Michelle de Kretser’s Theory & Practice (buy your copy here) is a novel with a difference. Virginia Woolf wanted to write a novel which included essays. The resulting book was The Years, which was pretty much all novel, whereas Michelle has actually pulled it off. The book is about a 24-year-old post-grad student who is writing a dissertation on Virginia Woolf, and is given a reading list as long as your arm on literary theory, from Derrida and Foucault through to Helene Cixous and Simone de Beauvoir. She enters into a relationship with Kit, who has a long-term girlfriend, Olivia. Supposedly Kit and Olivia are in a ‘deconstructed’ relationship.’ This was an interesting justification for cheating on her! I was fascinated by the protagonist’s role as ‘other woman’, especially as she seemed to be far more obsessed by Olivia than by Kit. The novel is very thought-provoking, discoursing on topics such as the mother/daughter relationship and how it changes over time, female friendship and solidarity, colonialism and immigration, and how immigrants are treated differently, depending on who they are and where they come from. It raises plenty of questions, and I’m delighted to introduce Michelle, who has kindly taken the time to answer some of them.
How much of the novel is autobiographical?
As an unmediated autobiography, probably about 5 per cent. Of course there are reflections, observations, situations in the novel that draw indirectly on my own experience, but no more so than in any fiction.
The novel opens with a novel that the protagonist is writing. Why did you choose this device? (I enjoyed it – I was especially outraged on behalf of Pearly.)
I’m so pleased that you enjoyed it, and that you cared about Pearly. I chose to open this way for a couple of reasons. Firstly, soon after this opening ‘stalls’, the narrator says that what she really wants to do is to write a novel that doesn’t read like a novel, and the rest of Theory & Practice is her attempt to achieve that ambition. The novel that begins the book is much more conventional: it’s a novel that DOES read like a novel. Its elements include third-person narration, historical setting, romantic intrigue, miscarriage of justice, untimely death … What follows is quite different: intimate, first-person narration, fragmentary form, essayistic interludes, the blurring of the line between fiction and memoir (which leads readers to ask the previous question!) A handy way to illustrate the difference between the ‘novel that reads like a novel’ and the novel that doesn’t is to consider how they treat jewellery that goes missing. In the opener, the wrong person is accused of the theft and punished unfairly. In what follows, the revelation of what happened to the jewellery is everyday and anticlimactic. The opener presents the entirely plausible but heightened treatment of life that is characteristic of realist fiction; what follows is hyperrealistic, miming and mining forms we associate with fact rather than fiction (diary, essay, memoir). The narrator says that she wants to tell the truth. By placing that ‘truth’ next to what is obviously a novelistic opening, the truth seems more truthful and the fiction more fictive.
Secondly, the opening draws on elements that occur in the second part: eg a character who is a geologist appears in both parts, as does a death on a mountainside, as does missing jewellery and so on. A reader can amuse herself by tracing these correspondences and the way the narrator has transformed ‘truthful’ fragments of her experience into fiction.
Virginia Woolf’s wanted to write part-novel, part essay, but she abandoned the essays in favour of straightforward fictional narrative. Theory and Practice achieves her original aim. The essays you include range widely in subject, from the Israeli-Arabic conflict to the establishment’s whitewash of paedophile artist Donald Friend. Were there essays you decided to exclude, and why?
No, I included everything I wanted to include. The essays are carefully chosen to reflect on and connect with each other and thematic elements. For example, the Friend essay describes a documentary film made by an Australian woman. This essay, which occurs near the end of the book, connects formally (they are both films) with the description of My Life Without Steve made by a different Australian woman, which occurs near the start of the book. Thematically, the Friend essay connects with the themes of paedophilia and colonialism that run through the novel. My Life Without Steve connects with the themes of romantic love, jealousy and feminism, which are also integral to the novel.
There is much in your novel about the mother/daughter relationship, and Virginia Woolf’s observation that ‘as women we think back through our mothers’. Do you think that ultimately we all become our mothers? ‘You’re going to break your teeth!’ that made me laugh.
If nothing else, we necessarily live in a different historical time from the one our mothers knew, and that will almost certainly inflect the choices available to us. The limits placed on our mothers’ ambitions and desires were different from those placed on our own, and the generations that follow will have to negotiate a different set of options again. But in another, powerful sense, yes of course we become our mothers – in fact we became them in the womb. Don’t cells from the placenta transfer to the foetus and vice versa? We might rebel against our mothers or even reject them, but we can never escape them.
The protagonist says, ‘while trusting in feminism’s transformative power, I had a stubborn, dazed belief in love.’ Do you believe that ultimately most women cling to this belief, even if they’re secretive about it? Is it something that women have been taught by feminism to be ashamed of?
Feminism is theory – and a practice! – that assumes many forms. Basically it encourages women to be independent and self-reliant, and to seek fulfilment in ways that aren’t limited to romantic love. But who is the feminist who has never felt the force and the promise of romance? It seems to me that there was a period when second-wave feminism was establishing itself (roughly 1960s to 1980s) when it could be difficult for feminists to acknowledge that power. I think – hope – that has changed, but patriarchy will always encourage women to police and scorn each other. So yes, there are situations in which feminism shames women into self-censorship and Theory & Practice considers some of them.
Do you think that feminism and the belief in love or the desire for it are mutually exclusive?
No.
Phew! Neither do I. There is a conflict between theory and practice in many things, which you astutely point out in your book. One of which is feminine solidarity: in theory its wonderful, in practice the protagonist shows a distinct lack of it. ‘Women would rule the world, if only they didn’t hate each other so much’. Do you agree? (I think that quote comes from ‘Mean Girls’)
I don’t think women hate other women. There are wonderful examples of female solidarity all around us. But as I said in my previous answer, as long as we live under patriarchy, women who take it upon themselves to keep other women submissive are likely to be rewarded for it. Also, I don’t think there’s a woman on earth who hasn’t at some point felt rivalrous towards another woman, whether personally or professionally. That can certainly be hard to acknowledge, even to ourselves. I think the way to counter that is to practice solidarity and generosity, to try to see the ‘rival’ in the round, as a real person, rather than the superwoman – or bogeywoman – of our imagination. I’m not saying that’s easy.
I don’t think women hate other women either. For the most part anyway. I like the quote, though, as it’s funny and arresting. Virginia Woolf’s A Room Of One’s Own is a feminist bible, in which she makes it clear that without her own space and her magically renewable purse she could not practice her art. Yet she did not speak for working class women and was pretty racist and anti-Semitic, even though she was married to a Jew! Was she just a product of her time, or should she have known better?
Woolf was certainly a product of her time in her views on race, antisemitism and class. I think that as she grew older she was at least somewhat aware of the last, and made some effort to empathise with the lives of working-class women. Her views on race and Jewish people would be dismaying but not surprising given the times and her background, but what I find astonishing is that being married to Leonard, who was anti-imperialist as well as of course being a Jew, seems to have made very little dint on her attitudes and opinions. Perhaps she went on, quite unconsciously, thinking of him as being less than her, of less worth, which made it unnecessary for her to consider his point of view. By contrast she was wonderful on women’s lives because her own experiences had taught her how society seeks to limit and control women. She knew that situation from the inside out. The challenge she never overcame – how many of us do? – was being able to see into lives that were nothing like hers and to understand the circumstances that produced them.
Why is your protagonist so keen on Kit? He doesn’t seem to have many redeeming features, other than the sex. Was that your intention, or am I being unfair to him? She appears to be far more obsessed with Olivia than with Kit.
Sadly, the objects of our desire don’t have to be worthy of it! The narrator’s attraction to Kit begins in sexual attraction. Later, when she fully realises that she will never be publicly acknowledged as his lover, that sexual pull morphs into a wish for an exclusive relationship with him. The relationship is an intense one but it doesn’t actually last very long – about six months.
Her obsession with Olivia is very finely drawn. Do you think she wants him just to get one up on her rival?
It seems to me the other way around: the narrator becomes obsessed with Olivia because Olivia has Kit, who declares that he loves her. She wants to supplant Olivia, to become her; later, when it’s clear to her that this won’t happen, she wants to destroy Olivia; later still, she realises that Olivia has been at least as important to her as Kit.
Your discourse on Donald Friend was extremely sensitively written, and heart-rending from the Balinese boys’ point of view. It’s especially distressing that the victims’ privacy was not respected in the publication of his diaries, so they were violated twice over. How is it possible to celebrate his art and simultaneously condemn his actions? Do you think that’s possible, or should the art be suppressed or canceled because of what he did? I don’t know the answer to this question, but would love to hear your view.
Along with many curators and art historians, I don’t think much of Friend’s art so I wouldn’t be celebrating it even if he hadn’t behaved so atrociously. Obviously there are people who value his art, and I have no quarrel with that. What I find disgusting is the refusal of some of those admirers to acknowledge his sexual exploitation of children and boys from poverty-stricken backgrounds in developing countries. Without acknowledgement, the crime against Friend’s victims is perpetuated. Thank you so much for saying you were moved by this section of the novel. That really means a lot to me.
It was very affecting and extremely well-written. I thought your observation that names were an indicator of ethnicity in Sri Lankan culture, whereas they were an indicator of class in Australia very interesting. Why did you choose to reveal your protagonist’s name only right at the end of the novel? Were you concerned the readers would pre-judge her?
Mostly I was teasing my readers! It was pretty obvious that many readers would take the novel to be a straightforward memoir, so not revealing the narrator’s name was a way of going along with that. Eventually, of course, the reader realises that the narrator is only a character in my novel. Right at the end of the book, a different character cautions against mistaking realism for reality. Not revealing the narrator’s name until late in the piece was a way of illustrating that pitfall.
Incidentally, I listened to the audiobook, which was very well narrated.
That’s reassuring feedback, thank you – the audiobook is always a bit of a gamble.
I’d love to ask more questions, particularly about the revelation about Olivia at the end, but this would introduce spoilers! Are there any other questions we should be asking which we’ve neglected? If so, please feel free to add anything else you’d like potential readers to know.
I can’t think of any others – you’ve been marvellously thorough! Thank you for reading it so receptively, for bringing such insight to it, and for choosing it for your book club.
A total pleasure – it was a joy to read.
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