creative writing
Dr Bridget Haylock is a creative writing scholar who specialises in writing for performance and literary studies research, with a focus on work that enacts and depicts creative emergence from trauma.
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
TEXT Vol 21 No 2 (October 2017), Writing and Trauma, Edited by Bridget Haylock and Suzanne Hermanoczki,
http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue42/content.htm.
Emerging from Entrapment: Sue Woolfe’s modern Gothic Painted Woman, http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue42/Haylock.pdf
In this article, I examine the Gothic generic, narrative and conceptual strategies Sue Woolfe uses to describe creative emergence from the effects of intergenerational trauma and the impact on modalities of subjectivity in Painted Woman (1990), a tale of incest and disavowed artistry. The deployment of the Gothic subverts expectations of power relations, engenders the development of new paradigmatic writing forms, and shows the presence/lack of agency from within the traumatic space. Woolfe reframes embodied experience through experimentation with assumptions around signifying practices, generates radical language through which to testify to trauma and suggest that from abjective experience, empowerment and transformation are not only possible, but also essential.
I critically examine the feminine Gothic sensibilities, and how the protagonist’s traumatic constitution advances Woolfe’s argument for feminist intervention in the sociosymbolic order. Her work describes incest and gynecide; it interrogates the role of the artist within society and demonstrates that an empowering outcome of the creative practice of artmaking is emergence from a traumatic paradigm. The novel elucidates through its themes, syntax and narratology creative emergence, and posits a future wherein the heroine defies gynecidal suppression and wilfully enacts desire. Allowing her creativity to flourish performs many functions for a woman: a realisation of subjecthood, a declaration of artistic agency and a painting in of the artist’s life through an uncompromising disruption of a deadly regime of phallocratic power. In the narrative Woolfe conceives a conversion of the painted, slain and objectified woman into the artist as active subject of her own gaze.
‘The Trauma of the Colonised: Writing Female in Barbara Baynton’s Human Toll.’ 2013 “The Strangled Cry”: The Communication and Experience of Trauma. Eds. Bray, P. and Aparajita Nanda. Oxford, U.K.: Inter-Disciplinary Press. Print.
‘The Trauma of the Colonised: Writing Female in Baynton’s Human Toll.’ 2012 Is this a Culture of Trauma? Eds. Bick, M. and Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen. Oxford, U.K.: Inter-Disciplinary Press. ebook. https://brill.com/view/title/38630
https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9781848881624/BP000020.xml
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2013.
The 20th century has been characterised by an unprecedented violence that seems to have left an imprint in contemporary societies: from the two World Wars or the terrorist attack of 9/11 to natural catastrophes or sexual abuse. All of these terrible experiences have been collected, represented, and communicated by many different people, especially in the last few decades, as seen in the high number of books and films dealing with traumatic experiences. As a result, an interdisciplinary ‘trauma studies’ field has emerged. At the 2nd Global Conference ‘Trauma: Theory and Practice’, an interdisciplinary conference hosted in Prague in the spring of 2012, academics and professionals met to explore and debate issues surrounding the experience of individual and collective traumas, their representations in art, and some theoretical approaches to trauma. This book is a collection of the papers presented at the conference, a snapshot of the current work in the field of trauma studies.
In these articles I argue that the radical textual practice in Barbara Baynton‟s (1857-1929) novel, Human Toll (1907), foreshadows contemporary feminine appropriation and subversion of the Bildungsroman genre which testifies to traumatic experience; specifically the creative emergence from the traumatic inheritance of feminine embodiment, demonstrated by concern with femininesubjectivity and signified by the colonised female (body). What Baynton argues for in Human Toll is an autonomous place for feminine expression, for écriture feminine, in the symbolic world. In a perturbation of genres, Baynton combines melodrama—the genre par excellence in which women have agency by default; romance; and the Bildungsroman, to create an impression of how fraught access to creative agency is for women in the context of trauma, and the cultural constraints on women at the cusp of Federation in the Australian Bush. As her heroine emerges from the feminine traumatic paradigm, her encounters with many aspects of the phallocentric world provoke traumatic repetition. For Baynton no masculine edifice is sacrosanct: Catholicism, property law, marriage, sex, education, wealth, and class are all found to be wanting in relation to the feminine. Experiences of opposition and denial serve to spur the protagonist into a fervent conviction of her desire for agency, and to find creative and cathartic expression in writing. In doing so, as Suzette Henke contends, the female author initiates an enabling discourse of testimony and self-revelation. In audaciously reinscribing the claims of feminine desire into the texts of a traditionally patriarchal culture, this écriture feminine attempts to reframe embodied experience through experimentation of assumptions around signifying practices, interrogating the outcome for its relation to power and feminine subjectivity.
‘A Fragmented Life: Writing Intergenerational Trauma in Morgan Yasbinchek’s liv’. Jul 2016, Hecate: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Women’s Liberation. 41.1&2. (2015) Hecate Press.
https://hecate.communications-arts.uq.edu.au/volume-4112-2015
In this article I engage trauma theory to analyse the narrative strategies that Morgan Yasbincek deploys in the novel liv (2000). I demonstrate how Yasbincek makes the expression of creative emergence from catastrophically fracturing intergenerational trauma significant as a theme and a process and how the text makes this imaginatively and effectively available to the reader. I analyse the representation in liv of the paradox inherent in the traumatic shattering of subjectivity and the ensuing reconstruction of identity facilitated through creative writing, where the imperative to create enables an oblique access to the foreclosed traumatic experience.
liv is a fictionalised account of a family’s Croatian-Australian migration and, although short-listed for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal in 2000, and commended by the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards of the same year, critical analysis of the work has to date been limited. The narrative is enacted through a heteroglossia that is foregrounded through the use of stylistic fragments that perform the temporality of the intergenerational and traumatic memory and dis-continuity. liv shows how intergenerational trauma manifests and has its effect attenuated as emergent subjectivity forms through creative endeavour.
‘Enlisting Rage and Speaking Place: Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria.’ 2013 Voicing Trauma & Truth: Narratives of Disruption & Transformation. Eds. Bray, O. and Peter Bray. Oxford, U.K.: Inter-Disciplinary Press. Print.
‘Enlisting Rage and Speaking Place: Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria.’ 2011 Traumatic Imprints: Performance, Art, Literature and Theoretical Practice. Eds. Barrette, C., Haylock, B. and Danielle Mortimer. Oxford, U.K.: Inter-Disciplinary Press. ebook. https://brill.com/view/title/54949
https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9781848880856/BP000011.xml
The ebook, Traumatic Imprints: Performance, Art, Literature and Theoretical Practice, presents conference proceedings from the 1st Global Conference Trauma: theory and practice, held in Prague, Czech Republic in March 2011. The conference brought together scholars who work on trauma in various ways: from theorists, to therapist practitioners, creative writers and performers; in three days of exchange, delegates sought to represent what has been defined as the unspeakable, trauma.
In these articles, I interrogate the tactics of opposition used by Alexis Wright in her much-lauded novel, which satirises and subverts the European invaders’ materialist and scientific worldview, and their presumption of territorial rights. Wright’s Carpentaria (2006) explores embodied and Indigenous subjectivity, presenting Australian society reeling from the genocidal trauma and subsequent rage at its foundations: consequences of colonialism. Carpentaria shows the progressive amplification of Indigenous traumatic experience from the personal to intra-familial to societal, and illustrates many areas of Indigenous people’s lives that trauma affects. Wright uses the attempted genocide and ensuing ongoing displacement of the peoples of her nation as a synecdoche for the experience of colonised people worldwide. Wright’s work is a chronicling of the fury of the occupied, emphasising the Indigenous view that the land and people are one. The novel centres on the development of land, the result of continued colonisation, and how rage can be a mobilising force for action. In this chapter I will explore how, through the implicit use of the Bakhtian carnivalesque, Wright subverts social assumptions. I will also examine what radical ideas she presents for cultural and political debate in the light of Deborah Bird Rose’s thesis of an ethics for decolonisation. Wright projects and presents a world where the abject, traumatised, Indigenous subject parodies would-be oppressors; in mirroring white society, she echoes Mary Douglas’ thesis that absolute dirt exists in the eye of the beholder. Through the deft use of Mudrooroo’s ‘maban reality’, the Indigenous genre of Australian writing that privileges oral storytelling, Wright performs emergence from trauma for readers by finding the words, breaking the silence and speaking place. While Germaine Greer contends that colonialism was successful in destroying Aboriginal culture, leaving a self-destructive rage in its wake, this is an invader’s point of view; Wright’s Aboriginal man enacts agency and enlists rage to regain his land and dignity. Wright suggests that from enraged, abjective experience, empowerment and transformation is not only possible, but also essential.