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April 23, 2007
Miles Franklin Award Commentary
Peter Craven is the critic of choice this year for "The Age" to continue questioning the Miles Franklin Award and its entry criteria - last year it was Jane Sullivan on this topic. Craven's piece, on the op-ed pages of the paper, carries the title "Reward the best novel, not the most Australian one", which pretty much sums up the arguments he raises. The trouble is that is not what the prize is for. But more of that later.
Craven is one of Australia's best literary critics around and does have some interesting points to make, not that I agree with all of them. First, and foremost among them, is his statement that "The Miles Franklin has always been a bit of a litmus test for our impulse as a nation towards cultural insecurity of one form or another." The "cultural cringe" in other words. Didn't this go out with flared jeans and tie-dyed T-shirts? I'm not sure this sense of insecurity or inferiority exists much outside mainstream media these days. A similar assertion could be levelled at this weblog - the "culture insecurity" part anyway. Just because you wish to publicise one aspect of literature does not mean that you aim to diminish any other parts. It's just a means of saying "hey, look at this, you might enjoy it". It should not imply anything else. A few weeks back I quoted Neal Stephenson when he said: "Lack of critical respect means nothing to sci-fi's creators and fans. They made peace with their own dorkiness long ago." Thirty years back Ursula Le Guin called for sf to drag itself up out of the ghetto and embrace the world. She implied that by doing so it would gain the level of critical acceptance that it deserved. It took maybe ten to fifteen years for that to occur, though whether or not it gained a level of "respectability" it may also have desired is another question altogether. I, for one, tend to think it didn't. But, you know what? I also think the sf community doesn't care any more.
The same should be true of Australian literature. Each year I find that the bulk of the Miles Franklin Award shortlist could replace the novels selected for the Man Booker Prize and you wouldn't see much of a drop in quality. It's not a question of "respectability" or "critical acceptance" any more. It's now a problem with promotion and publicity. How do we get the best of Australian fiction out there in front of the world's readers? Especially when we are so far from literature's English-language hotspots of London and New York. By extolling the virtues of awards such as the Miles Franklin might be a good place to start.
Contrary to Craven's earlier statement implying that the award praises the most Australian work on the shortlist, the conditions talk of a work of literature which reflects Australians or the Australian way of life. It doesn't have to be Crocodile Dundee or Chips Rafferty, it can quite easily be Gail Jones's writer living in Paris, or Peter Carey's painter stuck in northern New South Wales attempting to paint. It's the quality that counts.
Craven concludes: "The imagination cannot be tethered by nationalism, even though the fruits of the literary imagination -- the aching, erotic nostalgia of David Malouf's Queensland, the sensuous slap of the sun on Carlton streets in Helen Garner -- may have a peculiar poignancy to us because we live in this place. It doesn't make them better, it simply makes them ours." It does not make them better, but it also doesn't make them worse either.
Posted by larrikin at April 23, 2007 02:41 PM
Comments
Craven's right. A desire for native product at all costs reflects badly on the canon itself. 'It's only good because it's ours.' You shouldn't be reading books that critics wrap in the flag. Globally-minded readers are probably better readers.
Posted by: Dean at April 23, 2007 03:54 PM
His opinion may be right, but I can't help wondering whether he's recycling out-of-date ideas about the Miles Franklin without checking to see what contemporary interpretations of the prizes' terms actually are. What Franklin's will says is that the winning novel will reflect 'Australian life in any of its phases'. Craven does not have the wording right, and since he's using the terms of the will to frame his argument, that weakens it rather badly.
The year I was a judge, it was agreed unanimously around the judging table that one of the time-honoured 'phases of Australian life' was, in fact, travelling overseas. The winner that year, Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire, is if anything quite anti-Australian in its sentiments and representations. It has only a handful of Australian characters, and almost all the action takes place elsewhere.
That is, I think Craven is fighting a straw man. Erm, prize. A straw prize.
Franklin paid the piper and her ghost continues to call the tune, as, to me, is right. It would be absolutely fair enough (and, legally speaking, not a waste of time, which it is with the MF) to criticise the terms of prizes whose money came from the taxpayers' purses (all the Premiers' Prizes, e.g.) but somehow nobody ever seems to, which I find very odd.
Posted by: Kerryn at April 23, 2007 09:40 PM