By Moya Costello

As a reader and writer I like short forms: the short novel (as practised by Helen Garner for example), the forms of short prose: short fiction, essay, fictocriticism, and the newspaper column and feature article. Short fiction in particular is a form in which, like poetry, vastness comes by way of compression and (usually) brevity.

The length of what can be called short fiction can vary considerably from 50 to 6000 words. The 50-word length is exemplified in such a hybridised form as the prose poem, but it is also based on the fragment, the vignette, the aphorism.

I was ‘trained’ in the art of short fiction in the early 1980s by being a member of the Sydney Women Writers’ Workshop who, to put it crudely, favoured experimental short prose over the novel, which was seen as colonised by patriarchy.

Poets Pam Brown and joanne burns who were members of the group are exemplary practitioners of the prose poem, as is Ania Walwicz whose same work can be found in prose and poetry anthologies. In 1986, Don Anderson noted in his introduction to Transgressions, an anthology of short prose, that he collected pieces from newspaper columns and from the poetry section of magazines1.

Feminist writing practice and hybridity both take place at the edge, at the boundaries where genres meet and interchange. Jen Webb2, when reviewing my second collection of ‘pieces’, Small Ecstasies,3 said that it was a ‘selection of prose fragments that are not-quite-chapters, not-quite-poems, not-quite-stories’. In ‘public’ descriptions of my own work, I say that it shifts between genre boundaries: the prose poem, the short story, the essay and fictocriticism, and fiction and nonfiction.

In short fiction I am making raids at the gates of genre, wreaking havoc on the boundaries, smashing any rising notion of genre envy, elevating the bitter-sweet pall of synthesis rather than exclusivity to an art form. I talk of a hybrid breed, the short story becomes prose poem, celebrating without shame the vignette, reclaiming from the exotic the Siamese twins of essay and feature article. 4

Barbara Page5, in a discussion comparing a feminist experimental writing practice with a poetics of hypertext, listed features common to both such as a complex interweaving of disparate writing genres. Genre boundary crossing and the creation of new genres are what electronic text is about. Text can be combined with image, sound and animation, and, because of hyperlinking, all kinds of texts are linked to all kinds of other texts on the Web, forming new genres all the time in the reading process.

In my recently published first novel6 I’ve used hyperreal episodes in an otherwise realist text. I hope the hyperreal episodes raise questions in the reading about what is thought to be real and what is imagined, what is fact and what is fiction. The space of a novel also gives the novelist the opportunity to go on ‘little excursions’, ‘essaying’, to investigate things associated with the theme(s)novel. For example, because this novel is set in an electronic office, dealing with electronic communication and documentation, one of the things I did was I take a brief look at the history of printing and the printed book.

Barbara Page also included in her list spareness rather than expansiveness, unruliness and the refusal of perfection, randomness, clusters and constellations of associations, nonlinearity, an antihierarchical structure, self-reflexive vignettes rather than continuously developed action or panoramic description.

Pam Brown describes her prose poems as ‘episodes from a long running serial, chronicles of a transition which is never completed’7. In a sequence of prose poems, ‘On the Ironing Board’, I say: ‘I work in fragments so as not to be implicated in revelatory statements. Fragments look like gestures only’8. In her monograph on Helen Garner’s writing, Kerryn Goldsworthy talks of a feminist reading that concentrates on the techniques of ‘a polyphonic, open-ended narrative’ and on ‘discontinuous cinematic structures’9.

A lack of narrative closure and narrative roundedness is about the conversational and interactive nature of a feminist writing practice. Kerryn Goldsworthy also speaks of Helen Garner’s practice as being conversational or interactive: ‘the author-to-reader relationship she constructs through her writing, one of invitation’10. Interactive or conversational is how I think of my writing: that it is open-ended and process-oriented; like the art of good conversation, what matters, or matters equally, is the travelling as well as the destination.

In my novel, The Office as a Boat, I decided to play with the notion of delayed gratification in narrative resolution. Electronic technology throws the printed book, by way of contrast, into relief as a material object. The book is an open object; there just happen to be rules of the game that tell you to read in a linear fashion. There are indicators in the text about what is going to happen. I hope I’ve set up a shared joke with the reader about the grand resolution at the end. In the text there are spaces and gaps and silences, where the reader can engage with the text to make meaning. There are literal spaces in the text that are about transitions between sections and subsections, about associations that are linguistic or imagistic or thematic or even based in memory and history.

The thesis of the wild-child of (anti)narrative, Marion Campbell, in the recent collection of fictocriticism The Space Between is as follows:

Do you want to be buoyed by the viscous, mellifluous current; do you want a sure poultice for your wounds; do you want continuities; do you want a certain mirror from page to page? You want a prediction rule and a foreshadowing rule and a consistency rule and life-comes-full-circle rule? … I reckon flow sucks … I’d like for there to be nothing but traces of writing fading in the rear-vision mirror …11.

Campbell also writes in the same piece that character, as well as plot, is a troubled category. New electronic technologies play with gender, bodily based abilities and the machine–body interface. The postmodern tells us that our subjectivity is shifting, fragmented, unstable, fractured. So in the novel I’ve played with the idea of character as type and have a mise en scène of characters rather than an individual hero or heroine.

In a review article for The Australian’s Review of Books, Amanda Lohrey12, considering a number of collections of short stories, asked if a well-rounded narrative functioned to ‘stave off death’; if so, then the narrative’s point ‘had better be good since this will console us for death by imposing a meaningful shape on the terrifying chaos of our experience’.

I accept painfully, but nevertheless accept that death and the chaos of my experience are not necessarily resolved by the imposition of ‘a meaningful shape’.

Lohrey then went on to make a distinction between experimental writers who are risk-takers and ‘the conscientious celebrants of the fetishized fragment’. I assumed that the distinction, not clear in the article, was between potential and actual failure.

We currently live under an Australian government—the John Howard ministry—that has systematised the promotion of privilege and the breakdown of community, encouraging fear, self-centred competition and conformity. It seems to me that I have never heard so often as much in these times an assertion by artists that their practice is about entertainment. It is as if they wanted to assure the reader, ‘Don’t worry, I’m not saying anything; I’ll lull you; I won’t disturb’. What is the work of experimental, risk-taking art practice? I value a writing practice, among other artistic practices, that takes risks. I’d rather the book that practically hurls itself off the bookshelf in an effort of non-compliance than the book that sits respectably on the shelf in an entertainment-induced coma.

Notes

1 Anderson, Don, editor (1986). ‘Introduction’. In Transgressions. Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, page viii.
2 Webb, Jen (1994). idiom, number 23, page 115.
3 Costello, Moya (1994). Small Ecstasies. St Lucia: UQP.
4 Costello, Moya (1997). ‘A writing strategy in hypertext’. [unpublished talk]. Virtual Writers-in-Residence: Pilot Project. Adelaide: Arts SA/Ngapartji Multimedia Centre/Australia Council.
5 Page, Barbara (1996, January). ‘Women Writers and the Restive Text: Feminism, Experimental Writing and Hypertext’. Postmodern Culture [electronic journal on the Internet], vol. 6, no. 2. [http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/issue.196/page.196.html]
6 Costello, Moya (2000). The Office as a Boat: A Chronicle. Rose Bay, NSW: Brandl & Schlesinger.
7 Brown, Pamela (1987). Keep It Quiet. Glebe: Sea Cruise Books.
8 Costello , Moya (1999). ‘On the Ironing Board’. Overlandexpress. http://www.overlandexpress.org/issue000/prose/costello.html
9 Goldsworthy, Kerryn (1996). Helen Garner. Oxford Australian Writers. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, page 46.
10 Goldsworthy, Kerryn (1996). Helen Garner. Oxford Australian Writers. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, page 50.
11 Campbell, Marion (1998). ‘Telephony or Phoney Telos’. The Space Between. Edited by Heather Kerr and Amanda Nettlebeck. Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, page 217-219.
12 Lohrey, Amanda (1999). ‘The Long and the Short of It’ [review article]. The Australian’s Review of books, page 6.