The Best Australian Essays 2015 (30 page)

The alleged racism of
Hebdo
was part of a reasonable argument against one demand of the ‘recruiting sergeant' squad: that, to defend free speech, one had to reproduce the most hardcore
Hebdo
covers, and not merely as newsy examples but in large format and as a political act. That was valid, but the perception of
Hebdo
as racist was also necessary to casting Muslims in Western societies as an oppressed race-class, and to warn of the possibility of a mass outbreak of Islamophobia. In the influential blog
Lenin's Tomb
the author Richard Seymour, perhaps the most coherent representative of the far Left following the near collapse of the UK Socialist Workers Party, wrote:

Elsewhere, on sites such as
Counterpunch
or
Z Magazine
, and in newspapers still hosting left-wing writers such as the UK
Independent
, two other arguments were being made: one, that the attack was political, but not in its most apparent manner, as a religious attack, but as a continued part of the fight against Western involvement in Arab lands, especially in the area of Syria and Iraq occupied by Daesh/ISIS. Second was the opposite argument: that the attack was a symptom, a displacement of the longstanding alienation of French Muslims living in the vast
banlieues
outside major cities. This was also taken as evidence that the
Hebdo
attacks would prompt a series of large-scale attacks against Muslims. The anti-immigration Pegida rallies were taking place at the same time in Dresden, gaining relatively large crowds of marchers, and it appeared that France might be in for a supercharged version of the same.

These assessments may have been based on a genuine desire to stand up for a group whose social being was being marginalised in the rush to a self-congratulatory free-speech movement. But they were also an attempt to find a social subjectivity and a political process that resembled some of the mass processes of the past. Yet this was the application of an idea of mass politics from the modern era to a period in which mass political processes had collapsed, and the ‘mass' always being called upon – to be outraged, to be oppressed, to rise up – was now sets of peoples living in a multiply abstracted space of communities, subcultures and media.

By now, the French
banlieues
are more than a half-century old, home to two or three generations of immigrants and French-born Muslims. The exclusion of Muslims – of all non-white non-Europeans – in France's allegedly inclusive secular republic continues, but there has been no uprising from there, no civil-rights movement, no political parties to represent them. When the
banlieues
erupted in riots and car-burnings a decade ago, Jean Baudrillard noted that there was a car-burning a day in these areas, ‘a small eternal flame to the lost possibilities of politics'. And indeed, those uprisings failed to roll towards any more comprehensive political movement.

By the time the
Hebdo
murders came along, such communities were even more fractured. Many French Muslims are secularists who left Algeria when it drifted towards violent fundamentalism after independence. But others had become part of Islamist subcultures or were absorbed in the hundreds of Arab-world cable channels now available. The small, violent Islamist circle from which the Kouachi brothers came was part of no huge movement; nor do there appear to have been many more such circles. Days after the
Hebdo
attacks a similar circle was arrested in Belgium, planning an imminent attack. But the numbers of young men and women going to and returning from Syria/Iraq as
jihadis
was in the hundreds rather than the thousands. The marches that had accompanied the Rushdie affair in the late '80s was not matched. Nor was there anything like the mixed violent/non-violent movement such as the IRA based itself on during the '70s and '80s. There was no movement – simply a voluntarist small cell taking on extreme action.

Nor was there a huge Islamophobic backlash, though there were violent acts. By the end of the week following the
Hebdo
killings, there were sixty reports of attacks on mosques or Muslim cultural centres. Reading further into these, it became clear that the bulk were unpleasant but non-violent: graffiti damage, pigs' heads thrown in and the like. Firebombings and violent attacks amounted to fewer than a handful.

That was bad, but it did not compare to the modernity-era crowd events – pogroms, anti-Semitic attacks, Jim Crow attacks on black communities in the United States – which were the violent expression of a mass politics. To displace the Kouachi brothers' attack into a generic rage against alienation and anomie was reasoning of this ilk. Quite aside from displacing the obvious meaning of their own acts to the perpetrators themselves, it didn't explain why such acts have been so singular and rare in the past decade and now.

Neither ‘side' of the debate over the meaning of this event appeared willing to acknowledge the radical incommensurability upon which the event was based. The real possibility was that the Kouachi brothers – possibly with active involvement of Al-Qaeda commanders they had come into contact with – had chosen
Charlie Hebdo
as a targeted decapitation of the most outrageously blasphemous publication in the West. This was reinforced by their scrupulousness in not harming ‘civilians' they came into contact with, as a way of delineating the purposefulness of the act.

The meaning of the act was a radical refusal of anything that ‘free speech' would subsequently call on as a common standard by which to judge acts: a division between speech and violence, a sense of proportion, and the idea that all representations and signifiers are not the thing themselves – thus suggesting that the sacred can be profaned without damage to the former. The Kouachis' act came from a philosophical base that drew on an opposite idea: that the Prophet is fully present in representations of him (which for most Muslims is now solely via the Koran, the transcendent symbols in Mecca, the representation of the infinite in circular mosques). It saw the sacred – as everyone until modernity saw the sacred – as something that was not immune to being profaned by virtue of its sacred power but which must be protected from all profanations of it, as a measure of its sacred command.

Just about the most asinine thing said about the event was that it showed the weakness of a people who felt they had to protect their God from a few cartoons. This was the simple inability of those who could not understand the assumptions that underpin a liberal worldview as to a different idea of the sacred. Since any representation of the Prophet was held to be a fatal ‘corporealising', satirical and sexualised representation was an utter traduction. A statue of a saint that becomes even slightly flecked with mud must be burnt, to honour the saint's purity. The burning is a lesser act than the smudge of dirt. Postmodern cultures, which lack even the pseudo-religious grounds of transcendent politics and humanism that characterised modernity, have no widespread capacity at all to understand the meaning of the sacred, such as would make multiple murders the lesser act than a bad-taste cartoon. Such a conception of these killings holds even if, as is possible, they were partly designed by higher commanders with an eye to maximum strategic impact. There was also a resistance by many on the Left of an acknowledgement that such religious incommensurability continues to exist as something other than a symptom, since it raises problematic questions about implicit ideas of internationalism and unidirectional modernisation and secularisation.

Thus the mantra repeated by political leaders in the immediate aftermath – that the killings had nothing to do with Islam – was obviously untrue. The killers clearly believed that they were not merely licensed but obligated by Islam to execute its profaners. But the Right's sketch of them as yokels with guns who didn't understand that their act would prompt a reaction was equally ridiculous. As was the Left's hunt for a resistant political subjectivity concealed somewhere within the event or a victimised race-class from which political subjectivity could be made. The
Hebdo
killings had the external character of an IRA, Red Brigade or Palestinian operation – but these events, however rejected they may have been by a general Left, sat within a wider political movement and was one manifestation of its project.

Such movements have vanished from the contemporary postmodern social-political landscape, and it is not clear under what conditions they would, or could, reappear. Even mass manifestations such as Pegida tend to rise and fall once they have exhausted a certain need to express their dissatisfaction. The social-political frame in which people live presents itself as a set of highly abstracted economic processes beyond the possibility of intervention in the manner of the old political economic movements. Now culture, too, is receding from the grasp of the political. Such worlds become one of small conspiracies, subcultural networks, incommensurable belief systems within a world of social media, global TV and neighbourhoods cut off from any wider social whole. The
Hebdo
killings marked a moment when the old forces of social politics attempted to impose a meaning on the events that would serve to keep their politics going a little longer. But the real meaning of the event was that, under the banner of Unity, and with the bloodied pages of a rude magazine hovering over them like the angel Gabriel, the leaders of the West and its satellites carried through an extension of state power, of surveillance, coercion and the exercise of ‘speech crimes', with the enthusiastic support of a movement for freedom.

Arena

The Pencil and the Damage Done

Ceridwen Dovey

‘I was ruthless,' Karl Ove Knausgaard, the now infamous Norwegian author of the volumes of autobiographical fiction,
My Struggle
, said at last year's Sydney Writers' Festival. ‘All writers are ruthless.'

This dictum – that ruthlessness is a necessary attribute of writers – is not new, but it has long troubled me, and made me wary of writing autobiographically in my own fiction. A fellow writer friend tells a story from a class given by the Irish writer Colm Tóibín, who asked the aspiring authors to raise a hand if they would publish a piece of their best fiction knowing it would destroy the marriage of their closest friend. All but two of the students, both women, put up a hand. Tóibín focused his heavy gaze on these two a long while, then told them to leave his class and not come back, because their moral qualms would inhibit their ability to be good writers. ‘You have to be a terrible monster to write,' he told another class. (A rumour later circulated among the students that Tóibín had himself ruined his best friend's marriage because of a revelation he made in his fiction; in his 2010 collection
The Empty Family
, there is a story, ‘Silence', that has its origins in a passage from Henry James' journals about a marriage destroyed by a letter from a wife's ex-lover.)

This vision of the author as heroic truth-teller or ‘savage artist' – no matter the consequences to others – goes back a long way, at least to the nineteenth-century novelist Gustave Flaubert, the founder of the modern realist style of narration. The critic James Wood says of Flaubert's mode of fiction that ‘it seeks out the truth, even at the cost of repelling us'. The protagonist in O. Henry's 1903 story ‘Confessions of a Humorist' calls himself a ‘vampire', preying on his wife and children for material, offering it to the ‘public gaze' upon the ‘cold, conspicuous, common, printed page'. The late American writer John Updike was often accused of cannibalising the people in his life for the sake of his art: ‘No friend or lover was safe from being turned into fiction,' as Hermione Lee put it. The novelist Julian Barnes believes that ‘it's all fair game', whether ‘you've been told a story by a friend or something happens in your family'. Peter Carey's 2006 novel,
Theft: A Love Story
, was slammed by his ex-wife as a cruel ‘smear campaign' by an ‘enraged narcissist'.

The sister of the British writer Hanif Kureishi complained of his 2003 film,
The Mother
, that ‘it was like he'd swallowed some of my life, then spat it back out', and his ex-partner publicly voiced her feelings of betrayal after he based his 1998 novel
Intimacy
on their relationship. Kureishi responded to both women unapologetically: ‘If you started to censor yourself as a writer you wouldn't get anywhere at all, you'd have a terrible book. You'd be full of things to say but you'd be too afraid to say them.' In Joan Didion's view, ‘writers are always selling somebody out'.

Ruthlessness towards family and friends can equally be a feature of non-fiction genres such as memoir, and it's a truism that
all
fiction is to some degree autobiographical, in the sense that it constructs a self for the writer, and that all non-fiction is to some degree fictional, in being constructed. It's almost impossible to define exactly what constitutes ‘autobiographical fiction'. The literary scholar Philippe Lejeune wrote in 1973, ‘Anyone who goes on about “autobiography” (or about any literary genre whatever) is obliged to confront the problem of the definition, if only in practice, by choosing what to talk about.'

Here I'm choosing to talk about the type of thinly veiled autobiography, billed as fiction, written by an author like Knausgaard in the tradition of Proust. (He has been described as ‘Norway's Proust' and regards Proust as a major influence on his work.) Knausgaard's writing burns with a peculiar intensity because of its layered betrayals and the author-narrator's skilful dodging of questions of identity.
My Struggle
's narrator, Karl Ove, reveals hurtful thoughts (that he feels boredom and resentment about being a parent, for example, or that his desire to write is often more compelling than his desire for his wife), and Knausgaard as author then uses the cover of fiction to avoid being held accountable. He has said that ‘it was actions, not words written about [people] later, that had the most power to do damage', but it is the act of writing these words down – and making them public – that does the most damage. In his case, the damage done has taken on legendary proportions: his book triggered his wife's manic depression, his mother begged him to stop writing it, whole swathes of his extended family no longer speak to him, and he's had to move to a remote town in Sweden to escape constant scrutiny in Norway.

Some might justify Knausgaard's choices by saying it's only fiction – after all, he calls
My Struggle
a novel, not a memoir. But, as the Canadian writer Robert McGill points out in his 2013 book
The Treacherous Imagination
, in this age of modern confessionalism ‘some texts are more traitorous than others'. Fictional texts can be the most traitorous of all, for ‘the violation is often double-edged: people are wounded by the invasion of privacy entailed in the details that are true, while they are equally hurt by what seems false'. The ground falls away from beneath the feet of the victims of this kind of writing. Their public complaints about the revelation of private truths endorse them as true, while complaints about
un
truths are simply considered inappropriate in the context of fiction.

The genre of any text depends on an unspoken contract between writer and reader, which determines the reader's orientation to the text. In conventional autobiography, for example, the ‘autobiographical pact' described by Philippe Lejeune is that the reader can safely assume that the author, narrator and protagonist are one and the same. On this assumption rests the reader's faith that the author's attempts to make sense of his or her life are sincere. Yet this pact is broken in autobiographical fiction, even when there is identity of name between the author (Karl Ove Knausgaard; Marcel Proust) and narrator (Karl Ove; Marcel).

And what of the pact between author and subject? The way in which autobiographical fiction is framed simultaneously as ‘art' and ‘truth' seems to cause further injury to authors' subjects and intimates. Kureishi's ex-partner claimed that
Intimacy
is ‘not merely a novel. You may as well call it a fish. Nobody believes that it's just pure fiction.' Peter Carey's ex-wife also questioned the moral free pass that authors of autobiographical fiction are given. ‘People say writers have been doing this forever,' she said in an interview after the publication of
Theft: A Love Story
. ‘Then they need to be exposed and held accountable. No one … believes novelists lie, even when they boast of it. They're regarded as modern-day priests and priestesses.' In this sense, authors of autobiographical fiction are operating outside any pact or contract with their intimates, unlike the authors of autobiography, who are still expected – by subjects, readers, critics – to adhere to basic standards of truthfulness.

Knausgaard apparently first thought to publish his magnum opus as a memoir, but went along with the Norwegian publisher's proposal to call it a novel. This may have been a commercial decision, since he was already known in Norway for his novels. In
My Struggle
, he literally writes himself into celebrity, attracting a larger following with each volume. The use of celebrity to sell books is one of the most striking developments in the contemporary book business. Knausgaard's account of the minute details of his life creates the conditions under which these very details become interesting to readers hungry for the ‘truth' behind celebrity façades. Obsession or addiction is a common response among Knausgaard devotees. Zadie Smith tweeted that she needed his next volume ‘like crack'. Another critic confessed to sharing the communal ‘sick obsession', unable to stop consuming Knausgaard's volumes with both ‘horror and delight'. The reader becomes a crazed stalker of sorts – though we have access to endless details about Knausgaard's daily life, we are insatiable, wanting more, depending on him for our pleasure.

Reading as voyeurism, then, or what Helen Garner refers to as ‘perving'. And she would know. Since the publication in 1977 of her first highly autobiographical novel,
Monkey Grip
, Garner has alternately been praised as honest and criticised as ruthless by readers and critics, most recently for basing her 2008 novel,
The Spare Room
, on the life and death of her close friend Jenya Osborne. Not only that, but critics like Robert Dessaix have found it galling that Garner calls her books novels. ‘But they are not novels,' Dessaix wrote in his review of
The Spare Room
. ‘They are all of them fine works of art and innovative explorations of literary approaches to non-fiction, every one of them an outstanding example of stylish reportage, but none of them is a novel. So why does Helen Garner at the very least collude in having them called novels?'

Dessaix also notes the persistent criticism of Garner's fiction that has dogged her from the very beginning of her career: ‘random jottings, they seemed to be saying, about emotional entanglements in dreary suburbs with the odd thought about the meaning of life thrown in don't make you a
writer
'. So why, I wonder, when Knausgaard publishes random jottings about emotional entanglements in dreary suburbs with the odd thought about the meaning of life, is he not howled down for colluding in calling it a novel?

Knausgaard has been called the founder of ‘New Man existentialism' and ‘one of the great writers about male frustration', and praised for portraying ‘with savage honesty the challenges of being a man of genius who is also expected to be thoughtful, sensitive, unmonkish'. No wonder, then, that many female writers have admitted to me that they share my annoyance at the lack of acknowledgement by reviewers – and by Knausgaard himself – that he has essentially appropriated a mode of expression long used by female writers, who have a history of forensically depicting the subterranean war between the banalities of domestic life and the transcendence of artistic life. Why does Knausgaard trace his artistic heritage to Proust but not to Virginia Woolf, who experimented with blending memoir and fiction to explore exactly the same subject matter – the dangerous tug of recalling the past, and the limits that an author's domestic situation places on her artistic life? One author referred to the Knausgaard phenomenon as ‘First World fathers having the chance to experience their own Betty Friedan moment', expressing the simultaneous joy and ennui of parenthood, and how it can be both source of and poison to creativity. ‘Nobody wants to deny the New Men their moment,' she said, ‘but give the ladies who've cleared the way a little credit!'

Another foil for Knausgaard is the contemporary British-Canadian author Rachel Cusk, who has also published the intimate details of her domestic and artistic life: becoming a mother, surviving a divorce, being a writer. Her books are filled with the same Knausgaardian mixture of the stultifying daily routine, ruthless revelations about intimates, and digressions on art and death. The difference? She calls hers memoirs, not novels. And she has been viciously attacked, not lauded, by reviewers (both male and female), one of whom won the Hatchet Job of the Year award for harshest review, describing Cusk as ‘a brittle little dominatrix and peerless narcissist who exploits her husband and her marriage with relish' and who ‘describes her grief in expert, whinnying detail'. (To be fair, the Hatchet Job runner-up was Zoë Heller for her scathing review of Salman Rushdie's 2012 novelised memoir,
Joseph Anton
; she calls him out for dismissing anyone who is troubled or hurt by a work of fiction as having an ‘unsophisticated' or ‘crude' understanding of how literature works.)

Even Helen Garner, who is by no means a shrinking violet, seems to have internalised the suggestion that a woman who uses her own life as the basis for her fiction is somehow illegitimate, unworthy of being called a novelist, nothing more than, to quote one critic, a lowly ‘user' or ‘scab picker'. It doesn't seem entirely coincidental that her ex-husband, the novelist Murray Bail, is withering about ‘the age of narcissism', calling it a contemporary problem ‘worse than global warming'. (Garner has joked that every time she writes a book she loses a husband.) Garner is more timid than many of her male peers about the legitimacy of this mode of writing, and describes being haunted by questions about whether ‘a real writer' shouldn't be ‘writing about something other than herself and her immediate circle', and worrying about the inevitability of the damage done to people close to her, and the ongoing ‘ethical problem' this sort of writing poses.

Garner tentatively justifies her decision to write what she calls ‘auto fiction' by hoping that she writes it well enough that her ‘readers will be carried through the superficial levels of perviness and urged into the depths of themselves'. Knausgaard voices the same justification more assertively, saying: ‘The books are an experiment about the relationship between reality and writing,' and ‘to reach readers is everything I wanted'.
My Struggle
does seem to elicit an intense kind of recognition from the reader: as one reviewer put it, ‘[Knausgaard] reveals plenty about himself and his loved ones, but the people we learn most about from
My Struggle
are ourselves.' This strong identification seems to arise from what readers experience as the truth, veracity, frankness, honesty, authenticity or sincerity of Knausgaard's writing. These terms have a complex history that I don't have space to delve into here, except for noting J.M. Coetzee's point in relation to Rousseau's
Confessions
, that sincerity in writing is an effect of rhetoric – of literary style – and ‘an invention of devilish ingenuity, in that it claims to stand outside all systems of rhetoric' and to produce ‘an art that is above art'. Any dream of an unmediated relationship between writer and reader is bound to fail because realism is no more than a convention that produces the effect of verisimilitude. And the readers who identify so strongly with the protagonists of autobiographical fiction are, no less than readers of fantasy, engaged in a kind of willing suspension of disbelief – deliberately not seeing the writing for what it is.