Australian Women's Book Review Volume 14.1 - School of English ...

creation is music; specifically. evocative music that helps her awaken emotion and bridge the strings of
poetry and prose. In Hewett, theatre, music and poetry merge and bring about a sense of nostalgia and a
desire to recreate the past. In talking about what the French call la mode rétiro, that is retrospective
styling or a nostalgic mode in art, Fredric Jameson acknowledges that pastiche and parody are the most
significant features or practices of postmodernism. He argues, however, that in what he calls new
postmodernism, parody is excluded since 'modern art and modernism ... actually anticipated social
developments' along the same lines. Since those developments involve social fragmentation and the
emergence of numerous 'private languages' or, rather, registers associated with certain professions, the
linguistic norm becomes impossible and - by extension - so does ridicule. And indeed, Hewett's sense
of humour is never employed in the service of mere parody. For the version of pastiche she now
exploits is a syncretic mimicry of her own former dramaturgical styles as much as an author's discourse
with her cultural heritage. Thus, in Nowhere, 'all the old favourites' are played during the metatheatrical
moments in the plot, bringing back the recollection of The Golden Oldies, Hewett's earlier
work commissioned for the launching season of the Playbox, Melbourne. Intertextuality, including that
of modern art and social developments, is arguably why Hewett also keeps situating her plots on the
edge of a small fictional town in Australia: it allows her to efface the contemporary reference, and
encourages the public to receive her plays as Jameson puts it as narratives 'set in some indefinable
nostalgic past, an eternal [2000s], say, beyond history.' They uphold mass-culture values and are about
specific generational moments of the past. This stylistic option also explains why the language of
Hewett's plays nurturing the Shakespearean tradition, from The Man from Mukinupin to Nowhere, is
somewhat archaic and evocative. Like parody, pastiche requires a dramatist to wear 'a stylistic mask'
and reproduce 'speech in a dead language'. And yet Hewett's idiom is her own invention: it produces an
idiosyncratic and highly personal language of dramaturgy that accommodates poetry and political
awareness as an expression of 'the inner truth of that newly emergent social order of late capitalism'
peculiar to Jameson's new postmodernism.
The nostalgia mode serves Hewett one more purpose: to invoke the spirit of melodrama at various
points in Nowhere. These excursions began far back in the 1970s during the author's expressionist stint,
and can be detected in most of her plays. They were founded right from the start on an amalgam of
German and British notions of the genre since, in German theatre, the term melodrama is commonly
associated with a 'musical-dramatic hybrid' ('musikalishe-dramatischen Mischform') or with a
sensational form of popular entertainment. It was Eric Russell Bentley, Peter Brooks, and more recently
Richard Murphy, who labelled the heightened emotional states in melodrama as 'hysterical' and
introduced the argument that melodrama's 'deeper significance lies in the fact that it resorts to such
“screaming” only in order to reach beyond dominant representational systems, codes and conventions,
and beyond the epistemological and discursive restrictions associated with them.' The first big
melodramatic outburst in Nowhere comes about when old Josh starts telling young Vonnie about his
past, and the memory of the only woman he has ever loved brings back the image of his days as a
Communist as well. Josh's mind is the repository of his identity and it remains, like Hewett's, solid and
unshakable. The author thereby initiates a form of counter-discourse with her own past and the value
system that was the focus of her social and political discontent. By interspersing the play with
melodramatic utterances, she 'breaks through everything that constitutes the 'reality principle', all its
censorships, accommodations, tonings-down'
, She examines even her own convictions. Lines such
as: 'Class is a 'ard thing to overcome ... No, that'd never work out', suggest a 'sobering-up' and the
fading of Hewett's former ideals only to be revived several pages onwards in visionary statements like,
'Socialism with a human face. That's what I've always believed in, Edith.' What the playwright sets
about to undermine henceforth are assumptions encouraged by realism that 'grasping' reality
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