This chapter will discuss idealism in Australian literature, with especial consideration given to the role of artificial structures in promoting idealism. In the work of Frank Moorhouse, the artificial capital of Canberra is linked to a global idealism of international organisations and a realm of perpetual peace. In the work of Gerald Murnane, idealism pertains to imaginary landscapes and the cognitive and ethical power they exert. The chap-ter concludes with an examination of recent Australian fiction by Michelle de Kretser and Brian Castro that continues this idealism in a more mobile and transnational mode.
Idealism can be defined as the optimism that resists commercialism. As Nicholas Rescher puts it, idealism, in the philosophical sense, is “mind-directed or mind-coordinated” and transcends the material.1Twenty-first-century conventional wis-dom, dominated by a neoliberalism no less materialistic than classical Marxism, is apt to deride or dismiss it. Nowhere is this more true than in architecture, where the utopian and pedagogic aspirations of modernism are now seen as absurdly lofty paeans to a future that never came about – they are “hymns to yesterday’s future”, as Margaret Thatcher put it when denouncing the Berlaymont building in Brussels.2During the unrest between Sikhs and Hindus in the Punjab in the 1980s, it was routinely noted that the modernist architect Le Corbusier had designed the city of Chandigarh, as if his architecture were somehow to blame for failing to foresee or to prevent the ethnic strife.3
In her acclaimed 2013 novel The Flamethrowers, the American novelist Rachel Kushner uses the Brazilian capital of Brasilia, designed as a capital by the architects Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa as a metaphor for twentieth-century totalitarian violence (“Brasilia equalled death”). Kushner sees modernist architecture, such as Eero Saarinen’s airport terminal building in New York, as “the underside of modernity”.4 The character Sandro believes Brasilia amounts to “a prescriptive lie about progress and utopias”.5In gen-eral in the post-romantic era, literature has been slightly less euphoric about modernity
1 Nicholas Rescher,Studies in Idealism(Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005), 11.
2 Margaret Thatcher, “Europe’s Political Architecture”, speech in the Hague, 15 May 1992.
www.margaretthatcher.org/document/108296.
3 Stanley Wolpert,An Introduction to India(London: Penguin, 2000), 216.
4 Rachel Kushner,The Flamethrowers(New York: Scribner, 2013), 372.
5 Kushner,The Flamethrowers, 366.
than other genres or disciplines. Dickens scorned the Crystal Palace, as did William Morris.6Much of canonical modernism seemingly lamented technological modernity.7
Although the architect of Australia’s own modernist capital, Walter Burley Griffin, was not a modernist in the same vein as Le Corbusier – he respected earlier vocabularies, while still revolutionising urban life in the habitats he designed – his architecture partic-ipated in the broader modern challenge to traditional concepts of design and space.8 If Canberra attracted no less a traditionalist than A. D. Hope and no less an environmental-ist than Judith Wright, that was due to academic and career happenstance; surely the grain of these poets’ work pointed towards a more organic location, whether rural or urban.
Although reconsiderations of cultural modernism have palliated any melodramatic gap between literature and technology, this has not extended to the technological by-product of the artificial capital.9
How provocative, then, that one of the more sustained efforts at genuine idealism in contemporary Australian literature – Frank Moorhouse’s Edith Campbell Berry trilogy – set its final instalment,Cold Light (2011), in Canberra.10In this novel, Edith, who had formerly worked for the idealistic if doomed League of Nations, goes home to Australia to help actualise the stillborn vision of Griffin. Canberra is unquestionably Australia’s Brasilia, even if it is far less doctrinaire-modernist in architectural terms than the South American city, so it is pertinent that Moorhouse does not see the capital as yesterday’s fu-ture, or as a prescriptive utopian lie. Moorhouse views Canberra as a poignant unfinished project that still beckons in challenge to contemporary Australians.
The artificial capital exists in settler colonies for perhaps two and a half reasons. Most European countries have grown around a discrete capital for centuries, whether as “imag-ined communities” (as Benedict Anderson puts it), through nationalising violence, or through the presence in a certain city of a ruling house. Settler colonies, conversely, are often the amalgamation of several different initial settlements. The major cities of those different initial settlements develop rivalries that have to be mediated by establishing a third city (Montréal / Toronto / Ottawa; Sydney / Melbourne / Canberra; Boston / Rich-mond / Washington DC; Rio de Janeiro / São Paulo / Brasilia). Australia here is more like Canada or Brazil than the USA. In the USA, since as early as 1880, every city other than New York has been provincial in literary terms, whereas in the other settler countries both of the original major cities continue to exert a national cultural pull. The artificial capital as a concept is wholly different from the renovation of an existing city – such as that led by Baron Haussmann in the Paris of Napoleon III, so memorably lamented by Baudelaire and chronicled by Walter Benjamin. Building new buildings and demolishing old ones may 6 Philip Landon,“Great Exhibitions: Nature and Disciplinary Spectacle in the Victorian Novel”, PhD thesis, University of Rochester, New York, 1995; Martin J. Wiener,English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980, second edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 69.
7 Sara Danius,The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Aesthetics(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 39. Danius speaks of the “founding myth of modernism” as the “split between the
technological and the aesthetic”.
8 Walter Burley Griffin also designed another municipality in Australia, the Sydney suburb of Castlecrag; this much smaller design fit in organically with the existing landscape much more than did Canberra, and might well be more esteemed by today’s standards.
9 Todd Avery, inRadio Modernism,Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922–1938(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 54. Avery points out Virginia Woolf ’s interaction with broadcast mass media.
10 Frank Moorhouse,Cold Light(Milsons Point: Random House, 2011). All subsequent references are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the text.
change the visual scene of an existing city, but the new buildings inherit the accumulated cultural prestige and centrality of the old. In countries such as India and China the situ-ation is slightly different, as those cities that have attracted the greatest attention for their cosmopolitanism – Mumbai and Shanghai are not the capitals, but the capitals are also, in relative terms, old, established cities with layers of cultural heritage.11The artificial capital, conversely, starts out anew, with no accumulated prestige but an association with the gov-ernment that, in terms of the city’s cultural capital, is at best a double-edged sword. Settler colonies take this risk because they want to mediate arguments between competing fac-tions. They may also want to embrace the land that they are in, not just to hug the coasts but to advance boldly into the interior. Canberra, of course, is not that far inland, which leaves room for even more utopian visions, such as the eidolon of an Inner Australia in Gerald Murnane’sThe Plains, or the quixotic quest of Patrick White’s Voss to consummate his spiritual vision in the outback. But the choice of Canberra’s location was still a gesture towards a move away from the coasts, as was Brasilia more concertedly. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s relocation of the Turkish capital from Istanbul to Ankara, a city further inland and without European historical associations, is another pertinent example.
Other nations have tried and failed to build such a capital. In April 1986, Argentina under the presidency of Raúl Alfonsín considered moving its capital to the more southern interior city of Viedma, the goal again being to get away from the coasts. By then, however, the fissures in such an idea were more apparent. It was seen as a diversionary tactic from the nation’s legacy of past misrule and, as Carolina Rocha puts it, as testimony to the “fail-ure” of Argentina to fulfil its promise to replace “the barbarian tribes by civilised and productive” European culture.12In the twenty-first century, Argentina again considered moving its capital, this time to the more centrally located city of Santiago del Estero, but this idea received heavy opposition; it was denounced by the Harvard academic Filipe Campante as an “isolated, planned refuge”.13Sometimes, the idea of an artificial capital can be dystopian rather than utopian. The Burmese military junta’s move of the capital from Yangon to Naypyidaw, calculated to limit the government’s vulnerability to protest and dissent, is an example.14Australian literature contains a terrifying example of the suscepti-bility of architecture to authoritarian exploitation in Peter Carey’s short story “Kristu-Du”, in which a Western architect is hired by an African dictator to design a capital that is also a slaughterhouse.15
Even in democratic societies, artificial capitals can be burdened by the privilege of government. It is easier for populists to campaign against a monolithic “Canberra” or
“Washington” than it would be to campaign against Sydney or New York. Artificial capitals separate government from the rest of society. Whereas the young man from the provinces in a novel by Stendhal or Balzac or Flaubert can come to Paris to pursue both political and literary ambitions, in settler societies with artificial capitals the two career paths are kept separate: one has to choose. Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby can come from the Midwest to 11 On Mumbai, see Arjun Appadurai, “Cosmopolitanism from Below: Some Ethical lessons from the Slums of Mumbai”,The Salon4 (2011), 32–43; on Shanghai, see Lynn Pan, “Of Shanghai and Chinese Cosmopolitanism”,Asian Ethnicity10, no. 3 (2009): 217–24.
12 Carolina Rocha,Masculinities in Argentine Popular Cinema(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 57.
13 Filipe Campante, “Rural Capitals, Big Time Problems”,New York Times, 10 September 2014, A27.
14 Diane Zahler,Than Shwe’s Burma(Minneapolis: Twenty-First Century Books, 2010), 68.
15 Nicholas Birns, “‘A Dazzled Eye’: ‘Kristu-Du’ and the Architecture of Tyranny”, in Andreas Gaile, ed.,Fabulating Beauty: Perspectives on the Fiction of Peter Carey(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 101–14.
the East and plumb the depths of high society; if they had wanted to scale the heights of government, they would have had to go to a different city. The artificial capital separates government from the nation’s cultural centre, rendering it impossible for writers to access governmental figures who might otherwise bestow patronage or prestige, as would have occurred in renaissance Florence or the Paris of thebelle époque. If the Medici had been in a different city than Michelangelo, but still governing the polity where he worked, the support of his art would have diminished. Had Paris not been the governmental and cul-tural capital of France, the plots of books like Flaubert’sSentimental Educationwould not be feasible.
This makes the topography of settler-colony novels very different from that described in Franco Moretti’sAtlas of the European Novel. If, as Moretti puts it, the “lack of a clear national centre” produces a “sort of irresolute wandering”, it becomes even more compli-cated in settler-colony literatures, in whose lands there is a defined national capital, but that capital is not the first or the second or even the third city in the country.16The separate founding of the various Australian colonies, the rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne, and the consequent construction of Canberra have prevented Australia from having this unitary centre. In Nicholas Jose’sThe Custodians, a novel consciously modelled on The Great Gatsby, several contemporaries from Adelaide rove widely in the larger world – some to Sydney, some to New York, but none to the centre of political power. There is no single magnetic drawing-point, no defined centre. This clutters up the literary map, and renders moot a firm distinction between the metropolitan and the provincial.
The utopian urge of the artificial capital also has, within Australia, a distinctly dystopian underside. The very idea of the Europeans embracing a new land and migrating inward is an affront to the Indigenous people and to their custodianship of the land. The building of Canberra may have taken the Australian government further into the interior of the continent, but it only further derogated the Ngunnawal people who had been his-torically associated with the land. The idea of idealism is problematic in settler colonies because of this, and there is an inevitable point at which idealistic writing must deal with themes of concern. Murnane figures the limit of this idealism in his story “Land Deal”, in which Australian settler history is a nightmare from which Indigenous dreamers struggle to awake.
The two writers active in the twenty-first century mentioned so far in this chapter, Moorhouse and Murnane, will, along with Brian Castro, be its focus. Both Murnane and Moorhouse are rather unconventional idealists. Moorhouse made his name as an irrever-ent satirist, Murnane as an idiosyncratic but rigorous metafictionist. Neither is associated with the left in conventional terms. Moorhouse is often seen as a libertarian, albeit one with atavistic Labor sympathies. Murnane has stayed as far from public political posturing as is possible for an Australian writer to do. Both writers might easily be associated with one of the potential drawbacks of idealism: its traditional alignment with what George Kateb has termed “antidemocratic individualism”, which sees the idealistic figure as valu-able because he stands out above the crowd.17But Murnane and Moorhouse are idealist in not being bound by the material of being non-realist. They are not tethered to a reductive
16 Franco Moretti,Atlas of the European Novel(London: Verso Books, 1999), 66.
17 George Kateb,The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 153.
idea of things as they are. This is very different from any sense of head-in-the-clouds opti-mism or an elitist disdain of the given. Their idealism is a fundamentally democratic one.
The artificial capital, for all the dark aspects mentioned above, exemplifies this democ-ratic idealism. But it does so curiously and unpredictably. Because it is usually inland, with a less developed cultural infrastructure than the older and larger cities it has replaced, the artificial capital is often less cosmopolitan and diverse than the longer-established cities.
Compared to Rio and Sydney, Brasilia and Canberra seem provincial company towns, lacking the layers of historical architecture so brilliantly evoked by the Polish-descended Melbourne writer Antoni Jach in his experimental novel about Paris, The Layers of the City.18The artificial capital has the deracination of the transnational without its glamour;
it is poorly positioned to accumulate cultural capital in an age that wants sophistication, not utopianism.
The artificial capital is but one of many possibilities of contemporary urban manifes-tations that do not fit the neoliberal script. If Canberra sits at one end of the transnational spectrum, Western Sydney sits at the other. Michael Mohammed Ahmad describes the Western Suburbs as Australia’s “most densely populated region, and specifically, the most diverse region, with the largest populations of people from Aboriginal, migrant and refugee backgrounds”. Ahmad proposes that Western Sydney is the “kind of Australia that we all imagine and hear about, and that we constantly say is worth celebrating, but one that is heavily underrepresented when I watch television, read books, go to theatres, or attend arts festivals”.19This underrepresentation also pertains to how Australian culture is represented overseas, always under the mantle of globalisation, but not in light of the communities where people of diverse backgrounds actually live. What the international model of globalisation wants is a sheen of exoticism, sweetened by the allure of the eco-nomically privileged; neoliberalism is more than willing to accept multiculturalism if that multiculturalism is economically successful. As discussed in Chapter 5, the most challeng-ing multicultural Australian writers resist this consensus, which is at once anodyne and cynical. For all its transnationalism, neoliberalism shrinks from reaching out to places like Western Sydney, where the ideal of cultural hybridity, even if hardly utopian, is lived out.
As Lachlan Brown, writing of Macquarie Fields in Sydney’s southwest, puts it:
we’re not in Vaucluse or near some beach where they film iconic Australian TV. You know that within these cul-de-sacs you have to earn any hint of breath or change. You have to pay with sweat, with grease on a two-stroke, with teeth set like wire cutters, ready to meet the fenced-edge of the landscape.20
18 Antoni Jach,The Layers of the City(Melbourne: Hodder Headline, 1999).
19 Michael Mohammed Ahmed, “Western Sydney Deserves to be Written About”, Guardian Australia, 18 July 2013.http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/18/
western-sydney-representation-community.
20 Lachlan Brown, “Poem for a Film”,Limited Cities(Artarmon: Giramondo Publishing, 2013), 13.
Vaucluse features in both Harrower’sIn Certain Circlesand White’sThe Hanging Garden, and seems almost paradigmatic of late modernity. The representative Australia of the neoliberal era, meanwhile, is to be found in cosmopolitan, commercially buzzing metropolises, not in working-class, multi-ethnic communities. One could here compare the Newcastle of Greg Bogaerts’Black Diamonds and Dust(2005), even if the latter is not set in the present. Both Brown and Bogaerts describe gritty urban spaces that have diffi-culty being seen among the hyper-capitalist urban sheen of neoliberalism.
Moorhouse’s Artificial Capital
Moorhouse’s Canberra, although different again from the inland urban settings described by Ahmed, Bogaerts and Brown, with its utopian qualities and its bustling dynamic cul-tural producers, poses as much of a challenge to the neoliberal ideal of the glistening metropolis as Western Sydney does with its grittiness. It may be, fundamentally, that there is something suburban about artificial capitals, and something artificial about sub-urbia; this makes them abject in relation to the glistening metropolis. The artificial capital thus becomes an interstitial place. Like other such places, such as the suburbs of Western Sydney, and Steven Carroll’s suburban locales in his Glenroy series, these places reveal fissures in the corporate urban space. Even the left often lauds corporate urban space.
Saskia Sassen, a scholar widely seen as being part of the radical vanguard, stresses in her oft-citedThe Global Citythree time-honoured, teeming metropolises: New York, London and Tokyo. Of these, only Tokyo has a whiff of artificiality, as it was not the capital of Japan until the Meiji Restoration in 1868.21Sassen sees urban space as the dynamic hub of large, long-inhabited metropolises. The futuristic yet quasi-organic urban aesthetic Sassen is promulgating is the contemporary equivalent to what Robin Boyd, in his 1960 bookThe Australian Ugliness, decried as “featurism” – the love of adornment for its own sake, the assumption that a pluralism of possibilities for design and living is equivalent to a true dynamism.22Neoliberal urbanism postulated itself as an antidote to suburban featurism, but ended up becoming an aesthetic similarly constraining and stereotypical. A neoliberal exaltation of laissez-faire urban dynamism, represented by entrepreneurial and creative energies, can lead to a cynicism about such presumed fixities as government and bureau-cracy, and idealism about the creative destruction of unfettered capitalism. Yet there are
Saskia Sassen, a scholar widely seen as being part of the radical vanguard, stresses in her oft-citedThe Global Citythree time-honoured, teeming metropolises: New York, London and Tokyo. Of these, only Tokyo has a whiff of artificiality, as it was not the capital of Japan until the Meiji Restoration in 1868.21Sassen sees urban space as the dynamic hub of large, long-inhabited metropolises. The futuristic yet quasi-organic urban aesthetic Sassen is promulgating is the contemporary equivalent to what Robin Boyd, in his 1960 bookThe Australian Ugliness, decried as “featurism” – the love of adornment for its own sake, the assumption that a pluralism of possibilities for design and living is equivalent to a true dynamism.22Neoliberal urbanism postulated itself as an antidote to suburban featurism, but ended up becoming an aesthetic similarly constraining and stereotypical. A neoliberal exaltation of laissez-faire urban dynamism, represented by entrepreneurial and creative energies, can lead to a cynicism about such presumed fixities as government and bureau-cracy, and idealism about the creative destruction of unfettered capitalism. Yet there are