Work in Progress Paper

MACQUARIE UNIVERSITY ENGLISH FACULTY June 2006
Work in Progress paper

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* Slide 1 Title of paper

VICKI VIIDIKAS: WORK IN PROGRESS PAPER

Counter culture author Vicki Viidikas was born on the twenty-seventh of November 1948, in Sydney, NSW. Her mother was a young Anglo-Celtic woman (one grandmother was Irish) and her father was Estonian, much older than her mother. He was a violin-maker and later a wood turner. Viidikas grew up without a father figure in the household, only meeting her father when she was thirteen, but he never lived with her, her mother and sister as a family (Viidikas “Conversation”).

* Slide 2 Picture of Viidikas from Coast To Coast

While Sneja Gunew neglected to include Viidikas in her treatise on migrant writers, Framing Marginality, perhaps because Viidikas didn’t see herself as a migrant writer, according to poet Stephen Oliver writing in “One Day in the Life of Vicki Viidikas”, Viidikas sometimes carried the sensibility of Central Europe in her poetry, “…alert to the inherited histories that rose and fell in her Estonian soul with all the pull of primary, migratory tides” (8). In her third volume Knabel, she celebrates her father and a Central European environment in her poem “To My Father, Viidikas”: ‘Your favourite violin plays, Paganini,/Dark forests bloom in the night…’ (Knabel 37).
Viidikas described her childhood years as “erratic”; the single-parent family moved house often. She attended many schools; art and English were her favourite subjects. Leaving school at fifteen, she supported herself in a variety of jobs including vet’s assistant, typist, bartender, apple picker and research assistant while, from the age of sixteen, she wrote poetry in her spare time (Viidikas “Conversation”). She attended Art College for two years after leaving school; her diaries and private papers are littered with colour and black-and white paintings, drawings and sketches.

When Viidikas was nineteen years old she was paid three dollars for her first published poem, “At East Balmain”, by Poetry Australia. Using an unconventional form, with odd and varied numbers of lines for each stanza (Stanza 1 has 2 lines, 2 has 3 lines, down to 8 with 5 lines), the piece describes the harbour with its “clear water washing million year old stones”, and conveys a sense of timelessness in which “[t]his day will be submerged in a thousand other days”. In contradicting imagery, the narrator proceeds to represent at the same time human invincibility, in which “[o]ne could get the feeling of walking across the water,/ without moving a muscle, just sitting and gliding/ into grey” and human vulnerability, as the poem shifts abruptly from lyricism to a representation of death. In the last stanza the narrator anthropomorphises a rat, “arms stretched” in a “stiff” representation of death:

Dried weed hangs from a bleached stick, like a dead
rat swinging … I found one yesterday. So cold
and grey and stiff with his tiny mouth open, arms
stretched above his head. I felt very quiet because
his bead eyes had lost their sparkle. (14)

This unconventional juxtapositioning of images in order to gain an effect was a technique Viidikas subsequently often employed in her work. The anthropomorphism attributes to the harbour foreshore a human presence where none exists. The sudden disruption of mood fractures the meaning represented in the early lines of the poem, of the harbour as benign. Viidikas’s work often displays such poststructural techniques of fracture, disruption and unexpected associations of words or ideas to render new meanings, or to obscure meaning, or to challenge representation.

Viidikas gained wide publication coverage for her prolific short prose and poetry. However, apart from some early reviews, finding analyses of her work in the literature is difficult. It is the intention of this chapter to employ a close reading of the work, which was undervalued at the time of publication, as was much of the new experimental writing by women in the 1970s. A new reading exploring the techniques Viidikas used and the effects they create allows for new meanings to emerge, and hence a re-invigoration of her writing. The central presence of the question of representation in her work, with its confrontational, speculative aspects and its relationship between language, subjectivity and sexuality is one which this chapter addresses.

Her work has recently been remembered in two ABC radio broadcasts, “Vicki’s Voice” and “Feathers/Songs/Scars”, produced by poet and friend Robyn Ravlich. The recordings use Viidikas’s own voice and those of her contemporaries, who describe her writing as “organic, holistic, courageous, adventurous, foolhardy, delightful, dangerous, non-conformist” (“Vicki’s Voice”). Addressing themes of sexuality and desire in a counter-cultural context, her work can be seen as a kind of poststructuralist literary bridge between women’s realist writing of the 1960s (for example, that of Jessica Anderson or Barbara Hanrahan) and the plethora of women’s feminist fiction in the 1980s (for example, Finola Moorhead and Beverley Farmer).

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. In her discussion about the writing of desire in Australian women’s writing of the 1980s and 1990s, Alison Bartlett agrees with Cixous, arguing that innovative writing produces

… new meanings and increased possibilities, new ways of imagining storylines and life-stories and new ways of reading stories into our lives; new ways of writing which offer moments of being instead of plot, patterns and flows instead of linear journeys, questions instead of resolutions… (127)

Poststructural strategies of contradiction, obfuscation and refusal of conventional meaning are central to Viidikas’s work, which 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 Hélène Cixous describes as “…explosion, diffusion, effervescence, abundance” (The Newly Born Woman 91). This is true of much of Viidikas’s writing, and especially of her story, “Getting It all Together”, as we shall see.

* Slide 3 Cover of Condition Red
Her first volume of poetry, Condition Red, 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. That Viidikas saw the world as a visual artist might is evident in many of her poems, as can be seen in this first volume which includes a poem titled “red is the colour”. This begins: ‘Red is the colour/when creation burst and the first physical thing/ stepped amazed into itself’ (14). Later in the poem Viidikas uses a phrase that conveys concurrently a sense of connection and a sense of disconnection: red is ‘…the heat from their bodies as they passed through each other’ (Stanza 16 Condition Red 15). This use of a kind of metaphoricity that contradicts meaning or creates new meaning is one of the hallmarks of her work. It echoes the aim of the French feminist projects of the 1980s and 1990s, or écriture feminine, to question, disturb, and disrupt patriarchal meaning when women write in new ways.

In the broadcast “Feathers/Songs/Scars”, friend and poet Robert Adamson likens Viidikas’s work to “blood pulsing through her life and passions”, acknowledging at the same time the many references to the colour red in her texts, referring to the corporeal nature of Viidikas’s work and likening the importance of her work to the importance of blood in a body, essential in delivering nutrients for survival.

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”, employing discontinuity and dense metaphoricity with little transparency between the language and meaning, elaborates on issues central to counter cultural lifestyles: music, drug-induced experience and the Vietnam War, where “…tigers are eating through walls and Hendrix is playing from hell”. Fragmentation and impenetrable imagery is evident in the last five lines: “Our fingers are snarling in chaos/Oh take it easy baby the lords have too many kingdoms/They’re playing darts with hypodermics/The fools are recording pain/We’re making weapons from our dreams” (4). Line 6 reads, “These words are loaded hearts”. Even this title phrase, “loaded hearts”, works as a contradictory metaphor: usually “loaded” would be associated with guns and death, while the conventional meaning of “hearts” is one pertaining to romantic love. Because the creative writing component of my project weaves several contradictory stories together in a counter cultural context, I have used the phrase Loaded Hearts as the working title for my novel.

*Slide 4 & 5 Tapestry album cover
In a Western cultural imagery, the heart is traditionally represented as a physical and metaphorical centre in usually over-determined, clichéd metaphors. These ubiquitous sentiments are expressed in many popular lyrics such as Carole King’s 1971 song, “I Feel The Earth Move” from her album, Tapestry: “I feel the earth move under my feet/ I feel the sky tumbling down/ I feel my heart start to trembling/ Whenever you’re around” (King 1971). What is significant in Viidikas’s use of “hearts” is the way she undermines established notions, as we have seen with “loaded hearts”. Another example from the poem, “The Passage”, rather than engaging with romantic notions, attributes fear to a woman’s heart, claiming, “the heart will move in its singular fear/the urge to be more than itself” (CR 21). In subverting time-honoured ways of writing about the heart Viidikas disrupts conventional meaning, providing new ways for thinking about women’s bodies, subjectivities and sexuality.

In the early 1970s changes to the censorship laws, and political, historical and social changes increased the cultural capital of ‘new writing’, leading to an explosion of explicit writing about the lives of both men and women: their subjectivities, bodies, sexualities, desires and emotions. Authors Michael Wilding and Frank Moorhouse wrote discontinuous narratives such as The Short Story Embassy (Wilding) and The Americans, Baby (Moorhouse) from a masculine postmodernist standpoint. Marginal female voices, writing often from an outsider point of view, gained increasing exposure as critic Sue Higgins (Sheridan) suggested in her review of new women’s fiction in 1975, “Breaking The Rules”. Higgins wrote 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” (415).

In the broadcast “Vicki’s Voice”, Adamson maintains that Viidikas’s second volume “Wrappings put her on the map, although she disparaged it as ‘scratchings on a mirror’.” As a description of her writing, “scratchings” implies both engagement with and distortion of a reflection offered by the mirror of self-reflective writing. The mirror throws one’s own reflection back, but the mirror may also distort or change that reflection, as Viidikas argued in the last lines 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 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 (Revolution In Poetic Language 25), 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 early work as unpolished, indicating that she herself 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 (Wild Amazement 42), when she first showed her 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 (Viidikas “Conversation”). 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 at that time.

* Slide 6 Wrappings cover
In his latest memoir, Wild Amazement, Wilding details how Viidikas referred to her pieces as “things” rather than stories or poems. 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 ‘new writers’ eschewed narrative which contained a plot with a beginning, middle and end in favour of circular, non-linear structures (Wild Amazement 40) such as those evident in The Short Story Embassy and The Americans, Baby.

In a poem included in Kate Jennings’ Mother I’m Rooted anthology, Viidikas commented on contemporary American poet Denise Levertov’s work, in a poem titled “To Levertov, To the Tradition”, saying: “So many words, she/threads them, carefully/like jewels”, but, she added later in the poem, “It is her alone, she is/only one/with her head supporting the ball;/yet another/in the tradition/of the artefact/replacing life” (Mother I’m Rooted 525), this last phrase implying that Levertov’s poems were sometimes contrived works of art rather than spontaneous representations of “life”. While Viidikas both admired and satirised the American poet, calling her writing skill “paradoxical”, she played with Levertov’s idea of art as artefact with lines such as, “I am trying to look at the artefact, whether it be sublimation or extension” in “The Incomplete Portrait” (Wrappings 127).

In 1975 Viidikas told interviewer Hazel de Berg that her writing was “really confessional” (Viidikas “Conversation”). She added

I more or less write it off the top of my head, straight off, in one go. … My writing is done at any time of the day or night, it’s quite a spontaneous thing…

But although Viidikas described her writing as confessional, and while it does have autobiographical elements, rather than an “unburdening”, it can be read as having an experimental aesthetic. Levertov, who published a book of anti-war poetry (Out Of The Vietnam Vortex) in the same year that Viidikas published Wrappings, qualifies confessional poetry as that which has an aesthetic quality, not only a desire to unburden feelings on the part of the poet. In an interview with Sybil Estess reprinted from American Poetry Observed, Levertov elaborates that aesthetics such as “…open forms [of poetry] can allow one to explore chaos and see what can be discovered there…” (“Levertov Interviewed” 5). This notion resonates with Viidikas’s work, which often displays anarchic form and content.

The first piece in Wrappings, called “Trying To Catch The Voice” parallels Cixous’ notion of “writing by the voice”, which she described in 1996 as 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…” (Newly Born Woman ix). The narrator in “Trying To Catch the Voice”, who is enduring the pain of a failed relationship, struggles to “catch the voice” with which to express her thoughts. In the attempt, the narrator personifies the word “words” to express her frustration about the impossibility of representation, and employs contradictory metaphors: words are “bright daggers”.

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. (“Trying To Catch The Voice” 7)

This phrase in which “words” are shiny reflections of light, is juxtaposed with “daggers”, harbingers of violence and sudden death. It conflates two contradictory ideas, speaking metaphorically to the impossibility of representation itself.

Linguist Terry Threadgold argues that while it is impossible to escape a phallocentric linguistic environment, “meanings can be reified, used, consumed, internalised, resisted” by women writers (Feminine Masculine and Representation 5). 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. The hard-cover volume conveys the same notion, with a picture of three soft, velvety coats hanging in a row on pegs fastened to a rough brick wall.

In order to explore the disjunction between language and meaning, literary devices Viidikas uses to subvert and resist conventional meaning in the following poem include obfuscation and opacity. At stake in the poem “A Part Dialogue About Wrappings” (68) are expressions of vulnerability, as the narrator writes:

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

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 line two in which “they”, two unnamed lovers, “recoil”, and between lines two and three, where there seems to be no linguistic connection between recoiling and being burned. In more obfuscation, the poem’s soundscape plays with a duality of meaning. The writer 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 eighth stanza, the narrator resists conventional representation of gender and plays with words and meaning, writing, “It seemed the only thing to do, said the mummy, uncoiling from his/ wrapping and stepping into the other world” (69). In the final stanza, an echo of the previous confusion with “tear” is playfully thrown back into the poem, with: “These wrappings are extremely interesting, said the psychiatrist,/ poking at a pool of tears…” (69) Viidikas often used such ambiguities as a device to question and disrupt meaning, in ways that Threadgold later advocated.

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 (49). Together Viidikas and Wallace 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 doubled filmic lens through which to examine the early work of Viidikas.

Slide 7 Film title

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 cultural theorist Paul Virilio’s notion that “[w]e’re in the age of micro-narratives, the art of the fragment” (35). It is interesting to note that in the textual version, the narrator is never named, while in the filmic version, she is given that ubiquitous woman’s name, “Mary”. Viidikas called the male protagonist the universal Western male name “John” in the textual narrative, but in the film he is re-named “Phil”, a name Helen Garner later used in many of her stories, explaining that for her the name “Phillip” stood as a symbol for every-man (“A Writer’s Life”.) Once again, in the naming of the characters, Viidikas seems to be playing with multiple layers of meaning and subjectivity.
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 8 Clip 1 Mary and Phil fight

Discussing subjectivity within a framework of discourses, contemporary cultural theorist Anne Cranny-Francis in Engendered Fiction (16) argues that “…subjectivity is a configuration of subject positions negotiating discourses of class, gender, ethnicity and generation”. Teresa 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). Psychological and intellectual experiences, and social and power relationships also impact on a subject, constantly changing her (14). The self-reflexivity of Viidikas’s writing evidences this continual exploration of subjectivity, 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”. Using her hallmark contradictory device, the story begins breathlessly, using the image of the mirror as a mechanism for shattering the self, when normally the viewer might use a mirror as a means of creating a sense of self:

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. (98)

Via poststructural models, 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” (Engendered Fiction 7). There is a wonderful example of this inconsistency early in the film when we see Mary contradicting herself as she gazes into a mirror, staging her uncertainties about her future and her role in it. 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, she pulls back from the mirror and says:

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. (Break-Up)

* Slide 9 Clip 2 Mary in mirror
Contemporary theorists reconceptualise the body as a site of contestation on which differences of gender, ethnicity, culture, class and race may be inscribed. Feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz argues in “Inscriptions and Body Maps” that the body is “a place of inscription, a tool for writing in culturally specific ways” (62). Moreover, contemporary gender studies theorist Elspeth Probyn maps embodiment as including affect as well as physicality, describing “…bodies that feel, that are moved by different emotions – fear, love, shame, disgust, anger” (106). Viidikas, in her prose and poetry, pre-empted Probyn’s 2004 call to turn attention from women’s perfect bodies and concentrate on investigating “the feelings, the experiences and the sheer diversity of imperfect ones” (108) with phrases such as, “You do not want to read about my sitting in the VD clinic waiting to have my vagina scraped” (“The Incomplete Portrait” 126). With the words, “You do not want to read about…”, the narrator challenges the reader to engage with the idea of an imperfect body waiting in the VD clinic, accusing the reader of a squeamishness about, or lack of interest in, the diseased body of a woman.

Drenched with corporeal language and metaphor, which speaks to Helene Cixous’ call to write wherein “…my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs” (“The Laugh of the Medusa” 226), the stories in Wrappings combine physicality and affect to create a “place of inscription”. Consider how, in the last piece in Wrappings, “The Incomplete Portrait”, the narrator addresses her lost lover. Trapped in her “skin linings”, her frustration as her mind swings “between acts and bodies” renders her unable to say what she wants to say. She can only create a “literature of myth” while simultaneously desiring her thoughts to reach her lover, even as she knows the distance between them will prevent that which she most desires.

…I do not trust this distance, this portrait that does not resemble the original matter, this abstraction that allows minds to swing between acts and bodies… I’ve had enough of this distance, this literature of myth, as I sit here encased in skin linings, watching my wrists and fingers move across the page propelling my thoughts towards you. (124)

Claire Colebrook’s description of the body as possessing “a force and being that marks the very character of representation” (“From Radical Representations” 1) speaks to the corporeality of Viidikas’s work, which runs through it like Adamson’s pulsing blood, right to the end, when, in the very last line, the narrator begs for the page to become embodied. Employing a confrontational metaphor for embodiment, the line reads, “The page should fuck back – I can’t think of a more reasonable premise” (“The Incomplete Portrait” 127).

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 (Viidikas “Conversation”), adding characters from other Wrappings stories, such as Steve from “Steve and the Big Smoke” (64-67). The narrator attributes various subjectivities to Steve in an eleven-line poem embedded in the three prose pages. The poem begins:

* Slide 10 “Steve and the Big Smoke” first 4 lines of poem

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 poetic conventions and keeps desire, physical and emotional, at the forefront of her writing, as this short scene from “Steve and the Big Smoke 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?’ (65)

Exploring the central question of gender difference, Viidikas experiments with gender as separate from sexual difference, pre-empting Luce Irigaray’s urging to “[track] down what there is to be seen of female sexuality” (Speculum of the Other Woman 145), and later, Judith Butler and Teresa de Lauretis’s work on the moveable nature of gender, how it works through performance, mimicry, discourse, images and signs (Butler Undoing Gender 198, 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)

Because Viidikas pre-empted the blurring of boundaries between sexuality and gender, in which “[t]he terrain of romance, love and desire is necessarily contradictory”, (Cranny-Francis & Waring 232) her work is revealing for contemporary interpretation. In her continuing efforts to get over Phil, Mary goes to a party with her friend Ruby, where she meets up with the out lesbian character Steve again. Here Wallace portrays Steve as joint-smoking, waistcoat-wearing and 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 film, 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 11 Clip 3 Steve and Mary at party
In the textual narrative, Viidikas elaborates on different forms of embodied feeling, when Mary rejects Steve, the first-person narrator thinking:

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. (“Steve and the Big Smoke” 65)

Steve “[h]as a habit of running out of tobacco and having to smoke some of her deals”. Early in the piece, Viidikas uses the line, “‘ It’s all one big smoke to me, man,’ commenting on [Steve’s] thirty-five year life” (65). Steve’s story ends with Steve’s ruminations about bliss in a repetition of the earlier line: “‘Happiness? It’s all one big smoke to me, man’.” 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? Another more cynical, even bitter interpretation might be that happiness doesn’t matter, or that drugs cover up what is the taken-for-granted pain of everyday life and one shouldn’t expect happiness. 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 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 12 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 her work defies convention: Viidikas 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, 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” n.p.)

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” (“Steve and the Big Smoke” 67).

In the same review, Garner maintains that Viidikas’s writing is “dense with imagery”, with which I agree. Consider 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… (33)

* Slide 13 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” (“Getting It All Together” 35).

* Slide 14 Clip 6 Cornflake fantasy

Of Viidikas’s 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.

Strategies such as the use of sentence fragments, abstraction and informal language contrasting with complex imagery and poetic effect, vividly express a range of emotions from anger, pain and hopelessness to joy and wonder, and continue the contradictory and disruptive effects of the work. 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. (“Getting It All Together” 35)

Viidikas also employs rhythm and dissonant rhyme for effect. Consider this sentence about the narrator’s body, 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 assonance of 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. (“The Incomplete Portrait” 125)

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 with the reader, 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 piece “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.

*Slide 15 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 16 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. (“Getting It All Together” 38)

This ending also 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” (“Textes” 18). This is a “circulation of desire”, I would add, from reader to narrator to viewer, as we accompany Mary on her journey.

* Slide 17 Reading Viidikas

In a tribute to her work and in remembrance of her first poem, “At East Balmain”, Robert Adamson wrote a poem “For Vicki Viidikas”, about her life and death and work. It begins

East Balmain, the ferry wharf, dragon flies
and killer prawns hovering
above and below their reflections
on the harbour’s milky surface
after rain. We knew there was no such
thing as death and felt good about that knowledge,
though where did we get it from?
You thought any form of flattery
Was the rhetoric that killed poems;
Now you are dead, there’s no ‘other side’
Although maybe you’re back
As something not so human.”

Adamson’s eulogy resonates with Viidikas’s very first poem about the harbour, death and the dead rat. In homage to her juxtaposition of contradictory ideas, Adamson oddly combines “killer” and “prawns” to convey a new creature of the sea, a new meaning of how we might perceive prawns, perhaps as a metaphor for death. He also pays homage to Viidikas’s representations of subjectivities as complex, depicting those “killer prawns”, not as single entities, but split by their reflections into multiple images.

Reading Viidikas today crosses a historical boundary of thirty years, but her work still speaks in some ways to contemporary theory. Indeed, it could be said that Viidikas pre-empted 21st Century Third Wave feminism in her insistent desire to write how and what she wanted, even to the point of shocking or eschewing publishers, reviewers and readers. Adamson wrote in his poem, “For Vicki Viidikas”, “You mocked the idea of any kind of fame/ even if it paid.”

Her contemporary relevance has been under-read: there is strength and independence in Viidikas’s work, which lies in her use of experimental language and form to express a feminist aesthetic with its particularities of disruption, fragmentation, multiplicity of ideas and meanings, changeable subjectivity, gendered sexuality and overt desire. Her use of contradiction, rupture and obfuscation align 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.

Michael Wilding described how, towards the end of her life, “[s]he began to slide away from us, or we from her. Increasingly it was the world of the Cross, of hard drugs, of opiates, dependency, the twilight demi-monde that claimed her, or that she claimed. (“Mere Anarchy” 17). When she died in 1998, poet and friend Gig Ryan described her work in an obituary as “an integral part of the rich flowering in Australian poetry that took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s, part of an extraordinarily talented generation…” (20).

Slide 18 End slide

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