Excruciating Moments: On Writing Cross-Cultural Agency in the Novel

Abstract

This paper is about the pitfalls, risks and challenges of writing a cross-cultural novel set in Sydney (Australia) and Central Java (Indonesia), in which the central character is a young man from a village in Central Java. I draw on Snodgrass and Coyne's (2006, Interpretation in Architecture: Design as Way of Thinking) application of Hans-Georg Gadamer's theory of hermeneutics to the architectural design studio and study of Asian cultures to argue that writing across cultures, like the creative writing process itself, is to enter into a process of understanding with difference and an unfamiliar other. By adding shame, terror and fear of failure to this process I aim to illuminate their potential for sustaining cross-cultural writing that remains ethically and responsibly engaged even as it crosses borders. I argue that shame can play a productive role as a component of reflexivity in writing cross-cultural agency in the novel, and that courting failure is to destabilise certainty and embrace possibility.