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Yahoo
18-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Living in the Gap Between Theory and Practice
Every young feminist, at some point, bumps up against the limits of her ideals. For me, it happened in my early 20s. My consciousness freshly raised and my mind spongier than ever, I spent my evenings imbibing the no-nonsense feminism of Vivian Gornick, the big-hearted feminism of bell hooks, the caustic feminism of Virginie Despentes. On the page, I underlined their wisdom about forging romances rooted in equality and embracing solidarity with other women; yet in life, I chased the approval of apathetic men and harbored resentment for my beautiful, successful peers. I had done all the reading but felt that I was failing the test. The narrator of Michelle de Kretser's sharp-witted novel Theory & Practice, a Sri Lankan–born grad student at a university in Melbourne, has a similar, self-flagellating feeling early in the book. She has discovered that her boyfriend is cheating on her, and, to her horror, she wants the other woman—'a smart, good-looking, outspoken feminist'—dead. 'I'd raged silently, inwardly,' she recalls, 'censored by an internal critic who found jealousy a trite, despicable emotion, a morbid symptom that ran counter to feminist practice.' She is immediately ashamed of her reaction. Yet maybe her lapses and mine were not moral failings but case studies in what de Kretser (who, like her narrator, is Australian and was born in Sri Lanka) calls the inevitable 'breakdowns between theory and practice.' Feminism is a set of political principles, not social prescriptions. Ideology rarely maps neatly onto everyday existence—and it's in these gaps that we learn the most about who we are, what we believe, and what we really want. Read: How should feminists have sex now? The novel begins in 1986, when the narrator has just moved from Sydney to Melbourne to write a thesis about gender roles in the late novels of her hero, Virginia Woolf. Invigorated by the promise of a life of the mind, she buys a dress in a color she describes as 'Intellectual Black.' She gets an apartment in a vibrant bohemian enclave bursting with scholars and artists that sits a few steps from the beach. The nearby ocean becomes a model for the kind of knowledge she seeks: something to 'carry me beyond the limits of myself,' even at 'the risk of drowning.' But in truth, there is no escaping oneself—no city, no dress, no course of study with the power to liberate a person from who they really are. Not long after breaking up with her boyfriend, the narrator starts sleeping with Kit, a wealthy engineering student with an equally wealthy girlfriend, Olivia. Their trysts are aboveboard, Kit says, because he and Olivia have 'a deconstructed relationship.' The narrator convinces herself that she's fine with this. She's a 'modern woman,' she thinks, 'perfectly content with his body's undeconstructed need of mine.' But that idealized self buckles under erotic strain, and the narrator soon grows obsessed with Olivia: She fantasizes about breaking into her apartment and leaves marks on Kit's body before she sends him back to her. In a nod to the epistemic value of their dalliance, Kit and the narrator refer to sex as 'studying.' Since her thesis involves thinking critically about gender roles, what better way to study than to participate in a three-sided heterosexual power struggle? As the narrator discovers, neither our politics nor our principles preclude—or protect us from—unwieldy emotions, embarrassing impulses, or subconscious desires. What's more, the love triangle forces her to tussle with questions of not only gender but also class. A brown-skinned, first-generation immigrant, she's opposed to Kit and Olivia's inborn privilege and the socioeconomic stratification that enforces it; she also wants what they have. 'I wanted to join the bourgeoisie,' she says, 'and I wanted to destroy it.' The two truths coexist, however uneasily, rather than canceling each other out. The narrator's research into Woolf, whose picture she tapes above her desk, reveals another fissure between her ideals—namely, the writer she looks up to—and reality. Woolf looms large in her imagination not only as a pathbreaking feminist writer but also as a fellow survivor of childhood sexual abuse. Reading Woolf's diary, the narrator is moved by her description of the inner turmoil that lingers after an experience of harm. 'What is the word for so dumb and mixed a feeling?' Woolf writes. The narrator recognizes the sentiment: 'Dumb, mixed feelings,' she muses, 'are knowledge that lives outside language and outside time.' But the narrator faces mixed feelings of a different kind when she reads another diary entry, in which Woolf cruelly describes the Sri Lankan national hero E. W. Perera as a 'poor little mahogany coloured wretch.' It feels like a painful, personal blow. How to account for this wrinkle in her image of the beloved author? Again, by holding two truths simultaneously. The 'Woolfmother,' as the narrator calls her, is both an intellectual giant and a blatant racist. A friend suggests that instead of abandoning her study of Woolf, the narrator enter into a conversation with her blighted hero. The friend's prescription: 'Write back to Woolf.' The narrator's white adviser, Paula, dismisses the idea of shifting her thesis to account for Woolf's racism; she suggests that the narrator focus on Woolf's public work rather than her private thoughts. But the narrator feels she must 'reckon with [the] mahogany-colored wretch' who has 'taken up squatting on a corner of my desk.' She notices that both she and Paula have the same poster of Woolf, but Paula's, notably, is 'framed and under glass.' Where Paula wants to keep her idol's legacy pristine, the narrator wants to wrestle with Woolf—even if it leaves a mark. Paula, whom de Kretser refers to as the English Department's 'Designated Feminist,' has a rather low tolerance for complexity: At one point, the narrator learns that she once wrote a scathing pan of a woman's debut novel, tarring the book as 'unfeminist' because its female protagonist despairs over the end of her affair with a man. As it turns out, Paula's boyfriend had left her for this novelist not long before. When it comes to feminism—and to life itself—the narrator prefers to mine the 'messy, human truth' that she sees in her adviser's book review rather than worship a passed-down pantheon of 'flawless feminist heroes.' She wants to make sense of the gradations and complications of 'female experience'—that is, to go beyond theory and account for practice. Indeed, over the course of the novel, most of her learning happens outside the classroom, through encounters and conversations with other people. As fascinating and edifying as theory can be, it can rarely teach us as much about ourselves as everyday life. [Read: Escaping the patriarchy for good] Theory & Practice is sly, spiky, and brilliant: an intellectual coming-of-age story that accounts for all that can't be learned in the academy—or in books. The novel's meta structure bears this out: The first few pages belong to what appears to be an entirely different book, ostensibly written and abruptly scrapped by the narrator. The writing has 'stalled' because, she says, 'I was discovering that I no longer wanted to write novels that read like novels,' which she finds deceptive in their tidiness. With this observation, the line between author and narrator blurs: Aspects of the book are clearly lifted from de Kretser's own life—the novel's Australian cover even bears a picture of a college-aged de Kretser—yet it warns against drawing any neat conclusions. The story that follows flits confidently between modes: memoir and novel, personal and political, fact and fiction. Essayistic asides commingle with tender memories; heady emotions intrude on serious philosophizing. The aim, the narrator says, is to capture a sense of 'formlessness and mess'—in other words, real life. De Kretser's attraction to chaos and contradiction made sense to me; I myself have struggled to make my disparate thoughts and desires cohere. It was only when I began reading about the formless, messy lives of various feminists in biographies and memoirs—rather than, say, their works of polemic or philosophy—that I no longer felt like a failure. Their mistakes, their resentments, and their embarrassing, often unenlightened feelings were so much like my own. I realized that this painful gap between who one is and who one wishes to be is universal—and no amount of knowledge can assuage it. The narrator feels something similar the first time she sees her own 'everyday, unglamorous world' reflected back to her in a film about a young feminist who rages against her ex-boyfriend and his new lover. 'What made my heart run like a hare,' she says, 'was hearing my mind exposed.' And it's only through this kind of exposure—of our personal lapses, of the unfairness of love, of the faults of our heroes—that we can get anywhere near the truth. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
18-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
Living in the Gap Between Theory and Practice
Every young feminist, at some point, bumps up against the limits of her ideals. For me, it happened in my early 20s. My consciousness freshly raised and my mind spongier than ever, I spent my evenings imbibing the no-nonsense feminism of Vivian Gornick, the big-hearted feminism of bell hooks, the caustic feminism of Virginie Despentes. On the page, I underlined their wisdom about forging romances rooted in equality and embracing solidarity with other women; yet in life, I chased the approval of apathetic men and harbored resentment for my beautiful, successful peers. I had done all the reading but felt that I was failing the test. The narrator of Michelle de Kretser's sharp-witted novel Theory & Practice, a Sri Lankan–born grad student at a university in Melbourne, has a similar, self-flagellating feeling early in the book. She has discovered that her boyfriend is cheating on her, and, to her horror, she wants the other woman—'a smart, good-looking, outspoken feminist'—dead. 'I'd raged silently, inwardly,' she recalls, 'censored by an internal critic who found jealousy a trite, despicable emotion, a morbid symptom that ran counter to feminist practice.' She is immediately ashamed of her reaction. Yet maybe her lapses and mine were not moral failings but case studies in what de Kretser (who, like her narrator, is Australian and was born in Sri Lanka) calls the inevitable 'breakdowns between theory and practice.' Feminism is a set of political principles, not social prescriptions. Ideology rarely maps neatly onto everyday existence—and it's in these gaps that we learn the most about who we are, what we believe, and what we really want. The novel begins in 1986, when the narrator has just moved from Sydney to Melbourne to write a thesis about gender roles in the late novels of her hero, Virginia Woolf. Invigorated by the promise of a life of the mind, she buys a dress in a color she describes as 'Intellectual Black.' She gets an apartment in a vibrant bohemian enclave bursting with scholars and artists that sits a few steps from the beach. The nearby ocean becomes a model for the kind of knowledge she seeks: something to 'carry me beyond the limits of myself,' even at 'the risk of drowning.' But in truth, there is no escaping oneself—no city, no dress, no course of study with the power to liberate a person from who they really are. Not long after breaking up with her boyfriend, the narrator starts sleeping with Kit, a wealthy engineering student with an equally wealthy girlfriend, Olivia. Their trysts are aboveboard, Kit says, because he and Olivia have 'a deconstructed relationship.' The narrator convinces herself that she's fine with this. She's a 'modern woman,' she thinks, 'perfectly content with his body's undeconstructed need of mine.' But that idealized self buckles under erotic strain, and the narrator soon grows obsessed with Olivia: She fantasizes about breaking into her apartment and leaves marks on Kit's body before she sends him back to her. In a nod to the epistemic value of their dalliance, Kit and the narrator refer to sex as 'studying.' Since her thesis involves thinking critically about gender roles, what better way to study than to participate in a three-sided heterosexual power struggle? As the narrator discovers, neither our politics nor our principles preclude—or protect us from—unwieldy emotions, embarrassing impulses, or subconscious desires. What's more, the love triangle forces her to tussle with questions of not only gender but also class. A brown-skinned, first-generation immigrant, she's opposed to Kit and Olivia's inborn privilege and the socioeconomic stratification that enforces it; she also wants what they have. 'I wanted to join the bourgeoisie,' she says, 'and I wanted to destroy it.' The two truths coexist, however uneasily, rather than canceling each other out. The narrator's research into Woolf, whose picture she tapes above her desk, reveals another fissure between her ideals—namely, the writer she looks up to—and reality. Woolf looms large in her imagination not only as a pathbreaking feminist writer but also as a fellow survivor of childhood sexual abuse. Reading Woolf's diary, the narrator is moved by her description of the inner turmoil that lingers after an experience of harm. 'What is the word for so dumb and mixed a feeling?' Woolf writes. The narrator recognizes the sentiment: 'Dumb, mixed feelings,' she muses, 'are knowledge that lives outside language and outside time.' But the narrator faces mixed feelings of a different kind when she reads another diary entry, in which Woolf cruelly describes the Sri Lankan national hero E. W. Perera as a 'poor little mahogany coloured wretch.' It feels like a painful, personal blow. How to account for this wrinkle in her image of the beloved author? Again, by holding two truths simultaneously. The 'Woolfmother,' as the narrator calls her, is both an intellectual giant and a blatant racist. A friend suggests that instead of abandoning her study of Woolf, the narrator enter into a conversation with her blighted hero. The friend's prescription: 'Write back to Woolf.' The narrator's white adviser, Paula, dismisses the idea of shifting her thesis to account for Woolf's racism; she suggests that the narrator focus on Woolf's public work rather than her private thoughts. But the narrator feels she must 'reckon with [the] mahogany-colored wretch' who has 'taken up squatting on a corner of my desk.' She notices that both she and Paula have the same poster of Woolf, but Paula's, notably, is 'framed and under glass.' Where Paula wants to keep her idol's legacy pristine, the narrator wants to wrestle with Woolf—even if it leaves a mark. Paula, whom de Kretser refers to as the English Department's 'Designated Feminist,' has a rather low tolerance for complexity: At one point, the narrator learns that she once wrote a scathing pan of a woman's debut novel, tarring the book as 'unfeminist' because its female protagonist despairs over the end of her affair with a man. As it turns out, Paula's boyfriend had left her for this novelist not long before. When it comes to feminism—and to life itself—the narrator prefers to mine the 'messy, human truth' that she sees in her adviser's book review rather than worship a passed-down pantheon of 'flawless feminist heroes.' She wants to make sense of the gradations and complications of 'female experience'—that is, to go beyond theory and account for practice. Indeed, over the course of the novel, most of her learning happens outside the classroom, through encounters and conversations with other people. As fascinating and edifying as theory can be, it can rarely teach us as much about ourselves as everyday life. Theory & Practice is sly, spiky, and brilliant: an intellectual coming-of-age story that accounts for all that can't be learned in the academy—or in books. The novel's meta structure bears this out: The first few pages belong to what appears to be an entirely different book, ostensibly written and abruptly scrapped by the narrator. The writing has 'stalled' because, she says, 'I was discovering that I no longer wanted to write novels that read like novels,' which she finds deceptive in their tidiness. With this observation, the line between author and narrator blurs: Aspects of the book are clearly lifted from de Kretser's own life—the novel's Australian cover even bears a picture of a college-aged de Kretser—yet it warns against drawing any neat conclusions. The story that follows flits confidently between modes: memoir and novel, personal and political, fact and fiction. Essayistic asides commingle with tender memories; heady emotions intrude on serious philosophizing. The aim, the narrator says, is to capture a sense of 'formlessness and mess'—in other words, real life. De Kretser's attraction to chaos and contradiction made sense to me; I myself have struggled to make my disparate thoughts and desires cohere. It was only when I began reading about the formless, messy lives of various feminists in biographies and memoirs—rather than, say, their works of polemic or philosophy—that I no longer felt like a failure. Their mistakes, their resentments, and their embarrassing, often unenlightened feelings were so much like my own. I realized that this painful gap between who one is and who one wishes to be is universal—and no amount of knowledge can assuage it. The narrator feels something similar the first time she sees her own 'everyday, unglamorous world' reflected back to her in a film about a young feminist who rages against her ex-boyfriend and his new lover. 'What made my heart run like a hare,' she says, 'was hearing my mind exposed.' And it's only through this kind of exposure—of our personal lapses, of the unfairness of love, of the faults of our heroes—that we can get anywhere near the truth.
New York Times
18-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Story of Love, Critical Theory and Other Wild Fictions
In the 1980s, an intellectual revolution took hold on college campuses, spreading, this newspaper reported at the time, 'like kudzu.' Under the deceptively unassuming shorthand of 'theory,' a heady brew of philosophical schools and ideas — many of them imported from France — upended longstanding assumptions about language, meaning, reality and the human self. According to theory, words referred not to the world they were tasked with representing but only to other words in a ruthless system where meaning was elusive, reality an illusion and the self a romantic fiction perpetrated by the capitalist bourgeoisie. This revolution is in full swing when the 24-year-old narrator of Michelle de Kretser's deftly crafted new novel, 'Theory & Practice,' leaves her job in market research and moves from Sydney to Melbourne in 1986 to attend a graduate program in English literature. She buys a vintage dress in 'Intellectual Black,' finds a feminist scholar to supervise her thesis on Virginia Woolf and falls in with a loose circle of ironic creatives: a sax player in a feminist band, a sculptor who 'looked like Patti Smith but with much stormier hair' and a Marxist lecturer in art history who throws a party for his brand-new Apple Macintosh — 'a boxy object in orthopedic non-color' that presides over his desk surrounded by awed guests. Soon the narrator embarks on a consuming affair with Kit, an engineering student who's in a 'deconstructed relationship' with someone else. Yet she's unprepared for how her field has changed since she was last in school: 'Theory had taken book, essay, novel, story, poem and play, and replaced them all with text,' she marvels. 'It was necessary to make the text confess. Applying pressure to soft, secret places, the critic exposed fake oppositions, crude essentialisms, bourgeois hegemonies, totalizing mechanisms, humanist teleologies, squalid repressions, influential aporias, and many more textual fragilities. The text bucked and shrieked under the critic's ministrations, but the critic was merciless.' The excesses of 1980s academia are ripe fodder for de Kretser's mordant wit, but her aim here is more ambitious — and the results more rewarding. An Australian novelist of the first rank, who, like the narrator of 'Theory & Practice,' emigrated from Sri Lanka as a child, de Kretser has long been fascinated by the gap between our ideals and our actions — between theory and practice — including with respect to the novel itself. Her last book, 'Scary Monsters,' featured two obliquely linked narratives printed back to back and upside down; 'Theory & Practice' is also a bold experiment in form. It begins in the mode of realist fiction — a young Australian man touring the Swiss Alps recalls a recent love affair and a childhood transgression — before the narrator abruptly switches gears, a dozen pages in, to a first-person account that has the ring of memoir. 'I was discovering that I no longer wanted to write novels that read like novels,' the narrator interjects, explaining why she's abandoned her opening gambit. 'Instead of shapeliness and disguise, I wanted a form that allowed for formlessness and mess.' The ensuing book, a taut, enthralling hybrid of fact and fiction impossible to disentangle, situates itself firmly in the mess — in a host of contradictions and uncertainties. The narrator considers jealousy beneath her ('a morbid symptom that ran counter to feminist practice'), but she is overcome with fantasies of breaking into Kit's girlfriend's home and ransacking it. The young Marxists she knows confidently refer to the times as 'Late Capitalism,' but, she wonders, how can they be sure 'we weren't stuck in About a Third of the Way Through Capitalism? Or Still Just Revving Up Capitalism?' The English department's tenured position goes to a male Marxist who has published only journal articles rather than the narrator's female adviser, who's about to release a second book. More confusing is Woolf. She is the novelist the narrator cares for most, one the French feminists she reads revere as an embodiment of the 'disruptive Maternal' — an authentically female style. Yet Woolf's diaries betray her racism, including a description of an esteemed Sri Lankan barrister as a 'caged monkey' and 'mahogany colored wretch.' The narrator's thesis, restricted to Woolf's fiction and jammed into 'the corset of theory,' leaves her with lingering shame. Woolf, she tells us, planned late in her career to write a new kind of novel that would alternate fiction with essays. But the form proved impossible to crack and the book Woolf wrote instead, her best seller 'The Years,' remained a work of realist fiction. The trouble with realism, de Kretser suggests, is that its satisfactions — 'the possibility of redemption, answers and patterns, motives and cause' — are hardly realistic. In 'Theory & Practice' she offers an alternative whose pleasures are no less great for incorporating more mess.
