Fictocritical Innovations. Pawel Cholewa

I am not talking here, necessarily, about full-scale autobiographical writing—though I am not ruling it out either. But I am saying that writerly writing is personal writing, whether or not it is autobiographical. Even if it offers no facts from the writer’s life, or offers just hints of them here and there, it makes the reader know some things about the writer—a fundamental condition, it seems to me, of any real act of communication. (25-27)

      Narrative criticism is a formula of narrativity used to tell a story (Walker 559). And literary non-fiction is “the inclusion of a personal voice into a book of non-fiction” (Flavell 26).

      Other possible influences on fictocriticism include gonzo, travel writing, writing-between and beatnik novels, some of which continue to (re)appear and exist today. There is also evidence of the incorporation of experimental, personalised or fictive writing in academic disciplines such as:

      cultural and literary studies, film studies, performance studies, law, history, philosophy, visual arts, and even beyond the humanities into some areas of the sciences. A View from the Divide: Creative Nonfiction on Health and Science (1999), for example, suggests that even the most purely scientific and objective disciplines are not immune to the ficto-critical turn. (Flavell 104-5)

      In 2007, Denis Byrne’s Surface Collection: Archaeological Travels in Southeast Asia, an archaeological travelogue, told through stories in the first-person, was published. This further demonstrates the emergence of fictocriticism in different disciplines, bridging discourses and creating new approaches to writing in the way ‘straight’ informal theory or ‘normal’ fiction cannot do. Here is an example from Byrne’s book:

      Standing at the window of the second-floor room in the National Museum where I was reading through piles of old reports and archaeological site records, I could see, looking across a stream of traffic and a dusty park, a corner of the Spanish wall and the confusion of rooftops and low facades that lay beyond it. There, in 1571, Miguel Lopez de Legazpi had laid out a gridiron of seventeen streets on the site of what had been the palisaded fort of Rajah Suleiman. The Rajah’s small brass cannons, while perfectly adequate under previous conditions, were little more than a joke to the Spanish, and they easily drove him out of his stronghold. Intramuros’s defenses were elaborated and modified over time to produce a system of immense stone walls complete with moat, seven gates, several bastions and ravelins, and a large fort in the northwest corner guarding the river mouth. (1-2)

      All the foregoing discussion shows that a kind of fictocriticism can both fall into, under (and evade) a plethora of different categories, and at present there does not appear to be a unified, cohesive accepted understanding of the form.

      Fictocriticism was first taken up in Australia in the 1990s, stemming from Canada (Flavell 3-4). “Anna Gibbs reminds us that [fictocriticism] appears well before this in the writing of mostly non-academic women responding to the new and ‘provocative’ texts emanating from France then later Canada from the 1970s onward” (147). Fictocriticism’s emergence in Australia is thought to have been prompted by way of “French feminist interest in a new kind of writing defiant of phallocentrism” (147). Some of this French feminist experimental writing is often referred to as écriture féminine (Hancox and Muller 148).

      The first article to have the term ‘fictocriticism’ appear in it in Australia was Stephen Muecke and Noel King’s “On Ficto-Criticism” in 1991 in the Australian Book Review. Muecke and King’s tentative two-page article acts as a discussion—even a somewhat casual conversation—between the two academics, in curiously trying to decipher what type of writing much of Roland Barthes’ work, such as Mythologies (1957), Roland Barthes (1975) and A Lover’s Discourse (1977), and Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise (1985) actually are. Muecke and King claim that Roland Barthes’ texts “simply cannot be called criticism, but [they] cannot, for that matter be called non-criticism either” (14). And that White Noise is “at once a quite traditional novel (in terms of structure) and yet one of the sharpest meditations on the postmodern available” (Muecke and King 13). Thus, they emphatically decide on the possibilities of fictocriticism as a postmodern way “to simply [tell] stories” (Muecke and King 13), and as a relief from heavy theory. They even disregard the need for systematically accurate referencing at the end of the article, claiming “No need for bio details—they’re in the text, but also we want readers to be a little uncertain about our reality” (Muecke and King 14). Overall, the article paints fictocriticism as providing a refreshingly non-convoluted, un-bureaucratic perspective on the possibilities of (academic) writing in a way that is still rich, provocative and engaging.

      Helen Flavell’s important and unique 2004 doctoral thesis Writing-Between: Australian and Canadian Ficto-Criticism provides a thorough description, explanation and history of the term. What is so good about Flavell’s work is that it is likely to be the first thesis to look at fictocriticism as a style/genre through a more theoretical lens: “Through my application of Deleuzian theory I encourage a productive use of the literary machine, extracting from the ficto-critical text its revolutionary force” (Flavell 40).

      Elements of fictocriticism are also perhaps comparable to the idea of jouissance, which can be inferred from a reading of Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text (1973) and French feminism, in the discourse(s) of Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous, for instance (Spivak 166). Jouissance has been interpreted or connected to concepts such as “bliss”, “fully-tasted pleasure”, “orgasm” and “perversion” (Gallop 566). And it is a mode or an amalgamation of these things—an excited and stimulated sensation in which a feeling and/or sentiment of sexuality can be interconnected with a blissful intelligence and engagement with the text, whether in the act of reading or writing. And so, an ecstatic jubilation would come under that mode also. Like fictocriticism (and a lot of metafictive devices), jouissance is simple enough, though something that one needs to actively engage with in order to understand and appreciate.

      Due to the amount of purely fictocritical discussion(s) that needed to take place throughout the research process, much of the ‘higher’ theory has been expounded in the creative folios also. This, in many ways, is complementary to fictocriticism’s double-voiced and subtextual (Rubenstein 37) nature. Still, a deliberate methodology pervading this body of work is all about splitting my cognitive awareness into two parts: one as creative self, the other as analytical self.

      Occasionally these two writing approaches (creative and theoretical) are quite challenging to separate as there is a large amount of overlap between the two. This experimental study contends that this is a strong characteristic of fictocriticism though, and there are a myriad of academics that discuss the potential of literary research to be developed in this manner too (Barrett 2004; Kroll 2004; Nelson 2004; Brewster 2005; Arnold 2005). That is a discussion for another time: however, it is a possible avenue for future research and innovation.

      Also, I initially assumed that my very early research and work was fictocritical because a concrete and consistent explanation of it could not be located elsewhere. I found it difficult to understand the methodology properly without this concrete, unequivocal definition. It created a severe mental block in the work. Thus, at the end of 2017 a decision was made to alter my doctoral project into a literary ‘experiment’ which would produce an industrious, working definition of fictocriticism as a literary genre. In essence, my doctoral dissertation (and subsequently this book) construct a definition of fictocriticism itself through the creative writing experiments that would push the methodology’s boundaries. This process and feedback formed a renewed and re-focused line of research questioning that was definitive: What is fictocritical fiction? Is there a definition of it that is agreed on by all fictocritical academics? And which of my experimental pieces succeed or fail in this vein? Other similar questions then include: Does fictocriticism work well within both academic and creative writing practices? Does it work in a hybridised manner? Is it a methodology that can still be innovated? Has, or how has, fictocriticism changed over the years to become more concise and dynamic, regimented, or has it become more vague and obscure? By ‘doing’ fictocriticism, what problems does it solve? And do the ‘experiments’ in fictocriticism presented in the different (creative) folios of this book innovate upon the form successfully, and also show pathways for future research, or do they fail?