Christos Tsiolkas, ‘Career’, and Anti-Capitalist Critique

Abstract

In his introduction to a collection of essays on ‘European literary careers’, Patrick Cheney notes the etymology of the word career and its associations with ‘athletics’ or athletic pursuits, including its meaning of ‘The ground on which a race is run’ (OED). Cheney does not consider the verb, which often connotes something not so much ‘on course’ (as the etymology implies), but as something out of control: Coleridge’s ‘mad careering of the storm’ (1817; OED). It is this second connotation of ‘career’—not as something managed and manageable, but as a story of a life that can swoop off course, buffered by historical and economic forces far beyond the control of the most determined protagonist—that I want to use as a motif in discussing the writing and reputation of the Australian Christos Tsiolkas. The first of the two epigraphs for this essay exemplifies the way in which accounts based on a belief in progress (‘the career’, implicitly always an upward trajectory) splinter when trying to accommodate a postindustrial world of casualization and redundancy, or what is termed here ‘unpaid work roles’. Yet as Mark McGurl suggests in my second epigraph, despite all the evidence to the contrary, the belief that everyone can become the hero of their own life story is pervasive. Indeed, it is almost as though the deterioration in social and economic conditions is amplifying the call of the positive life story.

Careers are ‘constructed’ through the series of choices we make throughout our lives. A career is a life-long process. It includes the variety of work roles (paid and unpaid) which you undertake throughout your lifetime, such as everyday life roles (parent, volunteer), leisure activities, learning and work. Career development is the process of managing life, learning and work. … Career development is simply a way of thinking about your life, particularly in the context of education, training and employment. It puts you at the centre of decision making about your future. (Department of Further Education, Employment, Science and Technology, South Australia)

And when we pull back from the therapeutic enchantments of literary experience to a wider angle of vision, we see … a world in which the category of ‘personal experience’ has over the course of the twentieth century, and in the postwar period in particular, achieved a functional centrality in the postindustrial economies of the developed world … individuals [through the conditions of reflexive modernity] understand themselves to be living, not lives simply, but life stories of which they are the protagonists. (McGurl, The Program Era, 12)