Story Matrices by Gillian Polack
(Luna Press, 2022)
Reviewed by Dan Hartland
In this short book, Gillian Polack seeks to demonstrate how, and to what effects, novels act as transmitters of culture. To do so, she focuses specifically on science fiction and fantasy as instructive generic examples of the processes she identifies.
This is a work of cultural, not literary, criticism: Polack is not interested in what makes a novel ‘good’ from a technical perspective, but rather in ‘novels as artefacts of culture’ (p. 39), by which rubric there is no qualitative difference between one or another example of the form. She ‘does not question their separate literary value’; she simply finds it irrelevant to her purposes (p. 203).
What Story Matrices focuses on instead is a novel’s ‘cultural baggage’—effectively, the sets of assumptions it carries about how people behave and why, in what contexts and within which structures. These qualities are expressed structurally, through what Polack terms a novel’s ‘brickwork’—a term she deploys throughout to refer to the ‘building blocks’ selected by a writer which form the foundations and structures of their ‘story space’.
The book offers no sustained attempt at a systematic review of what these ‘cultural bricks’ might be—none are named, and no definitive list provided. The study is split into often very short chapters, and some of these—one based on work about cultural awareness that Polack undertook while leading the Ministerial Advisory Council on Women for the Australian Capital Territory, another suggesting spiderwebs as a useful approach to thinking about brickwork—offer brief reviews of potential approaches. But the question of what sorts of brick a writer may choose—and how they might be put together—is left surprisingly open-ended.
Partly this is because Polack is wary of offering ‘universalist’ solutions. This is laudable: one of the book’s best features is its awareness of culture’s relativity. Even ‘tension’—that quality of narrative which, in the form of ‘conflict’, can be so baked into how the Anglo-American tradition conceives of what a story is—cannot be said to be required in all places and at all times. Polack recalls working with Yaritji Green on a short story written from ‘a culture in which enormous effort is expended to prevent tension’ (p. 25, emphasis added). A review in another chapter of Polack’s positionality within Jewish cultures also emphasises this point.
The book spends much time on unpicking the implications of this, and one of its longest chapters (nineteen pages) considers the ethics of cultural use. Polack argues throughout that ‘novels are a place where we encode culture’ (p. 183), and she seems to intend for her book to offer tools for doing this more mindfully—or at least analysing the work of others to ‘identify silences’ (p. 75). Among the best sections of the book is its fourteen pages on Irish science fiction (though I would have liked to see some acknowledgement of, and investigation into the reasons behind, the fact that most of the texts discussed are very recent): as Polack says, ‘it demonstrates clearly how Irish writing can incorporate Irish culture intentionally and innovatively in speculative fiction’ (p. 171). This is very valuable work. Alas, fourteen short pages represents a very long passage in this particular book, and most of its briefer and more potted considerations of the theme are never quite as instructive.
Polack accepts the limitations of how the book was written—between bushfires and pandemics, Story Matrices emerged from ‘a very strange type of isolation’ (p. ii) during which Polack had no access to paper books she did not own, and only virtual means of attending conferences. Perhaps this explains the sometimes curiously free-wheeling selection of texts used here as ‘science fiction and fantasy’: Regency fantasies recur frequently, as does the Harry Potter series; Mark Twain, the Chalet School books and Hamilton are cited; The Witcher TV series and the Assassin’s Creed movie carry analytical weight. The breadth of reference helps demonstrate the wide applicability of Polack’s framework but doesn’t always help evidence its utility.
This problem aside—and we should recall the book is not a work of literary criticism, that it doesn’t mean to be detained by assessing its chosen texts as works of art or in detail—the book offers some useful thoughts on depicting cultures other than one’s own, and on #ownvoices (although, again, this latter term is simply deployed, and rather taken for granted). The book’s key argument is that ‘by the time a writer reaches story space’—that is, the realm of plot and character created by their choices of ‘brickwork’—‘it is too late to address’ deep issues of cultural bias or encoding that have already shaped the novel (p. 125). Inevitably this means that ‘the writer can nuance the novel more easily when they are writing close to their cultural home ground’ (p. 111); but, equally, ‘not all incorrect use [of culture] is appropriative. […] just like not all men admiring a woman’s looks is harassment’ (p. 186).
In response, Story Matrices offers its schema for considering the cultural brickwork of novels as a means of writing more inclusively, and therefore more successfully. What emerges from all this is a book that argues for popular novels and genres as not just worthy objects of study but active participants in culture—and shows how ‘novels themselves help us understand where habits of thought came from’ (p. 202). That effort is an urgent one.
Review from BSFA Review 19 - Download your copy here.