Cirrus@Austlit

'Rundown houses, tenements, lodging houses and otherwise unstable dwelling spaces recur in Ruth Park’s large and varied body of work. Importantly, however, these precarious homes often hold within them the possibility of transformation, escape, or transcendence. We might think of them then as porous spaces, drawing our definition from Walter Benjamin and Asja Lācis’s famous use of the term to describe the interpenetration, ambiguity and improvisation that marks spatial arrangements and social relations in the ancient Mediterranean city of Naples. Despite their genesis in intense poverty and social dysfunction, porous spaces admit the unexpected, and this means porosity is potentially liberatory. In this essay, close examination of precarious, porous homes in The Harp in the South (1948), Poor Man’s Orange (1949) and The Power of Roses (1953) yields new insight into the operation of realism in Park’s fiction for adults. Specifically, the essay argues that Park’s favoured narrative mode is best described as porous realism. Her fiction for adults is not realism destabilised or undermined by other generic interlopers, but the product of her idiosyncratic and inventive combination of realism with a range of other generic modes, which interact with and extend the realist narrative in productive ways. This paper argues that Park’s porous realism is most often infiltrated by the fantastic, a mode that is ultimately motivated by belief in the capacity of fiction to challenge the forces of socio-economic precarity by bringing into being the possibility of other worlds not governed by them.'  (Publication abstract)