Getting it all Together

Vicki Viidikas: An Australian Counter-Culture Writer Getting It All Together
By Adrienne Sallay
Paper given at the AAALS Conference in Montreal April 2006

ABSTRACT
In 1975 Australian writer Vicki Viidikas worked with director Stephen Wallace to transform a short story into a film which illuminates a particular moment in literary, filmic and historical time. This film acts as a focus to examine the early work of Viidikas, who explored new ways of writing about subjectivity, sexuality and desire. Using the work of contemporary critical theorists my essay re-appraises Viidikas’ writing: texts like hers open up ways of expressing meaning that still speak to contemporary feminism and modes of feminist writing, while flagging a particular moment in Australian literature. A contemporary analysis is particularly relevant with the 2010 publication of another volume of her work titled New and Rediscovered by Vicki Viidikas.

Short biography of Adrienne Sallay
Adrienne Sallay has a Masters’ degree in Education and a PhD in English (Creative Writing) from Macquarie University, Sydney. She has worked as a librarian, teacher and lecturer in primary, secondary and tertiary institutions and is currently an independent researcher. She writes essays, short stories and novels, has won awards for her short stories, and been published in Southerly and other anthologies.

VICKI VIIDIKAS: AN AUSTRALIAN COUNTER-CULTURE WRITER GETTING IT ALL

A mix of published and unpublished work appears this year in a new volume of work titled New and Rediscovered by Vicki Viidikas. It includes previously unpublished poems and short stories, an excerpt from Viidikas’ unpublished novel, Kali and the Dung Beetle, and some more familiar work from her single author anthologies. Edited by Barry Scott, it has a foreword by her friend, Kerry Leves, one of the Generation of ’68 poets, and is published by boutique publisher Transit Lounge Publishing of Melbourne. It is thus timely to re-examine the work of Viidikas to see how and why it still holds currency today. This essay focuses on her early work and in particular a short story that was made into a 26 minute film in 1976.
Australian poet Vicki Viidikas was born in 1948 and died fifty years later in 1998. As well as New and Rediscovered, her work has been remembered in two ABC radio broadcasts, Vicki’s Voice and Feathers/Songs/Scars. The recordings use her own voice and those of her contemporaries, who describe her writing, which addresses themes of sexuality and desire in a counter-cultural context, as “organic, holistic, courageous, adventurous, foolhardy, delightful, dangerous, non-conformist” (Vicki’s Voice).
Viidikas’ first volume of poetry, Condition Red (C R) published in 1973, has a red cover: the colour of a human heart, the colour of a woman’s internal organs, the colour of blood. In the poem “red is the colour”, Viidikas uses a phrase that conveys concurrently a sense of connection and disconnection: red is ‘…the heat from their bodies as they passed through each other’ (C R 14). This use of metaphoricity that contradicts meaning or creates new meaning is one of the hallmarks of her work. It echoes the French feminist project that questions, disturbs, and disrupts patriarchal meaning when women write in new ways.
Friend and poet Robert Adamson describes Viidikas’s work as “blood pulsing through her life and passions” (Vicki’s Voice). It is no coincidence that several of the poems in Condition Red bear the word “heart” in the title: “9 of Hearts”, “Keeping Watch on the Heart” and “Loaded Hearts”. This last poem “Loaded Hearts” elaborates on issues central to counter cultural lifestyles: music, drugs, war, where “…tigers are eating through walls and Hendrix is playing from hell” (C R 4).
In the broadcast Vicki’s Voice Adamson maintains her second volume “Wrappings put her on the map, although she disparaged it as “scratchings on a mirror” ”. “Scratchings” implies both engagement with and distortion of the reflection offered by the mirror of self-reflective writing. The mirror throws one’s own reflection back, but the mirror may also alter the reflection and disrupt the meaning, as Viidikas argues in the last line of her poem “Cracked Windows”: “mirrors/refract a thousand meanings/The head distorts what it can’t bear” (CR 18).
This kind of linguistic expression has interesting parallels with Julie Kristeva’s concept of the disruptive force of our unconscious drives, which she calls the chora. In her feminist work on psychoanalysis and structures of discourse, Kristeva extends Lacan’s idea of the mirror stage to argue towards a gendered discourse which moves “…with and against the chora”, unconsciously shaping our powers of signification (25), and, like scratchings on Viidikas’s mirror, simultaneously depending upon and refusing it.
Strategies of contradiction, obfuscation and refusal of conventional meaning are central to Viidikas’s work. It can be seen to engage with an experimental feminist aesthetic, freeing itself from the masculinist realist tradition that went before it, exploring new modes of subjectivity and sexuality using strategies that Christine Clement and Hélène Cixous could describe as “…explosion, diffusion, effervescence, abundance” (91). Viidikas referred to her pieces as “things” rather than stories or poems. In his 2006 memoir, Wild Amazement, friend and writer Michael Wilding describes these “things” as

… expressions of emotion, states of mind… They had the indeterminacy of things, they floated there with an undoubted specificity, but unanchored in consequence or cause, never located that minutely in time or place, as a realist treatment might have required (51).

The word “scratchings” also invokes a hastiness, an unedited, first-thoughts approach to one’s work. Viidikas’s use of the metaphor might imply her view of her early work as unpolished. When she first showed her short prose pieces to Wilding in 1973, she told him that she didn’t think they were “any good” (Conversation). He replied that they were “extremely good” and published them as Wrappings in his (then) new alternative publishing venue, Wild & Woolley that he had begun with friend Pat Woolley.
The first piece in Wrappings, “Trying To Catch The Voice” parallels the notion of “writing by the voice” that Cixous and Clément describe in 1986 in Newly Born Woman. Their concept is that of a female voice arising from the unconscious that speaks through the body: “the voice of a body dancing, laughing, shrieking, crying. Whose is it? It is, they say, the voice of a woman, newborn and yet archaic, a voice of milk and blood” (ix). Enduring the pain of a failed relationship, the narrator struggles to express her emotions, to “catch the voice”. In the attempt, the very word “words” is personified to express her frustration about the difficulty of representation

– “words die and new ones come”:

Things have been loved and fallen, lies burnt to death, and still I want to speak, still words die and new ones come, been talking and writing words down, read words aloud and seen them poised bright daggers over people’s heads. (W 7)

It is often the affective quality of her work that renders it powerful, with use of complex metaphors in which no one thing is itself: words are objectified as “bright daggers”. At stake for the narrator in Wrappings are expressions of vulnerability, as the narrator writes in the poem “A Part Dialogue About Wrappings”:

Through a tear in the wrapping
they touch at vulnerability, recoil quickly,
the innocent get burned. (W 68)

Once again the narrator plays with words and meaning. Use of the homonym “tear”, meaning both a rent in the outer layer, and “tear” as water running from the eye, underlines the insecurities that the writer is exploring. Using “tears” again, the poem ends:

These wrappings are extremely interesting, said the psychiatrist,
poking at a pool of tears… (W 69)

Viidikas often used such ambiguities as a means by which to question and disrupt meaning, in ways that contemporary cultural theorists Terry Threadgold and Anne Cranny-Francis later advocated (15).
The year after Wrappings was published, Viidikas worked with director Stephen Wallace on a short story from it. Together they transformed “Getting It All Together” into a twenty-six minute film titled Break-Up, which illuminates a particular moment in literary, filmic and historical time, and can be used as a focus to examine the early work of Viidikas. While I comment briefly on the movie here, I examine it in more depth in another essay (“Break Up: Getting it all Together”)
The movie was a finalist in the Greater Union Awards at the Sydney Film Festival in 1976. It displays an experimental style popular at the time, incorporating ad-libbing, slow shots sometimes ten seconds or more long, and scenes not sequenced in linear time, that convey a series of anarchic impressions rather than a clear line of narrative, mirroring the fragmentary style of Wrappings. Both film and text speak to the notion that “[w]e’re in the age of micro-narratives, the art of the fragment” (35), as espoused by cultural theorists Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer.
Viidikas worked with Wallace before, during and after the shooting of the movie, being involved in work-shopping sessions and also playing a short cameo role in the movie itself. It opens with a spat between the lovers, Mary and Phil, where we see Mary’s determination to pursue writing before shopping and household tasks. Phil arrives home to find Mary sitting at the kitchen table writing furiously. She barely looks up at him while he quizzes here about the household tasks he feels she should have done during the day. Belittling her creative efforts, Phil pulls at her writing pad. They fight over it. He tugs it away from her. She swears at him, grabs an orange from the fruit bowl and throws it at him, shouting, “Fuck off!” Casting Mary as a writer could mirror Viidikas’ own working life; perhaps Mary’s frustration was written from personal experience.
De Lauretis, in Feminist Studies, Critical Studies, defines subjectivity as “patterns by which experiential and emotional contents, feelings, images, and memories are organized to form one’s self image, one’s sense of self and others, and of our possibilities of existence” (5). In a continual exploration of subjectivity the self-reflexivity of Viidikas’ writing evidences these patterns through the narrator, who is often represented as marred, vulnerable and changing.
In another story from Wrappings, “Reality Fragments”, Viidikas expresses this notion as a “blowing apart”. She addresses her narrator’s subjectivity as “this reality, these bits”. The story begins breathlessly, using the image of the mirror as an instrument of shattering:

All this reality, these bits, you have to find a way of addressing yourself to the mirror, a way of getting it together and blowing it apart, then catching the pieces if you can. (W 98)

This illustrates another hallmark of Viidikas’ work: her contradictions of meaning. Anne Cranny-Francis’ notion that a person’s subjectivity is constituted from a matrix of pluralities that ebb and flow depending on external social, political and economic circumstances, and at any one time these subject positions “…may be inconsistent or even in contradiction with one another” (7) fits the Viidikas model.
There is a wonderful example of this inconsistency early in the film when we see Mary contradicting herself as she gazes into a mirror. This scene also evidences Viidikas’ fascination with mirrors, a trope she used often in her writing. Having split up with Phil, Mary looks at her reflection and reassures herself that everything’s going to be better now: no beds to make, meals to run to time. In an example of the kind of contradiction that Viidikas often uses to represent confusion, as Mary draws closer to the mirror she examines her face slowly, and tells her reflection, “You look awful”. After a long moment her mood changes, she pulls back from the mirror and contradicts herself:

No you don’t. It’s going to be really good. Everything’s going to be really top, see? Gonna go and see Ruby. We’re going to go out. It’s all going to be better.

In order to proceed with her recovery from the break-up with Phil, Mary experiments with her sexuality. Viidikas and Wallace workshopped the story with student actors for three months, adding characters from other Wrappings stories, such as Steve from “Steve and the Big Smoke” (W 64). The narrator attributes various subjectivities to Steve in an eleven-line poem embedded in the three prose pages. The poem begins:

I could write an ode to Steve.
Because of the fact she’s butch.
Because she’s a thief.
Because she’s been a junkie. (66)

Viidikas challenges convention and keeps desire, physical and emotional, at the forefront of her writing. In this scene/story she experiments with gender as separate from sexual difference, pre-empting Irigaray’s urging in Speculum of the Other Woman to “[track] down what there is to be seen of female sexuality” (145), and later, Judith Butler’s and Teresa de Lauretis’ work on the moveable nature of gender and how it works through performance, mimicry, discourse, images and signs (Butler 198; de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender 3). At the end of Wrappings the narrator contemplates sexuality with vexation:

The female fiction writer will be dealing in areas of bitterness; she’ll be making phone calls to her sexuality to see how she’s all wired up. (“The Incomplete Portrait” 126)

In her continuing efforts to get over Phil, Mary goes to a party with her friend Ruby. Here Wallace portrays Steve as a joint-smoking, waistcoat-wearing lesbian propositioning Mary, who vacillates between her desire for Steve and the young man who walks between the two women and the camera. Meaning is again turned back on itself when, in the movie, Mary rejects Steve, who asks her, “What do you want then?” Looking at the man in the green shirt, Mary replies, “Whatever comes along.”

In the textual narrative, Mary rejects Steve this way:

I’m thinking, I like this woman but I don’t want sex with her. I say,
‘I’m happy with men, Steve, I get what I need. I don’t need to go to bed with you,’ feeling like a heel passing back her roach.
‘It’s not a need is it, it’s love … isn’t it?’ she looks away warily.
I feel like a creep and have no answer. (W 65)

Steve’s story ends with Steve’s ruminations about bliss: “ ‘Happiness? It’s all one big smoke to me, man.’ ” (W 67). Since Steve is always stoned, could this allow the possibility that for Steve happiness is easy? Wherever there’s a joint? Always available if you know how to find it? A way to escape? Part of the lived condition? Taken for granted? Challenging interpretation, Viidikas’s careful use of this one line entertains many meanings for Steve’s happiness.
Underlining the experimental nature of Wallace and Viidikas’s work, the intersection of the film, the text and the real-life author results in a poignant moment for the viewer. It is at the party that the ghost of Vicki Viidikas visits us. To the words of Bob Dylan’s “Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again” the camera pans past Viidikas playing herself, her blonde hair swinging in front of her face, rolling a joint with her long fingers, and smiling as she listens to Dylan: “Oh, Mama, can this really be the end…” The music echoes the protagonist Mary’s thoughts as she walks past Viidikas and out into the courtyard, asking herself, “I’m enjoying myself, aren’t I?”; a question again expressing vulnerability.
In a 1974 review of Wrappings in an underground newspaper, The Digger, contemporary author Helen Garner described the anthology as written with:

…a background of knowingness against which the occasional sharp flash of sensual or emotional delight shows the more brilliantly for being unexpected. (“Books for Fascination”)

I would disagree that the flashes are occasional. A close reading of Wrappings reveals writing packed with sensuality, emotion and irony, such as this line about Steve: “Her acid punch has real fruit in it.” (W 67)
In the same review, Garner maintains that Viidikas’s writing is “dense with imagery”, with which I agree. Listen to this passage from “Getting it all Together” in which Mary laments her newly single status: When it was raining “[t]he skies opened and hair swelled like wet spaghetti”, but:

… when the sun was shining I’d iron all my clothes, maybe hang them up, take long elegant showers, finally get around to cutting my toenails, read Lewis Carroll, drink cheap flasks of brandy having fantasies of highballs, yachts, Spain and so on. (W 33).

As part of her recovery plan, Mary moves into a boarding house and contemplates one of her neighbours as they eat breakfast together in the communal dining room: “You wonder about the man next door and if he’s getting himself together too” (W 35).
Of Viidikas’ language, Garner says:

…she uses language with confidence, knows how to put a sentence together with panache… It’s dark, sometimes, but she doesn’t bullshit you; and there’s a real charge in the language, the way she can keep the whole thing surging along. (“Books for Fascination”)

I agree that Viidikas’ language has “panache”: strategies such as the use of sentence fragments, abstraction and informal language contrasting with imagery and poetic effect, vividly express a range of emotions from anger, pain and hopelessness to joy and wonder. Mary thinks about the stolid neighbour:

So I realise I have no intention of getting off with him, he’s so busy being normal he’d probably die of heart palpitations soon after. I plan a good screw in my course of ‘getting over it’ as I watch his hairy ears munching above his cornflakes. (W 35)

Viidikas employs rhythm for effect. Listen to this sentence, its use of syncopated rhythm mimicking jazz or scat, and see the refusal of conventional meanings when she juxtaposes sadness and semen, grave emotion beside bodily fluid and sex, which usually don’t go together. Similarly with the words infected and resurrected.

My body drapes itself on a chair – this loved, hated, sometimes infected, resurrected body; this receptacle of sadness and semen, of blood, celebration, distortion.
(W 125)

The narrator’s body is many opposite things at the same time: loved and hated, healthy and diseased, celebrated and denied.
With its innovative use of white space, broken lineage, the uneven length of pieces, the mix of prose and poetry inside and beside each other, her use of first person to create attachment and second person to create a feeling of intimacy, the whole of Wrappings works together as an experimental discontinuous narrative. Viidikas described Wrappings as “little prose pieces, nothing with set plots”. However, while the story “Getting It All Together” is just five pages long, and although the plot appears anarchic and non-linear on first reading, a close reading reveals the opposite: action and emotion are packed into every word.
The narrator tries many different strategies to overcome her feelings of grief and loss. Both filmic and textual versions portray Mary talking to close friends about the broken relationship; hanging out with acquaintances, drinking at the pub, going to a party and finally taking a new lover. Yes, it’s the man in the green shirt.
In the last minute of the film, we see Mary slip from the bed while the man is still asleep, and leave the house of her new lover, walking down the street swinging her shoulder bag.
The textual narrative ends:

Walking down an alley, things had got themselves together. Okay. The sun was coming up. Streets led into streets. (W 38)

Writing like Viidikas’s uses a deconstructive approach to subvert meaning. Such writing can be seen as pre-empting later feminist cultural work and even bringing about the theorisation of feminist post-structuralist writing. Her work has contemporary relevance because the issues she writes about still concern women today. Sometimes dense, always moving, the work of Viidikas offers readers other ways of reading themselves: through her eyes, across her skin, via her many hearts, words and images. Viidikas has been under-read for thirty years; it is timely that a new edition of her work appears this year. New and Rediscovered allows us unprecedented access to new work and a reinvigoration of some of her previously published work, important because it comprises an important contribution to English language literature.

WORKS CITED

Break-Up. Dir. Stephen Wallace. Canberra: Australian Film and Sound Archive, 1975. Perf. Film Actors Workshop. From short story by Vicki Viidikas.
Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Cixous, Helene and Catherine Clement. The Newly Born Woman. London: I.B.Tauris, 1996.
Cranny-Francis, A. Engendered Fiction: Analysing Gender in the Production and Reception of Texts. Kensington NSW: New South Wales University Press, 1992.
de Lauretis, Teresa, ed. Feminist Studies, Critical Studies. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986.
Dylan, B. “Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again” Another Side of Bob Dylan. LP. Columbia Records, 1964.
Garner, Helen. “Books For Fascination.” Rev. of Wrappings, by Vicki Viidikas. The Digger 2-10 Oct. 1974. Papers of Vicki Viidikas. Canberra: Australian Defence Force Academy Library, MS 96, Series 6, Folder 34.
Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. New York: Cornell University Press, 1985.
Kristeva, J. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. M. Waller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
Sallay, Adrienne. “Break Up: Getting it all Together”. Studies in Australasian Cinema. [forthcoming].
Threadgold, Terry, Anne Cranny-Francis, and eds. Feminine Masculine and Representation. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990.
“Vicki’s Voice: Remembering Vicki Viidikas”. Michael Ladd presenter, Robyn Ravlich, producer. PoeticA, Sydney: ABC, 1 Oct. 2005.
Viidikas, Vicki. Condition Red. St Lucia, QLD: University Of Queensland Press, 1973.
—. Conversation with Vicki Viidikas. Interview with Hazel de Berg. 3 Dec. 1975. Papers of Vicki Viidikas. Canberra: Australian Defence Force Academy Library, MS 96, Series 6, Folder 34.
—. Feathers/Songs/Scars: A Memoir for Vicki Viidikas. Prod. Robyn Ravlich. The Open Air. ABC Radio National. 25 Sept. 2005.
—. New and Rediscovered by Vicki Viidikas, ed. Barry Scott. Foreword by Kerry Leves. Melbourne: Transit Lounge Publishing, 2010
—. Vicki’s Voice: Remembering Vicki Viidikas. Pres. Michael Ladd. Prod. Robyn Ravlich. PoeticA. ABC Radio National. 1 Oct. 2005.
—-. Wrappings. Sydney: Wild & Woolley, 1974.
Virilio, P. and S. Lotringer. Pure War. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.
Wilding, M. Wild Amazement. Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 2006.