Interview #225—Michelle de Kretser
by Roanna Gonsalves
It is 1986 in St Kilda, Melbourne. A piece of jewellery is lost, a blue-rimmed baking dish turns up in an unexpected place, and there is the Woolfmother.
Theory & Practice is Michelle de Kretser’s seventh novel. An international circle of critics and readers have said that she is one of the world’s finest writers working in the English language. We are lucky to have such literary virtuosity here in Australia.
In Theory & Practice, de Kretser reinvents the form of the novel yet again while returning to the central ideas around which many of her novels revolve: the sometimes messy, sometimes exhilarating entanglements and gaps between love and power, between theory and practice. These ideas are held together by the homage to, as well as the taking to task of, the maternal line.
Below, Michelle de Kretser speaks with writer Roanna Gonsalves about hyperrealism, necessary sentences and Virginia Woolf.
In Theory & Practice, you reinvent the form of the novel yet again, playing this time with dualities of all sorts. The book has an image of you on the cover, suggesting a memoiristic work and yet under the cover is an emphatic insistence that this is a novel. The work begins with a third-person narrative which lures us into the interior world of an Australian geologist, building up and building up until it seems like something shocking is about to happen. Then suddenly, on the verge of catastrophe, the story stops, shifts gear, and the novel moves into the first person. From that point onwards we are left wondering about the boundaries between memoir and fiction. Why did you write the novel in this way?
Thank you very much for thinking about the novel so carefully, Roanna. As you know, the narrator of the novel is writing a thesis on Virginia Woolf’s late fiction. The novel’s project is, on one level, to write back to Woolf, and my decision to write a novel that blended forms came from Woolf’s original design for her penultimate novel, The Years. That was to be a hybrid book that alternated fictive chapters and essays, but Woolf eventually abandoned her initial plan and wrote The Years as straight fiction. Rather than strictly alternating forms, I decided to try for a more elastic tangle of fiction and nonfiction.
Another thing I set out to do was to unsettle the realist novel as a form. As you’ve mentioned, Theory & Practice opens with a third-person narrative that purports to be the start of a conventional, realist novel. When it shifts into the first person, it starts to read more like nonfiction: like a mix of essay, memoir, diary entries… In other words, it becomes what the narrator says she wishes to write: a novel that doesn’t read like a novel. I’ve been referring to that mode as hyperrealism.
When you set the hyperrealist narrative alongside the realist narrative that opens the novel, you start to see the contrast between the two. The former describes entirely plausible events and characters, because realism has to be plausible. But how does the narrator have access to the protagonist’s thoughts? How is that possible in reality? And think about the events described: again, entirely plausible, but also dramatic, culminating, as you say, with a catastrophe. So what that realist opening offers is actually a heightened version of reality; I’d say that this is generally true of realist fiction (including my own).
Towards the end of the novel, a character cautions against mistaking realism for reality. She also invokes Bovarysme, the tendency to mistake the tropes of romantic fiction for reality that Flaubert describes in Madame Bovary. It leads to Emma Bovary’s downfall, and over time Bovarysme has become a contemptuous, gendered label applied to women. Men are realists, of course. But the character in Theory & Practice, a woman, is pointing out that realism, too, is only a set of narrative conventions. It isn’t reality.
Obviously, the hyperrealism that prevails in most of Theory & Practice isn’t reality either. It’s just a different set of conventions that creates the illusion of direct access to facts. But realism is by far the dominant mode of Australian literary fiction, and I wanted to give its complacent operations a little shove.
So you’d describe the novel as hyperrealist when some might label it autofictional?
Yes, because it doesn’t fit the autofiction model. It’s largely fictional, with some essayistic sections and a much smaller component of memoir. Generally in autofiction, the auto component outweighs the fiction. At least that’s my understanding of it.
Much of the story takes place in the year 1986 in St Kilda, Melbourne. Why this particular moment in time and place?
One of the meanings of ‘theory’ in the novel is French poststructuralist theory—or Theory, as the narrator calls it—which swept through university English departments in the 1980s. I was a postgraduate then, and I was interested in exploring the turn to Theory as it played out in practice: i.e., in the way Theory was applied to literary texts, and also in the way it was weaponised by its advocates in order to boost their careers and dominate academic departments. Don’t get me wrong: I found many aspects of 1980s theory (particularly feminist, Marxist and postcolonial theory) deeply resonant and liberating, and my novels are underwritten by the ideas those theories offered me. But there was certainly a messy gap between the radical opposition to power insisted on by a thinker like Foucault, and the blatant will-to-power that underwrote university English.
All that would still have applied if I’d set the novel in 1984, 85, 87, 88… But I chose 1986 because that was when the film My Life Without Steve, which is important to the narrator, was released. As for St Kilda, I lived there for a large chunk of the 1980s, so I knew it intimately and felt confident about describing it as it was at that time—it’s changed radically now.
Your ethical project, to honour literature itself, plays out in your attention to the crafting of sentences. You were once asked what you were working on and you famously replied, “I’m working on my next sentence.” What are some of the sentences you wrote in the novel that you worked on until they did what you wanted them to do?
I’m pleased if a sentence strikes me as truthful; if it can be memorable as well, that’s a plus. I don’t have the nerve to go back through the novel to examine its sentences; it would feel too close to being confronted with past crimes. But here’s a sentence I remember because someone quoted to me recently: “The airless corridors of the English department smelled of photocopier and fear.” I like that because it came unbidden (I didn’t have to work on it), and because it’s precise as well as rhythmically pleasing; ending on a stressed monosyllable makes a sentence land with force.
I should add that many of the most important sentences in any novel are the invisible ones: those the writer has had the good sense to take out.
How do you decide which sentences to take out?
Such a good question! I try to abide by the principle that in order to earn its place in a narrative, a sentence must do necessary work. Most of what I delete would be sentences (and phrases) that are doing unnecessary work. These typically occur more frequently near the start of a novel, when a writer is explaining things to herself; as the narrative progresses, unnecessary sentences tend to occur where a transition is happening: between chapters, paragraphs, sections. All that’s fine in a first draft, but redundancies should be deleted in revision.
An example of the first kind of unnecessary work from Theory & Practice would be that I’m pretty sure I had more descriptive sentences about St Kilda in my initial draft. But those sentences were me remembering the St Kilda of forty years ago; they were serving nostalgia rather than narrative necessity.
An example of an unnecessary bridging sentence at the start of a section would be something along these lines: “A few days later I walked to Kit’s one evening and put a card in his letterbox. It said…” It’s already clear to the reader that the action took place after the preceding section; exactly how long afterwards is unnecessary information. How the narrator got to Kit’s and the time of day is also information the reader doesn’t need. So there are three pieces of information in that sentence that aren’t required. All the reader needs to be told is that the narrator delivered a card to Kit and what was on it. After revision, the sentence could run something like: “The card I put in Kit’s letterbox said ...” Two sentences have become one, and that sentence is doing necessary work.
This attention to precision at the level of the sentence extends to your vehement resistance of stereotypes and clichés in the rendering of the configuration of identity. When the narrator is asked why she didn’t learn languages that would have been more suitable to her background, such as Indonesian or Japanese, her riposte is classic de Kretser. The literary scholar Mridula Nath Chakraborty so aptly noted that your work refuses to conform to what is expected in Australia, that the immigrant hold their tongue. Please tell us why you think it is important to refuse to conform on the page, for the immigrant writer to be free on the page.
It’s important for every writer to be free on the page for the reason you’ve given: it resists stereotype and cliché. I’m old enough to remember when feminist critics used to get shirty with women writers whose female characters weren’t entirely admirable and heroic. That unfortunate notion lingers, demanding that oppressed groups be represented in literature as ‘empowered’, ‘resilient’, ‘courageous’, ‘feisty’, ‘role models’, etc.
Literature isn’t a morality tale. It’s energised by complexity. It feeds on human contradiction and mess. The immigrant writer has to be free to draw from the whole range of experiences and emotions to which white writers (or writers from any dominant group) have always been granted access in order to create characters who live on the page in all their flawed human intricacy.
You’ve spoken about the blurred boundaries between fiction, essay and memoir in Theory & Practice. All three require imaginative labour. What, to you, is the difference in the composition of these three genres?
The essay component in Theory & Practice required the most research (largely about Virginia Woolf), but of course both fiction and memoir contain factual information, some of which required research. One difference between the forms is that I felt it was OK now and then to tweak a minor detail that appeared in the fiction. For instance, My Life Without Steve first screened in Melbourne in May 1986, but I needed the narrator to see it earlier in the year and so I brought the date forward by a couple of months. And was it really in 1986 that the Coke sign at St Kilda Junction gave way to one for Fosters? I think so, but I couldn’t verify it; it might have been 1985. By contrast, the essay sections relate to the lives of real people, so I had an obligation to ensure that the facts they contain are accurate.
The dedication reads “for the Maternal line”. In the book, you explore two key maternal lines: one is the relationship between the narrator and her mother, the other is the relationship between the narrator and Virginia Woolf. Both relationships are honoured as well as scrupulously excavated, taken to task. Please tell us about the process of crafting these two relationships on the page.
The narrator’s mother, a widow, lives alone in Sydney. The reader gets brief extracts from her letters to the narrator and snippets of their phone conversations, and she often turns up in the narrator’s thoughts. I decided to construct her that way, as an indirect presence, arriving in textual fragments and memories because that’s the way Woolf—the Woolfmother—enters it, too. Both mothers haunt the narrator, looming large in her psychodrama: both have nurtured her, both disappoint her, both are loved, argued with, critiqued (at times unreasonably), finally accepted.
The narrator is invested in several romantic and sexual relationships to varying degrees. Yet she spends a considerable amount of time and energy dissecting offers and withdrawals of female friendships, overt and covert, examining female solidarities and rivalries. Things are not what they seem. Relationships unfurl in unexpected ways, especially as they are entangled with race. Please tell us why you render feminism in this novel in these ways.
I’d say that’s how I represent female friendship rather than feminism (although there’s an overlap, obviously). I’m drawn to depict friendship, a complex and often intense emotional tie, because compared to family or romantic relationships it’s relatively underexplored in literary fiction. I write about female friendships because I’m a woman and those are the friendships I know best.
Female friendship is a wonderful source of solidarity; but any relationship that has the potential to empower us has the potential to destroy our faith in it as well.To a greater or lesser degree, all relationships are structured by power, which typically fluctuates over time, and the drama that engenders is energising for fiction.
Of course race is a complicating factor in any human mix. I don’t need to spell out the ways in which western feminism has so often failed to show solidarity with women from the global south (Gaza: the four-letter word so many so-called feminist organisations are unable to utter); or the way corporatised, managerial feminism—think the loathsome Mss Clinton and Harris in their pantsuits—fails working-class women.
In Theory & Practice, Paula, the narrator’s white supervisor, is keen to minimise and dismiss Woolf’s racism. Feminist scholars worked extremely hard in the 1970s and ’80s to get major women writers onto university literature courses. Any critique of those writers was taboo because it threatened to undermine that effort. All revolutions are wary of complexity when they’re in the process of establishing themselves. Once again, we’re in that messy gap between theory and practice.
Michelle de Kretser was born in Sri Lanka. She lives in Warrane/Sydney on unceded Gadigal land. An honorary associate of the English Department at the University of Sydney, she has won several awards for her fiction. Theory & Practice is her seventh novel.
Interview by Roanna Gonsalves
Illustrations by W.H. Chong