SHOW, DON'T TELL

The end for PIR's and cultural sector exceptionalism

By Jack Robertson

So it’s a dark, stormy night and this cruiser capsizes, mid-Pacific. Five Australians in a life-raft survive for weeks on seaweed marinated in urine, until the inevitable day arrives. “We’re starving,” announces the captain. “Time to eat someone. As leader, clearly it can’t be me.” “Nor, just as obviously, me,” says the doctor. The engineer points out that only she can keep their fragile home afloat. “And don’t look at me,” adds the economist. “Who would distribute the body parts efficiently?” Together they turn to the fifth. “You – what good are you, mate?”

“Wait!” cries the Australian writer, feeling doomed. “One last request, at least?” “Fair enough,” concedes the skipper. “Get on with it, then.” Our plucky scriv defiantly whips out his notebook. “Comrades! These last weeks I’ve kept a diary of our shared ordeal. ‘Tis a bleak and gritty yet ultimately uplifting Australian masterpiece of social transgression, nihilistic misanthropy and bitter struggle against oppression. Before you eat me, I insist upon a full public reading. Followed by a Q&A.”

There’s a long, grim pause. Then the captain leans over and scoops aboard another armful of kelp. “So,” he says brightly, “Who’s for a delicious guano garnish?”

* *

Australian writers love comic exaggeration. Presumably. What else can we make of their sustained hyperbole throughout the Productivity Commission inquiry into restrictions on the parallel importation of books? To suffer impeccable stylists like Tim Winton and publishers as savvy as Louise Adler hysterically touting this dinosaurian trade barrier as their only cultural defence against populist barbarian invasion is enough to suspend your belief in suspended disbelief. Drop restrictions as the Commission recommends, Winton warns, and surrender again to stultifying literary occupation!

Forget the technology that’s changing publishing forever, into what nobody quite yet knows. Disregard the globalization of markets, in books as in everything else. Ignore the digital rights tug-of-war underway between online behemoths that include Google, Amazon and Microsoft, rendering this squabble over ‘territorial copyright’ yesterday’s provincial sideshow. Sidestep the fact that to the majority of Australian writers who are not and will never be published overseas – certainly not in the traditional way – this debate has always been irrelevant. And try not to succumb to the suspicion, increasingly nagging, that what’s really underway is an offensively self-interested railroading of the wider issue of literary subsidy, by a small but charismatic posse of publishing empire-builders and their usefully-domesticated marquee authors, who’ve been promulgating the at-best debatable assertion that what is in their cultural interests is automatically in the cultural interests of Australia’s wider ‘literary community’, not to mention those of the whole nation, too.

All this aside, the awkward historical fact for any brooder-in-our-cultural citadel is that under Winton’s despised ‘imperial dispensation’, one Patrick Victor Martindale White secured our sole Nobel Prize for Literature, producing an oeuvre as singularly Australian as it remains thrillingly universal, furthermore doing so from the self-imposed exile of unremarkable suburbia long before the evolution of any such collegiate entity as an Australian ‘literary community’, let alone the highly-professionalized, industrialized juggernaut today’s writer can enjoy (or, if you prefer – as I do – must suffer). Bluntly, PIR supporters so quick to lob the petard of ‘Australian cultural autonomy’ in this debate need to answer a simple question (while, I recommend, scrambling for cover): if White was able to write an Australian chapter so seamlessly and sublimely into the ever-unfolding anthology of global literature, on his own parochial terms but (necessarily, at the time) via wholly-foreign publishing mechanisms, just how culturally oppressive can those pre-PIR circumstances really have been? Last time I looked Winton, along with Keneally, Carey, Grenville, Matthew Reilly, Garth Nix, Mem Fox, Shane Maloney and all the many other contemporary writers warning of the pending deracination of Australia’s literary prospects, were yet to win even half a Nobel between them.

Sure, it may be a simplistic reduction (and more than a little tongue-in-cheek), but it’s scarcely the cultural argument in favor of the literary status quo that has been so irksomely spruiked, is it: pre-PIR, one Nobel Prize; post-PIR, none. You keep wanting to cough softly, and mutter: um, check the scoreboard, lads. And in naughtier moments one is tempted to muse that a taste of some new cultural-imperial cat-o-nine-tails is exactly what a few of our laggardly parochial scrivs need, as a kind of tough love encouragement from the occupying overlords to stop clapping each other on the back in one endlessly predictable circle-pat, and in thus eschewing vocational groupthink, better themselves as individual writerly voices.

But that’s just me being cheeky.

* *

As revealing as the doomsday cultural rhetoric that doesn’t hold up to even cursory scrutiny has been the failure in the fundamental requirement of lobbying of our supposedly professional story-tellers: getting your own straight before you try to sell it to anyone else. It’s not been for want of elegant prose or authorial reach. You can’t use a public loo these days without copping another stylish grizzle about ‘floods’ of cheap imports – tacked beside the You flew here, we grew here graffito, say. And before the Commission wrote its own book on books it studied over 500 submissions supporting restrictions, against a handful advocating reform. There’s been PC round tables, road-shows, open sessions, closed discussions, on-going gazette updates, exhaustive consultation with industry leaders and ad nauseam opportunities for multiple, he-said-she-said counter-submissions. Now that it’s gone to the elected politicians there are petitions, more Op Ed space, meetings with parliamentarians, rolling websites, industry counter-lobbies, State government support and even a hefty Federal government ginger group.

Now it’s a very fine thing at any time to see naturally-introspective, narcissistic writers out and about in daylight working hours, engaging in the cut-and-thrust imperatives of collective political pragmatism. But this debate does seem to have been going on for several centuries now, and you can’t help but wonder how many unwritten Moby Dicks our more obsessed protectionist pens have sacrificed to their interminably Great Write Wail. With a spooked Cabinet trying hard to defer this issue for as long as it possibly can - no-one knows better than the ALP the importance of cultivating the love and loyalty of the arts sector – the special pleading is now a deafening crescendo. But while the PIR lobby uniformly exalts their own industry under current arrangements as ‘vibrant’ – as if regurgitating a single note taken at the same writers’ workshop – their case against change has remained impenetrably dissonant.

I’ve read most of what’s been written on this issue (and added quite a lot of my own), but I cannot distil from it a consistent, cohesive suite of arguments in favor of restrictions. Cheaper imports will undercut local industrial viability in various ways, runs one pro-PIR line. Except that these imports probably won’t be cheaper at all, runs another. Right there, the debate should take a five minute fag break until the PIR lobby decides which it’s going to be, because however glib your tongue you just can’t moot both options in tactical concert, and expect to be taken seriously strategically. A third try – slightly haughty, by this stage – sniffs that Australian book-buyers don’t care about higher prices, anyway. A fourth, that they do, or they would, except that ours aren’t. A fifth, that ours probably are, yes, maybe a little, but only in the noble cause of nurturing writers.

And, yeah, well, so what if – as the Commission sets out in painstaking detail – those most ‘nurtured’ by this cultural protection racket turn out to be best-selling foreign squillionaires?

And so it goes, a ragged Bob Ellisian fusillade of debating snorts and hiccups and ejaculations, some half-right in isolation (but when lumped together, all wrong); some once valid in certain contexts (but surely no more); others, such as those regarding the printing sector, more defensible (but for how much longer?); still others, now as ever arising mostly from baser cultural resentments and anxieties: anti-Americanism, a distrust of capitalism, a resistance to technological change. The crippling difficulty for the PIR lobby is that, just as you can’t prosecute a unified case ‘for books’ as if they were a fungible cultural commodity – all good, all the time – neither can you defend an existing industrial framework for their production on those grounds. The inescapable endpoint of trying to do so is the painful spectacle of otherwise-inspiring cultural powerhouses just like Winton - just like Adler, just like Text Publishing’s Michael Heyward – eloquently arguing utter absurdities.

About the most generous context in which you can try to reconcile the oxymoronic essence of key lobbyist Heyward’s sustained position - that since his industry no longer needs a closed, subsidised marketplace to thrive, the government must maintain a closed, subsidised marketplace to ensure his industry continues to thrive – is to presume that Text’s ideal reader is Franz Kafka.

* *

There is consistency in one element of the PIR lobby’s stance, however, but alas it’s hardly to its members’ credit: unity in their disdain for the inquiry process itself, best expressed in publisher Henry Rosenbloom’s dismissal, of a diligent Commission which in fact made this a rare Australian lit-fest accessible to all, as ‘sociopaths in suits’. Of all this long debate’s many charmless lines – and those of us who oppose PIR’s have delivered our share – to me this last one charms the least of all.

Grounded in a philistine misreading of Modernism rife among our cultural elites - the artist as societal exceptionalist, rather than universalist - it’s the self-ghettoizing elitism revealed in this unfortunate bray, rather than the mercantile arguments, that most persuades me that import restrictions should finally be ditched. Rosenbloom’s implicit assertion is not simply, contra-Thatcher (or at least the 'verballed' one of populist infamy), that there is after all such a thing as society (a view with which I - probably like her - have no quarrel). It is a no less exclusive and excluding polar opposite of the extreme economic reductionism such critics straw-manned into being, call it 'cultural-elitist reductionism', say: that there is such a thing as society...but that society is strictly what (in this case) Henry Rosenbloom and Co, rather than Thatcher's commissars, tell us it is. His publishing industry and our society are as one, or – to use the form relentlessly reprised and largely unchallenged throughout this specific debate – the stories produced by ‘his’ literary community are, ipso facto and automatically, ‘our’ society’s stories.

Yet as an entity ‘Australian publishing’ is surely anything but broadly representative and reflective of ‘Australian society’. The fact that we are having this argument at all – yet again – so long after these matters were settled for the rest of us testifies to that. Henry Rosenbloom is part of a tiny percentage of the Australian workforce yet to have to square fully up to the realities of a global marketplace, and it’s not for want of past governments of both stripes trying to make him do so.

Ironically, in their strident and unyielding presumption that, being cultural producers, different benchmarks should apply, our writers and publishers are in danger of writing themselves out of the very Australian stories – their stories, supposedly our stories – they claim are their vocational and cultural raison d’etre.

* *

To me this is where the PIR debate needs to shift, now: to the nature of the relationship between the ‘cultural sector’ and the rest of us, whether the separatism inherent in a mechanism like PIR’s is really good for Australian literature in the long run, and indeed, whether it makes any sense to talk about a ‘cultural sector’ at all anymore. The PC’s terms of reference have meant that the consumer benefit of ‘downward pressure on book prices’ has dominated the case for reform, but while I think that those arguments alone make the case compelling, even if no-one is quite sure what effect that pressure will have, to beg off the debate there is to miss the opportunity to preempt the epistemological shifts already playing havoc with traditional modes of cultural production and consumption. Yes, book publishers can counter-attack the reform lobby on the still-unsettled consumer grounds if they choose, skeptical of the PC’s inability and unwillingness to engage in specific retail price number-crunching. But this is not only to misconstrue the creative leverage of industrial competition, which turns not on any specific retail-end price sparring but on the general prospect of exposure to the mercantile facts of life in a properly open market – facts precisely like that non-specific ‘downward pressure on consumer prices’ beyond which the PC is, prudently and quite properly, unwilling to speculate. More obtusely, it is also to unwittingly collaborate in quarantining the debate to exactly that supposedly ‘sociopathic’ consumer-economic context which the PIR lobby itself claims, and rightly so, to reject as insufficiently broad.

In fact what the PIR lobby refuses to see is what the ‘sociopaths’ of the PC simply take for granted, entirely unremarkable, barely worth comment: that these economic debates – over competition policy, industrial reform, sector restructuring, all those dull accountancy terms - are never just about economics, never just about things like industrial efficiency, viability and sustainability. They are about societal shaping, nothing if not cultural matters. To disdain the PC as fundamentally ‘sociopathic’ reveals, to me at least, the untenably compartmentalized worldview that pervades our nominally ‘cultural and artistic’ sectors. Apparently, if you study economics rather than fine art, if you wear a suit not jeans, if you work for a statutory bureaucracy instead of a publishing house or a dance company, or even a newspaper or university, then somehow you relinquish at least part of your stake in what those manning the right societal gates alone get to define as ‘Australian culture’. It’s never been a valid conceit but in today’s culturally permeable, unstable and riotously autonomous environment, it’s not even merely debatable, anymore: it’s simply an outright category error to even talk about ‘cultural producers’ or a ‘cultural sector’, as if the rest of us were, presumably, something else.

In truth we’re living through an explosively creative, egalitarian boom time in which we’re all anarchic creators, and erstwhile cultural gatekeepers are dropping like flies, for good and for ill. This has fundamental ramifications for the PIR debate and arts subsidy more generally, if only we could stop nit-picking over the shelf price of The Lost Symbol and Breath. What is arresting – if predictable – is how grimly established ‘cultural sector’ incumbents, like book publishers, are hanging onto their sense of distinction and authority, especially, as Rosenbloom did, by the age-old tactic of denouncing the nearest handily-expendable ‘philistines’.

Yet if anyone in the PIR debate has been guilty of philistine illiteracy it’s those writers and publishers who have been too quick to dismiss what they see as the clumsy incongruity of the dry language used by our public servants to discuss the case of Australian Letters. Much mockery has been made of a word-bite like ‘cultural externality’ – but only by those wordsmiths too thick or too arrogant to grasp that its shorthand deployment throughout the PC’s reporting is both a disciplined observance of the limits of its own terms of reference, and a catch-all acknowledgement of precisely those unquantifiable cultural benefits in whose name those who deride the phrase so gleefully claim to be doing so. Maybe all that was required was a more obviously poetic and worshipful phrase - say, the inspiring impact on Australians of our genius writers’ deathless prose’ - to avoid outraging such precious ears and egos.

These splenetic but misplaced objections to such banal trivialities have afforded a glimpse of an unpleasant aspect of the ‘success story’ of Australian publishing. It’s this aspect, with its jarring mix of cultural pomposity, fragility and huffy separatism, with its name writers lined up like porcelain busts on lofty pedestals to declare their vocation and their working lives uniquely off-limits to the vagaries of economic reality endured for three decades by the rest of us, that for me tips the balance against the retention of PIR’s. It’s not really just the vindictiveness or even the bored diffidence of the mostly-failing writer I happen to be myself (although rest assured there’s a good dollop of both, too).

It’s more the simple impatient urge to grab much better and certainly more accomplished wordsmiths than me by the scruffs of their necks, and shout: “Look, chum: This is how we all live now, OK? You’re not special, just because you have a talent for words. Deal with it. Live in the same world as everyone else. Who knows, maybe what you write will resonate even more with your readers.”

Or as the PC might put it: one external benefit of removing parallel import restrictions could well be some long-overdue ‘downward pressure’ on the culturally self-aggrandizing exceptionalism of our more narcissistic primary producers.

* *

There have been many times in this debate when no self-respecting writer could have avoided cringing at the sense of literary entitlement others have paraded. What everyone needs to realize, in this era in which the internet and digitalization is changing everything we know about how information gets produced and how it gets around, is that no-one has a ‘right’ to earn money from something as banal and ubiquitous as written words. No-one has ever had such a right, actually, but in an online digital wonderland hard copy books full of them are no more culturally unique, essential or fungible than newspapers full of the same, or blogsites, or tweets, or, for that matter, toilet walls. No writer on the planet, whatever their medium and however grand their reputation, is going to be bypassed by the epistemological tsunami wallowing our way, certainly not simply because their words come packaged in fat, heavy wodges and perch on a sexy display pyramid at Dymocks.

For joy of meritocratic joys, my fellow starving and unloved scrivs: as a literate species we humans are at last and for the first time in our history breaking properly free from the tyranny of the medium. Written words are, finally, able to revel in the unbearable lightness of simply being: being what they are, not what they are written on. Not ‘print-outs’, not ‘books’, not ‘scrolls’, not ‘papyrus’, not ‘tablets’ or ‘cave walls’. Just words; just written words. If you do not grasp the immense cultural implications of this, you’re simply not paying attention.

As for the particular tyrannizing medium under consideration just now - as for heavy hard copy books full of all those weightless words – well, no doubt they’ll go on being published in Australia, with or without PIR’s. And as always, some will be dazzling. Some, likewise, will be duds. Most will of course remain, as now and in the past, like the curate’s egg: good in parts, that ‘good’ being a matter of pure consumer preference. Each a stand-alone product for sale, just like any other. The brobdingnagian self-regard of the industry that churns them all out has always been bemusing, but now that any writer can blog his written words direct to the literate world, book publishers’ enduring pretensions to some kind of cultural noblesse oblige are absurdly anachronistic. Pulp fiction or high style, textbook or cookbook, their only marketplace imperative now must be that of all written word merchants – and indeed, all merchants: shift units, slick, or shift on.

As for us writers, when our fellow Australians turn to us in the cultural life-raft, wanting to know: ‘You – what good are you, mate?’, instead of demanding literary protectionist rule we should simply obey the most important of our own: show, don’t tell, our story. In the near future the only meaningful answer will lie in how many punters choose – or choose not - to buy it.

Jack Robertson contributed to Margo Kingston’s 2004 best-seller ‘Not Happy, John!’ and has written four and a half un-publishable novels.