AustLit

'In her poetic catalogues of being and experience, Emily Dickinson records the chasm between the visibility of the world, including the poetic image, and the invisibility of inner transformation. In one such poem she writes: “We can find no scar / But internal difference – / Where the Meanings, Are –”.  Elizabeth Harrower’s fiction investigates this “internal difference” in both its invisibile [sic] and its hypervisible effects, and understood in the related senses of transformation, individuation and self-division. In these representations, Harrower deploys a very particular version of the modernist epiphany or moment of being. In her novels and short stories this epiphany characteristically interweaves and disentangles the subjects and objects of the narratives. One recurring revelation exposes the ways some human subjects wire themselves and others through the objects of postwar consumer culture to expose how (mostly) women can become relegated to object status in and through these dynamics. In another mode, Harrrower’s narratives record moments of instant, electrical connection between strangers, who are otherwise isolated. Across the spectrum of these interactions, as this essay will investigate, the revelations experienced by Harrower’s characters are always intersubjective – even if the ultimate revelation is solitary and about the condition of being solitary in the world. This essay will identify at least some of the key properties of Harrower’s epiphanies and consider how they relate to narrative mode and genre by moving between her short fiction and the novels. Ranging across these different genres, in view of their respective relationships to realism and their capacities to represent temporality and causality, underscores the operations of her particular postwar, postmodern epiphany and its centrality to her understanding of being in the world.' (Introduction)