Scission explores the joy and pain of living - Tim Winton
Uploaded by Laurestina on Jun 01, 2004
The collection of short stories, "Scission", by Tim Winton, explores both the joy and pain of living. The stories portray the joys of life as arriving unexpectedly, in common, everyday situations. There is a common link of discovery: discovery of yourself, of others, of God. There is also pain present from the very beginning, the Book of Job quote plainly imploring an end to suffering, mirroring many of the characters in “Scission”. Clearly, “Scission” is also about the darker side of life, about suffering, in relationships, and spiritually.
The joy in “Scission” comes without warning, where happy emotions were not expected. Fittingly, it seems to be the innocents in Winton’s stories who experience this joy. Thomas Awkner, the boy whom everyone, even his family, had thought was unintelligent and incapable of all but the simplest tasks, misunderstood and mistreated, finally finds happiness in the discovery of himself, the discovery that he is an individual, his own person. Perversely, it is in disobeying his father’s commands that he regains faith in himself, finding that he didn’t ‘sink like a stone’. Faith is a common bond in “Scission”, with many of these joyful moments centring on spirituality. Albie in A Blow, A Kiss, realised that ‘God could touch someone’ because of his faith in his father, even through traumatic experiences such as the motorcycle accident. In Neighbours, a birth is the catalyst for an outpouring of raw emotion, a young man finding that, despite all of modern life’s technological advances, it ‘had not prepared him’ for the simplest miracle of all: life. Symbols of spiritual awakening run through these stories. In Thomas Awkner Floats, it is the Bible, an obvious reference to Christianity and spirituality and in A Blow, A Kiss, it is the Tilley lamp, the light conveying ‘illumination’.
On the flip side, pain is also explored in “Scission”, realistically portrayed as coming largely through relationships yet, contrastingly, can also come through spirituality and faith. The relationships in “Scission” are largely ones of power, of ‘kisses like blows’ mothers and wives, of domineering husbands and fathers, and of timid, always cowardly sons. Inevitably, it is the weak that are hurt. The pain can be physical, such as in the case of the big, burly masochistic McCulloch in Scission dominating his wife, or mental as in the case of the son, in Wake. The father-son relationships are interesting in the way that the sons...