By Jo Case
FICTION
Theory and Practice
Michelle de Kretser
Text, $32.99
“Geography is destiny,” states a character in Questions of Travel, the first of Michelle de Kretser’s two novels to win the Miles Franklin Award, in 2013. In the last decades of the 20th century, the novel shows, globalisation promised to disrupt this truth: a promise revealed as complex at best. Wherever we go, we carry our past. And when we remake ourselves, we build on the foundation of our origins. Theory and Practice, de Kretser’s seventh novel, extends her inquiry into how our selves are formed and remade.
One of the great joys of her novels is the way her vividly specific characters never exist in isolation, but are rooted in social context. In Questions of Travel, The Life to Come (winner of the 2017 Miles Franklin) and Scary Monsters, narration is shared, layering very different perspectives that brilliantly accumulate, revealing their characters more fully as they echo or contrast each other. In the solo-narrated Theory and Practice, this role is performed by the narrator’s conversation – and often argument – with a network of influences that help “build” her brain. They include her mother, her thesis supervisor, her friends and Virginia Woolf. The novel’s deep conversation with art and writers is also embedded in the text itself. A line from Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse – “Who will write the history of tears?” – recurs throughout; a refrain and statement of intent.
Theory and Practice opens with an Australian traveller in Europe, haunted by a careless childhood action that echoes our national disregard for First Nations lives. After a handful of pages, the story breaks off and its writer addresses us: “The novel I was writing stalled.” She segues into an essay about an Israeli military commander who used Situationist theory to devise a strategy to maximise the killing of Palestinian fighters, disregarding civilian casualties.
The writer-narrator tells us the essay sparked memories of her own experiences. She wants to understand “breakdowns between theory and practice” in her life, and decides to write in “a form that allow[s] for formlessness and mess”. She will, she proposes, “tell the truth” and “stop fearing shame”.
The intimacy of the confiding narratorial voice, the promise of “truth” and the front-cover photograph of the author all tease the idea of auto-fiction. But while the narrator and de Kretser moved from Sri Lanka to Australia at a similar age, myriad differences expose the confessional mode as technique rather than literal truth. (For example, the narrator’s family settled in Sydney, de Kretser’s in Melbourne, near St Kilda.)
Author Michelle de Kretser.Credit: Joy M Lai
The novel’s main action unfolds between Melbourne University and a community of artists and students in “violent, violently policed” St Kilda. It’s 1986: early desktop computers and mentions of “greenhouse gas”, AIDS, Chernobyl, Tainted Love and Annie Lennox. The narrator, whose name is only revealed late in the novel, has moved from Sydney to do a Masters on Virginia Woolf, working with the university’s red-lipsticked Designated Feminist.
The narrator and her friends agree Woolf “helped build my brain”, and A Room of One’s Own “explained my life”. They christen her “the Woolfmother”. But after the narrator is winded by Woolf’s diary description of a Sri Lankan national hero as “a mahogany-coloured wretch”, she questions her legitimacy as a literary hero.
Here, de Kretser joins other recent Australian novels in, like her narrator, “writing back” to Woolf. In Daisy and Woolf (2022), Michelle Cahill gave “a voice and a body” to Daisy, a marginalised Anglo-Indian character in Mrs Dalloway. And in This Devastating Fever (also 2022), Sophie Cunningham incorporated her process of writing a novel about Leonard Woolf into the novel itself, addressing an imaginary Virginia about, among other things, her racism and antisemitism. De Kretser masterfully juxtaposes this internal struggle with a sequence of phone calls from her narrator’s actual mother: a mirroring tangle of love and resistance, recognition and recoil: “Acknowledgement lay between denial and tearing down.”
The other key strand is a love triangle between the narrator, self-described “bohemian” mining engineering student Kit, and yellow-braided Olivia (who he’s in a “reconstructed relationship” with). The affair sparks after a screening of a film intimately documenting a woman’s year of pining over her ex-boyfriend, obsessing over the woman he left her for. “I didn’t know that this could be art,” the narrator (recovering from a similar situation) breathes, marvelling at “hearing [her] mind exposed”. She soon transfers her own obsession to Olivia, while aware it contradicts her feminism. She labels such contradictions, which also run throughout, “morbid symptoms”. In one of the most arresting images I can remember, they manifest as a bloodied tampon in a lasagne dish.
Though the narrator promised this novel would be messy – and it can be – that “mess” is always depicted with de Kretser’s characteristic precision. And the novel’s spare, fragmented structure elegantly incorporates its contradictory chorus of voices and ideas, which combine to suggest complex truths.
They are presented less as definitive answers than contributions to a deeper set of questions. How do we build our brains? What do we do when our heroes fail us? And what are the limits of storytelling and morality?
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