I have just finished writing an essay on the novella ‘Chroncicle of a Death Foretold’. You can find it under the ‘Text Response’ category. I’m interested in exploring concepts such as masculinity and gender roles.

Here’s my introduction:

The idea that ‘homicide is a legitimate defence of honor’ goes to the heart of Marquez’s critique of masculinity. Discuss

Chronicle of a Death Foretold exposes the complicity of Colombian townspeople who contribute indirectly to the murder of Santiago Nasar. Naming Nasar as the man responsible for her deflowering, the scandalous revelation that Angela Vicario is not on the evening of her wedding night, a virgin, becomes a matter of honor. Central to a narrative that documents the inevitability of events that have their foundation in a cultural system that deifies masculinity, the overwhelming view that the perpetrators of the crime, Pedro and Pablo Vicario, are innocent children, excoriates the violent underbelly of a community that refuses to acknowledge this truth. Compounding the unsettling nature of the events that unfold over the course of Monday morning – the morning of the Bishop’s arrival and the morning after the extravagant wedding of Bayardo San Roman and Angela Vicario, the absolution that follows confirms the immutability of a Latin American community that recognises subconsciously its crime but continues to exist, twenty-seven years post the murder, in a state of denial.

I have written a couple of Close Passage essays that are now available for purchase. Check out my introduction to:

Blazing in Gold and quenching in Purple – 228
Two Butterflies went out at Noon – 533
The saddest noise, the sweetest noise – 1764

Foregrounding grief as a pre-eminent concern, the poems (228), (553) and (1764) convey Emily Dickinson’s preoccupation with death and abandonment. In Blazing in Gold… the going down of the sun is associated with mortality and the finiteness of life. The line ‘laying her spotted face to die’ denotes the temporariness of existence. Communicating this fact in a neutral way, the speaker accepts death as an inevitable cyclical pattern as she watches from the detached vantage point of the ‘kitchen window’. In comparison, the distress of a speaker ‘left at noon’ communicates the feeling of abandonment associated with being alone and friendless. Finally, in The Sweetest Noise… the all-consuming nature of grief transforms the beauty of birdsong in spring into a ‘siren’. The piercing roar connoted in the description of birds singing, conveys the speaker’s resistance to ‘the sweetest noise’ and her desire to block out the sound so that it sings ‘no more’. For Dickinson, beauty and grief cannot co-exist. Resistant to the state of vulnerability that the joy of friendship and the joy of the natural world necessarily arouses, rejection becomes a means by which loss and abandonment can be negated. Retreating from the world altogether, the conundrum that emerges as the speakers in the three poems inure themselves to grief, abandonment and loss, invites the very same emotional state they attempt to ward off. By denying joy and embracing a state of reclusive solitariness, it seems, the speakers and in turn, Dickinson herself, cannot resolve the essential paradox that each of the poems addresses.

Hello there,

I’m sharing my wicked little piece that is a response to ‘The Dressmaker’. I hope you like it.

Sample response ‘The Dressmaker’ – note that I haven’t used a prompt.

Socially excluded, Mad Molly lives on the outskirts of Dungatar, at arm’s reach from the small-minded townsfolk in Jocelyn Moorehouses’s 2015 film noir The Dressmaker. Quintessentially mad according to stereotypes of crazy ladies – think Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, and Bertha Mason of Jane Eyre fame, she is unpredictable, challenging conventional 1950’s norms, and as a result, the good folk of Dungatar treat her with mistrust. My Uncle Mick is mad. He got a life ban from his local IGA for upsetting the manager. When I was eight, he took pot shots at our Jack Russell Rocko whilst we took cover, and when my mum was a kid, and he was a young lad, she received, for straying onto his veggie patch, a pitch-fork through the leg. Uncle Mick’s behavior is extreme and that he has anger management issues is beyond dispute. However, my take on Mick is that there is a bit of the cray cray going on there, backed up by lengthy stories of his exploits, a narrative fine-tuned over 78 years and quantified furthermore by my personal encounters with a man who does not, as Hamlet does, feign madness, but for whom madness is the sum total of the man himself. The difference between Mad Molly and my Uncle Mick is that Molly is a product of social exclusion, whilst Uncle Mick’s maladaptive penchant for upsetting the status quo seems to be a result of some genetic anomaly that definitely has not mutated into our family.

Cinematically, the fictional town of Dungatar is a washed-out patchwork of tonal beiges, the purple haze of sunset muting, as Tilly Dunnage asserts ‘I’m home you bastards’ the midday harshness that eats its way into the paintwork of weather-worn houses that are as colorless as the people who inhabit them. The Golden Fleece fuel sign and Singer sewing machine illuminated in the evening gloam signify the unchangeability of a community where outsiders must save themselves by escaping. Imbuing the lifelessness of the town with a color born out of a creative knack for designing dresses and honed under the tutelage of Parisian Designer Madame Vionnet, the cosmopolitan Tilly Dunnage is by virtue of a past that has been mythologised, both a threat and an enigma. The incongruity of her couture in this 1950’s wheat-belt town establishes Tilly as Mad Molly’s daughter, a woman who ‘doesn’t get out much these days’. Left to languish in a stupor of filth, our first encounter with the infamous woman is of an ailing bed-ridden mother who has seemingly lost her mind – one of the tell-tale signs of madness perhaps? She fails to recognise her daughter, retorting, ‘I don’t even know who you are’. Infusing the story, fragments of Tilly’s childhood memories elicit disturbing impressions of the past. The chemist’s finger-pointing, ‘Your mother’s a slut and you’re a bastard’ become formative character references that stigmatise the pair and establish a legacy that builds towards the inevitable label of madness that taints them both. Contesting this story, Tilly returns to remember the past so that she can rid herself of the label of murderer that defines her. Accused of murdering Stuart Pettyman as a ten-year-old, she implores her mother to remember so that she can break a curse and challenge the legend surrounding her name.

Perhaps the taboo around madness and mad people is that they speak truths no one wants to hear. Indeed in The Dressmaker, both Tilly and Molly become scapegoats, enabling the perpetuation of secrets that mask double lives. On a personal quest to challenge the script and free herself from the burden of guilt, the act of remembering is, for Tilly, a rewriting of an identity that the fashion halls of Paris cannot remodel. The increasing urgency to unburden herself of claims peddled by scape-goaters and cultivated by a community for whom duplicity and deception are ingrained motivates Tilly’s homecoming. Populating the story, the double lives of Constable Ferrat, and the lecherous Evan Pettyman, amongst others, are gradually revealed. The stakes are high as the myth of Tilly Dunnage as a ‘murderer and a curse’ must be firmly upheld.

Uncle Mick is a successful businessman and, once as a sergeant in the Federal Police force, was responsible for the policing of half of Melbourne. Ordering the entire fleet to stand down and attend his then-girlfriend’s 21st birthday party, he wielded his power like he wielded his firearms, with reckless abandon. Once when an equally mad Slovakian in a siege situation held a gun to a hapless victim’s temple, Mick instructed all attending police officers to knick off. Subbing in for the victim, he became the recipient of a handgun to the head. All ended well with the two downing tumblers of Scotch into the early hours at the assailant’s house. After talks with the Slovakian Ambassador to Australia, the criminal was secretly deported and never seen again. Another time, Uncle Mick deliberately set off gunshots, dispersing a mob of Hereford cattle that drovers were resting for the night. He boasts about the mayhem he caused. Proud of his fox-like cunning, Mick skytes about successfully contesting the 27 charges laid against him after leading police on a merry dance around the northern suburbs of Melbourne in a Datsun 180b. Law enforcement officer and offender, madness seems to inure Mick to the paradoxes of his past. As an avid fisherman, he once contacted the media, telling them the story of the 3kg trout he caught in the Maribyrnong River. Pictured on the front page of the Herald Sun, the midshot of man and fish was a complete hoax; he’d netted the fish on a trip in the mountains.

Madness or high jinx? There is a fine line between the theatrical antics of a larger-than-life character and a pathological social miscreant. But there is something of the unhinged about Uncle Mick. During the summer break, we paid Mick a visit – the boys were keen to do some fishing down the coast. Setting off in the early morning dawn with boats in tow, I travelled with Mick whilst the boys tailed us. It was blowing an easterly, so we headed for the other side of the bay, a ten-minute car trip. Nearly clipping a cyclist, Mick muttered something about having no time for those bastards. Without the luxury of a shoulder, the cyclist had to hold his ground. Clancy, my eldest son, later asked Mick whether he saw the cyclist’s feeble one-finger salute, a powerless remonstrance against the road rage of one unforgiving uncle. ‘Don’t look in the rear vision mirror’ was Mick’s response. ‘And that’s true for life’, he followed up, and I wondered at this moment about a man for whom introspectivity got in the way of things. I think that for the truly mad, moments of reckoning are perhaps unassailable red lights and there can be no line drawn in the sand for those who choose to run the gauntlet. As a rule-breaker, Mad Molly is punished. Giving birth to a fatherless daughter, Molly’s adulterate actions necessitate a kind of amnesia; she wilfully forgets the past, freeing herself from the guilt that is not her own. Equally, for her daughter, remembering becomes the only way of liberating herself from the guilt that is not hers to take on. So I wonder about the way we tally up our actions and account for our sins, and I wonder perhaps about the truly mad who seemingly wear their teflon-coated armour and soldier through life wrecking things without taking any prisoners along the way.

In the end, both Tilly and Molly look in the rearview mirror and find the truth that is denied them. Memory empowers them, but for Tilly, community acceptance does not follow as she redefines the past and, with the help of Barney’s testimony, confirms that Stuart Pettyman, horns locked in his bull-like stance, is the author of his demise. Launching himself at her, Tilly in true matador fashion steps aside. She is innocent. Revealing ‘he done it to himself’, Barney releases Tilly from the myth of a curse that Molly tells the townfolk is on them. It is the illumination of the Golden Fleece sign and the Singer sewing machine that accentuates in the opening scene the only route for Tilly Dunnage if she is to save herself from a madness that is not of her making. Uncle Mick isn’t going anywhere. And when he needs something from the supermarket, no ban from a university-educated know-it-all will deter a man who makes up his own rules and plays by them.

It’s been a while, but I’m back. I have, these summer holidays, been puzzling over Alias Grace. I have selected it as a Lit text for VCE Literature this year, and I must say that perhaps the strongest sentiment I’m feeling in response to the novel is one of bewilderment. There is absolutely nothing definitive, conclusive, or unequivocal about this text, and after recoiling from my laptop every time I went near it over the last month of blissful relaxation, I confess that I’m a bit rusty on the old keyboard. But here goes….

Passage Analysis – pp5-7

Disarmingly, Grace Marks’ first-person account of her story begins with a description of ‘red peonies’ coming ‘up through the loose gravel’. Establishing the role of peonies in this work of historical fiction as a residual visual motif linking the events of 1843 with the present, the initial reference in the first passage is puzzling. The contrasting allusion to the ‘white peonies that Nancy’ cuts the first day Grace comes to work for Mr Kinnear at his Richmond Hill estate draws attention to the inconclusiveness of a story where the pardoning of Grace Marks in 1872 for her role in the double murder of Mr Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery in 1843 does little to assuage the ambivalence surrounding her guilt. Evoking vitality, the red buds of Grace’s hallucination swell and ‘open’ before falling ‘to the ground’, belying an undercurrent of passion absent from the voice of a storyteller who intones moderation and poise. Moreover, the intentionality of Grace’s narration further complicates the overarching story and its reliability. Later, once the routine of telling her story to Dr Jordan in the Governor’s parlour has been established, the protagonist reveals to an unnamed audience her curatorial role in embellishing it for his benefit, surmising that his gift of a radish must be reciprocated with a story that is ‘interesting..and rich in detail’ (286), rupturing just as she garners rapport, the story itself and its believability.

Playing on the Victorian’s fascination with dreams and neuro-hypnotism, Atwood infuses Grace Mark’s narrative with somnambulistic re-enactments of the murder scene, all the while dismissing the conclusiveness of such elaborate reimaginings. The transposition of the impressionistic image of the white peonies that Nancy picks from Mr Kinnear’s Richmond Hill garden into red peonies seems to be a symbolic rejection of guilt and remorse. However, whether the absence of guilt is reflective of innocence or is perhaps more demonstrative of a pathologically disturbed mind is also impossible to gauge. Premising in the opening lines the ambiguity of Grace Marks’ status as a ‘murdereress’, the ensuing dream that seemingly bears the soul of Grace Marks is layered with many interpretive possibilities. The fleeting allusion to sinfulness, implied in reference to the ‘envy’ Grace attributes to her feelings about Nancy’s earrings, infers guilt, as does Nancy’s appeal for ‘mercy’, whilst the inclination to ‘run for help this time’ becomes a fantastical reimagining of Grace’s role as an accomplice and a desire to undo what has been done. Beginning in the middle of the story, this central constituent part binds the remaining parts of her tale as Grace Marks confesses that ‘this is what I told Dr. Jordan, when we came to that part of the story’.

What Grace tells Dr Jordan it seems, is not the entire story, nor even perhaps, the true story. The fluctuating transition from a dream-like state to a state of heightened sensory awareness further destabilises the plausibility of Grace Marks’ testimony and indeed elicits uncertainty about the sanity of the protagonist. Discriminating between past and present, in the opening passage, the converging of memories of Nancy’s murder with the factual details of her circumstance ‘It’s 1851. I’ll be twenty-four years old next birthday’, presents a protagonist whose sanity is validated then questioned. Accentuating her status as a convicted felon, the astuteness of Grace’s revelation that she is a ‘model prisoner’ confirms her assiduity and counters an assessment of Marks as a deranged mad woman. Cognisant of the role she must play in order for them to ‘let me go’, the simile ‘dangling’ over the ‘edge of a bridge’ illuminates the ‘strength’ required to be ‘quiet and good’, conveying a cunningness that once more, insinuates the murderess’s guilt.

I thought I’d share some work I’ve been doing with my students.  Here’s a Never Let Me Go/Things We Didn’t See Coming Introduction.  I’ve been having a few technical issues with my website so thought I’d post some content as a form of compensation.

The apocryphal consequences of knowing too much unfolds in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming.  Under siege, the threat to humanity presents itself in the form of a scientific program that perversely sacrifices life in order to preserve it, the hopelessness of the human condition communicated by a 31 year old narrator on the precipice of death.  Ethical questions about what it means to be human play out in Never Let Me Go as a subclass of people are relegated to the shadows in order to rationalise an organ donation program that requires clones to unzip their body parts.  Contrary to claims that they are test-tube aberrations, Kathy H embodies qualities that establishes her status and the condition of her peers, as undeniably human, exposing the untenable logic around their sacrificial purpose.  The tragic outcome of a fate that requires clones to relinquish love, humanity and a future, is also paralleled in Amsterdam’s novel although in this dystopian text, existential questions about humanity’s self-destruction are raised. Foregrounding Amsterdam’s ethical wonderings, Otis’s condemnatory assessment establishes a causal link between the pre and post apocalyptic world.  Arrogance, and a lack of humility denote civilization’s regression and the environmental catastrophes that follow signify man’s fall from grace.  Whether what has been lost can be redeemed is uncertain as the unnamed protagonist transitions from an innocent teenager to a cynical young adult and a corrupt middle aged man before finally, confronted with his imminent mortality and the moment of truth.  In Never Let Me Go, the harrowing memoir of a woman who exists only to die confronts readers with the truth about the destructive potential of human knowledge whilst in Amsterdam’s text the question about whether what can be known can be understood offers the potential for both enlightenment and despair. 

As a way of delving into these two texts, in this podcast I track character development/narrative voice in the opening chapters.  Comparing points of similarity and points of difference, I focus on the idea of sense making as a way of investigating how the two protagonists navigate uncertain worlds.  If you’re up for footy sirens in the background and a few rowdy spectators cheering on the sidelines, then this podcast might be slightly more exciting than the football game I was not watching as I recorded it.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

There’s nothing like simulating the tasks that the kids have to do.  Yesterday some fun was had mimicking the style of Austen’s writing using the opening chapter of Northanger Abbey as the stimulus.  This is what I came up with:

Having failed to master the simple act of riding a two wheeled bicycle by the age of seven, successive disappointments of a physical nature led Sally’s parents to question whether there was an underlying impediment that was attributable to the slowness of her development. Marking each failed benchmark against the achievements of her more agile and graceful sister, the failings of the younger sibling were compensated for by the universal acknowledgment that some people were simply behind the eight ball.

It was an explanatory phrase that was peddled out each time Sally breached a milestone such as clumsily succumbing to the challenges of walking vertically by tripping over ground that to the discerning eye, was level and untrippable.  A six week plaster cast on a broken toe that incidentally was not the fault of the owner of the leg but rather the father of the owner of the leg who ran over his daughter’s foot with the trailer, was yet another set-back.

Her lack of progress, whilst notably of a physical nature, was nonetheless not limited by any means to deficiencies such as walking, riding a bicycle, swimming, or dancing.  Her failure to articulate with clarity, the consonant S instead of eliciting shame in the parents, engendered mockery.  Becoming the focus of entertainment the recitation of the verse ‘warm pussy soft pussy little ball of fur, sleepy pussy, happy pussy, purr purr purr’ became a regular fixture at gatherings and dinner parties when, after the consumption of wine, the parents would usher their youngest daughter to the table for the recitation. The constancy of such occasions drew no suspicion from a child whose interpretation of the crowd’s laughter was in a manner that was at odds with the intentions of the parents.

And so she became, as an indirect consequence of her failed triumphs, a sideshow exhibit.  Continuing in this fashion until the age of ten, Sally’s sudden growth, her blossoming, her butterfly moment, did not occur in the manner expected.

An antipathy for bacon and indeed, all meat products whether they be cured or otherwise, was born or so it seemed, from a father’s propensity for slaughtering prized Angora goats purchased for the supposedly lucrative saleability of their much-sought after fibre, but repurposed as table fodder on account of a downturn in the market and their Houdini-like tendency to escape the confines of their enclosures.  The visual details of the execution of each lovingly named goat spurred within the child, a disdain for animal cruelty and a desire for other non-meat consumables.  Disappointed, the parents deduced that this was a phase; a momentary act of rebellion that could be overthrown by the slow braising of a beef goulash or perhaps a trip to KFC.  But the youngest sister was steadfast in her resolve, regressing indeed from an aversion to meat products to an aversion to all things dairy.  The decline continued until leather clothing was struck from the list and chip packets were scanned with the utmost vigilance in supermarket aisles, at a time when Veganism was not yet part of the lexical imagination of Australians for whom meat and three veg was sagely promoted as the key to longevity.

Hello there,

In this Screencast I guide you through the introduction that I have written in response to the question:

Comparing Texts

Texts:  Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam

Note that this essay is way too long.

‘Your life must now run the course that’s been set for it’ NLMG (p. 261)

‘She’s exactly the kind of romantic that’s got no instinct to make it’ – Things We Didn’t See Coming (p50)

Compare how the destruction of hope affects characters in both texts.