A Career in Writing

A Career in Writing Judah Waten and the Cultural Politics of a Literary Career David John Carter MA Dip Ed (Melb) Thesis submitted as total fulfilment of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, Deakin University, March 1993. Summary This thesis examines the literary career of Judah Waten (1911-1985) in order to focus on a series of issues in Australian cultural history and theory. The concept of the career is theorised as a means of bringing together the textual and institutional dimensions of writing and being a writer in a specific cultural economy. The guiding question of the argument which re-emerges in different ways in each chapter is: in what ways was it possible to write and to be a writer in a given time and place? Waten's career as a Russian-born, Jewish, Australian nationalist, communist and realist writer across the middle years of this century is, for the purposes of the argument, at once usefully exemplary and usefully marginal in relation to the literary establishment. His texts provide the central focus for individual chapters; at the same time each chapter considers a specific historical moment and a specific set of issues for Australian cultural history, and is to this extent self-contained. Recent work in narrative theory, literary sociology and Australian literary and cultural studies is brought together to revise accepted readings of Waten's texts and career, and to address significant absences or problems in Australian cultural history. The sequence of issues shaping Waten's career in writing is argued in terms of the following conjunctions of theoretical and historical categories: proletarianism, modernity and theories of the avant-garde; the "migrant" writer and minority literatures; realism, political purpose and narrative self-situation; communism, nationalism and literary practice in the cold war; utopianism and the "literary witness" narrative of the Soviet Union; assimilationism, multicultural theory and the "non-Anglo-Celtic" writer; theories of autobiographical writing, and autobiography in Waten's career. The purpose of the thesis is not to discover a single key to Waten's writing across the oeuvre but rather to plot the specific occasions of this writing in the context of the structure of a career and the cultural institutions within which it was formed. Table of Contents Summary 1 Introduction 2 1. Manifesting the Avant-Garde: The Moment of Strife 17 2. "Modernize Your Technique": Proletarianism, Modernity and the Literary Career 42 3. Before the Migrant Writer: The Writing of Alien Son 80 4. Undoing The Unbending: Criticism and a Cold War Novel 106 5. The Communist Man of Letters 140 6. Text of Conflict: Judah Waten's Time of Conflict 182 7. A Closed Book: The Soviet Union and the Literary Witness 230 8. An Australian Jewish Writer 283 9. Reading for Autobiography: From Alien Son to Scenes of Revolutionary Life 331 Bibliography 372 Introduction This thesis examines selected aspects of the literary career of Judah Waten (1911- 1985). It is not conceived primarily as a single-author study nor does it attempt an exhaustive textual analysis of an oeuvre, to cite two familiar modes of literary criticism. Instead its field should be described as cultural history, a study of the institutions and discourses, the structures and techniques, of meaning making in a given society at a given time — for my purposes in Australia from the late 1920s to the early 1980s. Of course, as my arguments will demonstrate, neither the society nor the time is in fact "given" but is to be constructed discursively from discursively- constructed materials. The writings of Judah Waten and the stages of his literary career or careers provide a focus for the investigation of a series of linked issues for cultural history and for theory. The guiding question of my argument might be summed up as follows: in what ways was it possible (and desirable) to write this sort of text, to be this sort of writer, at this time and in this place? Already the single question begins to multiply itself parenthetically into further questions for history and theory. How, for example, are we to define the "place" of Waten's writing — Melbourne, Australia, the Communist Party, international communism, Jewish culture? How does the writing place itself? There will be no single answer defining what I have called below the literary occasion (the "time and place") of this writing, not even for a single text let alone across the oeuvre. At each stage the occasion will need to be defined in both very local and international or trans-cultural (multicultural) terms, and as a structure or system of structuring possibilities and constraints. In what ways was it possible to conceive for oneself a career as a writer, a novelist, a "man of letters," an Australian-Jewish writer, a Communist novelist? (What difference did it make that one were male, foreign-born, Jewish, communist?) Where could such a career actually be pursued? What groups of writers, intellectuals, communists — what cultural formations — existed or could be brought into existence to provide models or means? What forms of publication, publicity and reception were available? What readerships were imaginable? Such questions, which we could continue to generate, pose theoretical issues about the relation between text and context or — since this too easily implies a relation of subject to background or inside to outside — between the institutional and textual dimensions of literary discourse. By institutional I am referring to such aspects of the literary field as the means and protocols of publication, notions of authorship or genre, cultural formations and "reading formations" all of which govern how texts get to be 3 written and get to be read. By the textual I am referring to the techniques and strategies by which literary narrative (which will be my concern) organises both its literariness and its narrativity, its readability and interpretability. This relationship cannot be figured in terms of inside and outside, for the institutional dimensions will be discovered as textual or narrative effects which in turn will depend for their significance on the institutions governing what counts as literariness, as authorship, as appropriate reading, as a "serious" career in a specific literary system. As John Frow has argued: The system is ... a normative regime, a semantic code which governs the nature and the limits of literariness and the relations of signification which are socially possible and legitimate for the genres it recognises.... [T]he text and the literary system are defined, given a determinate shape and function, through their relation to the "system of systems" — let us say their interdiscursive relation to other signifying formations and to the institutions and practices in which these are articulated.1 It is in articulating the relationship between textual and institutional dimensions of writing that my interest in theorising the concept of the career arises. Despite its place in biographical studies and some historical work, on the rise and fall of the man of letters for example, the concept of a career has played only a minor, footnote role in literary hermeneutics and literary history. In much romantic and post-romantic authorial criticism the career is at best something that adheres to the creative self or the creative act only incidentally or retrospectively, as a by-product of the main creative game for which the primary trope is always individuality (even when it is also tradition).2 Second-rate writers, perhaps, are the ones who have "careers" and so the notion works in weak opposition to the notion of creativity. My argument is designed to shift the concept of the career from this casual, even disreputable, status to a more significant position as structured and structuring in the very process of writing as well as in the "business" of a writing life. Again the relation between these two cannot be conceived in terms of inside and outside. Hence the double meaning of my title, "a career in writing," which refers to the career as a writer and the career actually prosecuted in the writing. Being a writer also means writing a being as an author (at least where the "author function" matters). The concept of a career, then, itself has both textual and institutional dimensions and, for analytical purposes, can usefully mediate between the two. In any literary system, any print economy, there will be constraints on the ways it is possible to be a writer (to form a "career in the head," to get published, to get taken seriously). As I argue below, to write is to construct oneself as a writer, to construct a writing or authorial self. This is true in a peculiarly strong form in the literary field within the 4 discourse of authorship which Foucault, and others subsequently, have analysed.3 Perhaps the point is more accurately expressed by saying that to conceive of oneself as a writer (or man of letters or Party intellectual) is to take a position, to stake a claim to a position, within the network of current notions of writer, author, novelist, journalist, intellectual, Australian novelist, communist novelist and so on. The positions are never equal, never equally available, but circulate in an uneven system of differences driven by competing bids for power or authority. Control of the power to bestow or to claim authorship will be one of the stakes in play, and a recurrent concern in my argument will be this issue of cultural authority and authorisation: who is authorised to speak, how is this authority granted, seized or sustained? Just as literary narrators must establish and maintain their authority to narrate on the textual level, so too must authors establish and maintain their author-ity within the literary/cultural institutions.

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