Interview #155 — James Jiang

by Robert Wood

James Jiang is a writer and academic based in Melbourne. While his scholarly work focuses on literary modernism and philosophical pragmatism, he also writes on Australian poetry, critical culture, and sport.

James is currently working on a book about the therapeutic imagination in modern literature.

James spoke to Robert Wood about criticism in Australia, good scholarly writing, and tennis.

How did you come to be a writer, scholar, critic? What did you read growing up and how did your early education shape you?

My earliest memories of reading and writing involve being made to memorise the short stories in my parents’ copies of Longman’s New Concept English. They have since been thrown out, but I still recall the reverential familiarity with which my parents referred to the books as the ‘New Con’; they were something of a migrant institution (the 1997 edition was prepared specifically for Chinese learners). Each volume had a different coloured cover with a white band at the top and four orbs indicating the different levels of advancement. The very first story I committed to memory was about a man who, inured to sleeping in on the weekends, forgets to collect his aunt from the train station; another more complex story had to do with a child telling her parents that their newly-acquired abstract painting had been hung upside down.

As an adolescent, I was more interested in music and computer/video games than books. I mostly pursued these interests vicariously through friends and magazines such as Hyper, PC Powerplay, Rolling Stone, and The Source (around this time, my parents decided to become self-employed and ran a grocery-shop-cum-newsagent). This was my earliest exposure to critical writing and there is probably something about this early and consistent exposure to the communicability of enthusiasm (‘the holiness of the heart’s affections’ as Keats might say) that has never left.

It was only really at the end of high school that I developed a self-image that included literature. I had a number of extraordinarily generous English teachers, one of whom distributed an entire dossier when Jacques Derrida died in 1994 (I didn’t read it). Another ended up publishing an award-winning memoir that included an account of his disaffection at Cambridge. It was also about this time that I began to realize that my lack of sexual capital as a Chinese-Australian could be somewhat (though not entirely) compensated for by the cultural capital of seeming bookish. Literature was a form of upward mobility in more ways than I had initially imagined.

We both had metropolitan post-graduate educations. I was at Penn in Philadelphia and you were at Cambridge. I felt I came into a different consciousness there. I became Australian because I was outside here, but I also felt more Asian because I was interpreted as diasporic unlike growing up in Perth. This is to say nothing of the classes, teachers and texts one studies. Tell us about the formation of a personal and intellectual identity while studying overseas?

I arrived at Cambridge after studying in America for four years (I took my BA at Yale) so I think I was a little confusing to people (after four years in England, I was still being referred as Asian-American). The British were used to a particular kind of Australian—white and usually pursuing a law degree—and this made me embrace my ostensible Americanness all the more since I had left Sydney for New Haven to escape becoming a lawyer. But as much as this ‘passing’ allowed me to forego ‘colonial’ status, I was also made aware of the gaucheries of Ivy-League Americans who, as one friend put it, treated Cambridge like a kind of finishing school. One reason I stayed on to do the PhD at Cambridge rather than returning to the States was to tear up this particular script.

The historian and conservative villain David Starkey once said on TV that ‘most of Britain is a monoculture. You think London is Britain, it isn’t.’ Cambridge isn’t London either. My first night there, I was walking with some friends past a group of teens huddled together at a bus terminal when one of them broke out into the Pokémon theme. This was one of the wittier and more innocuous instances in a larger series of ‘aggressions’ (both ‘micro-’ and ‘macro-’) which meant that Brexit didn’t really come as a surprise. (Lest this sound too grim: I will also say that after a friend introduced me to Shanghai Family Restaurant, Cambridge remains one of the few places outside my parents’ home where I have felt comfortable speaking Shanghainese.)

Intellectually, Cambridge was a place where I unraveled—not entirely a bad thing. I read more broadly than I ever had before and became more uncertain about the kind of scholar and writer I wanted to be (or was capable of becoming). Like many young aspiring men of letters, I had wanted to work on philosophy and poetry; my grand plan was to write the definitive phenomenological interpretation of Wallace Stevens before my supervisor warned me off it. This seemed strange at the time (I had asked specifically to work with him on the basis of his philosophical nous), but I now see that he was trying to push me towards a more ‘immanent’ style of criticism—to tease the philosophical implications out of poetry rather than arrange a marriage between the two. This upset the intellectual hierarchies in my head in a way that has helped me feel less ashamed about writing about poetry for its own sake and more skeptical about the kinds of intellectualism that deign to patronise poetry.

You are in Melbourne now, and one recent comment you made that I found striking was ‘indifference may just amount to a distinctly Australian style of cosmopolitanism.’ Were you indifferent in coming back to Australia? And what else do you notice about ‘home’?

I was terrified of coming back to Australia—without a job, without a plan, without any witnesses to my existence on those other continents.

It also wasn’t clear to me what I was coming back to; Australia was a place I had left at the age of eighteen. My job interview at the University of Melbourne was my first time in Melbourne. We never travelled or went on holidays in my childhood so outside of the suburban enclaves in which I grew up (to the south and west of Sydney) the rest of the country was very much unknown to me. Teaching Australian literature has filled the gap a little, but there are still significant parts of its histories and cultures (especially with respect to First Nations peoples) about which I still have a lot to learn. I don’t think I’ve lived a sheltered life, but this is one area where the charge is just.

What have I noticed about home? Criticism is much less institutionalised in Australia than abroad. There’s also less of an anxiety about being ‘discriminating’ because those subtle distinctions on which critics habitually plume themselves don’t seem to matter as much in a culture that considers itself so marginalised. This produces its own set of anxieties, but it can also be freeing, as Ivor Indyk pointed out recently in his observations about the ‘provincial imagination’ in contemporary Australian writing. I agree with Indyk that poetry, the main province of my activities as a critic, has peculiar advantages here, though not just because of ‘its nimbleness and its powers of compression and expansion’. The prevailing indifference towards poetry (doubly provincialised) has meant that it is relatively untouched by the middlebrow pressure chamber in which most contemporary fiction gets moulded; as a consequence, it’s one of the most unpredictable and excitingly baroque outgrowths of the literary landscape. Poetry seems to me to epitomise ‘agency in exclusion’ (in Nam Le’s deft phrase).

There is a lot of good work happening here when one looks for it, and I have enjoyed reading your pieces in Sydney Review of Books. These seem to be meta-critical and engage with a wide range of works. Tell us about the type of criticism you like including influences, books, and moments in history? Is this the kind you try to write yourself?

My tastes in criticism have been fairly predictably shaped by my education at American and British institutions influential for the development of ‘close reading’ (practical or ‘new’ criticism) as a pedagogy. To get a bit more granular: the single most formative influence on my thinking and writing has been David Bromwich, whose two most recent books I reviewed in the SRB. His writing models the kind of generalist intelligence that used to be associated with studying English but which has now been largely driven out of academia. This kind of intelligence brings an intensity of attention trained through literary encounters to the scrutiny of non-literary experience. It’s still alive in the work of, say, Mark Greif, whose Against Everything is the closest thing we currently have to what used to be called ‘sage writing’, a morally serious strand of cultural criticism. In a more strictly literary vein, I have yet to find a single essay more edifying than Barbara Everett’s essay on Auden in showing the proportion of intimacy and skepticism a critic should bring to their subject.

I think my sense of what criticism should do has been mostly shaped (if forced to draw a crude circle around a body of texts) by what Cambridge students are taught to call the ‘moralists’. This is usually taken to mean writing of some philosophical consequence, but even that’s too strict. It’s an amorphous category of writers whose moral vision is tied to their aesthetic sensibility. This characteristic doesn’t belong to any single tradition; those that have influenced me include: the American pragmatist (Emerson, William and Henry James, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Kenneth Burke), neo-Wittgensteinian (Stanley Cavell, Eric Griffiths, and Cora Diamond), the Continental existential (Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch). Susan Sontag and Lionel Trilling have also had a chastening effect on my prose.

Criticism is much less institutionalised in Australia than abroad.

There’s also less of an anxiety about being ‘discriminating’ because those subtle distinctions on which critics habitually plume themselves don’t seem to matter as much in a culture that considers itself so marginalised.

There was also your Southerly blog on Christopher Lasch where you called him ‘a populist intellectual.’ You exist in a similar space - how do you bridge writing for scholarly and general audiences?

I think good scholarly writing has always been/should always be able to reach a wider audience and given the precarious conditions under which so many younger academics work, we may see more academically-trained writers on non-specialist platforms. Even within academia, I think there’s a turn towards less specialised styles of writing, especially in the enthusiasm (though it may be petering out) for the turn towards ‘post-critique’ (where an attitude of engagement and absorption is preferred over one of suspicion and alienation).

It’s important for critics fully to inhabit the culture they’re in. Lydia Davis says in one of her recent essays how important it is for writers to take public transport as a way of exposing themselves to the habits of speech outside their immediate social circles. This isn’t just about learning to craft dialogue—it’s about being attuned to the full repertoire of gestures and tones available in a language at a particular historical moment. It’s the same for critics. The better the critic, the more easily they move between different registers of articulation and experience, the more felicitously they translate the esoteric qualities of writing at the margins in the terms of the prevailing idiom.

This leads me to some of your tennis commentary for The Saturday Paper, on Ash Barty and Nick Kyrgios, both of which connect character to athleticism to audience. I will also say that you are not alone among literary critics who love the game, and, for Australian poets I can think of Kate Middleton, Sarah Holland-Batt, and Luke Beesley (who has a laconic and deadly game). What is the essential appeal of tennis and writing about sport?

Alecia, my co-writer (and partner), and I talk about this a little in the Kyrgios piece, but sport is one of the few areas of contemporary life (cooking may be another) where the standard idiom is mock-heroic, allowing for a kind of hyperbole, a style of purplish prose that is eschewed in most other forms of respectable middlebrow writing, whether in fiction or journalism.

It’s also an area in which critical acumen is both encouraged and valued. Part of this has to do with a prevailing assumption that sport is so politically and ideologically neutral that spectators can afford to be discriminating without being discriminatory; that as the expression of natural endowments, sport constitutes the one genuine language of meritocracy that we have. Obviously, nothing about sport (from its ownership structures to its differential salaries to media coverage) exempts it from the structures of domination that govern other aspects of culture. But I also don’t think that the ideal sport stands for—an ideal in which one can speak of human excellence without sociological reduction—is necessarily a bad or corrupt one. It’s certainly an ideal that sport is much closer to approximating than art.

I’m much more of a squash player; it’s Alecia who’s the true tennis athlete. But we’re both avid fans of the game and one of the joys of the Australian summer is being able to follow the trajectories of certain players through the run-up tournaments and then the main event. For a writer, tennis also gives plenty of opportunity for character portraiture: you’re not just observing a player’s game, but their behavior between points: how they relate to the umpire, the crowd, their box, etc. There’s a micro-drama in every gesture, however small.

When I look at your practice, there seems to be a global, cosmopolitan, meta-textual impulse that sits nicely with reaching a broad audience who cares about local figures. Perhaps that is a good prelude to your review of Pi O’s Heide for Australian Book Review. Pi O’s obituary of Les Murray talks about Murray’s ‘appropriation and usurping of the ethnic debate.’ What do you make of the diversity of Australian literary criticism now, and, perhaps of Australian poetry?

It’s interesting to me that criticism is one field where the ‘ethnic debate’ seems to have kicked off (I’m thinking in particular here of the fallout from The Sydney Morning Herald’s decision to award its five fellowships in arts/culture criticism to five white writers—two of whom have now resigned). I think all writers should be grateful for the greater vigilance about representation that has been made possible as a result of initiatives such as the Stella Count and Diversity Arts Australia’s Shifting the Balance report as well as smaller-scale projects like Ben Etherington’s Critic Watch pieces in the Sydney Review of Books. But for diversity to be more than a matter of ‘optics’ (or simply another neoliberal metric covering up practices of exclusion and exploitation), it has to be accompanied by broader structural changes.

Criticism in Australia exists within a delicate ecosystem; the preponderance of it is produced by people whose main line of work lies elsewhere—in publishing or academia or on the creative side of things. So criticism is only ever going to be as healthy and diverse as these adjacent fields. Moves such as the Australia Council’s defunding of the Sydney Review of Books and the Australian Book Review (about which you’ve written) are disastrous, but so is the government’s proposal to force prohibitive levels of debt on students wanting to study the humanities. Ultimately, the data generated by the Stella and Diversity Arts Australia surveys begins with the level of government expenditure on cultural and educational policies that expand the scope of equality of access to opportunity.

However, it has been heartening to see emerge from this debate some kind of consensus that criticism matters—not only as a domain that ought to operate on the same principles of equitable representation as other parts of culture, but also as a privileged site of consciousness-raising and cultural custodianship. I like the direction taken by Black Inc.’s Writers on Writers series: there are some inspired choices (Le on David Malouf, Christos Tsiolkas on Patrick White, Alice Pung on John Marsden) that break up the Anglo monopoly on the authors and issues central to discussions around a national literature—a literature that is only alive to the extent that it’s open to being re-made by elective affinities. But criticism is only one area where the diversification of cultural custodianship needs to take place. Poetry is another and PiO’s HEIDE is a significant event insofar as it performs the work of a poet laureate—even while pouring scorn on the very idea of a laureateship.

It’s important for critics fully to inhabit the culture they’re in.

Finally, what are you working on now in both an academic and popular sense? And when can we expect to see it?

It’s taken me about three years to re-think my dissertation and turn it into a book which I’ve tentatively titled Sage Modernism: Character, Pragmatism, and the Therapeutic Imagination. It argues that by turning character from a moral to a psychological category, pragmatist thinkers opened up new therapeutic possibilities that allowed modern poets and critics to re-think the place of imaginative writing in an increasingly specialised world. We ordinarily think of pragmatism as a crudely instrumentalist philosophy associated with the ‘cash-value’ theory of truth, but as I show, the question of ‘how to live’ and ‘what to do’ are central to its ethical vision and by extension, its literary legacy. I’m interested in how the poets and critics in this tradition have come to understand literature’s relationship to disciplined knowledge on the one hand and the varieties of edificatory experience that resist expertise (what we might call ‘wisdom’) on the other. I’m still working on the last two chapters (on Susan Sontag and Adam Phillips, respectively) and hope to have a completed manuscript early next year—which probably means it won’t see the light of day until 2025!

Outside of my academic writing, I’m hoping to continue my work reviewing criticism and poetry. I’ve just written up a review of three recent collections of Australian poetry (by Aidan Coleman, Jennifer McKenzie, and Stephen Kelen) which will appear in the Australian Book Review shortly. I’m also hoping to complete a piece on the poetics of the fence that began as a paper I presented at a symposium on contemporary Australian poetry. Forthcoming books I would love to review include: Beth Blum’s The Self-Help Compulsion, Rita Felski’s Hooked, Laura Heffernan and Rachel Buurma’s The Teaching Archive, and new poetry books by Fiona Sze-Lorrain and Bhanu Kapil.

Do you have any advice for emerging public intellectuals?

I’m not sure I’m qualified to give advice on this front. I suspect the most important public intellectuals didn’t set out to be public intellectuals. I suppose the advice I often give myself is to follow my nose intellectually and burrow down the rabbit holes, ignoring the presentist impulse to which most of our daily conversations and ephemeral commentary are captive. I often find I have more interesting things to say about the things going on in the world precisely because my mind has been free of them for a certain period.

Who are you inspired by?

At the earliest stages of my life: my parents and teachers. I’m inspired by Alecia, whose curiosity, love of language(s), and generosity (intellectual and otherwise) have been a constant spur to my thinking both on and off the page; she has done more than anyone to cure me of my parochialism (intellectual and otherwise). My sister turned down the emoluments of the legal profession to work on film; I’m inspired by her balancing of humility with ambition, discipline with imagination. Every now and then I come across a student who makes me think the discipline of English has a purpose and future after all.

What are you listening to?

The chronic under-stimulation of life under lockdown means that I’ve been listening to a lot of high-octane electronic pop tunes (see my playlist ‘BOP CITY’). Currently on high rotation: Charli XCX’s how i’m feeling now, Doja Cat’s Hot Pink, and Caroline Palochek’s Pang. Alice Longyu Gao is an artist I’ve recently discovered who’s giving me a lot of joy.

What are you reading?

My mind’s a bit all over the place at the moment (blame the end-of-semester marking), but on my bedside table I can see: Weil’s Gravity and Grace, A Susan Sontag Reader, Elias Canetti’s Auto da fé, Cathy Park Hong’s Engine Empire, and Emma Lew’s Crow College.

How do you practice self-care?

In the pre-pandemic days, I would go swimming quite regularly either at the Northcote Aquatic Centre or the pool at Melbourne Uni. Since lockdown started, I’ve been doing a lot of cycling and walking (I’ve always fancied myself bit of a suburban flâneur). Very few things are as satisfying as having a chat with someone on a walk. Baths have also done me a world of good since the temperature has dropped.

What does being Asian-Australian mean to you?

It means a whole lot of insider-outsider stuff that is both fun and infuriating. My mother used to express surprise that my Chinese face commanded any respect in an ‘English’ classroom. Because of the lockdown work-from-home situation, she heard me lecture and lead a tutorial for the first time and was taken aback by the tone of command in my voice. ‘They let you speak to them like that?’ she asked. I replied that it’s the only way to keep them in line.