Theory and Practice: a Novel by Michelle de Kretser

Beautifully written, this new novel by Michelle de Kretser portrays deep human flaws and dilemmas in story form. An Australian woman student originally from Sri Lanka witnesses the dogmatism, irrationality and prejudice in the academic world that surrounds her.

“In 1986,” she tells us, “critics applying Theory to literary texts” behaved like “torturers,” probing and interrogating texts to make them yield what was concealed within. “The critic always already knew ever detail,” but must still make the text confess. “Applying pressure to soft, secret places, critics exposed fake oppositions, crude essentialisms, bourgeois hegemonies, totalizing mechanisms, humanist teleologies, squalid repressions, influential aporias” until “the text came apart, divulging its hidden significance” and proving “the critic had won.”

Yet even as our narrator reveals the university’s blatant failure to live up to its lofty ideals, she maintains a certain compassion for this flaw, as she does when observing her own behaviour and that of the people around her.

The narrator is a great admirer of Virginia Woolf, deserving of so much credit for women’s inclusion in the literary world. Preparing to write about Woolf’s novel, she reads her journals, and is shocked by a passage that shows that when it comes to race and politics, the revered “Woolfmother” has feet of clay.

Engaging with her own mother’s comment “You don’t know what it’s like to be me” along with Woolf’s construction of feminine interiority in the midst of patriarchy, the narrator raises this conundrum:

Reading about “characters whose inner lives revealed thinking we disagreed with and even found repellent,” ought we to “summon empathy and compassion for them?” Conversely, “if novels presented us with people who turned out to be ‘just like us,’ “ might that be only “the comforting reflection of our values and beliefs?”

The politics of novels are not the politics of politics, she concludes. “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.”

Even as the young academic’s trust in “feminism’s transformative power,” she retains a “stubborn, dazed belief in love.” Only to discover the man she thought loved her has been two-timing with “a smart, good-looking, outspoken feminist in our circle.”

The rigid feminist rules of her era leave her feeling “censored by an internal critic who found jealousy a trite, despicable emotion, a morbid symptom that ran counter to feminist practice.” Alas, this does not stop her from imagining her sexual rival “disembowelled,” even as she smiles sweetly, then runs away fast.

Like all the young men she knows, her friend Lenny is a Marxist, “always going on about Late Capitalism.” Admiring such optimism, she wonders how they can be sure that “we weren’t stuck in About a Third of the Way Through Capitalism? Or Still Just Revving Up Capitalism?” Though in theory she could have described herself as a “Marxist feminist,” that was not how the labels worked. Women described themselves as feminists, while “Marxism in student politics was dominated by men.”

One scene ironically portrays how the current fashion in feminist theory is deviously employed to to select a man over a well-qualified woman for tenure. Myron, the professorial department chair, turns out to have “sworn a blood oath to Theory,” and will ensure that “every subequent hire has done the same.” Meanwhile, the narrator squishes her ideas about Woolf’s novels “into the corset of theory,” which constricts and upholds her work, “as it was meant to do.”

Along with a riveting story, this book delivers rich ideas to ponder. De Kretser shows how we are divided by gender, class, the machinery of ethnicity and our troubled colonial past, complicated by the self-constructed identities (chosen according to the fashions of the era) that box us in. After discussing ‘style crimes’ with a fellow student—the wrong colour of lipstick, wearing tights with brogues—our protagonist confesses that she is bothered by the idea that “there’s only one way for women to write.” In a dig at certain male philosophers of the time, she finds this stricture “very Frenchly authoritarian.” Whether the subject is fashion or philosophy, she observes, we must follow the current trend until “we are ordered to change.”

What do we want out of life, and how likely are we to get it? Near the end of the book, the narrator comments that “Many years had to pass before I’d realize that life isn’t about wishes coming true but about the slow revelation of what we really wished.”