A pear of paradoxes

Like Drusilla Modjeska’s earlier book, Poppy, this is a book that resists easy classification. It’s the sort of book that may infuriate those who like their ideas served up in separate self-contained portions: fiction, history, biography, criticism. It’s also likely to confound librarians and booksellers, faced with the problem of where to shelve it. Modjeska’s ideas are not answerable to the Dewey Decimal System. Her narrator introduces the pieces that form the centre of the book as essays: ‘ … although they contain as much story as fact, and nudge towards fiction, they proceed with the spreading movement, horizontal and meandering, that the essay – a porous, conversational, sometimes moody creature makes its – own.’ It’s the influence of Virginia Woolf’s untrammelled mind (and, no doubt, the demands of Modjeska’ sown material) that lies behind this choice of form, rather than the recent Renaissance of the essay in Australian writing. Modjeska acknowledges that Woolf’s ‘fiction, her essays, everything she wrote, break with the expected, get rid of the consecutive, refuse division and exclusion, and present us with moments of shock, pleasure, understanding’. Much of this applies equally to Modjeska’s own work. It raises important questions about the relationship between writing and experience. Is there a line between fiction and history, memory and imagination, literature and interpretation, stories and life? If so, how firm is it? Can it be stepped over? After reading this book, many will find the conventions of set literary forms inadequate to the task of exploring one’s own experience. While it is ultimately storytelling that holds the book together (stories told and re-told in different contexts until they live independently of their tellers), the book is essentially a work of writing as exploration of the self. In a veiled warning to critics not to assume too much about the experience behind the writing, not to read the storytelling as confession, Modjeska tells us that what she does in writing, in telling, ‘is to search, sifting through the many versions and possibilities to find the shape and truth of her life, the story she doesn’t yet know, the image and narratives she struggles to bring, like herself, into being’. To my mind, this is what good writing is – a process of exploration, a discovery and definition of one’s self. The three essays that comprise the centre of the book are framed by two shorter pieces, ‘The Verandah’ and ‘The Orchard’, both of which explore the notion of self-definition in the context of women’s self-portraiture and the relationships women establish with others (particularly with men). Early in the book, the narrator is positioned on the verandah, a littoral zone between the inside of the house and the garden, ‘shaded, and yet open, from which I can see while not being seen’. This notion of perception, the paradox faced by the female artist as both perceiver and perceived, is central to the book as a whole. How does a woman who writes ‘I’ reconcile it with the ‘eye’? ‘How is she, the object who is seen, to see herself, both seen and seeing?’ It is the struggle for self-definition through art and writing and solitude, rather than the definition of one’s self through others (as wife, as mistress, as a reflector of the needs and agencies of others) with which Modjeska is concerned. This awareness of the ambiguous nature of the first-person narrative results in some fascinating (if demanding) exercises in perspective as the ‘I’ is lost in a series of overlapping narratives which sometimes leave the reader struggling for a sense of focus. Who is the teller? Who is told about? It’s a device that draws further strength from Modjeska’s considerations of the self-portraiture of women artists such as Stella Bowen, Grace Cossington Smith, and Artemesia Gentileschi, all of whom struggle to disengage themselves from a self-defined in terms of relationships with men and re-define themselves through their art. If Artemesia, ‘as woman could be at once subject and object’, there is also the potential for both to disappear in a hall of mirrors. ‘The canvas, blank but prepared, waits. The wardrobe door swings open, and in its mirror we see not the woman, not the artist, but the world that opens beyond her.’ The first essay, ‘The Adultery Factor’, is comprised largely of the meandering ‘confessions’ of the narrator as part of an exploration of the role of the adulterous drama ‘as impetus towards the redefinition of self’. The spreading movement of the essay form, however, allows it also to accommodate gendered readings of Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Ford Madox Ford. But it is the second essay that throws the widest net. ‘Sight and Solitude’ is, to my mind, the strongest section. Faced with the prospect of going blind, the narrator is confined to the shade of the verandah, forced to withdraw into herself and to re-evaluate the nature of perception, the significance of I/eye. In exploring notions of blindness and sight, light and darkness, Modjeska draws reference to the relationship between blindness and sexuality in mythology and Victorian literature, blindness and guilt in The Lives of the Saints, even the tenuous relationship between writers with glasses and their heightened perception of the world. That it works so well is due partly to the versatility of the essay form, but also to Modjeska’s fine control of a voice that hovers alternately between seriousness, humour, and an almost palpable fear. My only concern is that the third essay, ‘The Winterbourne’, pales beside it. More obviously autobiographical than the rest of the book this comparatively self-conscious reminiscence of life in an English boarding school (small injustices, romantic attachments, sheltered lives) struggles somewhat to find significance beyond the personal. It’s the final section of the book, ‘The Orchard’, that draws the seemingly disparate parts powerfully together. Here we are brought finally from the verandah out into the light of the garden and to the re-telling of the legend of ‘The Handless Maiden’, the story at the heart of everything that has gone before – a story of transition, of re-definition of oneself as a whole person. It’s a story that is at once both simple and enormously complex. Like Modjeska’s book, it stays with you, gathering strength as its significance gradually becomes more clear.

A pear of paradoxes

A pear of paradoxes

Liam Davidson

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Liam Davidson

Description

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