When working on my first novel, I was obsessed with modernist and neo-modernist authors from Woolf to Fraser to Watson to McBride. I was attempting to depict a second-generation, working-class girl’s coming-of-age tale in its specificity and felt guided by these writers. I know it can often be understood that “experimental” literature seems to be a way of setting a boundary between the author and the reader. However, whilst engaging with this work, I found the absolute opposite. Through their innovations, I felt I was able to get closer to understanding the complexities of the female experiences they were depicting; I was drawn to consider how plain language has felt “a brutal tool” (Watson) that cannot, as James Joyce explains, render those parts of human existence that do not fit within “wideawake language, cutanddry grammar, goahead plot”.

Kathleen Fraser’s critical and creative work, influenced by the tradition of modernism, directly and playfully confronts women’s “dis-ease” with language, literature and authority. Her narrative piece, ‘Talking to Myself, Talking to You’, addresses a key tension in her writing. Namely, how she can represent a specific female reality within a “structure that gagged me”. In this story, we follow a female narrator as she attempts to communicate with her absent male lover. But, “I had to stop because I couldn’t begin. Too much prelude”. She seamlessly shifts in her stream-of-consciousness style between memory and reflection as she hopes to put a name to her reality in a way she might later explain to him. However, repeatedly, she fears male judgement – a directness, a logic – where her internal experience cannot reside.

“I suddenly feel exposure. Unable to present something firm and clear … a logical extension of the productive person you’ve known me to be. Will you find me out? … No answer surfaces.”

At the end of this piece, the narrator does not find the words but ends with a promise that she will continue to try. At first, this ending may seem like the narrator’s failure. However, I believe in inhabiting this specific story of a woman’s inability to speak, Fraser achieves in showing the reader (in an embodied way) what it feels like to be alienated in a language system you are forced to perform daily.

First published in Each Next, The Figures, 1980 and also in Feminist Studies, Summer 1981