Scratchings on a Mirror

VICKI VIIDIKAS: SCRATCHINGS ON A MIRROR
Paper given at the annual ASAL conference in PERTH 2006
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2356 words + 4mins 23secs clips. Reads at 16 minutes, + clips = 20.5 minutes.
ABSTRACT
Scratchings On A Mirror: Ghostly Encounter With Vicki Viidikas

In 1975 poet and prose writer Vicki Viidikas worked with director Stephen Wallace to transform her short story ‘Getting It All Together’ into a film ‘Break-Up’. The movie acts as a focus to examine the early work of Viidikas, allowing a visual way into her work, which engaged with new ways of writing about subjectivity, sexuality and desire. Viidikas claimed that her writing was “really confessional” and “just what my inner feelings were at the time”. Critic Nancy Miller asserts that such writing involves us in identifying with the writer; reading their work acquaints one with that part of the writer that is like oneself, like looking into a mirror. Viidikas described her writing as “scratchings on a mirror”, a metaphor that both engages with and distorts the reflection offered.

Using the work of contemporary critical theorists Anne Cranny-Francis and Elizabeth Gross we can re-appraise the writing of Viidikas and understand why it remains powerful thirty years later. Viidikas’s story illuminates a particular moment in literary, filmic and historical time. In the ghostly context of this conference, the film is also used as an invitation for the ghost of Viidikas to visit us in the form of her celluloid image.

READ BRISKLY
* Slide 1 Title of paper

VICKI VIIDIKAS: SCRATCHINGS ON A MIRROR
* Slide 2 Picture of Viidikas from Coast To Coast

Australian poet Vicki Viidikas was born in 1948 and died fifty years later. Viidikas gained wide publication coverage for her prolific short prose and poetry from 1967 to 1984. However, apart from some early reviews, finding analyses of her work in the literature is difficult. This paper addresses the question of representation in her work, with its confrontational, speculative aspects and its relationship between language, subjectivity and sexuality.

Viidikas’s work often displays poststructural techniques of fracture, disruption and unexpected associations of words or ideas to render new meanings, or to obscure meaning, or to challenge representation itself. The work, which can be seen to engage with an experimental feminist aesthetic, freeing itself from the masculinist realist tradition that went before it, explores new modes of subjectivity and sexuality using what Hélène Cixous describes as “…explosion, diffusion, effervescence, abundance”.

* Slide 3 Cover of Condition Red
Viidikas’s first volume of poetry, Condition Red published in 1973, exhibits the tropes that concerned Her throughout her writing: hearts as metaphors for life, knives as metaphors for death, time, dreams, memories, corporeal imagery and mirrors. The second poem in Condition Red, “They Always Come” begins her long fascination with mirrors. The speaker imagines that after her death, when “they” come ‘[t]hey’ll find/ a mirror smothered in lips’. In another poem “Logic”, the mirror metaphor illuminates the speaker’s subjectivity:

Your self is a reflection of everything experienced.
Your experience is a mirror of being here before.

Viidikas uses mirrors to create unforgettable imagery, as in the poem “Well Scrambled”, ‘I want to be released from mirrors and inhibited bedrooms’; in the poem “O Woman of the Moon”, mirrors reflect the sails of the sea ‘through the lake of emptiness’; in the poem “there is a striving for…” they represent ‘someone other than myself;/a mirror shirt worn naked’ and in the poem “Reflections”, they reveal the OTHER in ‘the mirror of your eyes’.

* Slide 4 Wrappings cover

Friend and poet Robert Adamson maintains Viidikas’s 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. The mirror throws one’s own reflection back, but if it is marred that reflection will distort or change, as Viidikas illustrated in the last lines of her poem, “Cracked Windows”: “…mirrors/refract a thousand meanings/The head distorts what it can’t bear.”
This kind of linguistic expression has interesting parallels with Julia Kristeva’s conception 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 language which moves “…with and against the chora”, unconsciously shaping our powers of signification, and, like scratchings on Viidikas’s mirror, simultaneously depending upon and refusing meaning.

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 work as unpolished, indicating that she might have undervalued her work in the early years. Although she had amassed some two hundred and fifty typed short pieces in a suitcase under her bed, when she first showed them to friend and writer Michael Wilding in 1973, she told him that she didn’t think they were “any good”. He replied that they were “extremely good” and worked with her to choose fifty pieces to publish as Wrappings. In a period of publishing when women fought for exposure, it is interesting to note that the writer herself needed masculine validation of her work.

Critic Sue Higgins suggested in her 1975 review of new women’s fiction “Breaking The Rules” that marginal female voices, writing often from an outsider point of view, were gaining increasing exposure. However, she argued that the emerging female protagonists in books like Wrappings were “outsiders in a world that seems to offer…room to move and yet…brings them up against barriers, material and psychological that contradict their apparent freedom”.
Linguist Terry Threadgold maintains that while it is impossible to escape a phallocentric linguistic environment, “meanings can be reified, used, consumed, internalised, resisted” by women writers. In Wrappings Viidikas explores devices of resistance while using the notion of vulnerability as a vehicle for her literary subversions. Vulnerability is foregrounded in the photograph of Viidikas on the front cover, in the apparent shy smile, the way one foot kicks the other and the smallness of the figure against the empty background.

At stake in the title poem “A Part Dialogue About Wrappings” are expressions of vulnerability, as the narrator writes:

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

But who are “they?” Why are they innocent? And how can vulnerability burn the innocent? These are seemingly not transparent, answerable questions, and we are left with an effect of rupture. In the eighth stanza, the narrator refuses predictable representation of gender, writing, “It seemed the only thing to do, said the mummy, uncoiling from his/ wrapping and stepping into the other world”. In addition, the poem’s soundscape plays with a duality of meaning. The speaker is resisting representation with use of the homonym “tear”, meaning both a rent in an outer layer (the wrapping) and “tear” as water running from the eye. In the final stanza, “tear” is playfully thrown back into the poem, with: “These wrappings are extremely interesting, said the psychiatrist,/ poking at a pool of tears…” Viidikas often used such ambiguities as devices to question and disrupt meaning, in ways that Threadgold later advocated.
* Slide 5 Film title

The year after Wrappings was published, Viidikas worked with director Stephen Wallace on a short story from it to create what contemporary scholar Tanya Dalziell, describes as a “…malleable vision of the world that film makes possible”, discussing Gail Jones’ work. Together Wallace and Viidikas 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.

The movie, Viidikas explained, was “intended as [an] overall portrayal of a modern woman (poet’s) sensibility”, and 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.

The movie opens with a spat between the lovers, Mary and Phil, where we see Mary’s determination to pursue writing before shopping and household tasks.

* Slide 6 Clip 1 Mary and Phil fight

Via poststructural models, Anne Cranny-Francis argues 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”. There is a wonderful example of this inconsistency early in the film when we see Mary contradicting herself as she gazes into a mirror. 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. As she draws closer to the mirror Mary examines her face slowly, and tells her reflection, “You look awful”. After a long moment her mood changes and she pulls back from the mirror.

* Slide 7 Clip 2 Mary in mirror

Viidikas explores gender as separate from sexual difference, pre-empting Luce Irigaray’s urging to “[track] down what there is to be seen of female sexuality”, and later, Judith Butler and Teresa de Lauretis’s work on the moveable nature of gender, and how it works through performance, mimicry, discourse, images and signs. 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 the lesbian character Steve from “Steve and the Big Smoke”. Viidikas keeps desire, physical and emotional, at the forefront of her writing, as this exchange between Steve and the narrator shows:

‘You want to have sex?’ she asks me one night, sitting in my room smoking her little roaches. ‘I want to make love to you. You want love from me?’

Because Viidikas pre-empted the blurring of boundaries between sexuality and gender, in which, as Cranny-Francis describes, “[t]he terrain of romance, love and desire is necessarily contradictory”, her work is revealing for contemporary interpretation.

In her continuing efforts to get over Phil, Mary goes to a party with her friend Ruby. Here Wallace portrays Steve as joint-smoking, waistcoat-wearing and propositioning Mary again, 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.”

* Slide 8 Clip 3 Steve and Mary at party

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 in the party scene 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, rolling a joint and smiling.

* Slide 9 Clip 4 Viidikas

“Oh, Mama, can this really be the end…” The music echoes Mary’s thoughts as she walks into the courtyard, asking, “I’m enjoying myself, aren’t I?”, a question again expressing her vulnerability.

The subject matter of Viidikas’s work defies convention: she writes about the counter-culture lifestyle, sex and sexuality, drugs and drug addiction, prostitution and poverty. The strength of her work lies in her innovative use of imagery, form and structure, and her deconstructive approach to the way in which language can be a vehicle for ideas, subjectivity and attachment.

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.

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.”

In the same review, Garner maintains that Viidikas’s writing is “dense with imagery”, with which I agree. Listen to this passage 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…

* Slide 10 Clip 5 Highball fantasy

As part of her recovery plan, Mary moves into a boarding house and contemplates one of her neighbours: “You wonder about the man next door and if he’s getting himself together too.”

* Slide 11 Clip 6 Cornflake fantasy

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.

Viidikas described Wrappings as “little prose pieces, nothing with set plots”. 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. While “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 action and emotion 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.

*Slide 12 Mary in bed

In the last minute of the film, we see Mary leave the house of her new lover and walk down the street, swinging her bag.

Slide 13 Clip 8 “Streets lead into streets”

The textual narrative ends:

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

This ending speaks to Cixous’ idea of a female text as never-ending, “…aimless, endless and pointless, … it never concludes… What happens is an infinite circulation of desire from one body to the next”. This is a “circulation of desire”, I would add, from reader to narrator to viewer, as we accompany Mary on her journey.

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 provoking the theorisation of feminist forms of post-structuralism.

* Slide 14 Reading Viidikas

Reading Viidikas today crosses a historical boundary of thirty years, but her work still speaks in some ways to contemporary theory. Her use of experimental language and form to express a feminist aesthetic with its particularities of disruption, fragmentation, contradiction and obfuscation, imbue the work with contemporary relevance. Employing these strategies in the representation of sexuality, subjectivity and desire, aligns with the feminist project of finding new ways for representation to work. Texts like Viidikas’s 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.

* Slide 15 End slide

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