Theory and practice of Michelle de Kretsser Review – Shame, Desire and the Ghost of Virginia Woolf | Michelle de Kretsser
THis book begins as an evocative and changing novel of time and place: a young man traveling to Switzerland, distracted by thoughts of a beautiful music teacher whom he met in London, recalls how, in his Australian childhood, He was evacuated to live with his grandparents in a sheep station in New South Wales during the Second World War. He follows a brief story of how the boy he pocketed an emerald ring belonging to his grandmother and threw him into the neighboring woods. Shame did not end there. A young indigenous maid was blamed for the flight, and he did not have the courage to intervene to save her from dismissal.
Just as you lose yourself in this immersive little story, however, its author, Michelle de Kretsser, intervenes to inform you that “at this stage, the novel I was writing has blocked”. She continues by explaining how the block of this writer was the product of his difficulties with the “theory and practice” of the title of her novel: The Gap between ideas on the novel – in particular those promoted by these French deconstructionists of the 1970s , and earlier by Virginie Woolf – and the impulse for the narration.
The solution of the Australian author of Sri Lankan origin is to put an end to the first story and tell another, perhaps linked, of a triangle anxious with friends at the University of Melbourne in 1986. The Second story reads as a confessional; If it is not autobiographical, from Kretsser wants it to seem. “Instead of a form and a disguise, I wanted a (fictitious) form which made it possible to train and of mess,” she writes. “It came to my mind that a way of finding this form could be to tell the truth.”
De Kretser’s recent novels have often overturned in this kind of ways. His latest book, FrighteningFor which she won the Prix Rathbones Folio Fiction 2023, experienced two different stories in parallel – one literally going from front to back in the printed book, the other from the back to front. Half has told a realistic story of France in the 80s, the other was a dystopian vision of the future close to Australia. It was one of your challenges as a reader to retrace the connections between them; The reason they belonged together.
Something of the same thing happens here, but, as with the last book, if the premise seems delicate, the writing – precise and involved, is anything but. The narrator of Theory and practice is at work on a thesis entitled The construction of gender in the late fiction of Virginia Woolf, and at the same time involved in a overwhelming case with a graduate student colleague, Kit, who is engaged to their mutual friend Olivia. Their euphemism for their irresistible sex is “to study” – the excuse that kit invariably offers Olivia. The private joke is revealing. While kit is supported in reading the narrator’s bed, after his copy of Roland Barthes The speech of a loverShe finds it difficult to define the semiotics of their relationship and develops an irrational hatred for her rival, Olivia.
Neither her own Sri Lankan mother recently widowed, nor her idealized “Woolfmother”, with a piece with the narrator’s imagination, help a lot in this oldest intrigue. There are digressions on how the sexual abuses she was subjected by a piano teacher as a child to a relationship with that due by Woolf in the hands of his pedophile brother-in-law, George Duckworth. Life, art and the academic world seem to bleed in each other. The narrator imagines this book as a way of making Woolf’s prospectus for the latest novel published during his lifetime, The yearswhich would alternate between tests and fiction to create a “new form”. She communes with the enigmatic gaze of a poster of Woolf on the wall of her bedroom, while examining the cruelties of the Edwardian racism of the author dead for a long time: “(she) continued to avoid my eye, her destructive creative energies Sparkling, my boot -half obscured his face. ”
As the relationship with kit takes place, the narrator’s grip on the truth of his emotions: “Everyone knows that there are two types of mirrors”, she writes, “ruthless and kind”. Kretsser tracks a course between these reflections, however, living throughout this novel always inventive to the urgent necessities of desire and their unforeseen consequences. Its end sends you back to its beginning, to the history of outback in the outback, throw everything that shines in oblivion; At the false beginning which leads to his last quest for fictitious truth. It is a measure of the attractive talent of De Kretsser as a novelist that she has these two stories in balance without the whole never threatening to collapse.
