The angry periphery

In Theft, Carey explores Australia’s ambivalent relation to the Western artistic tradition. Subash Jeyan

(Published in The Hindu Literary Review on November 5, 2006.)

WE have been reared culturally to appreciate art in isolation, to conceive of art as a transcendental object, cut off from the hustle, bustle and sweat of life as it is lived every day. A novel or book comes to us neatly packaged, a whole industry of assorted talents behind the packaging, so that when we hold that beautifully designed book in our hands, it tells us nothing of the lives behind that book, nothing of the vast infrastructure and the industry, with all its machinations and politics, that made possible that particular book, perhaps at the cost of many others.

Similarly with a painting. Sanctified, put up in a frame and spotlighted, it stands in splendid isolation from its circumstances, transcending them if you will. All you are made to see is the talent that shines through. Not the slime it has had to wade through.The circumstances around a work of art, the way an industry functions in selecting, legitimising and then grading works into canonical classes and structures, is always hidden and may not make for a pretty reading even when it is brought out into the open.

And when someone does precisely that in a novel, as Peter Carey does in Theft: A Love Story, the question that comes to mind naturally is, why would one do that? Why would one wade through the muck, make it big (and two Bookers are “big” by any standards), and then turn the spotlight back onto the muck itself? One might say it is the periphery getting its sweet revenge. Apparently, if you are an Australian, your relationship to Western culture, especially the artistic tradition, is a complex, deeply ambivalent one. You belong and yet you don’t because you are from the margins, you are the provincial, without a comparable artistic tradition or history. You are from the great outback, in more ways than one. And that, apparently, makes one mad.

The wonder of things

Marlene, the small-town girl from down under who wants to make it big in the art world, acutely reflects this as she lands in the United States: “…although she remained an assistant to an assistant…she quietly, triumphantly, entered a completely unmapped ocean, and was gobsmacked, like Cortez, or like Keats himself, to see what the conditions of birth and geography had hidden from her i.e. the true wonder of bloody everything, no less” (p.140). And when Michael Boone, Butcher Bones as he is called, sees an ad for his exhibition in Studio International, he is proud “Beyond description. If you are American you will never understand what it is to be an artist on the edge of the world…And, no, it is in no way like being from Lubbock, Texas, or Grand Forks, North Dakota. If you are Australian you are free to argue that this cringing shit had disappeared by 1981, that history does not count, and that, in any case, we were soon to become the centre of f****** universe, the flavour of the month, the coalition of the willing etc., but I will tell you, frankly, nothing like this had been conceivable in my lifetime…” (p.145).

Space for questions

When the periphery speaks like this, it doesn’t go too well with the centre. Too bad, mate. John Updike (whose words of praise, ironically, are quoted on the blurb) writes, in The New Yorker: “Hugh, the lumbering epitome of Australian backwardness, runs away with the novel, while the expertly researched and caricatured art scene hangs flat on a well-lit wall.” Nothing falls flat really but I suppose it depends on where one’s sympathies lie. But then, art is nothing if it doesn’t have the space for questions or mutinies.

Theft: A Love Story, Peter Carey, Faber and Faber, 2006, p.269, £6.99.