Theory & Practice

by Michelle de Kretser

He’s searching for the chain of requests, expectations, and subtle demands with which he believes women make prisoners of men.

An artist once told me that she no longer wanted to make art that looked like art. I was discovering that I no longer wanted to write novels that read like novels. Instead of shapeliness and disguise, I wanted a form that allowed for formlessness and mess. It occurred to me that one way to find that form might be to tell the truth.

The relationship between my theory exercises and the music I played must have been so obvious to my teacher that she neglected to point it out. It wasn’t in the least obvious to me. Theory and practice remained distinct activities that occupied separate rooms in my mind. In one I wrote in pencil on paper printed with staves, in the other I struck black and white notes on a keyboard, and no corridor linked the two.

The way to counter shame was to seek out solidarity. She was only twelve but she understood that.

Theory had identified an authentically female way of writing, I told Anti. The Maternal sentence was liquid and nonlinear, swooping and looping, multidirectional, whorled. It disrupted norms. French feminists revered Woolf as a prime example of a writer in whose work the disruptive Maternal could be observed.

Anti was of the view that we had the right to lift-and-separate sentences as well as burned-my-bra sentences.

‘Artists used to think about art through art. Now they think about it through Theory. What happened to praxis?

Of course Leonard minded when his wife called him ‘the Jew’ or ‘my Jew’. Of course he didn’t show that he did. That was the meaning of assimilation: it trained us not to show that we minded. It trained us to pass. It trained us to disappear.

Many years had to pass before I’d realise that life isn’t about wishes coming true but about the slow revelation of what we really wished.

What politics asked of us was to care about people we couldn’t see into, and the difficulty of that was the difficulty of life.