Brains, Beauty and Balls: Eleanor Catton's uncompromising assault on New Zealand's neoliberal regime pushed all of the Right's political panic-buttons. Shock-jock Sean Plunket verbally slapped her down with the accusation of being both a "traitor" and "an ungrateful hua". Such over-the-top responses have vividly exposed the crude "sociocultural logic" of New Zealand's unique iteration of the neoliberal project.
ELEANOR CATTON was always going to be trouble. With her fine-china good-looks, transparent intelligence and uncharacteristic (for a Kiwi)
articulateness, she was a political reprimand just waiting to happen. One had
only to read her books or hear her speak to know that the same intuitive grasp
of the human condition which secured her the Man Booker Prize was never
going to let her line-up alongside the vacuous celebrities that accessorise the
power brokers of the Right.
Catton’s beauty is a significant factor in the current
controversy. No matter how unfair, a regular set of human features confers a
very special kind of power upon those fortunate enough to possess them. In a culture
saturated with advertising imagery, beauty has come to enjoy a mutually
reinforcing relationship with authority. In a nutshell: beauty is believed,
therefore, beauty sells. It also carries a potent sexual charge. Like it or
not, messages, of whatever kind, have a much better chance of making it through
our defences when they’re delivered by George Clooney or Scarlet Johansson.
That is why the Right becomes more than usually incensed
when it is challenged by good-looking opponents. They know that their messages will
reach the public unfiltered, and that their audience will not be distracted by bad
hair or crooked teeth. It’s been that way since (at least) 1960, when the
handsome, tanned and supremely confident John F. Kennedy easily overcame the jowly
pallor and five o’clock shadow of a perspiring Richard Nixon in the first
televised presidential debate. (Interestingly, those listening to the debate on
the radio gave the victory to Nixon.)
The other great sin the Right could lay at Catton’s door is
the near faultless diction of an upper-middle-class girl raised in the comfort
and security of a loving academic family. Accents are an instant indicator of
one’s social origins and a usually reliable guide to one’s place in society’s pecking-order.
Deploying cut-glass vowels has always been an excellent way of putting the lower
orders at a disadvantage. Under no circumstances, however, should they be deployed
against members of one’s own class!
The third strike against Catton was her possession of a rich
vocabulary and the wit to deploy it with jarring political accuracy. In other
words, she was an intellectual. Even worse, she obviously felt no special obligation
to hide her intellectual brilliance under a bushel.
The Right loathes intellectuals. The life of the mind offers
little to those who place their faith in tradition and prejudice. Conservatives
are, consequently, the natural enemies of critical thinking and evidence-based
decision-making. A young, attractive, well-spoken and intellectual woman
speaking truth to power will always be a cause for concern on the Right. But, when
that woman is also an internationally celebrated Man Booker Prize winner,
‘concern’ doesn’t nearly cover it.
One suspects that to the lengthening list of her sins
Catton’s critics were especially keen to add the sin of deceitfulness. How
could someone from such a good family; so well-spoken and accomplished
academically; the winner of a prestigious international literary prize; turn
out to be a bloody leftie ?! Did the NZ Herald know about these
“progressive” tendencies when they advanced her as a New Zealander of the Year?
Surely not! And did Creative New Zealand know, when they were doling out all
those grants to the little minx, that she was going to turn up at the Greens’
campaign launch and endorse them? One
certainly hopes not.
And then, of course, there was Catton’s use of the term
“neoliberal” to describe the governments of New Zealand, Canada and the UK.
It is one of the peculiar quirks of neoliberalism that its
adherents not only vehemently deny that they are neoliberals, but
also insist that neoliberalism itself only exists in the minds of economically
illiterate leftists. Their denial is born of their need not to be
thought of as ideologues. The neoliberal project is, above all else, an effort
to have the market regarded as a natural phenomenon – no more amenable to human intervention than
the weather. Their great objective is to have their highly contentious ideas
accepted, finally, as simple common-sense, thus becoming the unremarked wallpaper of
twenty-first century life. This cannot happen if people are encouraged to view
them as the ideologically-driven zealots they truly are.
It is here that Catton’s gender, her beauty, diction and
intellectual prowess become entangled in what the Australian sociologist,
Professor Raewyn Connell, describes as “an embedded masculinity politics in the
neoliberal project”.
“With a few exceptions”, writes Connell in Understanding Neoliberalism, “neoliberal
leadership is composed of men. It’s treasured figure, ‘the entrepreneur,’ is
culturally coded masculine. Its assault on the welfare state redistributes
income from women to men and imposes more unpaid work on women as carers for
the young, the old, and the sick. Its attack on ‘political correctness’ and its
rollback of affirmative action specifically undermine the gains of feminism. In
such ways, neoliberalism from the 1980s on offered middle-class men an indirect
but effective solution to the delegitimation of patriarchy and the threat of
real gender equality.”
The particular venom of the Right’s reaction to Catton’s
criticism of John Key’s “neoliberal” government – exemplified by Sean Plunket’s
vicious verbal backhanders: “traitor” and “ungrateful hua” – derives from the
very special character of the “masculinity politics” embedded in the New
Zealand neoliberal project.
As a political phenomenon, competing for power in democratic states, neoliberalism is constantly in search of viable electoral vectors. Under John
Key, the vector selected is the overwhelmingly male, determinedly
anti-intellectual, painfully inarticulate, culturally moronic and sports-mad portion
of the New Zealand population. The part that reacts with frightening emotional
fury against everything Eleanor Catton stands for. Theirs is the
militant egalitarianism of the “ordinary bloke” who would instantly identify in
Catton’s unblemished features, rounded vowels and polysyllabic vocabulary the absolute
embodiment of an “up-herself middle-class bitch”.
Catton was wrong to invoke New Zealand’s 'tall-poppy syndrome'
as the explanation for her personal cultural Calvary. A much more appropriate term has been coined by the
South Korean sociologist, Jesook Song. Eleanor Catton is a victim of the
“sociocultural logic” of Kiwi neoliberalism.
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Monday, 2 February 2015.
