Introduction: Christos Tsiolkas: Rage, Discomfort, Disgust … and Beauty

Abstract

IntroductionChristos Tsiolkas: Rage, Discomfort, Disgust … and Beauty Barbara M. Hoffmann (bio) "This is what's so great about it. It doesn't have to be your own story. It can be a story you heard, something that happened to someone else …" "God, it sounds so complicated." "No, it's a load of fun, I promise you." "How do you win?" "At the end of the round we all vote on the best story." —Christos Tsiolkas, "Merciless Gods" (7) To say Christos Tsiolkas is a celebrated Australian author is, at this point, an almost absurd understatement. The vote has been cast over and over—by scholars, by readers, by those who deem a work of literary fiction worthy of the jump from page to screen—and Tsiolkas has won, over and over. In highlighting Tsiolkas's breadth of accolades in the author blurb of his most recent novel, 7½, the editor at Allen and Unwin mentions the 2006 Age Fiction Prize and 2006 Melbourne Best Writing Award for Dead Europe, the 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Overall Best Book for The Slap, and the 2019 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction for Damascus, as well as shortlists and the fact that The Slap and Barracuda were "both adopted into celebrated television series." Per Henningsgaard, in his essay in this special section, notes, "In the years between the initial publication of The Slap and the release of the Australian television miniseries, the novel won the ALS [Australian Literature Society] Gold Medal, the Australian Book of the Year in the Australian Book Industry Awards, the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction in the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize—all in 2009." Eight days after the publication of 7½, Tsiolkas was announced as the recipient of the prestigious Melbourne Prize for Literature in 2021, awarded every three years to a "Victorian published author whose body of published work has made an outstanding contribution to Australian literature and to cultural and intellectual life" (Melbourne Prize). The Melbourne Prize, then, awards an author not only for the quality of the work published but also for the author's more transcendent contribution to national culture, raising the question of how an author [End Page 24] makes such a "contribution" to "cultural life." The word "contribution" signals an active role and points to a dual purpose of art in both reflecting and shaping a culture. In a line that is oft referenced in discussions of the purpose of art, Hamlet instructs the players that the purpose of playing is to "hold, as 'twere, the mirror to nature" (3.2.20), showing "the very age and body of the time his form and pressure" (3.2.22). In other words, the great purpose of art is to present as exact an image as possible of the present times. Of course, Hamlet knew that art does much more than merely mirror—that a skillfully acted scene can have a material effect on those who consume it, as he hopes will happen to his uncle (3.1.583–85). In fact, it is only through such storytelling—Hamlet refers to the players as "the abstract and brief chronicles of the time" (2.2.520)—that Hamlet can obtain a seemingly unrecoverable truth. In order to have such an effect, though, artists must not limit themselves to reflecting that which is pleasant: in addition to showing "virtue her own feature," artists must also show "scorn her own image" (3.2.21). It is in showing that which is scorned, all vice and meanness and human frailty, that art has a transformative effect on its audience. Christos Tsiolkas is certainly an author whose work shows scorn its own image. Most of his works reflect those parts of a culture—of Australian culture, of European culture, of Judeo-Christian culture—that often remain hidden: the pornographic, the scatological, the profane. As Tsiolkas himself asserted at the beginning of a 2014 essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books, "I didn't want to write polite books because what I wanted to say was not polite" (qtd. in Zuckerman). Put more bluntly, Jeffrey Zuckerman notes that Tsiolkas's "books...