ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an analysis of the leaky representations of time, space and the body in the Australian drug text: Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip (1977). The drug narrative provides a platform where alternative corporeal possibilities can be played out, reflective of the way the body is inhabited by and inhabits space. In the literary sphere the drug trope reframes spatial and temporal regulatory notions of the body. The drug metaphor disrupts temporal linearity through the reconfiguration of junk time. Likewise, landscapes, cityscapes and a sense of place are re-imaged in fluid, drugged dreamscapes. For this examination of the narcoticisation of the city in Garner’s novel, this chapter utilises Walter Benjamin’s notions of the urban space as a ‘narcotic dream’ and Elizabeth Grosz’s anatomisation of ‘uncontainability’ and corporeal ‘leakiness.’ Garner’s novel uses the drug trope to reconceptualise the spatiotemporal boundaries that normally confine women, and then to create new meanings.
