Seducing the audience

Early in Gail Jones’s novel Black Mirror (2002), an Australian artist dives into the Seine to retrieve a bundle that may contain a drowning baby. Before rising to the surface, she experiences a kind of epiphany in the face of possible death – ‘a willed dissolution, a corrupt fantasy of effacement’. Later she revisits the experience in dreams, swimming through a surrealist underworld of discarded bric-a-brac: plainly, a metaphor for dreaming itself, as an act of plunging into mental depths and searching for hidden treasures.

Some of the imagery in this scene is later echoed and reversed in one of Jones’s free-ranging academic essays, where she recounts a possibly unreliable childhood memory of walking across the ocean floor at low tide to view the wreckage of a Japanese warplane. Upon arrival, she tells us, she was disappointed, having hoped to find a skeleton resting in the cockpit; later, she imagined gathering and reassembling the bones of the lost pilot.

The aquatic museum of found objects, the sea temporarily made into land: both these vignettes conjure up a landscape founded on paradoxes and viewed from an outsider’s incomplete perspective (that of a child, or a foreigner in an occupied city). Either scene could easily have come from a film by Jane Campion, a director consistently fascinated with skewed or naive perceptions, with the conjunction of separate realities, and with mysterious kinds of ‘immersion’ that mark a passage from one state to another.