Gail Jones’s Intertextual Mirrors: In the footsteps of Virginia Woolf

I aim to prove that the word, understood as “double-voiced”, as belonging to the world of the speaker and to the world of the interlocutor, and the life that is not life but is all we know, are the axis of storytelling and post modernist narrative. Derrida’s notion of “dissemination” and our individual strife to solve it are present in every work of literature. In this article I intend to show that, with a difference of approximately three generations, Australian Gail Jones follows in the steps of Virginia Woolf’s images of mirrors and looking glasses as cornerstones of reflection and reflexion about culture, history and individual development. Life and living have to be turned into stories in order to become “real”, visible, a vision that will open possibilities for change and advancement. To make this possible, writers need a reflective subject - a subject able to carry out this complex operation in contemporary literature has to possess the characteristics of a nómade subject, a term coined by Rosi Braidotti – that is, subjects ready to follow the traces left by apparent realities, ready to confront their own past and to subvert not only the certainties held as the Truth but also the norms that were given as a “must” in their contemporary culture in order to sustain those fictional truths, as explained by Michael Riffaterre.