The Challenge of Representing Significant Cultural Moments in Fiction (Exegesis)
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Distance (creative component) Writing within history: the challenge of representing significant cultural moments in fiction (exegesis) Erin Gough Master of Creative Arts 2018 Certificate of original authorship I certify that the work in this thesis has not previously been submitted for a degree nor has it been submitted as part of requirements for a degree. I also certify that the thesis has been written by me. Any help that I have received in my research work and the preparation of the thesis itself has been acknowledged. In addition, I certify that all information sources and literature used are indicated in the thesis. This research is supported by the Australian Government Research Training Program. Production Note: Signature of student: Signature removed prior to publication. Date: 21 February 2018 ii Acknowledgements The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance, support and advice provided by Ashleigh Synnott, Anna Denejkina, Matthew Johnson, John Dale, Sue Joseph, Emma Kersey and especially Debra Adelaide. iii Table of contents A. Distance (creative component) 1 B. Writing within history: the challenge of representing significant cultural 93 moments in fiction (exegesis) 1. Introduction 93 2. Methodology 96 3. The value of history-based fiction 97 4. Dramatising the abstract: The Line of Beauty and Saturday 101 5. The ethics of the political novel and the problem of polemic: Falling 107 Man, Saturday and Salvage the Bones 6. Exploring the process of history making in fiction: Falling Man 117 7. Conclusion 120 Bibliography 123 iv Abstract The creative component of my MCA thesis is a novel set during the lead-up to Australia’s 1996 federal election. It tells the story of Abi Platter, a seventeen-year-old living in Sydney, who is beginning to outgrow the family she once loved unconditionally. Halfway through her final year of school, Abi becomes friends with Lucinda Whitford, the eccentric daughter of a wealthy barrister. Initially Abi is besotted with the Whitfords, and their cultured, opulent lifestyle. She longs to follow the talented Whitford children on their path to successful and important lives. Then she unexpectedly falls in love with Adina, the girlfriend of Luce’s older brother, Jonathan, and everything she thought she knew about society and her place within it shifts irrevocably. Embedded in the personal story of the novel are power plays that mirror the dynamics on the 1995–1996 Australian stage. Just as the Liberals were able to gain the support of middle Australia only to betray it, so the Platters become casualties in the Whitfords’ pursuit to protect their own status. Just as Howard harnessed fear and prejudice within society to win the election, so too does Jonathan Whitford use Abi’s sexuality to silence her. By paralleling a personal story with the events happening on the broader political landscape in Australia in the mid 1990s, my novel explores the values, hopes and fears of a nation at a pivotal moment in its history, as well as its schisms — between ‘middle Australia’, the Liberal Party’s traditional affluent voting base, and the educated social progressives that Keating spoke to. It examines the machinations of power: majorities over minorities, rich over poor, men over women. In the accompanying exegesis, I outline a brief history of the politics that characterised the 1996 election and its consequences and describe how my novel engages with the political themes of the era. I position my novel within existing literature and explain the original contribution it makes to the field. I describe my methodology and consider the value of exploring historical events through fiction. I contemplate the strengths of fiction in representing such events, as well as its potential limitations. I then discuss the challenges of dramatising an abstract moment in history, the ethics of the political novel, the problem of polemic, and finally the ways that fiction’s unique properties can be used to explore the process of history making itself. v Distance 1 ‘Yes,’ says the man behind the gallery counter. ‘I know the name. She comes here often.’ He is tall and thin, in a crisp white shirt and spectacular gold pants. His voice reaches the wide walls and makes its way back to me. The walls are white, like his shirt. Like the counter. Like the solitary chair behind him. Everywhere white, except for his pants; everywhere empty, except for a few washed out artworks. On a street of colour — shops cluttered with spices, furnishings, homewares — the gallery space is both an absence and an assault. ‘Yes?’ I repeat. His eyes travel across me. I watch the shimmer of his pants and wait. I can tell he is bored with me already — a thirty-something Australian in jeans and Birkenstocks — but I need to hear the word again, need to witness again his steely certainty, to confirm I haven’t dreamt it. After a month of no’s and maybe’s and not sure’s this is necessary. I have visited so many galleries. It is hard to believe I have found the answer in a place like this — so new and empty, and on the wrong side of the city. He leans back, prodding at the bridge of his thick-rimmed glasses. His fashionable moustache twitches. ‘The art scene here is bigger than it used to be. But I know everyone, pretty much.’ Behind him hangs a collage: a pale blue painting of a girl with her arms raised towards the sky. In the sky: child-like sketches of objects that are half-bird, half-plane. Wedged in her open mouth: a three-dimensional seagull made of canvas. I raise my arms like the girl in the painting, who has travelled in the plane and is grateful for the bird between her teeth. ‘Thank you. I’ll be back.’ I open the door and step out into the narrow street. The ferry arrives late. I push my way through the peak hour crowd making its reptilian crawl along the dock. Tourists, businessmen, spruikers with their smoking hotplates, juice stalls displaying halved fruit swollen with seeds. Yes. As soon as I’m off the main road it is quieter: just playground chatter, shop gates cluttering, the occasional car. I walk up the hill, keeping close to the edge of the narrow, footpath-less streets. Now the word throbs steadily, in time with my heartbeat. Yes. Yes. Yes. 2 A cat slips out from an alleyway and races ahead, thin tail pointed high. The call to prayer begins, crackling through the darkness. At last the apartment block. I let myself in with my borrowed key and climb the narrow stairway. I pour wine into a glass and lay out my dinner ingredients on the kitchen bench. On the other side of the room, the television flashes its light show on the wall. I am putting the wine bottle in the fridge when I hear the Australian accent. I look up. It is the pose I recognise first, even before the face and voice: the chin pointed high, the arm held wide on the podium, making its claim on a broad circumference of air. My heart cramps. There he is, on the screen: Jonathan Whitford, with Parliament House in Canberra as his backdrop. It has happened, then. Today, of all days, when my search might be over at last. I had hoped that in coming here I could make amends, and protect myself from this. As if by placing distance between us, I could sway the course of these events. But that opportunity passed years ago. I stare at the image and wonder whether, had I done things differently, he would be standing there at all. By the time I find the remote to switch it off, the anchor has already cut to another story. I look out through the glass of the balcony door, hoping to fix upon something to hold me to this place, to this present, but my eyes glaze over, and the sound of stereos in passing cars fade. The cluttered laneways, the street cats, the mosques, towers, the entire city: dissolved. I am remembering the three of us — me, Luce and Jono — in the back of Jono’s Holden Commodore on my first trip to Whale Beach. It is mid-November in Sydney, 1995. Luce and I have just finished our final exams. The windows are down; the upholstery is warm from the sun. The coast road bends to the shape of the continent, taking us past takeaway shops and furniture warehouses, alongside sports ovals where children race back and forth across grass. Luce and I are in the back, Hole is on the stereo and we’re straining at our seatbelts, shouting out the lyrics with our eyes closed. In front at the wheel with a can of beer in one hand, Jono watches us in the mirror and laughs. Not that Luce can be reduced to a single moment; you may as well try to take a still shot of a hummingbird. As for Jono, the car and the beer are mere props, distracting from the truth. To believe in these objects, in this picture of him, is to understand nothing. 3 The question I ask myself is this: what did the Whitfords hold over me to make me act the way I did in the weeks that unravelled from that car ride, like fishing line from spool? That are still unravelling? That have even brought me here, to the other side of the globe? To answer it I need to reinhabit the person I then was: a teenager at the end of my school years, about to embark upon life and knowing nothing about the world.