily they are replaced.

Finkel is a serious, pedigreed journalist with a firm conviction in the morality of reportage. He is also clearly and consciously pursuing the right rhetorical tone. The idea: to let the reader pass gradually, unprompted, through the experiences he had shared with Battalion 2-16. Finkel’s style is anything but blank though – pregnant understatement, emotive character cameos, a deliberate and relentless engagement with the rank and file. Finkel positions his good soldiers in the midst of a vaguely defined politico-military machine. He emphasises their vulnerability to the remote agendas of their own command as much as their vulnerability to the unconventional warfare of an evasive adversary. The good soldiers are lost in some metaphysical landscape where the hostile posture of the invading force invites karmic retribution. Counter-insurgency easily takes on a broad symbolic resonance: the enemy is elusive, absent, they offer no target, no easy means of engagement, they give their opponent time to think and to worry - and to lose hope. Booby traps turn the countryside into an adversary. A conflicted, frightened populace remain at arm’s length and eventually the fight transforms into a sacrificial ritual of deference to some blood hungry abstraction of human aggression. Extrapolate out – Finkel’s good soldiers are the sacrificial offering, or the forfeit, made by an industrial military complex dreaming of supply and reconstruction contracts, and oil.

It’s all there – the epic sense of hopelessness and the dim outline of a self-defeating pugnacity. But The Good Soldiers is also firmly grounded in the detailed troop-level experience of the Surge. Finkel’s telegrammatic descriptions of action are intermingled with sensational, suspense filled constructions and context. His staccato procedural style mimics the manner of the soldiers’ sworn statements, his main source of combat detail.

… This time the explosion was thunderous. The Humvee shot straight up in the air – it must have been ten feet, soldiers would say later – and when it came down, it bounced and then exploded into flames.
Immediately, Jay March and other soldiers ran towards the Humvee and began dragging injured soldiers away.
Now they watched helplessly as the driver, nineteen-year-old James Harrelson, burned to death in front of their eyes.
Now they were in the tall, green grass on the side of the berm, tending to the snapped bones and haemorrhaging wounds of the four soldiers they had been able to get to.
Now, at the Rustamiyah aid station, medics ran toward the first arriving Humvee and the howls of a soldier in pain.
Now, inside the aid station, a soldier who had been unconscious was screaming and a second soldier was moaning, and a third soldier was swearing and apologizing as a doctor filled him with morphine.

There’s nothing like being there of course, but Finkel also does a lot of hard work to establish his authority. Finkel moves between the hard-boiled (terse, punchy and knowing), the sentimental and plaintive (humble pathos for the soldiers) and a kind of buttoned-down gonzo journalese (insistent and challenging). Through all these phases, he is reaching out to keep his reader where he wants them.

What about the youngest soldier in the battalion, who was only seventeen? “Roger that,” he said, whenever he was asked if he was ready, but when rumours about the deployment first began to circulate, he had taken aside his platoon sergeant, a staff sergeant named Frank Gietz, to ask how he’d be able to handle killing someone. “Put it in a dark place while you’re there.” Gietz had said.
So was a seventeen year old ready?
For that matter, was Gietz, who had been to Iraq twice, was one of the oldest soldiers in the battalion, and knew better than anyone the meaning of “a dark place”?
Was Jay Cajimat, who in ten weeks was going to be remembered by his mother in the local paper as a “soft-hearted boy”?
Didn’t matter. They were going.

Even the most dispassionate depiction of what war does to soldiers will tend to valorise their suffering and ordeals. These experiences are, plain and simple, extraordinary, and for us ordinary civilians, safe at home, they easily claim and hold our attention. As they should. But war is not just good soldiers being ground down by diabolical circumstances. There are many aspects of war that are obscured by the kind of close, human scale Finkel utilises throughout The Good Soldiers. To be fair, Finkel has not set out to dissect or analyse the industrial and political dynamics that can make war look like good business or sound politics. Nor does he set out to thoroughly explore the hierarchies that determine the character of military procedure. Essentially, he has set out to evaluate the surge strategy by way of the experiences of the troops enforcing it. It stands to reason, he implies, that the experiences and morale of these soldiers will offer one of the truest registers of whether the strategy is sound. This focus also guarantees Finkel’s reader a maximum in emotional yield. Finkel maintains the semblance of an impersonal, just-the-facts address, but there is something disingenuous about his journalistic objectivity.

Finkel doesn’t engage with the justifications for the original invasion of Iraq, his method is heavy on context, but analysis and evaluation fall outside the boundary of his explanatory portraiture. Finkel’s show don’t tell approach provides what most curious readers want – the chance to observe and listen in, before drawing their own conclusions about the efficacy of the surge. The Good Soldiers also contains an implicit invitation to assess the moral foundations of the US campaign in Iraq. Finkel lets the soldiers lead his reader in the critical questions – should we have ever come here? Should we be here now? Can we possibly do any good? Finkel allows the good soldiers to condemn and question the war, but he himself never does. He catalogues traumatic ordeals, life-ruining physical and psychological injuries, loss, betrayal and social dissolution, and provides the raw data for the reader to weigh gains against losses, but he himself never does this.

Without moving too far from the experiences of the rank and file, Finkel has gone to some lengths to ensure his portrayal of the surge encompasses much more than fighting. Relying on a brisk if sometimes overly emotive pen-portraiture, Finkel gives fair showing to the many and varied aspects of the soldiers’ lot and to the range of trauma inflicted by combat. There are page turning battle sequences, heroism and bravado, and there is death, crippling injury and despair. The anguished vigil by the wife of a critically injured soldier anticipates the countless minor aftershocks that all participating nations will continue to experience as veterans reintegrate themselves into the civilian population. Finkel segues from the theatre of war to an army hospital where multiple-amputees, burns victims and seriously damaged veterans struggle to rehabilitate themselves. He juxtaposes the insular, focused world of the deployed troops with a carnivalesque protest in Washington. The peace protesters have arranged a die-in, and with the scene seeming so much like a rehash of the anti-war movement of the seventies, Finkel does a short stint of new journalistic homage to Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night. Reading between Finkel’s lines, these people are having too much fun, and the retro aesthetic of their protest is too kooky to be valid.

The demonstration is mollifying public theatre for the wishy washy left – Finkel cuts directly to the mess hall where disinterested troops carry on with the routines and rituals of day to day survival. Finkel lets the demonstration appear trivial by comparison, but is it? Similarly, Finkel assembles a supporting cast of Iraqi allies who are either cynical, corrupt, incompetent or indolent. While the American command is characterised as callous and careerist, with only the most abstract interest in the protocols of warfare and no real concern to safeguard the good conscience of their subordinates. Finkel makes his most telling claim on his readers’ sympathies by representing his subjects as effectively powerless. By placing them at the mercy both of an abstract command and an abstract enemy, he inoculates them against the personal accountability that surely goes hand in hand with their voluntary commitment to fight in their nation’s interest. Finkel’s good soldiers are presented as moral bystanders – they make no decisions (they react, respond, follow orders) and their ideas, wishes, suggestions and attitudes have no bearing on the strategies and initiatives they are there to carry out. They are tools and victims.

Compelling as The Good Soldiers is, this is a sentimental and partial representation – there’s emotional feedback here, identification and admiration crowd out objectivity. Finkel can’t be objective about the soldiers. Would objectivity have made for a better evocation of the soldiers’ experiences? Would it have made for a better book? Probably not, but it’s important to bear Finkel’s partiality in mind. If we sympathise with the soldiers too much, if we engage in the sentimental idealisation of what a soldier is and does, we lose the ability to focus on other equally important aspects of warfare.

Finkel has no interest in the prickly issue of the soldiers’ professional contractual commitment to war. With all that is done to and by the good soldiers there is never any sense that their enlistment might be something to be regretted or that they still have the capacity to reject or protest against their circumstance. Good soldiers, it seems, will take anything on the chin. Finkel does record an abortive groundswell of disobedience, but the ease with which it is quashed seems to reinforce the intrinsic decency of this representative battalion.

In his back pages, Finkel registers his respect and gratitude for a military media policy sophisticated enough to let the bleaker moments in his work go to press undiluted. Finkel clearly takes the integrity of the US Armed Forces as a given and his account of the surge is intended as a serious contribution to the problem of the Iraq occupation. For all that, and in spite of Finkel’s even handedness (see the way he defended the US military against Wikileaks’ characterisation of the killing of two Reuters journalists as ‘collateral murder’*), a prospective recruit reading The Good Soldiers with a dry and attentive eye would hopefully go away with their military aspirations chronically discouraged. The thing is, though, that Finkel’s evocative, novelistic effects and his determination to engage the reader’s emotions as well as their intellect makes a dry-eyed reading quite unlikely. To identify with the soldiers, to come close to some imaginative understanding of their ordeals should take the reader one step nearer to a total abhorrence of war. I’m fairly confident this is what Finkel intended. However, because the soldiers are divorced from the kind of agency that might sour a reader’s sympathy, and because they seem (an a result) the victims of some arbitrary sentence, Finkel’s good soldiers transcend the political, economic and historical realities of their professional service. The sympathy they inspire is the sympathy for the martyr. The Good Soldiers presents a doomed cohort, broken down gradually by circumstances over which they have little to no control, but to which their ideal of duty demands a tragic, noble surrender. For the young and impatient, or for impressionable infatuates of dutiful self-sacrifice, the mythic glory of this kind of martyrdom holds a wicked allure.

14.07.10

We welcome comments, corrections, arguments, attacks, enquiries. Write to us at mailbox@theember.com.au.

*In the chapter given over to July 12, Finkel gives an account of an incident that has become a flashpoint relating to perceived ethical shortfalls in the conduct of American forces and also to the freedom of information and the right of journalists to use and protect unnamed whistleblowers. Wikileaks posted the military’s own video record of a skirmish in which two Reuters journalists were killed by machine gun fire from an Apache helicopter. Finkel, who viewed the same tape with the leaders of Battalion 2-16 (who were the first ground troops on the scene after the gunship had calmed the hotspot) dismissed Wikileaks’ characterisation of the incident as ‘Collateral Murder‘, pointing out that the leaked clip gave no sense that the incident took place in the context of a lasting firefight in an area controlled by insurgents.

Belgian Artist Michaël Borremans insists that his figurative works and portraits do not depict individuals. He aspires to the archetypal, the generic and the anonymous. Identity is a retrograde myth, social function and structural determination are the defining human conditions. So it goes. But Borremans’ figures invite a kind of sympathetic response which undermines his arguments against the dignity of the individual.

Whether it be painting, drawing, etching or film, Borremans is wide awake to the traditions of his media. His imagery and palette contain echoes of Velazquez, Goya and Chardin. The entirety of one recent show was an “intentional dialogue with Manet’s paintings The Dead Toreador and The Execution of Maximilian.” Among contemporary figures, Borremans is impressed by the confident mark making of Luc Tuymans, and he gets shivers from the simplicity and intimacy of Richter’s family portraits. He hearkens to the bleak rigours of Bruce Nauman’s worldview and admires David Lynch’s attempts to depict things that are “against our nature.”

Having come to artistic maturity during a time when traditional idioms were mostly fodder for superficially knowing appropriations, Borremans sees his historical consciousness and earnest dialogue with the rich heritage of representation as a subversive and revolutionary orientation.

And the basis of this revolutionary orientation: “I think an interesting work of art … should have a whole range of qualities … In a lot of 20th century art, you have this focus on only certain aspects of art, and it was a very interesting period for that. But that’s finished now. That’s why I think I’m a very subversive and revolutionary artist [laughs]. An artist has to be convinced of that. It’s not pretentious, it’s not arrogance, it’s a responsibility.” Finally, the neo-modernists are starting to call the conceptual tune.

Writing in Artforum, Jeffrey Kastner explains: “Borremans is known for his refined style and for the portentous absurdism of his scenarios, which often feature characters engaged in cryptic activities that propose the human body as a subject of examination and alteration within bureaucratic or clinical environments.” Kastner looks at Borremans’ preserved, airless scenarios and feels that even the plainly living subjects might as well be dead. In the worlds which Borremans has drawn into existence, there seem to be very few functional distinctions between the two states. After all, if these are archetypes, or universal figures, they have no real independent life anyway. Are these people then, or symbolic figures moving about in patterns determined by their situation and function?

“In my paintings there are no individuals, they’re just types, stereo-types, two—dimensional images. They’re human beings in their symbolic quality, like the pieces in a chess game – they stand for something.”

For all Borremans’ structuralist convictions, it’s hard to accept that his personal vision, even one so strongly engaged with and prompted by the historical sequence of painting, has been solely determined by the structural level at which he performs his role. Free-will? Individualism? Character? These are fantasies – we behave as befits our function. The privileged can sustain the illusion of personality and free-will because they can afford the upkeep on this historical romance.

This crypto-Marxist worldview is conceptually frayed, but in its theatrically dour semi-coherence it is also rich and fascinating. Borremans’ anti-individualism, bolstered by the severe tenets of structuralism, is in its own way a kind of romanticism, an altered vision that recasts reality in an image that sustains a cherished idea, but then takes that image as the true copy of nature.

Borremans draws an intellectual line between art and reality, but then he takes a truth about painting and treats it as a truth about life. A painted figure will only ever be paint, it will never capture the individual essence of some person, place, thing or time. Even if that’s true, though, it doesn’t follow that an actual person can never be more than a figure defined by context. People, like paintings, exist within a system, but they are not created by that system, not solely. There are things in individuals, and in individual works of art, that exist and survive outside the determining functions of social systems. In theory, Borremans rejects this idea, but his works (particularly the drawings over which he claims virtuosic control) carry human energies and narrative subtexts that resist his intellectual taste for a structuralist worldview.

‘… the portraits are not real portraits. They’re not about people that are depicted, or making a characteristic image of them that speaks for what they are. I just use this exterior form of a portrait so that you have certain expectations of it, but it doesn’t really work like a portrait. It doesn’t reveal anything or go where we’d expect it would go. So on the surface you have a portrait, but the content of it is just not there. There’s nothing there.’

There’s an echo in the room, it’s faint but clear enough: “A portrait must not express anything of the sitter’s ‘soul,’ essence or character. Nor must a painter ‘see’ a sitter in any specific, personal way…” It’s Richter, holding forth on the painting of humanoid colour-fields. But can he be serious? A painting is a mere appearance, he tells us, and real things will not give up their meaning to a mere appearance. We can’t know anything with any certainty, and an artist with integrity will work hard to frustrate the viewer’s desire to find meaning. A painting does not mean something, it is something. “You realise that you can’t represent reality at all” says Richter, “that what you make represents nothing but itself, and therefore is itself reality.” And Lesende (1994) – is this not my beautiful wife?

Portraits that are not portraits. Representations or reality that represent nothing and therefore are reality (which also represents nothing). Individual agents are out, chess pieces, cogs and organ stops are in. But speaking in his function as artist-drone on the subject of drawing, Borremans is strangely self-oriented. “What has always fascinated me about drawing since I was a child is that you can, on an envelope or whatever, evoke a complete world. You are god. That has always been completely striking for me. I can do anything, and I don’t harm anyone.”

In spite of Borremans’ routine subversions of the conventions of perspective and scale, the illusion of a plausible reality remains (hence the godly thrill). Borremans’ is distorting the connective tissues in the codification of reality, but he never dispenses with the basic language of literal figuration. Every object, place or thing, is accurately depicted and in proportion to itself – from these literal components Borremans assembles alternative realities with the confidence of the expert draughtsman.

“We all deal with images as language, we all respond to these codes, but I fuck these codes up – that’s what I do.” You have to know the codes before fucking them up, though, and in this Borremans is carrying on the tradition of fellow Belgian Rene Magritte’s concept-based figurative punning.

The pictures in The Journey series (including The Conducinator) take the visual codes of the frame and perspective as part of their subject. These images of landscapes observed and depicted (possibly even created) contain an homage and a revisitation of Magritte’s allegorical surrealism.

Magritte’s representations of nature cover up the real thing, intervening between the painter or viewer and the ostensible subject of the work. Reading Magritte’s images at a very basic level, the choice of subject implies an aesthetic appetite for nature, say, which the act of representing nature supplants. When Borremans’ revisits this visual trope he emphasizes different aspects. The artist figure is imbued with the power to recreate reality, and with the help of a few simple tricks of light and shade, frame and perspective, to redefine their own relationship to it. Compare the implied relationship between the seated figure and the landscape in The Conducinator with that in The Journey – remove the window frame and the sketch pad from The Conducinator and you have the world maker of The Journey. Alternatively, The Journey might actually be the image produced by the figure in The Conducinator. The Journey, that is, may simply represent, as a literal fact, the creative attitude of the seated figure in The Conducinator.

One step further back, though, we have Borremans himself, ready to remind us this is a flat surface decorated using certain tricks which successfully fool the eye into reading it as a coherent reality. Magritte, by contrast, never tries to fool the eye, the two-dimensional artifice in his work is always plain. Whereas Magritte’s compositions offer a two-dimensional world assembled like a surrealist photo-collage, Borremans’ intricate sketches give the impression of accurately recounting an observed reality. Borremans’ commitment to generating the illusion of a documented reality means that his airless, display-cabinet tableaux are fully charged with the static electricity of the uncanny. In this, they are less openly allegorical than Magritte’s work, and invite a kind of emotional, narrative interaction, that is coolly rebuffed by Magritte’s plainly contrived and symbol-ridden idiom.

For Magritte, only the pictures are in the frame – the artist stands back with the viewer, he makes the joke, shows it to them. For Borreman’s, the artist figure is also pinned down, or confined, within the allegory. This artist has been demoted, he is not allowed to stand back with the ultimate audience because his role as a producer is inseparable from the end product. The function he is fulfilling is included in Borremans’ reinterpretation of Magritte’s visual commentary on aesthetics.* Borremans’ artist figures are firmly bound to the process of representation.

In these allegorically charged representations of representation, the seated figures with reality laid out before them suggest creative power (a giant model maker, shaping the natural world), but also something of the production line. Whether filling the frame or exploding it, Borremans’ artist figures seem chained to their labour. Although these figures are plainly involved in creating something capable of encoding the sublime force and beauty of the natural world (either as a fact or as an artistic trope),there is little sense that they are involved in personal expression or interpretation. Perhaps this is merely a trick of the palette, with Borremans’ washed-out, pallid tones offering no encouragement to myths of inspired, passionate or gratifying travail. Even a merry flash of garnet, which looks at first like a licentious expression of decorative flair, is actually just another marker of uniformity, the distinguishing badge of a particular level or specialisation.

Trickland recasts the natural world as a social project, but is this forced labour or co-operative participation? Are the people here collaborators or components of a system. Borremans’ rhetoric would suggest the latter, but the clothing and postures of the figures is more weekend working bee than work camp. Perhaps this comes down to how Borremans imagines the difference between living as part of a system in which people are components, and living in a community where people are participants with roles to play, jobs to do, abilities to utilise? The source of his archetypes – their austerity, the mimimum of ornamentation and individualizing fashion - looks to be the economically isolated Eastern bloc of the mid-twentieth century. It’s likely that there is a deliberate element of protest wrapped up in this choice, a sense that the austerity contains a conceptual link to a less superficial, less diffuse social ideal. However, in concocting this deliberately confronting commentary on the relationship between society and individuals, and on the fallacy of individualism, Borremans seems inadvertently to present a reality in which collectivism is a cage or a shackle.

The functionaries in ‘The Common World’ monitor a patch of reality, the figures in ‘Trickland’ tend fields and meadows from above as if they were small patches of a kitchen garden. They labour at their chores, but with a hobbyist’s intensity – whether this is a scale model or an actual landscape, the relationships between the figures and the world they inhabit speak plainly of contrivance. There’s an echo here of the large allegorical landscapes Goya painted in his final years – such as the Cudgel Fight and Asmodea. In Goya’s murals human passions and conflict are expanded to a titanic scale. Borremans’ figures crouch over the countryside at much the same scale as Goya’s, but their size suggests neither power nor independence. They are not colossal, merely big enough to walk the world and perform their particular function. They set the scene. Which begs the question - who for? Collective enjoyment? Themselves? Or for unseen forces with unclear goals. Are they automatons or collaborators?

And again, in the Good Ingredients pictures - where prone figures are arranged on the ground to form geometrical patterns - what are we looking at? Is this some situationist intervention, a whimsical or playful performance? Taking the images at face value, and putting aside the literal implications of the way these figures riff on Manet’s Dying Toreador, I fail to read any menace or foreboding in Borremans’ visual code. Then there’s one anomalously expansive title: “The Good Ingredients: The Hostages had to Lay Down on the Ground in Order to Form Geometrical Figures.” That changes things. Now, for instance, I find some significance in the presence of those still standing among the laid out figures. There is a relationship of power now - a hierarchy.

And what if I came to the prone figures in the Good Ingredients drawings via Borremans’ Square of Despair? I would already have seen the plans for something like a public memorial plaza, filled with rows of horses figured in various stages of what looks like dying and death (ailing, writhing, rigor mortis). I would already have learnt the pertinent visual code. These are all figures, I would remind myself. They are not people, not living things - if they’re laid out, most likely they’re broken. They are not playing, they are someone else’s playthings (Borremans’ mostly). In some of the Good Ingredients pictures rigid limbs and postures suggest the recumbent figures are statues and not real people at all. These imaginary eye-witness sketches record and enact an exercise in power and subjection in which, as Borremans observes, no-one gets hurt. But they also confirm again the potency of power dynamics which presume the unilaterally high value placed on individual agency.

In ‘The Greatness of Our Loss’, we have less geometry and more detail – but again it’s the Dying Toreador, and again an image within an image. Spectators witness the greatness of their loss - the aesthetic force and the mythical scale of propaganda creates an imprint of a generic experience: living amongst the ghosts of martyrs. Among these great, toppled statues, monumental memorials to executed citizen-figures, the presence of onlookers suggests an exemplary spectacle. The greatness of our loss – a state-sanctioned image, an emblem and a cue for what it means (or should mean) to consider the greatness of our loss. Your loss, my loss – it all comes to the same thing anyway, for mere figures like us, defined by our social context. This is the codification of Loss – note it well and use it. As ever there is ambiguity here – is the function of these fallen giants memorial or cautionary. Are they a homage or a threat? Is Borremans’ structured universe utopian socialism’s ideal of the ant hill, or is it Evgeny Zamyatin’s oppressive city of glass, surrounded by the suffocating rural collectivism of Platonov’s 14 Little Red Huts?

All these figures at differing scales suggest a hierarchy of knowledge and power. Simple tricks with perspective suggest a human system engineered around the idea of inequality. Crowds of lower order beings are observed from above by figures who are still defined within the system but who are conscious of at least some of its purposes.

In reality, workers go home and they get paid. Borremans’ other-worldly stillness – that airlessness again – and the sense of the workers’ passivity and identification with their work, erase the minor releases of a hard-earned private existence. You could argue that the kind of social structure that totally subsumes the individuals who serve its ends is a reasonable metaphor for social or economic systems that reject or dissolve the rights of individual workers. It is a good analogy, that is, for those systems where the workers’ choices boil down to surrender or starve. In this analogy, though, the interests of the individuals are not aligned with the interests of the system, people are fitting themselves to a set of circumstances under duress. In some of Borremans’ drawings, social control is openly ascribed a menacing power over the individual subject. This menace is seldom open in the workplace images, but it appears covertly in the clear designation of hierarchies among the workers.

That idea of freedom beyond the workplace is a mollifying lie and here, in ‘The Cutters’, is Borremans’ truth. The framed iconic figures seem totally defined by the task at hand. They might be put away in a cupboard at the end of the day, or plugged in somewhere to recharge. More likely, they never finish working, never leave the table. Tiny onlookers in the foreground act as human-scale markers, encouraging the viewer to read the relatively monumental scale of the central figures as a literal representation of some kind of grand municipal sculpture (to the weaving guild, the leather workers’ union, the electrical compliance and safety committee, any humble, piece-working, collective engine room of industry). The titanic workshop makes an exemplary public statement, providing an inspirational totem for the ant sized populace.

How, though, can a social structure, level or performance be represented if a person can’t? For Borremans, these ideas (structure, level, performance) are little more than the repudiation of the individual. Representing the systems that enforce this repudiation is always dependent then on the presence of the idea – the idea of individualism. ‘That the human being is a victim of his situation and is not free is a conviction of mine.’ Borremans’ compositions often declare the primary significance of some generic function or structural role, but this declaration is over-insistent. The atheist perpetuates the idea of god, the structuralist perpetuates the idea of the free individual.

Borremans’ workers in the new dawn have been divested of any triumphal or spiritual sense of individual determination. Their affect is blank, as it should be - they have not chosen collectivity, they simply are cogs in a machine. If these people are capable of aspiration, it is to take their place in this orderly module of productivity. This is a kind of dogma, and like most dogma it makes no concessions to an unconvinced audience. To the liberal, the humanist and the man in the street then, Borremans’ figures emanate a desire to be other than what he defiantly insists they are. Borremans’ strident insistence on the archetypal in his figures makes for a population who, while performing the role they exist to perform, appear subdued at best and at worst seem arbitrarily fated to a life of unfulfilled confinement.

The ideas that Borremans believes in - his insistence on the primacy of archetypes, his rejection of free will - are a kind of literary romance. The ideas breed the images, which in turn set about making a case for the reality of this worldview. Borremans sells it to himself, and buys it, because (fan of the imaginary) he likes a structural, system-based world better than any other. It is a world, that is to say, which satisfies him aesthetically – if nothing else, it suits his palette. But his insistence on the truth of his social vision is his own perverse version of utopian wishfulness.

Borremans’ commitment to a figurative tradition is paradoxically combined with a rejection of his human subjects’ individuality. And between these seemingly incompatible ideas, a lot of good friction is generated - the conceptual freight Borremans has taken on as the ideological grounding for his worldview is ultimately fertile and provocative precisely because of the contradictory truths about people that persist in the actual works. Either people exist to fulfil a role in a structural system, or they don’t. If they do, then the kind of implied suffering and the pathos of their condition (which fuels Borremans’ characterisation of the power and pervasiveness of the system) defies logic. If people don’t exist for the good of a system, the discomfort that registers in Borremans’ work amounts to an accusation against a structure that has been imposed on these subjects, and which denies important aspects of their existence (such as their individuality) in the process of furthering the interests of those who control the system.

If humans are structural subjects, structuralism should not feel like a straitjacket. The contradiction that registers in the response of Borremans’ subjects to the world he inflicts on them, suggests that Borremans’ real attitude is a kind of moralistic insistence on the propriety of individual subordination to some ambivalent, over-arching system. Structuralism, as a term and idea, becomes Borremans’ moral authority, and the suffering that takes place in its name (and which can be read on the faces and in the postures of those ruled by it) is the price of self-abnegating virtue.

Borremans wants to reject Romantic Individualism, but his experimental representations of a structured collective of depersonalised humans actually undercut his alternative. Or is this just my retrograde aversion to the dissolution of the individual into groups of social functionaries? I look at ‘The Cutters’ and I see subjection. I see their lack of interaction with their environment, each other, their product, and I see an image that is not only in bad faith with the real people all over the world who conduct this kind of work, I also see a quietist apologia for social systems that survive on this kind of reduction of human beings to instruments in a manufacturing equation. If it were a protest, it were a good one – but Borremans is not ‘exposing’ instrumentalising forces, he is creating a false naturalistic record of their ubiquity. His critique of individualism is justified, the idea is a construct of course, but it expresses important things about the way humans relate to the social demands of our species. A system populated by a multitude of archetypes, undifferentiated except by way of the function they perform, is hard to sell and hard to populate. Borremans’ desire to create images that will castigate and unsettle those who cherish the Romanticised idea of the unique individual is at odds with his conviction that the character free subjects he depicts truly represent the relationship between singular beings and society. Borremans’ figures project an uneasiness with the roles their creator has given them.

01.07.2010

We welcome comments, corrections, arguments, attacks, enquiries. Write to us at mailbox@theember.com.au.

SOURCES:

‘Interview: Michael Borremans’ by David Coggins 3/1/09

‘Michael Borremans at David Zwirner,’ Artforum review by Jeffrey Kastner.

‘Michael Borremans: A World of Quiet Mystery’ by Uchida Shinichi

Michael Borremans: Whistling a Happy Tune by Michael Borremans and Michael Amy. Ludion, 2008.

* It’s not always the case that Magritte removes the artist from his paintings of paintings, though it is true of his many versions of a landscape through a window frame. In these images, Magritte seems most interested in the relationship between a vista and its recreation (indoors, inside, as a human activity). Where Magritte does show the artist sitting at the easel - looking at an egg and painting the bird it will become, for instance - the subject is something more like ‘artistic perception’ and it begs the presence of an artistic perceiver.

Tom Wright, Associate Director of the Sydney Theatre Company, is drawn to classical tragedy “because it is difficult” and “because it is bigger than us.” Classical tragedy asks difficult questions of our quotidian and pragmatic ideas of order, justice and accountability. Ideally, any new adaptation of the Oresteia will renew and reframe these questions.

I asked Wright why it’s important to keep these works on our stage and how he has approached Aeschylus’ trilogy.

NT: Have you adapted this Oresteia as a thing unto itself or is it inextricably linked to this particular production and process with the Residents?

TW: In some way the adaptation stands alone; it reflects a particular ‘take’ on the piece and chooses to focus on certain aspects ahead of others. In that sense it’s a stand alone. But largely this version has been done for the Residents, as a solution to being presented with five women and four men.

NT: How did you develop this adaptation - have you used multiple translations, multiple versions of the myths? Are you trying to be true to Aeschylus’ language and rhetorical style or to his interpretation of the characters and the narrative?

TW: It would be wrong for me to claim any fidelity to Aeschylean language or style, in the literal sense. I’m dubious that this level of accuracy in adaptation is possible in any event. This version is really an adaptation of Agamemnon and Choephori, with a deus ex machina from Apollo at the end. The idiosyncratic and Athenocentric Eumenides is deeply fascinating but we’ve made the arbitrary decision to stay focused on the core family. In one dramatic sense the energy of the piece dissipates after Clytemnestra’s death. The rest is mopping-up and ideology. I can imagine doing a full version of the Aeschlyus, but we’ve tried to focus intently on the narrative surrounding the house of Atreus and taken note that we’re doing a chamber version of the piece, in Wharf One.

I used the Loeb edition crib and read the Fagles and Hughes, then ignored them. Some of it - particularly in the earlier sections - follows Aeschylean order and imagery fairly closely. Some of it doesn’t.

NT: Do you see the Oresteia (or equally The Women of Troy or Ovid’s Metamorphoses) as archetypes to be reactivated, or conventional platforms that allow for experimentation with a known quantity? Perhaps that question boils down to this: do you anticipate an audience that comes to this story as if for the first time or is it a given that provides common-ground (between an audience and director who know the source material) for an experimental departure?

TW: Both at once. I anticipate an audience that knows the core myth; this might be an erroneous assumption I know. I’m confident most people will be able to follow what happens. Exactly who Cassandra is might be unclear. That doesn’t bother me too greatly. The idea that theatre is an unfolding of a fresh, hitherto undisclosed set of events doesn’t interest me much. For me it’s about doing it again, again, again, same same but different different. The form should be new. The content should be old.

NT: For you, when adapting classical tragedies and presenting them for a modern audience, is it more important to bring period idiosyncracies into line with current expectations, or to maintain the ritual element of the dramas?

TW: Depends. Sometimes you need to be deliberately anachronistic, as if making an aside to the audience. Sometimes you want to keep the mind, language, body, ideology on a distant continent from our own. On the whole I don’t like any great myth being reduced down to a refraction of our current political squabbles, the ‘this play is for our purposes about Kandahar’ school of dramaturgy. I prefer the ‘Kandahar is about this play’ way of looking at things.

NT: The Canadian poet and translator Anne Carson succinctly justified a recent new translation of An Oresteia by explaining “it seems important to get Greek plays performed more”. I expect you would agree with that idea, but can you suggest why its important to do this?

TW: Because, if nothing else, it liberates our theatre from endless mimesis and turgid, facile domesticity.
Because in unpacking these texts we unpack our ideological archaeology.
Because in the west we have a tenuous grasp of the numinous and it turns us into machines.  Because one of the definitions of ‘civilised’ is having a powerful set of conversations with the ancestors.
Because they’re difficult.
Because they’re bigger than us.

NT: Following on from that, Carson’s sense that Greek plays are under-performed probably wouldn’t last long if she were based in Australia. Australian writers and theatre-makers clearly see something important, and contemporary, in this tradition. In the past few years there have been your own The Lost Echo, The Women of Troy, Tom Holloway’s Oresteia inspired Don’t Say the Words and Love Me Tender, Louis Nowra’s trilogy based on the Oresteia, Black Medea, Antigone, productions of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex in the Sydney Festival, Orestes 2.0, The Golden Ass, Live Acts on Stage, I’m sure I’ve missed many, and there’s also Malthouse’s adpatation of Seneca’s Thyestes coming up. Is there something about these tragedies, as a platform, that has particular appeal for Australian theatre-makers?

TW: Doubt it. I don’t sense a strong interest in Greek or Roman texts. They are barely performed on our mainstages, or our independent stages for that matter. Playwrights nicking structures or thematic lacings for their own texts is well and good, but those works you’ve mentioned don’t speak much to me. I can’t hear an Oresteia in Holloway or Nowra. Saying that our day-to-day experiences are like reverberatory repeats of Aeschylean themes feels like behaviourism to me.

There has been, in the past, forms of classical inquiry in Australia, particularly in relation to two things; nationhood and landscape. One of the ways for artists (particularly in the early 20th century) to grasp Australian-ness was via classical archetypes, as if we were hyperboreans lost. Or look at the paintings of  Napier Waller as a sort of patriarchal classicist obsession with control. Or Norman Lindsay’s bacchanals in the Blue Mountains as a counterpoint. Or Sydney Long for a twilight vision, Elysium among the brolgas. Or Bernard O’Dowd’s obscure poesy.

But on our stages? Perhaps the opposite. Perhaps the Greeks are a way for us to connect with the bigger pool, this thing called the world. Maybe they are ways for us to think about ourselves in a different way, not a nationalistic one.

For me the extent to which something is Australian isn’t hugely interesting.

NT: Is it important to stymie that modern moral impulse to think in terms of individual responsibility? To understand or relate to the characters’ choices, duties and obligations solely as moral dilemmas would be to lose something important about their fated roles. How do you keep that something important alive with a modern audience that does not share the cultural understanding Aeschylus would have presumed from his audience?

TW: You don’t. You let it be a problem. You let modern minds wrestle with the implications of fate. You let them problematise the characters; Orestes, Electra, Clytemnestra, Cassandra, they aren’t us. You ask an audience to imagine a universe of gods and relativity. You ask them to hear a bold poem where acts of will by one man are counterpointed with images of childbirth letting loose chaos upon the stars, and ponder what that means.

NT: How do you balance the epic scale of the drama (the broad, humanity-scaled symbolic resonance) with emotional involvement with characters who are specifically fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters and friends? I’m thinking for example of your representation of Noah (in The Mysteries, STC 2010) as an alienated loner, perhaps a Utah Mormon, receiving instructions from god on his transistor radio - an interpretation which keeps the religious myth in play but attaches a parallel almost secular narrative to it. Most of the characters in the Bible myths are ordinary people, they are not the progeny of gods and royal houses - is it possible to re-interpret them in a way similar to this reinterpretation of Noah, without defusing that epic standing?

TW: We’ve had to acknowledge that you can’t do a play like this without in some way acknowledging that we can’t help seeing it through a Freudian prism. I’m not saying the characters act in a Freudian way of course, I’m saying we see their actions that way. But when you do theatre you have to be aware of such distinctions. Agamemnon is a mythic absent father. He is a patriarch. Orestes does have mother shit. Electra eroticises her absent brother.

But to the heart of your question, I don’t know how successful we’ve been. On occasions it should be clear that the subject of the Oresteia is the frail fleshy human being in all its failings.

NT: Is human evil really at play in these mythic vendettas?

TW: No.

NT: No character rejects the destructive obligations of honour (as they see it) and just as no one could really be seen as innocent, can any of the characters in the Oresteia be singled out as more culpable than the others?

TW: No. The Olympian ideology of course sees Clytemnestra’s crime as more despicable. Medea gets the treatment. But all theat Judeo-Christian stuff is no use to us.

NT: Or is the evil at a cultural level. What then do you make of the fact that out of the atavistic feud comes a reconciling innovation - the jury trial. A civilising procedure to administer a quotidian, non-epic, kind of justice. Is this an element of Aeschylus’ trilogy that you have much sympathy with?

TW: I see that as patriarchal logocentric revisionism. I see it as Athenian colonising of darkness. I see it as history. We put all that baggage into the person of Apollo; he can come on and begin the great sweep of law, propriety, right and patriarchy. It’s good and it’s bad.

NT: On one reading of these myths, men do terrible things out of selfless submission to duty, and women do terrible things out of ambition, a sense of personal affront and hysterical spite. But then, of course, the relative virtue of the various characters is wide open to personal affinity. Agamemnon could justifiably be called Clytemnestra, and Sophocles’ version of The Libation Bearers is Elektra. In Aeschylus’ work, Elektra and Clytemnestra are dangerous because they have taken on the authority and self-determination attributed to men. Impressive because they are considered and articulate in their opposition to authority. In your Oresteia, are strong women impressive or dangerous? Is their kind of strident revolt the natural expression of a repressed minority?

TW: Yes, of course it is. Strong women are what makes Greek drama work, for that reason. Clytemnestra’s defiance is that of a society that knows it can’t rationalise, mathematicise, legalise the pain away. Men ‘are’, women are a problem. These texts are some of the founding documents in patriarchy. When Apollo proclaims that the woman you call mother is not the parent, just a nurse to the seed - the man is the source of life, the true parent (Eumenides 665-670) you have the definitional beginnings of an anthropological problem in which we are still enmeshed. In our version women are hopefully dangerous. And as a result, impressive.

NT: I’m generally so well persuaded by Clytemnestra’s case against Agamemnon (bolstered by Agamemnon’s choices in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis) that I find it hard to understand sympathetic depictions of him. Agamemnon is a hero of the Trojan war, he sacrificed his daughter to fulfil an order from Zeus, but even among the extreme inter-family violence that marks Tantalus’ line, the killing of Iphigenia seems most to warrant the vengeance it attracts. How do you see Agamemnon?

TW: On one hand, he had to act. Doing nothing is death. Men are ripping each other apart, dying in their diseased ships while the winds are against them. Agamemnon has a choice, he can fix this, save many lives in the short term, break the curse. One life for many. He had no choice. He had to act. But in doing so he had to face the inevitable price. Nothing comes for free. Orestes talks about his vision of what happens to a human who doesn’t act, doesn’t make a choice. They dessicate, they wither, they lose their organs, they become outcasts, dying in a corner. Agamemnon makes the choice. It was born of pride, but he was trapped. He suffers into truth. The Agamemnon that endures that, and the following decade of war, returns wiser, humane, ready to rule. But it is too late. Beautiful irony.

Sydney Theatre Company’s Residents will perform Tom Wright’s adaptation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, at Wharf One from the 1st of June to the 4th of July.

The Ask by Sam Lipsyte
Picador. 296 pages. $Au 29.99

“Throughout my whole life I was constantly finding my place taken, perhaps because I did not look for my place where I should have done.” Turgenev - ‘The Diary of a Superfluous Man’

Who, in this age of late, post or undead capitalism is more superfluous than the aspiring artist? Who promises the least likely return, the lowest work-to-profit ratio and the highest likelihood of redundancy? With their seedling talents having barely pushed through the heavy sod, yet to produce any mature, robust or arresting foliage, the aspiring artist is always on the brink of nonentity. Ignored, ambitious, over-astute of every hierarchy of success, these are figures who cherish their marginalisation as the antecedent to rich rewards, while also deeply loathing it as the material evidence of their unrequited pretension.

Superfluous Milo Burke, unwanted as the saviour of painting, has shouldered the burden of his lost illusions. Every day he carries that burden with him to his workplace, where he stalks potential donors (‘asks’) on behalf of Mediocre University.

Milo is uninspired, disliked by his colleagues and losing ground to the office temp. One morning, a painting student infiltrates the philanthropy sector to preen and complain. As the daughter of a man who donated the university’s observatory, she is claiming her right to special treatment. In the process she manages too pointedly to “reify [Milo’s] servility” and he snaps. “I should have just surrendered, cinched the entitled scion her little pouch of entitlement … done my duty.” Instead, like many of his superfluous predecessors, Milo makes a futile stand.  It plays out to no one’s detriment but his own. Milo kicks against the forces conspiring to belittle his great soul, but his self-assertion merely brings him face to face with his inconsequence and, worse than that, his expendability. “My words contained nothing an arrogant, talentless, daddy-damaged waif wants to hear about herself.” The arrogant, daddy-damaged waif sics her daddy on Milo and before the day is done, he has been jettisoned by Mediocre U.

Milo’s psychic limp becomes more pronounced as he begins to admit the emotional gulf that has developed between him and his wife Maura, along with the gulf that now yawns between who he is and who he’d wanted to be. Even Milo’s mother is reluctant to risk too much exposure to his deflated affect. She can spare little time, besides, from her age-defying routines of yogic oxygenation. For Milo’s mother, the word ‘grandchild’ is a cudgel. “This is my decade,” the septuagenarian confidently insists. At this point, the only thing keeping Milo from total capitulation is that he can’t find anyone willing to look after him.

After a brief period of drifting around his neighbourhood – a gentrifying borough in the process of ruination by people who wear the same category of sneakers and spectacles as Milo – and contending with the factional upheavals at his son’s childcare centre, Milo receives what looks to be a lifeline. A friend from his student days – days full of promise, when he was still a painter, “at least at parties” – is in a position to make a donation to Mediocre and he has requested that Milo handle the ask. Enter Purdy, the golden haired boy. Purdy is well liked, confident, benevolent and egalitarian; an inheritance-brat who had spent a passage of his extended adolescence mingling with the florid dramatis personae of Milo’s art school crowd.

Purdy wants to make a give, but he also has an ask which, for some reason, he feels Milo is well suited to fulfil. Purdy has come into his fortune, he is now grossly well-off and a successful man of business. His glamorous wife is undergoing IVF treatment and he will soon have his own heir to wreath in privilege. There is a problem though – he has a bastard son from a brief (she was poor), youthful romance. The bastard lovechild, Don, is an angry, disillusioned veteran of the Iraq war – a double amputee whose physical limp makes Milo’s psychic limp look something of a privilege. Milo is to play go-between and to protect Purdy’s interests while tending to Don’s financial demands. Milo is to work on Purdy while he works for Purdy. He is two times a flunkey now. But even as a paid troubleshooter, handling the moral waste of Purdy’s privileged negligence, Milo continues to float in a haze of docile acquiescence to the forces that have unmanned him.

In Milo’s neurotic self-doubt, his angst-ridden passivity, and his anti-hero schtick, Lipsyte is reincarnating a character type with a long tradition in the satire of identity and idealism. Gogol drew the first outlines, Turgenev formalised the conventions of reflexivity (‘The Diary of a Superfluous Man’) and Dostoevsky refined the psychological realities of the type in his Underground Man. These are fantastic, malformed creatures, floundering around the margins of polite society in a fug of self-infatuated abstraction. They inhabit the same kind of “pathetic hallucination of a life” as Milo; reality for them is a neglected, inhospitable realm, pale and uninspiring. Like Dostoevsky’s vain nonentities, Milo lives in “a fabulous and secret universe of the mind” (at least he would like to) and like his spiteful forebears he solaces himself with fantasies of future glory. In the particular slant of Milo’s aspirations and glory-hunger, Lipsyte invokes a vast tribe, ubiquitous to the modern urban landscape and economy, of under-utilised, tertiary-trained creatives.

Milo’s arrested adolescence, his unsatisfied mind, his vague, impotent dissent and his desire for a career as a successful artist are broadly representative traits. In capital cities all over the world, there are hordes of Milos, and for all of them, time marches on. After whiling away their youth nurturing romantic fancies of creative success and widespread renown, the evidence of their failure and their superfluity becomes too prolific to ignore. The dreamy aspirations which had insulated them against the hated idea of nonentity turn in an instant to a kind of hair shirt, and at every jarring encounter with their souring reality another layer of skin is rubbed away. Then there comes a point where the talismanic powers of that cherished idea of potential transforms into a cult of virtuous failure, of cherished integrity, of being better than the world, disdainful of success.

Still, what starts out as a sterile cynicism, with its roots in thwarted longing and untempered idealism, can form the platform for an overdue maturation. Once you realise you have become superfluous, you can make peace with your flaws. The Ask builds towards this point, Lipsyte even signposts the moment of crisis with an economical  commentary from Milo’s colleague Horace: ”He figured out the world wasn’t all about him and he fainted.”

In the meantime, though, Milo has his wit, and a fair idea of the disdain he inspires in all the normal, pragmatic adults around him. And thanks to Lipsyte’s sardonic penetration and his well-honed comic rhythms, the wit he bestows on Milo does go a long way towards balancing the ledger against his many character flaws. It’s not just the deflective comedy and pre-emptive self-deprecation that keep Milo’s trespasses from telling against him. His adolescent idealism and the romantic ambitions he’s nurtured since youth do encode a lust for glory, but they also contain genuine and generalised benevolence. It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if Milo, with his vague, left-wing humanitarianism and his reverence for culture, were to gain a bit of clout. It’s not what Milo is that renders him comparatively endearing, it’s what he’s not. What he’s not, and not willing to become, is American. A certain type of American at any rate – the global caricature, the self-deifying wheeler-dealer. There’s something monastic or self-abnegating in the form Milo’s passive resistance to the conventional dynamics of whoremaster America, something both radical and benign.

II.
Addressing his current crises and confusion, as well as some pivotal episodes from the formation of his now crumbling self-image, Milo gives engaging and self-deprecating commentary and analysis. It is an active conversational style which could be read either as the deflective persiflage of an intractable narcissist or as the natural complement to an intellectually curious and ethically fertile attitude towards confusion, identity and responsibility. This style is also precarious – Milo’s narrative is a carefully orchestrated, tenuous composition that must read like spontaneous confession. Mostly, Lipsyte pulls it off – the syntax and punctuation of comic writing is performing best when it goes unnoticed. In a way, that’s a shame, because there’s a lot to appreciate when it’s done well. Lipsyte’s phrasing and rhythm ensure that momentum flows smoothly for the most part, but also carefully frames points of emphasis, pauses and punchlines.

Lipsyte’s writing conveys the mental gait of a sardonically critical mindset, always primed to lacerate or puncture any threats to a fragile self-esteem. Milo once had a reputation as a stylist of the rant, able to riff his way out of social invisibility. But his “eighties pomo raps” are now a thing of the past. His idiom has dated, his youthful assurance has faded, and he has been superceded as the source of astringent social commentary. His commentary has gone underground, The Ask’s first person narrative carries the rhythms of a sub-vocal comic patter.

Maybe the hangover would never leave, just hide from immediate detection, hide like a deep-cover hitman, some human killbot who works the graveyard shift at American Smelter, takes his family to mass every Sunday, until the moment the baddies flip his switch. Then my hangover, “activated” by further alcohol consumption, would return, step out of the shadows in surgical galoshses, press the muzzle of its silencer-engorged Ruger to my skull.
The Milo Sanction would be complete.

As far as public performances go, it’s Milo’s younger colleague, Horace –  the office temp, the next-generation Milo, the replacement – who fires off The Ask’s opening sally. Milo’s first person narrative begins, tellingly, with some appropriated fireworks:

America, said Horace, the office temp, was a run-down and demented pimp. Our republic’s whoremaster days were through. Whither that frost-nerved, diamond-fanged hustler who’d stormed Normandy, dick-smacked the Soviets, turned out such firm emerging market flesh? Now our nation slumped in the corner of the pool hall, some gummy coot with a pint of Mad Dog and soggy yellow eyes, just another mark for the juvenile wolves.

The Ask begins, then, by casting a no-confidence vote towards the idea of America, and there are many more to follow. While hanging out in the local doughnut shop during his unemployed phase, Milo encounters a homeless regular, a man he has christened the kiddie-diddler. After the man leaves, Milo betrays his suspicions to the doughnut seller and receives a stern though conflicted reprimand: “He’s a good man. I just hate him.” Then he explains why:

“… He gets in the way of my lie. My lie for myself.
“Your lie?”
“That in America, things can be okay.”
“Why do you let him back?” I asked.
“It’s his store.”
“His store?”
“Well, was. Till he went nuts. Now his brother Tommy runs it. Not a very nice guy, Tommy. Lets his brother roam the streets. That’s not America.”
“Actually, that is America.” I said.
“True,” said Predrag, “but I don’t want to hear it.”

In Lipsyte’s America, then, the price of optimism is eternal vigilance – the mere idea of a just society is valued more highly than the truth. It’s hard to give much credence to the idea that America, or the idea of America, is any more rotten or compromised now than it always has been. And in a way, this is what Milo is saying here. At the same time, Lipsyte’s America is well stocked with the symptoms of decadence and the signs of a civilisation in decline. There are candy boutiques selling designer licorice, schism-ridden childcare collectives issuing pedagogical manifestoes, hordes of emerging artists living in apartment building car cages, and premium branded IVF clinics.

The Best Place was one of those establishments that signals the end of empire, or perhaps the advent of something much better than empire, at least to those who could afford it: spa facility, birthing center, archery gallery, breast milk bank, coffee shop. Who wouldn’t want to quaff a latte, or shoot a few quivers, during prodromal labor? If the mother to be wasn’t up to it, she could email JPEGs of her dilated cervix to her birthing community while her partner got a peel…

Milo’s cynicism about the land of the free is more than usually severe, perhaps, because he’s looking at his country through the lens of his personal disillusionment. If America is a basket case, then it’s not just him.

The parallel between another tradition in jeopardy – liberal humanities – is more directly stated.

…The whole game is poised for a gargantuan fall.”
“What game?” I said.
“Higher education. Of the liberal arts variety. The fine arts in particular. Times get tough, people want the practical. Even the rich start finding us superfluous. Well, they always think we’re superfluous, but when they’re feeling flush it doesn’t matter. You pay a whore to make you feel like a man, you fund a philharmonic to make yourself feel like a refined man. But it’s a pleasure many don’t feel like splurging on these days.

There is a sting in the tail for Milo, “The whole deal’s in danger” his colleague concludes, “And maybe it should be. Look at you.” A society that brings forth and nurtures such superfluous creatures must surely be on the skids.

III.
The fact that Milo is not a man of action - not the one to seize the moment, rise above – is ultimately what allows him to disentangle himself from the aggressive, competitive and morally bankrupt America he comes to associate with his old friend and temporary benefactor. Here again, Milo is not as hopeless as Lipsyte initially encourages the reader to believe. Tallying up a comparative table of the various personified options for life in NYC 2010, Milo’s ultimate condition would rank fairly high on the axis of ethical proportion. To begin with, it may simply have been that Milo was too self-absorbed to actively exploit anyone, but as the novel progresses he shows a distinct and conscious lack of appetite for this path to self-realisation.

On the eve of his departure for college, Milo’s father presents him with a large knife with a carved, ornamental hilt. Milo is pleased, touched, but puzzled as well. What am I going to do with it at college, he asks. “Get drunk and wave it at some stuck up ass-holes. Brandish it. Show it to a girl”. The urban college equivalent, I suppose, to taking it hunting. Milo’s dad is a surly, impatient, philandering man, emotionally detached from his family. Worried by his son’s predilection for reading and daubing, he is reluctantly, awkwardly, passing on some phallic steel. Milo is ambivalent about this inheritance, he can’t quite gauge whether owning such a knife is edgy-bohemian-hip or cro-magnon-hick. Even after his father dies, a year or so later, and the knife becomes a grief trigger, he manages to partially disown it in a communal cutlery drawer, ultimately leaving it behind when he moves house.

It’s a clumsy inheritance, smuggling through a kind of lackadaisical symbolism (take it if you want it) around the idea of a cutting edge. Milo of course, lacks just that, and the knife reappears in his life to prove it to him. Returning to his former share-house for a party, he discovers his father’s knife still sitting at the bottom of that same cutlery drawer. The new residents explain it was there when they moved in, and when Milo tries to claim it back the household and the assembled party-goers refuse to acknowledge his claim. Milo has to surrender to the disapproving crowd of hipsters and while backing down he is already castigating himself as unworthy of the blade. The fact that he did not take the knife, he tells himself, shows that he had no right to it. It’s plainly more than just a knife then.

Throughout The Ask, Milo experiences a series of similar emasculations. Rejection confirms his sense of broader impotence, and his broader sense of impotence all but ensures rejection.

Milo is most comfortable in “the creeks and dales and low rolling slopes of universal disappointment.” He is seldom more secure than when he’s good-humouredly flagellating himself with the memories of some past shame (their implications are reassuringly unequivocal). He recalls, for example, a night when his student group-house was broken into by three hooded men armed with bats and a handgun. The housemates are rounded up in the lounge room where the gun wielding housebreaker guards them as the others ransack the house. Things look bad, the gunman is aggressive and erratic. As the housemates sit and wait Milo retreats into abstraction. Observing his own paralysis, savouring it as a sensation and a moral revelation (though one he won’t entirely own), it strikes him that he may finally have drifted “beyond any possibility of action.” Milo turns the break-in into another test of his capacity to assert himself as something more than a passive being of pure consciousness. The episode becomes the acid test for certain illusions he cherishes about himself. It’s his Lord Jim moment: the ship is going down,  there’s a right way and a wrong way to meet the crisis, which will it be?

… a final tally, a statistical breakdown of this moment, did exist.
Future Apocalypse Guru: Smidgen of composure, ineffective diplomacy, intractable whininess.
Artistic Provocateur: Ineffectual response to threat, admirable behaviour under physical duress, unseemly and gratuitous assault on downed invader.
Larkish Frankfurtian: Frightened retreat into walls of self.
Marxist Feminist Who Fucked: Initial paralysis, subsequent display of courage.
Semi-Brain-Damage Crystal Tweaker: Valiant and focused response to threat.
Ruling-class Brat: Remarkable bravery and tactical leadership in face of threat.
Home Invaders: Bold initiative, bad intel, poor battle management.
Painting’s New Saviour: Utter cowardice, experienced as bodily paralysis in conjunction with what he would later describe , in an effort to steer the conversation away from actual events, a “bizarre floating sensation.”

Milo has internalised this episode as the confirmation of his inconsequence. He will later have to revisit some of these assessments, though not the assessment of himself.

…the box score stayed in my wallet, or the wallet of my heart, so to speak, a smeared and origamied scrap to remind me how little I resembled the man I figured for the secret chief of my several selves.

Lord Jim takes the leap. So, Milo carries a lot of ballast, he is trying to live down an array of personal failures but is hampered by his unshakeable interest in the gradual corrosion of his fondest aspirations and his idea of himself. His deprecation and self-pity console him, but this is because he is more interested in his inadequacies than he should be. His wounds are fascinating to him, so he keeps them fresh.

What’s going to break that circuit then? Dismayingly, but logically too I suppose, it is an act of violent rebellion against the relationships, values and the version of America that defined him as a superfluous man. Milo has to do what he can to get his metaphorical balls back.

IV.
In challenging the bona fides and the confidence of Imperial America, The Ask shadows some familiar territory. Milo Burke, shaken loose from financial and emotional security, slips into a kind of limbo – he is thrown off kilter from the regulating rhythms of the city and in a state of stunned impotence (a kind of strategic psychic equivalent to going limp to absorb a blow) he begins to re-evaluate his cherished ideas about himself, his ideas about success and his ideas about America. And each of these is shot-through with his confusion about the qualities and obligations (both genuine and bogus) that define masculinity. It could just be the common partnership with New York City (perhaps the pre-eminent world-historical figure of the last decade), but The Ask treads common ground with Joseph O’Neill’s highly praised ‘post-9/11 novel’, Netherland.

Like Milo Burke, Netherland’s Hans Van Den Broek has allowed himself to drift away from his wife and young son. Post 9/11 angst has shaken all his certainties, and in his confusion he has holed up in a psychic bunker of self-scrutiny, nostalgia and sentimentality. His wife turns her back on the souring promises of the US, but Hank chooses to stay in NYC. “Life itself had become disembodied. My family, the spine of my days, had crumbled. I was lost in invertebrate time.” A free agent, untethered, he allows himself to seep into layers of the city that had hitherto been conceptually cordoned off by his affluence and by the habits and conventions of upward mobility.

Without giving the outcome of either novel away, both authors conclude on a similar note. Having plumbed the depths of disembodiment - the loss of standing, conviction and self-esteem - and having drawn back the curtain on the murky dimensions of American opportunism, both O’Neill and Lipsyte leave the reader to ponder a remodelled ideal of masculine custodianship. It’s still a fact that these middle-class white men can choose to tread more softly because they don’t have to fight to survive, nevertheless, that they do make this choice does count for something.  In this sense, these are novels of disillusioned enlightenment. Romances which, in the great tradition of nineteenth century realism, show ideals withering when forced into proximity with a reality that is simply and always ambivalent to our individual aspirations.

Lipsyte’s commentary on the frail delusions that sustain the idea of America tends to be cursory, a pat exchange or a neat cameo with broad national overtones, but this avoids both sentimentality and pomposity (two of O’Neill’s serious and serial offenses against good writing). Lipsyte made his name with brief comic novels, but he aimed, in The Ask, to trade off brevity for gravity. Framed by Lipsyte’s (and Milo’s) wry and satirical attitude to society’s ills, even the gravest of the many themes Milo encounters while falling out of love with himself are inflected with a cartoonish black comedy. Lipsyte’s comic instinct to skim across the surface (and let the depths register like a slow-detonating punchline) sees him well clear of the pitfalls of forced profundity.

We welcome comments, corrections, arguments, attacks, enquiries. Write to us at mailbox@theember.com.au.

Let the Dead Lie by Malla Nunn
Pan Macmillan Australia. 392 pages. $Au 32.99

By the end of Malla Nunn’s first novel, A Beautiful Place to Die, Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper “had maligned the most powerful law-enforcement body in South Africa by delivering a letter to the mother of a black man wrongly accused of murdering an Afrikaner police captain.” In the letter Cooper had commiserated with the mother and explained that her innocent son had been beaten into a confession by the Security Branch. In the corrupt civil state of 1950s South Africa, Cooper is heavily burdened by his sense of moral duty. He is a dreamer.

In Let the Dead Lie, we rejoin Cooper in the port city of Durban. He has been stripped of his detective card and his classification as a white South African. With opportunities restricted by his new designation as a moral hazard to the white population, Cooper has gravitated to the docks where he works as a labourer and conducts off-the-books surveillance for his former superior, Major van Niekerk.

In the course of this surveillance, Cooper discovers the body of a boy who had eked out a living running errands around the docks. Cooper feels the stirring of an obligation and begins making his own enquiries around the margins of the case. Cooper’s motivations are at odds with the procedural bureaucratic approach of the sanctioned police who shadow his own detective work. For Cooper, “investigating the murder was more than an intellectual challenge … it was a desire to restore order and help the dead on their way.”

Cooper’s marginal involvement creates a circumstantial link to the case that soon sees him become a person of interest in the murder. When Cooper’s landlady is killed, the net of suspicion tightens. With the police convinced of his guilt (not least because of the persisting stigma from his former act of dissent) Cooper is taken into custody.

Cooper contemplates the noose but is thrown a lifeline. Major van Niekerk pays him a visit with a mysterious man carrying a toolbox. Cooper will have 48 hours to clear his name. So begins his descent into the Durban slums and underworld. Cooper moves among the outlaws and the disenfranchised, negotiating the protocols and the moral expediencies that have grown up around the inequalities enforced by apartheid.

Malla Nunn was born in Swaziland. She went to university in Perth, did a Master of Arts in Philadelphia, worked on film sets and wrote her first screenplay in New York, and returned to Australia to write and direct films. She currently lives and writes in Sydney.

Malla took the time to answer some questions about Let the Dead Lie.

It’s been said that a screenwriter’s job is to produce something that’s been produced before while a novelist has to produce something new – how does that gel with your experiences as a screen writer compared to your experiences as a novelist?

The best screenwriters produce something new while the worst novelists are guilty of re-hashing old themes and stories. An original work (no matter it’s form or origin) is just that… original. District Nine for example had aliens and big guns but I had no idea where the story was going… and an alien ship over Johannesburg was a stroke of genius. Neil Gaiman’s American Gods was a huge sprawling book, which also took me in unexpected directions. Both film and book have the space to be exciting and new.

On a similar note, the role of a screenwriter can be quite subordinate and anonymous, how liberating is it, with your novels, to be totally in charge of the final product? Perhaps daunting as well?

I love the fact that the novel is the end of the process, not the beginning. A screenplay has to be shopped around to gain finance, has to be cast and crewed, filmed and edited before the final “product” can be viewed. I find writing novels deeply satisfying because the final manuscript goes out into the world and into the hands of readers without huge delays.

You’ve spoken of having found the guts to write novels after making a trip with your mother back to her home in Swaziland (which served as the basis of your documentary ‘Servant of the Ancestors’), what sort of obstacles did your newfound fortitude allow you to overcome? Or was it more a case of having a mental block removed?

One major obstacle to writing a novel about Southern Africa was the fact that I never felt “at home” there. I was uncomfortable in my own skin because I wasn’t white or black but somewhere in-between. My mother re-connected me with my ancestors and made me realize that I was (and am) an African woman.

You have a passion for literature, history and theatre, what influences do you draw on in your writing?

My novels let me indulge all my passions! The Emmanuel Cooper series is set in the fifties so I get a chance to dabble with history and do research, which I love. The fact that my stories take the form of a novel is connected to my love of literature… I can’t go past a good book. It could also be said that my stories are “theatrical” in that there is always something at stake for my characters.

As a writer, which authors, thinkers, performers have you learnt the most from?

Reading is like eating… everything you read in some way nourishes you. There are too many influences for me to name! Here are just a few from the book category. Alan Paton for writing books that sing with love for Southern Africa. Toni Morrison for her gorgeous use of language. Henning Mankell for the flawed and very human detective Kurt Wallender. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird for introducing the righteous lawyer Atticus Finch. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which is the most moving and bleak love story I’ve ever read.
That’s just off the top of my head!

What drew you to crime writing?

I love a good crime novel. Also, the genre allows me to weave the weightier elements of South African history into an exciting plot.

How important is it that Cooper is officially déclassé and emotionally adrift at the start of the novel?

I wanted Emmanuel to know what it was to be outside the magic white bubble of South African life. He had to experience the random cruelty of the racial classification system first hand.

Let the Dead Lie consistently brings the socially vulnerable into the foreground, their experiences characterise a world that is plainly unjust at its core. Is there a kind of fantasy element, for yourself, in bringing justice to that world and in championing the strengths of the decent and morally courageous figures who resist its rigid hierarchies?

Yes there is a fantasy element to it all. Call Cooper’s adventures “retrospective justice” if you will.

For all the inequality, the suffering, the oppression and paranoia, there is rarely any sense in your writing of cynicism or bleakness – what are the qualities, in your mind, that justify optimism in the midst of such widespread suffering and injustice?

Hope and love keep the world spinning in spite of all the cruelty and injustice. My father lived under the apartheid regime but he is not cynical or bleak or bitter. He is my guiding example of how human beings can live through terrible times with a sense of kindness and humanity intact.

Cooper’s dedication to detection grows out of his sense of owing a debt to the victim. You contrast this at one point to an intellectual commitment to solving crimes.

Emmanuel works with his head and also his heart. Solving crimes as an intellectual exercise seems pointless to me. By redeeming the victim, Cooper redeems himself.

At its best, modern crime writing seems to have inherited the social realism and moral inquisitiveness that energised the great novelistic traditions of the 19th century – does that coincide in any way with your inspirations, motivations or interests as a writer?

I believe in redemption and so does Emmanuel Cooper.

The more admirable of your characters have a strong sense of doing what’s right, but there are serious consequences. In Let the Dead Lie, doing what’s right seems unworldly or naive, but ultimately it is a point of valour and a kind of triumph. Do you think that makes you a romantic?

Yes, I am a romantic. I believe there are people (very few) who stand up for the weak and for justice no matter the consequences. I admire that quality and wish I had more of it in my own life and actions.

As a writer constructing a world, do you feel a responsibility to instil a particular attitude towards the powerless and the victims around which your stories revolve. Alongside the dynamics of suspense and detection, how conscious are you of aligning the reader with the moral attitudes of the in many ways exemplary Cooper?

Cooper was powerless as a child and absolutely feels a connection with the victims of crime. I’d hope my readers see the world through his eyes because he understands that people are people, no matter their colour. His wartime experience has made him a moral being.

Without laying the machinery bare, how important are structure, pace and timing in providing good narrative momentum and the right levels of suspense? These are pragmatic necessities of telling a particular kind of story, and they require that you keep your audience very much in mind – do you find that a stimulating constraint or does it rankle?

I believe in story not structure. I don’t plan or plot beforehand so the process is organic. It’s important for readers to live the story with Cooper and discover things as he does. Of course I’m conscious of the constraints of the crime genre but it doesn’t rankle. I love discovering secrets and investigating the case.

We welcome comments, corrections, arguments, attacks, enquiries. Write to us at mailbox@theember.com.au.

Stooge Pile by Seth Scriver
A Petits Livres from Drawn & Quarterly

So we take a touch of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and Fat Freddy’s cat, we slip in a semi-consciousness of Big Daddy Roth and Philip Guston, we bypass (but can’t ignore) Spongebob, Ren and Stimpy and a legion of bulbous co-fiends, we remember we are in Canada – doff our deerstalkers and don our lumberjack flannels – we cultivate the fuzzy, the flaccid and the wrinkled, we doodle a bit, we pull out the airbrush and go stoner mental, then we bundle it in a sack and sit on it. And we are enthroned, I would say, on a stooge pile.

I’ve resorted to the scatter gun because the terminology eludes me: Stooge Pile? Scriver’s Montreal city-slang has put me in the corner. If I’m to retain my own urban insouciance, founded on a solid pretense of cross-tribal savvy, I need to know - what exactly is a stooge pile?  I’ve come at this in a literal mode and a logical mode, but I still can’t resolve my primary predicate: is it a pile of stooge or a pile of stooges? Is stooge to pile as shit is to heap, or as Horse is to Show? Or is it the pile, any pile, that a stooge accumulates in the course of their stooging? A stooge is a dim-witted straight man; a patsy or a schmuck. A stooge can be a stool pigeon or a cheap skate, or a parasite who doesn’t pay his way. But what kind of pile does a stooge accumulate?

Is Seth Scriver the stooge, this little book his own pile of leavings? Or is he the master of stooges, the bringer forth of degenerate caricatures and soggy hot-rod toons. Scriver’s Stooge Pile is humming with delirium and visual energy fields tuned to stoner-pitch. His petit sac is chirpy and messy, sweet on the tooth and fizzy on the eye.

The happy sack holds dollars, the shrivelled dog holds the sour disillusion of a withered cartoon career. The Scriver stooge is for the most part swaddled – the hulking man-child moves about in flannel or fur; his friends look on from behind their woolly beards, hunting caps and glistening probosci. Blissful savants, blissful idiots, Bring your own plaid, bring your own cushion stuffing – watch as a stooge army assembles.

We welcome comments, corrections, arguments, attacks, enquiries. Write to us at mailbox@theember.com.au.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

With the release of one film version, and another from Hollywood on the way, the only comment on any of Larsson’s ‘Millennium’ series that really matters is the one on the shelf at the store: ‘Re-order if stock drops below 20 units.’

Airport novels like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo are competing with Valium and Xanax as much as with their fellow titles: you take them to make a traumatic stretch of time disappear. They’re for when it’s necessary to block out a world that’s narrowed to seat 42K on a 747.

Enough copies have been sold and enough enthusiastic reviews written to ensure Stieg Larsson’s books will be on permanent re-order at airports and bookstores across the world. You can buy volume I at LAX, finish it somewhere high above the Pacific Ocean, and pick up volume II pretty much anywhere in SYD. And because 42K is replicated on a smaller scale on buses, trains, trams and ferries, it’s always best to be prepared.

But as successful and apparently critic-proof as the series may be, there’s always room for dissent. Sandcastles may make good photographs, but the real fun is in kicking them down or seeing them taken by the ocean (I can’t quite decide which mode of devastation is more gratifying). Anyway, successful artworks become billboards and billboards demand graffiti. I’ll keep the plot-spoilers to a minimum.

It’s easy to see the markers of brand-success in the Millennium series. There’s mental glue in a tricksy title, and that ‘girl-that-has-x-to-do-with-a-y’ formula finds a snug home in our brains next to Aesop’s Fables. I expect Larsson had very little to do with the branding that now defines his work, more likely it was stamped on by a crack marketing cabal. Anyhow, there will only be three instead of the planned ten volumes because Larsson’s not writing anymore of ‘em: by dying at 50, he’s the literary-age-adjusted Hendrix, Cobain, Ledger.

Fifty is, of course, a premature departure in any walk of life, but surely some of the hand-wringing from the blurb-o-sphere over this death of an artist hides a dark glee. Books are a commodity and scarcity drives up value.

So Larsson, like Salinger, like Foster-Wallace, is a finite resource now, and his yield was located within a rich vein already - Scandinavian crime writing has been a bankable crowd pleaser for at least the last decade. Scarcity and pedigree - were you a librarian in a bygone era you would have picked Larsson early as ‘a definite circulator!’(a lost honorific I came across  in a review of that granddaddy of Airport novels, Arthur Hailey’s Airport). And - ‘Hang the expense!’ - you’d have ordered 5 copies of the sequel and preordered the final volume, all of them in hardback. This was always going to be a successful crate of prøduct on the bandwagon.

Larsson’s editor did him no favours, failing to cut paragraphs of gush about laptops and technology and pages of email-formatted exchanges that add nothing to anything. Unfortunately for us English language readers, Larsson’s also been ill-served by his translator, as you’ll see below. (Speculation only, as I don’t speak Swedish, but surely, surely…)

There are also several implausible and groan-inducing reveals, and the tired tropes of the sadist and the Nazi are called into service to provide psychological impetus and to justify all this casual killing taking place under the cloak of Nordic restraint. I thought about proffering some passages as evidence - but it would be granting them an undeserved second life.

It’s hard to fathom some of the critical acclaim the novel has received, especially from other authors who should know better. Most of it is in relation to the novel’s heroine Lisbeth Salander. Perhaps they’re kicking themselves as to why they never brought to page a gamine, Asperger-suffering, super-hacker with a photographic memory. Honestly, you might praise this kind of characterisation in something from Nintendo, but not in a novel.

What Larsson has written will get you through one of those long Economy legs, or a series of commutes to the dreary workplace. There’s enough in terms of intricate plot and snappy pace to satisfy the dead-girl-whodunit crowd. But Larsson owes (and confesses) too much of a debt to the genre while failing to add much that’s new (or even very Swedish) to the mix.

Maybe it’s the flattened world of globalisation - there’s not a lot about fictional Stockholm that’s much different from a fictional Anywhere-else-holm. Sweden comes across as simply colder and slightly dorkier than the rest of Western Europe. Similarly, there’s nothing particular enough in the character of journalist Mikael Blomkvist to warrant his own paragraph here. I will break my quotation embargo, though, just to mention one incident when Blomkvist’s university–aged daughter Pernilla brings around a present:

She took a package out of her bag. He opened it and found a CD, Best of Eurythmics . She knew it was one of his favourite old bands. He put it in his iBook, and they listened to “Sweet Dreams” together.

Edgy stuff. And just slightly odd. Thankfully Pernilla’s been flirting with Christianity in a pretty serious way because she’s the one who makes the big break in her father’s case. She stays the night in the room where Blomkvist has his notes set up and the next morning she has linked the numbers that were thought for 40 or so years to be telephone numbers, to corresponding passages in the bible … that she knows by heart … and thinks her dad is studying:

…With one foot on the step, she turned.
“Pappa, I’m not going to proselytise. It doesn’t matter to me what you believe, and I’ll always love you. But I think you should continue your Bible studies.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I saw the quotes you had on the wall,” she said. “But why so gloomy and neurotic? Kisses. See you later.” She waved and was gone. He stood on the platform, baffled, watching the train pull away. Not until it vanished around the bend did the meaning sink in.

Groan! And again: just slightly odd. Something in this artless exchange between a father and daughter must have been lost in translation. Could Larsson’s ear for dialogue really be this tinny?

As a journalist who probably used to unwind at the end of the day with some Annie Lennox and something from Sayers, Christie, Grafton or Paretsky - Larsson decided he should have a shot at this crime fiction business. The result is a locked-room mystery that reads like fan-fiction.

In what was probably a gesture of affirmative action in a work whose Swedish title was “Men who hate women”, Larsson has his Blomkvist, on a number of nights in the novel, tuck himself in with one of these female crime writers listed above. On a number of other nights he has specifically non-sadistic and wholly consensual sex with a number of the female characters in the novel. It seems like an effort to establish his good-guy credentials; Larsson ensuring we’re clear that at least one man in Sweden’s still worth rooting for.

As Clive James said in Unreliable Memoirs: ‘Most first novels are disguised autobiographies.’ With Larsson writing in the spare time after his day job as a financial journalist (defending the people from the robber-barons of industry), it’s not hard to see the committed but frustrated lefty recasting his own life as a sexier, boiled-harder, techno-thriller. We’re all the heroes of the novels in our heads after all.

So if you’re looking for something to take you away from it all, en route to somewhere you’d rather already be, Larsson’s first novel might be just the dose you need. To paraphrase Pernilla, I don’t want to proselytize …but…when you get to wherever you’re going, read something from your too-hard basket instead. And while I don’t have the bible passage at hand to back that up, nevertheless, here endeth the lesson.

We welcome comments, corrections, arguments, attacks, enquiries. Write to us at mailbox@theember.com.au.