In a 2009 interview with Michelle de Kretser, who would go on to win the Miles Franklin Literary award – twice – the author characterised her work as “questing, jesting, testing”. It’s an apt description for her seventh and most experimental novel yet, Theory & Practice: a form-melding book contending with colonialism, the disharmony that can arise between our purported ideals and how we live, the depths of jealousy and shame, and motherhood and the maternal figures who shape us. It is also an inquiry into what fiction can look like and what it can achieve.
Theory & Practice opens with a stunted novel – elements of which hint at the book to come – that abruptly ends when it shifts to first person: “At that point, the novel I was writing stalled.”
This interjecting narrator is thinking back over her life, first as a child in Sri Lanka and later as a young woman living in Melbourne, through the lens of “breakdowns” between theory and practice. Her novel had stalled, she believes, because it wasn’t the book she needed to write. She wonders if it is time to “stop fearing shame” and “tell the truth”.
This “truth” emerges: our narrator is 24 and pursuing postgraduate studies on Virginia Woolf while living in St Kilda, Melbourne. It’s 1986, a time when university curricula fizz with theory, its “beautiful, radical ideas” upending traditional modes of knowledge. The narrator’s supervisor assigns her a reading list replete with theory’s heavy-hitters: “Derrida, Irigaray, Kristeva, Cixous, Foucault, Lacan, Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari”. Together they offer her new language and reorient her worldview in “startling new ways”.
But theory starts to lose its lustre. Nodding to Hélène Cixous’ “écriture feminine” (women’s writing), the narrator questions whether there’s only “one authentic way for women to write”. In her daily life – her friendships and lovers, her interactions with art, all of which De Kretser renders vividly – she becomes more interested in the gulf between theory’s espoused values and how one really lives. She starts sleeping with Kit, a man in a “deconstructed” polyamorous relationship with his partner, Olivia. There is no feigned feminist sisterhood. The narrator envies and is hostile towards Olivia; shame and desire inflame equally.
As her studies progress, the narrator struggles to ignore the blotches on Woolf’s history: her antisemitism towards her Jewish husband; her racist labelling of a Ceylonese barrister as a “poor little mahogany-coloured wretch”. Her pioneering influence, however, casts a long shadow: she is the “Woolfmother”. Meanwhile, interrupting the novel are fretful phone calls from the narrator’s actual mother, her dependency in old age inverting their mother-daughter roles. De Kretser perceptively evokes how maternal figures, both birthright and adoptive, maintain a hold on us, despite our attempts to distance ourselves.
Like Theory & Practice’s narrator and De Kretser, Woolf wanted to write a “different kind of novel” that would include essay fragments. However, she ultimately abandoned this vision in The Years, the resulting work, which ended up as straight fiction. This appears to be De Kretser’s impetus: to tread where Woolf refrained, to push the margins of what a novel can look and feel like. It also asks questions of the act of reading itself: De Kretser says that memoir constitutes only a “sliver” of the book, yet its cover features a youthful photo of her. She plays with readers’ expectations of what’s “true” within, asking: are you projecting me on to my characters? If so, why?
The nonfiction elements woven into the novel – such as the theoretical underpinnings of Israeli commander Aviv Kochavi’s raids in the West Bank, or the protectionism surrounding the Australian artist and paedophile Donald Friend – resonate with the book’s exploration of who has a voice and why. At times, though, these inclusions feel a bit shoehorned rather than seamless. But it’s hard to ignore that this is a book of intrusions: of unacknowledged inequalities, of flawed maternal figures, of raw human emotions (our “morbid symptoms”). The dissonance of Theory & Practice’s parts may well be the point.
Like Kit’s relationship, this is also a “deconstructed” book, both philosophically in its scratching at hidden contradictions and tensions, and literally, its assembled parts shimmering as a whole. So much is condensed into its brief length, not least of which is a probing interrogation of novels and why we write them. Near the book’s close, the narrator remarks that the “politics of novels” are not a mere “ethical device” for recognising our shared qualities or eliciting sympathy for those unlike us. Instead, as De Kretser accomplishes in Theory & Practice, they allow witness of life’s “messy, human truth”, told without shame.
Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser is out now ($32.99, Text Publishing)
