• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

The Colour of Dissonance Ethics, aesthetics, alterity and form in the cross-cultural novel Anne Elizabeth Lawrence Student No: 16928060 Thesis (dissertation and novel) Doctorate of Philosophy Writing and Society Research Centre University of Western Sydney 2014 Acknowledgements It has been an honour and a privilege to study for my Doctorate of Philosophy under the supervision of Associate Professor Anna Gibbs, Professor Nicholas Jose and Dr Maria Angel in the Writing and Society Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney. I thank them for their belief and support through all stages of writing this thesis. The Writing and Society Research Centre has provided a stimulating program of seminars, skills workshops, and a community of support by postgraduate colleagues. I am most grateful to Professor Anthony Uhlmann and the team of academic staff for their scholarly conversation, intellectual and academic brilliance and generosity of spirit. It has been invaluable to have such fantastic role models. I also thank Suzanne Gapps for her help and advice and give special thanks to Dr Melinda Jewell whose unwavering kindness, patience, and practical and emotional support have been critically important for completing my work. Felicity Castagna began this journey with me and has been loyal and encouraging throughout, as have many other fellow postgrads. I thank her and them for their wisdom, humour, advice and stimulating presence. I thank Murray Robertson for sharing his perceptions of ‘thinking in colours’. Thank you also to Dr Claire Scobie for her encouragement and moral support, and for reading and commenting on a draft of the novel. Ida Lawrence and Margo Moore read the novel and gave helpful comments. Professor Gail Jones read chapters of my dissertation at a Varuna Residency sponsored by Writing and Society Research Centre and offered valuable feedback. I also thank Ida Lawrence for permission to use her paintings in the dissertation and Monika Proba for her insightful comments on them. I thank my Indonesian family and friends in Sydney and Indonesia who have been available for conversation, discussion and problem solving. They are too numerous to mention by name but it would be remiss of me not to thank Nita Karianpurwanti, Pranoto and Kerry Pendergrast, Emil and Tahlia Raji, the families in Yogyakarta and Kliwonan, Self Rumbewas for translation, and Kerry Martin, Janet de Neefe and Ketut Suardana – for their assistance, hospitality and generosity over the years. Lastly, I thank Ida Lawrence, Marie Flood and Dr John Hayman for their practical and moral support during this long journey and for their faith that I would make it to the finish line. ii Statement of Authentication The work presented in this thesis is, to the best of my knowledge and belief, original except as acknowledged in the text. I hereby declare that I have not submitted this material, either in full or in part, for a degree at this or any other institution. ______________________________________________ [Signature] iii Abstract The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory (Gramsci 1971/1980, trans. Hoare and Smith: 324) This thesis, which consists of a creative component (a novel) and a dissertation, engages with creative arts practice understood as hermeneutical process, that is, as ‘fluid, repetitive and continuous … a kaleidoscope of everchanging reflections, revisions, false starts and backtracking’ (Snodgrass and Coyne 2006: 46). It brings into intimate proximity Australia and Australians, Indonesia and Indonesians, and considers the transformative process of writing the cross-cultural novel as an act of interpretation, where the embodied writer engages in a process of understanding with the self, and with the text as it is being written. The context for ‘The Colour of Dissonance’ – both the novel and the dissertation – is the web of affiliations that informs the relationship between Australia and Indonesia. In the novel the central character, Iwan, is an Indonesian young man who travels from Central Java to Sydney in 1997 to study art. After graduating from art school he marries an Australian and begins a career as a visual artist. Themes explored in the novel include migration and cross-cultural encounter, creative arts practice as a way of life, the giving and receiving of hospitality, situated knowledges, and the impacts of social, cultural and political change (local and geopolitical). The dissertation draws on Adrian Snodgrass and David Coyne’s (2006) application of Hans- Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutical theory to the architectural design studio to argue that to write across cultures is to engage in a process of understanding with difference and an unfamiliar other. By adding shame, terror and fear of failure to this process of interpretation I illuminate their potential for sustaining cross-cultural writing that remains ethically and responsibly engaged even as it crosses borders – where the horizon of the writer ‘fuses with the horizon of the text’ and the text ‘“unhinges” our prejudices and suggests its own’ (Snodgrass and Coyne 2006: 43). It is in this spirit, I argue, that the novelist is able to understand her or his character ‘from within, as it were, but must also perceive it as other, as apart from its creator in its distinct alterity’ (Ashcroft et al. 2007: 9). Tzetvan Todorov (1984) writes that ‘[a]rtistic creation cannot be analysed outside a theory of alterity’ (107), and he cites Mikhail Bakhtin: Creative understanding does not renounce its self, its place in time, its culture; it does not forget anything. The chief matter of understanding is the exotopy of the one who does the understanding – in time, space, and culture – in relation to that which he wants to iv understand creatively. … It is only to the eyes of an other culture that the alien reveals itself more completely and more deeply (but never exhaustively, because there will come other cultures, that will see and understand even more) (36: 334, cited in Todorov 1984: 110, italics in original). Drawing on Johnson and Smith (1990), Ashcroft et al. (2007) note that ‘[t]he term “alterity” shifts the focus away from … the “epistemic other”, the other that is only important to the extent to which it can be known – to the more concrete “moral other” – the other who is actually located in a political, cultural, linguistic or religious context’ (xix, cited in Ashcroft et al. 2007: 9). They argue that Bakhtin’s use of terms such as ‘alterity’ and ‘exotopy’ or ‘outsidedness’, emphasises that: ‘dialogue is only possible with an “other”, so alterity, in Bakhtin’s formulation, is not simply “exclusion”, but an apartness that stands as a precondition of dialogue, where dialogue implies a transference across and between differences of culture, gender, class and other social categories’ (9-10). In this understanding, exotopy ‘is not simply alienness, but a precondition for the author’s ability to understand and formulate a character, a precondition for dialogue itself’ (9-10). As a way of situating the author, each chapter in the dissertation is framed by paintings from an exhibition by Ida Lawrence, (n)desa/bloody woop woop, stories from Kliwonan, Barmedman and between (kisah dari Kliwonan, Barmedman dan kisah di antaranya) (2012). Following the above epigram, both the dissertation and novel are an experimental first step in developing ‘an inventory’ of the ‘infinity of traces’ deposited in ‘I/we/Australia’ in relation to Indonesia in the Australian imaginary. For Edward W Said (1978/2003, 1998) the compilation of such an inventory – including the deposits of family, collective and national histories that make up the self – is essential to the task of interpretation and ‘critical consciousness’ (26). Not only does it enable one ‘to understand one’s own history in terms of other peoples’ history, the relationship between ourselves and another, it also allows one ‘to transform from a unitary identity to an identity that includes the other without suppressing difference’ (Said 1998). The dissertation reviews a well-documented lack of alterity in Australian literary representations of Indonesia and Indonesians (Vickers 1998, Reeve 1998, Tickell 1998, and Rankin 1999) and, in order to highlight this lack, considers several non-fiction texts that explore little known historical and contemporary interactions between Indonesians and Australians (Hardjono 1993, Lingard 2009, Balint 2005, Crosby et al. 2008). It also draws on Terry Smith’s (2011) Contemporary Art: World Currents which identifies an emerging current in contemporary art today – one shaped by a changing ‘mix of cultural, technological, social and geopolitical forces’ – to imagine an evolving context for the work of three contemporary Australian writers in different genres – novel, novella and long poem (De Kretser 2012, Chi Vu 2012, Mackenzie 2009). v Can fiction play a role in advancing alterity and ethical ways of engaging across cultural boundaries? In the case of Australia and Indonesia, for example, could it expand those boundaries and go beyond demonisation and exoticisation? And could it offer understanding ‘for purposes of co-existence and humanistic enlargement of horizons’ rather than for ‘self- affirmation, belligerency’ (Said 1978, 1995, 2003: xiv)? Gabriele Schwab (2012) argues for the idea of reading literary texts as ‘imaginary ethnographies’ in order to draw attention to the way they ‘write culture’ through ‘thick descriptions of the desires, fears, and fantasies that shape the imaginary lives and cultural encounters of invented protagonists’ (2, original emphasis). Such texts, she argues, ‘rewrite cultural narratives’ and ‘can also be seen … as discourses and practices of cultural resistance’ (2). Schwab draws on Hans-Jorg Rheinberger’s notion of ‘experimental systems’ to argue literature’s capacity to use ‘language to explore, shape, and generate emergent forms of subjectivity, culture, and life’ (2).

Load more

  329

Copy Link