Grunge lit
Grunge lit (an abbreviation for "grunge literature") is an Australian
The genre was first coined in 1995 following the success of
The term "grunge lit" and its use to categorise and market this diverse group of writers and authorial styles has been the subject of debate and criticism. Linda Jaivin who disagreed with putting all of these authors in one category, Christos Tsiolkas called the term a "media creation", and Murray Waldren denied grunge lit even was a new genre; he said the works actually are a type of the pre-existing dirty realism genre.
Themes and style
Above all, these stories are about the disintegration of love. The male characters in these novels are individualistic and detached from everything: people (references to friends or family are rare), their environment and the self. This separation breeds a disquiet which they try to assuage with violent erotic behaviour.
Jean-François Vernay, A Brief Take on the Australian Novel (2016)[6]
Most grunge lit is published as short stories and novels; however, there are some anthologies and collections. The majority of grunge lit works place their subjects within an urban or suburban environment where they explore the relationship between the body and the soul and between the self and the "other".[7] The novels typically depict an "inner cit[y]" "...world of disintegrating futures where the only relief from...boredom was through a nihilistic pursuit of sex, violence, drugs and alcohol".[3] Often the central characters are disfranchised, lacking drive and determination beyond the desire to satisfy their basic needs.
The young people in the works are typically dissatisfied, alienated, bitter and cynical. Some characters in grunge lit face existential ennui[8] and boredom. According to Ian Syson, the "depressed and frightened young Australian men" who populate grunge novels express "their alienation through excessive alcohol consumption, acts of brutality, sexual conquests and active contempt for authority"".[9] An Australian 2009 PhD dissertation stated that in "Grunge fiction..., the fluids, organs and desires of its sexualised bodies are... promiscuously scattered" and the "...waste-full materiality of the body becomes the medium through which new forms of identity and politics are presented."[10] The River Ophelia is about a young female university student who faces domestic violence, self-abuse and is set in bars and nightclubs, amidst drug use, addiction and a mood of obsessive, self-destructive love:
The thing is … the thing about all this pain we go through, all this love that just hurts all the time, the thing about all this pain is that it’s really exquisite. It’s exquisite pain. That’s what makes us keep going back for more. (The River Ophelia, p. 134)
Character types and settings
The characters in grunge lit are those on the social and cultural margins.
The characters in Claire Mendes' book
The character Gordon in Praise is described as having long unwashed hair, an unshaven face, and pale, flabby skin, and he lives in a large, "old, dilapidated house" where all the renters share one bathroom.[14] Gordon is also not the "normative" Australian male, as he "lacks strength", has low libido, and boasts of an affair with a man.[14] The 14 and 15-year-old brothers in The Lives of the Saints have long hair, a mix of DIY and professional tattoos, and pierced ears and they live in a messy apartment that smells of alcohol, cigarette smoke and fried food.[14] Helen Garner's characters in her 1977 novel Monkey Grip are an inner-city male heroin addict drifting in and out of a destructive, obsessive relationship with a single mother, amidst a circle of artists and actors and people living on social assistance in shared housing. Grunge lit also focuses on characters with "abject" bodies [16] that is, bodies that are deteriorating and characters facing health problems. For example, the male and female lead characters in Praise, Gordon Buchanan and Cynthia Lamonde, both have diseased bodies, with Cynthia facing skin that breaks out in rashes.
Justine Ettler, a Sydney-based writer, gained notoriety for her 1995 novel The River Ophelia. Although a setting is never explicitly mentioned in the novel, many critics and commentators have identified it to be Sydney. One writer proposed that Ettler chose to leave the city nameless to give it a universal big-city feel: "Australia’s national borders – figural and physical - are blurred to varying extents, and in quite different ways. In The River Ophelia, for example, there are frequent references to French authors, theories and artifacts. The novel is set in inner-city Sydney, but Ettler does not mention the name ‘Sydney’, suggesting she could in fact be describing any city in Australia or (more generally) the West."[17] Sydney has achieved prominence among the counter-culture, and grunge lit movement, as Australia's birth-place of the "Push movement", which has been documented by many writers, namely Germaine Greer and Meaghan Morris. The Push movement, which flourished in inner-Sydney between the 1940s and 1970s, is described as being "a movement comprised of assorted men and women who congregated in inner-city Sydney". These men and women had "a liking for the bohemian life" and "opposed the church, the State, wowsers and censorship".[18]
Karen Brooks stated that Clare Mendes' Drift Street, Edward Berridge's The Lives of the Saints, and Andrew McGahan's Praise "...explor[e] the psychosocial and psychosexual limitations of young sub/urban characters in relation to the imaginary and socially constructed boundaries defining...self and other" and "opening up" new "liminal [boundary] spaces" where the concept of an abject human body can be explored.[2] Brooks states that Berridge's short stories provide "...a variety of violent, disaffected and often abject young people", characters who "...blur and often overturn" the boundaries between suburban and urban space.[2] Brooks states that the marginalized characters in The Lives of the Saints, Drift Street and Praise are able to stay in "shit creek" (an undesirable setting or situation) and "diver[t]... flows" of these "creeks", thus claiming their rough settings' "liminality" (being in a border situation or transitional setting) and their own "abjection" (having "abject bodies" with health problems, disease, etc.) as "sites of symbolic empowerment and agency".[2]
Brooks states that the story "Caravan Park" in Berridge's short story collection is an example of a story with a "liminal" setting, as it is set in a mobile home park; since mobile homes can be relocated, she states that setting a story in a mobile home "...has the potential to disrupt a range of geo-physical and psycho-social boundaries".[19] Brooks states that in Berridge's story "Bored Teenagers", the adolescents using a community drop-in centre decide to destroy its equipment and defile the space by urinating in it, thus "altering the dynamics of the place and the way" their bodies are perceived, with their destructive activities being deemed by Brooks to indicate the community centre's "loss of authority" over the teens.[2]
Marketing
Grunge lit books were marketed on their cover blurbs as "uncompromising narratives" that gave readers access to the "raw nerves of youth" in an "unflinchingly real", disturbing, and compelling manner.[3] The authors use a confessional, diaristic style of narration and autobiographical elements to achieve an intimacy with the reader.[5] These books were marketed in a way which emphasized the celebrity status of the young Gen X authors.[20] Grunge lit was marketed as authentic and bluntly-written texts about young people's experiences which are raw, vulgar, and explicit.
Authors
Australian
Link between literature and musical genre
Stuart Glover states that the term "grunge lit" takes the term "grunge" "...from the music industry"
Critical analysis
In 1995, when the first books were identified as "grunge lit", the new term was deemed "problematic" and soon after the moniker was coined, it was "hotly contested"[3] and it led to antithetical views. The majority of grunge lit books received little critical attention.[7] Linda Jaivin condemned critics who categorized all these authors' vastly different works as "grunge lit", an approach she called an "excuse for a wank".[3] The authors McGahan, McGregor and Tsiolkas criticized the "homogenizing effect" of conflating such a different group of writers.[3] Tsiolkas called the "grunge lit" label a "media creation".[3] University of New South Wales writing and literature professor Paul Dawson states that the rise of university creative writing programs was a factor which drove the development of grunge lit, as these programs encourage students to write, promote their students' works, and encourage the young authors to write in a diary-like style.[20]
Grunge lit has been assessed as a type of protest by these young writers, a revolt against the dominant and conservative establishment
Much of the response from critics was negative. One literary critic referred to the "'God-awful' prose of 'those appalling "grunge" novels' as 'surely fiction's last gasp before it disappears altogether to be replaced by the
In After the Celebration: Australian Fiction 1989–2007, Ken Gelder and Paul Salzman state that grunge lit writers focus on "grunge bases: drugs, vomit, shit, rough sex, a youth culture that embraces a certain chic poverty, and a barely suppressed misogyny."[16] Ettler's The River Ophelia was considered pornographic by some reviewers, although defenders called it feminist erotica.[24][2][25][26] Gelder and Salzman call grunge lit a "fashionable" genre and state that its goal was to "...
Subsequent genre
Michael Robert Christie's 2009 PhD dissertation, "Unbecoming-of-Age: Australian Grunge Fiction, the Bildungsroman and the Long Labor Decade" states that there is a genre called "post Grunge [lit]" which follows the grunge lit period. Christie names three examples of Australian "post-grunge lit":
See also
Further reading
- Bennett, Marjory. ‘The Grungy Australian Novel.’ Sydney Morning Herald, 24 September 1995.
- Dawson, Paul. Creative Writing and the New Humanities. Routledge, Aug. 2, 2004. (includes section on grunge lit)
- Dawson, Paul. "Grunge Lit: Marketing Generation X". Meanjin 56.1 (1997) 119-125.
- McCann, Andrew. Writing the Everyday: Australian Literature and the Limits of Suburbia. Univ. of Queensland Press, 1998.
- Muller V. ‘City bodies: Urban grunge and Andrew McGahan's Praise’, in Finch L. and McConville C. (eds), Gritty cities: Images of the urban. Sydney: Pluto Press. 1999.
- Nicholls, Angus. "Australian Grunge Fiction: A Literature of Philosophical Crisis?" Philosopher Magazine, 1997 p. 45-48.
- Syson, Ian. "Smells like market spirit: grunge, literature, Australia". Overland 142 (1996): 21-23.
- Waldren, Murray. "Lit. grit invades Ozlit". Australian Magazine, 24–25 June 1995.
- Waldren, Murray. ‘Dirty Realists: Enter the Grunge Gang.’ In Dining Out with Mr Lunch. St Lucia, Qld: UQP, 1999. 70-85.
References
- ^ Vernay, Jean-François. "Grunge Fiction". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 06 November 2008 accessed 18 December 2017.
- ^ a b c d e f Brooks, Karen (1998). "Shit Creek: Suburbia, Abjection and Subjectivity in Australian 'Grunge' Fiction". Australian Literary Studies. 18 (4): 87–99.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Leishman, Kirsty, 'Australian Grunge Literature and the Conflict between Literary Generations', Journal of Australian Studies, 23.63 (1999), pp. 94–102
- ISBN 978-1-74305-404-8.
- ^ a b c d e Vernay, Jean-François, 'Grunge Fiction', The Literary Encyclopedia, 6 November 2008, accessed 9 September 2009
- ISBN 978-1-74305-404-8.
- ^ a b c Brooks, Karen, 'Shit Creek: Suburbia, Abjection and Subjectivity in Australian 'Grunge' Fiction', Australian Literary Studies, 18 (1998), pp. 87-100, accessed 10 September 2009
- ^ a b c d e f Dawson, Paul. "Grunge Lit: Marketing Generation X". Meanjin 56.1 (1997) 119-125
- ^ Vernay, Jean-François, 'Grunge Fiction', The Literary Encyclopedia, 6 November 2008, accessed 3 February 2017
- ^ Michael Robert Christie's 2009 PhD dissertation, "Unbecoming-of-Age: Australian Grunge Fiction, the Bildungsroman and the Long Labor Decade" Available online at: https://eprints.utas.edu.au/19267/1/whole_ChristieMichaelRobert2009_thesis.pdf
- ^ a b c McCann, Andrew. Writing the Everyday: Australian Literature and the Limits of Suburbia. Univ. of Queensland Press, 1998. p. 88
- ^ a b Dagg, Samantha. "Still digging: from grunge to post-grunge in Australian fiction". Thesis, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1342404
- ^ "Kindling Does for Firewood". www.publishersweekly.com. Publishers Weekly. Retrieved 3 January 2017.
- ^ a b c d e McCann, Andrew. Writing the Everyday: Australian Literature and the Limits of Suburbia. Univ. of Queensland Press, 1998. p. 89
- ^ McCann, Andrew. Writing the Everyday: Australian Literature and the Limits of Suburbia. Univ. of Queensland Press, 1998. p. 94-96
- ^ a b c Gelder K. and Salzman P. After the celebration: Australian fiction 1989–2007. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2009.
- ^ Thompson, Jay (2009). "Sex and Power in Australian Writing During the Culture Wars, 1993-1997" (PDF). University of Melbourne.
- ^ Coombs, Anne (1996). Sex and Anarchy: The Life and Death of the Sydney Push. Penguin Books.
- ^ Brookes, Karen (1998). "Shit Creek: Suburbia, Abjection and Subjectivity in Australian 'Grunge' Fiction". Australian Literary Studies. 18 (4): 87–99.
- ^ a b Dawson, Paul. Creative Writing and the New Humanities. Routledge, Aug. 2, 2004. p. 142
- ^ a b "RCF lecture 4".
- ^ Glover, Stuart. A Short Note on Grunge Fiction. http://www.stuartglover.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/A-short-note-on-Grunge-Fiction.pdf Archived 2017-02-19 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Pearce, Sharyn. "Going for grunge: Revisiting Andrew McGahan's 1988 and ‘Kill the Old'". Queensland Review. https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2016.8 Published online: 31 May 2016
- ^ Dawson, Paul (1997). "Grunge Lit: Marketing Generation X". Meanjin. 56 (1): 119–125.
- ^ Syson, Ian (1996). "Smells like market spirit: grunge, literature, Australia". Overland. 142: 21–23.
- ^ Thompson, Daniel (2012). "'I don't wanna live in this place': The Australian Cultural Cringe in 'Subtopia' and 'The River Ophelia'". JASAL. 12 (3).
- ^ "Definition: Dirty Realism". Online dictionary service in English, Spanish, German and other languages by. 20 July 2008. 30 Dec. 2008 <http://dictionary.reverso.net/english-definitions/dirty%20realism>.
- ^ themodernnovel.org