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Playing in the real and the virtual

Guest Post by Eleanor Whitworth June 17

How many lives can a story have? Black Caesar, the Irrepressible appeared in Meanjin in 2008 (Vol 67/4). Since then I’ve half finished the series it is part of, and wondered whether to approach a publisher. I recently created a website and decided that my little piece of online real estate provided the perfect opportunity to give the piece more air whilst I procrastinate. And, more excitingly, it gave me a reason to play with other media and to do what is so rare for a writer: to work with other artists.

I knew I wanted a clean look for the website, especially because I was including the story. I worked with Simon Sherrin, a programmer, to customise (read hack) a WordPress theme. A couple of weeks later I read Jacinda Woodhead’s blog An argument for the long form and had a look at the ‘clutter cleaner’ Readability program which, on the fly, creates a similarly spartan look to what I’d set up. Having found my first grey hair last year I’m not well placed to comment on future trends, but for me, a clean screen is crucial for sticking with long form text in the digital environment. Short form, of course, is another matter.

If the story, a piece of historical fiction, was to appear online I knew it had to be illustrated – at 2,500 words, paragraphs weren’t going to cut it as break points. I approached Jennifer Tyers thinking her mix of gangster fairy tale would be perfect for a slice of Australian history. Jen agreed, and we were off. The process could not have been simpler: I left it to Jen to choose the sections of the story she wanted to illustrate, she sent through some drafts, they were exactly what I had envisaged, and she continued on to finish them.

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The only issue we came up against was, surprisingly, related to one that I’d had to grapple with when writing. The main character, Black Caesar, is not psychological. We never get in his head. When writing I felt close to Caesar but worried that he would come across as a cipher. In one of those serendipitous finds I stumbled on Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, where Morrison looks at ‘…the way black people ignite critical moments of discovery or change or emphasis in literature not written by them.’ Did I pick Caesar because he was black? I picked him because it isn’t common knowledge that an ex slave of African decent was on the First Fleet and is Australia’s first bushranger, because he had traversed much of the globe, and because he escaped multiple times. Yes, in part, because he was black. Morrison says of America: ‘Living in a nation of people who decided that their world view would combine agendas for individual freedom and mechanisms for devastating racial oppression presents a singular landscape for a writer.’ Whilst the Australian situation is not the same as America’s, there are some parallels.

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So, when Jen wrote in an email: ‘I was thinking it is important to the story that Caesar is obviously not white. I was worried that by putting a wash on him that the image would become flat and I wanted him to stand out in the drawing (e.g. – lighter colours come forward, darker shades recede),’ blackness was again at the fore! We talked about whether the pictures might be viewed out of context, i.e. without the text. As the story and images are not locked down and the images can be downloaded easily enough, Jen added a wash to Caesar.

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With the illustrations underway, there seemed no reason to stop there. At the Meanland event Reading in a time of change, Peter Craven said two things that struck me: ‘A work of literature is not a physical object, it is simply an order of words.’ and ‘The ear is much more tolerant than the eye.’ Inspired, I got the piece read by Ben Grant and recorded by James Wilkinson. It was challenging to think about the work from an aural perspective: how to create an aural world and bring the listener into the story. James and I tried several options but settled on a simple one. It was great to hear the words and phrasing dealt with by an experienced performer, which often differed to what I’d heard in my head

The story, illustrations and recording are available in the website under a Creative Commons license. We also used a sound scape by Sawako, available via a Creative Commons license on the Free Music Archive. Share and share alike where feasible I say!

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Curiously, the process of creating the website and working with other artists felt a bit old school, the combining of media a bit like making a record, or album: my order of words is there, audio is there, and artwork is there. The digital platform enables fluidity between text and words, and words and images. What I’ve done is conventional compared to what is possible, but even so, it’s been a fun space to play in, and it’s given my story not only a second life, but a whole new form.


 

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Comments

by Jonathan Walker
17 Jun 10 at 11:55

‘A work of literature is not a physical object, it is simply an order of words.’

Obviously I disagree strongly with the quotation, but in any case this is a very interesting project. Eleanor, do you know the work of my colleague Cassandra Pybus, who writes on characters like Black Caesar?

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by Eleanor Whitworth
17 Jun 10 at 20:35

Thanks Jonathan.

Peter’s comment is contentious! It did make me think about the work from a different perspective.

I wasn’t familiar with Cassandra’s work. Thank you for alerting me to it – I’m very interested to see what comes out of the ARC Fellowship, and will head to the library for ‘Black Founders’

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