Reparative Reading and the Cultural Cringe; or, You’re So Australian You Probably Think This Essay Is Inferior Caitlin Ashleigh Wilson

A force that has impeded the Australian reader, seemingly since colonisation, is the Cultural Cringe. Labelled as such in 1950 by Australian critic A.A. Phillips, reading while affected by the Cultural Cringe is dominated by critical distance, anxiety and self-consciousness. The Cultural Cringe has been so thoroughly embedded in the Australian psyche that it persists decades after Phillips’ seminal essay, and theoretical approaches that gesture towards a ‘cure’ remain scarce.

How can we begin to reimagine an Australian approach to reading? Phillips’ essay pinpoints the problem, but makes no plans to solve it, leaving Australian readers to our own devices. A reparative reading practice like that outlined by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in the seminal work from which this essay’s title is drawn, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay is About You’, seems a fertile avenue to explore. Mining Phillips’ essay rewards us with an understanding of the connective tissue between the Cringer and the paranoid reader as characterised by Sedgwick. To best position reparative reading as a solution to Cringing, I investigate the most salient aspects of Sedgwick’s reading practice, particularly where she draws upon Melanie Klein’s psychoanalytic writings to establish an ideal read- ing practice for the Australian reader. The exploration, however, cannot be left here; I also engage with Sedgwick’s earlier work on affect theory to reckon with colonialism’s impact on the Cringe where Indigenous and non-white Australian readers are concerned. In doing so, I seek to chart a trajectory from paranoid Cringing to a reparative uprightness.

A.A. Phillips suggested in 1950 that there existed a ‘disease of the Australian mind’.1 He described this disease as ‘an assumption that the domestic cultur- al product will be worse than the imported article’.2 Sufferers of this disease are wont to pre-emptively doubt Australian literature’s value and compare it

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unfavourably to that of the ‘great cultural capitals’—, Paris or New York. Phillips called it the ‘Australian Cultural Cringe’, and wrote about it as an endemic habit of the Australian psyche.3 The ‘distracting infuence of the English tradition’, Phillips says, confronts the Australian writer, and thus is passed on to the Australian reader.4 In pondering a cure for the Cringe, Phillips muses on the gradual progress of learning ‘the art of being unself-consciously ourselves’.5 He credits a turn towards such unselfconsciousness with beginning the process of moving away from the Cringe. However, his thinking here is ultimately unhelp- ful: to be more confdently ourselves, he says tautologically, we must be more confdently ourselves. His ‘cure’ offers no actionable process through which an Australian reader can unlearn Cringing. Thus, the answer to addressing the Cringe must be sought outside the work which came to defne it. While Phillips’ work provides no clear remedy, his fnal vision of an Australian reader cured of the Cringe and walking with a ‘relaxed erectness of carriage’, does point toward a useful avenue of investigation.6 This lands us in Sedgwick’s domain.

In Eve Sedgwick’s investigation of the affect ‘shame-humiliation’, she declares that, because of the importance we give to dignity, ‘man above all animals insists on walking erect’.7 Our pride, she says, assures a ‘perpetual sensitiv- ity’ to shaming.8 When we cannot avoid a feeling of shame, we reveal it by ‘dropping [our] eyes […] and sometimes the whole upper part of our body’, attempting to avoid both looking and being looked at.9 It is not diffcult to connect Sedgwick’s description of the shame affect with what the Cringe seeks to avoid: the ‘torment of self-consciousness’.10 For the Cringer, this self-consciousness would arise from a recognition of the self in the text. The reader thus shies away, Cringing, to regain critical distance and avoid being shamed by their proximity to an inferior . Sedgwick’s interrogation of shame, as evinced in her work on reparative reading, offers potential relief for the Australian Cringer. Here, Sedgwick positions reparative reading against paranoid reading, which she calls a ‘strong negative affect theory’.11 While her intended use of reparative reading was to interrogate the ubiquity of paranoid reading amongst gender and sexuality theorists, her practice proves remarkably transferable to the work of dismantling the Australian Cultural Cringe. This is because the paranoid reader and the Cringer share similar motivations, both desiring to avoid humiliation by maintaining critical distance at all times. Their maxim, as Sedgwick describes, is that ‘there must be no bad surprises’, which requires a constant ‘future-oriented’ anxiety.12 Thus, Sedgwick’s work on shame and reparative reading meets Phillips where he left off, towards curing the Cringe.

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Where We Are

Melanie Klein’s work on the paranoid-schizoid position also provides a fruitful structure through which to explore the relationship between the text and its reader. Klein describes a ‘paranoid-schizoid defence’, a developmental state of heightened anxiety, which she contrasts with a ‘depressive position’.13 In a paranoid-schizoid position, the individual perceives objects as only ‘part- objects—wholly good or wholly bad’, and thus to be retreated from with ‘paranoid fear and suspicion’.14 While this retreat functions to protect against the ‘depressive anxiety (guilt)’ that the individual so fears, it is the basis from which Klein assures us that reparation is possible. While Sedgwick holds Klein’s depressive position as the ideal state from which to read reparatively, she concedes that the relationship between the two positions is a ‘two and fro pro- cess’.15 This process is indeed similar to the experience of the Cringing Australian reader—stuck in the paranoid defence they cringe away from a more realistic understanding of Australian literature and, in turn, undermine the possibility of reparative reading. In transmuting this framework for my purposes, the part of the ‘paranoid-schizoid’ is played by the Australian Intellectual who, as Phillips paints, ‘is forever sidling up to the cultivated Englishman, insinuating: ‘I, of course, am not like these crude Australians; I understand how you must feel about them’.16 Refusing to identify with the refected in text, the Australian Intellectual Cringer pre-empts a negative response and so immediately seeks to avoid it. To move away from a paranoid phase, to approach repair, says Klein, the individual must enter the depressive position. But how to bring about this transformation?

Recognising what it is in our sociohistorical past that makes white Australian readers cringe when faced with Australian literature is crucial. Australia’s colo- nial past is both the progenitor of our nationhood and our abiding shame. In Eleanor Collin’s review of Kate Grenville’s novel The Secret River, she notes how white Australian readers are afficted with ‘a paralysis borne of denial and guilt’.17 While often enhanced by works like Grenville’s novel, which directly confront the atrocities of Australia’s colonial history, this form of paralysis is not solely borne of explicit recounts or fctionalisations. Rather, our colonial past is omnipresent, colouring our perception of our cultural products and ourselves. For white Aus- tralian readers, Cringing can thus appear as the ‘correct’ reaction to Australian literary culture, caught up as it is in our national story. Evidence of how white Australians manage their shame and guilt over the treatment of Indigenous people is expressed in Allpress et al.’s survey of white Australians. According to its fndings, white Australians cope with this form of cultural shame in one of

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three ways: ‘sub-categor[ising] those members of the ingroup who are perceived to have perpetrated the misdeeds’; ‘dis-identif[ying]’ with the colonisers; or ‘attempt[ing] to restore that group’s moral standing by behaving in a pro-social manner’.18 Here, it is important to note that it is not all negative affects that inhib- it progress toward reparation, but the paranoid engagement with only negative affects. As such, when white Australian Cringers read Australian texts they are therefore adopting this pre-emptive negative position—subconsciously fnding the text to be representative of a shameful Australian history. This evokes the ‘unresting vigilance’ that Sedgwick notes in Judith Butler’s paranoid practice in Gender Trouble: the ‘bad news’—signs of ‘Australian-ness’ or colonialism in the text—must ‘always already be known’.19 The experience of comparative inferiori- ty to the great ‘cultural capitals’, which Phillips claims to be implicit in the Cringe is also relevant here: mid-19th century London, Paris and New York were power centres ruled and controlled by white men, and while they are each haunted like Australia by a colonial past, they are more rigidly perceived as colonisers, rather than the relatively recently colonised.

It is important to note that a reparative reading of Australian literature, even the colonial variety, does not equate to brushing aside the negative aspects of Australian culture and history. For one, Sedgwick does not argue for the eradica- tion of paranoid reading, but rather a more judicious and intentional use of it as ‘one kind of affect/theoretical practice’ among others.20 Additionally, reparative reading is not merely an optimistic, positive practice. It is, after all, achieved by entering the ‘depressive position’, and is likely in a ‘world full of loss, pain and oppression’ to be ‘based on a deep pessimism’.21

But what of non-white and Indigenous Australian readers? For, Australian literature has two histories: the settler-colonial Australian and the Indigenous Australian. There is also the reading experience of other non-white Australians, arguably accounting for a third history of its own, concerning immigration and multicultur- alism. These Cringers understandably seek to avoid identifcation with the same Australia that oppresses them—the non-white Australian reader is simultaneously a part of this national culture, all the while suffering its oppressive history. This cringe is the most easily justifed. An Indigenous Australian reading an In- digenous Australian text may Cringe in a way analogous to the white reader/ white text, or even non-white reader/white text reading experience, because the reader is expecting the , heavy with violence, oppres- sion and the spectre of colonialism, to reveal itself in the work. My offering of reparative reading as a cure for these experiences of the Cringe here aligns

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closely with Sedgwick’s motive for defending it. Sedgwick draws on the tra- dition of queer theorists in her description of the paranoid practitioner. She investigates the impulses of those who are oppressed by a of heterosexuality, who are looking in literature for patterns and instances of this oppression. It is not diffcult to see how such a practice could extend to other oppressed groups, such as Indigenous or immigrant readers. Indeed, as Bill Ashcroft and John Salter observe, contemporary Australia is dominated by the ‘unrefective use of Eurocentric and imperial discourse to describe and defne the energies of a post-colonial culture’.22 Accordingly, they suggest that this has led to a ‘failure of inherited discourses of spatiality to adequately conceive the nature of Australian place’.23 However, I argue that the reparative read- ing practice may provide the very discourse that both Ashcroft and Salter call for—one that embraces locality and specifcity without giving in to the norm of hypervigilance.

For Sedgwick, there are ‘important phenomenological and theoretical tasks that can only be accomplished through local theories and nonce taxonomies’.24 As such, reparative reading could thus account for the multi-vocal, multi-perspec- tival nature of Australia, allowing for Indigenous and immigrant ontologies as well as that of the ‘dominant’ settler colonial.

Where We Want to Be

Having established that the paranoid position conforms to the current posture of the Cringer, investigating Sedgwick’s depiction of the Kleinian depressive position offers an intriguing alternative. For Klein, the depressive position occurs when ‘loving impulses come more into the picture’ and with them, ‘deep remorse and concern’.25 As Heather Love notes, Sedgwick’s ideal reading practice is clearly motivated by a conception of love alongside ‘multiplicity, surprise, rich divergence, consolation’ and ‘creativity’.26 However, there is a risk inherent to assuming a depressive, reparative position—one that must ultimately accom- pany it. Indeed, the position is an unstable one, and is marked by an ‘oscillation between’ the paranoid and depressive positions that remains ‘inevitable’.27 Phil- lips himself is aware of a kind of depressive position from which reparation is possible. He states:

‘It is not the critical attitude of the intellectual that is harmful; that could be a healthy, even creative, infuence […] if the critic had a sense of identifcation with his subject, if his irritation came from a sense of shared shame rather than a disdainful separation’.28

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Phillips’ ideal critic thus possesses a sense of ‘identifcation with his subject’ and a ‘shared shame’—qualities that, I argue, also situate them as a reparative reader.

While Phillips’ description is more defensive of the critical stance than Sedgwick, his suggestion is one that aligns with Sedgwick’s paranoid reader. As he states, the separation from an Australian text through Cringing is ultimately designed to avoid shame and avert identifcation. However, this similarity also brings to mind a further risk inherent in suggesting Sedgwick’s theory of reparative reading as the Cringe’s cure. Namely, in Michael Warner’s examination of Sedgwick’s approach he describes her practice as a ‘recoil from a maniacally programmatic intensifcation of the critical’.29 To recoil is not unlike to cringe— they are both protective, anticipatory and distantiating postures. Recoiling from a cringe is far from the relaxed erectness Phillips described, and that this essay credits reparative reading with inspiring. However, Warner’s char- acterisation of reparative reading seems itself to be paranoid. I argue instead that reparative reading is a lean toward a less critically distant practice, rather than a recoil away—just as decisive as a change in posture, but much less like replacing one bad habit with another.

How We Get There

Having proven the similarity of Sedgwick’s paranoid practitioner and Phillips’ Cultural Cringer, and established the case for reparative reading as a cure for the Cringe, the question remains of how to transform a paranoid reader into a repar- ative one. As we have established, paranoia is a ‘strong negative affect theory’.30

To avoid paranoia, Sedgwick says, a reader must give into the ‘additive and accretive’ reparative impulse and embrace surprise and hope.31 A reparative reading practice sees the negative, but it does not pre-empt it, and experi- ences it alongside a wide range of other affects both positive and negative. To avoid the Cringe, the Australian reader must therefore examine the ‘motive [they] have for looking’.32 A Cringing reader engages with Australian literature only to fnd evidence of Australia’s cultural inferiority, having pre-emptively distanced themselves from the text by adopting Klein’s paranoid-schizoid po- sition. As such, their ability to experience the text positively is inhibited—they are only ‘forestalling pain’, not ‘seeking pleasure’.33 The reparative reader must, as Heather Love interprets, give up on ‘hypervigilance’ and instead embrace ‘attentiveness’. 34In practice, this translates to an Australian not reading for proof of a text’s ‘inferiority’—local place names, Australian idioms and cultural

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iconography—but rather attending to how these places make us feel, and al- lowing these feelings, negative or positive, to come as a surprise. Importantly, Sedgwick describes the surprise affect as ‘ancillary to every other affect since it orients the individual to turn his attention away from one thing to another’.35 It is this interrupting infuence that I will continue to defend in using reparative reading to avoid the Cringe.

Phillips’ article in 1950 comes after decades of observing a habit of Australian literary culture, and remains just as relevant to Australian reading practices of the present. Thus, an interrupting, reorienting force in the form of reparative reading offers a framework upon which a more upright Australian reader could rest. As Warner details, Sedgwick’s reparative reading is in some ways less a method and more of a determined ‘avoidance of method’.36 But it is this turn away from rigid methodology, and toward an embracement of a more fexible, forgiving and openhearted reading practice that makes Sedgwick’s reparative reading such a ftting way to reorient the Australian reader.

We must ultimately intervene in the way in which many Australians read Austra- lian literature—from a position dominated by shame, anxiety and distance—to avoid undermining and underserving our cultural product. Reparative reading, which welcomes surprise and engages with texts attentively, does not in turn seek to ignore negative feelings produced by works that refect a fawed system or history. For this reason, I have argued, reparative reading functions not only for white readers of white literature, but for the multiplicity of Australian readers who make up Australian culture, from which we so often Cringe. By examining Sedgwick’s use of Klein, comparing the paranoid Cringing position to the ‘up- right’ Australian reader freed from the Cringe, and suggesting how an Australian reader could approach Australian literature to read reparatively, I have sought to show that it is not only possible, but also important, to begin the diffcult process of unfurling the collective spines of our readers and healing our relationship with our national cultural product.

1 A.A. Phillips, ‘The Cultural Cringe’, Meanjin 9, no. 4 (1950): 229. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 302. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid.

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7 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 136. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 134. 10 Ibid. 11 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick et al., Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 145. 12 Sedgwick and Frank, Touching Feeling, 130. 13 R. D. Hinshelwood, A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (Oxford: Free Association Books, 1989), 147. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 128. 16 Phillips, ‘The Cultural Cringe’, 300. 17 Eleanor Collins, ‘Poison in the Flour: Kate Grenville’s The Secret River’, in Lighting Dark Places: Essays on Kate Grenville, ed. Sue Kossew (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010), 167. 18 Jesse A. Allpress et al., ‘Atoning for colonial injustices: Group-based shame and guilt motivate support for reparation’, International Journal of Confict and Violence (IJCV) 4., no. 1. (2010): 75–88. 19 Sedgwick and Frank, Touching Feeling, 130. 20 Ibid., 126. 21 Ibid., 138. 22 Bill Ashcroft and John Salter, ‘Modernism’s Empire: Australia and the of Style’, in Modernism and Empire, eds. Howard Booth and Nigel Rigby (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 292–323. 23 Ibid., 292. 24 Sedgwick et al., Shame and Its Sisters, 145. 25 Hinshelwood, A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought, 139. 26 Heather Love, ‘Truth And Consequences: On Paranoid Reading And Reparative Reading’, Criticism 52, no. 2 (2010): 237. 27 Ibid.,137. 28 Phillips., ‘The Cultural Cringe’, 300. 29 Michael Warner, ‘Uncritical Reading’, in Polemic: Critical or Uncritical, ed. Jane Gallop (New York: Routledge, 2004), 18 [emphasis added]. 30 Sedgwick et al., Shame and Its Sisters, 145. 31 Ibid., 145. 32 Ibid., 138. 33 Ibid., 138. 34 Love, ‘Truth and Consequences’, 238. 35 Sedgwick and Frank, Touching Feeling, 107. 36 Warner, ‘Uncritical Reading’, 18.

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