The Inspector-General of Misconception

by Frank Moorhouse

  What is going on in the frequent use of the term in arts criticism?

  Our Investigators believe that there is a suggestion in arts criticism that the arts has a role in speaking for the disadvantaged to the exclusion of those who are materially well off.

  Or that the arts has a role in giving a voice to those without a voice and that this fabled middle class already has a big voice (despite its inclusion at other times in the expression ‘silent majority’).

  In the opinion of this Office, one of the great functions of the arts lies in the paradox of ‘saying what the articulate cannot say for themselves’.

  Yes, yes, yes, the arts can also speak for those without a voice (although it is a safer course of action to allow those without a voice to find it for themselves and to then speak for themselves. What was once known as ‘the Left’ had to learn this the hard way).

  It seems to be implied, at times, in the use of the term, that this fabled middle class is devoid of all graces and intellectual capacity. Moreover, as in the above quoted examples, the suffering of those in this fabled middle class can never be authentic.

  Angst or tragedy is denied to this class.

  It would seem that the refusal of critics to grant the capacity for angst to their imagined middle class springs from a rather crude notion that having economic security or material comforts disqualifies a person from suffering or, at least, from the imaginative examination of the causes and nature of their suffering.

  If you are above $50,000 a year in income you should shut up and suffer in silence.

  It is perhaps expressed best in what our mother said when we complained as a child, ‘Think of those at sea in ships.’

  But angst is the pain of being alive and that afflicts all.

  It is also implied by much arts criticism that this middle class has no rightful claim to be the content of art.

  Yet, any knowledge of those who are materially well-off or who have social status reveals that, yes, they can suffer. They can suffer all the things that are deepest in the human condition.

  In fact, they are also vulnerable to something that the ‘poor’ are not. They are vulnerable to loss of their status, wealth and comfort which may not be a loss to which we grant great sympathy, but which is nevertheless real, and often the proper stuff of art (Lear, for example).

  Further, the use of the term also implies a value and behaviour pattern.

  Perhaps those who use it are using ‘class’ as Weber used it, which was about ‘life chances’ which the private school is supposed to give?

  A writer in the Sunday Age seems to feel that something can be generalised from a private school education. Talking of one of the characters in a play Honour by Joanna Murray-Smith, he says, ‘With a ring in her nose, she’s a combination of the studied streetwise and the private school’. (Hibberd’s comments above were also from a review of this fine play.)

  This Office would have to be convinced by further evidence that the private school education, in the long run, does increase ‘life chances’ in this country. The contrary may well be true because of the way the non-private school world treats such elitist education with suspicion – but we won’t get into that.

  Finding: Our Office feels that the expression ‘middle class’ is best avoided in journalism and conversation with the hope that more meaningful expressions of social division and status might emerge. The tired expressions ‘blue collar’ and ‘white collar’ can also go.

  There may be no meaningful terms for broad social divisions in Australia. At least, none that are in general use.

  Another problem before The Office is with the idea of ‘suits’ as in ‘little men in suits’.

  ‘Our planners are little men in grey suits who … have given us Darling Harbour and The Rocks, planning disasters …’ (Sydney Morning Herald) but readers will have read hundreds of other examples of the use of the term.

  ‘The suits’ is another contemptuous social category meaning mindless males in powerful positions.

  We suppose it does encompass women in power, although no derisive category has emerged except perhaps ‘femocrats’ and the expression ‘power dressing’ when describing the dress of some women who have positions of authority.

  It is thought to follow that people in these occupations requiring the wearing of suits are slaves to convention and to their masters, or that they are limited imaginatively or theoretically by their occupations or their way of dressing.

  Hence, writers and people in the arts who avoid ties and suits for fear they will be identified as a ‘suit’.

  An historical by-note: Neville Chamberlain in 1936 prepared a list of improvement of tone for Edward VIII upon his accession to the throne. This included the wearing of darker suits by the King.

  Accountants and bank clerks especially are seen unfairly as exemplifying this suited greyness of life. But Einstein always wore a suit.

  Older women are dismissed as a category when called the ‘blue rinse brigade’. That there are women who, when their hair turns grey, do dye it blue tells us nothing about these women.

  Women with blue rinse in their hair will be found in further education – the arts, administration, and everywhere else in society.

  Nothing much follows from having rinse in the hair except as evidence that they are concerned for their appearance and have made a conventional choice.

  Finding: We hereby deem that the terms ‘blue rinse’ and ‘men in suits’ are lazy, contemptuous, and meaningless.

  Second Finding: We hereby decree that accountants, bank clerks, dentists and street sweepers be left alone and not used as cyphers of social derision or as common denominators of nullity.

  MISCELLANEOUS ITEMS OF CONCERN

  Decadence

  A cartoon in the New Yorker shows a couple on a beach. One of the couple says, ‘I think I’ll head back to the house for a little net-sex and a nap.’

  The internet information superhighway has become an eroticly charged backalley where any simulation of sexual pleasure can be found. The computer has become companion – albeit in a delimited and distanced way unless it is seen as a stepping stone into fleshly reality.

  The internet may be the only place where some people feel safe about sex and encounters with strangers.

  It has opened up a new fantasy land, a world of the sexual imagination.

  The internet may be both the Hotel Venus and the new cabaret.

  But touch and the exchange of bodily fluids has always loomed large in this Office’s ideas about decadence.

  Ruling: That the use of computers and telephones for sexual experience, while understandable in the Time of the AIDS Plague, is substitutional rather than being a true new decadence. But we agree with the dictum: Any port in a storm. (Which, in turn, reminds us of that old joke, ‘Would you care for a port?’ Reply: ‘Oh no, one or two sailors would suffice.’)

  Sex and condoms

  It has been suggested that a condom is to sex what chewing gum is to dining; that somehow sex with a condom is not ‘real’ sex. This raises the theological question of whether having sex with a condom could be considered infidelity or not. It follows on from the fact that if bodily fluids are not exchanged, then perhaps it is an intermediate form of sexual coupling which does not infringe the vows of fidelity.

  However, we are heartened to hear on SBS (the things we hear on that channel!) from a Young Person that condom use is now considered not so much a hindrance or a nuisance but part of foreplay. We have ourselves witnessed the erotic use of condoms (especially when the condom is put in place by your partner using his or her mouth) and applaud those who find the magic to transform the condom into a sexual enhancement.

  Ruling: That sex with a condom is not ‘real’ infidelity and that the condom can be erotic.

  A note: The respected American medical journal, the New England Journal of Medicine has found that most people under thirty in the US do not consider oral sex to be ‘real sex’ and nor did former presi
dent Clinton.

  Always seemed like sex to Our Office.

  Sex and the generations

  When are reviewers, and others, going to realise how silly it is to say things such as, ‘These were the days before such sentiments placed one under suspicion of being lesbian’ (the New Yorker article on Willa Cather). To think that our grandparents did not know or talk about homosexuality is generational conceit – that our generation alone knows about these things. That we were the first hip generation. Of course, we write about it more and the media has ‘discovered’ it, and children know about it sooner and more completely. And it may be true that genteel sections of the community were conversationally mute on these subjects and maybe still are. But popular culture, the intelligentsia, the arts, and of course, those whose inclinations were thus, have always known about this part of human sexuality.

  Although it is interesting to note that Havelock Ellis, a medical doctor, a progressive, and ultimately a pioneer in the study of sexual behaviour said that, while in 1890 he mentioned homosexuality in his first book, he did not really know fully what it was he was talking about. He was thirty-one. Ellis entertains the Whitmanesque notion that homosexuality both male and female would replace, to a large extent, heterosexuality, and he knowingly married a lesbian as a ‘planned’ comradeship without a sexual motivation. But to suggest that the human race until recently was blind to and ignorant of the manifold possibilities of sexual relationship (give or take a few innocents) is nonsense. It is a variant of the childish disbelief in the possibility that one’s parents made passionate sexual love or had, in fact, any sex whatsoever, let alone that our grandparents didn’t use their mouths and anuses in sex.

  What is more strangely and paradoxically true is that our generation has difficulty believing that two people of the same sex who share a domestic arrangement for an extended period aren’t necessarily homosexual.

  Sex and stomach rumbling

  A French poet, Valery Larbaud (1881–1957), once wrote a poem called ‘Borborygmes’ (flatulence).

  The poem is about two lovers in bed listening to the sighs and gurgles of the life of the stomach which in his words ‘is the only human voice that never lies’.

  Such rumblings can say that there is sexual nervousness.

  And hunger.

  Or that ‘there’s a bear in there’.

  The stomach can also say that the rumblings are harmless. Yet such rumblings could also be a symptom of ulcer of the oesophagus, peptic ulcer, cancer of the oesophagus, cancer of the pancreas, or cancer of the colon or rectum.

  Larbaud worked on the first French translation of Joyce’s Ulysses. Sadly, he suffered a severe stroke in 1935.

  Ruling: We wish to correct his misconception about it being the only voice that does not lie. It depends on what it is that you think that the stomach is ‘saying’ when it gurgles. Listen closely? No, there is no way of listening closely.

  The truth is that the stomach, as much as the mouth, also sends confusing signals in the bed.

  We don’t know how we got onto this subject.

  Racism in plant life

  We note that the Journal of Natural History would not use the term ‘blackboy’ to describe the grasstree or Xanthorrhoea. The rather poetic name ‘blackboy’ for this plant has been in use since 1834.

  Apart from being a rather spectacular plant in the otherwise visually similar Australian bush, it was found to be of great value by both the Aborigines and by the new settlers.

  If we go about erasing the records of the past in any of its quaint deposits even if we find them out of step with our contemporary sensitivities, we will soon have no past.

  At least the term was not found by the magazine to be also sexist, given that it applies the masculine term ‘boy’ to the plant which presumably has at least two genders.

  Ruling: That some apparently offensive things are best appreciated by releasing them from heavy application of contemporary concerns and morality (and Xanthorrhoea should be so released).

  Message tee-shirts

  We sometimes feel we are intruding when we ‘read’ message tee-shirts because it requires one to stare at a stranger, usually at the level of the chest.

  When this is a female we feel that, under some law or other, we may be committing a crime. We don’t know what to make of a girl wearing a tee-shirt saying, ‘I am a slut’. Perhaps some tee-shirt messages dare the passer-by to be foolish enough to take the message seriously (and the consequences).

  Yet we are surely ‘invited’ by message tee-shirts to read the message. Some of the messages are certainly of the sort which suggests that once having read it we should move on quickly. For example, ‘Don’t ask me 4 SHIT’ which we saw a woman wearing in Washington DC.

  Others are charmingly public-spirited, such as the tee-shirt message urging the recycling of cans, ‘I-can U-can’.

  Ruling: Those who wear message tee-shirts cannot complain if they find strangers stopping to read the message and at the same time becoming aware of the beauty of the body which wears it.

  Perfumed magazines

  We have noted a practice of inserting samples of perfume into magazines.

  We enjoy perfume (perhaps too much).

  But this is an olfactory intrusion which for some of us, who are highly sensitive about the nose, is close to pain.

  To have in our hands a magazine which has an unacceptable smell prevents us from concentrating or enjoying the magazine. This is in part because we find we enjoy the organic smell of the new magazine which comes from paper and ink and the trimming and glazing of paper. We are happy with this smell and look forward to it upon opening the magazine.

  Ruling: The placing of perfume in magazines for the purposes of marketing or whatever, is totally unacceptable and is to stop forthwith.

  Gay marriage

  We believe that marriage is for the very few. That it is a dark, dangerous and dicey business which some are equipped to undertake but which many feel, unfortunately, that they must do for no good reason.

  Marriage is for the purposes of child-rearing. It was designed long ago as a religiously inspired heterosexual commitment for life (when originally conceived, a life shorter by half than that which we can expect).

  Gays should not be pursuing the right to marry. What we all need are more socially applauded, recognised, and celebrated forms of involvement and commitment between people (or indeed, among people).

  David Malouf once said that there are not enough categories of being in Australia. We’d go further.

  We find that while people subtly do have many ways of being, our failing is that there is not enough amiable acceptance and pleasure-taking in the diversity of our categories of being.

  Nor do we find and employ a vocabulary to describe and title more precisely these various forms of commitment other than marriage. We tend invariably to tumble into the vocabulary of romance.

  Ruling: There are many more romantic pathways than our language or conventions recognise and celebrate.

  During the first fifty or so years of the Australian settlement, marriage was not considered important. For a time it looked as if marriage, along with religion, might die out here. The British government ordered an investigation – the Bigge Report (1822) – which is a very curious document in our history and worth reading.

  Ruling: That we all put on our thinking caps and apply ourselves to coming up with some names for these new life arrangements and ideas for their attendant celebrations.

  Deboned food

  We have to rule against the deboning of meat and fish. It is the view of this Office that the bones add to the flavour but more than that, we believe the presence of the bones gives a primordial sensation which we need with food. The bones are indispensable for the making of this primordial connection with the animal kingdom. Sure, there is more work required by the diner, but there is a great pleasure in working around a bone. There are the great bone dishes such as osso buco, and the knuckle and shank
dishes, let alone the pig’s trotter. And we are against the head being removed from fish or game before serving. And then there is the connection to our stone-age past when we actually take the bone into our hands and chew on it.

  Ruling: The presence of bones encourages the appreciation of the primordial connection and the architecture of the beast or fish. To appreciate the evidence of its animate existence while eating is to honour the animal and to honour nature and our strange eternal relationship to it.

  Fetishes

  The lunacy of censorship is returning. Over one hundred books are now banned and ‘adult’ magazines will have to go through the censor together with posters and films. Dear god, do we have to argue this all again? Simply put, censorship is authorising someone else to tell you what you can read or view; that is, authorising someone to evaluate and think for you. (See page 265, ‘The Urge to Censor’.)

  The preoccupations of our new censorship regime includes ‘genital detail’ and the ‘depiction of fetishes’ which they have broken into two categories, ‘mild and strong’. Ye gods. Oh, another thing, the title of Chief Censor will be changed to Director of the Office of Film and Literature Classification.

  What sort of work is this for grown people? Although it is called a classification system, it does involve the banning and the cutting of films and TV programs and it requires prejudicial labelling.

  It is an attempt to keep some sexual behaviour in the sleaze category and to condemn those who involve themselves with that behaviour.

  This form of classification endorses the fallacy of ‘norms’ and the penalising and persecuting of those who are seen as not.

  If they have an uncontrollable itch to censor, they could forbid the objectionable practice in US movies and TV of having characters tear pages from public telephone books instead of writing down or remembering the numbers they need.

  Ruling: Such classifying and censoring is despicable behaviour and certainly does not encourage the emergence of a sophisticated society.