Social Crimes

Social Crimes Camilla Nelson Doctor of Creative Arts, 2006 Certificate of Originality and Authorship I certify that the work in this thesis has not previously been submitted for a degree nor has it been submitted as part of requirements for a degree except as fully acknowledged within the text. I also certify that the thesis has been written by me. Any help that I have received in my research work and the preparation of the thesis itself has been acknowledged. In addition, I certify that all information sources and literature used are indicated in the thesis. Signature of Candidate 9 Abstract "Social Crimes" is a thesis comprised of a novel entitled "Crooked" and a critical exegesis on the subject of the social novel entitled "Social Crimes: The Social Novel as Crime Fiction". In the exegesis I argue that the dream of the social novel is primarily a political rather than an aesthetic one, and that, in this sense, social novels must not only address the social in their content and form, but must in some sense be enfranchised as social objects, and circulate as such. I also argue that as avant garde literature has progressively abandoned plot and other forms and conventions commonly associated with popular fiction, mass market, genre, and especially crime fiction, have increasingly come to fill the space once occupied by the social novel, as a genuinely popular form of fiction able to explicate the social transformations and upheavals of contemporary life. In so arguing, the exegesis draws together a range of critical debates taking place inside and outside the academy, including debates over experimental versus conventional narrative, high versus low art, theory versus practice, and most significantly, perhaps, the political relevance of an increasingly marginalised and marginalising literature in consumer capitalist society. The novel itself is about organised crime and political corruption in Sydney during the Askin era. It is a hybrid of crime novel, social novel and historical novel — high and low art. In style, content and form it reflects the theoretical concerns mapped out in the exegesis. 3 Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to thank my supervisor John Dale, without whose critical insight, intelligence, dedication and uncanny editorial ability this project would never have seen the light of day. I would also like to thank my associate supervisor Catherine Cole for the valuable contribution she made to the development of both the critical exegesis and the creative work. Last but not least, thanks go to Meg Simons, Peter Bishop and the Varuna Writer's Centre where the novel went through its gestation. The help of others during my research for the project has been invaluable. I would like to thank everybody at the Mitchell Library, the State Archives, the Australian Archives, the State Coroner's Office, and those people who dealt with my persistent (though not always successful) requests for documents from the State Attorney General's Office and N.S.W. Police Department. I would like to thank my uncle, former Royal Commissioner Frank Costigan, for giving me the benefit of his insight and experience, as well as a number of people from 'shadier walks of life' who agreed to be interviewed for the project, but have asked to remain anonymous. That said, all errors of fact are intentional and entirely the fault of the author. 4 Contents Introduction 6 You Can't Write a Social Novel After September 11 14 The Crime Novel is Where the Social Novel Went 49 Some Examples of Crime Fiction Thomas Harris's Red Dragon 83 James Ellroy's LA Confidential 103 Chris Nyst's Crook as Rookzvood 118 Reflections on Writing Crooked 130 Conclusion 136 Manuscript of Crooked 139 Bibliography 429 5 Introduction Speaking at the opening of the UTS Centre for New Writing, British novelist Caryl Phillips referred to what he sees as a fundamental tension in the position of writing within the university, suggesting that where “writers put things together, universities are places where you take things apart".1 This uneasy relationship between theory and practice becomes uncomfortably apparent in considering the fortunes of the so-called Teviathan' or 'great white whale' of literature, the panoramic social novel, to which much recent theory has attributed a variety of insidious ideological effects ranging from complicity with consumerism to complicity with ideologies of western ascendancy and dogmas of empire. French critic Roland Barthes has argued that while such novels may portray the oppressive machinery of capitalist society (replete with dramatic demonstrations of great suffering and social injustice), they manifest a comfortable conservatism at the level of plot and syntax that reinforces rather than challenges the status quo. He writes: For all the great storytellers of the nineteenth century the world may be full of pathos but it is not derelict, since it is a grouping of coherent relations ... since he 1 Caryl Phillips, Speech at the Opening of the UTS Centre for New Writing, UTS Gallery Function Centre, 24 May, 2005, author's notes. 6 who tells the story has the power to do away with opacity and the solitude of the existences which made it up, since he can in all sentences bear witness to a communication and a hierarchy of actions and since, to tell the truth, these very actions can be reduced to mere signs. 2 For Barthes, the social novel, and the realist attitude more generally, conspires to present the reader with a vision of the world that is already coherent, well ordered, and meaningful, so that what is in fact mere literary convention passes itself off as a reflection of the natural order of things. Barthes labels novels that provide such cosy reassurance "readerly",3 and argues that the reading of such novels helps to prevent change. They "plunge [the reader] into a kind of idleness [in which] he is left with no more than the poor freedom to accept or reject the text".4 According to Barthes, in accepting the text and negotiating the dominant codes, the reader experiences pleasure in conforming to the dominant ideology and the subjectivity it proposes. In other words, not only do such texts function to mask the anarchic nature of reality and reaffirm the socio-economic order, but also, as the theorist of ‘ Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero: and Elements of Semiology, trans Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, Jonathon Cape, London, 1967, p.37. 3 Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans Richard Miller, Blackwell, Oxford, 1990, p.4 and passim. A Ibid. 1 postmodernism Jean-Francois Lyotard once put it, "to preserve a certain consciousness from doubt".5 Worse still, Barthes argues that the universalising tendencies inherent in such works fostered the confidence with which the "triumphant bourgeoisie of the last century"6 imposed their values on the colonised world, claiming they were upholding the abiding truths of so-called civilisation. According to Barthes, the universalising tendencies inherent in such works allowed European nations to "look upon [their] values as universal and to carry over to sections of society which were absolutely heterogenous to it all the Names which were part of its ethos". 7 Postcolonial critics such as Edward Said have expanded this critique of the Eurocentric values of the social realist novel into a formidable body of theoretical work, citing the traditional social novel as one of the ways in which culture and politics cooperated to produce a system of domination that extended not only over colonised people and places, but over imagery and imagination, creating a false vision of the world which justified not so much Europe's right as its 'burden' of rule.8 Perhaps the most influential of recent theories to tackle the social novel are those of the New Historicist critic D.A. Miller who argues that the nineteenth century social novel performed a kind of Foucauldian surveillance, and that the reading of such works constituted a kind of disciplinary regime which 5 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1984, p.74. 6 Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, op.cit., p.39. 7 ibid. 8 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, Chatto and Windus, London, 1993, passim. See also, Orientalism, Routledge and KeganPaul, London, 1978, passim. 8 was functionally no different from the mechanisms of social control represented by the prison house, the barracks or the police force. As Miller writes, "Yet perhaps no openly fictional form has ever sought to "make a difference' in the world more than the Victorian novel, whose cultural hegemony and diffusion well qualified it to become the primary spiritual exercise of an entire age." 9 But for Miller, the whole "point of the exercise" is to "confirm the novel reader in his [illusory] identity as 'liberal subject'" as w ell as the "political regime that sets store by that subject".10 In other words, the social novel is complied with the expanding mechanisms of moral conformity of the modern bureaucratic State, and participates in an economy of police power that supports and upholds the very regime that it seeks to undermine. For the many writers who continue to practise within the realist tradition there is perhaps some embarrassment in theory's dismissal of the cultural legacy constituted by the works of writers such as Dickens and Balzac. Moreover, apart from Said, much theory still fails to account for the ways in which writers such as Zadie Smith have adapted the compositional style of the social novel to 'write back to empire', as the title of a famous anthology of postcolonial criticism once put it,11 or for writers such as Jonathan Franzen who have exploited its readability in order to seduce the reader into a bottomless pit of global disquiet.

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