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Possibilities from the Peripheries into the Urban Labyrinth: Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip
Book chapter   Peer reviewed

Possibilities from the Peripheries into the Urban Labyrinth: Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip

Nycole Prowse
Claiming Space: Australian Women’s Writing, pp.213-226
Palgrave MacMillan Ltd.
2017
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50400-1_12
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https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50400-1_12View
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Abstract

Performing Arts and Creative Writing
This chapter proposes that in the literary sphere the drug trope reframes spatial and temporal regulatory notions of the body. The drug metaphor disrupts temporal linearity through the reconfiguration of "junk time". Likewise, landscapes, cityscapes and a sense of place are re-imagined in fluid, drugged dreamscapes. In this way, drug imagery evokes leakages and slippages across time, space and the body enabling a re-evaluation of corporeal possibilities and potential. The "perverse" portrayal of the subject-body in drug literature is hyperbolised through the drug trope. The extremities of drug use also magnify the examination of difference between bodies based on gender and corresponding (dis)connections with space and time. A textual analysis of the Australian novel, Helen Garner's Monkey Grip (1977) in this chapter provides a literary example. Women are practised on the peripheries…Our memories, our stories, like the ways we live, are formed in movement between inner and outer, past and future, centre and margin, between the physical environment and the social world. We shape our cities, and re-shape them from the edge, we always have; just as our cities shape us…

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