Metaphorays (Sydney Morning Herald, 14/06/2008)

Christos Tsiolkas, Gideon Haigh, Alexis Wright
Tolerance, Prejudice and Fear
Allen & Unwin; $24.95; 176pp

A spectre is haunting Australian literature – the spectre of the ludicrous metaphor. Here, for example, is Christos Tsiolkas, in the first of three essays commissioned by PEN and collected in Tolerance, Prejudice and Fear:

We dig through the fetid soil of history’s graveyard and cloak ourselves with the stinking bones of the Crusaders.

And pretty menacing we look, too, though not as menacing as Pauline Hanson, ‘wrapped [in] the stench of a moribund past’. How one wraps oneself in a stench, or cloaks oneself in bones for that matter, is not a question to detain us here. This is Books, not Life and Style.

Tsiolkas’s essay, ‘On the Concept of Tolerance’, is actually much better than these forays into metaphor (or metaphorays) would seem to suggest. Tsiolkas is concerned to show how ‘tolerance’ is used in a world of ‘unequal power’ to mask the fact of power itself. The collapse of communism has left progressives ‘bereft of a language with which to comprehend and understand the effects of power’. ‘[S]tunned from its grand historical failure, wrapped in the sackcloths of political correctness’ (though not in the stench of a moribund past), the left is making itself irrelevant.

There is much to be said for this argument, though in advancing it Tsiolkas makes several false moves. Certainly he should have done Tony Cohen the favour of actually reading his work before dismissing it out of hand. Had he done so, he would have discovered 1) that Cohen’s name is Nick, not Tony and 2) that they have a lot in common – not least the concern that class has yielded to a muzzy-headed multiculturalism as the left-wing/liberal focus du jour. Still, I think Tsiolkas is right to insist on more intellectual rigour from his comrades on the Australian left.

No one could ever accuse Gideon Haigh of lacking intellectual rigour. Oh, there will be nationalists, wrapped ‘in the cloth of anti-intellectualism’ (to quote a certain Melbourne novelist), who will dismiss ‘In Matters of Prejudice’. But none will have a word to say against the elegance with which it is written. Note, for example, how the following two sentences breathe life into a decaying metaphor:

This essay concerns two related trends. One is the last decade’s tsunami of national sentiment; the other is a backwash of bien-pensant liberal resentment.

Style is the physiognomy of the soul and it is no coincidence that Haigh’s ability to revive a journalistic cliché is matched by a determination to take issue with unexamined assumptions. His essay does precisely that, suggesting that John Howard’s ‘politics of fear’ was actually a ‘politics of narcissism’. Howard, writes Haigh, ‘was the ideal therapist for countrymen desperate to think well of themselves’.

Would Alexis Wright agree with Haigh? On the strength of her essay, ‘A Question of Fear’, one would have to say ‘probably not’, though reaching that conclusion would involve much guesswork. With Tsiolkas, the reader gets the point even if he doesn’t quite get the picture. With Haigh one gets both. With Wright one gets neither:

I have often thought that Indigenous people cannot break through the deafness caused by the walls of the status quo that surround our containment, even if we wanted to, because of the layers in the maze of institutional violence.

A curious sentence, I’m sure you’ll agree, though not, alas, an untypical one.