Chapter 5: Textual Intercourse: Kathleen Mary Fallon's Working Hot

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

I. Introduction: the contextFollowing the shock punk splashdown of her 1978 Blood and Guts in High School the 1980s were a period of extraordinary productivity for Acker, always ready, as she was, to push her work further in its traffic with political and cultural theory and philosophy. While her textual experimentation with genre and promiscuous practice of citation and pastiche might not have been a direct source of inspiration to (Kathleen) Mary Fallon,1 2 the receptivity to innovation thus catalysed proved enabling to many bold younger generation writers emerging in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s.With its intensive formal and cross-generic experimentation already manifest in its graphic layout, its overtly signalled disruption of insides and outsides, its camivalesque friction of myriad vernacular voices and counter-voices alongside texts from pop culture and cultural theory, its streetwise traffic of fragmented stories and scenes, its jubilant and often wild affirmation of lesbian sexuality, its parodies of sexism, racism and homophobia, and its frank expression of affect in sexual longing, distress and abandonment, Fallon's Working Hot didn't quite burst on an unprimed scene in 1989. Nevertheless, its arrival was a spectacular and productive disruption. While it can be argued3 that the Era Malley affair and its conservative backlash had put the brakes on the advance of literary experimentation in Australia, Patrick White's denunciation ('The Prodigal Son', 1958), of what he famously termed dun-coloured realism, was just one early incitement to look to external modernist and already postmodern literary experiments, both from Europe and America. In the postWorld War II perspective,4 5 the impact of Patrick White's modernist inventiveness should not be under-estimated, with works such as The Aunt's Story preparing for the dizzying performance of sliding sexualities in works yet to come, such as Portraits of Many in One and The Twyborn Affair.In effect, the impact of European experimentation and American fabulism on the male fiction writing scene was signalled in the early 1980s by some dazzling experimentation in form and voice by such writers as Murray Bail, Peter Carey, Morris Lurie, David Foster, and Gerald Muraane, and what was received as an excitingly new, fragmented form of realism in work by Frank Moorhouse and Michael Wilding. This newly experimental verve was resoundingly manifest in Brian Kieman's 1977 edited collection, The Most Beautiful Lies5 and in 1986 Don Anderson's Transgressions: Australian Writing Now,6 7 8 which widely disseminated some of the more interesting non-realist writing.A little later, critic Helen Daniel imaginatively explored the impact of fabulist and metafictionally savvy works, like those of Gerald Mumane, Peter Mathers, David Ireland, and Elizabeth Jolley in her 1988 title Liars: Australian New Novelists.1 Fremantle Arts Centre Press, under Ian Templeman's direction, deserves accolades for its recognition of the bold, gothic originality of Elizabeth Jolley, the sole woman writer included by Helen Daniel, whose work until the late 1970s had been serially rejected, but also for gathering exciting new work in its first volumes of poetry and cross-genre experimentation. On the other hand, already in 1970, groundbreaking feminist literary analysis such as Kate Millett's Sexual Politics and Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch catalysed exuberant experimental departures from Australian feminist writers. Thematically, Kate Jenning's anthology Mother Fm Rooted was responsible for an exciting feminist enlargement of the domain of the speakable and the politicisable in poetry. Publications like the brilliant avant-garde performative prose poetry of Ania Walwicz's Writing? which draws on the tradition of European surrealist practice, as much as high modernist experimentation in narrative-related genres, spawned many imitations and arguably also genuine innovation across generic fronts. …