In other types of fictocritical writing there may be an alternation or
negotiation between creative writing and academic discourse, in which
different sections of the text gesture towards different types of writing. For
example ‘Learning to Drive: Reading the Signs’ by Australian writer Moya
Costello is written in short fragments (it is another example of discontin-
uous prose). It contains theoretical allusion (for example to Virilio and
Lacan); literary allusion (for example to Murray Bail, Helen Garner
and Annie Proulx); short narratives; reflective fragments; and quotation. It
uses driving as a metaphor for combining change with ‘staying on track’,
and interweaves driving and psychological ‘breakdown’ with the processes
of writing and reading. In the following passage Costello moves, in a deft
associative sequence, from literary allusion, to thoughts on the process of
driving, to a quotation about the activity of writing. The quotations are
from Annie Proulx and Nicole Bourke respectively, and are annotated in
footnotes:
Example 9.7
In her novel Postcard s, E. Annie Proulx has a chapter called ‘The
Driver’ (it is almost a complete short story in itself). After her
husband dies, Jewell, the oppressed wife and mother of the
backwoods Blood family, gains both freedom in her house—though
she narrows down the space she inhabits in it—and freedom in the
outside world when she learns to drive and buys a car.When she turned the ignition key and steered the car out of
the drive, the gravel crunching deliciously under the tires, she went dizzy
with power for the first time in her adult life.One of the hardest things to do, I find, is to get a sense of the
space of the car: how much space it fills up, its length and breadth.
There will be some days, I am thinking, when perhaps I should not
drive.These will be days when I occupy no space.When I write, it is a peculiar thing... I plunge in, having lost
my way, having never had a way, and begin to navigate absen(s)e.From ‘Learning to Drive: Reading the Signs’ (Costello 1999, p. 23)In Anne Brewster’s ‘sucking on remembrance: encounters with the
vampire and other histories of the body’, the text alternates between pas-
sages of creative writing and theoretical quotations. Again full references
are given at the end of the piece. Here is a short excerpt:
The invert, the cross-dresser, the fictocritic 207