incorporated such elements into their work. Bernard Cohen’s novel
Tourism (1992), which is discussed further in Chapter 12, is structured like
a tourist manual. However, the entries about Australian cities are very
unlike those you might expect to find in such a book, and tend to be
abstract and philosophical, rather than specific and commercial.
Over the years I have seen a great deal of entertaining and perceptive
work produced by students employing these methods. One student
created a text in which he attempted to sell death through the form of an
advertisement. Another rewrote a section of a Shakespeare play as a recipe.
At this point I am not asking you to base a whole text on such a
principle. But many published authors insert non-literary forms into
longer works. For example, Australian writer Jan McKemmish includes
postcards in her novel A Gap in the Records (1985), while British novelist
Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (2003) is
full of mathematical formulae, diagrams, maps and lists. Use of letters or
diary entries are commonplace in novels from the nineteenth century to
the present day. The insertion of such texts into fiction can be useful in
breaking up the narrative and producing more generic variety. Non-literary
texts can also be part of mixed-genre pieces, as we will see in Chapter 9.
The following passage uses the advertising style on websites (the claim
to be able to accomplish almost anything in a digital environment) to
satirise the limits of consumerism. We can’t buy apologies ‘ready-made’, if
we could they would be worthless: nor can apologies wipe out the past.
The passage alludes particularly to Australian Prime Minister John
Howard’s refusal to apologise to indigenous people in Australia for the his-
torical injustices they have suffered (including massacres, torture and the
removal of children from their parents):
Example 3.12
Fellow-consumers—visit our web-site! Download any of our
10 million virtual apologies! Listen to a stereo byte or two in the
voice of your choice. Wipe out all those guilt feelings! Cleanse
the past! Choose any phrasing you like, or let our resident writers
pick the most soothing words.The essence of all our apologies is that
they don’t have to be what they mean, or think what they say. We h ave
every kind of apology you could desire: beginner and advanced, family
and national, racist and multi-cultural, new age, site-specific, low-fat,
easy-care, quick fix, superglue and slow-release. All with state of the
art graphics and available on instant demand.Remember : our apologies can be made-to-mood—also cut-price
sets available if you buy now, complete with automatic renewals.60 The Writing Experiment