Editorial
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I am where I was:
A Draft of Shadows, Octavio Paz
It's a comment that taps the core of Beckett's artistic morality. His severity and strangeness are immanent with an astonishing compassion. In his refusal of comfort is relief from the coddling hypocrisies with which we are surrounded, and even an illuminating beauty. Pain becomes, not easier to bear, but recognisable. Beckett's work emerges from a steely courage, a reservoir of spiritual strength that cuts the safety nets which protect most of us from the extremities of joy and sorrow and, beyond that, from awareness of our own tragic absurdity. He created an oeuvre of continuous risk: and this refusal of compromise, vividly clear in his work, makes him exemplary. Yet in many ways Beckett, like all artists, is the antithesis of heroic. The fierce rigour of his literary mind focussed itself on the most mundane of moments and magnified them into the tragedies we fear they are. But out of tears he elicits laughter, and this perhaps is the cruelty of his gift. Cruelty, tragedy, tears, laughter: when applied to art these words have an archaic cast. They are used most often by commercial current affairs shows or tabloid newspapers as a crude rhetoric that serves to manipulate a passive response in an audience of consumers. This usage has given those words a melodramatic taint which serves enough to drive them out of the discourse of art. But they are words that signal real things. Without tragedy or cruelty or tears or laughter, what does art become? Where is its erotic tension - that 'intimate struggle'Heidegger described between the sacred unseeable and that which profanely seeks to expose it, the poles of material life and intangible silence that charge the potent magnetic field of artistic experience? Art in Australia is compromised - not by repression, not by exile or imprisonment or murder - but by petty ambition, pointless argument, shallow theorising, suffocating nationalism and all the other accoutrements of the 'arts industryî. (How many newspaper articles have sought to impress us with the value of the arts by releasing employment figures? Or by stressing their value to tourism? How many breathlessly reported intercinine feuds demonstrate only that art is a facile activity for the privileged?) Vaclav Havel warned of the seductive repressions of a 'free'capitalist state, an ideology that is harder to fight against than a totalitarian state because its inhibitions are invisible, free floating, decentralised, camouflaged by a vocabulary of satisfied desire that effectively represses dissenting voices. 'To think about the now,'writes Octavio Paz, 'means first of all to recover the critical vision. For example, the triumph of the market economy (a triumph due to the adversary's default) cannot be simply a cause for joy. As a mechanism the market is efficient, but like all mechanisms it lacks both conscience and compassion.' In Australia, the shallow topsoil mulched from European and American culture has allowed the market economy to create a culture which measures its worth in almost completely material terms. There are complex reasons for this, not the least of them being an amnesiac grasp of history. As has often been remarked, but perhaps not often enough to impinge on our 'national identityî, the history of European settlement in Australia is a litany of petty murder, beauracratised cruelty and raw greed. What is perhaps surprising is that such a picturesquely violent heritage hasn't spawned a literature as rich and various as South American writing. One reason for the difference might lie in the catholicism of the Spanish occupation of South America. Catholicism is a religion that absorbs by inclusion, and it allowed the local expression of the One God to flourish in all sorts of bizarre and colourful hybrids. Indigenous beliefs, indigenous texts, managed to retain a subversive presence within the colonising culture, infecting it as much as it affected them. The flowering of South American Spanish literature is a direct result of this complex and fascinating dialogue. Australia, in contrast, was colonised by the rational English whose Protestantism was insular and exclusive. The Aboriginal people had nothing that to the English pointed to a flourishing culture - not the impressive palaces of the Indian princes, nor the ziggurats of the Incas and Aztecs. Their oral and cermonial spiritual tradition was especially vulnerable to eradication by disease, addiction and massacre. While Octavio Paz can point to a complex spiritual tradition in Mexico that includes the civilisation that predated the Europeans, until relatively recently dialogue between European and Aboriginal cultures was mostly limited to anthropologists. That is only part of the problem; for when a people has been so devastated by another culture, the desire for dialogue, the desire to understand by the oppressors can be as insidiously repressive as previous silencings. To assume it is possible to speak for a silenced race can be effectively to silence that voice again. The debate over the stolen children stories, a question of very recent history, only highlights how raw this wound still is, after 200 years. From a European point of view, the question can only be addressed by inhabiting a sense of emptiness, by breasting the cruel moral implications of our actions. What does it cost us, as a nation, as a culture, to so assiduously ignore the truth of our history? What is it costing us, further, to ignore our continuing degradation of Aboriginal people? What implications does such anaesthetic morality have for the every other question that faces us as a nation? It is not enough to speak of guilt, for that is an escape route that merely begs the question. Reconciliation, that elusive prospect, means a dark journey into each of our hearts. It means refusing to romanticise the dilemma of our history, refusing to retreat into a myth of lost Arcadia, refusing to smooth over complexities or insoluble contradictions. When our culture as a whole truly addresses the questions of violence at its heart, it may be at last a culture worth taking notice of. There are so many influences mitigating against such a self recognition that such a step seems unlikely. We still labour under the anxieties of colonisation, which make the search for national identity an Australian obsession and cause the oscillation between aggressive self promotion and obsequiousness to be an embarrassing national trait. Post modern theorising found fertile ground in Australian intellectual life, as economic rationalism did in our politics. Behind both these ideologies is the shadowy promise of an explanation, an abstract utopian guarantee that allows the evasion of manifest social or artistic realities. Both permit the abandonment of any idea of value that is not materially measurable. In such a context, to assert the value of art outside a matrix of economics, to dismantle the idea of an 'arts career' in favour of vocation, is to be considered a fool, or at least quaintly romantic. If Australia is a vision of the West's future, the 'dark ages' that writers as diverse as Eugenio Montale and David Mamet have prophesied, it is an arid prospect. I don't wish to demonise post modernism, that chaos of academic and artistic idiolects that in retrospect will clarify into one of the symptoms of a giant climactic change in our civilisation. Its destablisations of meaning and truth are not the least of its gifts although, as Yves Bonnefoy has pointed out, poets have known about the instability of the sign for centuries. But in the jargon that characterises so much of its theoretics and its art it is hard not to detect a sense of aphasia, even of panic, and a supreme defensiveness. One might add in passing that post modernity is largely a middle class phenomenon that inclines to embracing the meretricious rather than the vulgar: it is easily offended and in some cases simply prudish. Its endlessly proliferating texts often seem very like the proliferating legislation imposed by the modern democratic state, legislation that in fact helps to conceal the mechanisms of increasing social inequities. It is legislation that purports to protect and yet has failed to eradicate the bigotry of the ignorant, or the suffering of the poor, or the spiritual hunger of a society that has progressively lost all its ideologies except for the imperatives of the marketplace. And the self-referential languages of post-modernity appear to serve a similar paradox: an obsession with desire, for instance, reveals rather a desolate absence of desire; continuous references to the body herald a lack of carnality; the appropriation of poetics signals the abandonment of poetry. If nothing else, post modernism is an expression of powerlessness in our time. The desire for freedom, which is inextricably linked with the desire for art, nevertheless persists, fraught with all the contradictory elements of human violence. As a quality violence is neutral, and before its appearance in human behaviour is a potential unattached to ethics. When it is expressed in behaviour, it takes a myriad of forms. Rigorous thought, great artistic achievement, sexual passion, the soul-shaking perception that we call love, are violent upheavals of the psyche. To elide this fact is to efface the possibilities that created Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights or Heiner Muller's Hamletmachine, to ignore Kafka's demand that literature be 'the axe to break the ice withinî. Misdirected, misused, misunderstood, it becomes merely destructive - the social disfunctions of war or de facto economic slavery, or the personal destructiveness of physical abuse or addiction or depression. Or the more abstract violence of mediocre thought, which is the failure of consciousness to confront its own complexities. It should be clear that I am not defending the prurience of those who exploit violence as a cheap trope: who make of it a pornography that is, strangely, generally considered less offensive than Nietzsche's outrageously serious comedies. Jacques Blondel, discussing Bronte, clearly explains the ethical basis of an artist's violent challenge to social morality: 'There is a desire to break with the world in order to embrace life in all its fullness and discover in artistic creativity that which is refused by reality. ... That this liberation is necessary to every artist is certain; and it can be felt most intensely in those in whom ethical values are most deeply rooted.' This is the quality for which Georges Battaille coined the phrase 'hypermoralityî. A contemporary repression of the hypermorality that seeks to address the authentically violent in art or thought has failed to have any effect on violence in our society. We are left with an art that follows the adage 'be nice', that strokes us into somnambulance rather than waking us up, an art, moreover, that is dazzled by the media and, consciously or not, draws almost exclusively from its values. The meretricious glamour of theory, its infinitely mediated irony, its inability, finally, to permit the bald statement of realities, obscures our poverty, our hunger, the violence of our desire for freedom. If our culture has turned out to be a psychic prison, it is always worth trying to knock down the walls, which are, after all, imaginary. Tragedy, cruelty, laughter, tears: they are present in our world, and they are not to be trivialised. They have an ancient lineage, cultural and physiological, which we are foolish to ignore. The more we flinch in distaste or cowardice from the real questions we confront as human beings alive now, the less able we are to understand ourselves. Rather we must have the courage to face ourselves, the best and worst of what we are, in the simple hope that in doing so we may live more richly, more consciously, more lovingly, in this world that is ours and that we are inhabiting so badly. To voice such a hope is to court the accusation of naivetie. There are those who have already decided what is possible. We are their heirs, and our children have to live in the world which they have created. But the history of art is a history of possibility. Masthead is a manifestation of a hope in possibility. It is a venture
almost completely devoid of conventional ambition. It may not exist after this
first issue. But it has been made in the certainty that it is better to speak,
no matter how futile that speaking might be, than to suffer the complicity of
silence. 'We who live in this chaotic age,' asked the editors of the Paris
magazine Transition, 'are we not aware that living itself is an inferno?'
Sixty years later, their rhetorical question still stands, as does their
statement: 'Perhaps we are seeking God. Perhaps not. It matters little one way
or the other. What really matters is that we are on the quest.'
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