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University of Technology Sydney Sue Joseph the Essay As Polemical Joseph The Essay as Polemical Performance University of Technology Sydney Sue Joseph The essay as polemical performance: ‘salted genitalia’ and the ‘gender card’ Abstract: On October 9, 2012, the then Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard rose to her feet in Canberra’s Parliament House, and, in response to a motion tabled by Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, delivered her blistering Misogyny Speech. Although Gillard’s speech was met with cynicism by the Australian Press Gallery, some accusing her of playing the ‘gender card’, it reverberated around the world and when the international coverage poured back into the country, many Australians stood up and listened. One of them was author, essayist, classical concert pianist and mother, Anna Goldsworthy. Shortly after the delivery of The Misogyny Speech, Quarterly Essay editor Chris Feik approached Goldsworthy to write the 50th essay for the Black Inc. publication with his idea to view this event through a cultural lens. It took several months to research and compose the characteristically long-form (25,000 word) essay that Quarterly Essay publishes every three months as a single volume; ‘Unfinished Business: Sex, Freedom and Misogyny’ was launched at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne on July 1, 2013, five days after Julia Gillard was deposed from her prime ministership by Kevin Rudd. This paper takes a look back at the 50th issue of the Quarterly Essay, to discuss with its author her essay-writing process and the aftermath of publication. Goldsworthy is erudite as she looks at the construction of the essay, its contents, and her love of essay writing. Although she confesses to not having a definition for the form, she believes it does not matter; that its fluidity is a basic constituent element. Her love of language and music inform both the breadth of her essay, as well as its narrative – there is lyricism to her sentences and a musicality to her structure. This paper also contextualises ‘Unfinished Business’ as an example of the crucial long-form essay contribution that Black Inc.’s Quarterly Essay performs in the Australian literary/political/cultural/intellectual environment. There were critics of Goldsworthy’s essay, and these are assessed as a component of how ‘the essay’ potentially can function in a liberal First-World society, as demonstrated by the Quarterly Essay periodical. Biographical note: TEXT Special issue 39, The Essay eds Rachel Robertson and Kylie Cardell, April 2017 Joseph The Essay as Polemical Performance Sue Joseph (PhD) teaches journalism and creative writing, particularly creative long- form nonfiction writing, in both undergraduate and postgraduate programs at the University of Technology Sydney. Her fourth book, Behind the Text (Hybrid Publishers, Melbourne), is about Australian creative nonfiction and its writers. She is currently Reviews Editor of Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics. Keywords: Misogyny – Quarterly Essay – Anna Goldsworthy TEXT Special issue 39, The Essay eds Rachel Robertson and Kylie Cardell, April 2017 Joseph The Essay as Polemical Performance The hallmark of the personal essay is its intimacy. The writer seems to be speaking directly into your ear, confiding everything from gossip to wisdom – Phillip Lopate in The Art of the Personal Essay (1995: xxiii) Introduction The essay, characterised by its intimate tone, seemingly collaborative dialoguing, and its intention to posit and circulate ideas, has been a powerful mode of expression for centuries. Phillip Lopate writes that a ‘conversational dynamic – the desire for contact – is ingrained in the form, and serves to establish a quick emotional intimacy with the audience’ (1995: xxv). He claims this conversational intimacy creates a collaborative pact with the reader: ‘In effect, a contract between writer and reader has been drawn up: the essayist must then make good on it by delivering, or discovering, as much honesty as possible … the struggle for honesty is central to the ethos of the personal essay’ (Ibid.). Today, most studying, practicing or simply reading in this field lays the modern prototype firmly at the feet of the French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592). His works, simply entitled Essais (The Essays), were written approximately between 1570 and 1592, with publication beginning in 1577. The Essays consist of three books with a total of 107 chapters. In many ways Montaigne embodies for the modern essayist the true ethos of the form; he writes through the lens of himself, with many frailties exposed: I make no doubt but that I often happen to speak of things that are much better and more truly handled by those who are masters of the trade. You have here purely an essay of my natural parts, and not of those acquired: and whoever shall catch me tripping in ignorance, will not in any sort get the better of me; for I should be very unwilling to become responsible to another for my writings, who am not so to myself, nor satisfied with them. Whoever goes in quest of knowledge, let him fish for it where it is to be found; there is nothing I so little profess. These are fancies of my own, by which I do not pretend to discover things but to lay open myself … (‘Of Books’ 2006) His argument underpins the tenor of the essay still – writing to discover; attempting to find out through a rational dialectic between the author and the reader, who may just know a little more about certain subjects than the author. It is this lilting lyricism between wonder and knowledge; between individual musing and fact; between opinion and proof that has seen a resurgence in the essay form as a staple of both the mainstream and counter-mainstream, and on both legacy- and technology-based platforms. Indeed, the internet has much to do with the broader swathe of essays at our fingertips – today, anyone and everyone with an urge to say something can publish online; here, the test of quality cannot be quantified by metrics. The test of quality can only be quantified by durability and longevity in the hands of a fair minded readership. Willa McDonald calls the essay ‘curiously democratic’. She writes: ‘Anyone can use it to express themselves – and on issues that matter – without claiming expertise in any field’ (2007: 125). Here she is echoing Phillip Lopate when he writes of the essay’s ‘implicitly democratic bent’. He is discussing Montaigne, tagging him the ‘patron saint of personal essays’. Lopate writes: ‘At the core of the TEXT Special issue 39, The Essay eds Rachel Robertson and Kylie Cardell, April 2017 Joseph The Essay as Polemical Performance personal essay is the supposition that there is a certain unity to human experience … When he [Montaigne] was telling about himself, he was talking, to some degree, about all of us’ (1995: xxiii). As Inga Clendinnen, in her ever-eloquent and polemical style, writes: The odd thing is that I know what essays are not. I know you can’t preach in an essay because it turns into a sermon; you can’t teach in an essay because it turns into a lecture; you can’t exhort in an essay because it turns into a harangue, and you can’t dredge the mud at the bottom of your soul because then it will turn into a confession. In the dry-mouthed panic of a radio interview I once said that essays were like love affairs, meaning they were intimate, brought unexpected pleasure and usually didn’t last very long. Now I realise they are nothing like as intense as a love affair, and that that is their quality. (2006: 3) This she writes in an introduction to Agamemnon’s Kiss: Selected Essays (2006). The introduction to this text is her grappling for a definition – of what an essay is – from Montaigne to Flaubert to Woolf and then back again to Montaigne, until finally she writes: ‘So now, rather too late, I think I know what an essay is: a direct, equal, personal communication on a matter of shared interest between writer and reader’ (Ibid.: 7). This time she is simple and succinct, clearly inspired by Virginia Woolf who, in her meta-essay on ‘The Modern Essay’ more than 80 years earlier, writes: The principle which controls it is simply that it should give pleasure; the desire which impels us when we take it from the shelf is simply to receive pleasure. Everything in an essay must be subdued to that end. It should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last. In the interval we may pass through the most various experiences of amusement, surprise, interest, indignation … The essay must lap us about and draw its curtain across the world … vague as all definitions are, a good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out. (Woolf 1925 [2003]) So, definitions begin to merge a little, more in their roominess to ponder than in their conclusions. What we do know is that the essay is generally identified and executed as one of two styles: the formal and the informal, also tagged as the impersonal and personal. In this paper, my intention is to interrogate the melding of the formal with the informal essay, and the enablement of this melding and positioning within the Australian literary/political/cultural/intellectual environment through the publication of the Quarterly Essay. Looking at ‘Unfinished Business: Sex, Freedom and Misogyny’, in the 50th issue of Quarterly Essay, written by Anna Goldsworthy, through narrative/discursive inquiry I will demonstrate her process of compiling and writing the essay. Additionally, this paper will discuss the means by which Goldsworthy’s essay performed and was tested amongst its readership, positing this as the literary evolution of a potentially democratic discourse in a liberal First-World society – an exemplar of the Montaignian spirit of essaying.
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