The Vapour Trail

My interest in history began as a child, I think, with stories my grandmother told me of her life at Hanging Rock, outside the tiny town of Nundle in northwestern New South Wales. There were stories of her wicked stepmother, of the stepmother’s former husband poisoning himself with strychnine, of animosity between Protestants and Catholics in the town, of weary rides by horseback over fields to school, and of learning the nomenclature in the butcher-trade with her grandparents, helping them hook up the cuts of meat and watching the ritual sharpening of the knives. They had the dark contours of a fairy-tale, these stories, but they were also fleshed out with innumerable details of ‘life back then’, both the exoticism and mundanity of which whet my interest. I have always wanted to sit down and record more of these stories, imagining some future spacious time in which she and I might sit for hours and pick over them together. But of course, that spacious time does not come of its own accord. She’s recuperating from heart surgery and in another city now, and it seems further away than ever.

My grandmother gave me a local history of the Nundle region not only ago, which I have only flicked through occasionally since. There is a companion volume which she also gave me, which seems to be comprised chiefly of the text written on headstones in the local cemetery, supplemented in some cases by anecdotes or reports from court proceedings. One of these reported the trial of a doctor who had either murdered or accidentally shot one of my grandmother’s relatives – I can’t remember the relationship now – with whom he was having an extramarital affair. Apart from this, however, the book makes for dully repetitive reading, and is almost entirely opaque as a window into people’s lives. But still, my grandmother treasures it: ‘a large part of my family’s history is in there, so look after it’, she said when she gave it to me. Really, the only way it functions as an historical record is as a prompt for stories ‘oh that guy [indicating a name and verbatim text from his headstone] – he was the school principal who used to…’. Local histories of that kind only come to life within the context of oral historical practice – and that, of course, is why I’ve only flicked over the two books to date. At the moment, they simply serve as a guilt-trip about how little we’ve talked about them together.

When a concept becomes hot, says Elspeth Probyn, it becomes untouched by wonder, unable to be discussed in a way that doesn’t render it banal. She was talking about affect when she said that: affect being one of those cultural studies buzzwords (like jouissance at the start of the 1990s) that are incredibly annoying to anyone not in the know. I always find myself caught in a two-edged reaction to hip concepts like that: drawn to them on the one hand, and on the other almost fearfully contemptuous. This is especially the case with affect, a concept which refers to experiences of bodily intensity unable to be readily accounted for through language. How could I not be drawn to such a notion, with my own interest gravitating irresistibly to the personal, to the subjective realm, and the experience of the unusual in the everyday? (In one sense, my whole project is concerned with intimations of the weird and unaccountable provided by ‘mystic theatre’). But at the same time, both the word and its hot status remind me instantly of affectation – and of course this immediately influences the way I relate to theoretical discussions of the concept.

The reason affect has become such a thing, I think (or at least was so a couple of years ago), is because of some of the grandiloquent claims made on its behalf. Defined as a realm of human experience unable to be caputred or contained by discourse, it was in some cases made to function as the basis for a whole new politics of being. If we all have moments in which our bodies react in ways that are unstructured by culturally-determined meaning (the argument went), then let us use them to elaborate new ways of feeling, thinking, resisting, relating to each other and the world! This is of course a highly appealing idea. Not withstanding the perceptive critique it has attracted (witness, for example, Claire Hemmings’ piece in Cultural Studies 19:5 2005), this is a claim I would want to make myself. But then the fear of affectation intervenes: the fear that speaking about affect in a theoretical way is simply another example of scholarship taking hold of the extra/ordinary and disinfecting it of its vibrancy.

Surely the whole enterprise of speaking about affect as a thing is perverse. Isn’t it an attempt to reify strange and fluid experiences of joy, revulsion, mystery, charisma, wonder, and the sublime? And surely there is something oxymoronic about the word itself: a conflict between the antiseptic sound of it when spoken, and the visceral phenomena it attempts to describe? That’s what Probyn was getting at, I guess, when she called for a movement away from Affect and towards an investigation of ‘affects’ on a micro-scale. And it also underlies Jeremy Gilbert’s insistence that scholarly interest in Affect is not in fact new, but rather a hip way of contributing to the humanities’ longrunning interest in ‘the irreducible sociality of human experience’.

When I was last at Mitchell Library, I went back to an 1870s newspaper I’d encountered briefly before: the Truth. What a nasty little paper. It’s hard to imagine an offering more different in tone and content to the upstanding goldfield-town papers I’ve been reading from the same period (papers such as the Ballarat Courier and the Mount Alexander Mail). The latter wrote consistently of temperance meetings and school concerts, exuding throughout the earnest fragrance of shoe-polish and altar flowers. The Truth was an altogether more malodorous creature, reeking of the gutters and hotels of Sydney’s CTB (central theatrical district). Its proprietors were W Drysdale and Bob Avery, neither of whom I’ve come across before.

Most of the Truth’s copy seems to have been written by Avery: a grubby, misogynistic anti-semite, who wrote (among other things) of punching a Jew in a late-night cafe, and being rebuffed by ‘prudish’ barmaids. Not surprisingly, given his penchant for theatres and nightlife, Avery was as contemptuous of provincial society as he was of conventional morality. The sanctimony of the events reported in the Ballarat Courier would have drawn either a snort or tirade from this self-proclaimed provocateur. Witness his attack on a ‘puny country rag’ (the Cumberland Times) which dared to criticise the Truth:

‘As a general rule, I do not trouble to jump on worms, but the cool effrontery of the scurrilous newspaper abortion that vomits its filth and nonsense upon the few residents of the Cumberland district, tempts me to mildly rebuke a drivelling, struggling journal that generally only merits a pitying smile’.

The Truth gives us a window into Sydney’s seamy side in the 1870s, delivered in a darker voice (it seems) than the muckraking papers Kirsten McKenzie writes about: the Satirist and the Omnibus, published in mid-century Sydney.  Bob Avery’s editorials were unashamedly urban in their character and mode of expression – not for him the elevation of bush life or rural simplicity that would later characterise Australian bohemian writing. ‘I don’t often hanker for mild enjoyments – something fierce and thrilling usually suits me better’, he wrote. Like the 1890s bohemians, however, the city life he depicted was modelled very obviously on overseas examples: on the New York depicted in James Gordon Bennett-style sensational journalism, and the London of the slum exposé.

Here I was thinking that the modernisation of popular theatre in Australia meant the disappearance of rowdy audience practices. But even in the twentieth century, audiences at Harry Clay’s vaudeville shows were rowdy as they come. ‘Should the audience react unfavourably – usually by roaring their disgust until the whole building shook’, a performer recalled, ‘the artist was given his pay and sent on his way’. There were brickies at North Sydney’s Coliseum who spent the whole time ‘bellowing or shouting their disapproval and delight’, and coalmining audiences on the Hunter Valley circuit who did much the same. Audiences at the Newtown Bridge Theatre were fiercer yet. ‘There would scarcely be a night when our strong-arm squad would not have to quell a fracas’, remembered a regular cast member. ‘Many are the teeth I’ve seen splattered around the floor in the old days’.

(This material comes from Clay Djubal’s evocative work on Harry Clay, in this case his paper ‘From minstrel tenor to vaudeville showman: Harry Clay, “a friend of the Australian perfomer”, Australasian Drama Studies, 34 (April 1999): 10-24).

The idea for my current project came from an interest in the explosion of so-called ‘New Age’, ‘pyschic’ or ‘mystic’ explorations of the universe taking place over the last decade or more. The sheer quantity of online commentary on mystic phenomena and belief is stunning when you start looking for it. So too the multitude of therapeutic-cum-religious industries surrounding the ‘New Age’. As critic Victoria Nelson points out, too, since the 1990s a there’s been a slew of TV series and films featuring ghosts, vampires, the sixth sense, the supernatural, and the X-Filesesque paranormal. I’m intrigued by the parallels between this kind of DIY religion today and what took place in the second half of the nineteenth century, in Australia and elsewhere in the Anglo world. There was an efflorescence of interest then in non-materialist explanations of reality – but while today the internet, TV and film seem to drive so much of the interest in mystic things, back then it was popular performance: the specialty acts in minstrel or vaudeville theatre, sideshows and circuses, and a mixture of lectures, stereoscopic shows, public seances and mesmerist displays.

I’m interested in the fact that popular performance has long been a site in which alternative notions of reality and religion are played out for a number of reasons. The first is because it buys into the whole question of the relationship of popular culture to understandings of modernity. What is significant about the fact that popular performance has long staged ghosts, spirits, and kooky explanations for the universe, and that this was particularly the case in the period of oft-described ‘modern secularisation’ in late nineteenth and early twentieth century western culture? Are there lessons to be learned from this in terms of our own understandings of modernity and postmodernity today?

The stage and screen are crucial to understandings of the modern – most forcibly film when it appeared in the 1890s, but also vaudeville and theatre. Proliferating claims about reality were also a hallmark of the late nineteenth century: from the fascination with so-called Modern Spiritualism, to the controversy caused by scientific agnosticism, to the disavowal for theological orthodoxy by social Christian movements, to a plethora of claims about mesmeric fluids, Z-rays, mental telepathy and clairvoyance. Because of this, audience participation in performances which showcased new claims about reality gives us a window into the popular experience of modernity at the time.

The key to my approach here is an interest in how audiences related to the kinds of mystic theatre that I’ve mentioned so far. I’m not interested so much in what performers thought, or in what the hard-core devotees of certain movements such as spiritualism did or thought. My interest is in a broader demographic than that. I want to use audience participation in popular forms of mystic theatre to investigate how ordinary people were negotiating the celebrated stand-off between religion and science in the post-Darwin era, and what they understood the modern universe to be.

I’ve been reading Peter Bailey’s 1998 collection of essays in fits and starts for some time now. Each time I do, I find something startling or inspirational. He has an extraordinary knack for condensing quantities of debate into a paragraph or less, and then cutting effortlessly through it. At one point, he talks about the impenetrable prose which characterises so much of the postmodern history written in the 1980-90s. ‘At one end of the scale reified categories like ‘the social’ and ‘the popular’ march numbingly across the page’, he says, ‘while at the other end particularist studies become so involuted in the mining of meaning that they disappear up their own text’. (Ouch).

So much postmodern historiography of the 1990s was concerned with dismantling class as an important category of analysis. In such texts, as Bailey says, ‘social identity… starts with the self, a multiple subject constructed by language…, a self for whom class may be one narrative thread among many’. Yet if class is ‘an imagined or invented phenomenon… it must still be imagined or invented out of something which includes material being or experience, however represented’. Bailey’s work takes account of some of the other narrative threads making up the identities of the people he writes about. But it insists nonetheless that ‘the mark of class sticks like a burr in nineteenth-century society’, and that it cannot as such be airily dismissed.

I recently had a paper published in Labour History which waded through the linguistic work on class produced by Joan Wallach Scott and Gareth Stedman Jones and Patrick Joyce et al. In it, I agonised over the fact that class was at once a linguistic invention and an identity which responded to material circumstances. And now here is this easy navigation of that minefield, written years ago, which I neglected to read before I wrote my paper. I’m not sure about the metaphor Bailey uses (a mark sticking like a burr?), but I am about what it expresses. However much a thing of imagination, class is imagined out of something, and it remains significant to the nineteenth century as a ‘potent vector’ of social difference and identity.

Patrick Joyce’s The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism in the City is a curiously impermeable thing. I keep picking it up and beginning to read, and then somehow my mind slips off it – none of what I’m glancing over sticks, and I put it down again. His line of inquiry seems obtuse to me: he says that he’s interested in investigating governmentality in the nineteenth-century city. All I can think when I hear that is ‘so why should I be interested? And are you really interested yourself?’ The text doesn’t have the polemic energy which animates other Joyce works I’ve read and found so valuable (Visions of the People and Democratic Subjects).

According to one reviewer of The Rule of Freedom, Joyce’s aim is to ‘understand how, in the physical context of the nineteenth-century city, new types of persons, temporalities, spaces, and practices were molded that rejected older forms of unapologetic coercion and led individuals to acquiesce voluntarily in a new regime of ordering and discipline they came to associate with the experience of being free’. Okay, so that helps. The book in itself is the story of the paradox of urban liberalism: the fact that it sought escape from an overtly authoritarian society, but that the freedom it created can only be talked about in relative terms, in inverted commas, and a sardonic tone of voice. Perhaps that is why the book doesn’t grab me. What, after all, has been more dispiriting and paralysing than that Foucauldian idea that freedom and governance go hand in hand, that ‘freedom’ (said sardonically) is the best thing one might hope for?  And there is also something discombulating about the book’s material, as it jumps wildly from discussions of maps and statistics-gathering by urban liberals, to the building of sewerage and rubbish-removal infrastructure, to the experience of individuals walking about in the city. As that reviewer also says: ‘as with many recent exercises in poststructualist history, there is a notable absence of actual people in Joyce’s book. For all his celebration of the contingent and the local, his analysis is often disappointingly abstract’.

The one point where The Rule of Freedom grabs me is in the chapter wonderfully and grandiloquently-entitled  ‘The Republic of the Streets’. In it, he discusses Manchester’s street-singers, and also its ‘free-and-easies’ in the late nineteenth century: pubs where musical entertainment and cheap food was offered. In London, the free-and-easies were replaced by commercial music halls in the 1850s and especially the 1860-70s, but this transition never happened in Manchester. The free-and-easies continued to pit professional, semi-professional and amateur singers alongside each other, and their audiences generally prioritised drink and sociability over the musical acts themselves. Audience members faced each other rather than the stage or the performers, and throughout each act they continued to talk and move about. ‘There was none of the decorum, or the fixed attention, of the commercial music hall, where the performer was separated from the audience’. And all the drinking, talking, eating, smoking and noisy singing gave the free-and-easy ‘a sort of sensual overload…, something akin to being in the streets of the city, or to the fair’.

Up until now, most of what I’ve been reading and saying about late 19thC popular culture has concerned the development of highly commercialised cultural industries, with the professional performers and expectations of ‘fixed attention’ from audience members that came with them. Now here is this reminder that what happens in the metropolis isn’t necessarily what happens elsewhere, and that modernisation was always uneven.

 (Note for self: find Philomen Eva’s ‘Popular song and social identity in Victorian Manchester’, PhD, University of Manchester, 1996).

My last entry makes me think now of three photographs I looked at in Sydney’s Mitchell Library last Friday. They were taken by a studio photographer in the ‘golden city’ of Ballarat, Victoria, 1875-6 (well, there wasn’t any other kind of photographer then, of course). And they depict stage magicians of the day: Ira and William Davenport, the American conjuror-spiritualists, and more intriguingly, a woman known as ‘Madame Cora, magicienne’.

In that last entry, I wrote about the bewildering rapidity of cultural change in Australian goldfields towns between the 1850s and 1880s. What happened to the plebeian excess evident on goldtown streets, I wondered? The Mitchell photographs suggest that what happened there was also happening throughout Anglo culture – this being the development of ‘emergent culture industries’ such as the music hall and theatre. From the 1870s, popular culture still answered to the ‘ritual promptings of an indigenous custom, old and newly forged’ (so historian Peter Bailey tells us). It retained ‘a populist address akin to the pseudo-gemeinschaft of the publican and the prostitute’. But it melded these with ‘the slicker formulations of mass or middlebrow commercial confection’, and much of it played out in purpose-built venues rather than on the streets.

The setting of the Ballarat photographs is suggestive of these developments. In each, the magician / magicienne leans against a classical balustrade, or else on an ornately-carved bureau, staring serenely to one side. The Davenports are dressed in formal attire: a double-breasted coat in William’s case, and a three-piece suit in Ira’s. Australian newspaper reports of the brothers similarly played up their gentlemanly appearance, as if this was sufficiently novel to draw comment (or sufficiently important to their audiences to require note). But of course these people came from a performance tradition which had seen more roisterous days. They grew up on performances in public halls, fairs, sideshows, and on the street. The memory of those days, and the performances practices that came with them, would have been present, and at times deliberately invoked, in their shows. And even if there was a shift away from street culture in the Creswicks of the 1870-80s, it could not have meant the wholesale disappearance of its forms.

I’ve just finished a paper based on research I carried out before beginning my postdoc here at UQ. It’s about masculinity: well, actually it’s about the late nineteenth century equivalent of the masculinity you find in Rotary Clubs in country towns or middling suburbs today. In the paper I look at William Guthrie Spence, one of the key players in the New Unionism and the growth of the political labour movement in 1890s Australia. For all his blather about mateship and the heroic qualities of Australian bushmen, Spence was a provincial father-of-nine who believed that civic service and religious feeling were all-important for a man. For most of his life, he lived in the Victorian goldfields town of Creswick, arriving there as a boy from Scotland in the 1850s. By the 1870-80s, the town was full of civic institutions: churches, mutual improvement societies, choirs, citizen militias, friendly societies, temperance groups, trade unions – and Spence was involved in a goodly number of them. Spence’s sense of what men should be had exactly that earnest, striving, morally serious air you associate with provincial progress societies or Lion’s/Rotary Clubmen, admixed with the more openly devout language of a lay preacher from the mid-nineteenth century.

I find it hard to reconcile this god-fearing, provincial picture of 1870s Creswick with the one I’ve encountered of goldfields society thus far in 1850-60s theatre memoirs. All those descriptions of street-hawkers, of miners with their guns in red sashes at the hip, of candlelight flickering in gin-bottles of an evening, of drunken hijinx on horseback in the wee hours – how does this marry with the life Spence knew as a preacher-unionist and family man? These towns were places of extraordinarily rapid cultural change, is all I can say. In two decades they went from the raw tents and elbow-jostle of the goldfields to places of a multi-layered civic life, complete with public monuments in the streets and earnest plaques on the communal buildings. Women were hugely outnumbered there in their first years, as you’d expect, and yet by the 1870s they were more or less equivalent in numbers to men in at least some goldfields towns. But was there still a street culture trading in echoes of carnival and excess in the Creswick and Castlemaine and Clunes, all Victorian goldfields towns, in the 1870-80s and beyond? Was there still evidence of the gin and the mayhem of not-too-much-earlier years? I need to find readings soon which give me some sense of this.

I’m reading a book by my colleague, Mel Gregg, called Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices (2006). As a novice to the field of cultural studies (up until now, my institutional affiliations have been with historians), the book demonstrates to me exactly what Gregg wants it to: that is, that cultural studies has something special to offer the humanities in the impassioned, unconventional voices of its key practitioners. I’m really enjoying the attention she gives to the formalistic aspects of these people’s work – Meaghan Morris’ reliance on anecdote to elucidate a point, for example - and to show how such things are significant to the force and appeal of their ideas. Her sustained interest in the tone of certain critics’ work is also new for me, accompanied by a contemplation of what this brings to the political project of cultural studies. Morris’ tone is presented in a wonderfully apt way, for example: she appears in this book as a difficult, ever-provocative friend, now personable and anecdotal, now spiky and intractable, given to outbursts of aggressively direct and personal criticism – difficult, but valuable because of it.

Reading this book made me think about the inept way so much scholarly work is judged within the academic community. The attention is usually on the arguments or ideas themselves: do they make ‘a significant contribution to the field’? Can they possibly be said to be ’groundbreaking’? Certainly groundbreaking is a good thing: who would not want that in every work they read, were it possible? But what is also of value is the way an idea is put, the way a writer approaches or expresses it, and the extent to which her tone or style ignites her readers.

I am about to do a huge temporal shift here, as this point makes me think of another book I’m reading at the moment – something worlds away from the new-millennial intensity of Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices - this being American historian Richard Wightman Fox’s Trials of Intimacy (1999).  The book itself is an instance of how a scholar’s voice can hook you in – I’m reading it in part for the pleasure of Fox’s lush, gorgeously descriptive prose. But he also talks about the significance of oratory and rhetoric to nineteenth-century Protestant American culture. Victorian Americans would sit for hours at a stretch listening to speakers teach, inspire or entertain them. We need to think of these audiences as ‘fundamentally different’ to audiences today, Fox says. ‘They were informed critics of rhetoric, gesture and voice… Whole vocabularies were available to describe the ”timbre” and “register” and “method” of orators whose words could not be mechanically recorded’.

Fox cites one commentator at the end of the century who talked about the value of really good oratory. What made good oratory was the mode of delivery even more than the ideas being expressed, he said. ‘The test of oratory’ was ‘the power of the speaker to impart to his audience his life, to impress on them his conviction, animate them with his purpose’. This is rather too masterful a description for my liking, but it emphasises what most nineteenth-century audiences would have recognised: the power of the affective voice.