Christos Tsiolkas Is, and Why We’Re Studying Him in This Course
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Who is Tsiolkas Before we get into the lecture proper, it’s probably important to elaborate on who Christos Tsiolkas is, and why we’re studying him in this course. So, let’s get the short version out of the way - Tsiolkas is a gay Greek-Australian, the son of post-war migrants. He grew up in Richmond, and went to Melbourne University, where he was the editor of the student magazine Farrago. Tsiolkas is one of Australia's more successful contemporary literary novelists. He has been awarded a number of prizes and has made it to some very significant shortlists. And his books are selling well around the world. We must be very careful to use the term literary because in overall sales he is still streets behind writers like Colleen McCulloch and Bryce Courtney, writers of popular fiction. And to emphasise this point – last year The Age’s literary editor, Jason Steger wrote You won't have forgotten that period a couple of years ago when everyone seemed to be reading Tsiolkas's book. You could hardly step into the pub or out for dinner without some bright spark buttonholing you to find out what you thought. Upon which several people commenting on the article immediately pounced on that comment and said they had never heard of the book, nor Tsiolkas, and that Steger was living in a cocoon. Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/the-slap- still-shocks-in-tv-translation-20111006-1lb2v.html#ixzz1tTPruGht Those of us who are familiar with him as a novelist may be surprised to find out that he is actually quite a prolific writer, having written or contributed to several plays, screen plays, art exhibitions, as well as writings on his love of film. As much as we may perhaps like to lump him into a purely literary sphere, Tsiolkas is an avid fan of popular culture, and his works can't be separated from that. As a part of that, he currently co-hosts a weekly music show on 3RRR. Books • Loaded (1995) • Jump Cuts (with Sasha Soldatow, 1996) • The Jesus Man (1999) • The Devil's Playground (2002) • Dead Europe (2005) • The Slap (2008) Theatre • Who's Afraid of the Working Class? (with Andrew Bovell, Melissa Reeves and Patricia Cornelius, 1999, adapted for film as Blessed ) • Elektra AD (1999) • Viewing Blue Poles (2000) • Fever (with Andrew Bovell, Melissa Reeves and Patricia Cornelius, 2002) • Dead Caucasians (2002) • Non Parlo di Salo (with Spiro Economopoulos, 2005) Screenplays • Thug (with Spiro Economopoulos, 1998) • Saturn's Return (2000) That biography is fine as far as it goes but it tells us little about the author's motives and personality. Here's something that Tsiolkas wrote about himself. I was born in Melbourne, Australia during the Cold War and I knew I wanted to be a writer when my Year Eight English teacher held up a piece of my creative writing and declared it “filth”. Though I tried desperately to escape suburbia I soon realised that you can take the boy out of the suburbs but you can't necessarily take the suburbs out of the boy. My novels, fictions and scripts are an attempt to explore the crevices and dark spaces of the Australian suburban landscape, and in doing so to hopefully scrawl a huge ugly handle-bar moustache over the dirty- blonde, blue-eyed Aryan iconography of this Great Southern Land. I have been accused of being a misogynist, a racist, a homophobe, a pornographer, a blasphemer and an upstart declasse poseur. I have also been accused of political correctness, of being an unreconstructed socialist, of being a crypto-Protestant Christian (which really pissed off my Mum), and of being a nice man to sit next to at a dinner party. I live in fear that there is an “other” Christos Tsiolkas and one day I'll go through a Philip K. Dicksian wormhole and confront myself as a complete stranger. I think that he gives us clues to what he is about in autobiographical snippets like this. Though he might have added that he worked as a Vet nurse for a long time, only recently resigning from a job he held for probably 10 years. He is formed by the complex politics of being an inner suburban gay migrant boy from a religious family. He likes to express his feelings to the extent that he is accused of writing blasphemy, filth and pornography. He wants to slur complacent anglo culture to shock some of us into seeing the multiplicities of Australian life. He burst onto the scene with his first novel Loaded. Later, this was turned into the film Head On. His second novel, The Jesus man, was pretty much ignored on its release, and is still basically ignored even among his supporters. His third novel, Dead Europe, won The Age book of the year, and was shortlisted for several prizes, while also being criticised for being anti-Semitic, and also of being histrionic and absurd (a criticism often made of his work). By all reports his most recent novel, The Slap, has sold over 800,000 copies world-wide. For example in four weeks in Ireland in 2010 The Slap sold over 3000 copies. • http://www.thebookseller.com/news/slap-tops-booker-sales-list.html • http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-10951497 Recently the novel has been turned into a TV mini-series An interesting question is why such a political and confronting writer is also such a popular one at home and abroad. Though he is not popular with all critics: The Slap slapped A preliminary observation might be that Tsiolkas is a writer who inflames passions and produces extreme responses whether positive or negative. This is especially true of people within the Greek community, as we’ll see a little later. Tsiolkas is important to me, because he was the first writer that I encountered where I intimately recognised the world and the characters of a novel. That is not to say that I necessarily agree with his conclusions or that he does not exaggerate circumstances – I find the amount of drugs taken to be absurd, but perhaps that's just my sheltered upbringing coming to the fore - but at the same time, the Melbourne that he describes fits far more into the Melbourne I grew up in than many competing narratives. The texts Loaded/Head On Tsiolkas first came to broader prominence in the mid 1990s with his well- received first novel, Loaded, a novel about Ari, a disaffected young gay Greek man (who also pops up in The Slap). The novel documents a day in Ari's life in which he travels around Melbourne NSEW The novel was seen to be a part of the 'grunge' phenomenon sweeping through Australian writing. If the body of writing had any shared characteristics, they were • rawness, • vulgarity • explicit • spare realism • in your face Grunge was a literature of anger and protest that came from younger writers alienated by mainstream publishing tendencies and broader senses of social disaffection. In the early 1990s contemporary Australia was a society in which previously secure identities had sometimes come to be atomised and disintegrated. The certainties of the old order had been replaced by the uncertainties of the new. This is Ari's world. As a result Ari's alienation is inexplicable to himself because of the absence of histories that could explain his life. As a gay Greek working class man Ari has no narrative that can unite these aspects of his identity. So this is one important aspect of Loaded: it is a novel about history told through the perspective of someone who doesn't care about the past or the future. Without the narrative fractures I mentioned before, the book wouldn't be able to tell this story. Moreover Loaded is a book that looks at histories (the waves of migration as Tsiolkas sees it) as opposed to a singular history. Loaded is also a spatially organised book about a character who doesn't care where he is. There are some thematic patterns in Loaded that have interesting echoes in The Slap. • Confusion of identity • fissures between cultures and generations • Concern to 'map' Melbourne and locate his narrative in the city and its suburbs • reliance on drugs • explicit representation of the sexual act • loss of religion The Jesus Man The Jesus man, his second novel was a critical and commercial flop. Even among Tsiolkas fans, it seems to be clearly the least loved of his novels, and yet it has some amazing scenes. In it you can also see a writer in transition, as Tsiolkas begins blending realism and fantasy – the net results which you can see in Dead Europe. The Jesus Man is about a family torn apart by the incomprehensible actions of one of their members, Tommy, whose life rapidly disintegrates after he loses his job. Once again, Tsiolkas sets this against the background of the supposed end of the history. Dead Europe If one of Tsiolkas' main concerns is the fractures and fissures within the geopolitical space of Melbourne, another is with the relation between the place he lives and the places of his ancestors. He sees the ghosts of Europe as being crucial to our understanding of contemporary Australia. This finds expression in the novel that brought Tsiolkas to full prominence, Dead Europe, a novel that saw him criticised for all his usual crimes but also with the new charge of anti-Semitism. Dead Europe tells the story of Isaac, a Greek-Australian photographer invited to Athens to help celebrate the culture of the Greek diaspora.