Excerpts from books by Ruth Skilbeck. Scroll to read the book excerpts. All excerpts and works copyright Ruth Skilbeck.
Fiction novel: Extract from Australian Fugue: The Antipode Room (2014; 2019, novel) Fiction novel: Extract from Sayonara Baby (2017, novel) also published with the title Cafe Life in the Antipodes (2018). Nonfiction: Extract from The Writer’s Fugue: Musicalization, Trauma and Subjectivity in the Literature of Modernity (2017, literary studies) with review by Emeritus Professor Garry Trompf (The Journal of Religious History, Vol 44, Issue 1, March 2020, pp.141-142.)
FICTION
Extract from:
Ruth Skilbeck. Australian Fugue: The Antipode Room, 2nd edition with new fictional preface and illustrated with 14 digital artworks. Adamstown (Australia): Borderstream, 2019; pp. 274
From pp. 1-11. Fictional preface and first pages of story narrative
Madame Flying Doctor’s Fugue Notebooks
This is the first Fugue Notebook.
When first I began my research into the mysterious condition of psychogenic fugue—diagnosed as loss of awareness of self-identity coupled with a wandering journey away from Home—I had no idea where it would lead me. I was young and driven; it was years before I earned my stripes. Madame Flying Doctor has come to stand for doctors without borders and Aboriginal flying spirit doctors for flights of healing powers, in many forms. If there are some things that seem fantastical and fictional, this is because some truths we cannot express in any other way. What some of the most visionary artists grasp and see in their dreams and realize in their works, years later becomes a mainstream understanding.
The Antipode Room presented here is the first in the series of Fugue Notebooks.
The Antipode Room is a consulting room, a room for reflection, a mirror fugue, its lines have no stopping points, endlessly looping, repeating, infinite; like Bach’s last unfinished fugue, it’s a game many can join in and play, a musical round of potentially infinite polyphony, multiple voices. I had no idea when I first entered that box of mirrors, on that raining London day years ago, of the significance of the order of voices, the need for precision, as the precise arrangement of notes in the melody line, is key. I did not know what I do know now about the practical and supra-worldly applications of the fugal modality that speaks in the hidden code of computer binaries, that through the power of alignment can take us to the higher dimension of global human consciousness, set us free. I was fumbling towards infinity, yet I had an intuition that I followed blindly, knowing somehow… It is the work of the artist to decide when it stops. It is the work of the fugue doctor to decide where it starts.
Fugue in Medical Discourse
The questions associated with phenomena of psychogenic fugue identified in recent and current medical/psychiatric discourse are to do with the subjective nature of memory, consciousness, and personal identity. These issues concern subjective awareness and loss of awareness of the self. These are areas of ambiguity in philosophy of Mind, and Phenomenology, that have long provided ‘questions with no answers’ for philosophers. These problems have eluded empirical medical knowledge. Considering contexts of the subject’s life is a holistic approach considered by K who said to better understand the phenomenon of psychogenic fugue, we must understand the subject’s life context and experience.
K conducted intensive research into case studies, which seek to understand social, cultural, and individual personal dimensions of the psychogenic fugue narrative.
Prelude
Young woman alone
Playing violin
Falling dusk
Darkening room
‘I’ve got Bach’s Art of Fugue. I can put that on. I often listen to it when I’m going to sleep. It’s my bedtime music,’ she adds suggestively.
She half sits up and leans over me. The top of her Japanese robe falls open. Her breasts are pale lilies floating on a dark pond.
She leans and touches the player beside the bed.
The first slow haunting bars of the fugue, the searing profound beauty of a solo violin shatters the still warm arm.
Suddenly she twists. She kisses me on my lips. This is the last thing that I want.
I wanted the love of my life that she stole away from me.
And that’s when it happens.
That’s when everything went red.
A fireball exploded at the back of my head with a blinding impact of noise—blood—spurting over her, over me.
And then nothing.
From faraway a bell is ringing. Ringing, ringing. Ringing. Boring into my brain.
I open my eyes, and rise from the bed like a sleepwalker...
Newcastle Jail, 14 August 2003
Every morning I wake in hope. I’ve heard that amputees forget their limb’s not there. Feeling a phantom limb. All I saw, heard in my dreams, were ghosts.
I remember the blood, red, I had a pain in my head. I hear the dawn chorus, bird’s first melodies.
See black, white, verticals. Bars, light, bars. Hear warders shouting. Rattling doors.
See an aeroplane fly by, a pale frail amoeba swimming in infinity. My window to reality, the outside world, is striped. Prison grids it.
And I shall tell Doctor. No.
Enlightenment, which I long for, did not illuminate my dreams, again. I did not remember in the night.
And I will move through this day, as the past four hundred and thirty. A life sentence ahead. Following my trial. Someone did it. But who? The full moon rises each month, drowns me in seductive grief. If I am good, they say I will be allowed to paint. I am good. My good work is my offering, chicken’s blood, and palm oil. Tap-tap-tap. Keep on going as I try to recall, the murder which led to my conviction.
The murder I cannot remember.
Tap-tap-tap, my fingertips press the keys of the laptop Sir Hugo brought before he returned home, which they let me keep in my cell. I’m trying to reconfigure that Time blanked from my mind. What happened? Throw myself on the narrow bed...
Bach was a master of the art of fugue...
Her words repeat, a code I’m struggling to crack
It’s my bedtime music.
Repeating, infernal internal Nietzschean CD track, stuck on eternal return.
Did he? Did she? What happened? I don’t know. But I was supposed to have been there! I must remember, so I will be able to forget. Move on, at least, figuratively speaking. To move on out of here, a free woman would be bliss. Divine.
Forget. Her violent violin. Lay to rest, my nemesis.
Haunted for so long.
Remember. Margarita, swooping, soaring. Flying, falling. Cutting the still air of the Castle into bittersweet motifs, ribbons and confetti, with the geometry of her bowing arm.
Dancing to her music, in a blood red gypsy dress.
You’ll get it, the missing real-to-reel.
Talk-it-up. Talk-out. Roll up for the five-dollar-a-minute talking cure. Here it’s on the house. The counsellors, shrinks, doctors, say. Think. And you will find. That missing piece. Is buried deep within. Lost behind a couch, perchance? Hugo’s chaise longue that Demeter, my delightful mother-in-law, said had once belonged to Oscar Wilde.
Under a bed, maybe? Hugo’s bed or Ray’s…he was always the untidy one when he was out-of-order.
That long-lost bit of me that will, that might, see me free.
I want to find the one I am searching for.
Bring her back from the Other Side.
What did Father Aristotle say without a seeming trace of irony in the prisoner chapel service last Sunday? The truth, my sisters, the Truth will set you free.
The last thing I remember clearly is preparing to go to Australia to collect art for my gallery.
Day Six
Ruby
Ruby Love Gallery, London, December 6, 2001
BANG!
Ouch! Sounds of industry crash against my hangover. Susan and Ham are renovating the Antipode Room ready for our return from Australia, laden with art and contracts if all goes to plan. Fresh blood, to inject colour and vitality into the antipodean collection I’m becoming known for.
I aim to stir up the artworld. Make something happen. Waste swamped art this fin-de-millennium. Doug & Dan’s excremental exhibition drew the highest audiences ever on record in the history of the Royal Academy. Am I the only gallerist in town craving visions to inspire us? Though I won’t let anyone know. Authentic, cutting-edge, as it undoubtedly is.
‘Ruby! Must you exhibit abjection, my dear?’ Sir Hugo joked as I helped hang the show.
‘Cheer up! Be happy! Celebrate life!!’
It was Hugo’s idea that we go. He’s been persuading me to take him for years since soon after we pledged our troth. Going to my ‘homeland’ as Hugo teasingly refers to it is not something I thought I could do. I have a lingering idea that I came from there, but scant memory of my family, that was all lost in the Accident. I agreed because I know it’s what the Gallery needs now. It’s a business trip. That’s all.
Blearily I pick up photocopies from my desk. On the top is an image framed by text, an island of tranquillity floating amidst a sea of words that swim and melt before my eyes.
I force myself to look, as if it will make me feel better. The image is grainy, reduced, diminished, rendered in shades of grey, a faded memory of itself, but intriguing magic shimmers through.
I look at delicately painted images. Chinese women semi-clad in loose robes, enclosed in small rooms. Accompanying each one is a different type of bird.
Who are the beauties, are they courtesans? What does the title mean beauties captured in time? I flick open a catalogue; find a colour image. The work, by a Chinese/Australian artist, is based on the ancient folk style of colour print, and picture albums destroyed at the beginning of the Qing dynasty, the remaining ones banned in the Cultural Revolution, I read.
My eye is seized by the vivid vermilion of the background against which the painted women’s skin shines. Deep crimson so deliciously deep I could drink it. I’d like to drape myself in its velvet depths, curl up and hide inside it. Live suspended eternally within it, like the beauties...
My stomach surges threateningly. Elbows on desk, rest my face in my hands. Leaning on the Beauties, close my eyes.
Despite diazepam, my head is pounding. I’m sure there was a time when I did not have to keep up with Hugo and cronies, the alcoholic academics; I (privately) term them. I’d have two, three glasses of wine, no more, but lately I’ve been drinking to almost keep pace with Hugo, and that’s a feat. I even get a sick kick from the wasted nausea, hammered-brain pain of an all-day hangover. For which I’ve found the cure is a drink (after six p.m. there’s no harm, I tell myself). Another drink, another, then a snort or two and I’m in a crystal prism, spinning colours radiating from thoughts, and every wisp of dream appears real, brilliant, and true, until I stand up and almost fall flat on my face.
If I were an artist, not the gallerist that I am, I would have stayed up all last night, painting, I was jittery, restless with a yearning tug in the depths of my being, pulling me to an unknown point I have to burst out from. At home I didn’t feel at home, as I walked through the shiny yellow front door of Rivers Chase terrace in Primrose Hill, which has been in Hugo’s family for a century. I couldn’t stop pacing the rooms, fidgeting. Rearranging flowers, straightening photographic artworks on flock-papered walls, I even began to fossick in the cupboard beneath the stairs, looking for the vacuum.
I forced myself to stop; I was going out with Hugo—dinner at the Vienna on the Strand with several of his colleagues. Changing outfits, decisions… My thigh high leather boots or kitten-heel Mangle’s—and if so, which ones?
—
With half an eye to the Gallery’s reputation I entertained the company with whimsical theories of art I think they’ve come to expect from Hugo River’s young wife. So I shocked them with the Phi-Love Room. As if from a distance I heard my voice curling archly around the words recounting what I’d written about in Planet Art.
‘‘Phi’ is a drug derived from phenylethyl-amine, which has a similar chemical configuration, apparently, a stimulant, apparently, fills imbibers with ecstatic love and sexual energy.’
‘Is it?’ Professor Brian Bear raised his bushy eyebrows.
‘Ruby!’ Esmé exclaimed. ‘How do you know this?’
‘A European artist made an installation called the Phi-Love Room. Participants take ‘phi’, then climb into swinging ‘love harnesses’ to indulge in a clever reference to Fragonard’s The Swing.’
‘Love it! Love his work! Had a copy of the dress made up for me, all that pink satin mmm scrumptious!’ Esmé giggled.
‘The eighteenth-century painting of a young lady dressed in voluminous masses of pink soaring on a swing pushed by her priest, her leg is raised and her shoe flies, symbol of loss of virginity, as a young nobleman reclining in the bushes before her has a view up her skirt.’ Recalled from my essay verbatim.
‘You know,’ said Esmé , ‘I wore it to Brian’s ceremony.’
‘It represented scandalous frivolity, exploitation of women and aristocratic decadence, religious corruption. All that was supposedly wrong with the Ancien Régime before the French Revolution.’
As I spoke I looked at her and raised my eyebrows.
‘Do you see it like that? I just love the picture.’
Esmé nibbled her crème caramel.
Politely raucous laughter from the gentlemen. Hugo puts his hand on my thigh under the table...
‘You’re joking,’ said Rufus, Ethics lecturer, looking slightly alarmed. ‘Naughty, making things up to entertain us.’
‘It’s true, Jasper Jackson plans to give it a whirl next time he’s in Cologne...’
Laughing over sherries by the fireside with Sir Hugo last night... Laughing because I can’t stop what I’ve started...
Acting as if everything is perfectly under control. Playing a part, married to the older philosopher, playing in the London art world as if born to it.
But why I wonder in my calmer, more reflective moments, typified by a hangover, like now, renovation banging shaking my spine, staring at the sleeting rain in Charlotte Walk, why is it so much easier to play a role than to live life authentically, be yourself, be real? And what does it mean to ‘be real’?
Know thyself is a Greek proverb. But how can you know thyself, what is Self? Answer this Jean-Paul, I ask the ghost of existentialism. There are no answers only questions...He says, just like Hugo.
But I think I must be good at it. Reinvention. Whichever way you want to spin it, if you don’t know, or can’t remember, who you are, if at heart you are nobody to yourself, so long as you keep on living as if you are somebody, it’s enough. Who bluffs best, wins? Isn’t that what it’s all about, in society? It’s developed into a principle by which I live my life.
My eighteenth-century writing desk in the room we call the ‘mistress bedroom’ conceals a file in which I keep articles on a condition that fascinates me. Last night when I couldn’t sleep, I rose, and crept down the passage that joins the master bedroom to the mistress. I seized the file and read a strange, familiar story.
The woman in Kopelman et al’s study reportedly came round on a London Underground tube between Liverpool Street and Bethnal Green. She had made her way to a phone box, rung the police, and eventually been taken to X Hospital, disoriented and confused. She had a bag that contained nothing but clothes and a letter addressed to ‘Alice Thornton’ (this turned out not to be her name). Two weeks later she was taken to Y Hospital, orientated in time and space by now, she still claimed to have no recollection of who she was, although she admitted to ‘macabre’ memories including that her husband and son had been killed in a car accident the previous December. When administered a ‘truth drug’ she recalled information that was false. She was discharged and was an outpatient on a regular basis for a couple of years. She proved adept at survival. She established herself in London, with accommodation, a voluntary job with a charity, and found a ‘man friend’, a fellow outpatient who worked as a paramedic. Meanwhile, Scotland Yard’s Missing Persons bureau and her family in America located her. It turned out she had three children and a husband in a town in the Southern U.S. She continued to deny all knowledge of her identity, shown photographs of herself she expressed surprise: ‘that certainly looks like me but it cannot be me.’
On further administration of the ‘truth drug’, she remembered more about her past life and gave information that she’d been in a difficult marriage; husband had been violent and drank heavily. She told doctors: ‘I think that I—I would if I were in that kind of situation, now I would, I would try and get out of it somehow.’ Her last memory of being in the U.S. was taking her children to school. ‘I remember being very sad, but I don’t know why, unless maybe that’s when I was planning to leave, I don’t know’.
‘I can’t live like this any longer.’
These were the last words uttered by A.T. to her husband on the day of her disappearance. She had no memory of leaving a note that she left for her husband or the flight to England, although she had an ‘islet’ of memory of the hotel in Marble Arch where she had booked a room and stayed for one week before she ‘came round’ on the Underground train, after which she said she remembered most of what had happened: ‘I remember—I remember being in the hotel…I can remember, being there, but not arriving there, or leaving there.’ A.T.’s family communicated with her by telephone and written correspondence after her identity was discovered.
Her family gave information that she had grown up in a small town in the Southern U.S., and was aged forty-two at the time of her disappearance. She had been the ‘odd one out’ of six siblings and she was frequently in trouble when she was a teenager. Reportedly there was rivalry (she was supposedly jealous of her six sisters who were more successful); she had no formal qualifications but worked as a supply schoolteacher. According to the research her marriage was tumultuous, she was emotionally detached from her children. Her medical history included hospital admittance, depression and overdosing. Amongst information she withheld from doctors was that three months after hospital admission she had written to her eleven-year-old daughter telling her that she had cervical cancer and had left the U.S. to spare her family the pain of seeing her suffer from illness. (She did not have cancer). A year later A.T’s family received a letter purportedly from a friend saying that she had died and been buried in Devon.
The study records that A.T. divorced her husband in the U.S., and married her man-friend, obtaining U.K. residency. She reported lasting amnesia for a brief period after her arrival apart from a fragment of memory of the hotel. Apart from a minor anomaly on a CT scan thought to be caused by perinatal factors, all other physical investigations were normal.
The researchers note ironically at the end of the study that the travel agency where A.T. booked her flight was called Great Escapes and its logo was a hot air balloon.
In the drawer of the desk are press clippings about Hugo and me from the art press and society pages, in which our names are writ in bold letters.
ART ARISTOCRACY WEDDING
COUNTESS RUBY CUTS THE CAKE
In the drawer are portfolios of art journalism stories. After we opened Ruby Gallery I stopped writing journalism, though I write occasional essays for Art. I concentrate on selling works judiciously, discreetly, to discerning collectors.
According to the media we are a perfect partnership. High profile couple! Agenda-setting gallerist, and contrarian philosopher! But nobody knows Hugo like I do. And nobody knows who I am.
Nobody knows the dreams, half-memories, thoughts that rise like dark waves threatening and ominous in the back of my head in the dead of night, terrifying quiet.
Nobody knows about the phantoms that play inside my head. Last night as I lay beside Hugo spinning-out with the after-effects of champagne and my after-dinner snorts in the Ladies at Vienna, in my mind I saw the tidal wave, tsunami, gathering in darkness with all the power of everything I have lost, forgotten.
‘Antipodes is Greek for ‘having the feet opposite.’ I’ll have a sign in the Antipode Room, saying that, a definition,’ I said to Hugo as I drove him to work this morning.
‘The antipode is the point at which the diametric relation is measured, which you would reach on the other side of the world if you drilled in a straight line all the way through the earth and came out at the other side, and vice versa.’
‘Yes,’ he assents as I speed across the Euston intersection.
‘Australians are often called ‘antipodean’. But the antipode point of England is not in Australia but in the South Pacific Ocean about four hundred miles east of the east coast.
If ‘antipodean’ designates a relation rather than fixed point of origin shouldn’t that mean that in Australia England is the antipodes?’
‘You’re joking!’ He threw back his head and laughed.
I winced and accelerated through an amber light, to turn into Torrington Place.
Oh Rose thou art sick/The invisible worm/That flies in the night/In the howling storm:/ Has found out thy bed
I might have known it. That poem’s been on my mind for weeks. It’s worse than having a ditty from the radio repeating in your mind. At least that’s normal, a hazard of inner-city life. Living in a marketing web, some of its jingle jangles are bound to, irritatingly, lodge in your ears. But having a poem stuck on random replay is a different matter. A poem that’s imprinted itself in a forgotten memory migrating into your consciousness of its own volition has to make you ask, why?
Where did it come from? What could it mean?
Found out thy bed/Of crimson joy:/And his dark secret love/Does thy life destroy
The sick rose, rain, banging, dark December sky, it all pounds around me. The dull overload of a diazepam-soothed hangover. I took a tab when I reached the gallery, and feel removed from the morning as if I’m in a blood-temperature cocoon.
This morning I sold two works. Received a cheque for a sum in the mail. Ruby is going well, very well. We’re collecting, we’re expanding, making a profit in difficult times. We’re about to go to Australia. I have nothing to worry about. Everything to celebrate, enjoy. As Hugo keeps saying, but he’s right. He’s always been right. Unlike me. Hugo was born right.
Susan approaches staggering beneath a box from the back room. She puts it on the floor beside me, and we sift through the heaps of papers that have piled up in boxes. Catalogues, reviews. Even a clipping about Admiral’s Emeralds, the racehorse Hugo owned. All must be disposed of to make space for the collection of antipodean art.
‘File, file, throw,’ I say as she holds up items to my scrutiny.
Then, ‘What about these?’ My assistant holds up a photo envelope. It looks suddenly, wrenchingly, familiar. I hold out my hand. What is this? Who are these photos of? What are they doing here? The numbing effect of the diazepam dissipates. Be still my beating heart. I force shock into cynicism. Pull out the first photo, staring at it with a willed immunity.
The image of the blue sky is dazzling, radiant. It’s high summer in the High Country of New South Wales. In my hand I am holding a young woman. She is dancing around the side of the weatherboard farmhouse, wearing a black silk slip, holding her skirt in an ironic curtsey, parodying a country girl. Heidi smiling at her goatherd. She is wearing a bee-keeper hat with a long green veil. Laughing.
The next image is a close-up. The same girl peeping with a dramatic expression, black eyelashes accentuate deep blue eyes. Her arms held in balletic third position, left arm curved, the other extended, head tilted back like a model from the 1950s. I am momentarily transfixed by the exquisite refinement of her expression. She is acting, yet in the act, a hidden side of herself is revealed or made up, but who can tell?
I select a third photo. The same girl in a farmhouse kitchen. Playing violin. Wearing the same black silk dress. Ebony curls spill over her shoulders.
Fourth photo. A young man wearing a straw hat standing with a young woman who looks disturbingly familiar. They are next to the farmhouse veranda; the steps are not visible but are apparent in different levels of their elevation. She is on the top step; hair pulled up in a ponytail reveals high cheekbones. Her expression is pensive. A girl from another world, gazing into an inner space. Caught in three-quarter profile she is in shadow, brooding. In contrast, the image of the young man is bleached by the sun. His face is white, overexposed. As is his nude torso. A backpack slung over his shoulders. He is looking with a provocatively blank expression at the photographer.
My imagination whirs.
Who are they? Was he setting out on an expedition, in the backpack were there watercolours, sketchbooks, and inks? Was he an artist? Was she?
‘Bloody hell.’ I hear the sharp tone and choice of expletive as if the words are coming from someone else’s mouth.
Fanning the photos, I replace them in the envelope.
‘Throw these out.’
Susan is squatting on the floor. In calico pyjamas, with her head shaved, why she would want to adopt such a look in the middle of an English winter is beyond me.
She looks at me curiously.
‘Is everything alright?’ She asks.
‘Where did these come from?’
‘The back room, the Antipode Room,’
As she reaches over, I involuntarily pull back, tuck the flap down, hurling the photos into the box: to join a precipice of resumés, multi-dimensional curricula vitae, taped biographies, public relations hype, applications from artists wanting to show in the gallery. Flick. Forget. Without a further thought.
As if it really were that easy.
Rain beats, drums, against walls of windows, walls of glass that protect me from the streets, from the cold, hunger, greed, the needs of people who look the way I used to look and feel, on the streets in the pouring rain. After I ‘came around’ on the Northern Line. Re-born like a character in a black-and-white film, joining the Foreign Legion ‘to forget.’
Before I met Hugo.
O Ruby thou art sick...I look at the watch Hugo gave me for a birthday. My birthday that —he doesn’t know—I decided upon. The eighth of July 1968.
At one-o-clock, in half an hour, I shall meet my Professor for lunch in a whole food restaurant between the Gallery and Princes College.
Lunching at Sprouts is our main health habit. Apart from leisurely Sunday afternoon constitutionals on Primrose Hill. The occasional strolls farther afield into Regents Park, along the canal. To ‘shake out cobwebs’ as Hugo puts it. Move booze and nicotine through the bloodstream a bit faster would be more accurate, especially on Sunday afternoons. Hugo’ s capacity for fine wine and tobacco inspires awe. He loves intoxication, although of course he’d never do anything illegal. Hugo likes to stay firmly within the limits of the law, and in his role as Ethical Adviser to government, he’s well-rewarded for his love of authority—which I know about intimately.
When I started living with Hugo I was intrigued, amused, and a little carried away by what it conferred: the novel sense of power, and well-being, it bestowed. He was well dressed, quite the dandy in his bespoke suits, and perfectly fitted handmade shoes. A philosopher. After we married I enjoyed the challenges of living in luxury and privilege and running the gallery he gave me as a wedding gift. Until—what? The ‘thing-in-itself’ set in. It’s been three years, the golden egg has started to lose its lustre, and I can hear it starting to crack.
Susan turns on the heel of her work boot and walks out of my office, dripping papers. The pale floorboards shake with her footsteps. Through the open doorway I can hear her and Ham the manager; the muted buzz of voices shattered by more banging.
A woman in green is peering intently at the series Nuclear Family, Still Life With Mushroom Cloud. My torpor sustained through the morning’s business deals has disappeared.
The invisible worm/ that flies in the night/ in a howling storm...
The thought of those photos is disturbing me, the images familiar-distant like a name on the tip of one’s tongue.
The prospect of going there is making me nervous, jumpy, and I’ve slipped into a secret self-destructive coke and diazepam habit in addition to Hugo’ s booze, to try and deal with it all.
Back in that landscape of beauty and terror... In six days time... It’s almost impossible to believe…I tell myself it’s just another business trip. Every month Ruby goes on trips. No different just because it’s ‘Australia.’ It must be years since I was last there. It might as well be another country, a Republic, dictator state, Shangri-La, for all the effect it will have. Anyway, I’m going to be so busy there won’t be time to do anything but business as I have been trying to explain to Hugo who seems to want it to be a special sort of ‘holiday.’
From the corner of my eye I can see the rubbish box. The envelope fell open as I threw it. I can see an edge of the silver farmhouse roof. My resolve wavers. I want to look at the photos again, to scrutinize them in private. Interrogate their faded surfaces; it’s ridiculous. I’ve thrown them out. Ruby get on with it. I admonish myself. I’m good at that. Admonishing myself. And getting on with work. That’s how come I’m here ...
——————————————————————————————————-
FICTION NOVEL:
Ruth Skilbeck: Sayonara Baby Newcastle (Australia): Borderstream, 2017; pp. 242. Australian Fugue Series. Also published with the title Cafe Life in the Antipodes (Adamstown: Borderstream 2018)
From pp. 3-6
Prelude. 1975
I had never had a cappuccino before I left Northern Ireland. But since arriving in Australia drinking this kind of coffee in cafés had become a major part of my life here, it was a ritual that kept me sane.
It had been that way ever since I arrived in Canberra with Dad, and had to stay with him alone in the flat in University House until the government allocated family house became available and we moved to the outer reaches of the (un)known universe. I had supped on delicacies in Japan on the way to my new life down under, but it was not green tea or sake that had stamped an impression indelibly in my soul. The healing elixir had been cappuccino—not a drink one associates with Japan; my first ever, in an outdoor café next to a cable car in a scenic mountain range east of Kyoto, where Dad and I had made a surprising (to me) encounter with Dad’s work friend the glamorous New Yorker Francesca Bellinka, the first person I’d met who always dressed in black. She was a favourite family friend of mine. She was at the conference too and she popped up one afternoon for a sightseeing excursion. Before we went on the cable car across a ravine, we had refreshments.
She perused the menu, then said in a purring tone, “Well I know we’re in Japan but I’ve never liked green tea. I’m going to have a cappuccino, how about you Roxy”?
She looked at me with a smile.
“What’s that?”
She laughed. “You’re joking, right?”
“No! I’m not!” It was indeed true. The menu in the local caff in Ballyhope had offered nothing more exotic than teabag tea and instant coffee.
“Marcus!” she said in a mock chastising tone. “How could you have not introduced her to cappuccino?” As if it were a failing in my upbringing, or education.
“What is it?”
“It’s coffee made from real coffee beans, topped with fluffed up milk sprinkled with chocolate. You’ll love it!”
She was right.
When I arrived in Canberra, I found cafés that made cappuccino, which were run by Italian or
Greek people, families, I discovered as I went to all of them, comparing their cappuccino in Civic, the centre of the city. Every day when Dad was at work, I would walk into the city centre which was as little like such a thing as I could ever have imagined. I would shop for food, then have a cappuccino, “with lots of froth”. Soon I discovered the library, and would go there first when I reached the centre. I’d take my borrowed books by Böll, or Camus, or Sartre, or Kafka, to a café and read for hours, in between scrawling lines of thoughts in my notebooks.
It was a habit that continued.
I
Samuel and the Lone Deranger 1980
I arrived in Adelaide with Sam on his 1000 cc motorbike. Samuel and I were supposed to have split up weeks before but it hadn’t quite worked out. It seemed we were still spending all of our time together. As I’d packed up my things in the garage by the lake where I lived preparing to set off to start university alone he’d insisted on taking me: “Just to see you settled in.” I privately thought that I was quite capable of settling in all by myself but there seemed little point in arguing. We’d been together for four years, and had travelled far on the outback and back roads on his bike, we might as well part on good terms. And have one last long roadtrip.
It was a two-day ride of over a thousand kilometres taking the interior highways. Setting off mid- afternoon, five hours straight on the bike, and we crossed the Hay Plains at night. The motorbike was the fastest and almost the only vehicle on the road; we sped for hours overtaking the few cars and trucks we passed along the mind-bendingly straight line. A bright silver full moon shone down, on either side the highway long fields of tall wheat appeared to ripple in luminous waves, with a cold distant radiance the moon lit the way.
Samuel and I had been to Adelaide the year before on our trip around Australia. We’d stayed with an inner-city philanthropist Samuel met in a shop in North Adelaide. Tony gave shelter to motorbikers in his cottage from pure generosity of spirit, asking for nothing in return. We’d ridden into town from the desert, covered in red bulldust— as local people call the soft red sandy earth— and dehydrated. He’d offered us his front room where we’d stayed for a week. Samuel was good at making these arrangements with people. He was good looking and charismatic. With the motorbike with its panniers parked nearby, as he browsed the community noticeboards in alternative wholefood stores, nibbling high-energy bars—in his black leathers, contrasting with his long curly-haired ponytail, big wide smile, backpack, me behind him—something physically magnetic about Sam attracted locals and inspired trust. They came up and talked; offered to let us sleep in their barns, outhouses, and houses.
When we arrived in Adelaide late in the afternoon, Sam and I went straight to Tony’s. We hadn’t been in touch with Tony for over a year but he welcomed us in like old friends …
Copyright Ruth Skilbeck
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NONFICTION:
Ruth Skilbeck: The Writer's Fugue: Musicalization, Trauma and Subjectivity in the Literature of Modernity Newcastle (Australia): Postmistress, 2017; pp. iv + 436.
From pp. 2-5, Introduction:
This book addresses the fugue in music, psychology and literature, and is perhaps the first to do so. In Part I the etymological development of fugue in music and psychology is traced, with case studies that focus on the psychological and musical meanings of fugue. Part II comprises in depth and finely grained musico-literary analyses of the adaptation of musical fugue forms and techniques in the inventive musicalized fugue works of Romantic, Modernist, and contemporary authors and poets. Authors discussed herein, who use the musical form of fugue, in their works include Thomas de Quincey, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Paul Celan, Sylvia Plath, and Christopher Barnett. In this literary investigation, from the perspective of the multivalent figure of ‘fugue’, I discuss selected literary fugue compositions of modernism, and contemporary writing. The analysis is grounded on theories of how literary processes relate to articulation and consciousness of individual subjects and subjectivity in innovative intermedial uses of language.
The literary figure of fugue is used as a heuristic device to approach and investigate concepts of authorship, and to examine contradictions inherent in concepts of representation, imitative mimesis, and the construction of the ‘subject’ in language, as identified in contemporary discourse. The inquiry aims to deploy an array of established analytic strategies, and to further advance understanding of the cultural figure of fugue and its applications. This endeavour is expressed in the concept ‘the writer’s fugue’.
In the focus on the style of musicalized fugal writing, the investigation is informed by Mikhail Bakhtin’s approach to stylistics, which he wrote has been ‘deprived of an authentic philosophical and sociological approach’. He wrote:
More often than not, stylistics defines itself as a stylistics of “private craftsmanship” and ignores the social life of discourse outside the artist’s study, discourse in the open spaces of public squares, streets, cities and villages, of social groups, generations and epochs. [1]
The social life of discourse now exists in the online public squares of social media. In Part 1, the inquiry draws on a range of genres, not only of literary writings of fugue narratives and poetry, but also professional writing of government reports, medical articles, media articles, and musical articles, and interviews, from research into fugue writing; and in the case studies in chapter 1, draws on open letters, and articles in online media and on blogs. This approach is informed by another idea put forward by Bakhtin about heteroglossia or the living formation of meaning (in discourses) and genres in languages, that occurs in a play of dynamics created by what he terms the centripetal forces (of centralization and unification) and centrifugal forces (of decentralization and disunification), which is a continual process in living language:
At the time when poetry was accomplishing the task of cultural, national and political centralization of the verbal-ideological world in the higher official socio-ideological levels, on the lower levels, on the stages of local fairs, and at buffoon spectacles, the heteroglossia of the clown sounded forth, ridiculing all “languages” and dialects; there developed the literature of the fabliaux and Schwänke of street songs, folksayings, anecdotes, where there was no language-centre at all, where there was to be found a lively play with the “languages” of poets, scholars, monks, knights and others, where all “languages” were masks and where no language could claim to be an authentic, incontestable face. [2]
Some of the authors of the literary works discussed herein, for instance Joyce, do use parody, in the creation of new forms of musicalized language, and each of the fugue authors discussed creates new forms of language in literary language, including new words and terms. In the earlier part of the book which discusses the dissociative fugue, a range of sources are drawn on. As is shown in differing ways throughout the book, one voice or point of view, may not define the ‘truth’ of a historical event, but through listening to many voices, on the themes, a fuller and more accurate account is created from which the reader is able to gain a broader and deeper understanding. This holds true, too, in individual works of literary narration, the interweaving of many ‘voices’, in polyphonic literature echoes the form of the fugue in music. This is discussed in various ways and forms in the book.
‘Every utterance participates in the “unitary language” (in its centripetal forces and tendencies) and at the same time partakes of social and historical heteroglossia (the centrifugal, stratifying forces), wrote Bahktin in his essay Discourse in the Novel. [3] In my literary investigation I focus not only on the morphology, and use and forms of fugue, in literature, and different discourses, but primarily on the authors, and why they used fugue. It is my focus on the author, in social and cultural contexts of their lives, that makes this study. The focus on the authors in the contexts of their lives, shows that despite the possible use of carnivalesque or parodic forms of language, that what was driving them deeply were traumatic experiences, and that many authors who write deeply from traumatic contexts and experience, with political engagement use polyphonic and fugal forms of writing, and in different ways. In this book, I do not use the term ‘centrifugal’, I refer to the term I develop, fugal modality, in relation to musical form, which I then apply to literary writing, and criticism.
I do refer to the term dialogism that was coined by Bahktin. Michael Holquist, translator and editor of The Dialogic Imagination, gives a succinct definition:
Dialogism is the characteristic epistemological mode of a world dominated by heteroglossia. Everything means, is understood as part of a greater whole- there is a constant interaction between meanings, all of which have the potential of conditioning others. [4]
In this living process:
A word, discourse or language or culture undergoes “dialogization” when it becomes relativized, de-privileged, aware of competing definitions of the same thing. Undialogized language is authoritative or absolute. [5]
Holquist identifies two ways in which Bakhtin uses the term dialogism, and these are, too, the ways in which I use the term throughout this book. ‘Dialogue may be external' [between two different people]’ or it may be ‘internal [between an earlier and a later self]’. [6]
These two types of dialogue have been distinguished and described as respectively spatial and temporal communication acts. In my analysis of literary works, specifically of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which is an excellent example, I suggest another dimension: of space-time, a virtual dimension, which is entered in the reading of the work. How this dimension, or space-time, is activated and entered in the writer’s process of writing, is an underlying theme of The Writer’s Fugue. Bakhtin referred to space-time in the novel, as a chronotope. I do not specifically refer to this in this book, but I do explore in depth the dynamics and dimensions of the fugal writing process, and relate this to the musical form of fugue, which gives such a concept as space- time a more grounded context, of analogy and comparison in the time and space of musical performance.
As I have been researching fugue for twenty years I show here some ways in which its uses have changed over that time. A new interest in fugue and fugal writing in literature is developing around the world in Europe, Australia, America, and Asia, and more widely.
Fugue is a potentially enigmatic (and thereby instructive) example of linguistic duality in itself. Its dual, apparently dichotomous, meanings potentially render it a performative example of rhetorical and symbolic linguistic contradiction. Derived from the latin fuga or flight, the fugue presents as an apposite device to indicate and explore recent attempts to ‘ground’ or ‘anchor’ allusive definitions of the elusive and divided subject in language.
From pp 68-69, Chapter 1, Exiled Writers […]
BEHROUZ BOOCHANI
Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish-Iranian writer and freelance journalist, who fled Iran where he faced arrest, imprisonment, and death. He has been incarcerated on Manus for more than two years, throughout all this time he has been reporting, and the Guardian and independent publishing houses have been publishing his writings. Boochani is 32, and is an ethnic Kurd from Ilam city. The Kurdish people are stateless and form the biggest ethnic group of stateless people in the world.
He began his career as a writer and journalist writing for the student newspaper when he was studying geopolitics at Tarbiat Modares University in Tehran. He freelanced for newspapers and the Iranian Sports Agency. When Boochani and others started a newspaper devoted to Kurdish language and culture which he edited, Werya (or Varia) a political and social magazine, he became known to the authorities.
He said in an interview that they started it because: “The new generation are talking with their children in Farsi language and the Kurdish language and culture will be destroyed in the near future.”[177]
Boochani was a member of the Kurdish Democratic Party which is outlawed in Iran. For several years he was under surveillance. Then in 2011 he was arrested and interrogated by the paramilitary intelligence agency Sepah, or the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution. They warned him to stop writing or he would be shut in detention for years. They wanted to stop him promoting Kurdish culture. The magazine and his work as a writer and editor continued. In 2013 the offices of Werya were raided by Sepah who arrested eleven of his colleagues. Boochani escaped arrest as he was in Tehran that day. He published a report on his colleagues arrest on the website Iranian Reporters which gained global attention. This put him at risk of arrest and he had to go into hiding. When two of his colleagues were released, they told him the article he wrote saved their lives, Sepah had asked questions about him, and that they wanted to arrest him.
That was when Boochani realized he must flee to escape arrest. He was under the belief that Australia was a free country where he would be able to keep working, and publish his ideas which would benefit his own Kurdish culture. Little did he know that the regime confronting asylum seekers who ‘come by boat’ is little different to the opposition he had faced as a Kurd in Iran: he was put into detention for years by Australia. He had travelled through southeast Asia and taken a boat to Christmas Island, which is Australian; from there he was transferred to Manus Island offshore processing centre on 27 August 2013, month of the highest asylum seeker capture. Since his arrival he had continued to write, and he is writing a book with publisher contract. He has been accepted as a refugee, but does not want to stay in a place where there are no facilities for locals let alone refugees; and ever since Reza Barati was murdered, he fears for his safety.
Boochani is an honorary member of Pen International Melbourne. [...]
From: pp 203-208, Chapter 7, Thomas de Quincey’s ‘Dream Fugue’:
‘INTO MY DREAMS FOREVER’
Dream-Fugue: On the Above Theme of Sudden Death, is the concluding section of the three-part article series The English Mail Coach written by De Quincey for Blackwood’s Magazine first published in 1849. Masson who compiled Collected Writings (1897) writes in his Introduction that it has revisions by the author. There are several published versions. This chapter refers to the version in Masson’s 14 volume The Collected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. XIII Prose Tales and Phantasies (1897), and its republication in The Works of Thomas de Quincey, in 21-volumes, published under the general editorship of Grevel Lindop (2000-2003). Dream-Fugue is the first modern narrative in English to consistently explore different levels and layers of consciousness, and unconsciousness, which the reader is led to infer may operate simultaneously, and contrapuntally in the author’s mind. This judgment, however, may be an effect of contemporary psychoanalytical or post-psychoanalytical interpretation. It may not have been the author’s conscious intention although De Quincey did emphasize the significance and meaningful unconscious power of dream, beyond the understanding and control of the rational mind.
De Quincey’s attention to aesthetics was actively political, as well as reflectively philosophical. He was writing in the Romantic era when aesthetics and politics were imbricated, if not inextricably interwoven. In The English Mail-Coach De Quincey was writing spectacular, social and political critique—which provoked some outraged critical reaction. It seems fair to say that De Quincey’s English Mail-Coach performs the semantic function of a symbol of modern progress. Through this symbolic device, he offers a moving, dynamic and fast-paced social and political critique of early modernity from the perspective of the individual subject. This effectively constructs the ‘subject’, the active principle of the individual narrator with a powerful personal identity, driven by passionate feeling and trauma: subject formation constructed in the medium of affective writing.
Each of the main sections of the English Mail-Coach are narrated in a distinct style, effecting a transposition of topoi and style from the rhetorical digressive witty style of The Glory of Sudden Motion, through the reflective articulation of traumatic shock triggered by the near-accident in The Vision of Sudden Death, to the hallucinatory spectacular intoxicated performative writing of the Dream-Fugue.
Taken as a whole, The English Mail-Coach triptych effects a series of transpositions that can be analyzed as a ‘double-voiced’ articulation and reflection in a narrative form of De Quincey’s critique of social and political changes of early modernity. Simultaneously, in a contrapuntal reading, these transpositions can be interpreted as a series of changes performed in his writing of the consciousness and the uncon- sciousness of subject formation articulated in writing as self-based art.
This pattern of change occurs in sequential order. on a subliminal level, the writing is antithetical to the supposed progress of modernity, in relation to its traumatic and dissociative effects on the ‘subject’—the narrator/implied author. The rationally constructed ‘subject’ of the first movement of the triptych is deeply shaken through the traumatic shock of the second movement; and in the third movement is deter- ritorialized, disassociated into a spiritualized bodiless perspective of observation, like a fugueur in the imaginary phantasmagorical ‘simulacra’ of his own dream images.
The triptych positions the individual author, as author, within the wider context of the antithetical Romantic explorations into human consciousness, ‘hidden’ truth and meaning. De Quincey’s writing was antithetical to the ‘artificial’ rule-governed harmonies of sophisticated industrialized society that Rousseau identified in his criticism of Western harmony. There is perhaps a political edge to the symbolic choice of the musical fugue, exemplifying pre-modern melody, in the subliminal social critique in The English Mail-Coach. Is there a hidden polemic, and/or a double-voiced discourse in his impassioned articulation of affect and expression of the free artistic spirit?
Read in The English Mail-Coach, the Dream-Fugue contrasts to, and counterpoises, the earlier sections, performing a state of altered consciousness, spectacular, symbolic ‘waking dream’ of fantastical images, and rhythm producing strong emotive affects. The first sections of the triptych set the scene for the dream fugue, an intense excitation, concentration, and overflowing of impassioned emotion. The three parts of The English Mail-Coach triptych constitute a narrative providing an insight into multi-layers of consciousness in the imagined mind of the implied author/narrator and perhaps also the reader.
The English Mail-Coach begins in humorous, witty, informative style on the theme of the English invention, the mail-coach, in The Glory of Sudden Motion. Its content is autobiographically based, drawn from De Quincey’s experiences as a student at oxford, using the royal mail-coach as his, and his peers, preferred form of transport, the only mode they deemed worthy for themselves, to and from home, London, and Oxford.
Through anecdote and reflection, De Quincey relates a rhetorical account of experiences riding as an ‘aristocratic young gentleman’ on the box of the mail-coach, which after careful consideration, the students deemed the most desirable seating arrangement, preferable to riding closed inside. He discusses the social hierarchy of this:
the illustrious quaternion, [who] constituted a porcelain variety of the human race, whose dignity would have been compromised by exchanging one word of civility with the three miserable delf-ware outsides. Even to have kicked an outsider might have been held to attaint the foot concerned in that operation, so that perhaps it would have required an act of Parliament to restore its purity of blood. (Collected Writings Vol. XIII: p. 273)
Thus they rearrange the order of the social hierarchy of the mail coach seating arrangements. As the narrator puts it: ‘Great wits jump’, and it was not long before this debate over the merits of inside or outside the mail coach had, somewhat improbably, travelled to China where:
The question was soon asked in China when a state-coach was sent as a gift by George III to the Emperor of china in Pekin. The grand state question, ‘Where was the Emperor to sit?’ (p. 296)
Thus, the narrator relates:
A revolution of this same Chinese character did young Oxford of that era effect in the constitution of mail-coach society. It was a perfect French Revolution; and we had good reason to say ca ira. (p. 296)
De Quincey’s narrator draws out the most spectacular elements of the experience: the volition, horses, the power and style of the royal mail-coach, including the superior size and tasteful design of the coach and the livery of the ‘royal’ coachman with his whips and hard-won decorations. Yet, this is a foil, for the mail-coach has a more ominous culturally symbolic, and personally significant, function as a vehicle for the narrator, which is about to become clear.
The Glory of Motion concludes with the ominous—albeit thrilling— acknowledgment that in bearing news of victory in the great battles of the times, the news was not always gladly received by everyone:
The mail coach it was that distributed over the face of the land, like the opening of apocalyptic vials, the heart-shaking news of Trafalgar, of Salamanca, of Vittoria, of Waterloo. (pp. 271-2)
The narrator describes the female relatives whose menfolk have been slaughtered, with examples of grieving mothers and mothers yet to discover their bereavement. The glorious motion of the mail-coach—symbolizing volition, the speed of communications and the power of modern life—now suddenly appears shadowed by, if not causally connected to violent and sudden Death.
The Glory of Sudden Motion introduces a panoramic topos of England in early modernity, connected to the moving figure of the mail coach. It is written in a rhetorical style of persuasive appeal. It functions on a level of factual, rational narrative consciousness. The essay’s tone is high-spirited, social, confident, recounting the recollected percep tions of the implied author’s Oxford youth, discussing a dazzling array of affairs of the day related to the theme of the mail-coach, the social hierarchy of seating arrangements, politics, Empire, battle, communications, romance. Towards its end, the eloquent, empirically grounded style gives way to an increasingly ‘impassioned,’ ominous tone with the introduction of the theme of sudden death.
The second part,The Vision of Sudden Death, focuses on an incident of near-fatality involving an imperilled maiden, one of a romantic couple, in a traumatic near-collision at night, between a ‘reedy gig’ and the mail-coach. Evoking a figure of dissociation, the narrator/implied author is both spectator and participant. Whilst the incident happened ‘almost forty years ago,’ the narrator relives every detail in traumatically shocking, vivid imagery and sensation. The incident is recounted as if the narrator is split, observed and observer, frozen and caught in the ‘infinite’ moment of traumatic shock. Matching this, the writing style is anchored (‘forever’) in the facts of traumatic memory, recalled in an increasingly impassioned tone.
The Vision of Sudden Death is prefaced with a discussion of the cultural relativism of the concept of ‘sudden death’. For instance, the narrator comments, sudden death was considered ‘glorious’ to the Romans, yet ‘tragic’ in Christendom. Yet this discussion has an emotive, increasingly impassioned tone, suggested by the subject matter and a certain, increasing, velocity of language that implies and evokes a sensational, impending, sense of alarm.
It was during the Assizes (19th century periodic criminal court sessions held in ‘assizes towns’ which ‘justices of assize’ judges travelled to)—the reader is informed—and roads were unusually still at night, as so many horses and carriages had been out during the day, by night the horses and people were generally too exhausted to travel as usual. The narrator, in the guise of De Quincey the implied author, tells the reader that, when travelling through the country at night in a mail- coach, he was almost involved in a fatal collision with a small ‘reedy gig’ coming from the opposite direction, down a narrow avenue of ‘umbrageous trees’ which met high overhead, giving it ‘the character of a cathedral aisle’ (p. 314). The coach driver had fallen fast asleep. The six horses were galloping uncontrollably fast—down the wrong side of the road. Riding in the reedy gig was a young couple, who escaped death by only a few seconds. The narrator was the only one who was in a position to act and he struggled to avert the accident:
What could be done—who was it that could do it—to check the storm-flight of these maniacal horse? could I not seize the reins from the grasp of the slumbering coachman? You, reader, think that it would have been in your power to do so. And I quarrel not with your estimate of yourself. But, from the way in which the coachman’s hand was viced between his upper and lower thigh, this was impossible. (Collected Writings Vol. X111: p. 313)
In desperation, the narrator remembers Homer’s Iliad.
Strange it is, and to a mere auditor of the tale, might seem laughable, that I should need a suggestion from the Iliad to prompt the sole recourse that remained. but so it was. Suddenly I remembered the shout of Achilles, and its effect. but could I pretend to shout like the son of Peleus, aided by Pallas? (p. 314)
Fortified by this symbolic appeal to classical culture, the narrator/ implied author, shouts twice and succeeds in alerting the oncoming reedy gig to swerve just in time.
Over ‘in the twinkling of an eye’, the incident was never to leave the narrator’s mind: ‘the turn of the road carried the scene out of my eyes in an instant, and swept it into my dreams forever’ (p. 318).
The third part of the triptych, Dream-Fugue: on the Above Theme of Sudden Death, relates to the previous realistic essays, as a dream relates to the incidents, events and thoughts of a dreamer’s waking life. All the elements from the preceding essays are rearranged in a dream-narrative of five parts. Spectacular visual images of endangered maidens, battles, volition, warships, childhood, christendom, and death and redemption, jostle and metamorphose, in rapid succession, in the dream narrator’s hallucinogenic fantasies of horror and redemption. The mode of writing is poetic musicalized prose, surreal, dream-like, and impassioned.
Through its use of musicalization, and visualization, the writing of Dream-Fugue performs a paradoxical semantic function of conveying a ‘deep’ semiotic meaning beyond words. This evokes the displaced symbolic meanings of dreams, performed in the realm of the spectacular imaginary. In this way, the Dream-Fugue links the narrator’s dreams to the incident that caused his trauma. Another ‘truth’ is alluded to in relation to the divine, to De Quincey’s narrator’s appeal to the christian God of his childhood. Two incidents are alluded to in this sequence. Most obvious is the near-accident observed in the mail- coach. but the more formative is an experience of childhood trauma, when the young De Quincey’s sister, Elizabeth, died suddenly, at the age of eight, and he, aged six, secretly visited her corpse.
Dream-Fugue is the first literary fugue narrative ever written. Poems written before this had allusions to fugue, such as Dante’s The Divine Comedy (Purgatory), and most significantly Milton’s Paradise Lost whose reference to ‘the resonant fugue’ De Quincey quotes in the intertextual epigraph to Dream-Fugue. But De Quincey’s poetic fugue narrative appears to be the first sustained narrative intentionally to adapt musicalized fugue techniques and visualization, performatively enacting a polyphonic, multi-layered, fugue. Whilst this is achieved through use of polyphony, recurring motifs and counterpoint in Dream-Fugue, the highly impassioned and affective form of the fugue achieves greatest semantic meaning in the overall context of The English Mail-Coach.
Ruth Skilbeck: The Writer's Fugue: Musicalization, Trauma and Subjectivity in the Literature of Modernity Newcastle (Australia): Postmistress, 2017; pp. iv + 436.
REVIEW BY EMERITUS PROFESSOR GARRY TROMPF, in The Journal of Religious History, Vol 44, Issue 1, March 2020, pp.141-142.
“I dare anybody to read this book. The author of “fugal novels,” Ruth Skilbeck pulls out all stops and works vigorously on the treadles of literary philosophy to produce a veritable fugue of scholarship, sounding many notes important for religious history. If looking discordant in a book eventually arriving at “literary fugue studies” — about Thomas De Quincey's The English Mail‐coach (Chap. 3: Dream‐Fugue), Marcel Proust's À la recherché du temps perdu, James Joyces's Ulysses (Epis. 11: The Sirens) Paul Celsan's Todesfuge, and Sylvia Plath's Little Fugue — the first half of this unusual book runs backwards and forwards between the trauma of refugees in Australian offshore detention centres and issues of subjectivity and personal memory in Western musical and cultural theory.
The recursing back to the Nauru and Manus Island detainees may now seem too Pacificocentric, especially when we consider the biggest worldwide amassing of refugees ever known in our time. Yet Skilbeck, as an accomplished Australian journalist and cultural analyst, rightfully focused on the worst social atrocity in her region, and in any case seems the first to write anything in a serious monograph about Behrouz Boochani, the Iranian‐Kurdish refugee on Manus who was to win the lucrative Victorian Prize for Literature (2019) after sensationally sending a book, snatch after snatch on WhatsApp, from his incarceration on Manus to his Sydney translator Omid Tofighian. Tofighian (a proud product of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Sydney) has placed the composite nature of Boochani's work as unique and as “horrific surrealism” (see New York Times, 8 Feb. 2019); but Skilbeck has “fugue” to cover anything as disturbing as that. She draws awareness to many other forms of writing under trauma, exile and anxiety (some already introduced in her other writings), and takes us through a small host of thinkers attentive to these issues she reads as “fugal‐critical” (Mikhail Bahktin, Michael Holquist, David Hamlyn, John Queripel, Melanie Klein, Julia Kristeva, Saul Friedlander, Susan Gubar, and Hans Markowitsch in that order of appearance among an interesting list), and introduces music historians authoritative on fugue (inter alia Alberto Ghislanzoni, Alfred Mann, Charles Rosen, and Paul Walker). The gallery of thinkers most cited are usually in tune with Skilbeck's quiet inclusion of spirituality in emotion‐filled, imaginative, creative, and strife‐torn life, and with her stubborn refusal to write the subject qua whole person out of the written text (esp. p. 205).
Part Two deals with the literary case studies. We are taken by De Quincey's Dream‐Fugue on the Theme of Sudden Death to spectacular, drug‐enhanced “visual images of endangered maidens, battles, volition, warships, childhood, Christendom, and death and redemption” all jostling and metamorphosing “in rapid succession,” like the layering upon layer of a musical fugue (p. 209). We put up with so much “recurrence” in Proust's Recherches as a symbolic device from which develop, fugally, the contrapuntal themes and complex variations of consciousness” in his subject's (sometimes “disembodied”) memory (and “lost time”) (pp. 263, 269). We find ourselves strangely absorbed in Joyces's “play of tension between subject and countersubject, in exposition and counterexposition, interwoven with songs of seduction and rebellion” so quintessentially Irish in Ulysses that are used to parody classical heroic myth, push toward “an anti‐violent alternative” and record the wonder of “everyday life lived by ordinary people” (pp. 293, 343). I leave commenting on these three crucial texts to illustrate how stimulating Skilbeck's study could be for practitioners of religious history; indeed I take her argument seriously enough to announce that the fugue is among the most useful analogies of human processes, keeping open (for the moment) the question of who is doing most of the playing.”
https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9809.12642
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9809.12642.