Jamming the Machinery:

contemporary Australian women's writing

by Alison Bartlett

INTRODUCTION

In this book I am interested in the ways in which feminist theory and practice intersect, specifically in the relation between contemporary women's writing and feminist theories about women's writing. Do the subjects of women's creative writing coincide with the concerns of feminist theorists? Can the theories be applied to contemporary novels? Do they work? Do the novels include theoretical issues - purposefully? And how might the practices of women writers reflect back on or interrogate the work of theorists? In this book, I examine the ways in which the work of seven contemporary Australian women writers relates to French feminist theories of écriture féminine. These theories of women's writing have been enthusiastically taken up by many Australian theorists and critics - as well as other writers - but I suggest that there are some national, linguistic and cultural differences that only appear when the theories are applied locally, as I do here with Australian writing. As Hélène Cixous predicts, 'writing is working; being worked; questioning (in) the between (letting oneself be questioned)' .

My understanding of écriture féminine comes largely through the work of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and, to some extent, Julia Kristeva. While undefinable, it is a style of writing marked primarily by its disruption to conventional reading, writing and representational practices as produced through, and supported by, patriarchal values. Luce Irigaray represents such a disruptive strategy not as 'elaborating a new theory of which women would be the subject or the object, but of jamming the theoretical machinery itself' . This metaphor might invoke a machanical image of jamming a spanner in a machine (give a girl a spanner...) but the machinations of patriarchy that Irigaray refers to are, of course, more invisible and insidious, entrenched as they are in our cultural imaginations. As a counter strategy, écriture féminine, it is argued, is theoretically sourced in the bodies of women. Here, the body represents one aspect of what it 'means' to be a woman, but of course our bodies are infinitely variable as are our socio-historical relations and the way that we live through and make meaning of our parituclar bodies. Texts, however, are produced through the lived practices of being socially positioned as (among other things) women, so those effects will be inscribed in what is written.. 'Writing the body' therefore plays a significant part in inventing new ways to speak and write about ourselves as women, rather than through the narrative machinery of patriarchy.

The seven women writers whose texts I have selected to study have all published between 1988 and 1992 and, like myself, they all live in Australia. Our location in and as part of 'Australia' has an impact on our practice of reading and writing both fiction and theory. Considering the incorporation of 'imported' feminisms, Susan Sheridan writes that Australian feminism 'has certain indigenous features, notable among them being its capacity to graft those others on to its own growth and at times to produce new species' . Moreover, Sheridan sees this as a 'rewriting of their discourses in different circumstances' . Susan Hawthorne also regards our position in Australia as an asset in this grafting process in being historically 'other' to the traditions of dominating Northern Hemisphere cultures, which don't necessarily translate onto our cultural landscape . The women writers here are part of that grafting process insofar as their writing is produced through the cultural conditions of living in Australia and contributes to the body of literature engaged in working through and interrogating feminist theories of women's writing.

The cultural conditions of living in Australia, however, are not homogeneous and I want to flag at this point that there is an important body of cultural work missing from discussion here, and that is work by Aboriginal women. That I have found very little to connect their increasing oeuvre of writing with French feminist theories is perhaps not so surprising, given the very different cultural formations and material conditions which, as indigenous people, they live and write in Australia. As Patti Lather argues, 'our different positionalities affect our reading' and, I would suggest, our writing practices in various ways.

Considering my own position as a writer has also had a profound effect on the way I have chosen to write this text, especially in relation to the French theories I examine and the Australian writing I read between these covers. Rather than assume a single, linear, consistent and authoritative voice as author, I want it to resound with the many women's voices on which I have drawn to produce this text. As a piece of contemporary Australian women's writing, I want it to reflect the 'different economy' of écriture féminine which, Irigaray argues, 'upsets the linearity of a project, undermines the goal-object of a desire, diffuses the polarization toward a single pleasure, disconcerts fidelity to a single discourse' . The seven chapters which read the seven writers' texts are therefore interspersed by four pieces of more experimental writing, writing that represents my desire to write in a different language and the pleasures I find in that writing. These sections are also crucial to the performance of écriture féminine as those theories can be practically applied to my reading and writing.

A major contribution to the process of this text has been the interviews I conducted with each writer; edited versions of these therefore form an important part of this book. Because I regard contemporary women writers as critical thinkers, whose texts practice and interrogate feminist theory, I felt it important to interview the writers concerned to record their theoretical perspectives. By including their knowledges I am able to position their thinking alongside the academic signatures of published reviewers, critics, theorists and other commentators, including myself. I use excerpts from the interviews as points of intersection with my narrative on their work, and they were also given the opportunity to comment on what I have written. The writers' comments are not conventionally introduced or referenced but are indicated by a different font, to differentiate them visually from my own text and to situate them as interventions rather than as a part of my argument. The 'Polylogue' begins the book by using fragments of these interviews, arranged into common themes that the wriers all discuss. They largely fall into topics like how 'feminism' affects them and their writing, their attitudes to 'theory' and also their views on the conditions of writing as a woman in Australia at the start of the 1990s. I had trouble fitting the quite passionate responses to these subjects into the more academic chapters, even though in some ways they represent the central concerns of my project. Representing them as a kind of a play, however, allowed me to highlight their common and particular responses and also to introduce the writers as individual characters being staged in this book.

The work of Ania Walwicz begins the analyses 'proper', introducing some of the fundamental ideas on language and subject formation with reference to the theories of Julia Kristeva. i argue that Walwicz's non-English speaking background intensifies her speaking position , and that her novel, red roses, especially problematises some of the work of Julia Kristeva. This densely theorised chapter is followed by a ficto-critical piece which theorises in an alternative mode by attempting to 'flesh out' the ways in which écriture féminine might be practised. In this way, 'Reading Bodies' imagines the interwoven relations between theory and practice, and reader and writer.

The next section examines four novels which is concerned with representations of specific women's bodies in their contribution to theories of writing the body. In Chapter Five, Margaret Coombs' text, The Best Man For This Sort of Thing, narrates the dilemmas of a woman with 'post-natal depression'. In doing so, I argue, Coombs raises important theoretical issues about how women's bodies are positioned by and produced through medical discourses, including psychiatry. This analysis is then continued through Fiona Place's novel, Cardboard, the narrator of which writes her experience of anorexia nervosa into a recovery story, partly due to psychiatry. My dilemma in this discussion is how to account for the romance plot that appears to enable such a story. The importance of new storylines is a vital part of the next chapter's discussion of Inez Baranay's Between Careers, which takes up 'romance' in a quite different way. Using a narrator who works as a prostitute, Baranay problematises the linear and climactic storyline of the romance genre and its parallels to the heterosexual relations expected of women. . The patriarchal structure of storylines is further challenged by Susan Hawthorne's The Falling Woman, a text which explores alternative perspectives on epilepsy through its lesbian narrator(s). Located specifically in an Australian desert, Hawthorne's text is also shown to question Irigaray's possible biases through a discussion of constituting desire. While each novel is traced through it representation of a woman's body and how meanings are made of that body, it is through the particularities of the bodies they write that theoretcial implications emerge.

The ways in which desire is constituted becomes an increasingly important site for interrogation and, sometimes, dismantling at this stage. Slightly uncomfortable at my tenuous position in discussing lesbian aesthetics, Imove on in the next section to ruminate about definitions of desire and how they might be reconceived. 'Writing Desire' is also about the implications of redefining desires. The next two novels also pivot on notions of desire: about women whose desire is to be a visual artist, and how this desire is complicated by the politics of representation and the conditions of production for women. Sue Woolfe's Painted Woman charts how a woman's body forecloses on the options available in the traditional art world. Woolfe's artist-narrator is intent on living up to, and then discarding, the desires of her father before she can tell her own story. Davida Allen, on the other hand, centres her novel on the desires of the artist Vicki. Close to the Bone: The Autobiography of Vicki Myers, represents a woman as wife, lover, mother of four, teacher, daughter and artist, and how these identities inform each other. The fairly conventional heterosexual desires of this narrative impel some discussion of 'feminist heterosexuality', a topic many feminists find distinctly uncomfortable in theory, if not in practice

The final chapters bring some self-reflexivity to the limits of practising écriture féminine. Written in the form of a speech, 'Performing Bodies' plays on the discursive act of performing feminist theory, especially one that involves the apparent paradox of theorising bodies. The conclusion is then tentative about concluding; it problematises endings and looks forward to many more beginnings. Then begin the interviews with each of the seven writers. These are edited versions but they nevertheless maintain a sense of the dynamics and tone of each conversation. While all the writers were dubious about their spontaneous and transient thoughts being enshrined in print, I regard these primary sources as valuable, documenting the writers as often quite formidable theorists, rather than as idiote savants, as Walwicz and Coombs feel they are still perceived.

Finally, I hope this body of work gives as much reading pleasure as I have taken in writing it and, like Elizabeth Grosz argues for feminist theory, that it will 'produce new kinds of questions and different sorts of answer[s]' , new reading pleasures and writing desires.

references

Hélène Cixous , 'Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks / Ways Out / Forays' in The Newly Born Woman by Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, trans. Betsy Wing, Theory and History of Literature 24 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p.86.

Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p.78.

Susan Sheridan, ed. Grafts: Feminist Cultural Criticism (London: Verso, 1988), p.1. Sheridan, p.1.

Interview with Susan Hawthorne.

Patti Lather, Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy With/in the Postmodern (New York: Routledge, 1991), p.145. Irigaray, p.30.

Elizabeth Grosz, 'What Is Feminist Theory?' in Knowing Women: Feminism and Knowledge ed. Helen Crowley and Susan Himmelweit (Cambridge: Polity Press in assoc with The Open University, 1992), p. 368.

from Jamming the Machinery: contemporary Australian women's writing. Toowoomba: Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL): 1998.

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