Culture
Book Review: ‘Theory & Practice,’ by Michelle de Kretser
THEORY & PRACTICE, by Michelle de Kretser
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.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions — or even books. With the Academy Award nominations announced last week, this week’s challenge celebrates past Oscar-winning films that were based on books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and their filmed versions.
Not every poem about love is a love poem. This one, from William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” first published in 1794, is more analytical than romantic. Instead of roses and violets, it offers us dirt and rocks.
William Blake (1757-1827), obscure in his own time and a hero to later generations of poets and spiritual seekers, made his living as an engraver and illustrator. He conceived and executed many of his poetic projects as works of visual as well as literary art, etching his verses and images onto copper plates and printing them in vivid color — a style designed to blur the boundary between word and picture.
“The Clod & the Pebble” is set in a rustic tableau populated by wild and domesticated animals. In the print, we can’t quite see the main characters, who are presumably somewhere beneath the hooves and the ripples. But the cows and sheep, the frogs and the duck, are nonetheless connected to the poem’s meaning.
The two sections of “Songs of Innocence and of Experience” are meant to illustrate “the contrary states of the human soul” — the purity and wonder associated with early childhood and the harder knowledge that inevitably follows.
“The Clod & the Pebble” recapitulates this fall from sweetness into disillusionment, and the plate suggests it in contrasting ways. The wild animals down below symbolize a natural condition of innocence, while the livestock above live in confinement, bound to another’s use. At the same time, though, the cows and sheep are peaceful ruminants, while the frogs and the duck are predators.
In the poem, the Clod is an avatar of innocence. As it happens, this is a recurring character in the Blakean poetic universe. In “The Book of Thel,” a fantastical meditation composed a few years before the publication of “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” the Clod appears as a maternal figure selflessly nursing a baby worm:
The Clod of Clay heard the Worms voice, & raisd her pitying head;
She bow’d over the weeping infant, and her life exhal’d
In milky fondness
“We live not for ourselves,” she tells the poem’s heroine, a young girl named Thel. But in Blake’s system self-sacrifice can never be the last word. There is no innocence without the fall into experience, and no experience without the memory of innocence. Giving gives way to wanting.
Question 1/6
Love seeketh not Itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care;
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Get to know the poem better by filling in the missing words below.
First, the Clod’s perspective.
Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s challenge tests your memory of 21st-century books that were inspired by ancient myths, legends and folk tales. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
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