Michelle de Kretser, Theory and Practice.

 

- Michelle de Kretser's latest book is an intriguing mix of fact and fiction. It explores major issues on the 'theory' side such as modernism, feminism, racism, and colonialism, and others on the 'practice' side such as mothers, writers, lovers, friends, and enemies.

- It's hard to describe it as a memoir, as it indulges in the cliche of the unknown narrator. (However a name is dropped right at the end, for some reason).

- We're in the mid-80's when literary scholarship was heavily influenced by French poststructuralism which was conquering the humanities generally. Philosophers such as Derrida and Foucault popularised 'formlessness and mess'. Liquid and non-linear styles became an authentically female way of writing too.

- The narrator tells her life story in this faux-memoir. She was a pianist as a child and excelled at theory and practice. But at the age of eleven she was sexually abused by a music teacher and ditched the piano altogether.

- Her family emigrated to Australia from Ceylon when she was a teenager. She studied English literature at Sydney university and moved to Melbourne at the age of twenty-four. It was 1986 and Marxism and feminism were the thing, especially in Melbourne. She enrolled to complete a Masters on the novels of Virginia Woolf. Critics had become 'torturers', positing, demystifying, interrogating. (As a student in English literature in the 1970's at Sydney University I was immersed in the Leavis tradition of literary criticism, and D.H. Lawrence was my hero. But in Melbourne this liberal humanism was the enemy, and considered reactionary, and Lawrence 'destroyed').

- She shared a cheap flat in St Kilda, and was thrust into the social life all around her - the noise on the streets, the pubs, the sexual encounters in lanes, the prostitution and drugs. She was bright, she was popular, and she made good friends, male and female. And she continually experienced abject racism. She was also enduring a problematic relationship with her mother, and with her friend Olivia who was the fiancee of Kit with whom she was having an affair. So real life, the 'practice' was as torrid as the 'theory'.

- The central focus of her life however was theory. As the book proceeds we're immersed into the disruptive novels of Virginia Woolf. And Woolf's abject racism. ‘…the modernising trajectory of Woolf’s Englishwomen and the ongoing immiseration of the tea-pluckers’. She damns her last novel The Years as trapped in ‘the powerful fiction that the self-fulfilment of British women transcended the imperialism that enabled it’. Woolf was a terrible snob and ‘unforgivably rude about colonials’.

- As the book nears its end the friends move on, some overseas, they split from their partners, and some die tragically. She also tells the story of the celebrated Australian artist Donald Friend and his paedophilic abuse over many years in Ceylon and Bali.

- We're reminded at the end that reality is not like a novel with its well-worn narrative tropes, but is 'random and cruel'.

- Michelle de Kretser has written a 'novel/memoir' that is thoughtful and challenging and quite brilliant on many levels. It's confronting and loaded with intellectual heft. Just what we need in these tempestuous times.