Fictocritical Innovations

ibidem-Press, Stuttgart

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

LIST OF TERMINOLOGY

INTRODUCTION

SECTION I

FOLIO ONE: Journeys

“At Some Point Reality Needs to Become a Part Of …” (2013)

A Daze to Come True (2014)

A Literary Mitosis (On Form) (2014)

The Mission Man (2014)

An Apple on a String Swings in Front of Me (2014)

The Island (2015)

The Spirit of the Times (2013)

A Sentimental Cynic (2013)

‘Til Morning Came (2013)

“There’s a Road Train Going Nowhere” (2013)

“The Writer on Holiday” or Clockwork (2014)

A Train Ride to Russia in 2007 (2015)

Déjà Vu Delirium (2013)

Coast to Coast Infrequency (Part I) (2013)

Coast to Coast Infrequency (Part II) (2013)

Ghouls (2014)

End of the Weekend (2014)

Going Home (2014)

Tiers and Towers (2014)

THESIS ONE

Examining the Fictocritical Value of Journeys: The Author Meanders

SECTION II

FOLIO TWO: Family

Guise (2014)

Kwiat Dwóch Puszcz (2017)

Storm (2017)

Be the Tallest Poppy (2015)

Daj Mi Pić, Proszę Cię (2016)

Dickheads (2015)

THESIS TWO

My Family and other Fictions: Fictocriticism Creates New Subjectivities

SECTION III

FOLIO THREE: Education

(Scrapped) Book: A ‘Professional’ Educational(?) Overview (2016)

An Agitation (2016)

Hum, Amplitude, (Being a) Focal Point (2016)

‘Big’ Ideas (2016)

THESIS THREE

Fictocriticism as Innovative Pedagogy

SECTION IV

FOLIO FOUR: Technology

Preamble … (2013)

Busy Bees Buzz (2014)

Do the Evolution(ary Jig) (2015)

Coaxing the Ouroboros (2014)

Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters (2015)

Technological Response: A Confession (2015)

Tunnel Vision: A Tribute to 2001: A Space Odyssey (2014)

(Constantly) Changing Headspaces: I’m Bored (2013)

… But My Friends are Unreliable, So Plans are Hard to Make (2014)

After all, the World Does Not Run on Time (2013)

Yet My Persistence and Insistence are Being Misconstrued as Haughty and Overbearing (2014)

Repetition (2014)

My Refrigerator: More Repetition (2014)

Solutionism (2017)

Canvas (2013)

P.S. Mutual Misunderstandings of Brotherhood (2014)

Idiocracy [Film] (2014)

Be Careful Though. There is such a Thing as Over-organisation (Regarding Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited) (2014)

Rushing the Order and Fate (2014)

The Flux of Repulsion or Expulsion (2014)

No. In Fact, I Do Not Need, I Do Not Want. (Mantra) (2014)

Two Cents (Everyone Has an Opinion) (2013)

‘Irony’, Alanis Morissette and Me (2015)

The Accumulation of Demons (2015)

Cattle Call (2015)

THESIS FOUR

Solutionism: Fictocriticism and the Digital World

CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I gratefully acknowledge the funding received from Central Queensland University through the UPRA Program that supported this research. I also respectfully acknowledge the expertise and guidance provided by Professor Stephen Muecke in the final stages of my PhD dissertation.

Some sections and fragments of this book have previously been published in TEXT Journal, Idiom 23, Stoned Crows & Other Australian Icons: Prose Poems & Microfiction, Colloquy and narratorAUSTRALIA.

Professional editor, John McAndrew, provided copyediting and proof-reading services of my PhD dissertation, according to the guidelines laid out in the University-endorsed national ‘Guidelines for Editing Research Theses’.

Various names and identifying details and characteristics of locations, people and institutions have been altered or invented for creative, legal and confidentiality reasons.

Book cover art/photograph “Pink Lake” courtesy of Liam Baster.

To Wally, for stoking the flame.

To Tris, for settling the embers.

To friends and family, for your care, conversation, content, humour

and patience.

To Andrea, for being a second conscience, and for just helping me

to be a better version of my self during much of this process.

To God, for not existing, therein providing me the independence

and freedom necessary to rely on more innate and tangible things.

To all the blurred, pivotal or indirect influences.

To the multitudinous chaotic selves manifested in these writings:

may this work bring you some closure and a sense of unified

peace and consolidation.

LIST OF TERMINOLOGY

Creative self: Originator of creative folio(s)

Analytical self: Writer of theses

Folio(s): The (creative) fictocritical work written by the creative self

Thesis/Theses: The theoretical analyses (of the creative work) written by the analytical self

Section(s): A thesis and its accompanying folio

INTRODUCTION

This book has been adapted from a doctoral dissertation submitted to CQUniversity in 2019, and conferred in the same year. The study containing the two separate elements of creative work and analytical exegesis, was positioned within the creative writing field of fictocriticism, and stems from earlier ‘experiments’ in autobiographical writing and experiences of travel and growing up in Australia as a first-generation Polish-Australian male. Touching upon episodes of diaspora, family, education, and questions of ‘self’ and ‘identity’ that have arisen as a young creative artist living in an increasingly digital age, the exegesis of this creative work is both intensely personal and clinically theoretical. The creative pieces are thinly veiled personal accounts which, in turn, provide a framework for various thematic constructions for a developing sense of self in relation to the experiences under discussion. The reason for structuring this dissertation in four theses is due to the flexible, yet “inimitable” (Gibbs 1) needs of the fictocritical genre and form and because the discussion demands some definable limitations.

Initially, this exploration was influenced by Josie Arnold’s “The PhD in Writing Accompanied by an Exegesis” (2005), where she discusses the dichotomy between traditionalist or conservative modes of constructing a PhD, versus the more creative types of work that challenge preconceived or traditional templates of the exegesis and artefact model. This is where my interest in experimentation comes to the fore, and it offers a space where unique conceptualisations of creative/critical ‘academic’ writing are disseminated and introduced to provide new literary insights. Arnold references Nelson, Deleuze and Scrivener and their desire to ‘catastrophise’ or rebel against the type of ‘straight-jacket’ that is “the traditional thetic/exegesis” (38). This is where fictocriticism comes strongly into the equation, offering as it does, a revolutionary, experimental and metacognitive way of researching and writing in the synthesis of new and original thinking.

To reiterate, and to properly prepare the reader for what is to come, I assert that fictocriticism deserves further academic attention and investigation, and what I believe to be the most interesting and/or challenging aspects at the cutting edge of the debate surrounding fictocriticism is its unclassifiable nature and its potential technological innovativeness. During the course of this explorative discussion, I canvas many different positions in the fictocritical debate, almost all of which are vastly interconnected (or vastly disconnected), depending on how they are examined. I contend that the central motifs, mission and contribution of this book is in its exploration of fictocriticism’s chameleonic nature and its growing (futuristic) tendency towards electronic mediums. The first three sections of this study intentionally and gradually synthesise these complex issues and build towards the overarching notion that four individual theses are needed to detail the separate folios of the emergent argument and to provide context for the creative writings. The fourth thesis coheres the various arguments.

Fictocriticism can be described as a hybrid-style of writing that is both fictional and critical, a genre of writing that is naturally theoretical, personal or personalised and professional, (Schlunke and Brewster 393). It has been considered a ‘buzzword’, on the fringe of mainstream literature, ‘meta’ and postmodern in nature and form, format and execution or delivery. It has also been referred to as “a refusal of any steady border between genres” (Trottier 1), a mode (or collage) of thought “gently flapping, between experience and interpretation” (Kerr and Nettelbeck 109), “a textual no-man’s land” (Dawson 139), “a writing of compounds and mutations, a hybrid writing which is not just any one thing, but not any one thing” (White et al. 10-11), an “inchoate category” (Schlunke and Brewster 393) that allows or permits one to really disperse oneself and the ‘I’.

This book involves two very distinct and different perspectives, each of which has a unique ‘voice’ and persona: the four-part creative component is recounted by a self-conscious creative informal self in four folios; while the four theoretical theses, which dissect the creative folios and explore the fictocritical strategies, are written with the more clinical and formal voice of a literary scientist, referred to as the analytical self. It was necessary to develop a sense of estrangement between these two personas, to split the author and researcher, (myself, Pawel Cholewa), into these two diverged voices. This is done to be consistent with, and to further the notion of fictocriticism being “double-voiced” (Kerr 93).

Double-voicedness is a key feature within the context of fictocriticism, and it requires some expounding. Double-voicedness is about subtext: the voice on top and the voice on the bottom, or the voices of the writer speaking side-by-side. They are the yin and yang of duality within the context of writing. One is generally creative, the other critical. One is about poeticism and storytelling, the other is about critique, social commentary, philosophy or concrete theory. They can be integrated, work in tandem, or contrast and reverberate off one another dichotomously. They are the tangible and the intangible, working with, against or through one another.

My separation between creative self and analytical self, in the folios and theses of this work, makes this literary technique and function very obvious and literal. This deliberate estrangement of personas, the development of a schism between creative self and analytical self, also enables the subtleties of double-voicedness to be better seen and more clearly recognised in the creative folios.

For obvious reasons, it is generally quite difficult to write about oneself. If my ‘self’ is going to be interesting, it has to be vulnerable to change. The analytical self in the theses, recorded in the third-person, is armour-plated in dealing with new emerging problems and innovations of fictocriticism. The creative self (or selves), most often in the state of confessing in the first-person, can be guarded at times, but change dramatically over the course of the work. The creative self is not safeguarded to the point that it is immobile. The point of this is to remove the armour carried around with us. The narrative arc, as well as the multitudinous perspectives in the writings, show this. Both diverged selves, just as my own complete persona, change through the process of this exploration. I am not the same researcher or creative writer as I was at the outset of my PhD in 2013, nor do I necessarily hold to the same views and opinions I held between the ages of 25 and 30 (2013–2017); these views and opinions are more so in the creative act of venting/catharsis.

To assist in comprehending the complexity and nature of these ‘selves’ and their (correlating) diverged sections, a brief list of the terminology used in this book, is provided prior to this introduction, on page 13. It may be easier to think of fictocriticism, not as a literary genre, but more as a way to process thought—“a strategy for writing” (Kerr and Nettelbeck 4). The majority of explanations of fictocriticism, my own attempts included, are inconclusive. They either overcomplicate the idea, or the language used to describe it is too figurative or metaphorical. Hazel Smith’s explanation in “The Erotics of Gossip: Fictocriticism, Performativity, Technology” (2009) is well-balanced in that sense and probably the best description found so far to explain the concept:

fictocriticism juxta-poses creative and academic writing environments, and breaks down their separation and autonomy. Fictocritics may, for example, insert, imply, or elucidate theoretical ideas within creative work without feeling the pressure to transform those ideas into entirely fictional or poetic texts. Such texts can take many different forms, but may often be experimental and discontinuous: for example, fictional or poetic sections are juxtaposed with theoretical interjections so that they reverberate with each other. Or, fictocritical critics may attempt to disrupt the formality of the academic essay with strategies such as crossing of genres, collage, non-linearity, wordplay, anecdote, or use of the first person. (1001-02)

The initial and primary appeal of fictocriticism was its resistance to having any kind of authority dictated over its form, a creative structure that aspires to the convenience of being inherently freeform (Gibbs 310): “There is no specific way to write fictocritically” (Naismith 24). Fictocriticism is referred to as a genre that is about “personal journey and storytelling” (Hancox and Muller 149) and that “the form is part of the message” (Flavell 186). It is an unorthodox writing technique because of the level of literary iconoclasm. To offer any deep level of critical explanation or attempting to cage the creative work within any kind of accepted writing parameter goes against the grain and meaning of its intention as a literary form of writing or ‘device’—a tool for the erratic construction and personalised investigation of journal-like ‘meaning’ (Flavell 29).

When fictocriticism appears in anthologies, articles, in the introductions of theses and the like, it is usually something that is explained fictocritically, which is typically personalised, abstracted and mixed in style, genre, form, etc. Yes, “ficto-criticism is indeed a slippery and contradictory category” (Flavell 126). But this is what makes it such an exuberant and stimulating mode. Furthermore, it is particularly useful in being able to construct a fragmentary narrative that is in part abstract, creative and autobiographical but then also a narrative(s) which features some critique regarding the explicit themes or issues addressed. Fictocriticism allows a writer to ebb, flow and move through and between these different primary voices to render a richer narrative.

A detailed review of the literature surrounding fictocriticism and its predecessors shows that there are terms that exist in other countries that have a suggestive fictocritical air about them. In Japan there is Shishōsetsu or the ‘I-novel’, a confessional form of writing that promoted transparency and textual interconnectivity between writer, narrator and narrative hero in early twentieth-century Japanese fiction (Layoun 158). Shishōsetsu encouraged authorial presence and ‘sincerity’, just as fictocriticism encourages authorial involvement and engagement in its ‘storytelling’ form (Layoun 159).

In the writing of Québecoise women there is fiction-theory or fiction-théorique, as seen in the works of Nicole Brossard—someone who “has had considerable impact on the development of creative-critical writing in English Canada”, having influence in the development of a “very specific creative-critical style” on the margins of Canadian culture (Flavell 215).

Paul Dawson, an Australian academic, in “A Place for the Space Between: Fictocriticism and the University” (2002), states that the North American version of fictocriticism would be called “confessional criticism” (145):

confessional criticism is … indebted to the post-structuralist critique of critical and philosophical modes of writing as metalanguages, and the subsequent rejection of the epistemological relationship between these modes and an unquestionable truth. If the disinterested and impersonal prose of academic writing can no longer provide access to knowledge, then the intellectual as political subject becomes the only enabling motivation of critical activity. (Dawson 145)

Essentially, both confessional criticism and fictocriticism aim to distance and liberate criticism from its “parasitical dependence on literature” (Dawson 146).

There is also “autocritique, the new belletrism, experimental critical writing, narrative criticism, and literary non-fiction” (Flavell 106). Autocritique is a complicated form of self-criticism—a “trendy ‘I’ that beams out at the reader from the ‘personal’ critical essay” (Flavell 274). The new belletrism is another conceptualisation of autobiographical criticism identifying “American ficto-critical moves as a return to an earlier form of the essay (before its appropriation as an academic genre and reincarnation as logical formal writing)” (Flavell 108). Experimental critical writing has been best summed up and expressed by Marianna Torgovnick:

When writers want to be read they have to be more flexible and take more chances than the standard scholarly style allows: often, they have to be more direct and more personal. In a very real way … I could not think myself as a writer until I risked exposing myself in my writing. 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).