Master Copy 254 September

2003 LA TROBE UNIVERSITY/AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW ANNUAL LECTURE The Meaning of Recognition Clive James HERE IS A DIFFERENCE between celebrity and recog- the journalists are now quite likely to call it, a phenomena. nition. Celebrities are recognised in the street, but Really, it is just a bore. But to know that, you have to be Tusually because of who they are, or who they are genuinely interested in the sort of achievement whose practi- supposed to be. To achieve recognition, however, is to be tioners you feel compelled to recognise in a more substantial recognised in a different way. It is to be known for what you way. The cure lies in that direction if it lies anywhere. have done, and quite often the person who knows what you have done has no idea what you look like. When I say I’ve hile we are waiting for the cure, I am quite content had enough of celebrity status, I don’t mean that I am sick of the to go on having my life distorted by my own small very idea. As it happens, I think that the mass-psychotic Wmeasure of celebrity, which has mainly come about passion for celebrity — this enormous talking point for those because my face was once on television. Your face doesn’t who do not really talk — is one of the luxurious diseases that have to be on television for long, and in any capacity, before Western liberal democracy will have to find a cure for in the you become recognisable not just to normally equipped peo- long run, but the cure will have to be self-willed. I don’t think ple but to people who are otherwise scarcely capable of that it can be imposed, and certainly not from the outside. recognising anything. You will find out why posters of the ten I didn’t much like Madonna’s last television appearance in most wanted criminals can be so effective. How is it that the Britain. Billed as the lurking presence of a fu- height of sophisticated gitive master of disguise sexiness, it featured Ma- is so often detected by donna wearing high the village idiot? The an- heels, a trench coat and swer has to do with a a beret. She crouched primeval characteristic like a pygmy prizefighter of our sensory appara- while snarling into the tus. Once the human microphone as if anyone brain has the outline of listening might be insuf- another human face suf- ficiently intelligent to ficiently implanted, that understand her message other human face can be — a hard audience to picked out of a crowd find, in my view. decades in the future, I thought of this per- whatever has happened formance as an attempt to it. Once you have ap- to prove that a knowing peared on that scale, sneer can be made audi- nothing is harder than ble while discrediting to disappear. On the day the French Resistance. you realise that you can But Madonna’s slow vanish only through paroxysm of self-regard, a flagrant example of Western deca- never emerging from your motel room, and that even then dence though it undoubtedly was, did not inspire me to fly a the pizza delivery man has recognised you through your hijacked airliner into her house. Here, indeed, was a celebrity floor-length facial hair, you will realise that celebrity really gone mad, if not celebrity itself gone mad. But she will have to amounts to a kind of universal mugshot. While it resolutely realise that herself, through her sense of the ridiculous, if she misses the point of what you would like to think you have still has one. A violent attack would produce nothing but done, it is an indelible picture of who you are. more Madonnas: spiteful spores in berets. An awareness But when I say that I have had enough of it, I only mean even more sophisticated than the aberration is its only cure, that I have had my share, and can’t complain. Some of the for her and for the phenomenon of celebrity as a whole. Until distortions were always welcome. That was one of the things the moment when mocking laughter does its work, we will be that made them distortions. They were too welcome. You can stuck with celebrity being called a phenomenon, or, as even very rapidly get used to the idea that the swish restaurant will Archived at Flinders University: dspace.flinders.edu.au AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2003 21 ESSAY always find a table for you. You can get so used to it that you enjoy arose from the conflicts between interest groups, and think the restaurant needs a new manager on the night when no such natural state of justice has ever existed. The only the table strangely can’t be found. What’s needed, of course, natural state is unjust: so unjust, and so savage, that we is not a new manager for the restaurant but a new injection of would rather not imagine it, even when, especially when, fame for yourself. Now there’s a distortion. That way mad- we are young and strong. Hence the defence mechanisms. ness lies, and madness would probably have arrived for me if Restricting perception so as to free us for action, they liberate I had ever been a famous young rock star: go to hell, go us, but they are limiting, and sooner or later we have to directly to hell, do not even pass through rehab. As it hap- examine the limitations, or the liberation will defeat itself. pened, I was never a famous young rock star. Instead, I was a Facing reality ought to be an aim in life. It hardly ever is, and reasonably well-known middle-aged media man, and never the pursuit of happiness can practically be defined as the became addicted to anything more destructive than Café Crème avoidance of any such thing. But an aim in life it certainly mild miniature cigars, smoked at the rate of one tin of ten a ought to be. Just as long as somebody else does it. day, escalating to two tins the day after I passed the insur- ance medical. When Elvis Presley hit bottom, he exploded in hilip Hodgins (1959–95) faced life. He would have been the bathroom. His bottom hit the ceiling. My own nadir was the first to say that he faced it only because he was less spectacular, and the world did not take note, because the Pforced to, but he did it. He faced life when he faced world did not care. death. For him, death lit life up. In his final time on earth, I was in one of the smoking rooms at Bangkok Airport, on he would sometimes deny this, but only in poems that lit life the way to Australia. I would say you should see a smoking up like nobody else’s. Lavishly talented, he would have been room at Bangkok Airport, but in fact you can’t see it, or a major poet whatever the circumstances. If he had lived as anyway you can’t see into it. It is not long as his admired Goethe, he would very big, and, though made of glass, it is ‘Facing reality ought to probably have been Goethe. Hodgins opaque when viewed from the outside: might never have written Faust, but he opaque because of what is happening be an aim in life. It almost certainly would have produced a inside. The smokers are in there, jammed hardly ever is, and the vast body of work in which art and sci- together like the damned on some bro- pursuit of happiness can ence interpenetrated each other as if all ken-down, fogbound trolley car designed the modes of human knowledge came by Dante. When a smoker, reaching for practically be defined as from the same impulse: the synthesis that the smokes in his pocket, opens the door the avoidance of any Goethe was so keen on. That kind of scope to enter, he realises that he can leave the needs an inexhaustible knack for putting smokes where they are. All he has to do is such thing. But an aim in things in an arresting manner to go with breathe in. It was my last experience of life it certainly ought to the comprehensive intensity of percep- this that made me realise that I should tion, and Hodgins had that compound leave the smokes where they were perma- be. Just as long as gift. nently. Eventually, only a few months somebody else does it.’ Looking at it from the other direction, later, I did so. If what was left of my life his circumstances would have made him brought stress, then I would live with it without an analgesic. emblematic whatever his talent. Put the two things together, I wanted to live. I was reasonably sure, of course, that I still however — the talent and the tragedy — and you’ve got had the choice. something with a force of gravity strong enough to feel on Others, I had finally noticed, are not so lucky. After your face. It’s important to go on saying that, because his a lifetime of self-indulgence, I was at last beginning to be books look so slight. But they only look it. They weigh as if impressed by the possibility that abusing your own the language in them had been refined from pitchblende. health might be an insult to those whose health has already Barely there between the finger and the thumb, when opened been abused by the Man Upstairs, who really knows how they put you into the world of physics whose heavy metals to dish the abuse out the way it should impress you most — produced the rays that bombarded him in his illness.

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