The problem of change, of the way in which hegemonic systems can be opposed and altered, has constantly dogged Marxist theory. The standard criticism of Althusserian models of cultural production, for instance, is that the process of overdetermination seems too comprehensive; the effect of such models, it is claimed, is to deny the dialectical process of history.1 The tendency in Marxist theory to construct a model of a total system (which we can see in Michel Foucault’s work for instance) is problematic. The most important of the problems which arise is the tendency to ‘eliminate any possibility of the negative as such, and to reintegrate the place of an oppositional or even merely critical practice and resistance back into the system as the latter’s mere inversion’.2 The Screen debate on realism and the ‘progressive text’ over the BBC series Days of Hope falls into this category, as it rules out the possibility of realism ever being used for other than bourgeois, hegemonic ends.3 This present study, too, may seem to concentrate overmuch on the totality of the system, denying change. Therefore, before concluding, it is important that we acknowledge some of the other possibilities in Australian narrative as a way of opening out at least some areas for change. In so doing, we also reinforce the theoretical admission of difference within the culture, between particular readings of narrative, and between narratives themselves.
Film and fiction have so far been treated as contributors to a larger system, the emphasis having been placed on their similarities rather than their differences as narrative forms and as generators of meaning. Yet the application of developmental models to the study of film and fiction in Australia reveals important differences. At the simplest level, it is possible to see Australian fiction at a point now (in 1986) as composed of a wide variety of styles and conventions, and as composed of a number of individualised voices whose utterances resist being pulled back into the general pattern. Most critics would find it difficult to see contemporary film in this way. Instead, the search for homologies between Australian film and fiction inevitably leads one to the fiction of fifty years ago—the period in which Australian fiction was slowly emerging from the double shadow of nationalism and the cultural cringe to focus attention on contemporary Australian life. If cultural forms necessarily ‘mature’—as the evolutionary model has it—then Australian fiction must now be at a later stage of maturity than Australian film. An inference from this, if it was acceptable, would be that Australian film has ahead of it the same kind of development and individuality that Australian fiction could be argued to enjoy at the present. However, the forms are different; they are the product of very different industries and although they both serve the function of narrative they do so by providing very different forms of pleasure for their audiences. To see contemporary Australian cinema as having so far ‘failed’ to produce its Patrick White or Peter Carey is to misunderstand the conditions which determine the development and the language of the two media.
Further limitations of this kind of developmental view—and I admit to having argued it elsewhere myself4—lie in the fact that it depends upon a progressive model of history that not only asserts the inevitability of change but also connects that change with progress. This present study does not rest on such a model of history, although I do recognise the usefulness of such approaches in explaining the recurrence of particular modes and thematics across a range of very different media and representational forms. What an historical survey can reveal is not simply the evolutionary course of a medium or its messages. Here, such a survey is useful in that it reveals the existence of narratives of a different kind to those so far discussed. Thus this sort of survey makes it possible to see how the incidence of oppositional, critical stances towards the dominant structure has fluctuated. In other words, it reveals the more dialectical movements within the body of Australian narrative.
Two separate areas of development in contemporary film and fiction, in particular, suggest possibilities of narrative form and meaning that are not necessarily homologous with the account that I have given so far: in the first place, we have the increasingly critical focus on urban, social and political subjects in Australian film; and in the second place, the formal influence of fantasy, metafiction and ‘fabulation’ in Australian fiction. These two areas, while perhaps not the only two which one could choose, do remind us of the possibilities of change at the same time as they provide possible complications to the conclusions of this study.
Treatment of bush subjects dominates the film industry of the 1920s and 1930s. The subsequent movement into more contemporary urban dramas (in the 1930s and 1940s) was associated with the Australian industry’s attempt to make more Hollywood-styled ‘international’ movies in order to survive. The superficiality of these films’ examination of Australian contemporary life means we do not have a strong tradition of films which deal seriously with contemporary realities. It is the use of history, and the construction of contemporary Australian life through the representation of the past that is the dominant mode in our film tradition—and this sort of treatment is becoming once more dominant in the current productions of the television mini-series. During the revival of the 1970s, there was only a handful of films which concerned themselves with contemporary urban life on a level which could be called critical or analytic. With the significant exception of Bert Deling’s Pure S and perhaps Esben Storm’s 27A—neither of which gained widespread release—we would have to look to the ocker comedies such as Stork (1971) or else to the quartet of scripts by literary writers, Libido (1973). The release of Michael Thornhill’s The FJ Holden (1977) and John Duigan’s Mouth to Mouth (1978) stand out as rare examples of attempts to describe and capture the problems of contemporary urban and suburban existence in Australia. Thornhill’s film was not generally well received, although it documents the rituals of teenage life in Sydney’s western suburbs with accuracy and affection and allows its world to retain a sense of authenticity while revealing its essential deprivation. Susan Dermody’s Cinema Papers review recorded her elation at the film’s ‘use of its material’; and she also noted the critical nature of its depiction of suburban life:
. . . the lives we look at are teeming with details and impulses; yet they are resoundingly empty, uninhabited spaces, unaware of the possibility of conscious action altering the pattern of existence.5
It is a familiar thematic, and Rod Bishop and Fiona Mackie also refer to it by discussing F J Holden as a film which projects the image of the battler, struggling against ‘oppressive environments’.6 The film does, to some extent, celebrate the life it documents—as its reception indicates (it did not do well in city theatres but was extremely successful in the drive-ins, doing 90 per cent of its business there).7 However, F J Holden does not simply naturalise its subject. The emotional constriction of the characters, the poverty of communication between them, stand out rather as images of oppression and of the diminution of possibility; and despite the humour and vitality of the film these images linger. And yet the film is not as committed an attack on Australian society as Thornhill’s earlier Between Wars (1974), where similar principles of conservatism and conformism came in for more political analysis.
Mouth to Mouth is a more critical film. Although it occasionally does romanticise the predicament of the unemployed—notably in the last shots of Carrie walking past the dream-filled windows of city stores, with the romantic song lyrics underlining her personal love problem—the film is still a genuine stylistic departure from the norms which had been set in Australian cinema. Unlike Donald Crombie’s lyrical treatment of the urban slums of the depression in Caddie, John Duigan’s depiction of the world of the four young unemployed characters in contemporary Melbourne is anything but affectionate. Mouth to Mouth was shot by Tom Cowan—whose camera work in Pure S was largely responsible for its savage effect on its audience. Although less confrontational than Pure S and less unpleasant to watch, Mouth to Mouth also presents us with a world which is filled with wreckage—building sites, litter-filled tenement backyards, neglected houses, abandoned buildings, railroad yards with rusting rolling stock, shattered families . . . and also the aspirations of the main characters. The lighting is insistently dim, the few daylit exteriors operating as much needed relief from the claustrophobic effect of the rest of the film. The world of the unemployed is seen as separate from that of the normal middleclass Australian, even though it is ruled by the same images of success. The attempt to gain entry into this normal world dominates the four characters’ lives; and their dependence on its definition of a useful life is underlined in various ways: Carrie’s efforts are stimulated by her envy for the surroundings enjoyed by her clients, and her need for a romantic relationship with Tony; Tim and Serge’s attempts to find work punctuate the film as regular reminders of the cycle of hope and frustration which dominates their lives.
Duigan’s view of the Australian context is consistent with that outlined in the second chapter, and it presents the promises of Australia as an ironic, impossible joke for these young people. A sign over Jeanie’s bed in the abandoned warehouse (if that is what it is; significantly, its previous function is never made clear) promises ‘satisfaction as big as our land’. It refers to her emotional generosity, of course—but it also emphasises the improbability of any other forms of satisfaction ever being allowed them, while ironically underlining the characters’ progressive marginalisation within a society that has no place for the unemployed even as it creates them. Even liberal principles are seen as a luxury, as the demonstration outside their squat is given the ambience of a family picnic. The extent of the callousness with which society can treat its victims is established in the gratuitous murder of the old man, Fred, who has cared for Carrie when she needed help, and in whom she recognises her own possible fate. There is little that is romantic about the world of the film; it is visually grainy and dark, and thematically grim; the characters’ relationships are born out of desperation, out of the need for companionship in times of stress. Mouth to Mouth is not as anarchic or aggressive as Pure S, but it is more aware of the political construction of its subjects’ lives.
On its release, Mouth to Mouth’s departure from the existing precedents was noted: Jack Clancy wrote in Cinema Papers: ‘We have not seen anything like this in Australian films’, and he commended its ‘combination of compassionate observation, social concern and behavioural truth’.8 The film was the first of its kind to suggest the usefulness of documentary realism (although its enclosure within this convention is qualified by such factors as the rapid cutting pattern) when applied to the excluded forms of Australian life, to those aspects of existence which are not part of the consensual view of the Australian way. The disconnection of documentary realism from representations of the past is thus the significant achievement of Mouth to Mouth.
Critiques of realism argue that it is a form which privileges one organising view of the real, which the reader accepts in order to make sense of the narrative. Consequently realism is a form which is incapable of expressing criticism—of producing a contradiction which, while remaining unresolved, would still oblige the viewers to think for themselves.9 This position has been argued, as mentioned earlier, in relation to the political progressiveness of the BBC’s leftist reconstruction of labour politics in the television series, Days of Hope. Such a position might also qualify our sense of Mouth to Mouth’s progressiveness; however, while realism may be a more bourgeois, naturalising form than the ‘interrogative text’ (which questions the natural views of reality) there is still doubt as to how legitimately we can ‘read off’ the ideology of a film—or any text—from its choice of form.10 If realism is able to privilege its view of history, then it may also have the potential to propose an oppositional or alternative view of history which is itself naturalised by the form. Mouth to Mouth is realist in form, yet its conception of Australian life is not entirely contained within dominant constructions. The disjunction between its view and the dominant views is mediated by the form, so that Mouth to Mouth exploits its documentary style to express opposition. Rather than simply naturalising existing social conditions, Mouth to Mouth attempts to interrogate them. It does this by forcing us to recognise the existence of a form of life which is produced by basic divisions within Australian society, but which is denied by that society.
Although Mouth to Mouth stands slightly outside the patterns of representation as outlined in this study, its meaning is still consonant with that exposed in our third chapter. The film is significant, however, in suggesting new uses for the dominant formal conventions and in opening out new areas of subject matter. As we continue into the 1980s, the incidence of films dealing with contemporary urban Australia and with particular, often marginalised, sections of that context, increases. For instance, migrant experiences occupy Paul Cox’s Kostas (1979) and Michael Pattinson’s Moving Out (1982); the obsessive relationships of the subcultures of Carlton and Fitzroy dominate the film version of Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip (1981); the gap between the worlds of the middle class and of the streets is again John Duigan’s subject in Winter of Our Dreams (1981); the structures of oppression and exploitation link the worlds of the small-time criminal and the aspiring model in Don McLennan’s Hard Knocks (1980); and David Pattins’ documentary style provides a case study of a day in the life of a VD clinic in The Clinic (1983).
These are not radical but popular films which may collectively imply the renovation of the filmic representation of life in Australia by their enfranchising of new, potentially oppositional, class and gender positions. The Clinic is remarkable for, among other things, depicting the main character as normal, well-balanced, admirable and homosexual; the diagnosis of Sam’s attempt to transcend her criminal background and her gender in Hard Knocks is presented from a point of view which is uncompromisingly critical of the society in which it takes place. The realist visual style toughens up the point of view of Monkey Grip: the ‘true romance’ voice-over threatens to send the film into the most mawkish of modes, despite its trendy setting, but it is rescued by its visual depiction of the grimmer aspects of the life within the urban subculture.
Although the dominant conventions ill such films are still those of realism, they are often put to uses which challenge the viewers’ comfortable expectations—which asks them to question rather than to comfortably ‘know’. Hard Knocks juxtaposes ‘before’ and ‘after’ images of the main character in order to set up expectations of the gradual unfolding of a ‘rags to riches’ success story, of the reformed criminal who becomes the successful model. But these expectations are eventually revealed to be naive. The end of the film has Sam under attack from those who wish to exploit her in the modelling world; from her friends from the prison who resent her attempt to break out of her criminal context; and from the police who refuse to see her as anything but a criminal. We are strongly encouraged to identify with Sam in her entrapment (more than we are with Lou in Winter of Our Dreams, for instance) and the dominant emotions aroused by the film are those of frustration and anger.
The argument about the progressive, critical and oppositional potential of realism (which is by no means over) may thus require a special application in so far as the history of Australian film is concerned—since realism here has been so closely connected with representations of the past, and since contemporary life has occupied so little of the screen. Within such a tradition, and given the established convention of realism’s signification of historical truth, the realist depiction of non-consensual views of life which construct the identification between the viewer and the characters living that life may well be interrogative, proposing rather a critical analysis of Australian society. It is also clear that the formal break from realism can carry with it the potential for dislodging the viewer from a comfortable position of knowing and accepting—a position that is related to both the narrative and the world that it represents. The value of dislodging the viewer from this position, and the expansion of the ability to shock and confront which results, is readily apparent in Hayden Keenan’s Going Down (1983). Initially Going Down is reminiscent of Pure S, but its realist form gradually evolves into comic fantasy, into an exhilarating riot of invention. Its style is aggressive and confrontational (when on its first run in Sydney, those passing the cinema were harangued by a man who warned them not to see the film, because ‘it will damage your mind’) and in some scenes shocking, but its omnivorous appetite for the life that it represents is irresistible. Formally, Going Down is a signal reminder of the value of departing from the established norms and practices. The film begins with two lengthy handheld shots which take us through the rooms of a seedy communal house, recording the ephemera of the characters’ world in documentary, if rapid, fashion. As the film develops, the objective, documentary use of the camera diminishes, and the tempo of the cutting increases. The range of images and content widens, and any residually realist conventions are finally exploded in the high comedy of the journey to the airport. The level of invention and artifice is gradually revved up through this film, foregrounding its function as a display and celebration of the medium and of its ability to transform the real.
One of the new directions in contemporary Australian cinema: Alyson Best and Norman Kaye in Paul Cox’s ‘Man of Flowers’ (1983). (With Kind Permission of Paul Cox)
The formal possibilities exploited in Going Down are also apparent in formal features which have been noticeable for some time in Australian fiction—although this is not to argue that the two trends are necessarily related. However, it is certainly true that the realist style is no longer dominant in contemporary Australian fiction. The seeds of realism’s demise lie in the 1950s and particularly in the novels of Patrick White. Thematically, White challenged the natural and agreed ‘truths’ about existence. Formally, his infiltration of an essentially poetic, metaphoric coherence into his fictions complicates what is otherwise a realist style and enables him to offer rare suggestions of ‘transcendence’.11 White’s use of fable as a structural convention has been noted—and fable is a universalising alternative to realism.12 Fable proposes the lack of cultural difference between human societies in order to focus on those common, metaphysical principles which are seen to be immanent in all human existence. In White, this process can be almost reactionary, but more radical exploitation of the possibilities of formal invention has now become common. In younger writers, the foregrounding of the manipulation of language and of ‘fabulation’,13 (that is, the creation of narratives which depend less on their referential dimension than on the arbitrary construction of stories and worlds for their own sake) has become important. The influence of American fabulists such as John Barth, Kurt Vonnegut, and Tom Robbins—writers whose work is inherently individualist—can be seen in the prominence of verbal style in much contemporary fiction and in the increasing application of black humour—which, importantly, operates as a signifier of resistance rather than of acceptance.
Peter Carey’s work is a key example of this trend. His novel, Bliss, depends more on the metaphorical felicities of its inventions than on sharp social observation, although its world is by no means totally removed from our own. Bliss, like many of Carey’s shorter pieces, has a definite nationalist tinge. It depicts Australia as being colonised by ‘the Americans’; in this process, the natural indigenous remnants of Australian life are the good, and the ‘imported shit’ is the bad. The novel’s relation to the conventional myths of Australian existence, however, is ambivalent. On the one hand, the novel sets up the condition of the archetypal ‘Good Bloke’, Harry Joy, who seems to represent all the Australian virtues:
Harry Joy was not particularly intelligent, not particularly successful, not particularly handsome, and not particularly rich. Yet there was about him this feeling that he belonged to an elite and for no good reason (none that Bettina could see) he was curiously proud of himself.14
This summary of the ‘middling standard’ could, if supported, be open to the kind of criticism that Crofts directs at Breaker Morant. However, in Bliss we see the powerlessness behind it:
He had known the quiet superiority of being a Good Bloke. But beside this there was a nagging doubt that something was missing from him, that he suffered an impotence. For instance, when he saw a chair raised above a head in a movie he felt excitement and resentment that this passion was denied him. When Bettina became angry he felt a jealousy. When she threw a plate, he envied her. (160)
By the novel’s end, Harry Joy has taken a different direction, and the novel rebuilds the familiar figure of the bushman in order to mythologise the condition into which the hero has escaped:
He did not become a leader or a strange man with a long white robe, not a shaman, a magician or a priest. He was a bushman. He was a bushman in the way he stood with one leg out and the back of his wrist propped on his hip. He dug holes, used flooded gum trees to outgrow and conquer the groundsel weed; he won Clive’s respect by the energy with which he helped at the mill, where they cut packing case timber from blackbutt and sold it to pineapple farmers in the world outside. (277)
There are important differences between Carey’s bushman and Lawson’s—no mateship, for one thing—but the novel’s primary resolution does move towards the pantheism of the idyll in nature. It is, fortunately, more complex than this, for Harry has other ways of making meaning.
In Bliss, the role of story, of fiction itself, is essential to the creation and communication of meaning. The stories of Vance Joy, and later of Harry Joy, have the magical properties of myth. And what they offer are alternative meanings and alternative values to those of the society. The novel’s style, foregrounded as an invention rather than as a reflection of the real, is consonant with the thematic assertion of the necessity for reinventing reality. A strong tradition of metafiction15 (which is fiction proposing the fictiveness of both fiction and reality) exists in the United States and can be examined in such writers as Vonnegut, Robbins and Barth, as well as in the more elaborate South American fabulists such as Marquez. These writers see their role as resisting even the discourses through which fiction normally deals with reality—so as to assert instead the priority of the self over its social and ethical context. One of the characters in Slaughterhouse Five tells a psychiatrist that he will have to come up with ‘some new lies’ if he wants people to go on living—and Vonnegut and others seem to accept this challenge as one which confronts the writer too.16 By working within this tradition, Bliss inevitably proposes an existentialist, or absurdist, alternative to realism—which is that of exploiting the resources of the self to construct reality.
This proposition is largely responsible for the optimistic and even magical conclusion to the novel, which places the narrative in the specific context of legend. Although superficially similar, the return to the land at the end of Bliss can be seen to have different implications to the endings of Voss or To the Islands: Harry Joy may find his resolution in the land, but this is not a discovery necessarily intrinsic to the natural world—rather, it is made possible by the ways of inventing meanings which this alternative social structure can value. If this new formulation is convincing this is because the novel manages to separate itself from the conventional use of the land as an alternative image of society.
A conventional use of the alternative of nature would also seem to be implicated in the ending of David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life. Despite its setting on the fringes of the Roman Empire, An Imaginary Life is a novel which can be seen to refer to and derive from Australian experience in detailed ways; its resolution of the problem of exile in the antipodes by submersion in the land has a long lineage in Australian narrative. Yet there is a more positive, less resigned sense of acceptance at the end of An Imaginary Life than in most Australian fiction. Ovid’s death in nature is not so much an acceptance of defeat or a signifier of accommodation as a kind of reconciliation between the poet and those sources of life which he has hitherto regarded as beneath his civilised attention. What Ovid learns in An Imaginary Life is not simply how to accept his own defeat in death, but how to live ‘authentically’, and thus he can eventually face death as simply another of those changes for which he must be ready. Unlike much of the fiction discussed in the third chapter, the knowledge won in this novel is implicitly existentialist. Ovid chooses to ‘belong to this place now. I have made it mine. I am entering the dimensions of my self.’17
Like Bliss, An Imaginary Life foregrounds its style and its status as fiction. Its language is not that of the realistic novel or of history; it is the language of legend and myth. It has an elegaic and impressionistic quality, its clauses looping together to connect and complicate the impressions which they register. Although the novel draws much of its significance from the construction of analogies with contemporary Australia, the world which it represents is the product of fantasy.
The thematic influences of existentialism and of individualism, and the stylistic influence of fantasy and black humour, are more in evidence in Australian fiction now than at any previous point. They are not, however, the only modes in which we encounter the depiction of the ‘authentic’ life, which bases itself on a firm conception of the subject and of the context. Patrick White’s ‘tale of survival’,18 A Fringe of Leaves, presents an uncharacteristically optimistic portrait of its main character, Ellen Roxburgh, and of her gradual development to free herself from the social and ethical constraints around her. The ending of that novel may not present her suggested union with Mr Jevons as a romantic solution, but neither is her ability to make independent assessments of her situation that of a victim. At the end of A Fringe of Leaves, as at the end of The Tree of Man, life goes on; the difference is that its continuity is not symbolised by the cycle of the seasons and the permanence of nature, but by the sheer resilience which sustains the protagonist.
In narratives which seem able to propose critical reformulations of the dominant structures, the foregrounding of the individual style of the narrative—visual, verbal, structural—is important. The foregrounding of style can have a confronting, individualising effect, challenging the reader’s ability to make sense of the text’s view of the real. Realism presents itself as natural, as not a style at all; and in it there is a minimum of mediation between the material and the reader. The adoption of styles which attack, oppose or fracture realist expectations carries with it considerable potential for giving to the point of view of the text a putative sense of autonomy, by reducing its referential dimension and dramatising its role as fiction. This reduction of the referential dimension is less possible in film than in fiction—even the film version of Carey’s Bliss (1985) is more naturalistic than the novel—and the movements described have different ideological determinants in the two media. However, both the use of fantasy and black humour in fiction and the film’s appropriation of clearly generic narrative styles—in Mad Max (1979), Starstruck (1981) and The Man From Snowy River (1982)—currently share the potential to dislodge the reader and to create space for alternative constructions.
Hebdidge has talked of the style of subcultural groups—the dress and the music of punk—as offering ‘gestures of refusal’; the display of membership to a subculture in clothing, behaviour, rituals and so on is to Hebdidge a ‘form of resistance in which experienced contradictions and objections to . . . ruling ideology are obliquely represented in style’.19 Although it is possible to see such gestures as recognitions of the impossibility of any other form of defiance, there is within Hebdidge’s view a reminder of the continual immanence of change within culture—an immanence of change which must qualify any description of dominant patterns such as the ones we have detected here. As Hebdige points out, the emphasis on ‘integration and coherence at the expense of dissonance and discontinuity’20 can be misleading. Nevertheless, the foregrounding of style in literary fiction does not automatically serve analogous functions to those he sees in subcultural behaviour; style is, after all, connected with those individualist myths of the artist that are universalising and privileging, and one is wary of drawing too many conclusions from the marginal movement that we are discussing.
It does remain true, however, that the dislocating effects of American black humour are customarily talked of as strategies of resistance—of assertions of the self against society—and as a denial of those established systems of meaning which frustrate the imperatives of the romantic, individualised, American version of the self.21 As such, American black humour infers very different models of the relation between self and society than those characteristic of Australian fiction. Its appropriation by Australian writers, together with the use of fantasy, has the potential of shading the primary tones which I have used to paint the landscape of the Australian narrative. In film, also, the foregrounding of satire, pastiche, and intertextual references that celebrate the fictional status of Goodbye Paradise (1982), or else the explosion of documentary realism into absurdist fantasy in Going Down, or again the deliberately elitist inscription of the film-maker as artist in Paul Cox’s films (which motivates Cox’s obsession with visual style)—all these have similar potentialities, albeit with less homogeneous ideological functions.
These examples present genuine challenges to the dominant structures I have described, but they are challenges which inevitably take place within the frame of those structures. Their importance is neither to be denied, nor over-estimated. The process of their analysis, inevitably draws upon the patterns which I have outlined in earlier chapters. As in the expression of the subculture, the foregrounding of either ‘group’ or individualised experience is still contained within the general framework of meanings of the culture—which may be the subject of renovation or resistance but which still strives to appropriate these group expressions as its own. So, despite the use of fantasy in Carey’s stories for example, their general thematic remains one that is nevertheless entirely familiar. Although Carey’s style works at stripping meaning away from rather than naturalising existing meanings, the portrait of the individual which emerges from, say, ‘The Fat Man in History’, or ‘Chance’, or ‘American Dreams’, is one which emphasises isolation, entrapment, and the failure of community.22 And despite Cox’s universalising, European aestheticism, the characters in Man of Flowers (1983) and in My First Wife (1984) are given a definitively social lesson in acceptance and endurance. In Hard Knocks, the definition of class position literally invokes the stigma of convictism, both in general and in a specific scene—the one where Sam overhears the agency boss calling her a ‘convict’ (and therefore ‘used to screws’) while arranging her sexual exploitation with another man.
Not only is it necessary to remind oneself of the large frame within which these apparently contradictory representations are constructed, but one also needs to be aware that what may be represented to the reader or viewer as a critical point of view may operate structurally as a means of naturalising acceptance of existing conditions, of winning assent. The role of ‘Australian’ humour, for instance, is characteristically seen to act as a goad against hegemonic constructions, exposing contradictions, and undermining the authorities and institutions which control us.23 This is premisely what American black humour claimed to do, by connecting itself with an individualistic ethic that asserted the priority of the self over the society. American black humour claimed to subvert as well as mock. But instead of doing this, most of the humour within Australian narratives turns back on itself, to sugar the pill and ensure the acceptance of powerlessness. A comparison between two ‘Vietnam’ films made by the two different cultures, The Odd Angry Shot (1979) and M*A*S*H (1970), immediately demonstrates the difference—both formal and ideological—between the two treatments. The stereotype of Australian humour as wry laughter in the face of adversity is more a description of a mode of surviving those conditions rather than an attempt to subvert them. Stan Cross’s celebrated cartoon depicts two men hanging from a beam projecting from the upper storey of a tall building. The lower of the two men is hanging onto the other’s legs, laughing as the other’s pants come down—and the caption reads ‘For Gor sake, stop laughing, this is serious’. The cartoon can be seen as quintessentially Australian: to laugh at the predicament can be seen as typically Australian, while to suggest that the two men should stop laughing so they can do something about the predicament is not.
A characteristic example of the naturalising process of humour, although drawn from an essentially dramatic narrative, occurs in Sunday Too Far Away. At the film’s end, Foley has failed to ring the shed and has blown all his money, leaving no prospect of escape. The strikers have gathered to meet the trainload of scabs coming to take their jobs and thus threaten the success of the strike. Most of the shearers stand by passively, but Foley, conscious of his now dubious role as leader, tries to deter the scabs. They ignore him, walking off to the pub while Foley shouts after them with as much dignity as a dog barking at a car. As he turns back to the group, flushed and indignant, one of them says That was pissweak’. Foley puts his fist to the man’s jaw in mock threat, acknowledging the validity of the comment, and the group dissolves in laughter. Foley’s quixotic pretensions are thus cut down to size (it is one of the means by which he is collapsed back into the group) and the group thereby finds some relief in being able to confront their own powerlessness to change the situation. All that is left then is the defiant gesture, the fight in the pub that concludes the film’s action. Within the point of view of the film, such humour is not made to appear passive or gallows-like but as admirable, as proceeding from a sense of proportion that is only possible when one is able to detach oneself from the condition of being mocked. The remark’s trenchant realism (‘pissweak’) is seen as a consoling and recognisable Australian virtue. The humour, in other words, enhances the viewer’s identification with the shearers by clearly establishing them as the underdogs, and thus it has an important function in the narrative. If it subverts anything, it is the shearers’, and by extension the viewers’, hopes of ever being able to control their own conditions.
In films which are formally comic, the comedy does not normally operate subversively either. The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972) lampoons the Australian type in such a way as to make it open to a number of readings. In Britain it confirmed all the popular stereotypes of the ‘stage Australian’, and exposed it to ridicule; in Australia, it was either seen as terminally vulgar, or as attempting to propose an ocker critique of the English—one in which Bazza becomes a lovable if exaggerated representative of Australianism who succeeds in defining that quality in the most conventional of ways, in opposition to British values. While satiric in mode, the film however is also capable of a celebratory construction, of an affectionate mythologising of the Australian abroad. As such, it would then present an assertion of national identity rather than a critique of it.
A more sophisticated example of this process is the film version of David Williamson’s play, Don’s Party (1976). The transfer to the more intimate medium of film provides the script with greater potential for criticism; the camera’s survey of Ray Barrett’s cratered and dissolute face, for instance, is capable of generating a more physical sense of failure than is possible from the stage. Yet the more aggressively Australian characters—such as Mac—are positioned against the more civilised, European characters—such as Simon—in order precisely to reconfirm the former’s greater authenticity and thus acceptability. Mac’s portrait is affectionate, while Simon is enthusiastically routed and his wife offered the definitively masculine version of liberation, going to bed with Mac. As G. A. Wilkes points out in some general comments about Williamson’s plays, the writer ‘delights in the stereotypes he depicts’, and provides no intimation that he has ‘spent sleepless nights worrying about the condition of the middle classes or the anti-intellectual quality of Australian life’. The effect of Williamson’s plays—and, I would argue, also those films that he has scripted—is ‘still celebratory’.24
While one can detect ameliorating, progressive or oppositional aspects in Australian narrative by viewing it developmentally, this does not radically qualify the outline of the dominant ideologies evident in the narrative structures examined in this study—although it does remind us that ideology ‘leaks’. That there are a number of conflicts and contradictions, and that the possible readings of those texts which support the dominant ideologies are potentially various, is admitted. This is not, in my view, a denial of the validity of the structures which I have outlined, but simply a recognition that they are built in ordej to integrate and resolve potentially conflicting positions and that these structures are neither monolithic nor permanent.
The theory of narrative which has informed this book is one that insists on the connection between the individual narratives on the one hand and the culture which produces them on the other. Narrative has been seen as serving a function which is analogous to that which Levi- Strauss ascribes to myth. It provides a symbolic resolution to a social contradiction, and is one of the major areas of the labour of representation within the culture, performing the ideological work of ‘making things mean’.25 Narrative thus is an epistemological category, one of the means through which we construct our world. Its relationship to ideology is clear, as Frederic Jameson points out:
. . . ideology is not something which informs or invests symbolic production; rather the aesthetic act is itself ideological, and the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal ‘solutions’ to unresolvable social contradictions.26
Although one can agree with Stephen Heath in his assessment that the meaning of narrative art in film is not totally reducible to ideology;27 and although one is aware that the kinds of arguments being made in this study are more valuable for stressing similarities than differences and for enquiring into a large body of writing or film-making rather than into the individual text in either medium—yet the picture of Australian narrative which emerges does carry important suggestions about the nature of the meanings which Australian culture produces for itself.
The pattern extracted in this study may seem a grim one. The view of form and meaning in Australian narrative which I have outlined in the preceding chapters is one which suggests that the commonsense notions of Australian experience (as being harsh but worthwhile, eliciting realistic expectations of a modest level of survival rather than romantic or naive notions of transcending one’s physical conditions) and the commonsense notion of the ‘Australian type’ (as resourceful, tough, possessing an independence and individualism that does not preclude a sense of community and ‘mateship’) are consoling inventions. The function of these constructions is to encourage assent to a system which consistently privileges the good of the community (however that is represented) over and above the good of the individual—even though the individual characteristically finds these two principles opposed to each other. The level of disaffection with the Australian context which thus marks the representation of the self in narrative is in fact radically inconsistent with the assertion of the value of authentic Australian experience—something which marks much, particularly populist, Australian narrative. Thematic representations of the self’s powerlessness and isolation are juxtaposed against the idea of one’s resourcefulness and commitment to community; and the resolution of this contradiction in favour of acceptance and accommodation is made possible by the effective denial of the contradiction’s importance. The ideology of the pragmatic, resourceful self runs completely counter to those very kinds of meaning and power which are represented as being beyond the individual’s reach, thus encouraging scepticism about both meaning and power.
Hence the common assumption that scepticism and illusionpuncturing realism are Australian virtues; but this does not usually recognise that the thematic function of these notions in Australian narratives facilitates the doubting of the value of individual effort, the denial of the possibility of change and the qualifying of the strategy of hope. In this commonsense portrait of the Australian self in society, a conservative and comprehensive assent to the prevailing historical conditions is a defining element. It is difficult not to see this process of smoothing over contradictions and of naturalising existing conditions as having class implications. If, as Marx asserts, everything is ‘in the last analysis’ political, and if narrative is (in the words of Jameson) ‘a socially symbolic act’ and the expression of a ‘political unconscious’,28 then the representation of the relation between dominant and subordinate classes in Australian narrative reveals a remarkably well-established and accepted politics of subordination. The figure of the convict itself can be seen as a displacement of class categories; and its celebrated tradition of anti-authoritarianism—with its divorce from the possibility of change—can be viewed as an alibi for impotence.
This book’s account of Australian narrative has concentrated on the ways in which a number of strategies of representation converge on a particular meaning. Although this meaning seems to be dominant, it should not be seen to be composed of entirely consistent contributing ideological positions. The way dominant meanings are generated within culture, and their maintenance through hegemony, is complex. Meaning itself is a site of struggle between conflicting interests and constructions. Nevertheless, the study has looked at a significant area of representation within the culture, a major location of the making of meaning. The results may stimulate social or political anxiety. However, this account should not generate such a response, since on the one hand the meanings outlined are those which, for good or ill, organise Australian experience in narrative (to attack them as undesirable is simply to enter the arena occupied by the Leonie Kramers) and since, on the other hand, such meanings are ultimately political (so that their function as myth and as history does need to be recognised). And of course the meanings are not set in stone. We have already seen instances of resistance to, and changes within, dominant structures in our narratives and the pace of this change—particularly in film—seems likely to accelerate.
The importance of our description of Australian narrative is ultimately related to its usefulness as an account of the culture—even though its width of application beyond the study of narrative is a matter for further study rather than automatic assumption. In this work, all the benefits obtained from viewing Australian culture are suggestive rather than comprehensive. But at least we can learn a great deal about Australian culture by examining the function of filmic and literary narratives and the ideological work which they accomplish.
1 The account of ideology and the state usually seen as central to Louis Althusser’s system is given in ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in Lenin and Philosophy and other essays, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 127-86. Criticisms of Althusser occur in Docker’s In a Critical Condition, Belsey’s Critical Practice, and most importantly, in Terry Lovell’s Pictures of Reality : Aesthetics, Politics and Pleasure (London: BFI, 1983).
2 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p.91.
3 For a convenient collection of the key articles in this debate, see Bennett et al. (eds), Popular Television and Film.
4 ‘Travel Books in Disguise: The Australian Novel and Australian Film’.
5 No. 13 (1977), p.77.
6 The New Australian Cinema, p. 161.
7 The Last New Wave, p.90.
8 No. 16 (1978), p.356.
9 Popular Television and Film, p.286.
10 The term, ‘interrogative text’, is used by Catherine Belsey as the alternative to the classic realist text in Critical Practice, Chapter 4. ‘The Interrogative text . . . disrupts the unity of the reader by discouraging identification with a unified subject of the enunciation. ... it does literally invite the reader to produce answers to the questions it implicitly or explicitly raises’, p.91. The argument against the Screen position on realism is in Terry Lovell’s Pictures of Reality, pp.84—7.
11 The argument of Veronica Brady’s A Crucible of Prophets takes us in this direction, and it is a well established point of view on White now.
12 Laurie Hergenhan’s chapter on A Fringe of leaves in Unnatural Lives makes this connection on p. 154.
13 The term seems to originate with Robert Scholes’ book The Fabulators (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967) and it is further developed in the later revision of this book, Fabulation and Metafiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979).
14 (London: Picador, 1982), p. 10. Further references to this novel will appear in parentheses in the text.
15 Accounts of this fiction can be found in Scholes’ Fabulation and Metafiction and in Tony Tanner’s City of Words (London: Jonathon Cape, 1971).
16 (London: Panther, 1968), p.71.
17 (London: Picador, 1980), p.94.
18 Dorothy Green, The Music of Love (Melbourne: Penguin, 1984), p.42.
19 Dick Hebdidge, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, (London: Methuen, 1979), p. 133.
20 ibid. p.79.
21 See Tanner’s City of Words, Richard Hauck’s A Cheerful Nihilism: Confidence and the Absurd in American Humorous Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971) or Ihab Hassan’s Radical Innocence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961).
22 Exotic Pleasures (London: Picador, 1981).
23 e.g., John Carroll ‘National Identity’ in Intruders in the Bush, p.214.
24 Stockyard and the Croquet Lawn, p. 122.
25 Stuart Hall, ‘The rediscovery of “ideology”: The return of the repressed in media studies’, p.64.
26 The Political Unconscious, p.79.
27 ‘Jaws, Ideology and Film Theory’ in Popular Film and Television, p.205.
28 The title, and the thesis behind The Political Unconscious.