Abstract:
This is an open text with porous borders, and can be approached/entered at any point. While it can be read from beginning to end, it also welcomes non-linear engagement in both a temporal and textural sense. The reader may wish to read it backwards, in parts; to skim their eyes quickly over the words, perhaps not finish it at all. Robert Altman’s dreamlike 1977 film 3 Women serves as a starting point and clue for this journey. The writer is at one corner of a triangulated relationship with artists/writers/filmmakers Moyra (Davey) and Chantal (Akerman), who are referred to by their first names. This relationship is mirrored by the writer’s relationship to her mother and sister. The text is paralleled by a film – Hollywood Ave. The text and film feed into each other and are/can be read alongside one another. The film is comprised of fragments taken from hours of filming in the home of the filmmaker’s mother. The idea for the film took seed in the chance rediscovery of home movies and letters sent by the family of these 3 women the years following their uprooted departure from home. This film echoes the text’s resistance to clearly deduced narrative, rejecting conventional filmmaking devices in favour of ambivalence, fragmentation and the intuitive fractured dream-logic of memory. Drawing notably on “minor” forms of literature, the text mimics the fragmented meanderings of a curious, distracted mind immersed in research; one that spills beyond the boundaries of academia and into the writer’s own life. Many “minor” characters feature throughout the text; writers, artists and friends, they are part of the expanding network of intertextual relationships between our writer, the writers she reads and the writers they read. We follow her along referential tunnels, side streets and cul-de-sacs in an ambling flânerie. The selfreflexive diaristic documentation of the research process sees all three women subject and author of the work at the same time. As Moyra Davey herself declares, “I am reliant on the words of others.”1 This consequently calls into question the idea of a singular authentic voice; something often demanded in the academic arena but also implied by the personal “I.” Paramount to the text is a notion of ‘writing the self’ - the writing of multiple histories, mythologies, bodies. Yet both the text and film also circle around an ambivalence over this impulse to document the individual/collective experience. They reside between boundaries: to tell/not to tell. Notes on 3 Women embraces intertextuality, tangents, sideroads, interruptions. It values memory, nostalgia, intuition and chance. It refutes the impossible task of writing the complete, closed text that denotes mastery of language, of a subject and above all, confident conclusiveness. This text works in opposition to the impersonal voice of academia, where “I’s” are not welcome. It dwells instead in the realm of fluid wandering, indecision; inconclusiveness. The text does not boil down to one point; rather, it boils over; evaporates into mist.