Poetic Revolutionaries

324 Pages·2014·2.995 MB·English

by  Marion May Campbell

Poetic Revolutionaries
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Postmodern Studies 50
Series
edited by
Theo D’haen
and
Hans Bertens
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Poetic Revolutionaries
Intertextuality & Subversion

Marion May Campbell
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014
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Cover painting: Black with No Way Out (after Motherwell) by Australian
painter Barbara Bolt. Diptych, oil stain on linen, each panel 41 x 51 cm.
Endpaper charcoal image: Black with No Way Out (after Motherwell) by
Australian painter Barbara Bolt. Charcoal on arches, 114 x 400 cm.
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 978-90-420-3786-1
E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-1035-5
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2014
Printed in The Netherlands
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Contents
Acknowledgements 9
Introduction 13
The fetishised coupling: poetics and revolution
Chapter One 31
Jean Genet’s transgressive scenography
i. Introduction
ii. Inversion of classical tragedy in Les bonnes/ The Maids
iii. Les paravents/ The Screens
Chapter Two 75
Monique Wittig’s Le corps lesbien/The Lesbian Body
i. Introduction and overview
ii. Macrostructure and salient stylistic features
iii. Détournement
iv. Critical or metatextual parody
v. By way of conclusion
Chapter Three 111
Re-materialising the disappearing body in Angela Carter’s The
Bloody Chamber
i. Introduction
ii. “The Bloody Chamber”
iii. Bartered to big cats
iv. Disappearing girls: “The Erl-King”, “The Snow Child” and
“The Lady of the House of Love”
v. Beyond necrophilic consumption
vi. By way of conclusion
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Chapter Four 155
Kathy Acker or Catheter the Hack
i. Introducing aborted identity and the narrative non-sequitur
ii. The unbildungsroman
iii. Losing the plot: textual shattering, interruption, and
repetition
iv. The anti-home, or, having sex with capitalism
v. Specifics of textual h/ackering in Blood and Guts in High
School
vi. Janey’s Genet
vii. By way of inconclusion

Chapter Five 183
Textual intercourse: Kathleen Mary Fallon’s Working Hot
i. Introduction: the context
ii. Manifest subversive features of Working Hot
iii. “The wound & the message” as textual intercourse
iv. By way of conclusion

Chapter Six 219
Kim Scott’s Benang: From the Heart
i. Benang, an introduction
ii. The tessellated structure: anti-telos
iii. Assuming abjection
iv. Intertextuality: parody, pastiche and puns
v. Multiplicity: from alone to among

Chapter Seven 253
Radical disorientation in Brian Castro’s Shanghai Dancing
i. The macrostructural: narrative tessellation or mosaic
expansion
ii. Scenographies of abjection
iii. Intertextuality: mythic makeover, parody, pastiche and
puns
iv. Unsettling multiplicities
v. By of way of conclusion

In guise of conclusion 285

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Appendix: ironic trans-contextualisation in a work of
postmodern parody 289
Works cited 293
Index 311
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Acknowledgements
My deep and lasting gratitude to Michele Grossman, for her peerless
wit and contagious brio, which always made dialogue with her a joy,
for the unfailing acuity of her literary, theoretical and political insight,
and, of course, for her sustaining encouragement. I’d like to
acknowledge my debt of gratitude to Aritha van Herk, Susan Lever
and Moya Costello for their enormously helpful feedback.
Special thanks to my partner Warren Walker, who has provided
provocation and enlivening intellectual conversation throughout this
project and has usually tolerated my obsessive raving. Thanks also to
my sister Margaret Campbell and to my children Morgan Campbell
Gasseng and Zoë Campbell Walker for their sustained loving support.
My gratitude also goes to my former writing students at the University
of Melbourne for the wonderful stimulation of the dialogue around
their projects.
Many thanks also to Brian Castro for most graciously reading and
commenting on earlier articles on his work Shanghai Dancing; to Kim
Scott for so kindly responding to questions regarding Benang; to
Kathleen Fallon for her generosity in offering fascinating insights into
the composition of Working Hot. Thanks also to Adrienne Walker
who made invaluable editorial suggestions on an early version of the
chapters on Scott and Castro. Sincere thanks equally to Nola Farman,
who devoted many hours of her editorial expertise to proofreading the
thesis version of this study and who saved me from crimes worse than
my habitual spoonerism.
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10 Poetic revolutionaries: intertextuality and subversion

I would also like to acknowledge the editors of journals who made
helpful suggestions and accepted for publication the following earlier
versions of work developed in this study:
‘Brian Castro’s Radical Disorientalism’ in (eds Caroline Hamilton,
Will Noonan and Michelle Kelly). The Politics and Aesthetics of
Refusal Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007; ‘Dismantling
the White Picketfence: Reclaiming Multiplicity in Kim Scott’s
Benang and Brian Castro’s Shanghai Dancing’ in (ed. Martine
Piquet). Synergies11 Actes des 4ièmes Rencontres du CICLaS de
novembre 2006 (2007).
Many thanks to the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin
University for providing me with Individual Research Funding
Support enabling me to enlist the unfailing editorial vigilance and
formatting skills of Alyson Miller for the preparation of the ms for
Rodopi.
My deep gratitude to Barbara Bolt for so generously providing her
fabulous artwork for the cover and endpapers of this book.
Finally, my huge and heartfelt thanks to Masja Horn, Publisher at
Rodopi, Amsterdam, who, from the word go, has shown amazing
patience, insight and generosity in guiding this work towards
publication.
Permissions
I would like to thank and acknowledge the following publishers and
writers for granting me the right to quote from their publications:
Cambridge University Press for the extract from Timothy Matthews.
2000. Literature, Art, and The Pursuit of Decay in Twentieth Century
France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press;
Les Éditions de Minuit for extensive extracts from Monique Wittig.
1969. Les Guérillère; and Monique Wittig. 1973. Le Corps lesbien;
Kathleen Mary Fallon for the extensive quotations from 2001 [1989].
Working Hot. Random House (Vintage Books);
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