Minding the Gap : Writing Across Thresholds and Fault Lines [1 ed.] 9781443884945, 9781443880657

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Minding the Gap

Minding the Gap: Writing across Thresholds and Fault Lines Edited by

Thom Conroy and Gail Pittaway

Minding the Gap: Writing across Thresholds and Fault Lines Edited by Thom Conroy and Gail Pittaway This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Thom Conroy, Gail Pittaway and contributors Cover design Fantail © Nicholas Allen – Profotos Media, 2014 All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-8065-5 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8065-7

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................. vii Introductory Note ........................................................................................ 1 Minding the Gap between Was and Will Be Thom Conroy and Gail Pittaway Chapter One ................................................................................................. 7 Masturbating with Prostitutes: Research and the Realist Novel Shady Cosgrove Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 17 Thresholds of Innovation: Conceptualising Imaginative Writing and Fiction Biography James Vicars Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 27 Transgressive Consumption: Reading between the Lines of the Alcoholbased Memoir Donna Lee Brien Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 43 History, Historical Fiction and ‘Phenomenological Longing’ Thom Conroy Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 53 Writing between Two Shores: Migration and the Personal Essay Diane Comer Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 63 Voyaging the Gap though Scandinavian Sagas of Migration to New Zealand Gail Pittaway

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Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 81 Lost in Translation: Using Fictional Language as a Form of Narrative Denise Beckton Chapter Eight ............................................................................................. 93 Fault-lines: Creativity and the Lure of Language in The Carpathians Dominique Hecq Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 105 Writing across Platforms: Adapting Classics through Social Media Jessica Seymour Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 117 Playing with Gaps: Science and the Creative Writer Lisa Smithies Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 135 The Creative Writing Doctorate as Survival Story: Minding the Gap between Success and Failure Jeri Kroll Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 155 Ovid’s Artists and Mythic Failure Jen Webb Contributors ............................................................................................. 169 Index ........................................................................................................ 173

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors would like to thank the following places and people for their generous support in the creation of this book: The School of Media Arts at Waikato Institute of Technology (Wintec), Hamilton, New Zealand, and the Wintec Centre for Research for providing editorial assistance, through the work of Alexandra Lodge. Massey University of New Zealand, in particular, the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the School of English and Media Studies, and the W. H. Oliver Humanities Research Academy for their support for the initial conference from which these chapters derive. We also gratefully acknowledge the President, Executive committee and members of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP), especially those who participated in the double-blind refereeing processes for the chapters in this book.

INTRODUCTORY NOTE MINDING THE GAP BETWEEN WAS AND WILL BE THOM CONROY AND GAIL PITTAWAY

Passengers on the British railway and underground must “mind the gap” because it’s dangerous not to. In a state of embarking or disembarking, passengers must stay aware of the small but significant space separating the stationary from the moving. The contemporary practices of writing and reading are in constant motion, and the phrase “mind the gap” captures an essential aspect of the way language and literature progress as they pass through any number of social, technical, and political exchanges. “Minding the gap” also suggests an awareness of the always shifting distance between the expected and the unexpected, the ordinary and the impossible, the familiar and unimagined. Speaking of the novel in particular, Eudora Welty advises us that writing must be “something that never was before and will not be again”. The “never was and never will be” may serve as the best description we have of literature. It is the stuff of betwixt and between, the linguistic spandrel, the mushroom you can’t stop sprouting in the fertile but perilous ground between was and will be. Creative Writing as an academic discipline is into its fourth decade in Australasia and, increasingly, academics and practitioners are being challenged to balance their contributions to the growing canon of writing about writing against the impact of the reality of a dwindling print media industry. Long cherished as the love-child of the arts and humanities, creative writing is now flirting with the sciences, social media and business, as these disciplines develop new emphases upon storytelling and narrative. Gaps between disciplines are closing as the former “silo” structures of academic programmes become merged. The following chapters started life at a conference of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP) at Massey University, in Wellington, New Zealand, in November 2014, where the original call for papers under the

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title of “Minding the gap: writing across thresholds and fault-lines” attracted a wide range of papers and discussions—well beyond the imagination of the convenors—to consider concepts and practices such as “writing across the gaps, reading between the lines, unearthing writing, writing across thresholds, fault lines and storylines”. With an eye to the physical gap between nations and an ear to the rumbling of earthquakes in our region, we also encouraged papers about building and rebuilding writing, survivor stories, and strategies for writers across gaps of time and place. Many of these fine contributions can be found on the website of the AAWP, www.aawp.org.au, published under the conference proceedings. This volume follows on from that conference, advising us to mind the gap between the way writing and reading are experienced today and the possibilities for their perception tomorrow. Those who write, teach, or study within a stone’s throw of the academy are aware of the unprecedented changes and challenges facing creative writing and the associated fields of creative practice and literary study. In an era when the interest in literature and the links between literature and popular culture are more pronounced than ever before, the bodies that fund, evaluate, and enable creative writing in the academy have grown increasingly dubious of the value of a tradition that has, until recently, been seen as crucial to the progress of knowledge—indeed, as Camus once remarked, “The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself”. While those who practice creative writing and reading—and both require innovation and originality—remain convinced of the urgent need for creative writing in today’s world, there is no question that we are being tasked with finding new ways to make words speak in the digital cacophony. The range and breadth of chapters also call attention to the gappy nature of language itself. Like the spaces that pepper each sentence, language and literature operate across, between, and sometimes in spite of the breaks in meaning, genre, and cognition. Meeting the challenges of new conceptions of and expectations around writing means we have the opportunity to find new ways to conceive of what it is we do and how we go about doing it. While the cultural role of creativity has never been more central, our charge is to craft fresh articulations of the primacy of the literary imagination. Writing across gaps requires cooperation and connection, and in the conceptions of writing in this volume, we find new configurations of genre, fresh approaches to creative research, and innovative approaches to old questions around practice, failure, and readerly cognition. Novel understandings of the ways in which language functions inevitably lead to new possibilities for pleasure: in the gap that once separated memoir and fiction arise new understandings of genre; in

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the space between real and invented languages appear new possibilities for creation; in the white space surrounding textual fragments emerge new constellations of meaning and nuance. Minding the gaps in language and literature also involves paying attention to the gaps that form the identity of those performing the writing and reading. Each act of composition, each episode of reading and interpretation is grounded in the particularities of an individual experience constituted in terms of culture, ethnicity, class, and gender. Every voyage of imagination launches from its own shore, and every landfall reconstitutes the space between near and far. The essays in this volume ask us to be mindful of the gap between home and terra incognito, and they enable us to stretch this vision backward in time, extending our awareness of the way identity has been produced, maintained, and, in some cases, complicated beyond recognition. In the provocatively titled “Masturbating with Prostitutes: Research and the Realist Novel”, Shady Cosgrove grapples with the intersection of research and ethics in realist fiction. The chapter distinguishes between two forms of research that are essential to realism: fact-checking—which involves the gathering of real world details relevant to the story—and a second form of research which Cosgrove calls “the production of new knowledge”. “Thresholds of innovation: Conceptualising imaginative writing and fiction autobiography” takes up the associated question of how methods of research relate to our understanding of the slippery distinction between imaginative writing about people and biography proper. Situating his own research on the life of Millicent Bryant—Australia’s first female aviator—in the context of other imaginative biographical writing, James Vicars argues that conventional research based on historical artefacts such as letters can be combined with what Hayden White calls “knowing in practice” to join emotional truth to factual knowledge. Donna Lee Brien’s “Transgressive consumption: Reading between the lines of the alcohol-based memoir” undertakes a re-classification of a memoir in an effort to refine our knowledge of the sub-genres of memoir. Arguing for the need for genre study to “tease out an understanding of [memoir] and its possible significance”, this chapter classifies accounts of drinking into categories based on culture, history, terms of production and consumption. After a review of alcohol-based memoirs ranging in genre from the celebratory to the denial to the recovery, Brien concludes that this study, and others like it, can assist in resituating certain types of popular memoir and provide a framework for ongoing genre research. In “History, historical fiction, and ‘phenomenological longing’”, Thom Conroy argues that historical fiction can respond to that same phenomenological longing

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to move beyond the text that characterises conventional history. Conroy maintains that narrative constructivist historians overlook the ethical obligation that many writers of realist historical fiction feel both toward their subject matter and their readers; and he goes on to consider the phenomenological longing underpinning his intentions in writing his historical novel, The Naturalist. In the chapter “Writing between two shores: Migration and the personal essay”, Diane Comer chronicles the use of the personal essay to depict and evoke the experience of migration to New Zealand. In an effort to expose “insights into migration that might not otherwise manifest,” Comer shares the stories of migrants to New Zealand and frames their revelations in the context of her own migration from Christchurch to Sweden. Gail Pittaway’s chapter takes up the theme of migrant stories. “Voyaging the gaps: ethnography through Scandinavian Sagas of Migration” documents Pittaway’s investigation into her own family history, that of migrants to New Zealand in the Nineteenth Century, and reflects on the gaps in history, time and geographical space that serve to obscure or illuminate that knowledge. Denise Beckton’s chapter, “Lost in translation; using fictional language as a form of narrative” moves to considerations of invented languages and bridges gaps between literary writing, children’s writing and popular culture. She discusses the nature and function of the unique languages created by J.R.R. Tolkien, Richard Adams and George R.R. Martin, among other writers, and their effect in each narrative as enriching and enhancing the worlds and the works created. Another writer is celebrated in Dominique Hecq’s densely scoped and intensely argued chapter “Fault-lines: Creativity and the lure of language in ‘The Carpathians’”. Hecq explores Janet Frame’s invention and intervention between “the raw materials of art; signifier, signified; literal, figurative; metonymy, metaphor; fact, fiction; self, other”. In a change of direction, but still adhering to canonical authorship in subject matter, in “Writing across platforms: Adapting classics for social media”, Jessica Seymour traces the means by which the works of Austen, Fitzgerald and Brontë are not only being adapted, but rewritten, re-imaged, re-dressed and revised for onscreen and online games and web-series. Seymour’s chapter provides a comprehensive introduction to the language of vlogging, transmedia texts and the world of online fandom, while arguing for the relevance of extending Foucault’s concept of heterotopia to include these electronic texts. From social and transmedia, we move to neurological concerns. “Playing with gaps: Science and the creative writer” investigates the

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complex relationships underpinning cognition, literature, and reading, especially as they apply to American short story writer Lydia Davis. The gaps in the way our brains process information, Lisa Smithies argues, provide cognitive structures that literary writing can exploit to various ends. Smithies turns to the work of Davis as a striking example of the ways that writers can manipulate elements of cognitive function to create meaning and evoke emotion. She concludes by discussing Davis’s own theoretically-informed process of composition, which operates as “a form of cognitive information processing” linked to the creation of poignant fiction. The collection ends with two chapters reflecting on aspects of failure as a significant yet regularly overlooked component of writing and art. In “The creative writing doctorate as survival story: Minding the gap between success and failure”, Jeri Kroll examines the gap between failure and success in PhD candidature in the arts. She cites two particular “successful failures” in science and architecture as indications of where the mentor and supervisor might be encouraged to see that “the full articulation of a project might only be possible in the future” and not necessarily at the moment of submission of a thesis. She argues, “Failure can lead practitioners in new directions, close pathways, solve specific problems that turn out to be more significant than the project as a whole and suggest more fruitful questions to pose”. Jen Webb is similarly concerned with failure in the final chapter “Ovid’s artists and mythic failure”, and interweaves her current collaborative research project of interviewing poets from across the “Anglophone community” where failure is repeatedly reported as an incentive to “fail better”, with stories of artists who “fail well”. She widens the scope of the chapter with rumination upon the life of Ovid and a selection of the artist vignettes whose stories he recounts in The Metamorphoses, “as object lessons for the emerging artist: a list of things to do, and not do, in order to avoid ending up banished to outer Romania, or turned into a flower or torn to shreds by angry Maenads.” This chapter brings us back from our original initiative of minding gaps in writing and reading for today and our anticipation of these for tomorrow, to a reminder that, yesterday and beyond that into myth and the earliest utterances of our kind, it has always been fearless perseverance which has taken the artist across the gap between failure and success. In Minding the gap: Writing across thresholds and fault lines, we have tried to develop a gap-closing thread of ideas: from considerations of the writer as activist researcher to the writer as reader; to the reader and the reader as writer; on to the writer as mentor and student; and, finally, to the

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writer as artist. Perhaps more of a mesh than a thread and maybe more of a spiral than a circle is stitched, but we are confident that in these chapters, in the minding of gaps, we pay attention to the delicate shifting ground of our graft—past, present and future.

CHAPTER ONE MASTURBATING WITH PROSTITUTES: RESEARCH AND THE REALIST NOVEL SHADY COSGROVE

Introduction In an interview with the Paris Review, writer William T. Vollman states: One of the things that I had to do occasionally while I was collecting information for that prostitute story, “Ladies and Red Lights” from The Rainbow Stories, was sit in a corner and pull down my pants and masturbate. I would pretend to do this while I was asking the prostitutes questions. Because otherwise, they were utterly afraid of me and utterly miserable, thinking I was a cop (2000: 1).

Vollman offers an interesting entry point to a discussion about fiction writing, research and ethics. Indeed, this chapter began as a consideration of whether or not fiction writers of the academy should be required to obtain ethics clearance when live subjects are involved in their research. It is difficult to imagine a study leave application that outlines brothel research as described above; however, a tenet of creative writing is to write what you know, or as writer Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky says, “know what you write” (2007: 1). This is not always straightforward, certainly in the face of university bureaucracy. However, it’s worth considering that research for fiction is an ethical matter: both in the ensuing representations that are published but also in the fact it can affect those who are researched. This chapter begins by clarifying the types of research involved in novel writing, specifically within the context of realist literary fiction. It will then argue that because of realist literary conventions, an expectation of verisimilitude exists with regard to representation and these expectations have ethical implications for authors who are researching and writing realist fiction.

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Research—fact-checking versus the academy This paper differentiates between two types of research that can inform novel writing—the first being fact-checking, the second being the production of new knowledge. The research of fact-checking, in the style of journalism, is the research that novelists undertake to ascertain details relevant to the story. For instance, writer Don Delillo cited books, magazines, scientific reports, audiotapes and film footage as sources of information that were useful to him as he researched his novel Libra: [T]here were times when I felt an eerie excitement, coming across an item that seemed to bear out my own theories. Anyone who enters this maze knows you have to become part scientist, novelist, biographer, historian and existential detective (1993: 1).

I had a similar experience in writing the book What the Ground Can’t Hold (2013). I read extensively on avalanches, interviewed avalanche experts and reviewed video footage of avalanches as the novel is set in the Andes, and an avalanche is the inciting incident of the book. This research was not primary—I did not venture into avalanche zones or witness avalanches firsthand but rather used secondary research to imagine the experience of witnessing/possibly surviving an avalanche. Writer Barbara Kingsolver gives preference to primary research over secondary research when she says: “The difference between amateur and professional research is a willingness to back away from other people’s accounts of what is, and find your own. There is no ‘googlesmell’” (Kingsolver, 2014: 1). And while circumstances don’t always make this possible (for example, in the case of realist novels set well in the past or amidst dangerous situations like avalanches), I do agree that it is usually preferable. Kingsolver goes on to say: If I want to remove you from your life and whisk you into a picnic on the banks of a river in Teotihuacán, here are some things I need to know: what grows there, what trees, what flowers, in that month of the year? What does it smell like, are there bees? … Passing on someone else’s account of these things, from reading about them, would likely render a flat, onedimensional scene, no matter how I injected my own additions of plot and character. The sensory palette would be limited. I can only paint with all the colors if I’ve seen them for myself (2014: 1).

In this chapter, I will refer to both this primary and secondary research as fact-checking research because whether or not the author has witnessed the material firsthand or discovered it through other sources, it is still the

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research of fact-checking. I will now argue that this type of research is distinct from the research of the academy. According to the Australian National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Research Involving Humans, there are many definitions of research: “These include systematic investigation to establish facts, principles or knowledge and a study of some matter with the objective of obtaining or confirming knowledge. A defining feature of research is the validity of its results” (2007, 2014: 6). For the purpose of this chapter, academic creative research will be defined as creative inquiry aimed at the production of new knowledge. For those engaged with Australian ERA processes, creative work (also known as non-traditional outputs) must be accompanied by a research statement that includes: the research background, the research contribution and the research significance. That is, creative work that is to be counted as research within the tertiary sector must include a statement demonstrating that the author understands their research context, how their creative work contributes to this field and how their creative work is significant. These two types of research—fact-checking and the production of new knowledge—are different endeavours; however, this paper argues the research of fact-checking can be critical to the research of producing new knowledge within the context of writing realist fiction. Delillo went to various American locations to scout out information for his novel. This fact-checking research had a palpable effect on his creative production: There were several levels of research—fiction writer’s research … I went to New Orleans, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Miami and looked at houses and streets and hospitals, schools and libraries—this is mainly Oswald I’m tracking but others as well—and after a while the characters in my mind and in my notebooks came out into the world (1993: 1) (my italics).

When Delillo states “after a while the characters in my mind and in my notebooks came out into the world”, he is talking about the work of producing new knowledge, which can occur within the context of factchecking research. That is, the fact-checking research is what led to ‘the characters…[coming] out into the world.’ Writers undertake this factchecking because they need details they don’t know and, embedded in this unknowing, is an innate flexibility: the shape of the author’s project may change on account of additional information. This interplay—between fact-checking and the production of new creative knowledge—is relevant when we talk about research in the context of novel writing. Writer Lobanov-Rostovsky also supports this connection when he says the writer “combines…research with imagination” (2007: 1). That is, fact-checking

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plus imagination can yield the research of new knowledge. Writer and academic Catherine McKinnon offers another example of how creative research (new knowledge) is made possible through the research of fact-checking. In her article Writing white, writing black, and events at Canoe Rivulet, McKinnon describes her ambivalence regarding the writing process: If I didn’t write an Indigenous narrator was I really writing about what it meant to be Australian? If I couldn’t write an Indigenous narrator did that mean I couldn’t write a Greek narrator? Or a Turkish one? It seems absurd to suggest that a writer should never write outside his or her own experience (2012: 2).

For McKinnon, one way to avoid this misappropriation was to ensure her research was thorough and primary. This fact-checking research made it possible for her to pursue the research of new thought/ideas. Interviews, in particular, provided key data: Fictionalizing first contact stories, I discovered, requires a comprehensive research approach that acknowledges and respects contemporary Indigenous cultural protocols, recognises past misuse of Indigenous stories by white Australian authors, and is sensitive to the unique place of story within Indigenous culture. Interviewing Indigenous elders was an important – vital – component of my attempt to fill in the gaps prevalent in the historical documentary material and hypothesise about the meeting between the Europeans and the Kooris (2012: 5-6).

My argument here is that frequently, the research of creative practice—the production of new knowledge—cannot be separated from the research of fact-checking. That is, one can bear influence on the other. The research of checking your facts impacts on the creation of new creative material— otherwise it wouldn’t be necessary. This point is important when examining how novel-writing research is conducted (in both fact-checking and knowledge production terms of the word) and the ethics of the research process.

Verisimilitude in realist fiction Let me now turn to assumptions regarding realist fiction. The Oxford English Dictionary offers this definition of realism: “close resemblance to what is real; fidelity of representation, the rendering of precise details of the real thing or scene” (2014: 1). That is, realist texts are concerned with resembling what is “real” or offering a representation that is “faithful” to

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the original. As literary theorist, Pam Morris states: “Realist plots and characters are constructed in accordance with secular empirical rules. Events and people in the story are explicable in terms of natural causation without resort to the supernatural or divine intervention” (2003: 3). In other words, characters and plot points are understood within the context of natural causation: one thing leads to the next. This is not to say that realist novels are exact replicas of the realities they portray. Realist novels are composed of words, and by the nature of that fact, they can’t offer an exact imitation of the object under scrutiny: the word “bed” will never be an actual bed. Or, as Morris states: “…literary realism is a representational form and a representation can never be identical with that which it represents” (2003: 4). Literary theorist Lilian Furst explains further: “The places of realist fiction can be conveyed only in words and are therefore ultimately the product of an illusion: ‘un stable fantasme’ (‘a stable illusion’), as Butor calls it” (1995: viii). I take this to mean that while the word “bed” will never be an actual bed, in realist fiction it will continue being the representation of a bed. It won’t turn into a dragon or a pear. It will continue the stable illusion of “bed-ness” within the context of the narrative. According to Furst, this tension of the never-quite-bed bed—or the relationship between truth and representation—is one of the things that makes realist fiction exciting: “It is in the very precariousness of its endeavor that the ultimate attraction of the realist novel resides: in its risky attempt to create truth and/in illusion” (1995: 2). Realist fiction is a series of risky attempts to replicate reality, inevitably drawing attention to the reality that is being represented. Realism is often concerned with representing the human, as Robert Hauptman states: “Given the conventions of fiction, the work must give the impression that it is true to itself and honestly reflects the human condition” (2008: 325-6). However one issue with this is that what constitutes “the human condition” is not a settled matter. According to Morris: The term realism almost always involves both claims about the nature of reality and an evaluative attitude towards it. It is, thus, a term that is frequently invoked in making fundamental ethical and political claims or priorities, based upon perceptions of what is “true” or “real”. As such, the usage is often contentious and polemical (2003: 2).

Indeed notions of truth, representation and realism are large ones and this essay could focus on these arguments exclusively. However, for the sake of containment, let us say that realist literary fiction is concerned with representing reality, whatever that may mean for the author. There is a

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sense of causation with regard to character and plot, and regardless of whether the actual events have taken place or whether those exact characters exist, within realism there is a sense that the “real” world is somehow being represented. That is, if I set a novel in Argentina, the reader would assume my details and descriptions of Argentina ring true to the actual place. Readers often assume that (even if the work is fictional) if the text is realist, some attempt has been made to represent reality. This can be seen in non-Australian reader responses to Marlo Morgan’s fictional book Mutant Message Down Under. As Cath Ellis states in her essay Helping Yourself: Marlo Morgan and the Fabrication of Indigenous Wisdom: This is disturbing precisely because the book, which is routinely taken by non-Australian readers to be an accurate, non-fictional account of Australian Indigenous culture, is in fact a complete fabrication” (2004: 149).

Even though Morgan has admitted the work is a fiction, readers nonetheless assume she has researched Australian Indigenous culture and take it to be an accurate reflection. For this chapter, these assumptions of research embedded in the reading of realism are the point where research (both as fact-checking and as the production of new knowledge) and ethics collide.

Ethics in all of this Reader assumptions that realist fiction is representing reality, even if specific events and characters have been made up, are why research (factchecking) matters to research (production of new knowledge), and are one reason why the realist novel writing project is one with ethical implications. In Australia, research within the university sector that involves human participants must be approved by an accredited Human Research Ethics Committee. The University of Wollongong’s Human Research Ethics Committee web page states that its primary purpose is “to protect the welfare and rights of the participants of the research” and its secondary purpose is to “facilitate research of benefit to the wider community” (2014: 1). With this in mind, novelists of the academy should consider: A) how human participants are affected through the course of the research and writing; and B) how their research is of benefit to the wider community. In a situation like McKinnon’s, cited above, where official interviews were part of the project, this seems to be a clear mandate: the writer-researcher within the academy applies for ethics clearance before

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undertaking interviews to ensure that he/she understands the ethical implications of their research on those being researched. But what about spontaneous interactions? Consider an author exploring a city to capture details of setting. He/she stumbles across someone who offers interesting insights about the city and those insights are woven into the realist text. Does the author have an ethical obligation to disclose the fact they’re a writer to the interested bystander? Does it matter as long as the work is deemed fiction? If there’s no apparent connection between the bystander and the information in the novel, does it matter? What if the bystander is adversely affected anyway? It also must be acknowledged that much authorial research occurs during the course of being alive and living day-to-day. An interesting insight might not occur on a research trip but at the local Parents and Citizens meeting. Does an author need to predicate every human interaction with the clause that he/she is a writer and anything that takes place might provide imaginative fodder? Obviously this is ludicrous; after all, authors are influenced by events in their pasts. Writer T.D. McKinnon states: All writers are natural observers, and so their research is a never ending undertaking. Writers of fiction…allow storylines and characters et cetera to flow from a rich imagination that is banked up by a lifetime of observation (a virtual plethora of research)’ (2013: 1).

As a writer, I wouldn’t claim to be a natural observer—in fact, I’ve been forced to work on being a better observer to be a better writer—but certainly authors can access memory and use that in crafting fiction. Writer Ian McEwan did so in writing the novel Sweet Tooth (2012). As he stated in an interview: I drew heavily in ways which I haven’t done before on my own past. So I, too, like Tom Haley was at the University of Sussex. I was writing short stories in the early ’70s. I drew on the cultural milieu of a very important literary magazine The New Review … It was an odd experience of reentering my imagination of that time (2012).

If novelists draw on their pasts, they can’t journey back in time to warn interested parties. The argument here is not that universities should require ethics clearance for writers who use material from lived experience, but that authors should consider the ethical implications of the research (both fact-checking and knowledge-producing) and how it might impact on the individuals who they come across in the course of their “lifetime” of research.

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Also, there’s the ethics of representation involved in the novel writing process to be considered. That is, what are the ethical implications if I write about Argentina without researching Argentina and readers assume my version to be a faithful account? Or indeed, what are the ethical implications of Morgan’s descriptions of Aboriginal Australia? Is this the kind of thing universities could require ethics clearance for? Should realist novelists in the academy be forced to consider how their work might affect perception of the events/places/people being described? The idea sounds onerous, especially in a system where writers struggle for writing time amidst administrative and teaching responsibilities. And perhaps there already is an imperative to research and represent responsibly: publication. One could argue writers care about researching their subject material for the self-interested reason that they don’t want to get caught out by readers. As Kingsolver says: I almost never set a fictional scene in a place unless I’ve been there. Fiction is an accumulation of details, and if they’re wrong, it’s an accumulation of lies. Readers are not fooled. Fiction is invention but it’s ultimately about truth (2014: 1).

The better known a book, the more heightened the scrutiny. Take, for example, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch and the spiralling, passionate blog discussions on Goodreads with relation to her inconsistencies. As reader ‘Tim’ states (2014: 1): Here are just a few of the things that had not been invented or popularized in 1999 which she continually makes reference to: iPod -- 2002 texting -- 2000 iPhone -- 2007 camera phone -- 2004 maybe GPS in automobiles -- mid-2000s Survivor -- fall, 2000 American Idol -- 2002 Blackberry -- just introduced in 1999 As for the fact that it's a novel the author can do whatever she feels like -sure if she wants to make a point about technology or wants to be humorous a la Blazing Saddles. But, no, the author is wanting us to accept it as realism. Imagine writing a book about Henry VIII and having him drive a car!

The point here is that novel writers will have to face an ethics board of their own: their readership. Rigorous readers hold writers accountable for their texts. This isn’t to say that we should not consider the role of

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research and ethics within the academy or that readers will always be correct, but rather that it’s important to acknowledge the many ways of safeguarding representational integrity with regard to realist texts.

Conclusion This chapter has argued there are at least two kinds of research frequently involved in writing realist literary fiction within the tertiary context; fact-checking and the production of new knowledge. It has also argued that fact-checking research can inform the research of producing new knowledge, and that because of reader assumptions with regard to realism, novelists of this genre should consider how they fact-check and how this fact-checking informs their creative research. In conclusion, I would ask fiction writers to consider the Australian National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research that states: All human interaction, including the interaction involved in human research, has ethical dimensions. However, ‘ethical conduct’ is more than simply doing the right thing. It involves acting in the right spirit, out of an abiding respect and concern for one’s fellow creatures (2007, 2014: 3).

Vollman might well argue that masturbating in front of prostitutes was the ethical way to conduct his research—that he was “acting in the right spirit” to allay their fear and misery. I’d argue he was trying to access the information needed to write a good story. Of course these two goals aren’t mutually exclusive—but as writers we need to think about how research is conducted and how that research informs our work.

References Australian National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research 2007 (updated March 2014) http://www.nhmrc.gov.au/_files_nhmrc/publications/attachments/e72_ national_statement_march_2014_140331.pdf – accessed 24/09/2014. Cosgrove, Shady 2013 What the Ground Can’t Hold, Picador, Sydney. Delillo, Don 1993 The Art of Fiction No. 135, The Paris Review, No. 128, interviewed by Adam Begley. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1887/the-art-of-fiction-no135-don-delillo – accessed on 24/09/2014 Ellis, C 2004 “Helping Yourself: Marlo Morgan and the Fabrication of Indigenous Wisdom”, Australian Literary Studies 21, 4: 149-165.

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Furst, Lilian R 1995 All is True: The Claims and Strategies of Realist Fiction, Duke University Press. Hauptman, Robert 2008 “Authorial Ethics: How Writers Abuse Their Calling” Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 39.4. Jacobs, Naomi 1990 The Character of Truth: Historical Figures in Contemporary Fiction, Southern Illinois University Press, Chicago. Kingsolver, Barbara 2014 The Authorized Site (http://www.kingsolver.com/faq/about-writing.html, accessed 24/09/2014. Lobanov-Rostovsky, Sergei 2007 “Guns, Drugs, and Elvis: A Guide to Research for Fiction Writers” Kenyon Alumni Bulletin: 29.4. McEwan, Ian 2012 “Sweet Tooth – Writing and Research – Ian McEwan” interview, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbuS-SHtzhU accessed on 30/09/2014. McKinnon, Cath 2012 “Writing white, writing black, and events at Canoe Rivulet”, Text, 16.2. McKinnon, T.D. 2013 ‘Yes, Fiction Writers Do Research’, Indies Unlimited, http://www.indiesunlimited.com/2013/04/07/yes-fiction-writers-doresearch/ – accessed 24/09/2014. Morris, Pam 2003 Realism, Routledge, New York. Oxford English Dictionary, 2014 (online), http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/158931?redirectedFrom=realism#eid – accessed 11/11/2014. Tartt, Donna 2014 discussions about The Goldfinch on Goodreads. See http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1611414-what-year-is-it-whythe-inconsistencies – accessed on 24/09/2014. Vollman, William T 2000 The Art of Fiction No. 163, The Paris Review No. 156, interviewed by Madison Smartt Bell. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/620/the-art-of-fiction-no163-william-t-vollmann, accessed on 24/09/2014 University of Wollongong Research Ethics Home Page 2014 http://www.uow.edu.au/research/ethics/human/index.html accessed 23/9/2014

CHAPTER TWO THRESHOLDS OF INNOVATION: CONCEPTUALISING IMAGINATIVE WRITING AND FICTION BIOGRAPHY JAMES VICARS

In her recent, wide-ranging survey of innovation in the biographical field, Donna Brien points out that while biography is widely understood as “a literature that tells straightforward, factual stories of lives as written by someone else”, it continues, paradoxically, “to be the site of considerable experimentation” (2014: 2). But having catalogued some of the most interesting and influential of these at length, she notes that, despite the acknowledgement of creative construction, debates continue over the validity of experiment and innovation in biography and that [i]nevitably, perhaps, these debates repeat main threads of argument. The first positions biographical fact as being allied to ‘truth’, while any invention/innovation is, therefore, inevitably related to fiction and, therefore, falsity. The second is to ally conventional forms and practices with ideas of ‘solid’ history, fact and truth (and ‘good’ biography), meaning that any experimentation or innovation is understood as leading to falsity, manipulation, underhandedness and a degradation of the form (Brien 2014: 4).

While engaging the threads of argument that Brien refers to is not my purpose here, they appear to displace an increasingly large body of work that is recognisably biographical and often embodies a similar breadth of research, but that is imaginatively written or entirely (or in part) presented as fiction. Brien acknowledges the work of narratively focused British biographers including Peter Ackroyd, Victoria Glendinning, Michael Holroyd, Hilary Spurling and Andrew Motion (whose “openly fictionalised” Wainewright the Poisoner (2000) she treats at length) and points to others such as poet Stephen Scobie’s semi-fictional And Forget

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My Name: A Speculative Biography of Bob Dylan (1999). However, there are many others who explicitly write lives through the imagination and as fiction, and a tiny sampling might range from the stylish fictions about writers such as Henry James in Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2005) and David Lodge’s Author, Author (2004), and Sylvia Plath in Kate Moses’ Wintering (2003) and Emma Tennant’s Sylvia and Ted (2001), to popular depictions such as that of little-known early palaeontologist Mary Anning by Tracy Chevalier in Remarkable Creatures (2009). Australian examples range from Ernestine Hill’s My Love Must Wait (1941), about Matthew Flinders, to Marele Day’s extensive imagining of “the Captain’s Wife” in Mrs Cook (2002) and Sonia Orchard’s The Virtuoso, about Australian-born pianist Noël Mewton-Wood (2009). Together with these, I place a work of my own, provisionally entitled the Fortunes of Millicent Bryant, aviator (Vicars 2014) that writes the life of Australia’s first woman aviator as fictional biography. This work provides a practice-based research perspective as the second part of an approach to conceptualising the use of imaginative writing and fiction in the biographical field. The framework is presented here in outline, with the focus briefly on its first component, the theoretical base, before dwelling on the second more fully and demonstrating the intertwining of the two. A survey and analysis of published works, while not included in this discussion, is the final component. Writing a life has always involved a degree of subjectivity in its construction, even if that is little more than a bare placement of facts. During the re-invigoration of biography in the 1920s and 30s, perspectives on this practice, including the use of imaginative writing, were debated by Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, André Maurois, Harold Nicholson and others; these issues have been taken up more recently by writers such as Robert Skidelsky, Richard Holmes, Ray Monk and Susan Tridgell. [1] While Ira Nadel (1984) perhaps provided the first systematic attempt at a poetics of biography that incorporated imaginative innovations, fictional biography as a term and an area of scholarly study was established by Ina Schabert in her seminal 1990 monograph on this subject, In Quest of the Other Person: Fiction as Biography. In developing a theoretical basis for the use of fiction as biography, illustrated with in-depth case studies, this work also concurs with the proposition that, rather than there being authoritatively objective biographies, there can only be approaches to biography that situate themselves in a discourse of objectivity and utilise its methodologies and formats. This is not to claim that all biography should be thought of as fiction (nor to get caught in questions of either inadvertent or deliberate untruth,

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which is, for this discussion, an entirely separate question), but to avoid the positioning of fictional biography as a binary opposite to nonfiction biography. While such opposites tend to fall apart when placed under a lens such as that of deconstruction, we can also observe that all biography sets out with some initial story, factual or otherwise, which is then researched, broadened, formed more fully and shaped by a variety of personal and extrinsic factors; however, a particular challenge is to find an approach that permits expression of—to employ Virginia Woolf’s famed distinction—both the “granite-like” and that of “rainbow-like tangibility” in the life and that enables these to act as loci of understanding about the subject person rather than being in binary conflict.[2] Fictional biography as Ina Schabert defines it aspires to such aims, and her case does not flinch from the term fictional: it is the adjective or modifier of the noun “biography”, the term that announces its primary purpose. Schabert argues that it is because of the “centrality of the real-life orientation in the works in question” that fictional biography must be considered, moreover, “a special kind of ‘biography’ rather than a subgenre of the novel” (1990: 4). It is, she says: respect for the documentary evidence referring to the other person [that] distinguishes them [fictional biographers] from novelists proper whereas they share with the latter confidence in the imagination as a truthful principle for the selection, organization and interpretation of the materials (1990: 48).

But if the nearest form of fiction to fictional biography is still the novel, how should it be employed? On one hand, this might mean that a life finds its counterpart in the characters, time sequence, social norms and plot of a realist novel; on the other, Schabert considers that fictional biography subverts these conventions and structures in order to be true to the knowing of the subject person, which is its purpose. In this respect, she argues a closer kinship with the authors who created the psychological novel or “novel of consciousness”, saying that they have prepared the way for those who write fictional biographies through their preoccupation with probing the mystery of a person as existential identity (1990: 38). The defining feature is, then, that fictional biography aims neither at a set of psychological and moral generalisations nor at ontological truth. Rather, [e]ach specimen of the genre tries to comprehend the subjective being of one, ungeneralizable person and to convey the unique through the relation of the particular contiguities of the person’s life and through an ideographic style (Schabert 1990: 112).

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Therefore, she argues, fictional biography stands distinct from pure fiction as a mode that follows its own creative inclinations, or is ultimately concerned with the patterning of plot or character: it is subject to the life in question. Of course, continual evolution and experimentation suggest that forms other than the psychological novel written in first person may also be able to meet Schabert’s condition; the postmodern novel, for example, construed as part of this continuum of experimentation, plays with language, blurs reality and invention, disrupts its own form, and references itself and other fictional works. Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrott (1992) is a relevant example. My own fictional biography, while utilising a substantially realist approach, also crosses the boundaries of fiction and nonfiction by entwining authentic source material from the letters of Millicent Bryant with the fictional narrative. Letters become conversation, for example. Doing so created an alternative path by which to chart Millicent’s inner course, while maintaining the work’s orientation to the service of biography—rather than fiction—as its primary enterprise. Thus, while picking up a fictional biography and asking “is it true?” may seem redundant, it remains a relevant question; proof of its veracity may be less obvious than in a nominally nonfiction biography, but the question of whether or not its main objective is the truth of the subject person is still central. Compared to its nonfiction counterpart, though, it is perhaps more incumbent on the reader to make a judgment, to “mind the gap” and to ascertain whether the alternative passage of a fictional biography brings them closer, or adds to the truth of the subject person. This may not be a new kind of journey for readers of fiction, but it may be for readers of nonfiction biography. They will find, for example, that gaps can be fluid in their width, such as in the case of Drusilla Modjeska’s Poppy (1990). This work not only moves between memoir and biography, but some parts—such as Poppy’s diaries—are fictionalised. The writing, as Modjeska says, took her into “a reimagined past, rich with detail, at once a gift of imagination and held in a bedrock that I don’t think I can call truth but is related to truth” (Modjeska 2002: 74). What is apparent with this book is that reimagining the past is what made it possible for her mother, as Poppy, to appear vividly and authentically—truthfully. Conversely, but closer to the other side of the gap, Kate Grenville’s 2005 novel, The Secret River, was wrought from the life of her ancestor, Solomon Wiseman; in this case, though, it draws from the man but the book is not “about” him per se, showing her approach to fall on the side of fiction rather than biography. Finally, if there is a work that falls into the gap itself rather than on either side, it might be Edmund Morris’s controversial Dutch, a memoir of Ronald Reagan (1999), in which the

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fabrications, perhaps unintentionally, slipped from their author’s grasp over the course of the 14 years it took for the book to be completed. Considering these examples, it is apparent that judgments are possible and, thus, that conceptualising imaginative writing as biography is practicable, tying in with the second as well as the first component of the framework which I have proposed. My own writing, while providing a further illustrative example, also represents practice as a site for research and experiment that intertwines with the conceptual base and the other works in the field. My project came into being because of a family-inspired interest in the life of Millicent Bryant, a “woman of many parts” who became Australia’s first female aviator early in 1927—as well as one of the most notable victims of the Greycliffe maritime disaster at the end of the same year. The project began as a biographical one, with conventional approaches and expectations, but was soon struck with discontinuities between the lack of evidence for the early part (indeed the large majority) of her life compared to that available, mainly in the form of a letters collection and newspaper reports, for the two years at its end. But while the historical gap between writer and subject person would seem to increase the possible discontinuities, I was able, by writing in fiction, to develop a sense of proximity and real-life orientation to Millicent’s experiences. This was the case even with her earlier life, as its paucity of information allowed me greater scope in imagining around the facts. An example is her courtship and wedding, about which nothing is known but the date and a crucial sentence or two in a local newspaper. However, it seems all but certain that she met her husband to be, Edward (Ned) Bryant, in Manly while assisting her mother with the “sea-bathing” that was the suggested treatment for the polio afflicting her brother George. While a little was known about the Bryants’ lives in Manly, such as where they lived, when they died and where they were buried, the social pages of the Sydney Morning Herald in 1897 happened to report in some detail a birthday party of Ned’s younger brother, Charles (who become a noted war artist), that I utilised and turned into the meeting with Millicent. Something like this is not unlikely to have happened; it became, then, the entry point for the development of the story of this part of her life: from it, several incidents were then developed which fitted around this one fragment of personal evidence together with the much greater expanse of material recorded about Manly and its environs at the turn of the century. I also drew on the later letters (1925–1927) to create a way through which Millicent’s written words to her son John (who was overseas at the time) could help tell the story of her own life. This went through two quite

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different phases but the first involved making these letters to John an integral part of the narrative, turning comments or observations in letters, her diaries or statements in newspaper stories into actions or spoken incidents. For example, I turned her notes for a speech into the actual speech that she was preparing for but for which there is no factual record; I also used both the details and actual words in her travel diary to construct the story of her trip to England in 1911. In addition, I featured some of Millicent’s own handwritten fragments in the text, usually without captions, in order to reflect feelings or incidents that come into the narrative. This provided a method of exposing the reader directly to Millicent and making her presence stronger, emphasising the roots of the work in her own writings. Although this was not the final form the writing took, the innovation from this part of my practice can be summarised as a kind of “reverse engineering” in which my story of Millicent’s earlier life could be created and given shape by the evidence, in the letters and associated fragments, of her later personality. The notable benefit of this method was in supporting a consistency of persona, though it also supplied ideas for appropriate additions to the story that could flesh out her life in an authentic way. This demonstrates how a fictional account may be able to build credible biographical depth through a creative approach that works with and respects the evidence. However, it is complemented, or balanced, by writing from my own subjective and personal understandings, the base I developed for the imagination of Millicent’s personal reality. This is an example of the subjective engagement and “truthful principle for the selection, organization and interpretation of the materials” to which Ina Schabert refers (1990: 48). These depended on understanding my personal relationship with Millicent as an awareness vital to my creation of the narrative. While this is a non-rational process at one level (and for all biographers), writing in fiction encourages its nuanced and reasoned development; in this respect, Paul Ricoeur’s exploration of the dialectic of “self” and “the other than self” is helpful in suggesting that we can know “an other” in a similar way that we know our own self (1992: 2-3). In the present context, this suggests an awareness of a complex framework of “like-ness” with other humans that we grow up with and that operates at many levels. The deepest motivation for reading as well as writing biographical works might therefore be to find or see this “like-ness”: the underlying appeal might be simply the demonstration that “other” is ‘like self’ in its intelligibility. Fictional biography appears well suited to engaging with such notions, and exploring my own “likeness” with Millicent enabled me to creatively

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draw on personal and family history, common life experiences such as raising children and experiences of place. It also required seeking out less familiar connections with the period, such as flying in a biplane—a critical experience, as it turned out, for me to be able to imagine and write authentically about flying an aircraft in the 1920s. Clearly, it was not Millicent’s experience but, if similar enough, mine could stand in place of the original and enable it to be evoked as if it was she who was in the cockpit, an approach biographer Richard Holmes richly describes.[3] This highlights a freedom in fictional biography to imaginatively inhabit gaps between one’s own experience and that of the subject—one similar to the freedom to inhabit gaps in factual evidence. This added authenticity and immediacy to my work through greater vividness, detail and unforeseen insights, but also through the drawing out, in the narrative, of a sense of Millicent’s inner being as I was coming to “know” it. This “drawing out” included sensing or questioning what I had not already considered about Millicent’s own experience: how she felt in a bodily way in the forward cockpit, her confidence in the machine and the ‘newness’ of its flying technology, the reasons for the kind of bravado her letters occasionally reveal, the different sense of landscape it might have given her, as well as comparing things I myself had felt and how I had felt them—even the way flying might have been the occasion for unrelated thoughts and feelings. This, I found, was not so much a generation of material as a way of unfolding very real possibilities through the imaginative construction that fictional biography allows. This might be summarised as a kind of “knowing in practice”, a notion well expressed by Hayden White’s argument that narrative is the solution to the problem “of how to translate knowing into telling” [emphasis in original] (1980: 5). This connects in turn with a potent observation by Hannah Arendt in her reading of the Aristotelian notions of poïesis, the product of artistic activity, and praxis. The latter is viewed as an action … that is not construction (fabrication) but rather ‘the possibility of the human being’. The activities which take place in this view of praxis are then ‘exhausted within an action which is itself full of meaning’ (Kristeva 2001: 14).

Seeing my writing as linked to my “knowing” of Millicent through this notion of praxis helped to affirm the efficacy of biographical writing undertaken as imaginative process—and writing in fictional biography to be expressing the knowing of another life through its actual praxis of telling. While this would also be true for nonfiction writing, fictional biography, arguably, opens up this perspective and prompts a greater

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awareness (even if it does not entail it). In this sense, Millicent is not an object of study in the creation of my narrative but mirrored and formed and drawn out by it. The conceptual framework therefore encompasses several strands. It begins with Schabert’s proposition that fictional biography of a real person follows the idiosyncratic path of that life, rather than the dictates of fictional plotting. Likewise, commonly accepted facts and historical knowledge are honoured unless new evidence to the contrary is being explored. Imaginative and fictional construction can then be based on factors such as acknowledged subjective engagement [4] with the person, an “other like self” as Ricoeur suggests, with whom “likeness” can be explored and drawn out in the telling of a life as creative praxis. This shows how theory and practice can intertwine to build a conceptualisation of imaginative writing and fiction in the biographical field. While the insight, emotional engagement and immediacy that fiction can bring to some biographical projects is already demonstrated, this intertwining may be a way fiction can be understood to encompass and join with the truth of fact—rather than being conceived as its opposite—in the task of better understanding, connecting with and illuminating a real life subject.

Notes 1. See, among others, Robert Skidelsky, 1988, “Only Connect: Biography and Truth.” The Troubled Face of Biography. Ed. Eric Homberger and John Charmley. London: MacMillan Press; Richard Holmes, 2002, “The Proper Study?” Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography. Ed. Peter France & William St Clair. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press for The British Academy; Ray Monk, 2007, “Life without Theory: Biography as an Exemplar of Philosophical Understanding.” Poetics Today 28.3: 527-70; Susan Tridgell, 2004, Understanding Our Selves: The Dangerous Art of Biography. European Connections. Ed. Peter Collier. Bern, Berlin, Oxford: Peter Lang. 2. See Virginia Woolf, 1958, Granite and Rainbow: Essays by Virginia Woolf. Ed. Leonard Woolf. London: The Hogarth Press. 3. See Richard Holmes, 1985, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer. London: Hodder and Stoughton. In a similar vein, Paul Murray Kendall writes that ‘[t]his complex, subtle, frequently inarticulate relationship between biographer and locale affects not only the simulation of the life but also the simulation of the liferelationship, heightening the interaction of biographer and subject by the biographer’s direct, sensory experience of the matrix from which the subject’s experience has been shaped’. (Paul Murray Kendall, 1965, The Art of Biography. London: George Allen & Unwin: 150-51.) 4. Engagement which is unacknowledged is assumed to be unknown for purposes of nonfiction as well as fiction.

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References Barnes, Julian 1992 Flaubert’s Parrot. London: Bloomsbury. Brien, Donna Lee 2014 ‘“Welcome creative subversions”: Experiment and innovation in recent biographical writing’ TEXT 17 (1), at (accessed 19 June 2014). Chevalier, Tracy 2009 Remarkable Creatures. London: HarperCollins. Day, Marele 2002 Mrs Cook : The Real and Imagined Life of the Captain’s Wife. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Grenville, Kate 2005 The Secret River, Melbourne, Text Publishing. Hill, Earnestine 1941 My Love Must Wait: The Story of Matthew Flinders. Sydney and London: Angus and Robertson. Holmes, Richard 1985 Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer. London: Hodder and Stoughton. — , 2002 “The Proper Study?” Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography. Ed. Peter France, & William St Clair. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press for The British Academy. Kendall, Paul Murray 1965 The Art of Biography. London: George Allen & Unwin. Kristeva, Julia 2001 Hannah Arendt: Life Is a Narrative. Trans. Frank Collins. The Alexander Lectures. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press. Lodge, David 2004 Author, Author: A Novel. London: Secker and Warburg, 2004. Modjeska, Drusilla 1990 Poppy. Ringwood, McPhee Gribble. —. 2002 Timepieces. Sydney, Picador. Monk, Ray 2007 “Life without Theory: Biography as an Exemplar of Philosophical Understanding.” Poetics Today 28.3: 527-70. Morris, Edmund 1999 Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. New York, Random House. Moses, Kate 2003 Wintering. London: Sceptre. Motion, Andrew 2000 Wainewright the Poisoner. London: Faber and Faber. Nadel, Ira 1984 Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan. Orchard, Sonia 2009 The Virtuoso. Pymble, NSW: HarperCollins. Ricoeur, Paul 1992 Oneself as Another. Trans. Kathleen Blamey. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Schabert, Ina 1990 In Quest of the Other Person: Fiction as Biography. Tübingen: Francke Verlag.

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Scobie, Stephen 1999 And Forget My Name: A Speculative Biography of Bob Dylan. Victoria, BC: Ekstasis Editions. Skidelsky, Robert 1988 “Only Connect: Biography and Truth.” The Troubled Face of Biography. Ed. Eric Homberger and John Charmley. London: MacMillan Press. Tennant, Emma 2001 Sylvia and Ted. Flamingo ed. Sydney: HarperCollins. Tóibín, Colm 2005 The Master. Sydney: Picador. Tridgell, Susan 2004 Understanding Our Selves: The Dangerous Art of Biography. European Connections. Ed. Peter Collier. Bern, Berlin, Oxford: Peter Lang. Vicars, James 2014 The Fortunes of Millicent Bryant, aviator. Unpublished fictional biography. White, Hayden 1980 “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” Critical Inquiry Vol. 7, No. 1(Autumn): 5-27. Woolf, Virginia 1958 Granite and Rainbow: Essays by Virginia Woolf. Ed. Leonard Woolf. London: The Hogarth Press.

CHAPTER THREE TRANSGRESSIVE CONSUMPTION: READING BETWEEN THE LINES OF THE ALCOHOL-BASED MEMOIR DONNA LEE BRIEN

Drinking’s an ugly thing, really, And since I don’t drink to feel pretty I order ugly (Gaffney 2009, 5)

Introduction Numerous book-length memoirs that focus on problem drinking and/or recovery from alcoholism, as well as a smaller number that celebrate the excessive consumption of alcohol, are currently in circulation. The majority of these chronicle how alcohol either causes or amplifies personal, family and professional issues, and is often a component of multiple addictions and/or mental illnesses. Despite being a prolific, popular and often moving form of life writing, these memoirs have, to date, largely been grouped with other addiction (Smith and Watson 2010) or mental illness narratives—what Adams terms “mental catastrophe” narratives (2002)—and have not explored as a discrete sub-set of memoir. This is evident whether in discussions of memoir as a cultural artefact or as a therapeutic tool in the medical context (see, DonohueǦSmith 2011, Brien and McAllister 2013, McAllister et al. 2013). Representations of alcoholism and heavy drinking have been considered in fiction (Boler 2004, Crowley 1994, Dardis 1989, Donaldson 1990, Forseth 1999, Millier 2009), film and television (Cook and Lewington 1979, Denizen 1991, Dwyer 1996, McIntosh et al. 1999, Taylor 2002, Cornes 2006, Lyons 2012) and popular culture more generally (Black 2010). Aside from reviews, some of which can be quite lengthy and detailed, however, few in-depth studies have discussed

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memoir specifically in relation to this subject matter, despite the popularity of this kind of memoir with readers. Exceptions include a small number of gender-focused theses as, for instance, Mackie’s doctoral discussion of women achieving sobriety (2007) and Woodcock’s honourslevel study of four women alcoholics’ memoirs (2012), and Krauth’s consideration of some memoirs in his study of alcohol and the writing process (2012). In order to investigate these memoirs as an existing and expanding sub-genre of life writing, therefore, the following chapter will briefly critically assess the role of genre in classifying life writing in taxonomical terms. It will then profile examples of the alcohol-based memoir in this way in order to explore common concerns and tropes and demonstrate how a genre approach can assist in beginning to explore this form of life writing in a more nuanced manner.

Classification and genre Ways of discussing and classifying memoirs and other life writing abound as, for instance, in Smith and Watson’s sixty categories of life writing (2010). Adams has found that alcoholic memoirs form a significant component of what she describes as “nobody memoirs”; that is, memoirs written by those “who are neither generals, statesmen, celebrities nor their kin” (2002). Adams further elaborates, explaining how these fit into a category she terms “mental catastrophe” memoir: almost every “nobody” memoir sorts into three types … the childhood memoir—incestuous, abusive, alcoholic, impoverished, minority, “normal,” and the occasional privileged … the memoir of physical catastrophe—violence, quadriplegia, amputation, disease, death. The third is mental catastrophe—madness, addiction, alcoholism, anorexia, brain damage (2002).

Yet another aligned way would be to consider the alcohol-based memoir as one of the main clinical areas of mental illness in contemporary society, alongside such areas as depression and anxiety. Using genre descriptors as a form of classification and the basis for literary analysis is so common as to be normalised; however, genre is more often used than discussed or problematised in creative writing studies. While Derrida argues for the universality of genre—“a text cannot belong to no genre…cannot be without…a genre” (1981, 61)—Stam questions if genres actually exist or if they are merely a construction of what he derisively calls “analysts” (2000, 14). Poet and essayist Eileen

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Myles agrees and denies their very actuality: genres … don’t exist at all. They serve the needs of marketing, of academic specialization, even as modes of work, but in terms of meaning or content or associative formations they are like traffic lights—not so interesting and most adamantly not what we are doing today (qtd. in Gharavi 2012).

Myles expands on this to suggest that the very idea of genres oppresses writers: “just a way in which we [authors] are controlled” (qtd. in Gharavi 2012). In contrast to such arguments, which ultimately contend that genre is not a helpful tool in either thinking about or producing writing, Miller asserts that genre can be best used to “help account for the way we encounter, interpret, react to, and create particular texts” (1984, 151), and this is the sense in which I find notions of genre (and taxonomies based on genre) useful in relation to memoir. In Chandler’s comprehensive discussion, genre’s typological and nominological work—“the division of the world of literature into types and the naming of those types” (1997, 1)—is of less value than its role in assisting writers and readers in their production and consumption of texts: obviously an approach particularly useful in creative writing studies. One example of how the use of genre can assist is in counteracting two opposite, but related, unconstructive tendencies in examining written works—the first to treat individual texts as isolated cases and not understanding them in relation to the broader field, the second to indiscriminately generalise about those fields. In 2007, respected life writing theorist G. Thomas Couser noted that although genre as an organising term has been “a troublesome term in literary studies generally, and … no less so in the late-blooming field of life writing studies”, genre terms were useful, and so much so that he deemed their use “necessary” and “indispensable” in attempting to understand life writing and its development. In the following discussion, I mobilise Couser’s reiteration of his belief in “the continuing utility of a notion of genre in the study of life writing” (2007, 155), and how: deploying existing terms and inventing new ones as called for has helped me sort through and think about what might be a significant new set of life narratives. … [H]aving come across a critical mass of texts that share some similarity, I find it useful to isolate it by naming it and to analyse it by sorting it out into subdivisions. At the same time, I do not want to ignore its connections with adjacent or prior forms ... what is important is not classifying but clarifying life writing, exploring what genres are in order to understand what they do (155).

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Following this approach, the below considers memoirs of drinking alcohol as a significant cultural phenomenon, and categorizes these texts in order to tease out an understanding of the form and its possible significance. By following a genre-based approach, the below will seek to situate works within specific cultural contexts and historical perspectives, both in terms of production (authorship and publication) and consumption (readership, including critics and reviewers).

Classifying the “alcohol-based memoir” Couser notes that many ways of defining genres are based on the identification of “superficial boundaries” (2007, 150), especially in relation to writing; what he describes as “the impulse behind the generation of the texts” because “it makes little sense to speak of genre without at some point addressing the purposes, utility, and politics of the forms in question” (2007, 150). In line with this, alcohol-based memoirs can be categorized in a number of ways, which I broadly group together and describe as elements of form/style, content, author and publication—although it is clear that these are not discrete or unconnected categories. Form/style describes these memoirs in terms of the way they are written. Such consideration can describe a memoir as traditional or experimental; chronological or non-chronological; a continuous or discontinuous narrative (a collection of essays, for instance); and whether this is rendered in one voice or a series of voices. In terms of content, I use the following categories to describe memoirs: autobiographical (about the author’s self) or biographical (about someone else) or a mixture of these; a single, dual or group memoir; and Couser’s “full life” and “single experience” narratives (2007, 149) which can be compared to the “portrait” which is “more essayistic and impressionistic” (Couser 2007, 149). These memoirs can also be classified in terms of how they present the consumption of alcohol (celebratory and ‘functional’, or heavy, problem and alcoholic ‘dysfunctional’ drinking), and whether this is the focus of the memoir or one of a number of themes or motifs1. How this consumption is written about is important too—that is, whether the memoir is largely a narrative of alcoholic illness and misery and/or sobriety and survival. Whether the memoir is written in a confessional tone and/or if a redemptive narrative arc is presented is another key element for consideration. An examination of factors in relation to the author is the next major aspect to be considered (although, of course, this also links closely to the other categories). This area of “author”

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encompasses questions such as whether the memoir is set in the memoirist’s deep or more recent past; whether the author worked in an alcohol industry-related profession; whether they self-identified as a writer or not; and whether they were famous and/or a celebrity before writing. I am also classifying the author in terms of gender, nationality, age and class. Beyond this, there is also the author’s stated or implied intention/motivation in writing. In terms of publication, whether the memoir is published by a major, mainstream commercial publisher or selfpublished is of interest, as is a consideration of whether the text is a first, sequel (Waters 2014) or one-off memoir. Mapping memoirs against these elements, I have identified a number of commonalities and trends, which I am using to develop a number of new descriptors which could be used as sub-genres of the alcohol-based memoir. I profile a small number of these below.

The celebratory memoir The Grape and I (1969) is an early Australian example of a memoir that celebrates the production and consumption of alcoholic beverages. This engaging text is written by journalist Frank Margan (b.1931–) who took up one of the first positions promoting Australian wines with Len Evans at the Australian Wine Bureau. Margan also wrote a wine column— the ‘Ray Castle Column’—for the Sydney Daily Telegraph, as well as several wine and food columns for other newspapers and magazines. As the title suggests, The Grape and I describes Margan’s personal relationship with wine, which is all-consuming and always positive: I will never know all about it, who will? But one thing I do know—it has everything, this drink, that soothes and satisfies me. All my senses. There are times when I can think of nothing else, and some of those times I don’t want to think of anything else (7, italics in original).

In line with other such memoirs, Margan describes his first taste of wine— a bottle of Médoc Burgundy in a London Soho bistro when he was 21 years old—in animated terms: “It certainly was fantastic…a liquid that was like nothing I have ever had in my mouth before. That was the first bottle, and the magic started” (9). Margan recounts the broader industrial, social and cultural context unfolding alongside his personal history as an oenophile. In this case, he describes the growth of what he calls “the business of table wine drinking” (12) in Australia, tracing this to how many Australians (then 25,000 a year) travelled to Europe and then, on their return, sought out the wines and foods they had enjoyed while away.

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This debunked what he termed the “official fictions” (13) then (and still) circulating about new “migrants bringing their wine-drinking habits with them and teaching us about food and wine” (13). All his following descriptions—about types of wines; how, where and by whom they are made; and ways of storing and serving them—are filtered through his own memories, sensibility, taste and judgments, often expressed in the first person: Particularly I like the dry reds, rough reds…I like, but a little less, the dry whites…more when they are aged and become golden and mellow and full and round in flavor. However I would still swap a good glass of white for a good glass of red (25).

Even his advice regarding how others should best enjoy wine is given in an intensely autobiographical way: The main thing is to enjoy your wine, to not carry on with any nonsense about it. To enjoy it at is fullest, you need to know a little about it. But don’t spend all your time reading books on the subject…taste the bloody stuff (133).

By the end of the book, Margan has shared a great deal about the pleasures of drinking, tasting and collecting wine. With no mention of over indulgence or the possibility of abstinence, the focus is on the gratification wine can offer, and encouragement for others to experience this. Four years later, in line with this interest, Margan wrote a group biography of Hunter Valley vignerons, The Hunter Valley: Its Wines, People and History (1973) and later himself purchased a vineyard. While the organizing subject matter of Frank Moorhouse’s Martini: A Memoir (2005), some fifty years after Margan’s volume, is, similarly, an alcoholic beverage, the cocktail of the title and the culture of imbibing it, the tone of the memoir interwoven around and through this text is much more personally revealing. This is, indeed, an intimate narrative about his relationships and sexuality. Although, therefore, the narrative celebrates the martini, and there is much information on such related elements as its invention, components and ways the drink has been served, this is framed, and inflected, by the narrative of Moorhouse’s own experience. Writing about the olives, twists of lemon and other ways of flavouring a martini, for instance, Moorhouse then proceeds to reflect on first tasting an olive, a narrative which begins “I was working as a journalist in a country town” (101) and, within a page, develops into a discussion of homosexual sex, infidelity and bisexuality. Indicating that people, not alcohol, is the real focus of his narrative, Moorhouse provides a postscript chapter at the end

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of his memoir titled “Where are they now?” in which he outlines further information about the friends and lovers he describes earlier.

The denial memoir American Jack London was a spectacularly popular and famous writer. With fifty books published in seventeen years, he is said to have been the first individual to earn a million dollars from his writing (Boe 1980), which includes the much-loved novels The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906). His autobiographical memoir, John Barleycorn, subtitled ‘Alcoholic Memoirs’ (1913), published just over a century ago when he was 37 years of age, was ground-breaking for a number of reasons, including that it rehearsed many of the tropes of the modern alcohol-based memoir. Apart from the gripping power of the, at times, tormented confessional narrative, London’s revelation of his own degradation and shame shattered his public reputation as a fearless, cleanliving adventurer that he had established through his earlier work. Despite its seeming, and often searing, honesty, this memoir is also testament to the limits of self-understanding. Despite claiming throughout that he is not an alcoholic, for instance, the book clearly chronicles his struggles with alcoholism. He describes how at 17: I drank every day, and whenever opportunity offered I drank to excess ... I was learning what it was to get up shaky in the morning, with a stomach that quivered, with fingers touched with palsy, and to know the drinker’s need for a stiff glass of whisky neat in order to brace up (1964, 97). Throughout, he not only relates regularly consuming enormous amounts of liquor, but also the ramifications of this consumption. He describes, for instance, being so drunk as a sailor on shore leave that he passes out in a doorway only to find, when he awakes, that his coat, watch, money and even his belt and shoes have been stolen. Later, after attending night school, he was soon successful in his career as a writer, but could not control his drinking: “The older I got, the greater my success, the more money I earned … the more prominently did John Barleycorn bulk in my life” (163). He not only binge drank, but also began to drink regularly, and often alone, to the point where he needed alcohol before breakfast and to write. He wrote how he: achieved a condition in which my body was never free from alcohol. Nor did I permit myself to be away from alcohol. … There was no time in all my waking time, that I didn’t want a drink (187).

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He also wrote of the depressive effects of both heavy drinking and, despite periodically giving up, always beginning again: “suicide, quick or slow, is the price John Barleycorn exacts. No friend of his ever escapes making the just, due payment” (37).2 This is despite his acknowledgement of the wealth and comfort fame has brought: “Not a hundred men in a million have been as lucky as I. Yet with all this vast good fortune, I am sad. And I am sad because John Barleycorn is with me” (192). Sutherland suggests that London, who had a contract with a publisher for all his fiction, aimed to write a memoir which would be controversial—London himself described the volume as “bare, bald, absolute fact” (1913)—and “sell as greedily as a novel”. The book attracted significant media attention and its serialisation was a great success, but this reducedsales of the book. In 1914, the volume inspired a film but readers also understood John Barleycorn as “clinching evidence that London has destroyed himself as a writer” (Sutherland, introduction). Unlike many contemporary examples, London is unrepentant at the end of the book and in its final chapter he writes: “Mine is no tale of a reformed drunkard. I have never been a drunkard, and I have not reformed” (207). Fascinated by the work of Jung, London also planned to write his sexual memoir as a sequel to this volume (Boe 1980), but this project was never eventuated, as London committed suicide three years after John Barleycorn was published.

The celebrity memoir Memoirs by celebrity authors, while many mention heavy and/or problem drinking or alcoholism, tend not to focus on this subject. Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking (2008) is unusual in this regard. Fisher, perhaps best known for her starring role as Princess Leia in the original Star Wars film trilogy, had already published four successful novels before her memoir. These included Postcards from the Edge (1987), which was adapted into a film of the same title starring Shirley MacLaine and Meryl Streep, for which she also wrote the screenplay. Wishful Drinking is unusual in that the text is an adaptation from Fisher’s one-woman stage show of the same title. It is also atypical among memoirs about alcohol by women in that it is extremely funny—many by male writers are humorous, but this feature is less common among those by female authors. As the memoir opens, Fisher, although fifty-two years of age, still describes herself in terms of her dysfunctional family, “a product of Hollywood inbreeding” (7), and describes her parents Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher as the “Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston of the late 50s”

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(3). By page 9, she has revealed that she has just emerged from ECT treatment and a few pages later that she is both an “alcohol addict … and bipolar” (13). She describes her experiences with Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and what she characterises as years, even decades, of “erratic sobriety” (121). Another form of celebrity alcohol-based memoir is the biographical memoir, where the author writes a memoir of a well-known figure’s drinking (often a spouse or parent) as in Susan Cheever’s Home Before Dark: A Biographical Memoir of John Cheever (1985) about her famous alcoholic father, or when a celebrity writes about someone close to them, as in US politician George McGovern’s memoir about his daughter, Terry: My Daughter’s Life-and-Death Struggle with Alcoholism (1996).

The best-selling memoir A further element that can be used to usefully categorise these memoirs is sales success, as this indicates readership and circulation, which is important when trying to assess the impact of such memoirs. Alcohol-based memoirs which have achieved bestseller status include Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story (1996), Augusten Burroughs’ Dry: A Memoir (2003), Koren Zailckas’ Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (2005) and Mary Karr’s Lit: A Memoir (2009). Published in the midst of what has become known as the 1990s “memoir boom”, Drinking: A Love Story (1996)—which describes Knapp’s life as an alcoholic after beginning to drink at age 14—attracted significant media and critical attention. Part of the power of the narrative is how well Knapp describes the patterns of self-deception and secrecy, meaning that the early part of this memoir fits into the denial category discussed above. Knapp describes how: “I drank when I was happy and I drank when I was anxious and I drank when I was bored and I drank when I was depressed, which was often” (5), but, like the celebratory memoirist, she admits that she drank because of the pleasure it gave her: I loved the way drink made me feel…its special powers of deflection...to shift my focus away from my own awareness of self and onto something else, something less painful than my own feelings...I loved the sounds of drink…I loved the rituals, the camaraderie of drinking with others, the warning, melting feeling of ease and courage it gave me (6).

She also describes the process of becoming an alcoholic as a process of it becoming integral to her being:

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Portraying herself as a ‘high functioning alcoholic’ (and, either coining or popularising the term), she vividly describes how this entailed feeling “Smooth and ordered on the outside; roiling and chaotic and desperately secretive underneath” (11). In becoming an alcoholic, she writes that she understood that she had “created two versions of myself: the working version, who sat at the desk and pounded away at the keyboard, and the restaurant version, who sat at a table and pounded away at white wine” (17). Apart from her obviously powerful writing, Knapp’s book was praised by critics for its honestly in describing the control that addiction has over the addicted, and the sheer difficulty of overcoming this dependence. Despite harrowing scenes of humiliation, Knapp’s memoir follows a redemptive triumphal narrative arc, as she ultimately describes her journey to sobriety—a process involving anti-addiction drugs, psychotherapy and the group support of Alcoholics Anonymous. Influential reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, who was critical of such confessional memoirs for their narcissism, described Knapp’s narrative in The New York Times as “a remarkable exercise in self-discovery” (1996, C18), and this power ensured the title remained on the newspaper’s best-seller list for several weeks in both hardcover and paperback editions.

The serial and the sobriety memoir Knapp’s work also signals the work of serial memoirists, where writers already known for a memoir compose a sequel or companion memoir. Sometimes this is on completely different topics, as when Knapp followed Drinking with Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs (1998), which focused on her relationship with her own dog Lucille to explore this subject more widely. Her Appetites: Why Women Want (2003), about her anorexia, was more closely related to her alcoholism in probing her own issues and dependencies, and was published after she died of cancer. The obvious and intentional rhetorical intertexuality between these volumes (Day 2011) is, I believe, essential in understanding such multiple works of memoir. Augusten Burroughs’ Dry: A Memoir (2003) was similarly written following the success of his New York Times bestselling memoir, Running with Scissors (2002), which focuses on how—once his parents had divorced (his father was an alcoholic)—his

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mother had sent him to live with her dysfunctional psychiatrist. In Dry, Burroughs describes how he operates at work, with prose reminiscent of how Brett Easton Ellis describes psychological breakdown in American Psycho (1991): Fifteen minutes early, I’m wearing a charcoal grey Armani suit and oxblood red Gucci loafers. My head throbs dully behind my eyes, but this has actually become normal. It usually wears off by the end of the day and is completely gone after the first drink of the evening (Burroughs 2003, 9).

The remainder of Dry is about Burroughs’ experience during, and after, his treatment for alcoholism, including Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and could be classified as the tale of a recovered alcoholic struggling to stay sober—territory which a number of memoirists also inhabit. Burroughs’ journey is, however, quite original in the extremity of his relapses. By the end of the book, he has, however, been sober for a year. A related sub-genre is the sobriety memoir where the content focuses on becoming and staying sober. In this way, Australian journalist Jill Stark’s High Sobriety (2013) charts the author’s self-imposed year without alcohol. A newspaper health reporter, Stark understood the irony of writing about the negative impacts of Australian binge-drinking culture while herself regularly drinking to excess (McMillen 2013). Becoming sober is the touchstone for self-investigation—she analyses how, when and why she drinks, and links the exacerbation of her anxiety and depression to drinking. Wound around this personal story are historical and sociological data on Australians’ relationships with alcohol and interviews with public health professionals.

Conclusion The above discussion shows how analysing texts utilising a series of elements and features grouped around the genre descriptors of form/style, content, author and publication can assist in providing a language for a useful discussion of what is often described as a monolithic entity—the popular memoir. This is important because exploring these works as a discrete sub-set of memoir can allow a more nuanced evaluation of their contribution to writing, and an assessment of their place in published literature. It can also provide assistance for writers and publishers of such memoirs in terms of tropes and commonalities with other texts. In the process, this discussion has sought, therefore, to bring one sub-set of memoirs into sharper focus for both readers and writers of this seemingly enduring popular, but often disparaged, form of writing, and offer a

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framework for further investigation.

Notes 1. Although there are many of these kinds of memoirs, and although they are acknowledged here, this discussion focuses on memoirs in which alcohol is the main subject around which the memoir is framed. 2. Stanley diagnoses London as suffering from “bipolar affective illness” due to how he writes about “periods of severe depression, when the thought of suicide was never far from his mind, and also times when he had great energy, being able to work very long hours with little sleep” but does not see a direct relationship between this and his drinking (1995, 639).

References Adams, Lorraine. 2002. “Almost Famous: The Rise of The “Nobody” Memoir.” Washington Monthly, April. Accessed September 15, 2012. URL: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0204.adams.html. Black, Rachel, ed. 2010. Alcohol in Popular Culture: An Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood. Boe, John. 1980. “Jack London, the Wolf And Jung.” Psychological Perspectives: A Quarterly Journal Of Jungian Thought, 11(2): 133–36. Boler, K. 2004. A Drinking Companion: Alcohol and The Lives Of Writers. New York: Union Square. Brien, Donna Lee, and Margaret McAllister. 2013. “Off The Shelf And Into Practice: Creatively Repackaging Popular Memoirs As Educational Resources In Health Disciplines.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, Special issue 23, October. Accessed November 24, 2014. URL: http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue23/Brien&McAllister.pdf. Burroughs, Augusten. 2002. Running With Scissors. New York: St. Martin’s Press. —. 2003. Dry: A Memoir. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Chandler, Daniel. 1997. An Introduction to Genre Theory. Aberystwyth, Wales: Aberystwyth University. Accessed July 13, 2014. URL: http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/intgenre/intgenre.html. Cheever, Susan. 1985. Home before dark: A Biographical Memoir Of John Cheever. London: IB Tauris. Cook, Jim, and Mike Lewington, eds. 1979. Images of Alcoholism. London: British Film Institute. Cornes, J. 2006. Alcohol in the Movies, 1898-1962: A Critical History.

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Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company. Couser, G. Thomas. 2007. “Genre Matters: Form, Force, and Filiation.” Lifewriting 2(2): 139–56. Crowley, John William. 1994. The White Logic: Alcoholism and Gender in American Modernist Fiction. Amherst: University Of Massachusetts Press. Dardis, T. 1989 The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol And The American Writer. New York: Ticknor & Fields. Day, Ally. 2011. “Toward a Feminist Reading Of The Disability Memoir: The Critical Necessity For Intertexuality In Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted And Madness.” Disability Studies Quarterly 31(2). Accessed September 15, 2012. URL: http://www.dsq-sds.org/article/view/1591/1559. Denizen, Norman K. 1991. Hollywood Shot By Shot: Alcoholism In American Cinema. New York: Aldine De Gruyter. Derrida, Jacques. 1981. “The Law Of Genre.” In On Narrative, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell, 51–77. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Donaldson, Scott. 1990. “Writers and Drinking In America.” The Sewanee Review 98(2): 312–24. DonohueǦSmith, Maureen. 2011. “Telling the Whole Story: A Conceptual Model For Analysing The Mental Illness Memoir.” Mental Health Review Journal 16(3): 138–46. Dwyer, Kevin A. 1996. “On A Celluloid Platter: An Analysis Of Representations And Functions Of Food And Eating In The Cinema.” PhD diss., University of Warwick, U.K. Ellis, Brett Easton. 1991. American Psycho. London: Macmillan-Picador. Fisher, Carrie. 1987. Postcards From The Edge. New York: Simon & Schuster. —. 1990. Postcards From The Edge [film]. Dir. Mike Nichols. Columbia Pictures. —. 2008. Wishful Drinking [theatre show]. San Francisco: Berkeley Repertory Theatre. —. 2008. Wishful Drinking. New York: Simon & Schuster. Forseth, Roger. 1999. “The Alcoholic Writer By Any Other Name.” In The Languages Of Addiction, edited by Jane Lilienfeld, and Jeffrey Oxford, 3–14. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Gaffney, Tommy. 2009. Whiskey Days. Portland: Night Bomb Press. Gharavi, Maryam Monalisa. 2012. “Five Questions With Eileen Myles.” The New Inquiry 11 May. Accessed September 1, 2014. URL: http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/southsouth/five-questions-with-eileenmyles.

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Karr, Mary. 2009. Lit. New York: Harper Collins. Knapp, Caroline. 1996. Drinking: A Love Story. New York: Dial. —. 1998 Pack Of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People And Dogs. New York: Dial. —. 2003. Appetites: Why Women Want. New York: Counterpoint. Krauth, Nigel. 2012. “Alcohol And The Writing Process.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses 16(2). Accessed February 19, 2014. URL: http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct12/krauth.htm. Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. 1996. “Two Lives, One Lost To Alcoholism And The Other Surviving It.” New York Times 13 June: C18. London, Jack. 1903. The Call Of The Wild. New York: Macmillan. —. 1906. White Fang. New York: Macmillan. —. 1913. John Barleycorn: Or, ‘Alcoholic Memoirs’. Cambridge MA: Bentley Publishers. —. 1989. John Barleycorn: ‘Alcoholic Memoirs’ [1913]. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lyons, Ailsa. 2012. “Tobacco And Alcohol In Films And On Television.” PhD diss., University of Nottingham. Mackie, Cara T. 2007. “Achieving Sobriety: A Narrative Investigation Of Women, Identity, And Relationships.” PhD Thesis. Graduate Theses And Dissertations. Accessed July 23, 2014. URL: http://Scholarcommons.Usf.Edu/Etd/2268. Margan, Frank. 1969. The Grape And I. Dee Why West, NSW: Paul Hamlyn. —. 1973. The Hunter Valley: Its Wines, People And History. North Sydney: Hunter Vintage Festival Committee. McAllister, Margaret, Donna Lee Brien, June Alexander, and Trudi Flynn. 2013. “Exploring The Educative Potential Of Eating Disorder Memoirs.” Journal of Mental Health Training, Education and Practice 9(2): 69–78. McIntosh, W. D., S. M. Smith, D. G. Bazzini, and P. S. Mills. 1999. “Alcohol In The Movies: Characteristics Of Drinkers And Nondrinkers In Films From 1940-1989.” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 29(6): 1191–99. McGovern, George. 1996. Terry: My Daughter’s Life-And-Death Struggle With Alcoholism. New York: Villard. McMillen, Andrew. 2013. “Frank Memoir Explores The Cost Of Our Drinking Culture.” The Australian, 2 March. Accessed February 19, 2014. URL: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/frank-memoir-explores-thecost-of-our-drinking-culture/story-fn9n8gph1226587889582?nk=9b0ca5c143d4e4dca14691e3dfd001df.

Miller, Carolyn R. 1984. “Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of

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Speech 70: 151–67. Millier, B.C. 2009. Flawed Light: American Women Poets And Alcohol. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois. Moorhouse, Frank. 2007. Martini: A Memoir. Milsons Point: Knopf/Random House Australia. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. 2010. Reading Autobiography: A Guide For Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Stanley, W. J. 1995. “John Barleycorn: Jack London’s ‘Alcoholic Memoirs’.” Psychiatric Bulletin 19: 638–39. Stark, Jill. 2013. High Sobriety: My year without booze. Brunswick, Vic.: Scribe. Stam, Robert. 2000. Film Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. Sutherland, John. 1989. “Introduction.” In John Barleycorn: ‘Alcoholic Memoirs’, edited by John Sutherland. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, K. 2002. Images of female alcoholism in film, 1940-1999: A Thesis. PhD diss., University of Massachusetts. Waters, Irene. 2014. “The Sequel Memoir”. Paper presented at 2014 WIP: Work In Progress Conference. St Lucia: University of Queensland, September. Woodcock, Nicolyn. 2012. Blacked Out Memories And Best Selling Memoirs: Alcohol And The Woman Writer. BA Hons diss., Kenyon College. Zailckas, Koren. 2005. Smashed: Story Of A Drunken Girlhood. New York: Penguin.

Acknowledgements An earlier, briefer, version of this paper was presented at Minding the Gap: AAWP 19th Annual Conference 2014, at Massey University in Wellington, New Zealand, held from 29 November to 2 December 2014. A sincere thank you to the delegates of that conference and the peer reviewers of this publication, who provided excellent and generous feedback, and to the editors of these proceedings for their efforts in producing this publication. Thank you, also, to the School of Arts and Education, Central Queensland University, who supported my attendance at the conference.

CHAPTER FOUR HISTORY, HISTORICAL FICTION AND “PHENOMENOLOGICAL LONGING” THOM CONROY

What is history? How do we recognize it? What intentions or “phenomenological longings” mark the threshold between “true” history and the adjacent territory of fictional narrative? In his Tropics of Discourse, Hayden White famously drew attention to the undeniable convergence of forms in history and imaginary narratives: In point of fact, history—the real world as it evolves in time—is made sense of in the same way that the poet or novelist tries to make sense of it, i.e., by endowing what originally appears to be problematical and mysterious with the aspect of a recognizable, because it is a familiar, form. It does not matter whether the world is conceived to be real or only imagined; the manner of making sense of it is the same (98).

White’s conception of history and fiction as coterminous has come to be known as narrative constructivism, and although many historians have begrudgingly accepted its central formal explanation of the similarity between history and literature (RH Pihlainen 510), new arguments about the distinction between literature and history are being made around what Wayne Booth would call the “friendship” between the author and reader. Inga Clendinnen, for example, has written that “[t]he largest difference between History and Fiction is the moral relationships each establishes with writer and subjects, and writer and reader” (2). She goes on to explain: Had I discovered the nature of Humbert Humbert’s private joys in real life, I would have had him locked up . . . Snug between the covers of the fiction called Lolita, I can revel in his eely escapades, his delirious deceptions; weep with him when his child-slave escape; yearn with him for her recapture (2).

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Operating on the basis of a related distinction between textual and extratextual reality, Calle Pihlainen has distinguished the historical from the literary enterprise on the basis of what he calls the “phenomenological longing” of history: that “desire to relive the choices of an agent in the past” (TCF 59). In its connection to an experienced desire on the part of the reader— and presumably the writer—to look beyond the text and outside the formal boundaries of the narrative, the argument goes that history parts ways with literature. Pihlainen characterizes history’s “pact” between the reader and the author as one that orients the reader away from “the range of associations afforded by the text” and toward an outward-facing reality. This pact, even in the case of intertextual fiction—such as that of an historical novel with endnotes—relies on a distinct movement away from the enclosed or imaginary world of the text: The displacement of meaning encountered in an historical narrative is thus quite different from the use of intertextual references in literature. The text transfers its argument or meaning (its ‘message’ or interpretation) to evidence that is textually manifested as ‘real’ through various documentary conventions (TCF 61).

In his conceptualization of the relationship between history and reality, Mark Day discusses the active and living “presence of the past” in the narratives of history, and contends that these narratives are most practical when they open into the future so that “alternative narratives are naturally suggested” (426). In all these descriptions of history in a narrative constructivist paradigm, what stands out is the longing or intention of both the author and reader to transcend the textual boundaries of their meeting place and turn the meaning of text toward a justification of real-world behaviour in a way that fiction will not permit (TCF Pihlainen 64). History, in other words, means something in the world beyond the text in a way that fiction does not—and this meaning is not bound up in the form of the text itself, but in the relationship or “contract”, to use Booth’s term, between the reader and author. While I agree that history is more oriented toward an extra-textual reality and that literature inclines the reader toward the imaginary domain of the text, historical fiction operates according to a nuanced interplay of phenomenological impulses that complicate demarcations between history and literature. In Postcolonialism and the Historical Novel: Epistemologies of Contemporary Realism, Hamish Dalley has argued that postcolonialism’s neglect of historical fiction in favour of antirealist historical fiction overlooks the fact that:

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plausibility is a core value of much postcolonial literary production and that this principle has wide-reaching implications for how historical novels are written and read in postcolonial contexts (52).

This widespread neglect, Dalley asserts, is rooted in a long-standing suspicion about the limitations of the realist style of much historical fiction, namely the belief that “representations of history which operate in terms of fixity and closure are bound to perpetuate familiar colonial stereotypes” (Meinig qtd. in Dalley 53). Postmodern fiction, on the other hand, which foreswears any such simplistic portrayals of the past as it really was, has come to dominate much postcolonial scholarship. What this preference for anti-realist over realist fiction (such as historical novels) fails to take into account, however, is the very intentionality that historians turn to as the basis of the distinction between history and literature. As Dalley notes, what characterizes the intentions or “phenomenological longing” of writers of historical fiction is a desire to connect readers with that extra-textual reality which is said to endow history with the “added value” unavailable to literary productions (RNC Pihlainen 513): The problem with [readings which favour antirealist fictions that make claims to understanding history] is that they ignore the ethical commitments [of] historical plausibility routinely expressed by many postcolonial novelists. For example, even Rushdie himself, asserts his desire that his novels be read as thoughtful, informed analyses of the past and not simply as acts of discursive contestation or linguistic experimentation (Dalley 53).

In an interview focusing on the historical novel Alias Grace, Deborah Rozen asked author Margaret Atwood how she determined when to stick to the facts and when to fabricate. Atwood’s reply is interesting for the way it foregrounds the very plausibility that Dally argues is crucial to contemporary historical novelists: When there was a known fact, I felt that I had to use it. In other words, I stuck to the known facts when they were truly known. But when there were gaps or when there were things suggested that nobody ever explained, I felt I was free to invent. . . Although people at the time may have set down a version of events, you can’t actually go back and question them. And they leave out the things that you would most like to know. People don't have the consideration to foresee that you might be interested in this stuff in 150 years (Rozen np).

Atwood’s insistence on sticking with “the known facts when they were

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truly known” suggests the primacy of her intention to link her imaginary world to a real one beyond the text in that way meant to set history aside from literature. At the same time, her response exposes the principle of selection she used in moving beyond that reality and suggests that the reality with which Alias Grace is linked is one that is fragmentary, continent, and open to interpretation. While it is fair to claim that our interest in Alias Grace is not primarily rooted in our desire to move beyond the imaginary world that Atwood constructs for Mary Whitney, it seems like a reduction to claim that our phenomenological longings are completely accounted for by the text in and of itself. One relatively subtle distinction that Pihlainen forwards to distinguish the readerly affect of historical versus literary texts is the difference between what he calls “lived experience” and “heightened experientially”. Pihlainen discriminates the reader’s response in terms that call to mind the previous demarcation between an experience meant to move toward an external reality and an experience meant to contain or enclose a reader inside a primarily aesthetic and linguistic environment: A text aimed at experientially through aesthetic impact largely determines, then, the meaning that a reader will find in it, whereas a text that emphasizes the creation of lived experience would leave a great deal more room for the reader’s own meaning-making process (RH 521).

Here Pihlainen’s distinction between “lived experience” and “heightened experientially” is grounded in the convention that literature is an entirely linguistic medium of signs which bear no necessary resemblance to signified reality. Words are essentially concepts, and, as William Gass reminds us, the writer stands in altogether different relation to the tools of her medium than any other artist: “‘Five’ is no wider, older, or fatter than ‘four’; ‘apple’ isn’t sweeter than ‘quince’, rounder than ‘pear’, smoother than ‘peach’” (28). While I am not arguing that history is a form of fiction (a proposition explored in the title of the recent volume Is History Fiction?), I do think that the phenomenological longing toward the reality of the past which Pihlainen and others posit as characterizing authors and readers of history cannot be unproblematically employed as a boundary marker between history and some types of literature, in particular historical fiction. In the remaining space of this essay, I will consider the phenomenological longings that I imagine underlie the contract I am forging with the reader of my own historical novel, The Naturalist (2014). A useful starting place for this discussion is an examination of my first impulse in deciding to undertake writing this novel, but first, let us

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consider a classic example of that phenomenological yearning which is said to impel historians. In his preface to his 1963 history, The Making of the English Working Class, E. P. Thompson makes plain his version of what is often called ‘the historian’s promise’ to deliver truthfulness (insofar as it is possible) to the facts involving actual historical people. Thompson writes: I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condensation of posterity . . . they lived through these times of acute social disturbance and we did not (qtd. in Curthoys and Docker 140).

While Thompson’s avowal to restore the lived experience based on evidence represents a typical instance of the sort of “added value” that Pihlainen and others claim as a unique attribute of historical texts, I find it noteworthy that my own intentions as a historical novelist are entirely in accord with these sentiments. The Naturalist tells the story of the actual historical figure Dr. Ernst Dieffenbach, who, exiled as a university student for participating in a revolutionary group espousing democracy, gained a medical degree in Zurich, and eventually ended up on board the Tory as a member of the New Zealand Company’s land-buying expedition in 1839. During the eighteen months he spent in New Zealand, Dieffenbach became fluent in Te Reo MƗori, made the first European ascent of Taranaki, explored much of the North Island, and joined a delegation which was acquiring signatures for the Treaty of Waitangi. Upon his return to London, he published Travels in New Zealand, a two-volume book that narrates his time in Aotearoa and includes the first Maori ethnography, the first nonmissionary Maori grammar and dictionary as well as a fairly comprehensive New Zealand fauna. Unfortunately, his forward-thinking views on the absolute equality of the races—and possibly his German ethnicity—marginalized his influence and more or less consigned him to a footnote in New Zealand history. From the beginning, my fictional impulse toward Dieffenbach was to rescue him from an obscurity that I believed was undeserved and to reinsert his historical presence into the contemporary dialogue on New Zealand colonial history. But my phenomenological longing as a historical writer went further still. More than merely restoring Dieffenbach his standing in the historical record, I wanted to craft an imaginary world I believed would be in keeping with the available archival evidence. Following Atwood, I made a conscious decision to stick to the known

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facts when they were truly known. This yearning for historical accuracy is in keeping with Dalley’s observation that an “appeal to archival evidence is commonplace for most postcolonial historical novelists” (54). While my own phenomenological yearning as an author bears resemblance to the historian’s impulse toward truthfulness, this longing only forms one element of the pact that Pihlainen and others maintain distinguishes historical from literary texts. The other, and presumably more significant, element of this pact, or contract, plays out in the reader’s phenomenological longings toward the text. No author can hope to conclusively judge the yearnings of his or her readership, of course, but what I am able to do is to discuss both my expectations of readerly desires regarding the novel and the ways in which these estimates shaped my crafting of the book and use of archival resources. My opinion from the beginning—and discussions with readers have borne out this belief—has been that readers of historical fiction are interested in the archival evidence as well as the relationship between the imaginary world of The Naturalist and the external reality of New Zealand’s past. My thoughts on the relationship between authors and the anticipated expectations of readers are rooted in Wayne Booth’s description of the ways in which authors and readers participate in the “patterning of desire” that underlies the narrative experience. Speaking as a reader of fiction, Booth explains: . . . the powerful effect on my own ethos, at least during my reading, is the concentration of my desires and fears and expectations, leading with as much concentration as possible toward some further, some future fulfilment: [when I read fiction] I am made to want something that I do not yet have enough of (201).

The scene which best illustrates the ways in which I sought to craft the readerly contract (of which phenomenological longing plays a part) is the one that depicts Dieffenbach’s ascent of Mount Taranaki. According to standard historical accounts, Dieffenbach is credited with the first European ascent of the mountain Cook named Mount Egmont and which the MƗori called Taranaki. This recognition is crucial from a historical point of view, as this ascent represents the principal event for which Dieffenbach is remembered in New Zealand. While Dieffenbach acknowledges in his own narrative that he “started for the summit accompanied by [James Worser] Heberely”, he is circumspect about who reaches the peak first, noting only that “we at length reached the summit” (156). Interestingly enough, in the typed manuscript of his unpublished Journal in the Turnbull Library, the shore whaler James Worser Heberely devotes particular attention to the order in which he and the man credited

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for the ascent of Taranaki reach its summit: “I got on top of the mountain about twenty minutes before the Dr.” (38). Faced with such an inconsistency and endowed with a phenomenological yearning for the archival truth, the historian could note the variance in these accounts and, perhaps, offer a logical explanation. Ultimately, of course, the truth of the event is unknown to us, existing as it does in the space between Dieffenbach’s and Heberely’s accounts—and this space is charged with the tensions of class and ethnicity. In acknowledging the textual lacuna opened by competing accounts, the historian locates the “lived experience” that Pihlainen contends leaves “a great deal more room for the reader’s own meaning-making process”. While I acknowledge the fact of this effect of the absence or gap, I believe it fails to capture the nuanced interplay of the phenomenological longings that mediate the reader’s interest in the imaginary world of the novel as well as the evidence suggested by the archival record. What historical fiction allows the reader to experience, I would contend, is a phenomenological tension between reality and the aesthetic impact of the text. This tension is fostered by the conventions of the genre of historical fiction as well as by various paratextual elements that signify the historical or non-textual reality of the narrative, including the reproduction of an 1840 lithograph which forms the frontispiece of the book, the presence of maps which serve to verify the historical reality of the land-buying expedition, and the presence of an endnote on the ascent scene which explains that my fictional depiction is a blend of Dieffenbach’s and Heberely’s archival accounts (377). Taken in the context of various other endnotes in which I note contradictions in the evidence or acknowledge my reinterpretation of standard historical accounts, these paratextual elements enable an apparently realistic novel to oscillate between competing accounts. While I cannot judge how readers will ultimately register, or react to, this oscillation, I can attest to the fact that my intention was to satisfy an anticipated phenomenological longing that wavered between the unity of a single aesthetic explanation and the inconsistency of incompatible evidence. With Pihlainen, I believe that the reader’s predominant impulse in this scene and throughout The Naturalist is towards what he would call the ‘heightened experientially’ of the literary text. Nonetheless, the conventions of the genre and presence of various paratextual elements intended to create phenomenological expectations around historical veracity complicate the reader’s relationship to the text vis-à-vis its historical or literary status. To overlook the ways in which these expectations or longings move a reader outside the heightened experientially of the text toward the lived experience of actual people in

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the past is to neglect the complexity of the author–reader contract underlying a postcolonial historical novel. Beyond creating a kind of phenomenological tension between reality and the aesthetic experience of the text, historical fiction can open a reader to an imagined and historically plausible emotional knowledge which is unavailable in the historical text. For example, in my archival reading of both Heberely’s and Dieffenbach’s historical texts, I judged that both accounts were reliable. That is, by taking into account the humanitarian impulse of Dieffenbach’s ethnography and the sparse but affirming comments on his personality that I encountered in historical correspondence, I deemed Dieffenbach to be an upstanding character—the very sort of fellow who would be unlikely to claim an ascent which was, in fact, not his to claim. At the same time, I found nothing in the straightforward vernacular of Heberely’s Reminiscences to inspire doubt. If anything, I judged that the lack of artifice in his prose suggested veracity. The historian must be content to allow the two accounts to exist as fragments that can only be unified in the heightened experientially of the aesthetic text. While my reference to competing archival accounts of the ascent allow readers to experience some aspect of this irresolvable lived experience which points us away from the text and toward an unknowable past, I had another phenomenological yearning as an author: I wanted to believe both historical accounts at once. Like so many longings, this one was irrational, and within the confines of the historical writing, it could not have been satisfied. In the complex interplay of yearnings that characterize the relationship between the author and reader of historical fiction, however, it was possible to—at least partially—satisfy this yearning. In the fictional account of the ascent in The Naturalist, I imagined a compromise that would allow the two conflicting accounts of the ascent to be true at once—I had Heberely gift credit for the ascent of Taranaki to Dieffenbach: ‘“I’m giving it to you, Doc”, he said, “This ascent is yours”’ (296). Is this satisfying of my own phenomenological yearning toward both verifying both historical accounts a kind of emotional knowledge or is it simply the sort of information gained from a narrative fantasy? In other words, is this version of longing—and any corresponding longing on the reader’s part—a purely textual form of heightened experientially which bears no relationship to the lived experience of figures from the past? I think it’s fair to concede that this seems likely. To classify an invented but plausible explanation of an historical lacuna as a form of historical knowledge seems, on the one hand, simply obstinate. Certainly, there is no question that it is an intentional violation of truth that the

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historian must not tolerate. And yet. In The Art of the Novel, a collection of prefaces, originally written for the 1909 multi-volume New York Edition of Henry James’s fiction, James imagines an essentially moral use of the fictive imagination toward “honourable” and community-oriented ends. “What better example than this”, James asks, “of the high and helpful public and, as it were, civic use of the imagination?” (qtd. in Nussbaum 165). If we were to deploy James’s notion of “the civic imagination” in the context of the mixed phenomenological longings that characterize historical fiction, we might well ask what sort of experience this engenders in readers whose desires are dispersed across longings directed at the reality of the past and longings focused on the aesthetic reality of the literary text. In Literature and the Moral Imagination, Martha Nussbaum describes the complex moral experience that a novel such as James’ The Golden Bowl generates for readers: It calls forth our “active sense of life,” which is our moral faculty. The characters’ “emotions, their stirred intelligence, their moral consciousness, becomes thus, by sufficiently charmed perusal, our own very adventure” . . . By identifying with them and allowing ourselves to be surprised (an attitude of mind that storytelling fosters and develops), we become more responsive to our own life’s adventure, more willing to see and to be touched by life (162).

In the interplay of phenomenological yearnings for verifiable, archival truth alongside the truth of an aesthetic and textual experience, I imagine a new kind of knowledge. It is not historical knowledge, but it involves an emotional investment in historical evidence. It is not knowledge about the verifiable truth of history, but it has bearing on how we interpret—and whether we pause to consider—the truth of that history. In the strictest sense, this is not knowledge that is applicable to the real world in which the archival events of history have taken place, and yet who can deny that a reader’s interpretations of history and its impact on their actual lives escape the influence of that species of emotional knowledge that emerges from historical fiction?

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References Booth, Wayne. The Company We Keep: And Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Print. Clendinnen, Inga. ‘Fellow Sufferers: History and Imagination.’ Australia Humanities Review Sept 1996. Web. 25 Nov 2014. Conroy, Thom. The Naturalist. Auckland: Penguin Random House, 2014. Print. Cuorthoys, Ann and John Docker. Is History Fiction? Sydney: U New South Wales Press, 2010. Print. Dalley, Hamish. ‘Postcolonialism and the Historical Novel: Epistemologies of Contemporary Realism’. The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry. 1 March 2014: 51-67. Web. 17 Nov 2014. Day, Mark. ‘Our Relations with the Past’. Philosophia 2008 36. 17 April 2008. Springer Science and Business Media. Web. 8 Nov 2014. Dieffenbach, Earnest. Travels in New Zealand: with Contributions to the Geography, Geology, Botany, and Natural History of that Country. London: John Murray, 1843. Gass, William. ‘The Medium of Fiction.’ Fiction and the Figures of Life. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1970. Print. Hebereley, James. Reminiscences. Unpublished MS. National Library of New Zealand. Print Nussbaum, Martha. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Auckland: Oxford U P, 1992. Print. Pihlainen, Kalle. ‘Rereading Narrative Constructivism (RNC)’. Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice. 17:4: 509-527. Web. 24 Nov 2014. —. ‘The Confines of the Form: Historical Writing and the Desire that it be What it Is Not (TCF)’. Trope for the Past: Hayden White and the History/Literature Debate. Kuisam Korthonen, Ed. Rodopi: New York, 2006. Print. Rozen, Deborah. An Interview with Margaret Atwood. Boldtype.com. Hunterdon County Library. Nd. Web. 20 Nov 2014. White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. London: John Hopkins U P, 1978. Print.

CHAPTER FIVE WRITING BETWEEN TWO SHORES: MIGRATION AND THE PERSONAL ESSAY DIANE COMER

dead reckoning (noun) 1. Navigation: calculation of one’s position on the basis of compass readings, speed, and distance run from a known point, with allowances for drift from wind, currents, etc.

Migration and the personal essay form a nexus of possibility that no one has explored in depth. In the personal essay, migrants access their own lives, using what they do know to chart a course through new territory in writing, navigating by dead reckoning. Through dead reckoning, the essayist casts off from a known point and keeps moving forward despite the absence of landmarks, asking Montaigne’s ageless question, “Que sçais-je” or “What do I know?” (Hardison 1988: 620). Writing the essay becomes a process of discovery, often self-discovery, for as memoirist Patricia Hampl notes, “I write in order to find out what I know” (1999: 27). This is an essential tenet of the personal essay—we write it to find out what we know, and suddenly, on the horizon of the page, is something we never knew was there, within us, waiting to be found. In much the same way migrants discover their new country, moving from one they have known, toward one they do not, their knowledge deepening and enriched over time as they find their way in a new cultural and perhaps linguistic landscape. The journey of migration is one of discovery, an endeavour it shares with the personal essay, as: the essayist takes the reader on a journey, defining and commenting upon a real-life experience in a detailed and insightful manner that leads to a broader understanding of life and a greater sense of meaning and selffulfillment (Iversen Shadow Boxing, 2004: 41).

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Further, the joint venture of discovery and assessment coincide in the migrant and the personal essay. Both the writer and the migrant test and weigh experience for what it means, and this shared process of inquiry and analysis makes the personal essay an effective genre for assessing the actual stakes of migration for the individual. Not only can migrants explore their own narratives, but they can also consider the meaning of them as well, for “[t]he essay, in fact, focuses on achieved meaning to a greater extent than those other forms we typically call literature; essays foreground meaning along with represented experience” (Atkins, 2005: 150). By looking past the surface narrative—the who, what, where, when, and facts that can be gleaned from any immigration survey—the migrant reflects on individual experience in the personal essay to provide insights into migration that might not otherwise manifest. New Zealand is among the most isolated and remote places on earth, as well as among the most recently settled. Everyone who comes to its shores initially, from the MƗori who arrived centuries ago to myself in 2007, has been a migrant. The journey of the stranger to a new land is one of the oldest narratives, and for migrants that journey is lived, but not always written. Acknowledging the entwined nature of roots/routes, the MƗori trace their ancestral lineage to the ocean-going waka (canoes) that brought them to New Zealand centuries ago. Like most migrants, they were voyaging toward the unknown, but they brought their cultural memory forward in the form of narrative, as “Polynesians carried their stories with them, peopling each island with their own genealogy to establish a cosmological and social order” (Mein Smith 2012: 12). Contemporary adult migrants also bring a cultural memory with them embedded in tangible and intangible things, but especially entwined with language. Individual memory migrates too, and that root informs the route, for as the Chinese migrant writer Ha Jin observes, “no matter where we go, we cannot shed our past completely – so we must strive to use parts [of] our pasts to facilitate our journeys” (2008: 86). How migrants use the past to help find their way in a new country is part of the new narrative route that they are charting. Unlike those who never leave their home country, migrants have crossed a frontier into the unknown. When Hélène Cixous observes that “writing forms a passageway between two shores” (1993: 3), this is especially true for migrants who have left one shore for another: geographic, cultural, linguistic. Every migrant has crossed a literal and existential shore, and the personal essay acts as a passageway between those two shores, a route through to where self meets world and self meets other, for “In more than one manner the essay moves outward, the essay

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and its writer connecting with the world, with otherness” (Atkins 2005: 50). The movement outward in the essay has a parallel with the route of migration, which is outward from what is known and familiar, toward what is unknown and other. We cannot know where the route ends, any more than how the personal essay will progress, for “the essay might be considered a journey into the unknown, a voyage of discovery” (Hall 1989: 86). Thus the route of the migrant is the journey of the stranger who comes to town. For migrants, these two archetypal narratives—a man goes on a journey and a stranger comes to town—are elemental, real, and combined. Migrants arrive in a place not yet mapped or rooted in memory, where they must find a route to everything their life touches: work, home, family, language. How migrants navigate that route, both in life and in the essay, addresses how strangers learn to cope with a new environment, both immediately and long term, for migration is an ongoing dynamic, though the experience of being a stranger lessens over time. The learning curve is initially steep, and while it tapers off as the migrant becomes more familiar with a country, it cannot be hastened. As Mary, a Scottish psychotherapist, notes in a personal essay from a writing workshop I taught targeted to migrants: “The experience of a new friendship/country must be tended, like a small seedling, if it is to put down roots and flourish. One cannot hurry, it takes time” (Comer 2014: 78). The personal essay provides a means to examine and assess what migrants learn along the migration route that enables them to put down roots and feel they belong. The testing and weighing of individual experience offers vital information about the contact zone between migrant and native, a space of increasing relevance in a progressively more mobile and globalized world. Migrants are the vulnerable participants in their own lives, and their willingness to share that vulnerability on the page is part of the genre’s empathic appeal. But more than that, the personal essay shows how migrants have been changed by what they have experienced, and that combination of self-disclosure and self-understanding is central to the form. As Leonard Kriegel points out: the task of the writer of personal essays, is not only to tell us what happened to him but to show us how what happened was transformed by memory. The personal essay is at its most powerful when it gives us the writer realizing how he has been permanently, inextricably changed by all that he has witnessed. The eye he casts upon the world will never again see as it saw before consciousness itself was changed (2008: 95).

Migration is by its very nature transformative, and migrants have been

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changed not only by what they have witnessed, but also what they have experienced firsthand. For those who have crossed oceans, cultures, and languages, the personal essay is a vitally effective genre to chart the journey of the stranger who comes to town, a means towards an active reflection that can map the route of their going. Migrants understand things at different points in their migration— before they leave the country, when they are newly arrived, and days, months, years, or decades later. The personal essay is the ideal vehicle for such exploration, driven by its desire to inquire and appraise experience for its significance. Gareth, a Welsh doctor who migrated in 1974, observes: Writing essays is a demanding, satisfying challenge that is also frustrating and emotionally charged. Frustrating when the words do not match the memories and feelings; emotionally charged when the words disturb the dust, covering the memories which I had, perhaps, hidden from myself (Comer 2014: 85).

No matter when migrants begin writing about their experiences, the personal essay explores and elicits ideas, memories and connections that might not otherwise manifest, because one virtue of writing is that “Objectified and held at a distance from the self, the written word makes possible a considered survey of the human mind and its contents: once a thought can be looked at once, it can be looked at twice” (Hirshfield 1997: 190). Writing allows us to see what came before and what came after, where we have been and where we are now, reflecting on how we have been changed by what has happened. As Søren Kierkegaard recognized, “We live forward but understand backward” (qtd. in James 1912: 132), and the personal essay is ideally suited for this retrospective gaze. Elizabeth, an Englishwoman in her forties, shows the value in looking back and understanding who she once was: Now I know more about who I was back then, what I was trying to contain, the past I was recoiling from and the future I was hurtling towards, I see more in the photographs of that time. I see panic, denial, abstract hope, haste, pain. An inability to cope unless I was running, so that I could feel nothing but the sinews in my calves and the ache of my lungs (Comer 2014: 86).

Her unflinching self-examination in the essay reveals she was running away to New Zealand, husband in tow, because he is happy to be towed and wants to surf, and she has lined up an excellent job. Three weeks

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before they emigrate she predicts in her journal: “It is so obvious it will end in tears” (Comer 2014: 144). The route did not end in tears, but it was transformed by them: In New Zealand I lost absolutely everything—my marriage, my home, my savings, my identity and my ability to soldier on with platitudes. Yet in the rubble of my life I found myself—a self that for 42 years I only hoped might exist (Comer 2014: 86).

She lists everything she lost, underscored by the insistent repetition of the personal pronoun: “my marriage, my home, my savings, my identity and my ability to soldier on with platitudes” (Comer 2014: 86). One loss leads to another in a cascade of undoing and dissolution of things both concrete and abstract—marriage, home, savings, identity, and her ability “to soldier on with platitudes.” Migrating to New Zealand was the catalyst for all that loss, but it also gives her “a self that for 42 years I only hoped might exist.” Had she not come to New Zealand, that self might never have manifested. For some migrants, the route of migration, instead of coalescing a sense of self, has the exact opposite effect. The migrant experiences a sense of erasure, muteness and disappearance. Anna, a Swiss woman who married a New Zealander and migrated to his country in 1968, expresses this idea of disappearance beautifully: Sometimes I felt as if the person I had been was fading out of existence. So many of the things that had helped to shape me into who I was had been stripped away, my country, my language, my culture, the treasured traditions, my home, my family, my friends, and even my name. English speaking people pronounce it differently (Comer 2014: 88).

What a catalogue of loss this is, with the powerful anaphora emphasizing everything being been “stripped away” from her: “my country, my language, my culture, the treasured traditions…”. If ever there was a list of what a migrant gives up to follow a foreign partner to his home country, this is it. Anna begins with the large abstractions she has lost, her country—embedded in her language, culture, and treasured traditions— and then the list deepens to more personal and grievous losses, “my home, my family, my friends, and even my name.” Perhaps the most poignant thing to have lost is also the most elemental and basic, her name. Forty years later, the disbelief at her loss of name resonates, the last thing on the list, and “even” that is stripped away. Few things stand in for us as clearly as our name, and to have it pronounced differently contributes to her feeling that “the person she had been was

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fading out of existence.” She no longer speaks or is surrounded by her own language, which heightens the sense of erasure, for “People who move from one natural language to another are likely to undergo significant losses to their existing selves” (Besemeres 2002: 34). Since no one remembers her or shares her past narrative in the new country, her old self is in danger of fading out of existence. Here the recognition and awareness offered by the personal essay are a means to prevent the disappearance of self, an insistence through words that prevents such erasure. Her migrated self must follow a route toward understanding and being understood, where the world becomes resonant and meaningful again. As Salman Rushdie observes, “Migrants must, of necessity, make a new imaginative relationship with the world, because of the loss of familiar habitats” (1991: 125). Forging that “new imaginative relationship” is part of learning to live in a new country, and the personal essay reveals how migrants accomplish this difficult and lifelong task. Unlike those who never leave their home country, migrants may be stripped of the very things Anna details in her list: country, language, culture, treasured traditions, family, friends, home. Establishing similar links in the new country takes time and it is this route that migrants are mapping over days and years. Often, the sheer effort to understand things that do not yet have meaning is exhausting. I realized this firsthand when our family migrated to Sweden after a series of earthquakes caused us to leave our Christchurch, New Zealand home. In Sweden, I felt hemmed in by the dense forest of everything I did not understand: why no one made eye contact, why the doors to houses opened out not in, why there was no word for please, why they did everything in groups and travelled with their own bedding when they came to visit, and why, despite taking good care of its citizenry, the country felt neither welcoming nor generous. For some native inhabitants, the other remains unwelcome. Bearing witness to these encounters, migrant personal essays provide vital and important lessons in our collective humanity. They inscribe something that is both elemental and ethical in the encounter between self and other, namely, as the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas reminds us: “To recognize the Other is to give” (1969: 75). What the self and other must give to each other is welcome and acceptance of the other’s difference—a contact zone that migrants are keenly aware of in their lives. Migrants have all crossed a frontier; a frontier that touches on geographic, cultural, linguistic, existential and emotional borders. The challenge of negotiating a passage between two shores is even greater when the migrant crosses over into a new language and culture that is very different from the one left behind. In Suk migrated from Korea to

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New Zealand in 1994 and met resistance on the grounds of language, ethnicity, gender and marital status. Her essays show how difficult the route of migration can be as she journeys from the known toward the unknown. As a divorced Korean mother, she experienced a powerful censure in her own country, which helped set her migration in motion: I was alone, with my five year old daughter. I hadn’t slept a wink for a few years. All the time there were questions, ‘Where will I go? What will I do?’ trailed after me. The stigma of my situation burned within me (Comer 2014: 90).

When she sees the newspaper advertisement for immigration to New Zealand she realizes an opportunity has appeared and, “All I could think of was to get away, miles away from where I was to start a new beginning” (Comer 2014: 97). For In Suk, as for any non-native speaker, the route to integration in the new country is through language. Language embodies culture on abstract and concrete levels and touches on every aspect of the migrant’s new life—written, spoken, heard. Language connects us, and when the migrant does not understand the host country’s language, the sense of disconnection and alienation is profound. Moreover, the migrant’s command of the host country’s language is “the most significant indicator of the ability to integrate with the local indigenous community and to come to terms with the local culture” (King, Warnes, Williams 2000: 128). As Sabina, a Dutch migrant, notes, “The English language that I love is what made me go to all the countries where they speak it. And then I heard it one day in New Zealand where the English language suddenly has a nice ring to it” (Comer 2014: 93). For her, the route of language is positive from the outset, having enjoyed studying English in school. But for In Suk, who migrated in her forties, the route to language acquisition is more difficult, and she must make a real effort to master it: To integrate into the native society we moved to a Kiwi church. Tricky colloquial English is a forever task to be solved. Mingling with this was and is not easy. Whose problem is it? Nobody has the answer. This has made my high university’s degree and good qualification buried. However, I have tried to learn English to survive here as a useful person who contributes to this society (Comer, 2014: 93).

Like many migrants, In Suk is deskilled when her university degree and qualifications are not recognized in the host country, or as she puts it “buried”, implying that part of her life is, if not dead, at least buried, like treasure. The migrant’s sense of worth and purpose is diminished when

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she is unable to work on the educational and economic level she once did, for “work provides a sense of esteem, self-coherence, identity, location in a social context, and, in Freud’s words, ‘justification for existence in society’” (Akhtar 2010: 62). As though echoing Freud, In Suk says with the humility that pervades her essays, “I have tried to learn English to survive here as a useful person” (Comer 2014: 94). In Suk’s selfless commitment to staying in New Zealand for her daughter’s sake enabled her to overcome significant obstacles along her migration route, and in turn she hopes that their example as migrants might be of help to others. Her personal essays, with their modest but very real courage, embody what the genre can do, as they move from the individual to the universal, for: .

Creative nonfiction is rooted in reality, but it seeks the symbolic character of art; that is, it seeks to discover the universal in the particular, and asks us to consider what it is that makes us human and connects us to one another (Iversen "Interview", 2012: 207).

Both on the page and in her life, In Suk’s example urges us all “to keep digging the ground for us and other people by giving hope” (Comer 2014: 95). Now, since migrating in 1994, her essays mark a passageway between two shores, between her formerly mute Korean self and her present day English speaking and writing self. She has given voice to the migrant who arrives in a country with nothing to connect her but “tears, dreams, hope” (Comer 2014: 91). Giving voice to experience that is reflective, understood, and weighed for its value and significance, is the hallmark of the personal essay. Through this genre, we learn the real stakes of migration for each individual, their particular and lived experiences, and the routes mapped in the going, for “Each essay springs from an idiosyncratic vision, the essayist’s personal slant derived from years of life and thought and experience” (Ryden 1993: 214). As migrants and writers cast off for distant shores, the personal essay provides a powerful form of navigation to find their way.

References Akhtar, Salman 2010 Immigration and Acculturation: Mourning, Adaptation, and the Next Generation, Lanham, UK: Jason Aronson Publishers. Atkins, G. Douglas 2005 Tracing the Essay: Through Experience to Truth, Athens: University of Georgia Press.

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Besemeres, Mary 2002 Translating One’s Self: Language and Selfhood in Cross-cultural Autobiography’ in European Connections (vol. 3), Peter Collier (ed.), Bern: Peter Lang AG. Cixous, Hélène 1993 ‘The School of the Dead’ in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press, 1-55. Comer, Diane 2014 The Braided River: Migration and the Personal Essay (unpublished doctoral dissertation), Christchurch, NZ: University of Canterbury. Dasgupta, Shamina Das 1998 A Patchwork Shawl: Chronicles of South Asian Women in America, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. “Dead reckoning” 2010 Random House Kernerman Webster’s College Dictionary, thefreedictionary.com: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/dead+reckoning (accessed 14 August 2014). Hall, Michael L. 1989 “The Emergence of the Essay and the Idea of Discovery” in Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre, Alexander J. Butrym (ed.), Athens: University of Georgia Press, 73-91. Hampl, Patricia 1999 I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory. New York: WW Norton. Hardison, O. B. Jr. 1988 “Binding Proteus: An Essay on the Essay” in The Sewanee Review, Vol. 96, No 4, Fall, 610-632. Hirshfield, Jane 1997 Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, New York: HarperCollins. Iversen, Kristen 2012 “Interview with Kristen Iversen” in Metawriting: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction, Jill Talbot (ed.), Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 202-207. —. 2004 Shadow Boxing: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction, Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education. Jin, Ha 2008 The Writer as Migrant, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. King, Russell, Warnes, Tony, & William, Allan M. 2000 Sunset Lives: British Retirement Migration to the Mediterranean, Oxford: Berg. Kriegel, Leonard 2008 “The Observer Observing: Some Notes on the Personal Essay” in Truth in Nonfiction: Essays, David Lazar (ed.), Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 93-99. Mein Smith, Philippa 2012 A Concise History of New Zealand, Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Orwell, George 1952 “Such, Such Were the Joys” in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol 4, Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds.), London: Secker & Warburg, 330-369.

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Rushdie, Salman 1991 Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 19811991, Harmondsworth: Granta Books. Ryden, Kent C. 1993 Mapping the Invisible Landscape: Folklore, Writing, and Sense of Place, Wayne Franklin (ed.), Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

CHAPTER SIX VOYAGING THE GAP THROUGH SCANDINAVIAN SAGAS OF MIGRATION TO NEW ZEALAND GAIL PITTAWAY

Introduction My voyage across the gaps of history began with genealogy and ended with a journey. Recently, while looking for examples of Scandinavian themes and motifs in New Zealand literature for a conference paper for the New Zealand Studies Association in Oslo, Norway, in 2014, I encountered a cache of mostly out-of-print nonfiction books written about the voyages of these hardy settlers to New Zealand in the nineteenth century. I have a personal interest in these texts as part of my maternal family’s story is featured in one of them, Johanna’s World by Øystein Andresen (2000), so I began with a genealogical focus. In New Zealand’s MƗori culture, the tracing of familial connections is an important part of establishing identity; one is not so much an individual but considered as part of a whole family or line. Whakapapa is to place in layers, lay one upon another. Hence the term whakapapa is used to describe both the recitation in proper order of genealogies, and also to name the genealogies. The visualisation is of building layer by layer upon the past towards the present, and on into the future. “Whakapapa include not just the genealogies but the many spiritual, mythological and human stories that flesh out the genealogical backbone” (Himona 2001). Increasingly, Pakeha or non-MƗori people are also investigating their genealogies in New Zealand, across generational and geographical divides… But is it important? I think so. Maori have always known the value of their whakapapa. As the traditional nuclear family disintegrates, workers become more transient, and the world more alienating, people are searching for meaning in their lives (J. Rosier-Jones 2005, 1).

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While I was not “looking for meaning” in my search, I did find the same themes of the sea, voyaging, exile and belonging that linked these texts with the literary examples I had found during my initial research for the New Zealand Studies Association paper. Above all, I found part of my whakapapa, my maternal grandfather’s family story. In addition, as I have an academic interest in the ways of telling, which these family sagas and voyages have inspired, I use this concept of whakapapa to reflect the uncovering of the layers of writing as well as the information and characters which contribute to this story. By overtly acknowledging the influence of whakapapa, I assert the value of oral recollections and anecdotes as appropriate resources, for they are, after all, components of the saga tradition (Lonnroth, The concept of genre in saga literature 1975, 419). In several of the nonfiction books, some written for local rural New Zealand communities, others translated into English from Norwegian and Swedish, Danish and Finnish, the usual colonial themes of privation, struggle, poverty and hardship prevail. However, the books often go beyond historical record and the original documents and letters upon which they are based, to bridge the gap between history and imagination, as the authors articulate how their subjects felt, construct conversations, reconstruct meetings, and attempt to express what motivated many of their decisions and responses—topics upon which most settlers had been stoically silent for a century. It is now over 20 years since Lee Gutkind (1994) and others gave us the term creative nonfiction, where writers immerse themselves in the field of research or write about their own experience, and yet these non-fiction authors write about history subjectively, using scant documentation and acknowledging family stories and hearsay as valid sources, to recreate the ordinary lives of those who lived through historical events rather than making them. Under the framework of a literature review, this chapter will consider the narratological and rhetorical devices by which these texts cross the threshold between fiction and non-fiction. It will also describe how I encountered my maternal family story, almost lost to my generation, pieced together the story of the family’s journeying, and unexpectedly met recreations of my ancestors, through these sometimes rough and ready, but always compelling, retellings.

The saga tradition re-lived The themes of heroism, warrior status, deity, voyaging, exile, belonging and mortality are themes which abound in Norse mythology and sagas, as

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do lesser beings such as trolls and water spirits (Hamilton 1969, 310). Yet the depiction of the lives of the settlers who travelled to New Zealand, their endurance and stoicism, their determination and strength of will, is no less heroic than that of the heroes of sagas, as the settlers face exile, voyages, disaster, physical deprivation and emotional loss. In her small but respected book on mythology, Edith Hamilton states: The world of Norse mythology is a strange world. Asgaard the home of the gods is unlike any other heaven men have dreamed of. No radiance or joy is in it, no assurance of bliss…. The gods know that the day will come when they will be destroyed… the cause the forces of good are fighting to defend against the forces of evil is hopeless. Nevertheless the gods will fight for it until the end (300).

Cultural determinism or reckless nihilism? The events described in all of the sources I uncovered contain elements worthy of inclusion in Propp’s list of 31 narratemes in Morphology of the folktale (1927), where poverty, of the level fabled in tales by their contemporary, Hans Christian Andersen, along with hunger, unemployment, and the deaths of children are frequent experiences. There are tricksters and fraudsters, an evil sea captain and (only) a few good people. There are embezzlers, exploiters, frightening foreigners and the mysterious dark people of the land who speak strangely and stare at the blue-eyed big boned blondes whom they call “Yaya” (Walrond 2012, 2). Above all, there is the hard work which, against all odds, assists the settlers to survive. There are few rewards. It is clear that the sagas of these pioneers share similar elements with Nordic saga, and especially the spirit of endurance.

Voyaging the gaps in reading There are three pathways that “voyage the gap” of time and understanding that my reading of my own family history and the history of the migrant Scandinavian families voyaging to New Zealand has taken me. The first pathway is in locating these accounts within a historical framework, testing the waters of veracity, as it were. Here I use the Penguin History of New Zealand by Michael King (2003, 270), in which they merit 1.5 pages; the online history of New Zealand, Te Ara, commissioned by the Ministry of Culture and Heritage (Walrond 2012); and an illustrated history of New Zealand, The people and the land (Binney 1995), which each afford them half a page. More specific popular histories that are referred to include Dannevirke the early years (McDonald 2006), which gives a photographic history of the years of

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settlement of one area in particular, while including a very comprehensive introductory essay; also, Mosquitos and Sawdust (1995), which replicates the busy font and crowded format of one of the early newspapers of the immigrants, Skandia, to retell the story of the people on the first two migrant ships, the Caelano in 1870 and the England in 1871 (9-20). The second pathway of exploration is the voyage from personal to academic interests, in finding a trove of literature on a subject that I had thought quite obscure, yet discovering that for all the fascination the stories held for me, the “tellings” were somehow lacking in craft as pieces of writing. Here, I refer to two texts in particular—In Scandinavian Footprints (Brew 2007) and Norsewood; the Centennial story (Andersen 1972)—to compare the ways of writing these family sagas to a nonliterary readership that yet has strong familial and cultural interest in the stories. I consider them, in terms of narratology, as “levels of narration” (Bal 1997, 43), but also with reference to rhetorical structures, because, despite what might be seen as their failings as literature, these simple books have a particular audience to whom they appeal strongly, whether those readers read the books from cover to cover as I have or, as Sir Walter Elliot did in Persuasion (Austen, 6), to affirm their own existence. Here, too, several out-of-print books, monographs and old webpages fill in many gaps— often specifically for each nationality—Danish, Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian migrants to New Zealand; written out of personal interest by amateur genealogists and historians, to record the tale of ancestors’ voyaging. I add, in contrast, George Peterson’s Forest Homes (1956) and Bob Hansen’s account of the settlers’ first years (1999) written for an American-based website dedicated to stories of Norwegian migration. Finally, returning to the personal, as a reader “voyaging” across these gaps, I unexpectedly met accounts of two of my own ancestors, Ole Olsen and his wife Berthe Maria, in the final book I discuss, the fictionalised Johanna’s World (Andresen 2000). This pair were the parents of my greatgrandmother Annie who, in turn, married Ole Larsen, whose runic scrawl claims the old Bible that I inherited from my grandfather, Edwin Larsen. Some of these stories were told to me by my mother’s cousin Hannah Olsen, when as a reluctant teenager, I attended the centenary of the Scandinavian settlement of Norsewood in 1972 with my parents.

The historical voyage The historical background, the first voyage across these gaps, is that Scandinavian settlers were among many ethnic groups who came to settle New Zealand’s shores over the last two centuries. There were Scandinavian

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crewmen on board Tasman’s ships and “on Captain James Cook’s first voyage to New Zealand (1768–71), naturalist Joseph Banks’s assistants were Swedish botanist Daniel Solander and Finnish draughtsman Herman Spöring” (Walrond 2012, 1). Scandinavian whalers and sealers travelled to New Zealand too and after the gold rushes, many jumped ship. Mining sites such as Westland’s Scandinavian Hill and ventures such as the Scandinavian Company in Otago mark their presence. It is estimated that during the 1860s some 500 Scandinavian prospectors were in the South Island. Most left after the rush, but some settled (Walrond 2012, 2).

But the Scandinavians came to New Zealand in their largest numbers in the 1870s as a result of government treasurer Julius Vogel’s Public Works Act 1871, a bold scheme which was to borrow money (around UK£20 million) from English banks in order to entice thousands of assisted migrants to come to New Zealand to construct roads, railways, telegraph lines and public buildings (King, 269). Over 100,000 immigrants came to New Zealand in the years 1871-1880. Over half of these were from England and Ireland, around 4,000 from Germany and almost the same number, combined, of Scandinavians, from Denmark, Norway and Sweden (270). From 1872, special settlements of Scandinavians were formed in the North Island— to clear a coach road through [from Hawkes Bay] to the West Coast and Wellington…immigrants who toiled on the public works schemes for 5/- a day and the promise of a forty acre farm which they would have to hack out of some of the densest forest left in the country (Binney 1995, 173).

The particular settlers were selected for this most difficult of tasks by Vogel’s ally, Isaac Earle Featherston, the agent who was then Superintendent of the Wellington Province, after whom one of the popular Wairarapa townships is named (Hamer 2013). Two causes, the decline in British emigration and the demand for hardy settlers for the forested land, were sufficient to turn the attention of the New Zealand Government toward Scandinavia. The scarcity of fertile land had forced the Scandinavians to be frugal; the climate made them hardy (Hansen 1999). The settlers were people who had already lost much; in land through fragmentation and division of ownership among families; in crops and stock through the harsh climate and terrain; in work through the increasing urbanisation of communities; and in a sense of community through the breakdown of village life, particularly in Denmark and Norway (Binney: 1995: 173; Burr, 1995, p.5). Norway itself did not achieve independence as a nation (from Sweden, which invaded the Danish-ruled nation in 1814)

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until 1905 (Burch 2005) after most of these settlers had come to New Zealand. It was not until the 1970s that oil was discovered and Norway became a wealthy nation. About 800,000 people are believed to have emigrated from Norway, Denmark and Sweden in the years between 1820 and 1930, most to America, but around 3,500 people made their way to New Zealand (Walrond 2012, 2). One more recent historical narrative, Dannevirke, the early years by Rob McDonald (2006), contributes to this story of migration through a collection of photographs with a short prefatory essay and a critical discussion of the elements of the story of the predominantly Danish settlement of that name, which was established in a similar manner to the Norwegian-settled town of Norsewood. The names of the towns were given by government officials in consultation with the setters in 1872. Popular history collections have been made for most localities and regions in New Zealand and offer a magazine-styled approach to history in an engaging way. Of all the texts consulted in this exercise, only McDonald’s covers the initial complicated purchase of land from the MƗori tangata whenua, the original people of the land, the RangitƗne tribe who, after considerable deliberation, eventually settled on a sale with the government’s agents of over 200,000 acres for £18,000.The settlers were then sold this land for £1 an acre, and told they needed 40 acres to make a living (McDonald 2006, 6). Simple mathematics reveals the immense profit made by the New Zealand Company. Most other general historical sources give an entirely Eurocentric view of this land sale and the idea that this experiment in social engineering and colonial greed might have been a huge mistake is not entertained. McDonald’s book is otherwise a visual narrative stacked with period photographs of enormous trees dwarfing tall foresters, bush tracks, early saw-milling structures and practices, simple wooden dwellings, and hill top panoramas of towns in the making rising up out of the cleared bush and muddy flats.

The settler sagas In terms of the second pathway, the settler accounts, the first book I consider is chronologically the most recent piece of writing, and covers much of the political and business background to the story of settlement which came about as a result of Julius Vogel’s immigration and public works scheme. In Scandinavian Footprints by Margit Brew (2007) gives an account of the life of Bror Eric Friberg, the Swedish immigrant and entrepreneur who became the agent for the developers Ormond and Maurice, after whom the small towns of Ormondville and Mauriceville are

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still named, in this south-eastern Wairarapa region of the North Island. Guided by Featherston, Friberg recruited still more settlers by encouraging chain migration, through which families invited other members to join them in the new land, by writing excessively positive letters home. After making his way in New Zealand for five years, Friberg returned to Europe as an agent for the developers. Friberg sailed for New Zealand from Christiania (Oslo), Norway, on the Høvding, arriving in Napier on 15 September 1872 with 292 adult immigrants, mainly Norwegians. He accompanied them to the Seventy Mile Bush, where they balloted for sections in the settlements of Norsewood and Dannevirke (Roipiha 2013, 1).

Like many of the people he came to assist in their migration, Friberg was born in poverty. He became the primary earner for his mother and sisters at the age of ten when his father shot himself. He made much of himself, however, and trained as a forester, then in languages and business, before coming to the attention of a German sea-captain on a trip around the Hanseatic ports of the Baltic Sea, who recommended him for work as a merchant’s agent. Brew’s book includes quotations from letters and several holographs of letters and documents as well as photographs, but the story is told as a personal narrative, beginning with the traumatic events of Bror Eriks’ father’s death, about which she writes that the son hears the sounds of the familiar gun and looks forward to the rabbit they will eat that night, only to discover that his father had shot himself (Brew 2007, 5). Brew covers Friberg’s many occupations from saddler (p. 16), to merchant’s clerk (p. 17); then from forester training first in Stockholm (p. 19) and then London (p. 30), to finally meeting his German wife Cecelia in 1863 when he worked in the Black Forest (p. 36). With many of his compatriots emigrating to America, Friberg considers following them; however, soon after proposing to Cecelia (p. 48), Friberg hears of a Danish Bishop and former Prime Minister, Ditlev Monrad, who had decided to leave Denmark after his country lost a skirmish with Prussian forces and was taking himself as far away as possible, to New Zealand. Encouraged by the idea of other Scandinavians taking on such a journey, the young couple emigrated immediately after their wedding, in June 1866 (p. 58). Here, the main sources of the story, apart from legal documents and land deeds, are letters written by Cecilia to her family back in Germany, or letters home by the much-travelled Friberg (none of which is formally cited). The representation of Friberg is of a diligent and caring person who spends far too much time worrying about his immigrant charges (Brew 2007, 293).

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The accounts of him by the settlers are somewhat different (Andresen 2000, 95), especially when it is clear that he profited from his work in more ways than as a salaried agent, having “applied for three sections in the Makotuku [Norsewood] settlement, and later add[ing] four more” (Roipiha 2013). But it seems that Friberg was tasked with a near impossible role, to keep his charges happy once he had recruited them to tame and settle the new land. Never in the history of New Zealand was there more bitter [sic] disillusion or disappointment than that experienced by these people from Scandinavia. They had of necessity to face what lay ahead as they were anchored to the settlement by lack of money, a strange language and many children… Menfolk soon began work hewing the roads with pick and shovel… whilst the women and children remained in their pathetic forest homes trying to grow, among the tree stumps, the vegetable seed which had been supplied (Hansen 1999).

As a Swedish-born educationalist and psychologist, trained in New Zealand, Brew uses several documents and photographs to authenticate a strong narrative, in the third person but with many elements of direct speech or thoughts expressed, clearly of her own invention. Her attitude to Friberg is sympathetic, stressing both the early tragedy of the loss of his father and his own early demise from illness at the age of 38, when she imagines his last thought as being, “I’m leaving my loved ones behind” (309). Above all, she stresses the strong love between Friberg and Cecelia and articulates their loyalty and love for each other, giving a strong familial motive for his hard work, many nights away from home in the bush or at sea, and eagerness to please those he served. Friberg acted as interpreter, collector of promissory notes and paymaster for the immigrants, who were engaged in bush clearing and road building. The responsibilities of his position included frequent and detailed reports to the department on the state of health and employment of the immigrants, and recommendations for educational facilities and medical services (Roipiha 2013).

Clearly, no-one could have pleased the powerful political masters he served, but in constantly reporting his charges as not needing more support and reporting their condition as satisfactory—in order to save his employers money and to impress them with the success of his scheme—he was seen (by the immigrants) as being cruel and unsupportive, although they could do little more than mutter to him and each other (Andresen 94, 5).

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How would a librarian catalogue this book? As history, it is too reliant upon the third person narrative style, imagining thoughts, feelings and conversations, and does not acknowledge the source of such speculation, in the manner now identified as speculative biography (Brien 2015, 4). As fiction, however, it is too chronologically bound, locked into a birth-tograve treatment, while as creative nonfiction, it is too methodical and detailed to ‘sing’ to a reader (Gutkind, 1994). Yet as an important person in the story of New Zealand’s settlement, Friberg is indeed worthy of such attention and I note that this text is catalogued as a biography, and does follow Brien’s understanding of the authorial complexity of this task: Biographers recognise that they construct stories from the data they collect, forcing the disordered and vast complexity of an actual life into a neat literary form and, importantly, that the life thus presented only appears authentic and life-like to readers because they accept, and endorse, this literary convention (2014).

In the case of Brew’s biography of Friberg, these elements of narrative writing generate a text which is accessible and informative to a wide range of readers. What then of writing about less notable people? The second book I encountered in this pathway was Norsewood; the Centennial Story by Archibald Andersen (1972), which picks up the tale of the settlers who, although named, are nonetheless “nobodies” in the realm of history making. In the copy I read, my mother’s cousin has inscribed her good wishes to my parents and the date, which was also that of publication in 1972. Andersen was a son of the soil of Norsewood and this book is based upon family reminiscences and stories told to him by his settler parents as well as his many observations of local events over seventy years. His preface contains the motivation for his book: My granddaughter remarked “Grandpa why don’t you write a book about Norsewood?” … After I commenced writing however, several relatives and friends suggested that as 1972 is the Centennial of Norsewood, it would be fitting to have it published for that occasion. (A. Andersen 1972, xi)

Unfortunately, the book suffers from too much detail and too little shape. What began as stories of genealogical interest grew beyond its remit into a complicated survey of 100 years, in as many pages, with few references for the material included and a large number of civic records appended to the penultimate section—such as lists of postmasters, mayors, members of the Country Women’s Institute, ministers and pastors. However, in its

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preface is the core of the ‘good yarn’ that might have been recounted: Try to imagine the women walking through the bush on their way to obtain supplies, with little children tailing behind them while their husbands are working miles away from home for days or even weeks at a time. The constant threat of bush fire in summer, when the conditions were dry, the dripping wet bush in winter. The midwife walking through the bush at night with a candle in a bottle on her way to assist a mother in childbirth (i).

By moving away from recording and/or recollecting oral storytelling in order to attempt to make this an official record, published for the 1972 centenary deadline, the book lacks structure and lurches from theme to theme in content, but lacks the methodology and documentation required. It would have been more successful and suited to a wider audience if presented as a recollection of tales and “hear sayings”. Written well before these two books and now out of print is George Conrad Petersen’s Forest Homes (1956), a wide-ranging collection of stories and anecdotes, with a focus upon the Danish community from which he is descended. Full of lively detail, the story of migration is told as a saga, with Petersen even inserting quotations from such sagas as the Kalevala, and Sigurd the Volsung as epigrammatic chapter headings. The first chapter is a summary of the voyaging nature of the Scandinavians, up to and including the Middle Ages, after which chapter two tells the historical facts of planning Vogel’s Public Works Scheme, recruitment and journeying. Without giving details of costs, Petersen also identifies the MƗori name for this part of land as Te Tapere nui o–te-Whatonga, which literally means “the large lands or forests of Whatonga”—named after the ancestor of the tribes in the same area who is believed to have come by canoe from the Pacific Islands, and, being a great explorer, travelled up the river of Manawatu (Horizons District Council 2013). An early chapter describes how some Swedish travellers were defrauded of their small savings when their ship stopped in London en route for the colony. Thinking they were purchasing Certificates of Sale for land, they were later told by English readers that the documents they had paid for were in fact menus from London restaurants (p. 31). Continuing with the use of Scandinavian epigrams, such as “A man never gained the world by snoring” from Saxo Grammaticus (p. 46) or “The tooth of time gnaws clean” (126), ensuing chapters explain how the name of the area to be cleared changed from The Seventy Mile Bush—which was the entire area of the southeastern corner of the North Island—to the Forty Mile Bush, their particular area, south of the dividing river.

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Petersen also tells the interesting fact that McLeod, an early agent working for Vogel in developing an immigration scheme, originally suggested that Canadians should be recruited to settle and each family be offered 100 acres. But further discussion decided upon the even more desperate Scandinavians who would agree to the offer for 40 acres (10). He goes into further details of the agreements—the first two years to be free of repayment, during which time five acres were to be cleared and a house to be built. But these plans did not anticipate the epidemics of typhus and dysentery, several fires, the magnitude of the trees to be felled and the density of the native bush to be cleared, let alone the isolation and poverty the families would suffer. Early chapters describe the arrival in the forest for the shocked settlers: …splashing through creeks, climbing over fallen logs and trudging wearily up the hillsides, until each family party eventually reached its own little clearing with a solitary cottage or tent (Petersen, p. 40).

As another descendent writes, ‘On the first day they wept, on the second they started work. There could be no going back’ (Flavell 2014). Like heroes of saga on a quest, once the voyage began, there was no going back.

The final voyage across gaps—to my whakapapa My maternal family story begins here, as first told to me by a newly discovered relative when I was 16 and attended the Norsewood Centenary celebrations in 1972. In the 1960s and 1970s, my mother’s second cousin Hannah Olsen began writing a family tree, and followed it with her naïve, although revealing, booklet of recollections titled Fragrant reminiscences, a monograph which I could not handle as a teenager without smirking at the sentimentality of the title. But these reminiscences form the basis of Johanna’s World (2000), the final book I consider, by Norwegian journalist Øystein Andresen (now deceased) and translated from the Norwegian by Johan Bonnevie. Andresen came to New Zealand in the late 1990s and met up with Norwegian descendants of the pioneers. It is based on the life and reminiscences of Hannah Olsen’s mother, Johanna Johansson, who came to New Zealand in 1873 from a small settlement called Paso, near modern day Kongsvinger. The publisher note writes that this text is Based on a true story…The year is 1873 and Johanna is about to leave her home country Norway for far-off NZ. They join a group of assisted

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Chapter Six immigrants who dream of escaping the poverty and hardships of their home country…This is the human face of Vogel’s immigration policy of the 1870’s and a government that misled and exploited its new, nonEnglish speaking settlers (i).

The stories include those of my maternal family, as my great-greatgrandparents came with this group of pioneers and are, indeed, the sister and brother in-law of the titular Johanna. It includes photographs, including one of their former forest home in Norway, as well as newspaper reports and notices from colonial papers, which add to the authenticity of archival and oral record. Here, storytelling and research entwine as Andresen identifies the sources and people who assisted his investigation with footnotes throughout and a central collection of images. In his acknowledgments page, Andresen… …would like to point out to the reader that aspects of the family’s life, how they spoke and acted, may differ from their real lives … [or] may be composite characters drawn from the life experiences of a range of people associated with the time and places referred to (p. 6).

The story follows the same chronological plotting of the previous books, but in its focus upon the seventeen year old Johanna Johanssen, Andresen has chosen a person whose long life covered not only the passage to New Zealand and the establishment of a new family, but also retained warm recollections of her life in the fir forests of her birth place. The story is much more engaging for this specificity and unity, but also overtly changes style—in both font and direct address to the audience—as Andresen intersperses accounts of his own voyaging gaps of knowledge and understanding, and identifies the “pathfinders” (p. 16) who assisted him in both Norway and New Zealand. The book includes an introductory section with maps, a simple summary of the historical background to the story with clear subtitles, (“Emigration: an historical overview…Why did they leave? ...Who were they?’ 7-13) and cites a list of books consulted or for further reading (13). This introduction is earlier signalled as nonfiction in the contents page. Here, for the first time, I read of my own ancestors and the place they left behind: Pasotorpet. The word has a melancholy sound. A sad piece of music, like the never ending sighing of fir trees. Here people toiled for centuries with little to show for their labours… (16).

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Their story begins with a letter from Johanna’s uncle, Christoffer Findsen, who had travelled in the first trip from Norway on the HSS Høvding, accompanied by Bror Eric in 1872. His letter is florid and detailed—and the family, while encouraged and excited by his recommendations for them to join him in ‘Ny Seland’ (21)—is suspicious that his writing was never so fluent before he left (18-20). Here Andresen references the historical fact that Friberg often wrote letters for the immigrants, to encourage their families to join them. However, Johanna’s parents, Johan and Randi Johanssen, decide to take up the offer of work and land and join the chain of family migrants who had already gone by ship in 1872 to take up Vogel’s scheme and to bring the seven children still living at home with them. Joining their party are Johanna’s married sister, Berthe Maria, husband Ole Olsen (my great–great grandparents), and their children Arne and Annie (my great-grandmother, who married Lars Larsen in New Zealand) and Johanna’s fiancé, Christian Christiansen, aged 23. Olsen, I discovered, was a farm worker on a farm called Kuggerud and the whole group from Pasotorpet, near Pasoberg, walked about 40 kilometers to meet with the Olsens before taking up a horse and cart to finish the trip to Christiania, as Oslo was then called, some 100 kilometers further south, in order to board the Høvding. Andresen covers the voyage with horrific detail. Their captain, Nordby, is a drunkard and the cook has disappeared, so the immigrants whom the captain calls slave labour are nearly starved by Nordby’s miserly rationing (71). The doctor, too, seems to spend long hours drinking with the captain and they are beset by, first, a period of calm in which they make no progress, and then a terrifying storm in which all the passengers are locked for days in the hold. Nine children die on the voyage out to New Zealand, while five babies are born onboard the ship. As they near the end of their voyaging, the Captain comes out of his drunken stupor long enough to tell them that cannibals are waiting for them in the new country (84). Later, upon arrival, the exhausted travellers begin to make their way onto solid ground at Napier, only to be terrified by the welcome dance of a local MƗori party, whose slapping and stamping chant, with accompanying eye rolling and gestures sends the immigrants racing back up the gang plank (105). The situation does not improve as they realise they have traded poverty in the old country for poverty in a new land (93-4), and to earn their promised freedom, they must work far harder than ever before. They blame Friberg for false promises; even more so once the New Zealand government, which by the end of the 1870s was in a financial depression, began to ask for repayment of what they were then calling a ‘loan’ for passage out to New Zealand

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and the promised acres of land. Many had to sell off their properties to pay their debts. Johanna and Christian did not marry for seven more years, until he had cleared land and built a small shack for them to live in, while he continued to work as a forester and saw-miller, away for long periods of time in huts and bivouacs out in the bush. In one of his introductory explanations, Andresen stresses that he is intent on recognising the important role of women in Norsewood: “Without their courage and doggedness, life here would have been very miserable” (121). It is at the wedding of Johanna and Christian Christiansen that I encounter my ancestor, Ole Olsen, in full characterisation. Johan, Johanna’s father, and Ole had by this time sold off part of their acres in order to set up a blacksmith store, as the saw-milling life was so financially unrewarding, while they anticipated that with the increasing mechanisation of the industry, skilled workers would be needed to maintain the machinery. Andresen credits the father and son-in-law with the invention of the “Scandi-wheel” (135), a reinforced wooden and iron wheel which was strengthened to support the logging trailers as they hauled the enormous logs out of the bush. The historical Ole is given personality and voice as he is required to make a speech at the wedding: Ole Olsen…had not shown his usual healthy appetite during the meal. He knew he had the honour of saying Takk for maten—to thank the hostess for the meal…It had given him palpitations and had certainly taken the edge off his appetite...He was known for his booming voice, but that was not enough today (134).

It is one of the few comical moments in the book as Ole recovers his nerve and goes on to give praise for the food as well as making extravagant claims about his own skills in the kitchen. At this gaining of confidence, a charge of recognition surprises me, even more so when the guests clear back the tables and begin to dance to a ‘wheezy accordion’ (p. 135). I see my grandfather in this comical depiction—Edwin, or Ted, who loved to speak and joke at family parties and would play folk and old popular tunes on his squeeze box, but who also stammered a little in the telling of tall stories. I see, too, a little of my older brother, Bob, and myself, both of whom fancy ourselves as raconteurs and entertainers. In this book, the merging of factual detail and creative invention give life to the names, sepia images and ghosts in our family tree.

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Narratology and rhetoric in the immigration stories In the period since the eventual survival or extinction of these immigrants, a world of change has occurred, not least in literature, when over the heads of these simple folk and tellers of family stories, debate has raged about the nature and impossibility of biography and even the death of the author. Since the 1990s, a number of texts have taken issue with historical fact and have created novels about historic figures. C. K. Stead’s Mansfield, Witi Ihimaera’s The Trowenna Sea, Graeme Lay’s Secret Life of James Cook: A novel are all by New Zealand writers and all fall between the cracks of fiction and non-fiction. Although not all the authors would use the descriptive term of creative non-fiction, clearly they have all used dialogue, embellished with intimate and substantial description, and included an inner point of view, thus adding the “creative” element to what was once an impersonal process. (Gutkind 1994).

In the meantime Anderson and Peterson, farmers from the Norsewood area, decided to put down the stories they could remember, and several subsequent small monographs and not so small booklets have been published on topics of Scandinavian settlement in New Zealand. Many have had a strong, local flavour of the communities they describe or have been published by libraries to retain family and community knowledge before it passed out of context and memory. There have also been several theses written by descendants of Scandinavians, exploring the large contribution that was made by their efforts in literally closing the gaps of communication between settlements, with the transport that their bush clearing allowed in terms of roads and railways. In this range of books, however, this chapter has concentrated on selecting those whose intention was storytelling—voyaging the gaps across not only time and distance, genre and medium but also in history telling, by including the stories of simple people, without whom today’s progress would not have been so advanced.

Postscript: He waka eke noa (MƗori proverb—We are all in the same canoe) (2014).

At Easter 2014, I travelled to Norsewood with my husband and son and visited the graves of my forebears. We saw the “Scandi” wheels in the little folk museum, alongside some of the handiwork, folk art and relics of pioneer life which now rust quietly in the tranquil town. After his first visit

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and the success of his book, Andresen came back and set up a model Norwegian village around several of the old wooden houses, with a replica “Stave” church, and children’s troll house, which he called “Johanna’s World”. My son was asked in the main street if he spoke Norwegian, as he looked so familiar to the tourists from Scandinavia who were passing though. In June, the first of my mother’s family to visit, I travelled to Oslo, to present the paper on Nordic themes in New Zealand literature and stood in the harbour that the Johansson’s, with Ole, Berthe Maria and Annie Olsen, had left from in 1873, never to return. There was a sailing boat called Johanna moored alongside the wharf. I travelled by boat on Oslo fjord and then by train and bus into the hinterland that now has no trace of their existence; closing another gap in my story.

References Andersen, A. 1972. Norsewood the centennial story. Dannevirke, NZ: A L Andersen. Andersen, H.C. 2011. Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales. 1 September. Accessed May 14, 2014. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Hans_Andersen’s_fairy_tales_(Robinson )/Elfin-Mount. Andresen, O .M. 2000. Johanna’s World. Auckland: HarperCollins. Austen, Jane. 2003 republished. Persuasion. London: Penguin classics. Bal, Mieke. 1997. Introduction to the theory of narratology. Toronto, Canzda: University of Toronto Press. Bender, Hennin;, Larsen, Birgit; for Danes Worldwide Archives. 1990. Danish Emigration to New Zealand. Aalborg, Denmark: Danes Worldwide Archives, Denmark. Binney, J. Bassett, J., Olssen, E. 1995. The people and the land. Wellington: Bridget Williams Books. Brew, M. 2007. Scandinavian footprints. Auckland: Egan Reid. Brien, Donna Lee. 2015. “History, Fiction and Speculative Biogpraphy.” TEXT Special Issue 28. 1 April. Accessed April 10, 2015. http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue28/Brien.pdf. —. 2014. “Welcome creative subversions’: Experiment and innovation in recent biographical writing.” TEXT journal Vol 18 No 1. 1 April. Accessed January 15, 2015. http://www.textjournal.com.au/april14/brien.htm. Burch, Stephen. 2005. Norway and 1905. 6 June. http://www.historytoday.com/stuart-burch/norway-and-1905. Burr, Valerie. 1995. Mosquitoes and Sawdust. Palmerston North:

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Scandinavian club of Manawatu, NZ. du Fresne, Y. 1980. Farvell and other stories. Wellington: VUP. —. 1985. The growing of Astrid Westergaard and other stories. Auckland: Longman Paul. Flavell, Kay. 2014. Where our story begins. n.d. n.d. Accessed April 24, 2014. http://scandinaviantrail.org.nz/index.html. Gutkind, Lee. 1994. The art of Creative Nonfiction: The Literature of Reality. New York, USA: John Wiley and Sons. —. 1996. The art of Creative Nonfiction: The Literature of Reality. New York, USA: Jonh Wiley and Sons. —. 1994. What’s the story. n.d. Accessed January 15, 2015. https://www.creativenonfiction.org/online-reading/whats-story-1#. Hamer, David. 2013. “Featherston – Isaac Earl.” Te Ara-The encylopedia of New Zealand. 18 September. Accessed November 1, 2014. http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1f4/featherston-isaac-earl. Hamilton, Edith. 1969. Mythology. Boston USA: Little Brown and Company. Hansen, Bob. 1999. “Norwegian Settlements – Norsewood NZ.” Norway heritage. n.d. n.d. Accessed April 20, 2014. http://www.norwayheritage.com/articles/templates/norwegian_settl.asp ?articleid=18&zoneid=17. Himona, R.N. 2001. What is Whakpapa? Accessed November 2, 2014. http://maaori.com/whakapapa/whakpap2.htm#Introduction. Horizons District Council. 2013. Whatonga. n.d n.d. Accessed January 16, 2015. http://www.teapiti.com/tour/whatonga. Hutching, Megan. 2008. Over the wide and trackless sea: pioner women and girls in New Zealand. Auckland NZ: HarperCollins. Jones, Jenny Robin. 2011. No simple passage. Auckland NZ: Random House. King, Michael. 2003. The Penguin History of New Zealand. Auckland New Zealand: Penguin. Koivukangas, Olavi. 1996. From the Midnight Sun to the Long White Cloud. Turku, Finland: Institute of Migration, Finland. Lonnroth, Lars. 1975. “The concept of genre in saga literature.” The journal of Scandinavian Studies Vol 47, No, 4 419, 420. Lyng, John. 1939. The Scandinavians in Australil, New Zealand and the Western Pacific. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. McDonald, Rob. 2006. Dannevirke the early years. Dannevirke, New Zealand: McDonald. Peterson, George Conrad. 1956. Forest homes; the story of the Scandinavian Settlements in the Forty Mile Bush. Wellington NZ: A.H.

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& A.W. Reed. Pilkington, Dorothy & Robinson, Penny. 2002. Pictures from the past: Manwatu and Wanganui. Christchurch NZ: Whitcoulls. Propp, Vladimir. 1927. Morphology of the folktale. 2nd Edition, 1968. Translated by Lawrence Scott. Austin USA: University of Texas Press. Roipiha, Dorothy. 2013. Friberg – Bror Eric. Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand. 25 September. Accessed November 2, 2014. URL: http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/biographies/2f27/friberg-bror-erik. Rosier-Jones, J. 1987. Voyagers. Auckland: Hodder and Stoughton. Rosier-Jones, Joan. 2005. Telling it like it is. Accessed September 14, 2014. http://nzbooks.org.nz/2005/comment/telling-it-like-it-was-joanrosier-jones/. Stafford, Jane. 2000. Romancing the colonial. 1 September. Accessed January 30, 2015. http://nzbooks.org.nz/2000/literature/romancing-thecolonial-jane-stafford/. Walrond, Carl. 2012. “Scandinavians – 1642-1870: first arrivals.” TeArathe Encyclopedia of New Zealand. 13 July. Accessed September 29, 2014. http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/scandinavians/page-1. Ware, Peter. 2005. Anders and Jacobine Hagenson Scandinavian pioneers in New Zealand. Greytown, New Zealand: Ware. Woodward Ltd. 2014. Maori Proverbs. 23 December. Accessed february 1, 2015. http://www.maori.cl/Proverbs.htm.

CHAPTER SEVEN LOST IN TRANSLATION: USING FICTIONAL LANGUAGE AS A FORM OF NARRATIVE DENISE BECKTON

Introduction The success of works such as The Lord of the Rings (J. R. R. Tolkien 1954), Star Trek (NBC 1966), Avatar (Cameron 2009) and Game of Thrones (HBO 2011) is evidence that the appeal of fictional languages, within novels and on screen, is both enduring and global. The cult-like popularity of these works can be partly attributed to the fictional languages within them that mimic and transform the reality of life, as we know it, into a believable fantasy. However, despite their cult-like following and economic success, comparatively few examples of fictional languages exist within the literature and film industries. This chapter examines this underrepresentation and the motivations and strategies that drive and assist writers, in particular, to create languages for fiction literature. In doing so, it shows how these inventions can be used, as textual agents, to enhance narrative elements such as characterisation, setting, atmosphere and plot. Further to this, the chapter will demonstrate how fictional languages help establish imagined worlds that appear, to the reader, to be both plausible and authentic. Fictional languages, in literature, can range from the creation of a few words that have symbolic relevance and importance to the narrative, to fully functioning constructed languages. According to Peter Stockwell, in his exploration of Invented Language in Literature, the primary function of invented language in literary fiction is to delineate the distance and connections between the reader’s world and the world imagined in the text […] Delineating the difference between the textual

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Chapter Seven world and the readers world is the first step in determining the significance of the work, in making identifications for empathy or satire, in being able to generalize the specifics of the story world into principles for the reader’s world (2004, 3).

This delineation creates a platform from which fictional languages can ornament imagined landscapes, highlight central themes within the narrative and create a sense of plausibility for the reader. In terms of their composition, all languages usually fall into three categories. Languages that are completely created from scratch are called a priori languages. Those that take most of their material from existing natural languages are called a posteriori languages, and those that contain elements of both types are categorised as mixed (Okrent 2009). Examples of each of these categories are evidenced in works of literature and vary, both in complexity and sophistication. Anthony Burgess, who was also a passionate linguist, created his a posteriori language, Nadsat, in 1962, for the novel A Clockwork Orange by combining elements of the English and Russian languages. Na’vi, which was constructed by linguist Paul Former for the movie Avatar (2009), is an example of an a priori language. J.R.R. Tolkien who, as a professional philologist, is famous for his many grammatically sophisticated languages (most notably some of his Elvish works such as Quenya), which he created before his Middle-earth mythology and worked on until his death. In the book From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages, Michael Adams investigates Tolkien’s creations and notes the influence of languages such as Gothic, Old Norse and Old English. Readers of The Lord of the Rings encounter Tolkien’s linguistic creativity in a copious stream of names, words, short utterances and longer pieces of speech and verse in almost entirely unfamiliar languages […] few may realise that Gandalf is a name borrowed from Norse legend (Adams 2011 76).

Planned or constructed languages are further categorised, sometimes contentiously by enthusiasts, into three distinct areas. The first category called auxiliary languages, are stripped-down and/or technically basic inventions. The second category, artistic languages, encompass invented languages that appear in literary works and languages of their supporting worlds, and invented languages that exist for their own sake. And thirdly, logical languages, which are usually devised as a means of demonstrating some point of principle in linguistics or philosophy (Stockwell 2006). For the purpose of this chapter, and within the field of literature, all terms related to constructed languages refer to the second category of artistic

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languages.

Languages as artistic creations When Hildegard von Bingen—a twelfth-century German nun who was prone to religious visions—recorded a manuscript of around one thousand unidentified words, it was assumed that she was speaking in tongues. However, the list of these words, which was translated in both German and Latin, demonstrated signs of organisation with carefully sorted categories containing grammatical structures, which were more aligned to a Lingua Ignota (Latin for unknown language) than the channellings of a spiritual medium (Okrent 2009). In her biography of Bingen (2007), Sarah Higley argues that the main purpose of the manuscript, which is the earliest documented invented language, is one of personal expression and artistic drive and was invented by the nun, as a purer way to describe, and therefore dignify, the world. This desire to convey an artistic perspective of the world in which we live is shown by a multitude of constructed languages throughout history. Thousands of artificial languages have been artistically created and published for varying purposes including communication, personal recognition, education, philanthropy and the pursuit of a better world (Conley and Cain 2006, Okrent 2009). Ludwik Zamenhof, for example, published Esperanto (which literally translates to one who hopes) in 1887, with the intention of creating a universal language designed to foster peace and international understanding between people who spoke different languages. Edward Foster, an American Reverend who made the construction of his invented language (Ro) his life’s work, was not seeking universal communication or peace; rather, Foster was focused on creating a logical language system designed to enhance learning, improve acquisition and contribute to enlightenment and human progress (Lo Bianco 2004). In the literary world of popular fiction, where the primary intent is to entertain, constructed languages provide a reality for, and a cultural setting around, imagined races of speakers, societies and/or invented worlds. They are designed to add depth and an appearance of plausibility to the fictional worlds with which they are associated (Conley and Cain 2006, xix). This view is confirmed by Joseph Lo Blanco, who, in his 2004 linguistic investigation of invented languages, explains that “constructed languages are meant to be used by humans in giving life to new worlds of ideas, interests, art, politics and ideology, particular civilisations, gender, particular lifestyles, and the imagination” (11).

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Current trends of invented language in film and literature None of the hundreds of languages created for social reasons developed as ardent a following as those created for movies, television and books (Okrent 2009). This appeal is demonstrated by the enduring nature of many best-selling books such as Tolkien’s Middle-earth fictions The Hobbit (1937) and his trilogy The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Richard Adams’s Watership Down (Adams 1972), and G. R. R. Martin’s fantasy series A Song of Fire and Ice (1996–), to name a few. It is perhaps surprising then, given this potential for success, that there are not more examples of works that contain fictional languages when compared to the huge number of published books within compatible genres—fictionalised languages within literature list in the hundreds compared to the many thousands of novels published within the fiction-language compatible genres of fantasy, science fiction, utopia and dystopia. It is a statistic that, due to an increasing number of Internet languageconstruction sites and book-to-movie adaptations, is likely to change. Professional linguist Professor Matt Pearson agrees and notes that “there has been a sea change in Hollywood. They realise there’s a fan base out there that wants constructed languages” (Chozick 2011). This consumer desire is driving demand for realistic constructed languages with grammatical rules, written alphabets and a vocabulary that allows for basic conversation. In response to this, movie directors are employing professional linguists, with this in mind, to create and adapt films from existing examples in literature. The film Avatar, directed by James Cameron and the television adaptation (of G. R. R. Martin’s A Song and Fire and Ice series) Game of Thrones (HBO 2011) are recent examples of this. Such is their appeal that fans create new words and phrases to expand on existing numbers within collections of fictional languages. For example, Avatar’s fictional language, Na’vi, started with around 1,500 words but has steadily increased in number after contributions from dedicated online fans. Martin’s Dothraki language expanded significantly after his novels were adapted for television, and now the language boasts a vocabulary of words that number in the thousands. Much of the Elvish spoken by the characters in the movie version of Lord of the Rings has been created, since the publication of Tolkien’s novels, by dedicated fans of Elvish, based on guesses as to what Tolkien would have constructed. This trend of employing professional linguists, combined with the fact that many of the most recognised authors of invented literary languages

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are professional linguists (Tolkien, Burgess and Elgin), may be possible reasons for the underrepresentation of fiction languages within literature overall. It is plausible that some writers are reluctant to create fictional languages because they perceive them to be difficult or too time consuming to construct. This view is contrary to most examples, in fiction literature, which are written by authors with no formal linguistic training, and whose works contain little or no structured language. In her article about created languages in science fiction novels, Ria Cheyne reiterates this view: Highly developed languages such as Elgin’s Láaden and Okrand’s Klingon are much in the minority. The lack of technical linguistic information behind science fiction’s creative languages is no flaw or weakness, however. It only appears that way when created languages are read in terms of a scholarly paradigm that does not fit the material. Whatever other purposes they serve, real-world constructed languages are designed to be used for human communication. They need to be extensively developed, with a large vocabulary, comprehensive grammar rules and so on. The created languages of science fiction, in contrast, do not serve the purposes of practical communication. “Completeness” is not a criteria because science fiction texts are not language primers (2008, 389).

This view can be applied to all literature genres that contain artistic languages. Tolkien’s collection of published works is a mere fraction of his total linguistic creations which, in comparison, contain far more invented language than his novels: ‘The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings are something like islands in the vast sea of his legendary output’ (Robbins 2013, 184). Tolkien’s islands are, furthermore, considerably richer in invented language than most other examples where the number of invented words is relatively few. The fairy language of Gnommish, for example, in Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl novels (2001-2012) contains only five invented words, and Watership Down, written by Richard Adams in 1972, included only 40 words of Lapine for the rabbit characters that inhabit his book. Similarly, G. R. R. Martin’s recent novels contain only a smattering of invented words in Dothraki and Valyrian, and, when recently asked about their construction and complexity, he noted that, Tolkien was a philologist, and an Oxford don, and could spend decades laboriously inventing Elvish in all its detail. I, alas, am only a hardworking Science Fiction and Fantasy novellist, and I don’t have his gift for languages. That is to say, I have not actually created a Valyrian language. The best I could do was to try to sketch in each of the chief tongues, my

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Chapter Seven imaginary world in broad strokes, and give them each their characteristic sounds and spellings (Martin 2001, 1).

Martin’s humble response, in this instance, does not reflect the impact that his invented languages have added to his best-selling works. Moreover, his “broad strokes” approach to grammar conventions and minimal invented word count is evidence that fictional languages, as textual agents, can effectively convey meaning even when writers do not necessarily classify themselves as linguistically talented or include highly developed creations within their works. Martin, in his succinct response, does not reveal any new or unfamiliar strategies in his explanation of language development; rather, his statement highlights the use of essential narrative elements that are required for successful fiction in all its forms. That is, aspects of voice, setting, character development and plot.

Invented language as a textual agent According to Peter Stockwell, “all creative fiction depends, to a greater or lesser degree, on the difference between our actual world and the imagined world of text” (2006, 3). Within this context, the primary functions of creative language are to delineate this distance between worlds and to add plausibility to the text. Richard Adams explained how he used delineation to create his invented language of Lapine in Watership Down, from the elemental construction of words—to which he gave a “kind of wuffy, fluffy sound”—to more thoughtful considerations: Lapine was invented word by word in the course of writing. This took place wherever a rabbit word was needed rather than words used by human beings. For example, “going above ground to feed” is a phrase hardly needed by human beings. But rabbits would need a single word—a word they quite often needed to use, for example silfay. Again, tharn was a rabbit word meaning stupefied or paralysed with fear (2005, xiv).

This approach illustrates how fictional language can be used as a textual agent to convey narrative, and how it acts as a conduit between the writer and reader to provide information about characters and the invented worlds in which they live. As a literary tool, it is a condiment, of sorts, that enables the writer to scaffold text, develop character traits and cultural nuances, and to create environments for imagined worlds. An invented language instantly delineates the speaker from both the reader’s world and other characters within the novel who do not share that character’s language or dialect, thus establishing a unique voice and point

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of difference. As a tool, it has been used to depict all manner of races and beings ranging from animals and humans to aliens and invented beasts. Edgar Rice Burroughs constructed the ape language of Mangani for his fictional species of great apes, which feature from the beginning of his series in his first novel Tarzan of the Apes (1914). Similarly, Tolkien created at least fifteen Elvish languages in combination with several fully developed examples for various races of invented creatures in Middle-earth; each containing separate linguistic features that reveal character traits specific to each one. According to Lo Bianco, Tolkien’s languages, and the evolution of them, are indicative of real world languages and the cultural distinctions that they disclose: [T]he hard-to-learn languages of the ancient tree-like Ents, described as repetitive and poor sounding; the slow changing language of the Dwarfs, with its secret discourses and private speech; and the Black Speech of the Orcs, cobbled together from other languages as if to reflect their lack of virtue (2004, 12).

Galach, which is the common tongue spoken by all citizens within in Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune is described, within his work, as the terminology of the Imperium. As a writing strategy, this shared language effectively delineates Herbert’s invented worlds from the reader’s world with a collectively profound and distinct difference, and establishes an avenue of communication between interracial characters that negates the need for translation by the author. Artistic languages are named partly because of their ornamental capacity and ability to enrich the physical and political background of the imagined world. This characteristic makes it a valuable tool for writers, like Martin who creates worlds containing multiple races, cultures and landscapes. His harsh, unyielding landscapes inhabited by the fierce Dothraki race correlates with the tribe’s language and brutal cultural nuances. In contrast, the lush city of Quarth is suited to his refined characters who speak Valyrian. The stark dialectical language of Nadsat, used by members of a teen subculture in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), helps to create a threatening atmosphere, and enhances the scenes and themes of ultra-violence within the novel. It serves the thematic purpose of increasing the reader’s involvement with the antihero, and narrator (Alex), ‘by pitching the reader into Alex’s mind more effectively than if the narrative had been written entirely in standard English’ (Stockwell 2006, 6). Similarly, the political environment portrayed in Nineteen Eighty-Four is enhanced by Newspeak which, was explained within the text, as politically purposeful:

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Chapter Seven Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it (Orwell 1949, 46).

The controlled language, which, in the novel, was created by the totalitarian state, is used as a tool to limit freedom of thought and concepts that pose a threat to the regime. Any form of thought alternative to the party’s construct, such as freedom, self-expression, individuality or peace, is classified as thoughtcrime. It is interesting to note that Orwell deplored the English of his day, and published his opinions in an essay called The Politics of the English Language (1946). His arguments within this paper reflect the underlying political themes within Nineteen Eighty-Four in statements such as “but if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better” (260). An equally engaging use of fictional language can be seen in examples where common words within the constructed language are purposefully omitted in order to accentuate political and/or environmental themes. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s science fiction novel The Dispossessed (1974), she deliberately omits words for some common objects and animals such as forests and horses since the environment is mostly dry and has little vegetation. The absence of money and property within Le Guin’s imagined world means that words such as gambling are also redundant. These purposeful omissions, ironically, add plausibility to the political and natural environment and offer a realistic platform from which to build narrative. Building elements of characterisation, setting and atmosphere through invented language helps to develop meaning and, where created languages are used as plot devices, they can also heighten suspense and enhance audience engagement with the narrative. The lines of translatable Gnommish symbols that run along the footer of the Artemis Fowl novels form a riddle relating to the storyline. The character of Artemis Fowl is the only human to speak Gnommish fluently, which enables the author (Eoin Colfer) to explain plot-worthy information to the reader via his main character. In this way, Colfer can progress the narrative, via Artemis Fowl’s translations, to those who do not possess the gift of tongues. J. K. Rowling created Parseltongue, the language of snakes, for her series of Harry Potter novels (1997- 2007). To a human who cannot speak it, the words are similar to the hissing of a snake. Harry is one of only a few wizards who can speak and understand Parseltongue and Rowling uses this fact as a plot device throughout her books, by connecting the language to a problem or mystery that Harry and his friends need to solve.

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For example, Harry could only unlock the spell to open the Chamber of Secrets by speaking Parseltongue, and this, of course, underscores his role as the central protagonist of the series.

Fictional languages and language-related theory Many novels and stories use created language to speculate about linguistic science, particularly in the area of linguistic theory. In Ria Cheyne’s work on created languages in science fiction, she notes that the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (which is the idea that the language that people speak affects the way that they think) is a commonly showcased example. For writers of fictional languages, this suggests that changing the language which a person (or society) speaks will change their thinking patterns as well. This concept has been embraced and explored by a number of writers. Ian M. Banks, the author of the utopian series of novels called The Culture (1987-2012), constructed a society which, in turn, designed the language of Marain as a method of societal control and to exploit the notion that language influences thought. Banks explains the language in the following way: Marain is a synthetic language created towards the very beginning of the Culture with the specific intention of providing a means of expression which would be a culturally inclusive and as encompassingly comprehensive in its technical and representational possibilities as practically achievable—a language, in short, that would appeal to poets, pedants, engineers and programmers alike (Banks 2011, para. 1).

Similarly, Láaden—the language created by Suzette Haden Elgin, for her novel Native Tongue (1984)—was initially designed to test the SapirWhorf hypothesis. Elgin, who was interested in determining whether the development of a language aimed at expressing the views of women would shape a culture, constructed the language components with feminist expression in mind. Lo Bianco suggests that Elgin’s language (as a project): speculates about what impact a language that expresses fundamentally different notions rooted in female experience and perception would have (or have had) on American culture (2004, 11).

Another example of invented language that makes a strong SapirWhorphian connection between language and thought is Orwell’s

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Newspeak. The austere language, invented for his novel Nineteen-EightyFour, was designed to cut down existing vocabulary in order to diminish the capacity for complex or subversive thought.

Conclusion Invented language, when used as a literary device in fiction literature, is, in essence, an artistic creation. As a textual agent, it serves to enhance narrative elements and reader plausibility regardless of its complexity. This ability to enrich and ornament the spoken language of characters and the landscapes of imagined worlds is evidenced in works with few invented words as well as novels with highly developed language systems. The creation of words in order to detail objects, characters and cultural or political distinctions establishes an immediate difference and sense of foreignness that, for the reader, delineates the real from the imagined world portrayed in the text. This delineation facilitates reader immersion and allows the author to convey central themes and progress plot designs via the narrative. In addition to this, the application of language theory can be a complimentary when combined with fictional language. The intriguing idea that the language that we use can influence our thoughts (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis) is a powerful literary tool which has been embraced by science fiction and fantasy writers, in particular. The use of invented language, in fiction, has an immediate effect on the reader and also a broader influence outside the reading experience, with evidence that some fictional language permeates the narrative to reside, with a tangible identity and presence, within the real world.

References Adams, Michael 2011, From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages, Oxford University Press, New York. Adams, Richard 2005, Watership Down, Scribner, New York. Banks, Iain, M. 1987-2012, The Culture (series), Macmillan, London. Blish, James 1958, A Case of Conscience, The Ballantine Publishing Company, New York. Burgess, Anthony 1962, A Clockwork Orange, William Heinemann, London. Burroughs, Edgar, R. 1914, Tarzan of the Apes, A. C. McClurg, New York. Cheyne, Ria 2008, ‘Created languages in science fiction’, Science Fiction

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Studies, vol. 35, pp 386–403. Chozick, Amy 2011, ‘Athhilezar? Watch your fantasy world language’, New York Times, viewed 5 September 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/arts/television/in-game-ofthrones-a-language-to-make-the-world-feelreal.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 Colfer, Eoin 2001, Artemis Fowl, Disney Hyperion Books, New York. Conley, Tim and Cain, Steven 2006, Encyclopaedia of Fictional and Fantastic Languages, Greenwood Publishing Group, Santa Barbara. Elgin, Suzette, H. 1984, Native Tongue, DAW Books, New York. Fitzgerald, Francis. S. 1925, The Great Gatsby, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York. Garcia, Ello, M. and Antonsson, Linda 2001, Westeros: The A Song of Fire and Ice Domain, Interview with George R. R. Martin, The Citadel, “So Spake Martin”, viewed 10th September 2014, http://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Entry/1250/ Game of Thrones 2011, Television series, H.B.O., New York. Herbert, Frank 1965, Dune, Chilton Books, New York. Higley, Sarah, L. 2007, Hildegard of Bingen’s Unknown Language: An Edition, Translation and Discussion, Palgrave Macmillan, New York. Le Guin, Ursula 1972, The Dispossessed, Harper & Row, New York. Lewis, Clive, S. 1938-1945, The Space Trilogy, The Bodley Head, London. Little, Brown Book Group, 2009, Ian M. Banks, A Few Notes on Marain by Ian M. Banks, viewed 15th September 2014, http://trevorhopkins.com/banks/a-few-notes-on-marain.html Lo Bianco, Joseph 2004, “Invented languages and new worlds: a discussion of the nature and significance of artificial languages”, English Today, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, vol. null, no 2, pp 8–18. Martin, George, R. R., 1996 –, A Song of Fire and Ice (series), Bantam Spectra, New York. Okrent, Arika 2009, In the Land of Invented Languages, Speigal & Grau, New York. Orwell, George 1946, “Politics and the English language”, Horizon, vol. 13, no. 76, pp 252–265. —. 1949, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Martin Secker and Warburg Limited, London. Robbins, Susan 2013, Zmogus Ir Zodis, “Beauty in language: Tolkien’s phonology and phonaesthetics as a source of creativity and inspiration for the Lord of the Rings”, Lithuanian University of Educational

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Sciences, vol.1, pp 183–190. Stockwell, Peter 2006, “Invented Language in Literature”. In: Keith Brown, (Editor-in-Chief) Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics, Second Edition, vol. 6, pp 3–10, Elsevier, Oxford. Tolkien, John, R. R. 1937, The Hobbit, George Allen & Unwin, London. —.1954–1955, The Lord of the Rings (series), George Allen & Unwin, London. Whorf, Benjamin, & Carroll, John 1956, Language, Thought, And Reality: Selected Writings Of Benjamin Lee Whorf, Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. Zamenhof, Ludwik 1887, Unua Libro, Dr. L. L. Zamenhof, Warsaw.

CHAPTER EIGHT FAULT-LINES: CREATIVITY AND THE LURE OF LANGUAGE IN THE CARPATHIANS DOMINIQUE HECQ

As is now well-established, Janet Frame’s work defies all categorisations, including that of literary genre. This is especially true of The Carpathians (Frame 2005), a text in which genre blur is instrumental in setting up a narrative quest. It is a journey over and through the writing life tracing points of rupture and growths, storying the creative process and of the idea of what an author is. This quest posits resistance to and continuity with the past, not only the past of the literary canon, but a private past from which as an artist Janet Frame has designed multiple escapes. Re-entering old time in a new space leads to experiment and innovation, but it is also an act that pays homage to human creativity. This presupposes a certain relationship to language, one whereby the artist is both outside and inside the body of the text and the text of the body. In a sense, then, The Carpathians engages in a performative parody of the creative process that defies the constraints of literary criticism and theory only to affirm the force of art as a human practice. This chapter explores the ways in which this text stages the work of creativity as a constant bridging of the gap between world and word, self and other, fact and fiction, art and science, madness and sanity in order to re-assess the epistemological thrust of such a gesture. It does so by examining the blood-lines deployed in the macro structure of the book and the fault-lines apparent in its micro fissures. In particular, it considers the articulation of time-space as embedded in the central metaphor of the book through a coupling of two concepts—the Memory Flower and the Gravity Star—in relation to the creative process. In The Carpathians, Frame’s appreciation of imagination, her rendition of the role of memory in the creative process and probing of the limits of language is first and foremost a homage to human creativity as a

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labyrinthine process that curiously follows fault-lines and blood-lines. This process is predicated on encounters between binary opposites— especially fact and fiction and time and space—and the filling of gaps that exist between these binaries at the level of representation and being. Thus the creative process is both an “imposture” (Frame 2005: 118) a blurring of fact and fiction; it is also a (re)generative act as the fusion of Memory Flower and Gravity Star in one mixed metaphor suggests. Through putting into words the gestation, composition and production of the book as a fusion of fact and myth—Memory Flower and Gravity Star the book (re)stories creativity. Crucially, words not only cover “the invisible gap in the fabric of space and time” (Frame 2005: 135), they cover “everything” (Frame 2005: 65). But what does this covering up entail, and what does it tell us about Frame’s relationship to language? I posit here that this relationship is one of “extimacy”i. In other words I suggest that Frame relates to language both from within and from without as is best illustrated in the character and “creative practice” of Mattina in The Carpathians. The Carpathians is a complex text, a novel, we could say, which incorporates the tropes of poetry, the conventions of multiple narrative approaches and the discourses of cultural politics to interrogate the question of “accepted knowledge” (Delrez 2002: xv). As such, it dismantles the “certainty of truth” (Frame 2005: 83). At the literal level it tells the story of Mattina Brecon, a rich New Yorker, wife of failed novelist Jake Brecon and mother of fledgling novelist John Henry Brecon, who travels to Puamahara, a country-town in the South Island of New Zealand and “finds herself caught up in a catastrophe of identity and cultural disintegration” (West 2006: 9). The novel is in four parts. Told in Mattina’s words, the first part is mimetic and the point of view is omniscient. The second part is the work of Dinny Wheatstone, a local of Kowai Street who may be seen as Mattina’s alter-ego; it mainly consists of visual descriptions of daily events in Kowai Street told in first person limited point of view linking Mattina to Puamahara. The third part records a “folie à deux” (Frame 2005: 179), questioning whether Mattina is dreaming or awake, herself or her alter-ego, sane or insane. In the fourth part Mattina is back in New York and the narrative is seemingly given over to Jake after her death, and finally, to John Henry, the invisible “scriptor” (Barthes 1977: 142) who may have made up the whole story. Frame’s wager in The Carpathians, is not only to explore diverse creative modes and create a metafictional novel which defies narrative conventions, but also to highlight two types of relationship to language. Frame achieves this through parodic manoeuvres that inscribe a series of dichotomies as differential rapports between signifier, signified; literal,

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figurative; metonymy, metaphor; fact, fiction; self, other; animate, inanimate; singular, universal; myth, science; tragedy, comedy, etc. These differential rapports are exemplified in phrases such as “the human country of birth, meeting, parting, and death” (Frame 2005: 83), which describes human life in metonymic terms, and ‘the near distance downwards and far away’ (Frame 2005: 121), which conjures up the work of metaphor. These differential rapports are inscribed in the gap between signifier and signified, word and world, self and other, and indeed in the “invisible gap in the fabric of space and time” (Frame 2005: 85) which highlight the dichotomy between “the small words linked in deadly persuasion” (Frame 2005: 80) and those never spoken that withhold a truth (Frame 2005: 114), or those “composed of the real and the unreal that also withhold a truth in need of transcription” (Frame 2005: 176). The title of the novel underscores the gap between signifier and signified. The Carpathians are a chain of mountain ranges that stretch in an arc from the Czech Republic through Slovakia, Poland, Hungary and the Ukraine to Romania in the east and on to the Iron Gates on the Danube between Romania and Serbia in the south. As such The Carpathians has nothing to do with its accepted signified. In the novel the narrating voices are also divorced from the notion of a traditional narrator. Indeed, multiple narrative voices take turns assuming the role of narrator, including Mattina, who records the tales told her by the inhabitants of Kowhai Street, Puamahara, New Zealand and the self-proclaimed imposter writer, Dinah Wheatstone, Dinny for short. Upon Mattina’s death in Chapter twenty-eight, the reader assumes that the novelist is probably her husband, Jake Brecon, once a best-selling writer, but finds out on the last page of the book that the “author” is her son John Henry. Interestingly, the son bears the name of Mattina’s lover and before signing his name on the manuscript declares that both his parents died when he was young, that he never knew them and that Puamahara may never have existed. This series of fictional narrators describing memories and experiences beholden to multiple points of view becomes an analogy for different ways of apprehending “really and its parent noun” (Frame 2005: 79), accepted “reality” or the “real” that, for Lacan, escapes representation.ii Identity is elusive in The Carpathians and so is “reality”. The book begins with Mattina’s recounting her trip from New York city to Puamahara, where she rents a house at 24 Kowhai Street. The story becomes stranger as she becomes acquainted with her neighbours and meets Dinny Wheatstone, an artist and self-proclaimed “imposter” (Frame 2005: 73) whose typescript Mattina reads. It begins with a paradoxical statement about the imposture of being:

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Chapter Eight “The human race is an elsewhere race and I am an imposter in a street of imposters. I am nothing and no-one: I was never born. I am a graduate imposter, having applied myself from my earliest years to the study of the development of imposture as practiced in myself and in others around me…” (Frame 2005: 83).

In the eyes of Dinny Wheatstone, self-doubt clashes with the certainty of truth and in turn pits the personal against the universal. This dichotomous articulation is at the root of the imposture of being. Delivered with the certainty of one whose point of view hinges on what she “has merely ‘seen’” (Frame 2005: 83), as opposed to Mattina’s, who looks, listens, and feels, the point of this opening is to announce that “yet always there is no guarantee of truth” (Frame 2005: 83), a theme approached from multiple points of view in the novel. Dinny’s dilemma is the artist’s dilemma as it runs through Frame’s work, that is to seek a truth of representation and being which is bound to elude her by dint of the fact that she is a speaking being. As an artist, she has attempted to portray the elusive articulation of time and space, but the novel does not convey whether this was achieved. Even less, how this might have been achieved, for Dinny speaks a language that is incapable of signifying the gaps between birth and death, meeting and parting. It is a language that fails to account for ontological truth and communicative efficiency. These are the two components of her point of view. As an artist, she has understood her role to be as one to reconcile these opposite points of the compasses of ontology and communication. As a writer, she has done so by exploiting the metonymic axis of language. Consequently, reminiscing about early self-doubts Dinny extrapolates on the imposture of language, that is language understood as an act of communication: I questioned all replies, demanding proof, and proof came dressed in words, was identified by words; even the marvel of proof within music, painting, dancing, science, all art, came always dressed in words, while that mass of proof attainable only through the listening, watching heart, the language of feeling, that too became words, continuing to build the language of imposture (Frame 2005: 84).

The language of imposture in this instance is the recycling of words gleaned from the din of existing discourse and set in the conventions of the traditional narrative style of first-person limited point of view. Ironically, because of Dinny Wheatstone’s reliance on chronological time—which she achieves despite a proliferation of points of view wittily presented as acts of “dream-light robbery” (Frame 2005: 177)—Mattina loses her grip on time: “the runaway time, influenced by this imposter

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typescript, seemed to have removed the guiding presence from each day” (Frame 2005: 121). As she is done, she is completely disconnected from time’s constraint: “Her emergence from the typescript confus[es] her” and in particular she feels “that her hold on the passing of time ha[s] been lost” (Frame 2005: 169). Mattina’s relationship to language is changing from one of “inhabiting” to one of “being inhabited” by it. Deeply affected by the narrative, Mattina emerges from the typescript with a paradoxical sense of being, “at once meeting and parting, of being and non-being” (Frame 2005: 169). Mattina’s literal disorientation due to jet-lag and the need to acclimatise to unfamiliar skies and uses of language in part one has been unsettled by the embedded narrative of Dinny Wheatstone whose Janus-like vision of reality and of the invisible real behind it she is now compelled to adopt. Mattina is both within and without language, and soon to experience language itself as both imposed from within and from outside—in one word, as “extimate”. In part three, Mattina partly regains her point of view, but as the Gravity Star begins to exert its influence on Kowhai Street, “bearing its overwhelming unacceptable fund of new knowledge from millions of light-years and centuries of springtime” (Frame 2005: 180), her place of being appears to be invaded from the outside by another reality divorced from her own. The residents of Kowhai Street—although mostly strangers—have mastered the local idiom, which makes them imposters in the eyes of both Dinny and Mattina. But under the influence of the Gravity Star, they regress to a pre-linguistic state which renders them inarticulate. Ultimately they are reduced to a state of speechlessness and lack of being, which soon sees them expelled from Kowhai Street, Puamahara, New Zealand and all memories tied up with this small town. Told from Mattina’s point of view, this section is effective at a literal and realistic level because the reader is aware that Mattina has been unhinged by Dinny’s “imposter” narrative. As a result, Mattina fluctuates from states of alertness and consciousness to states of dreaming, hallucinating and loss of consciousness. Mattina hears things. It is “midnight when Mattina was awakened by the cries” (Frame 2005: 180). These cries operate as a Greek chorus from which Mattina and Dinny Wheatstone are excluded. Except for Dinny, the voices are those of her neighbours. However, their voices are not recognisable and their utterances make no sense: no part of the chorus had words of any recognisable language. The sounds were primitive, like the first cries of those who had never known or spoken words but whose urgency to communicate vowels, consonants; yet within and beyond the chorus, recognisable as long as the human brain held some

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Mattina sees things, too: she sees “the faces, the bodies, the clothes of the people of Kowhai Street” (Frame 2005: 182). Everyone looks distorted, with eyes ‘bright like animal eyes’ (Frame 2005: 182). And soon it is raining letters from all alphabets known to men and women in all languages imaginable, highlighting that the people of Kowhai Street—bar Mattina and Dinny (Frame 2005: 181)—tricked themselves to have inhabited a local language that they had appropriated, wrongly assuming some identification between word and referent. In contradistinction, Mattina and Dinny never had such pretension. As aspiring artists they are only too aware of the extimate dimension of language. Further proof of this mirage that one could ever inhabit language is the pile of letters that Mattina finds on her table-cloth in the wee hours of the morning when the rain has ceased and all is quiet again. Denouncing the imposture of language in this novel is finely modulated: language is an imposture only in its communicative dimension, and this includes the way we read a text as complex as The Carpathians. This ultimately draws attention to two types of relationship to language: either we are inhabiting or we are being inhabited by language—but as we shall see, there is a third way. These two types of relating to language hint at different creative modes, one aligned with the mimetic axis of language and the other gesturing to the metaphorical. The former, epitomised by Dinny’s writing and Jake’s ideal of narrative “cocooning” favours the gathering and recording of facts, while the second favours the absorbing and synthesising of facts imbued with feelings and ontological questions which take on a life of their own in the process. As such the latter is more interested in the butterfly than in the chrysalis inside the cocoon, or to put it more literally its concerns exceed the dimension of language as linguists understand it, for it comprises the legacy of love implicit in “chittering” (Frame 2005: 174) and loyalty to questioning “certainty” (Frame 2005: 174). This is the third way. This is Frame’s way. This is the artist’s way in Frame’s universe. In her quest for discovering the “invisible gap in the fabric of space and time” (Frame 2005: 85) Mattina seems to be confronted with that which has filled the “crevice” (Frame 1985: 170) at the heart of being, words that she has taken in—words that her body has incorporated, absorbed, processed and secreted back into the world: She noticed a small cluster like a healed sore on the back of her left hand. She picked at it. The scab crumbled between her fingers and fell on the

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table into a heap the size of a twenty-cent coin. Examining it, she discovered it to be a pile of minute letters of the alphabet, some forming minute words, some as punctuation marks; and not all were English letters—there were Arabic, Russian, Chinese and Greek symbols. There must have been over a hundred in that small space, each smaller than a speck of dust yet strangely visible as if mountain-high, in many colours and no colours, sparkling, without fire (Frame 2005: 185-86).

What Mattina’s body has produced are the raw materials of art. As such they partake of mimetic dichotomies staged as differential rapports between signifier, signified; literal, figurative; metonymy, metaphor; fact, fiction; self, other, etc. However, this passage hints at the fire that is necessary to ignite not creativity, but rather the synthesising part of the creative process as “the runaway time, influenced by this imposter typescript, seemed to have removed the guiding presence from each day” (Frame 2005: 121). This process and the transformation of these dichotomies are epitomised in the fusing of the two concepts in the novel, namely the Memory Flower and the Gravity Star, a fusing that in itself constitutes a fortunate “mixed metaphor”, possibly hinting, metaphorically, at Frame’s definition of the creative act as a cross-pollinating of binary opposites and apparently distinct discourses. Frame’s invention of “the legend of Maharawhenua or Memory Land with its town of Puamahara” (Frame 2005: 29) tells the story of a woman who retrieves the memory of the land and eventually evolves into a tree bearing the Memory Flower that “grows always from the dead” (Frame 2005: 35). The Gravity Star, an actual scientific discovery, is described in the introduction as “a galaxy that appears to be both relatively close and seven billion years away”, a paradox understood as “being caused by the focussing of light from a distant quasar (starlike object) by the gravity of an intervening galaxy” (Frame 2005: 9). The conjunction of this invented myth and that scientific fact augurs: the prospect of the sudden annihilation of the usual perception of distance and closeness, the bursting of the iron bands that once made rigid the container of knowledge, the trickling away of the perception of time and space…yet if you examine it you see the widening crevices in what was believed always to be the foundation of perception (Frame 2005: 34).

Belonging respectively to the world of myth and science, the Memory Flower and the Gravity Star are made to co-exist in a creative process that requires its own mode of apprehending the ‘real’, its own way of conveying it in language, and its own fictional conventions.

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This collusion between modes of apprehending the real as having to do with the articulation of time-space in particular calls up Bakhtin’s “chronotope,” his idea of how various narratives construct, represent, internalise time and place, and turn it into language: “the inner connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed as literature” (Bakhtin 1981: 84). Both Frame and Bakhtin derive their stages of change and creative modes, from ideas of binaries and ensuing power relationships, in particular, society and nature. Bakhtin traces the “chronotope” from a point where the individual has no power to make change to a point where the individual takes over, becoming involved in decision-making and hence contributing to personal destiny. With Frame, and especially in The Carpathians, we begin with pure myth, where the mind of the protagonist is divorced from the environment and strives to attune to it imaginatively. Interestingly, Bakhtin adapts the notion of chronotope from Einstein, and while he concedes that the ‘special meaning it has in relativity theory [it] is not important for our own purposes’, adding that ‘we are borrowing it for literary criticism almost as a metaphor (almost, but not entirely)’ (Bakhtin 1981: 84). This is quite uncanny in relation to The Carpathians, and in particular with regard to the coupling of the concepts of the Memory Flower, a myth made up by Frame, and the Gravity Star, a fact drawn from physics. In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to movements of time, plot, history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope (Bakhtin 1981: 84).

Let us extend the relativity metaphor to the “overwhelming unacceptable fund of new knowledge from millions of light-years and centuries of springtime” (Frame 2005: 180) akin to Frame’s idea of composition as accretion of points of view field, of space charged with energy; points of view join time and space into a four-dimensional entity where locations are measured independently of fixed Newtonian concepts of an unmoving void containing forces that act on independent objects. Rather, time and space are intimately blended, in a way that pertains to an “extimate” relation to language as imaginative construct, namely as an entity which links up with Einstein’s “inertial frame,” a system where Newton’s measurements prevail. Borrowing again from Einstein, we could scrutinise those frames, though uniting time and space, could still be thought of as a

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“time-like” or “space-like,” tilted more one way or more the other—the difference being one of aspect, not reference, more adjectival, say than nominal, as though differentials had been absorbed into the formula itself. So-called “relativity theory” may not be really relative. It rethinks notions of time and space in terms of a hyper-language by which all observers agree, absolutely, though not really, on relational gaps between events; it is just that these gaps, or separations, are ratios—intervals between events in a universe coded as mathematics (Hawking 1998. Italics mine). My point here is that, alongside similar lines, relations between events in the imaginative world of Frame can be viewed as time-like: new outcroppings of old and disparate voices in time find a field in the here and now that is the sum of an elaborate creative process. As such, the creative process can be conceived of as space-like continuum, situated in relation to external and internal events, factual and imagined differentials organised as a journey through space, a place that is also an archive for old stories and memories of individuals encountered in the text, as well as the fertile ground for the creation of new myths. It is telling that in The Carpathians only the poets can counteract the effects of the new galaxy, for they have always lived in “unimaginable reality” (Frame 2005: 92). They are liars and imposters only by dint of the fact that language in its communicative and ever evolving dimension is a lure. Or as Lacan would say, a “semblant”, that is an object of enjoyment which is both seductive and deceptive (Lacan, 2001 [1971]: 14; Lacan, 2006 [1971-72: 14).iii This synergy with Lacanian thought is uncanny. For all her blurring of distinctions between there and here, then and now, between voices speaking, the constant mingling of perspectives, Frame’s work is not an apology for “trickerism”. Rather, her work is a homage to human creativity in that it suggests artists live through and for the pretence which is representation. I will leave it to Janet Frame to generalise upon a Thesean theme that for all its deceptive character language remains the most valuable instrument of the human race: And although the inevitable deceit also of language has built for us a world of imposture, we do survive within it, fed by the spark, at times by the fire of the recognition of the hinterland of truth (Frame 2005: 69).

Transformations as elaborations that lead us back to where we are effectively link Frame with Bakthin and Lacan. Such movements highlight what already is in place through the interplay of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary. What is so stunning, though is the way in which Frame not only dramatises the impulse to balance word and thing, thus highlighting a certain “extimate” relationship to language—one whereby the artist is both

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outside and inside the body of the text and the text of the body—she also stages the desire to have the last word, as it were. In The Carpathians, this is achieved through a complex dismantling of binaries at the level of representation and being which entails parodic manoeuvres. The quest staged here over and through the writing life, though it cannot be verified, cannot be denied. And so the poet does not really leave the scene of writing.

Notes i

Extimacy, from the French “extimate”, is a late Lacanian neologism derived yet not opposed to “intimacy”. As such it denotes phenomena that impinge on the self / other, inside / outside boundaries. Extimacy is bound up with the real as that which cannot be said. ii This reference to Lacan’s “real” is not gratuitous as it is also Frame’s understanding of the word, playing as she does on the fragility of linguistic categories. See, for example Mattina’s repressed comments in a conversation with Ed Shannon where she seemingly agrees to understanding what he means and answers “I guess I do”… not admitting to him that most of her life had been spent on the trail of really and its parent noun. (Frame 2005: 79 iii For Lacan, the signifier is the semblant par excellence (see Lacan, Jacques 2006 [1971-72] Le séminaire, livre XVIII : D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant (Jacques-Alain Miller, ed), Paris: Seuil

References Bakthin, Mikhail. 1981. Forms of time and the chronotope in the novel. In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, eds Michael Holquist, Caryl Emerson. Michael Holquist (trans). Austin: University of Austin Press, 84-258. Barthes, Roland. 1977 [1968]. Death of the author. In Image, Music, Text, Stephen Heath (trans), London: Harper Collins, 142-148. Delrez, Marc. 2002. Manifold Utopia: The Novels of Janet Frame. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.Delrez, Marc. 2009. Conquest of surfaces: Aesthetic and political violence in the works of Janet Frame. In Frameworks: Contemporary criticism on Janet frame, Cronin, Jan & Drichel, Simone (eds). Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 135-154. Drichel, Simone. 2009. Signposts to a world that is not even mentioned: Janet Frame’s ethical transcendence. I n Frameworks: Contemporary criticism on Janet frame, Cronin, Jan & Drichel, Simone (eds). Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 182-212. Frame, Janet. 1985. Owls Do Cry. London: The Women’s Press.

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—. 2005. The Carpathians. Auckland: Vintage. Hawkey, MC. 2000. Imagination and empathy in the novels of Janet Frame, MA thesis, University of Canterbury, http://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/handle/10092/6942 (accessed 11 May 2014). Hawking, Stephen. 1998. A Brief History of Time: From Big Bang to Black Holes. New York: Bantam. Lacan, Jacques. 1966. Écrits. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. —. 2006 [1971-72]. Le séminaire, livre XVIII : D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant (Jacques-Alain Miller, ed). Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Panny, Judith Dell. 1991. Allegory in the fiction of Janet Frame, PhD Thesis, Massey University, New Zealand. West, Patrick. 2006. Abjection as “Singular Politics” in Janet Frame’s The Carpathians, M/C Journal, 9(5), http://journal.media-culture.org.au/ 0610/05-west.php (accessed 22 August 2014).



CHAPTER NINE WRITING ACROSS PLATFORMS: ADAPTING CLASSICS THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA JESSICA SEYMOUR

In 2012, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) was adapted into the web series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (LBD) (Su & Green 2012a). The series of YouTube videos explored the lives of the Bennet sisters and their family’s troubling financial situation, their work and education, and the arrival of their new neighbour Bing Lee. The LBD’s storyline was supplemented through various social media platforms, including Twitter, Tumblr and Google+, and the series won several awards, including an Emmy for Best Original Interactive Program (2013), the TV.com award for Best Web Series (2012), and the Best Interactive Series award from the International Academy of Web Television and Streamy (2013). Since then, there has been a surge in YouTube adaptations of classic novels. These adaptations use a classic novel as their basis, usually one in the public domain to avoid paying royalties and dealing with copyright. Actors portray the characters in the video blog, while a “transmedia” team supports the narrative and keeps the characters’ social media sites updated over the course of the series. These adaptations and re-imaginations of classic narratives update them for a contemporary audience and offer an interesting new model for storytelling. By engaging with the same social media as fans, the characters are constructed as existing as online “bodies” who exist and engage in the virtual space. In a similar manner to real-world internet users, the characters exist and engage in the virtual space as (assumed) extensions of a physical body. The link between the characters and the audience is intensified because the two groups occupy the internet’s virtual space and use transmedia to engage with each other. This is a particularly engaging new style of storytelling because not

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only does it establish the audience as a peripheral character and occasional collaborator, the narrative itself is structured to allow the secondary characters in the story the opportunity to offer their insights and tell the audience their side of the story. Foucault’s (1986) concept of “heterotopia” is particularly pertinent to a discussion about online adaptations of classic narratives, where there is scope for multiple storylines, characters backstories and motivations. Foucault (1986) writes that the heterotopia contains spaces which have “the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect” (24). These secondary (or counter) narratives are carried by secondary characters and cannot be told through traditional media, such as books and film, because these mediums exist in a limited physical space. It allows the narrative to move in several different directions at once, and allows the audience to approach the main narrative from multiple perspectives.

Transmedia and textual bodies This chapter explores how the various online social media platforms further audience engagement and the development of background characters in web series adaptations of classic novels. The analysis is mainly concerned with the structure of these adaptations and how each series employs transmedia to give voice to secondary characters. By transmedia, I am employing the term used by the LBD team to mean the use of multiple online spaces for narrative production (see Bushman 2013). As written elsewhere: [The] production of online texts alongside traditional narratives can be considered “transmedia storytelling”—but I would argue that this is not, in fact, storytelling because the use of transmedia in these circumstances only extend an original narrative and build upon what is already known. They do not tell the story in the way that traditional media such as books, films and TV series do (Seymour 2014: 112).

“Transmedia” generally means different types of media, such as print and audio-visual, but the term is used in this paper to mean a narrative spread over different media platforms online (Bushman 2013). I followed the web series as they unfolded while keeping track of the characters’ social media pages, their interactions with fans, and fan commentary outside of the narrative world in forums such as Tumblr and YouTube comments. Methodologically speaking, this chapter draws from the method of netnographic research outlined in Xun and Reynolds (2010),

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Applying netnography to market research: The case of the online forum. Xun and Reynolds approach online research as an extension of ethnographic (or non-participant) research, which is based in the observation of a textual discourse or dialogue. Their research presumes that online users are aware that their textual communications are open to public access, and therefore suggest that informed consent is not required for the reproduction of these communications in academic discourse. Included in the scope of this analysis are the completed web series, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (Su & Green 2012a), The Nick Carraway Chronicles (Stewart 2013), The Autobiography of Jane Eyre (Aref & Babins 2013), Welcome to Sanditon (Su & Green 2013a), and the ongoing Green Gables Fables (Whitson, Harmon & Trotter 2014). Audience interactions with the adaptation and producers are in the public domain, and the scope of enquiry includes audience reactions, which are readily available without a password (thus excluding Google+ and private blogs). I have chosen these series because they are popular, with several thousand subscribers each, and they model the use of transmedia to support and further the narratives, with varying degrees of success. The characters in these YouTube adaptations are reduced to textual bodies in the context of the internet space. ‘Textual bodies’ exist in the online environment as a conglomeration of social media profiles and activity, which serve to create an image or schema of the character (Seymour 2014). They are portrayed in the online space in the same manner as audience members construct themselves. Within the social media space, the ‘self’ exists as a deliberate construction by internet users (Ashford 2009), and by creating a virtual ‘self’ for the fictional characters, it creates a relationship of mutual engagement between the audience, the characters and the story (Seymour, Roth & Flegel 2015). This also creates a collaborative and occasionally adversarial relationship between the producers and fans, when fan practices affect the narrative beyond the expected conclusion, which has been discussed elsewhere (Seymour, Roth & Flegel 2015). However, the relationship between the fans and the producers is beyond the scope of this paper. When these YouTube adaptations begin, they construct the fictional characters as textual bodies, and this creates an opportunity for them to create a heterotopic space where the secondary and minor characters in classic narratives can be built upon and extended in a manner which the original, physical novel could not support (Seymour 2014). One of the most engaging methods of world building utilised in these transmedia narratives is Twitter. They extend the narrative beyond the main plot as portrayed in the main character’s video-blog (or vlog). The producers need

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to get to the essence of the character’s interactions and distil their thoughts and motivations into one-hundred and forty characters or less. The forum allows audiences to contact the characters in-world, ask them questions and discuss narrative events.

@Replies and #AudienceEngagement The audience engages with the textual body as they would with a reallife person existing beyond the online space (Seymour 2014). This creates a space for the audience and the characters to develop a relationship, which transcends their fictional nature. In this way, the secondary characters build a rapport with the viewers and share their backstories and motivations. Green Gables Fables (Whitson, Harmon & Trotter 2014) is an adaptation of Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery (1908). The main character, Anne Shirley, is an orphan fostered by the Cuthbert siblings in Avonlea, Canada. Gilbert Blythe, who was cast and introduced to the viewers about halfway through the series, has several hundred Twitter followers (Blythe 2014). Like the LBD before it, Green Gables Fables introduced the main character’s love interest to the audience as a textual body, and so the audience knew his motivations and personality before his physical body was needed for the vlogs. This storytelling style relies on an online presence for each character, to build characterisation and plot, and, because the audience is allowed to develop a rapport with characters through their textual bodies, the line between reality and fiction is blurred. At the beginning of the series, before Anne is shown to have met Gilbert, his Twitter account was used mainly to share pickup lines with his followers (Blythe 2014: March 28). Anne and Gilbert’s meeting does not take place in the videos, although Anne recaps the encounter in the ninth episode, ‘Top Five Worst Flirting Techniques’ (Whitson, Harmon & Trotter 2014: April 16). Instead, their first meeting is live-tweeted by both Anne and Gilbert, as well as by the secondary characters, Josie Pye (2014a;b) and Rachel Lynde (2014). On the back of this meeting, Gilbert is portrayed ceasing the pickup lines and, instead, tweeting about interesting facts and his rowing training to show a change in his interests from potential flirting techniques to attention-seeking behaviours. Ruby Gillis’s Twitter feed (2014: April 13) details her ongoing romances, while Josie Pye’s feed makes continued allusions to her crush on Gilbert and her jealousy of Anne (2014: June 11a;b). Their personal interactions, with the other characters and the audience, create an illusion of reality, which is then supported when they appear physically in Anne’s

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vlogs. Jane Andrews, who does appear on the vlogs, helps Anne edit her short stories, and so her Twitter feed is primarily made up of grammar and vocabulary tips (2014: July 7a;b). Each of these twitter accounts is dedicated to fleshing out the secondary characters before they engage directly with Anne on camera. This allows the adaptation to foreshadow characterisation in possible future appearances, and this storytelling technique allows the producers to establish character personalities, relationships, and motivations which the vlog format—as a limited perspective focused mainly on Anne in front of a camera in her bedroom—necessarily excludes. The Autobiography of Jane Eyre (Aref & Babins 2013), an adaptation of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847), likewise employs Twitter to flesh out secondary characters and their relationships with each other beyond Jane’s limited experience. There is a significant lack of social media engagement on Jane’s part, as she only tweeted seventy-four times during the year-long series, but the heterotopia is supported and established through subplots which are portrayed through the secondary characters’ Twitter feeds. A company Twitter account for Thornfield Exports (2014), which is Rochester’s company, was also created to develop and portray the subplot of Rochester’s financial difficulties in the wake of Jane leaving him. Another subplot, the relationship between Mr Rochester and his daughter Adele, plays out over their respective Twitter feeds (@Pilotsthoughts & @AdeleCRochester). Before Jane leaves Rochester in the wake of his attempted bigamy, she is portrayed on the vlog telling him that he needs to make more of an effort to connect with his daughter (Aref & Babins 2013: January 9). What follows in the wake of Jane’s escape, is a series of tweets between Rochester and his daughter that show a more playful and supportive tone to their relationship, indicating that Rochester has taken Jane’s rebuke to heart. While Jane is absent and cannot show Rochester and Adele interacting on her vlog, the heterotopia which plays out through the transmedia narrative allows the audience to experience the reconnection between father and child which is not part of the main narrative action. The Nick Carraway Chronicles (Stewart 2013) is an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1925) The Great Gatsby, and it demonstrates a somewhat less successful venture into the social media production of characters’ textual bodies. Like the Autobiography of Jane Eyre (Aref & Babins 2013), the series regulars in the Chronicles did not tweet frequently, but this lack of engagement in social media is not made up for by subplots or significant character development. The potential for a heterotopia is stifled by this lack of engagement. The series creators

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launched the Twitter accounts to establish textual bodies for the characters several months prior to the narrative’s beginning, and their relationships with each other were established in this way. There is, however, significantly less engagement through these Twitter accounts and in some cases the characters stopped tweeting after the vlogs began in earnest. In fact, the show runner Bryan Stewart, who plays the title character, frequently broke character through the Nick Carraway Twitter account (2014) to tell the viewers news about the series. In this case, the narrative heterotopia is lessened by the lack of engagement through transmedia, and as a result, the Chronicles were significantly less successful than the other series I have examined here; the series only attracted just over a thousand subscribers. Welcome to Sanditon (Su & Green 2013a) is a particularly effective transmedia adaptation, being an extension and conclusion of Austen’s unfinished work Sanditon (1817). The series is about a budding commercial town where appearances are more important than reality; the adaptation extends this idea by creating a town online through audience roleplaying and collaboration. It was produced by the same team as the LBD and the, currently running, Emma Approved (Su & Green 2013c). Welcome to Sanditon allows the audience to become actual characters in the narrative by fleshing out the virtual town through their roleplaying Twitter accounts, blogs, and response videos, where audience members perform as original characters in the context of the fictional, virtual world (Welcome to Sanditon 2013). Welcome to Sanditon is, arguably, the least critically successful series examined in this paper. The series had more subscribers than The Nick Carraway Chronicles (Stewart 2013), but YouTube comments demonstrate viewer dissatisfaction with the series. While the roleplayers enjoyed creating the virtual town and characters which inhabited it, the viewers who were not roleplaying felt marginalised by the narrative which portrays most of the subplots off-screen through blogs and Twitter accounts.

Heterotopia and characters’ agency Subplots can be portrayed onscreen, thanks to the heterotopic nature of the YouTube adaptations’ storytelling style, by having characters with separate YouTube accounts create their own vlogs. The LBD (Su & Green 2012a) had additional vlogs running concurrently to the main narrative which allowed secondary female characters such as Georgiana Darcy (Su & Green 2012b), Charlotte’s sister Maria (Su & Green 2012c) and Lydia Bennet (Su & Green 2012d) to give their own interpretations of events and

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portray characterisation and subplots beyond what is seen in Lizzie’s vlogs. These subplots had a minor effect on the main narrative as shown through Lizzie’s vlog, but they were not compulsory to understanding the story. For example, Maria (Su & Green 2012c) begins vlogging shortly after Charlotte accepts Mr Collins’ job offer; a modern update of the original text’s offer of marriage. Lizzie becomes upset when Charlotte leaves to work for Mr Collins, and Maria’s vlogs feature Charlotte being emotionally affected by her separation from her best friend. This portrayal establishes Charlotte’s desire for reconciliation with Lizzie. This was an interesting storytelling choice; not only does it examine Charlotte’s motivation, which is only alluded to in the original text and other adaptations, it does so by prescribing agency to a frequently ignored or side-lined female character—Charlotte’s younger sister. Likewise, Georgiana Darcy’s (Su & Green 2012d) vlogs allow the audience to see Darcy’s attempts to find Wickham and save Lydia during the climax of the adaptation. Georgiana is portrayed as being crucial to that endeavour because she is the one who eventually makes contact with Wickham and finds out where he is (2013: February 12). Again, this subplot, while a satisfying portrayal of female agency and power in the series, is not crucial to understanding the story as it unfolds on Lizzie’s vlog. A heterotopia is established through the creation of multiple storylines, but engaging with the heterotopia is not a necessary part of the narrative. It is there, however, for those viewers who desire multiple points of view and insight into the various secondary characters. There is a nuance to the audience/narrative relationship in transmedia adaptations of classic novels because the audience knows, essentially, how the narrative will end (Seymour 2014). While they do not know how the adaptation will modernise particular elements of the original text, the audience has a reference for the narrative arc and has certain expectations about how it will play out. The transmedia format extends a level of power towards the audience, which is rarely seen, because they are able to engage directly with the characters, both main and secondary (Seymour 2014). In some cases, the fans attempt to use that power to warn characters of their impending mistakes or tease them by alluding to their future romantic attachments. As explored elsewhere (Seymour 2014; Seymour, Roth & Flegel 2015), the LBD used fan interactions to actively further the plot. When Lydia Bennet is shown to be dating George Wickham in her personal vlog (Su & Green 2012b), fans of the series took to Twitter to warn her to leave him. Lydia was established early in the narrative as a sensitive and

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insecure character, and so she is portrayed as particularly dependant on Wickham for acceptance and love. The audience reaction to the character solidifies Lydia’s dependence on him by apparently proving that everybody, even her fans, expect her to make poor decisions. In attempting to warn Lydia, the audience facilitated George’s manipulations by making her less willing to trust anyone but him. This brings up questions of ownership, textual engagement, and the producer/consumer relationship, but these questions have been explored elsewhere (Seymour 2014; Seymour, Roth & Flegel 2015) and are beyond the scope of this paper. The audience interacts with the textual bodies of fictional characters in the YouTube series as if they are actual people, but there is an element of dramatic irony in these interactions because the audience is aware of the original texts and how the story ought to end (Seymour, Roth & Flegel 2015). So the storytelling strategy of creating characters as textual bodies in the online space allows the audience to directly access these characters and build up a rapport, which makes them complicit in the narrative. They become emotionally invested in the story’s outcome, having gotten to know the characters over the several months, even years, of the story playing out (Seymour 2014).

Experiencing stories through social media The production of a heterotopia through transmedia is a particularly engaging new style of storytelling which constructs fictional characters as textual bodies in a similar manner to how real-world internet users construct themselves through social media. By engaging in the social media platforms occupied by the audience, each series bridges the gap between the story and the viewer, and creates a richer level of immersion. It is particularly interesting to see how social media platforms, such as Twitter, became crucial to the development of the narrative heterotopia, but these forms need to be used properly and actively in order to demonstrate the motivations of background characters and develop the subplots. In the case of The Nick Carraway Chronicles (Stewart 2013), which failed to utilise Twitter as extensively as the other examples, the heterotopia was underdeveloped and viewer engagement suffered. It is also important for audience engagement that the transmedia spaces make the heterotopia accessible, as demonstrated by Welcome to Sanditon (Su & Green 2013a), which failed to garner as much critical acclaim as the LBD because the various subplots and secondary characters were exclusive to the roleplaying fans, rendering the main narrative thin by comparison. As

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more narratives migrate online and we see the development of this storytelling technique through repeated experimentation, producers of transmedia narratives will learn to implement transmedia to get the most out of the narrative experience.

References Andrews, Jane 2014 @JustJaneAndrews, available from https://twitter.com/JustJaneAndrews (accessed 26 July 2014). —. July 7a ‘Funambulism (noun): tightrope walking’, available from https://twitter.com/JustJaneAndrews (accessed 26 July 2014). —. July 7b ‘Clishmaclaver (verb): casual chat and/ or gossip’, available from https://twitter.com/JustJaneAndrews (accessed 26 July 2014). Ashford, Chris 2009 ‘Queer theory, cyber-ethnographies and researching online sex environments’, Information & Communications Technology Law 18,3: 297-314. Aref, Nessa & Babins, Erika 2013 The Autobiography of Jane Eyre, available from http://theautobiographyofja.wix.com/jane-eyre (accessed 28 February 2013). —. 2014: January 9 ‘The Truth’, available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hogek-e6xU8&list=PL3NxAiyc89HP3wHV2y5mbwi2TidvocKZ&index=61 (accessed 11 January 2014). Austen, Jane 1813 Pride and Prejudice Penguin Books LTD, London 1995. Brontë, Charlotte 1847 Jane Eyre Reader’s Digest Pty Ltd, Sydney, 1995. Bushman, Jay, 2013 ‘Ask’ in The Loose-Fishery Blog, Published 1 March 2013, available from http://jaybushman.tumblr.com/post/44355638413/first-of-all-justwanted-to-say-that-i-think-the (accessed 1 March 2013). Blythe, Gilbert 2014 @Call_Me_Gil, available from https://twitter.com/Call_Me_Gil (accessed 26 July 2014). —. March 28 ‘You must be the square root of two, because you make me feel irrational. ;-)’ available from https://twitter.com/Call_Me_Gil (accessed 26 July 2014). Carraway, Nick (2013) @NickCarrawayNCC, available from https://twitter.com/NickCarrawayNCC (accessed 26 July 2014). Fitzgerald, F. Scott 1925 The Great Gatsby, Scribner, New York. Foucault, Michel 1986 ‘Of other spaces’, Diacritics 16,1: 22-27 Gillis, Ruby 2014 @RubyRedGillis, available from https://twitter.com/RubyRedGillis (accessed 26 July 2014).

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—. April 13 ‘I’m so lucky to have John in my life, he’s so sweet and kind. #blessed #datenight’ available from https://twitter.com/RubyRedGillis (accessed 26 July 2014) Lynde, Rachel 2014 @LyndeRachel, available from https://twitter.com/LyndeRachel (accessed 26 July 2014). —. April 17 ‘Oh, my. The stories one hears in the grocery store.’ available from https://twitter.com/LyndeRachel (accessed 26 July 2014). Montgomery, L.M. 1908 Anne of Green Gables, Sourcebooks, Inc., Naperville. Pye, Josie 2014 @josieberrypie, available from https://twitter.com/josieberrypie (accessed 26 July 2014). —. April 17a ‘wow can i just say some ppl have anger management issues? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?’ available from https://twitter.com/josieberrypie (accessed 26 July 2014). —. April 17b ‘that did NOT JUST HAPPEN WHat omg’ available from https://twitter.com/josieberrypie (accessed 26 July 2014). —. June 11a ‘done with school abd people in general being annoying’ available from https://twitter.com/josieberrypie (accessed 26 July 2014). —. June 11b ‘crazy in love’ available from https://twitter.com/josieberrypie (accessed 26 July 2014). Seymour, Jessica 2014 ‘Lizzie Bennet: Breaking the Fourth Wall Since 2012’ in Fan Studies: Researching Popular Audiences, Chauvel, Alice, Lamerichs, Nicolle & Seymour, Jessica (eds.), Inter-Disciplinary Press, United Kingdom, pp: 111-121. Seymour, Jessica, Roth, Jenny & Flegel, Monica 2015 ‘Lizzie Bennet: Storytelling, Fan-Creator Interactions, and New Online Models’ The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 4,2. Stewart, Brian 2013 The Nick Carraway Chronicles, available from https://www.youtube.com/user/ncchronicles/videos?sort=da&view=0& flow=grid (accessed 2 July 2013). Su, Bernie & Green, Hank 2012a The Lizzie Bennet Diaries available from http://www.lizziebennet.com/ (accessed 20 November 2013). Su, Bernie & Green, Hank 2012b The Lydia Bennet, available from http://www.youtube.com/user/TheLydiaBennet (accessed 20 February 2013). Su, Bernie & Green, Hank 2012c Maria Of The Lu, available from http://www.youtube.com/user/MariaOfTheLu (accessed 20 February 2013). Su, Bernie & Green, Hank 2012d Domino: Gigi Darcy, available from https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_ePOdU-

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b3xdh6_NmbLx6Uh0X3_48yuAJ (accessed 20 February 2013). —. 2013: February 12 ‘If Else – Ep: 5’, available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5przNqJOQrU&index=5&list=PL_e POdU-b3xdh6_NmbLx6Uh0X3_48yuAJ (accessed 20 February 2013). Su, Bernie & Green, Hank 2013a Welcome to Sanditon, available from http://www.welcometosanditon.com/ (accessed 13 November 2013). Su, Bernie 2013b Lydia responds, available at http://www.lizziebennet.com/lydia-responds/ (accessed 21 February 2013). Su, Bernie & Green, Hank 2013c Emma Approved, available from http://EmmaApproved.com (accessed 26 July 2014). Thornfield Exports 2014 @ExpThornfield available from https://twitter.com/ExpThornfield (accessed 26 July 2014). Whitson, Alicia, Harmon, Mandy & Trotter, Marie 2014 Green Gables Fables, available from https://www.youtube.com/user/greengablesfables/videos?sort=da&flo w=grid&view=0 (accessed 8 January 2014). —. April 16 ‘Top Five Worst Flirting Techniques’, available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VokqcaHmkhk (accessed 20 April 2014) Welcome to Sanditon 2013 Available at http://www.welcometosanditon.com/story/ (accessed 26 July 2014). Xun, Jiyao & Reynolds, Jonathan 2010 ‘Applying netnography to market research: The case of the online forum’ Journal of Targeting, Measurement and Analysis for Marketing 18,1: 17-31.  

CHAPTER TEN PLAYING WITH GAPS: COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND THE CREATIVE WRITER LISA SMITHIES

We can’t think of fragment without thinking of whole. (Lydia Davis 1987)

Introduction Lydia Davis is a writer who specialises in the fragmented. Her stories are often very short, only one or two lines, and when announcing her as the winner of The Man Booker International Prize in 2013, Sir Christopher Ricks highlighted how difficult it was to clearly define her work: Davis’s writings fling their lithe arms wide to embrace many a kind… Should we simply concur with the official title and dub them stories? Or perhaps miniatures? Anecdotes? Essays? Jokes? Parables? Fables? Texts? Aphorisms, or even apophthegms? Prayers, or perhaps wisdom literature? Or might we settle for observations? (Perloff 2014).

Davis herself asserts it is “really easier just to call them very short stories” (Matthews 2014). She maintains she can get away with calling them stories “as long as there is a bit of narrative, or just a situation” (Hoh 2013, 10); and that any fragment inevitably implicates a whole (Davis 1987). Rather than focussing on definitions of form, this chapter aims to address how Davis’s very short stories demonstrate “storyness” in cognitive literary terms; as well as examining how they fit with cognitive literary theorist, Ellen Spolsky’s, view of what constitutes literariness.

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In her book Gaps in Nature (1993), Spolsky utilises cognitive scientific theories to argue that our brain’s cognitive capacities, to receive and process information, are inherently imprecise. This, she contends, leads to “gaps”1 in our understanding that we inevitably fill creatively; and this creative cognitive gap-filling is a process fundamental to literary interpretation. In her words: There is a level of cognitive structure at which brains can be said to bridge gaps creatively in response to failures in understanding; these failures themselves are produced by the neurological equipment on which we depend for that understanding of the world. (1993, 2)

Spolsky states that while gaps are not a new idea in literary theory, there is little recognition that these gaps are “neither occasional nor random”. She also insists that “interpretive gappage” comes from our underlying cognitive systems rather than any individual reader’s response (2). Examining Davis’s very short stories from Spolsky’s cognitive literary position, this paper begins by outlining “modularity of mind”, the main scientific theory underpinning Spolsky’s work; it then examines her view of how and why the mind cognitively creates literary experiences. Close readings of Davis’s work follow, with emphasis on the creative writing process. Physically, the creative writing process involves combining, in various ways, on a page, the same seventy-five, or so, characters, available to any writer of English (Pinker 1997, 25). When discussing Davis’s very short stories in cognitive literary terms, the focus is on the information available—on the way she organises the words and punctuation on the page. In short, cognition refers to the brain’s capacity to process information. Our brains have evolved to take in complex information, categorise it and respond to it, in complex ways. Exactly how the brain does this is still hotly debated; however, this paper follows the widely accepted scientific assumption that, as Steven Pinker says, ‘the mind is what the brain does’ (1997, 21). In other words, there is no separation of mind and body. This is supported by cognitive scientists such as Antony Damasio (1994), George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1999), who argue for an embodied view of the mind and its processes, including cognition. While Spolsky draws on three influential cognitive scientific theories—Jerry Fodor’s “modularity of mind” (1983); Ray Jackendoff’s “preferences models” (1992); and Eleanor Rosch’s “fuzzy categorisation” (1999)—to make her literary arguments, given the necessary brevity of this paper, modularity will be my main focus.

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Modularity of mind Modularity of mind postulates that the mind operates in the same way as the rest of the human body, with modules or, as Noam Chomsky refers to them, “mental organs”, which are specialised innate neurological structures tailored to carry out their own specialised tasks, within a larger complex system (Pinker 1997, 31). In simple terms, we have specific brain regions and neurological pathways for processing specific types of information. Fodor’s original modularity of mind theory has been extensively debated and expanded, not only by Fodor himself (2001), but particularly by evolutionary psychologists, such as Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (1994, 2005), Steven Pinker (1997), and Dan Sperber (2001), who all favour a broad view of modularity based on “functional specialisation” that operates on all levels of the mind (Barrett and Kurzban 2006, 628-629). Whereas Fodor originally viewed only “peripheral” systems, such as vision, touch and smell, as modular, modularity theories have developed over the past twenty years to view most information processing systems of the mind as modular as well, including “what Fodor would have called ‘central’ processes, such as those underlying reasoning, judgment, and decision making” (Barrett and Kurzban 2006, 628). Rather than undermining Spolsky’s use of the modularity theory, these modifications to Fodor’s original theory make modularity more relevant to her notion of literary gaps, as it can be more broadly applied to all levels of cognitive processing. There is an evolutionary advantage to modularity, in having different receptors and processors instead of a single all-purpose one. As Pinker says, we all come with standard operating equipment and this equipment is successful due to its flexibility in responding to inputs (1997, 32-33). We are equipped to “respond variously to the various kinds of energy in the world”; therefore, “if one system fails all is not lost” (Spolsky 1993, 45). However, Spolsky argues, because each module is distinct and limited in the information it can process, there are necessarily gaps in the system. Spolsky contends that we are working within a limited system because understanding does not need to be a “logically watertight, foolproof system.” It only needs to be “good enough” (2002, 52). Indeed, not only is good enough, good enough, it is desirable. Human evolutionary success requires these gaps for flexibility, it “would actually be compromised by an entirely rigid, that is, dependable, representational system” (52). Spolsky maintains that this essential flexibility not only helps us to make sense of our everyday experiences, but literary experiences as well; that our minds creatively bridge these gaps, filling them analogously with

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memories, inferences or deductions (46). Furthermore, she contends that literature exploits intrinsic cognitive instabilities, playing with tensions, contradictions, ambiguities and multiplicities of meaning; and also that literature works within a “system of perception and thought that both produces and at the same time works at compensating for instability” (1993, 45). She argues that these gaps have “creative potential” as they “must be filled by an inference based on individual experience and memory,” and that “even in similar situations different people will make different inference” (2002, 46). Even though, as the later examples of Davis’s work illustrate, a writer may utilise language with great precision, her very short stories illustrate Spolsky’s arguments, giving readers the opportunity to creatively fill the created cognitive gaps in a variety of ways.

Modularity and literariness A simplified everyday example of modularity in action is the way our visual centres allow us to process what we see, while our auditory centres process what we hear; each working happily and independently providing us with fairly reliable information. However, imagine you are going to cross a street and your vision tells you that all is clear. With just that information you could cross with confidence; however, your ears hear something that questions your visual input—the sound of an approaching siren. The information you are receiving is now contradictory, but your memory helps you make sense of this situation and tells you to look for further information. You look around for the source of the siren. You use your ears to determine the direction it is coming from and adjust your decision, to cross or not, accordingly. You do all this in a split second. Independently, each system gives us readily comprehendible information (our vision says it is safe to cross the road; our hearing says it is not), but, at the “interface” of these mental modules, a higher quality of information is created. Spolsky states that these interface areas, or gaps, are where “adaptation, re-representation, and mismatches occur” (Spolsky 1993, 24). She argues that literary interpretation occurs when our minds deal creatively with these cognitive gaps and it is in these gaps that literary fiction becomes most meaningful. Here, she also stakes a claim for a change to dominant literary theory, arguing that every interpretation is “inevitably a compromise” between the limitations of representation and the limitations of our modular mind (1993, 31). Jackendoff (1987) states that there are limits of understanding, because human cognition has certain blind spots.

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There are limits to what each module can process; therefore, there is an intrinsic level of failure to be expected within this system. Furthermore, Spolsky contends, interpretation is a compromise between competing and cooperating cognitive systems of information representation. Cognition is not a case of “right or wrong understanding”, but rather “a matter of stronger or weaker, clearer or fuzzier judgement” (1993, 31). She argues that a modularity model allows for a “cluster” approach, rather than one unified theory of representation and interpretation, which has the distinct advantage of allowing not just for “successful understanding,” but also for “conflict, failure, tension, mismatching, and misunderstanding” (24). The gaps in human cognitive structures create “vacancies between fragments of understanding”, that “not only permit but actually encourage transformation and innovation” (2). Literary activity does not depend on specialised mechanisms, or modes of cognition, “but rather makes special use of ‘normal’ cognitive processes by disturbing, deforming, or delaying their functioning” (Richardson and Spolsky 2004, 8). In this way, literary fiction, Spolsky argues, is a “systematic disturbance” of everyday cognition. Our “categories of cognition are inherently inexact, and can even include contradictory elements, they are inherently unstable as well, and can be expected to change over time” (Richardson 1999, 162). Literature exploits our innate cognitive instabilities, as it works within a “system of perception and thought that both produces and at the same time works at compensating for instability” (Spolsky 1993, 192). The cognitive modules we have to make sense of our world take the information available in literary fiction and combine it to form alternate, more complex forms of information. Davis’s short stories can be seen to exploit these cognitive tendencies, often providing conflicting, contradictory and ambiguous information, creating gaps where complex literary interpretation may be formed.

Creatively filling gaps The gaps in Davis’s very short stories are created as much by what she puts in, as by what she leaves out. Working on a micro-level, Davis’s fragments give just enough information to offer a glimpse of a potential whole. Brian Boyd, another literary theorist who draws on the work of evolutionary cognitive theorists to reframe literary theory, contends that our minds are “bundles of expectations, preferences, ways of inference,” “geared to the greatest possible cognitive result for the smallest processing effort” (2009, 133); and that our minds are designed to leap to complex multifaceted conclusions from minimal and often ambiguous information,

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like that fouund in Davis’s very short sto ories. While it is a different form of inforrmation proceessing, opticall illusions offer a simpplified examplle of how our cognition maakes creative leaps l (see figure 1).

Figure 1: Thee Kanizsa squaare optical illussion and the Ruubin vase illusion. (Both images accesssed from Creatiive Commons, http://creativeccommons.org/ under u open distribution liicensing.)

These ttwo figures show how the brain automatically y creates meaningful conclusions given g only a small s amountt of informatio on. There is no squaree in the Kanizssa illusion, yeet we can’t heelp but see onee; and we alternate whhat we see in the Rubin illu usion, either a Romanesquee vase, or

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two facing profiles. This is involuntary. We have to look for meaningful patterns. In Davis’s very short story, “Hand”, there is also minimal information presented; however, meaning can be creatively inferred. Hand Beyond the hand holding this book that I’m reading, I see another hand lying idle and slightly out of focus—my extra hand. (Davis 2009, 530)

In “Hand”, Davis describes the slightest situation, leaving the reader many gaps to fill in; pitting “compression in form against expansion in the readerly mind” (Lee 2014). This description can be viewed as a meditation on the embodied nature of reading—the mind in one place, with the body, slightly out of focus, in another. This is a moment of realisation, a fragment that can indicate a variety of wholes. The whole is filled creatively; firstly by Davis’s own memories and significances in the process of writing, then by the reader in the reading. We are offered only a glimpse of a story landscape, which we then “decode semiotically and fill in after the fact” (Lee 2014). Externally, the few words on the page do not change, but like another famous optical illusion, the duckrabbit (figure 2), they offer alternate modes of viewing. Ambiguity leaves “Hand” open, presumably like the book in the story, for a reader to connect with the described moment, to fill the gaps by reimagining their own experience of reading and the feeling of being in two worlds at once—the story world and a real embodied world.

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Figure 2: Thee duckrabbit: a classic c examplee of an ambiguoous image. (http://en.wikkipedia.org/wikii/Rabbit–duck_ _illusion#mediaaviewer/ File:Kanincheen_und_Ente.pnng)

Story ying Biologist, Gerald Edelman, maintaiins that while the world is organised o with properrties that can clearly be deescribed by cchemistry and d physics, individual hhumans are noot born with direct d access tto any of thesse formal information structures. We W do not receeive clean “daata”, but rather “just a lot of stimulli” that our cognitive structu ures need to m make sense off (Spolsky 1993, 34). L Luckily, humaans have evollved to be ab le to “categorrise these stimuli in a sufficiently clear way to make them iinto reusable ‘data’ or knowledge”” (34). The waay we make it reusable is tto make it meemorable, to make it m mean somethinng to us. One common wayy we do this is to turn it into a storyy, or ‘storyingg’ as short sttory theorist Susan Lohafeer (2003) refers to it. Storyingg is an integraal form of co ognitive proceessing, which h Lohafer maintains coomes from ouur earliest experiences withh the world. Sh he quotes psychologistt, R. L. Greggory, who argues that wee first learn about a our environmentt through ourr nerve ending gs. Everyday knowledge iss encoded

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in neurological scenarios such as “I touch a hot flame, my finger recoils, my hand avoids fire” (Lohafer 2014, 44). Such scenarios, Gregory argues, form “perceptual hypotheses”, the most primitive form of “plot”, which is one of our “primal cognitive strategies for processing experience” (1980). This strategy, which Lohafer calls “storying”, is an “active process, a capacity for ‘chunking’ experience into meaningful units for remembering and transmitting” (Lohafer 2014, 44). “Chunking” is a term developed by cognitive psychologist George A. Miller (1956) and recognised today, by cognitive scientists, as a key mechanism of human cognition (Gobet, Lane et al. 2001). We chunk individual pieces of information together to form meaningful groups, leading to an increased ability to extract information from our environments, in spite of our cognitive limitations. Stories can function as both “a target of interpretation” and “a means for making sense of experience”, as “a resource for structuring and comprehending the world…in their own right” (Herman 2013). Cognitive linguist, Mark Turner, confirms both Spolsky’s and Lohafer’s views of human cognition, with its creative gap filling and storying tendencies, stating that “seemingly specialised processes like story-making and parabolic projection, are in fact constantly deployed within [everyday] cognitive life” (Richardson and Spolsky 2004, 6). In other words, storying is part of our genetic make-up; it is a natural way of making sense of our everyday experiences, as well as our literary ones, fictional or not. Turner’s notion of “parable” describes our “constant and pervasive use of one story to structure, explain, or comment on another, resulting in a creative blend that enables inferences that neither the source nor the target story could supply by itself” (6). Davis’s stories are examples of storying on a micro level, but her very short stories ring many of the same cognitive bells as longer stories. Here is the example of “Double Negative”: Double Negative At a certain point in her life, she realises it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child. (Davis 2009, 373)

In this story, each section transforms the meaning of the one before. The first part of the sentence sets up the space (a certain point in her life), which, as a reader, I assume to mean reaching an age where the question of having children (or not) becomes more urgent. The complicated (and complicating) structure of the second section (which is a triple negative), initially gives us the impression that she does not want a child, but then

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turns this around. And the third section turns the meaning again, adding the past tense “had”, to give yet another level of information. Davis’s precise play with negatives and tenses complicates this sentence to the edge of confusion; however, by storying, we can bridge the gaps to form a coherent whole. Filling in the gaps with social context, fleshing out the story imaginatively, we make sense of this woman’s state of mind. This kind of repetition and search for the perfect form of expression is pervasive throughout much of Davis’s work. And this single sentence story is more than just a comment on social expectations of motherhood; it is also, like many of Davis’s stories, a comment on the way we tell stories themselves.

Davis’s “storying” Many of Davis’s stories, directly and indirectly, are inquiries into the way we tell stories, mirroring the cognitive view of stories as both objects for interpretation and a means for organising experience. Breaking her subjects into small, manageable, fragmentary forms ‘is a way for Davis to organise her stories’, but they also illustrate how stories help to organise experience. Davis’s stories “are structured entities that offer ways of making sense of the mass of facts, events, emotions, and ideas that form the material of human life”, particularly when looking across entire collections. Her reflections on the nature of stories “involve both the motivation of her characters to tell stories and meditations on the nature of stories” themselves (Alexander 2008, 169). Cognitive science indicates that our understanding of language comes from interactions with the world (Turner 2002); and Davis’s stories are all about interactions—with language, with the world and, particularly, with the world as filtered through language. Through these interactions, she is constantly questioning the role of the writer in the storytelling process—why we tell stories, as well as how we tell them. Many of her short stories, such as “Story” and “The Centre of the Story”, focus on the writing process directly, as does her novel, The End of the Story (1995), where Davis’s storytelling itself is the subject of examination. Her experimentations, in form and structure, are an expression of the doubts and dissatisfaction she has with existing, more traditional forms (Alexander 2008, 170). She is well aware of the assumptions a reader makes and questions these assumptions directly, through devices such as repetition, repetition with slight variation, changing points of view and changing tenses. Drawing attention to the very nature of language use, she highlights the work that the writer is doing, the choices they are making, the particular selections made in the

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writing process. Davis is not interested in simply telling one story after another, in a traditional narrative sense. Quoting Roland Barthes, she says fragments are a preferable form to a potentially false sense of narrative completeness; or “incoherence is preferable to a distorting order” (Davis 1987). She writes, “I guess that my higher value is on some sort of philosophical investigation. What is the point of any of this if we are not arriving at some world-view, or some view of reality that makes sense and pursuing an investigation of reality?” (Knight 1999, 533-534). Her story “Happiest Moment” gives an example of this idea. Happiest Moment If you ask her what is a favourite story she has written, she will hesitate for a long time and then say it may be this story that she read in a book once: an English-language teacher in China asked his Chinese student to say what was the happiest moment in his life. The student hesitated for a long time. At last he smiled with embarrassment and said that his wife had once gone to Beijing and eaten duck there, and she often told him about it, and he would have to say the happiest moment of his life was her trip, and the eating of the duck. (Davis 2009, 359)

There is a lot happening cognitively in this story. Clearly, there is a bigger picture here, a philosophical message regarding the nature of individual human experience; with the idea that the most significant moments of our lives may actually be external to ourselves, never physically experienced, even fictional. However, I want to examine how Davis delivers this information. Though written in plain language, the structure is complex. There is the shifting subject—from the “you” asking the initial question, to the “she” as writer, then the teacher, the student, his wife and back to the student. There is a shift from the “real” world to the world of the book she has read, as well as shifts between present and past tenses throughout. There is much repetition with variations like: favourite/happiest; ask/asked; hesitate for a long time/hesitated for a long time; eaten duck/eating of the duck. There are displacements such as “written” with “read”, and the man’s happiest moment with his wife’s experience. All these techniques work to illustrates Spolsky’s notion that literature both produces and, at the same time, works at compensating for instabilities in cognition. It is an example of the way in which literary activity disturbs, deforms, or delays “normal” cognitive processes. However, we are used to dealing with the gaps in cognitively contradictory information every day, so when we encounter them here, we can creatively navigate Davis’s gappy terrain to form complex conclusions.

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Davis processing information Of her writing process, Davis says, she doesn’t know where her stories are going to go when she starts to write; she just writes them “over and over again”, to try and find “their centre” (Prose 1997). She describes herself as having a freeform process; she only sits down to write after she is struck by an idea, “usually it is a paradox, or a contradiction, or a pattern. I see a pattern repeating itself that interests me. It is a pattern that amuses me to trace out on the page” (Knight 1999, 534). She says that working deliberately in a fragmented form can be seen as stopping “a work closer, in the process, to what Blanchot would call the origin of writing, the centre rather than the sphere” (Davis 1987). It can be seen as “an integration into the form itself, of a question about the process of writing” (Davis 1987). She describes finishing a story as the realisation of a thought. If she cannot find the right words, if it is “not expressed quite right”, then she has not brought that thought “to some sort of completion or realisation” (Prose 1997). Davis avoids the use of slang and colloquialisms and prefers to repeat words and phrases rather than varying them with synonyms. Karen Alexander says, Davis’s “language is so plain as to be remarkable” (2008, 168). Marjorie Perloff calls the way Davis uses plain language as “at once totally familiar and yet rigidly defamiliarised” (2014, 211). For example, Davis would rather write “a large city in the East” than “New York”. That way, she says: You can see this large city whatever way you want. If you say ‘New York,’ then you not only have to see New York in your mind’s eye, but you also have all these associations with New York… It often doesn’t matter whether it’s New York or San Diego or any other place… I’d rather leave it open like that (Knight 1999, 549).

So readers may fill their own interpretive gaps. For Davis, and for many creative writers, the process of writing itself appears to be a form of cognitive information processing, a form of thinking on the page (Oatley and Djikic 2008). This is particularly evident when she uses rule-bound systems such as grammar, logic, or mathematics, often to twisted extremes. Like in “Breaking it Down” when she uses economics to break down a failing relationship; or in “Grammar Questions”, when she uses questions of grammatical correctness to examine a father’s death. Using these methods of analyses “does not reveal the constructed nature of entities such as the self, but rather points to the sense of self and to emotion as things that elude analysis. The

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whole, it seems, is more than the sum of the parts into which it can be broken” (Alexander 2008, 166). Many of her characters lack insight and “can often be seen resorting to analytic processes in futile attempts to come to terms with painful or confusing aspects of their lives” (166). Here is the beginning of “Grammar Questions” as an example: Grammar Questions Now, during the time he is dying, can I say, “This is where he lives”? If someone asks me, “Where does he live?” should I answer, “Well, right now he is not living, he is dying”? If someone asks me, “Where does he live?” can I say, “He lives in Vernon Hall”? Or should I say, “He is dying in Vernon Hall”? When he is dead, I will be able to say, in the past tense, “He lived in Vernon Hall.” I will also be able to say, “He died in Vernon Hall.” (Davis 2009, 527)

The precise and complex structure of the first sentence—with a central question inside two, potentially contradictory, statements and the question mark coming after the quotation marks—illustrates Davis’s attention to detail. The narrator searches for the perfect form of expression, again, creating a world filtered through language. Her ruminations on the grammatically correct way to describe the situation continue, again with Davis’s signature repetition and attention to the detail of punctuation, turning words and ideas inside out and back again, over its two and a half page length. It may seem like she is stating the facts in a detached observational style, with a focus on the language, often in the form of a question, but a more complex meaning is created in the gaps between content and form. “Despite the fact that the questions are strangely humorous, a clear sense of emotion (sadness, distress, perhaps anger) emerges from this story’s ostensibly merrily formal analyses” (Alexander 2008, 173). Davis’s word games are a way to avoid discussing the emotion of the moment directly, indicating the narrator may be emotionally incapable of addressing it. In our everyday lives, in the face of chaos and the overwhelming truths, patterns such as stories offer a refuge of control. A space where we can make sense of things that often make no sense at all. The story ends: “He is not eating” sounds active, too. But it is not his choice. He is not conscious that he is not eating. He is not conscious at all. But “is not eating” sounds more correct for him than “is dying” because of the negative. “Is not” seems correct for him, at the moment anyway, because

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As the heightened focus on language continues, particularly on the negative and positive nature of words, the emotional distance of the events being described is not lost on the reader, but rather the focus on grammar and ideas of correctness emphasises the numbing effect of attempting to logically process such emotionally wrought information. This piece, written around the time of Davis’s own father’s death, is particularly poignant, as the narrator struggles to come to terms with the language of loss.

Conclusion While I have utilised close readings in this chapter (a traditional but imperfect method for analysing the creative process), cognitive scientists, such as Keith Oatley, are leading the way with more empirical, less traditional, literary analyses; examining how the writing process is influenced by, and also impacts on, cognitive processes. Cognitive science continues to expand its theories of the mind and, as it does, this can only lead to a greater understanding of what it is we are actually doing when we sit down to write. Further engagement with the cognitive sciences will allow more methodologically complex and interdisciplinary engagement with literary texts. Davis’s very short fiction offers many convenient examples for exploring creative writing in cognitive terms; the small, fragmented nature of her stories, in particular, illustrate Spolsky’s interpretive gappage perhaps more clearly than longer forms. Becoming aware that creative writing, and literary fiction are extensions of our everyday cognitive processes, rather than something “special”, should make writers, like Davis, more willing to push the boundaries, finding new ways to create interpretive gaps, with the confidence that readers will also find creative ways to bridge them.

Notes 1. While Spolsky’s use of the term “gaps” fits neatly with the conference theme this paper was written for, it may be argued that it is an over-simplified term for the multitude of literary features that Spolsky is using it to describe. Also, it could be argued that literature exploits other, non-“gappy” cognitive capacities; for example: Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner’s theory of conceptual blending is especially useful in describing cognitive responses to literary information.

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However, these fall outside the scope of this particular paper. Therefore, for the purposes of simplicity, I will continue with Spolsky’s term “gaps”. For further information on cognitive blending see: (Fauconnier and Turner 2002).

References Alexander, Karen 2008. Breaking It Down: Analysis in the Stories of Lydia Davis. Scribbling Women & the Short Story Form: Approaches by American & British Women Writers. Ellen Burton Harrington. New York, Peter Lang Publishing: 165-177. Barrett, H. Clark and Robert Kurzban 2006. "Modularity in Cognition: Framing the Debate." Psychological Review 113(3): 628-647. Boyd, Brian 2009. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction. Cambridge, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Cosmides, Leda and John Tooby 1994. Origins of Domain specificity: The Evolution of Functional Organization. Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture. Lawrence A Hirschfeld and Susan A Gelman: 85-116. Damasio, Antonio 1994. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. New York, G. P. Putnam. Davis, Lydia 1987 ‘Form as a Response to Doubt (excerpts from an unpublished manuscript).’ HOW(ever) 4: http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/archive/print_archive/ alerts1087.html —. 1987 ‘“...Without thinking of whole...” (excerpts from talk given by Lydia Davis, November 20, 1986, at New Langton Arts, San Francisco).’ HOW(ever) 4: http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/archive/print_archive/ alerts1087.html —. 1995. The End of the Story. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. —. 2009. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. London, Penguin Books. Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner 2002. The Way we Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York, Basic Books. Fodor, Jerry A. 1983. The Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty Psychology. Cambridge, The MIT press. —. 2001. The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way: The Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology. Cambridge, The MIT press. Gobet, Fernand, Peter C.R. Lane, Steve Croker, Peter C.H. Cheng, Gary Jones, Iain Oliver and Julian M. Pine 2001. ‘Chunking Mechanisms in Human Learning.’ Trends in Cognitive Sciences 5(6): 236-243. Herman, David 2013. Cognitive Narratology. The Living Handbook of

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Narratology. John Pier Peter Hühn, Wolf Schmid and Jörg Schönert. Hamburg, Hamburg University Press. Hoh, Amanda 2013. ‘In Short, a Man Booker Winner.’ Sydney Morning Herald, 24 May. Jackendoff, Ray 1987. Consciousness and the Computational Mind. Cambridge, The MIT Press. Jackendoff, Ray 1992. Semantic Structures. Cambridge, MIT press. Knight, Christopher J. 1999. ‘An interview with Lydia Davis.’ Contemporary Literature 40(4): 525-551. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. New York, Basic books. Lee, Richard 2014. Flash-Y Fictions: The Implications and Constraints of Short Short Fiction. 13th International Conference on the Short Story. Vienna, Austria. Lohafer, Susan 2003. Reading for Storyness: Preclosure Theory, Empirical Poetics, and Culture in the Short Story. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press. —. 2014. ‘Poe, Hemingway, and Beyond: Importing and Exporting Short Fiction Prototypes.’ American Studies in Scandinavia 36(1): 42-58. Matthews, Brendan 2014 ‘Lydia Davis: “I kind of like the fact that my work isn’t for everybody”.’ Salon: http://www.salon.com/2014/04/28/lydia_davis_i_kind_of_like_the_fac t_that_my_work_isn’t_for_everybody/ Miller, George A. 1956. ‘The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information.’ Psychological review 63(2): 81. Oatley, Keith and Maja Djikic 2008. ‘Writing as Thinking.’ Review of General Psychology 12(1): 9-27. Perloff, Marjorie 2014. ‘Fiction as Language Game: The Hermeneutic Parables of Lydia Davis and Maxine Chernoff.’ Breaking the Sequence: Women's Experimental Fiction: 199-214. Pinker, Steven 1997. How the Mind Works. New York, Norton. Prose, Francine 1997 ‘Lydia Davis – Interview.’ Bomb – Artists in Conversation: http://bombmagazine.org/article/2086/lydia-davis Richardson, Alan 1999. ‘Cognitive science and the future of literary studies.’ Philosophy and Literature 23(1): 157-173. Richardson, Alan and Ellen Spolsky, Eds. 2004. The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture and Complexity. Aldershot, Ashgate. Rosch, Eleanor 1999. Principles of Categorization. Concepts: Core Readings. Eric & Stephen Laurence Margolis. Cambridge, MIT Press:

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189-206. Sperber, Dan 2001. ‘In Defense of Massive Modularity.’ Language, Brain and Cognitive Development: Essays in Honor of Jacques Mehler 47. Spolsky, Ellen 1993. Gaps in Nature: Literary Interpretation and the Modular Mind. Albany, State University of New York Press. —. 2002. ‘Darwin and Derrida: Cognitive Literary Theory as a Species of Post-Structuralism.’ Poetics Today 23(1): 43-62. Tooby, John, Leda Cosmides and H. Clark Barrett 2005. Resolving the Debate on Innate Ideas. The Innate Mind: Structure and Content. Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence and Stephen Stich. New York, Oxford University Press: 305-337. Turner, Mark 2002. ‘The Cognitive Study of Art, Language and Literature.’ Poetics Today 23(1): 9-20.

CHAPTER ELEVEN THE CREATIVE WRITING DOCTORATE AS SURVIVAL STORY: MINDING THE GAP BETWEEN SUCCESS AND FAILURE JERI KROLL

Introduction Failing is something that the contemporary zeitgeist of societal progress and self-actualisation suggests individuals can control. Although fear of failure can make artists insecure about their worth and status, it can also prove a useful bedfellow. Academia is a special case, however, providing a circumscribed environment where students can be set specific goals. In Australia, Topic Aims and Learning Outcomes quantify what each class requires. Passing means that students have fulfilled course objectives, just as the degree as a whole demonstrates success. Doctoral education does not proceed in such a regimented manner. Let me return for a moment, however, to this chapter’s opening word—“failing”— because it can function as more than one part of speech, and consider its implications for those who enrol in a PhD. Take these two sentences: Failing is not an option for a doctoral candidate whose university offers no exit degree. That doctoral candidate’s novel is failing to find a publisher.

The first “failing” is a gerund that functions as a noun, which underlines the condition of failure that postgraduates seek to avoid. The second is a present participle, a verb form that captures the continuous action of the verb “to fail”. Presumably that action causes the writer psychological distress. A sense of inadequacy, as the history of failure documents, can

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sometimes be generative. Those who take their vocation seriously realise that they “must hold [their] nerve for a very long period of time (2013)”, as Anne Enright says, “and just do it, one word after the other” (2013). In diaries, letters and articles, in interview and on the festival circuit, authors have charted their journeys to success by confessing to manuscripts that they have abandoned. Nevertheless, their pronouncements about failure’s necessity are heeded since they speak from the right side of the gap. Margaret Atwood says that “[p]ublication changes everything” (2002: 134) for the lucky ones who have bridged that gap, securing a reputation. Failure has, therefore, been ultimately fruitful. This does not preclude them, however, from complaining about the detrimental effects of that “condition known as Fame” (Atwood 2002: 135, 136). A key figure in twentieth-century literature, Samuel Beckett, whose work is often cited for its wry pronouncements on failure, resisted celebrity, wanting his audience to focus on his writing only, despite the fact that, over the course of his career, he questioned the quality of that writing. In his characteristic ambiguous prose, he said to his first biographer, Deirdre Bair, that: “He would not help me … but he would not hinder me, either” (1978: xi). Critic and friend James Knowlson finally wrote an authorised biography with Beckett’s unqualified support. The resulting book tellingly is called Damned to Fame (1996). Failure has critical implications for PhD candidates, however. Like their peers and mentors, they no doubt would welcome the opportunity of being ruined by fame. But innovative work always carries the possibility of failure. Composing drafts that might not come to fruition, as exhausting as it might be, is integral to the writing life. As late as 1965, Beckett could still feel so unsatisfied with texts he experimented with in both French and English that they were eventually published as “four short passages” “Faux departs” (“False Starts”) (Knowlson 1996: 467). Unlike a mature author who might decide to publish his false starts, doctoral candidates realise that their first challenge is to satisfy the scrutiny of supervisors and examiners. This paradoxical condition raises the unspoken question of how doctoral candidates, who might produce primarily “false starts” or promising drafts, can become “the peer of the examiners” (Flinders University 2014) [1]. That phrase appears in university policies describing the examination process as an initial stage that confirms the candidate has been inducted into a community of scholars. In the case of a Creative doctorate, we must include a community of artists. Can this confirmation happen, however, if the thesis fails? Here “to fail” can mean either that the thesis “fails to fulfill its aims” as expressed in the thesis or that it fails in the sense of it “does not pass.”

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As I will explain, the doctoral journey understood as a sequence of short and long-term goals can help stakeholders to develop strategies that avoid outright failure—that is, the non-award of a degree. Experienced supervisors occupy the position of authors whom aspiring writers— substitute here candidates—believe know the secret of success. They don’t realise, however, what their supervisors accept—that perfection is not possible. Yet students expert in “self-sabotage” (Kearns & Gardiner 2006) develop blocking strategies, creating excuses rather than writing imperfect but workable drafts. Consequently, supervisors must keep track of what point their students have reached in a professional cycle that begins with apprenticeship and progresses to varying degrees of mastery. It is worth highlighting that the creative PhD is still largely a hybrid, and so assessing its elements complicates how supervisors, candidates and examiners understand failure, as Brien, Burr and Webb (2013) have discovered. I want to suggest now that if supervisors and Creative Writing doctoral students focus on work produced within the cycle, rather than worrying constantly about the final product, they can dispense with idioms of success and failure. Ultimately, examiners as well as supervisors should devise more useful descriptions for what previously might have been deemed “failed” or imperfect projects.

Apprentices and Masters Reconsidered Creative Writing doctoral candidates enter a university to seek knowledge, but what kind of knowledge? Do they see their supervisors as masters in an historical or a contemporary sense? Do they consider themselves apprentices? What about authors who return to the academy? This chapter revisits understandings of apprentice and master to attempt to answer these questions. From classical times, through the middle ages with their stratified guilds to the present day, human beings have been seen as fabricators or, to use Hannah Arendt’s term, “Homo faber—man as maker” (Sennett 2008: 7). In guilds and in Renaissance studios, just as in today’s performing and visual arts schools and writing centres, masters instructed apprentices because they possessed the knowledge and skills needed to induct others into their disciplines’ practices and mysteries. Responsible for standards, today’s teachers need to balance their mission to transmit knowledge with a comprehension of the challenges of those just beginning in an art form (Sennett 2008: 53-80). This educational process takes longer than a semester, and is not necessarily completed by the end of a degree. Apprenticeship takes years and only some will qualify as masters able to open their own studios or to enjoy a full-time artistic

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career. Although progression is less regimented now, skill, talent, reputation, money and luck determine whether an individual will succeed. Many with talent give up. Someone with “domain-relevant skills” (Dacey & Lennon 1998: 81), who grasps the cultural temper of the times, will ideally have been responsible for their training. Masters’ insider practical knowledge will complement the aesthetic knowledge underpinning the discipline. They will be able to communicate how cultural tastes fluctuate based on local, national and global factors, influencing the possibilities of success (Sawyer 2006: 28-29; 123-25). This section opened with a question about the seeking of knowledge, but this chapter does not have space to discuss epistemology’s slipperiness. It is nevertheless worth returning to John Henry Newman’s seminal essay, “The Idea of a University” (delivered as lectures in 1852). Consider the following points that Newman made: “…branches of knowledge are connected together. They complete, correct, balance each other” (1958: 179). “And in like manner [as colours contrasted], the drift and meaning of a branch of knowledge varies with the company in which it is introduced to the student” (1958: 180). “Knowledge is capable of being its own end” (1958: 181).

In the course of defending the idea of a liberal university education, Newman suggests that myriad knowledge branches act as “safeguards” (1958: 180). At once, they complement and enhance students’ understanding by widening frames of reference. The bricolage of theories that characterise some Creative Writing theses partake of this liberality. It is therefore appropriate that an exegesis’s argument might integrate or hold in opposition the knowledge of more than one discipline. Furthermore, we could say that Newman postulates that culture and taste influence how branches of knowledge are understood. Again, this prefigures Sennett’s and Sawyer’s (among others) theories about the culturally determined nature of success and failure as well as concepts of creativity. Finally, Newman quotes Aristotle on possessions to emphasise a principle that can be distilled as “knowledge for knowledge’s sake”. Newman implies that such a principle can be extended to areas of study: “…those liberal, which tend to enjoyment” (185) and, in particular, “…where nothing accrues of consequence beyond the using” (185). The value of pursuing knowledge or art (or knowledge of and through art) for its own sake might very well be the reason some individuals enter the academy, including professional

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authors. They might be interested in what knowledge they gain from experimenting with different literary techniques, rather than in a final text itself. As Le Feuvre suggests, “The act of testing takes on a different register when considered as a process rather than a result-oriented search for progress” (2010: 18). This goal, of course, does not preclude future success for the doctoral creative project. To summarise, entering a university to seek knowledge implies that students do not already possess it. Science students should not commence a PhD thinking that they know the results of their experiments; certainty can be the death of productive research. Similarly, a position of uncertainty is particularly apt for artists in academia. Yet hostile examiners’ reports, even if they do not recommend failure, can damage doctoral candidates’ feelings of self-esteem, colouring what happens after graduation: “Negative experiences of doctoral work, and especially assessment, can profoundly influence identities and subjectivities subsequently” (2002: 264), as Morley, Leonard and David found in their study of British PhD assessment. Take Australian doctoral examination categories, which usually contain a version of the following: Pass without revisions, minor revisions, major revisions, revise and resubmit, etc. If wise masters know that authorities are fallible, they must somehow decode those categories for apprentices. This means explaining what can be perceived as degrees of failure. Supervisor-authors understand that they will face future challenges themselves; there are always structural hurdles to clear, narrative strategies to choose, clichés to edit. Lionel Shriver distills the paradox of success and failure in this way: “…each new success conjures new standards we can’t meet, thereby inventing ingenious new ways to fail” (2013). Just as their doctoral students, masters must keep seeking.

Of Roles and Responsibilities Supervisors of Creative Writing doctoral candidates bear a plethora of responsibilities. Distilled into one sentence, their primary goal is to facilitate students’ timely completion, hence avoiding failure. Yet they must also perform other tasks set out in key American, European, UK and Australasian white papers, reports and studies generated during the past two decades that intend to foster professionalisation of research training (Council of Deans and Directors of Graduate Research Good Practice Framework, now incorporated as ACGR Australian Council of Graduate Research; Morley, Leonard & David 2002; The Concordat: to Support the Career Development of Researchers; Walker, Golde et al; Universities

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Australia 2013: 42, 53; Humphrey, Marshall & Leonardo 2012: 48-49, among others). All stakeholders acknowledge that supervisors are in a pivotal position to affect the likelihood of candidate success. They manage in the sense of administering candidature. They teach, and indeed many scholars conceptualise supervision as another form of pedagogical practice. Humphrey, Marshall and Leonardo (2012) describe “a learning agreement completed at the outset … of studies by students and their supervisors” (2012: 52). Supervisors oversee the evolution of both scholarly and artistic practice. They mentor, since professional development encompasses experiences that help to “socialise” the postgraduate as an academic (Austin 2002) or an artist. Providing training that leads to career readiness can test a supervisor’s ingenuity. Universities record when candidates complete, but most do not track how many obtain jobs after candidature that relate to past study. It is worth including here the clients’ points of view. Annual institutional student satisfaction surveys often yield information about doctoral candidates’ perception of career readiness, but more importantly, they underline the overarching factor that affects positive feelings—the quality of supervision (Carayannopoulos 2012: 62; 2011: 73). Graduate Careers Australia administers the Postgraduate Research Experience Questionnaire (PREQ) yearly to graduating RHD candidates from over fifty institutions [2]. That too emphasises the vital nature of supervision. This chapter now turns to consider how supervisors and candidates can employ short and long-term goals embedded in the doctoral structure to facilitate success. Ticking off of candidature milestones, such as the literature review, research proposal (or confirmation of candidature), draft chapters, creative publications and conference papers, among others, are achievable successes as determined by university policy. If students fail to complete those required during the first year of study, for instance, interventions should be devised. If they do ultimately drop out, university systems record withdrawal from a research higher degree as just that— without failure or prejudice—since final assessment has not occurred. Those who do pass those milestones or student progress markers will find that they also act as morale boosters. The outputs that accompany them, such as publications and presentations, can be listed on both candidates’ and supervisors’ CVs. It is worth highlighting here, in fact, how staff members’ careers can be tied to the successful transition from stage to stage of their students. Certainly healthy doctoral numbers followed by ontime completions normally support claims of staff expertise. Chronicles of postgraduate successes can, therefore, bolster promotion and teaching

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award applications. I am not only referring to co-authored publications, which might not be a prime element of some supervisor-student relationships. The following factors, among others, demonstrate a wholeof-candidature approach that encompasses professional, craft and scholarly dimensions: service to professional associations; prizes or awards; the calibre of outlets that publish postgraduate work; complementary peer feedback; teaching and review invitations; book contracts; and finally, one of the Holy Grails, an academic appointment. Decoding all of the above, supervisors are mentors, editors, trainers and career advisors, as I have argued in earlier essays (Kroll 2010; Kroll & Finlayson 2012), because they function as “major relays of power with academic, material and affective consequences” (Morley, Leonard & David 2002: 264). Their final challenge is preparing students for life after the degree, which in the case of Creative Writing includes experience of disappointment. So a supervisor’s practical experience—their street cred, if you will—can help to alleviate stress during the doctoral journey caused by a particular form of failure anxiety—the desire not simply to complete, but to complete well enough to receive good reports that might help facilitate publication post-degree, if not before. One of my supervisors gave me this useful piece of advice: “Don’t think that your dissertation is going to be the best thing you’ve ever written. Finish the degree, find a job, and then turn your thesis into a book”. Granted, that advice was offered long ago, but still seems correct, in the main. If writers hope that they will improve with experience, which does include degrees of failure, accompanied by the congenital authorial “package of doubts” (Atwood 2002: 137), then their first efforts will be just that. Doctoral candidates cannot produce the equivalent of a mature work if their thesis is their first major effort. Those rare ones who do enjoy early success might experience “second-book writer’s block” or they may be demoralised by reviews that compare new work unfavourably with the old. Worse, they might feel pressured to produce one type of book; critics have, in a sense, stolen their identities. This was American author Herman Melville’s fate, since his public wanted more exotic romances rather than philosophical and intellectual daring. As Richard Chase (1963: viii) comments, Melville had much in common with his character Bartleby the Scrivener, who steeled himself and continued to say, “I would prefer not to” (Melville 1963, 1853: 101), when faced with appeasing an adventurehungry audience. Conceptualising the doctoral journey, therefore, as a series of stages with explicit goals, including ones related to creative work, none of which will necessarily garner critical or commercial success, is a productive

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strategy. After all, a healthy proportion of Humanities and Creative Arts graduates will not find a continuing academic position, let alone have their theses published in book form. An understanding of the practice-led research loop as an ongoing process in the writerly life can be sustaining. It involves some movement forward and, one hopes, less movement back, as happens in any experiment, where false starts and unproductive pathways need to be explored and abandoned. This paradigm can resonate with a generative meaning of failure and prepare doctoral graduates for a short-term future that might include temporary positions and small press publications. To summarise, the doctoral journey can be compared with the stepped procedure characteristic of medieval guilds and later embedded in art school curricula that marked out stages that would lead eventually to the attainment of master (or peer) status. It seems futile to define the gap between master and apprentice by the unproductive binaries of failure and success. Any artist who keeps experimenting, trying new materials, and shaping new forms, will risk failure. Apprentices do not become masters when they no longer fail. Failure is an integral part of the learning process, a form of endemic “trial and error” for those who practice in the arts, crafts, trades or sciences. This fact unfortunately does not facilitate the getting of grants, let alone the getting of wisdom. At the 2014 Byron Bay Writers’ Festival (3 August), novelist Kate Veitch said that Australia Council guidelines did not support projects that the applicant acknowledged might fail. She wondered why, “If something is not successful, the artist feels shamed”. This attitude implicitly blames the artist and, if encouraged in the academy, would most likely destroy a doctoral candidate’s confidence. As a supervisor, I can realistically attempt to ensure that the theses my students submit are not below discipline standards, that study has enriched their practice and scholarship, and that they understand how to articulate the strengths and weaknesses of their projects.

Successful Failures: An Intermission Now for an intermission that I hope will prove the efficacy of failure in certain circumstances. This is not an official break in a process because it has resulted in writing, not excused me from it. It contemplates how works that can be conceptualised as failures can also be construed as successes. When practitioners acknowledge that they have learned what they needed to know from a project, and that it is time to abandon it, they might feel reenergised rather than frustrated. Alternatively, they might also embrace the

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identity of being a failure. In fact, this defiant attitude was adopted by artists who participated in the Parisian Salon des Refusés (1863). They had been excluded from “The Academy of Fine Arts” that “rejected around 3000 works that they felt challenged the criteria and authority” (Le Feuvre 2010: 13) of its members. Le Feuvre argues that the concept of productive failure in visual arts modernism has its origins to some degree in this group, which included Whistler and Manet. There is strength in numbers, however, and probably bolstered the cohort of rejects so that they could confront those “arbiters of taste” (Le Feuvre 2010: 13). In so doing, they prefigured twentieth-century theories of creativity and those that problematised concepts of success and failure. It points to Csikzentmihalyi’s “cultures as systems of interrelated domains” (1999: 5); Boden’s notion of “field experts” who arbitrate what an artistic domain will find acceptable (Boden 2004: 10, 22); and Sawyer’s “sociocultural definition of creativity” (Sawyer 2006: 286). The protagonists of the following stories do not belong to the literary culture, but to the disciplines of science and architecture: renowned plant biologist, Professor David Day, and Spain’s most celebrated exponent of early modernism, Antoni Gaudi. They reveal how each responded to failed or incomplete work—or work that failed to produce results—and integrated the experience in a manner that might help doctoral candidates. Failure can lead practitioners in new directions, close pathways, solve specific problems that turn out to be more significant than the project as a whole, and suggest more fruitful questions to pose. In Australasian and UK research evaluation systems, the gold standard fields setting the bar for excellence, quantified by peer-reviewed publications, are the hard sciences. The former Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research at Flinders University, Professor David Day, a member of the Australian Academy of Science, is one of the most cited plant biologists. A while ago, we were discussing the way research is evaluated and how it disadvantaged the arts. He told me the following story about one of his peer-reviewed articles. I … now see that it has in fact been cited 10 times. But it was a completely negative set of results that we published so that others didn’t keep trying to prove a popular but incorrect hypothesis about how the plant ripening hormone ethylene … works. The hypothesis was that it affected plant respiration directly but we showed that wasn’t true. We presented the results first as a poster at a conference in the USA and several people said they had got the same results, so we decided we should publish it. As I recall, it was accepted without modification. This might seem a bit esoteric but understanding what controls fruit ripening is a big deal for post-harvest

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Based on an experiment that had produced no results, this article could have been counted in a Commonwealth publications audit as well as in citation sweeps. The lack of findings was significant, closing one door and directing researchers to alternative pathways. So what could be construed as failure here benefitted the authors, the field and the universities. Of course, no scientist would base a career on not producing results, but obviously sometimes they can be generative. In this sense, the experiment that produced ‘no results’ was successful. Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926) is one of Spain’s most innovative early modern architects. The Basilica of Sagrada Familia, Park Güell and the Church of Colònia Güell, among other works, possess world heritage status [3]. Yet Gaudi finished none during his lifetime; the first is slated to be completed in 2025, and the other two were abandoned. Gaudi was Catalonian, rather than Spanish [4], yet despite his language being banned, he continued to use it. His will to survive amidst defeat characterises the Gaudi who designed Park Güell. It was an ambitious enterprise that the architect as well as his financier and friend, Eusebi Güell, abandoned after fourteen years (Carandell 2003). Conceived of as a park graced with sculpture and recreational spaces as well as ‘a housing development’ (Carandell 2003: 10), the park carried a heavy burden from the beginning. Both admirers of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), the collaborators wanted a utopian and environmentally responsible philosophy to underpin this elitist community set apart from urban Barcelona. Gaudi’s solution to water storage in particular was ahead of its time, being at once practical, innovative and aesthetically pleasing. The Park’s undulating bench, tiled in trencadis (Catalan tiling), enclosing the square with views over the city, its entrance, its cisterns, its fountain, its lodge—all the work completed allowed Gaudi freedom to experiment, so he could mine past projects for ideas and techniques. As he said: The only fertile way is repetition … in Beethoven there are themes that are repeated from ten years earlier, and we find the same thing in Bach; the Catalan poet Verdaguer always copied and improved his poetry. (Gaudi in Carandell 2003: 95)

By the time poor sales and monetary constraints forced Güell to withdraw his support, Gaudi was ready to return full-time to the great cathedral building project. He had solved certain architectural problems and developed ideas about “using only materials taken from the land itself”

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(Carandell 2003: 174). In a similar manner, another failed project, the Church of Colònia Güell (only the Güell crypt was completed), commissioned in 1898, allowed Gaudi to turn it into “a laboratory of ideas for future application in the Sagrada Familia” (Regas, Giordano & Palmisano 2012: 149). In an imaginative leap, he used only a “four metres high” (149) model, rather than calculations as conventional architects do, to plan the church and crypt. He subsequently took what he learned and applied the knowledge to Sagrada Familia. One of the Basilica’s most daring features, its enormous columns, which resemble trees and create the illusion of an indoor forest, support the roof and walls without buttresses (Regas et al 2012: 60). Spiritually as well as artistically motivated, Gaudi was not concerned with success, yet he remains a Catalonian cultural hero for his vision as much as for what he did achieve. In sum, both scientists and artists lay the groundwork for colleagues to follow by the way in which they practice and innovate. In biology, others might repeat experiments in order to verify results, or save time and money by abandoning one pathway in order to explore alternative routes. As Gaudi said, repetition is also vital for artists, who repeat themes and techniques in order to perfect them. The skills, knowledge and preoccupations of the apprentice underpin mid-career and mature practitioners. Supervisors who understand that the full articulation of a project might only be possible in the future can interpret this truth for those at the beginning of their careers or professionals moving off into new territories. The challenge in both cases is to help them to grasp the patterns that support their artistic practice.

Examination and Beyond This chapter opened by questioning how doctoral candidates can satisfy examiners if they have generated, for the most part, “false starts” or promising manuscripts. How does this developmental stage equate with them becoming “the peer of the examiners”? A factor that might influence examiners’ perceptions is prior publication, because it means some independent critical assessment has occurred. How prior publication affects examiners’ attitudes needs further research, although a 2010 study suggests that at least 50% in all fields respond positively (Mullins & Kiley 2010: 381). It is worth noting here that “evidence is also emerging from the USA that few students publish in peer-reviewed journals” (Nettles & Millett 2006). But we should ask this question: how likely is it that candidates publish both creative and critical work in quality outlets? Brien,

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Burr and Webb (2013) raise the issue of unbalanced assessment, with the creative work, especially pre-published in book form, overshadowing the scholarly component, despite university guidelines asking theses to be assessed as a whole. Not all supervisors monitor or encourage publications. In addition, if postgraduates do not want to enter academia after graduation, or lack confidence, they might not submit creative or critical manuscripts, and so miss out on objective feedback. Creative Writing candidates could find that their initial exposure to external assessment might be the examination process itself (Holbrook, Bourke, Lovat & Fairbairn 2008: 37). Current Australian research suggests that few fail in any field (Holbrook, Bourke, Lovat & Fairbairn 2008: 46-47) and yet receiving a “Revise and Resubmit” can be understood as a type of failure and can demoralise candidates; this despite research that points to experienced examiners being tolerant, cognisant of the vulnerable status of examinees (Mullins & Kiley 2010: 384-85). To summarise, those senior in the profession do not expect a thesis worthy of “a Nobel Prize” (Mullins & Kiley 2010: 386), let alone a Booker or Miles Franklin. Yet it is fair to say that supervisors face continual challenges sourcing assessors experienced in both the creative and critical aspects of the dissertation as well as the examination process (Kroll & Webb 2012: 4). Given the emotionally charged nature of examination, therefore, supervisors must negotiate with candidates so that they produce a thesis that is clear about its achievements and honest about its drawbacks. This training also enhances editorial skills, preparing them for a life after degree that will most likely involve some disappointment. The ability to identify lapses in critical argument, creative depth and skill as well as to understand an audience should be graduate outcomes. Supervisors can help candidates to second-guess examiners, who need to be tutored about what to expect. Sometimes candidates must be encouraged to scale down their ambitions. The safest course is no doubt to be honest about what can be achieved, if timely graduation is the goal. The work ultimately belongs to the student, however, and so whatever cannot be encompassed in the current project—whether it is that extra 10,000 words or a more daring technical experiment—can be returned to later. But to be devil’s advocate, do supervisors and students want “safe”? Do we, as Halberstam suggests, “ultimately want more undisciplined knowledge, more questions and fewer answers?” (2011: 10). Granted, she poses this question in a book published by the prestigious Duke University Press from her position as a Professor at the University of Southern California. She feels free to push against the “political manipulation to

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which all university fields and disciplines are subject” (10), and work towards “knowledge sharing that detours around the mission of the university, with its masters and students” (13). That ongoing process will not serve the majority of postgraduates seeking certification. Perhaps her most useful suggestions, at least for those undertaking doctorates, pertain to the use of “low theory”, which she adapts from Stuart Hall as well as from Freire and Ranciére’s pedagogy, supporting an “open … questioning … flexible” (Halberstam 2011: 17) process. This recalls Deleuze’s position about the functionality of theory, which should be “exactly like a box of tools … It must be useful. It must function. And not for itself” (Foucault & Deleuze 1972, 4). Attractive to those living an imaginative life, this approach must be weighed against the necessity of presenting a comprehensible structure and argument that will produce a thesis of a certain quality. Candidates and supervisors cannot escape the fact that the research journey’s end, however open its methods, must engender something that as a whole is passable by examiners. So what might success look like as opposed to failure? The question has been asked, but let us now dispense with those terms. Rather, it is worth asking what a passable thesis might resemble and, by comparison, one that will not survive close scrutiny. First of all, it must be competent; in other words, it must meet artform industry standards for the creative component. This does not mean it is publishable by small or large presses, but it does demonstrate that it understands how it works with or against its genre conventions. Original contributions might comprise provocative questions and innovative approaches that could not live up to their promise, but might eventually open alternative pathways for the candidate or his or her colleagues. Writing the work itself might have been the only way to generate those questions or new directions. The process therefore has been key and one that others could replicate. Supervisors and examiners should try to situate the candidate’s work, thus, on a continuum from early apprentice to professional. Presumably candidates will not be accepted into a PhD until they have proved themselves by previous degrees and/or publications. The critical component and the creative product both need to articulate their purposes for experienced readers. If Mullins and Kiley’s research (2010: 382-84) proves correct and the majority of examiners would like students to see the examination process as “formative” rather than “summative” (passing or failing), and are mostly concerned with their proving mastery of an area and a capacity for independent research, then a thesis that does not include a “perfect”, “fully realised” or “mature” work will not fail. Experienced examiners will recognise the time and word constraints that hamper the

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dissertation. Within this context a thesis that acknowledges gaps in its argument and discusses why they exist, including future strategies and research questions, will demonstrate just that. The quality of the writing must nevertheless meet artform industry and academic standards. If not published, performed or exhibited before examination, the creative artifact will always have a second chance at another life, if the writer chooses, just as the critical elements can take form as individual essays or books.

The Doctoral Journey as Survival Story: Redefining Failure This argument has considered how supervisors and Creative Writing candidates might understand the doctoral journey as a sequence of stages with short and long-term goals, the ultimate one being the production of a hybrid thesis. That journey might also comprise the initial stages of an apprentice career or a redirection or enhancement of a mature one. It is time, therefore, to return to that emotive and slippery term, “failure”, in order to explore more useful idioms to describe “failed” projects. The intermission detailing the cases of Day and Gaudi suggest that incomplete, imperfect or failed work can still be efficacious for researchers and for a field. Projects that must be abandoned for lack of money, will, time, or even imagination might yield technical, experimental or aesthetic solutions for future work. Labelling something as a failure closes off this possibility. The gap between an unfinished and fully realised project is not predictable or measurable. The doctoral journey in fact constitutes a species of survival story. Candidates have written through false starts and missteps, past the threshold between what almost works, what might and what does. It is hard to anticipate where on that continuum they will end, and whether they will have deviated from accepted routes. Halberstam remarks that: The desire to be taken seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the tried and true paths of knowledge production … Indeed terms like serious and rigorous tend to be code words, in academia as well as other contexts, for disciplinary correctness … (2011: 6)

Acknowledging one’s predecessors in order to contextualise research does not preclude being innovative. It is one way of underlining the dissertation’s contribution, but the value of new pathways must be clear. Insufficient scholarship, however embedded in a dissertation, is a common complaint of Creative Writing examiners. The exegesis or critical

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component is, after all, just that—an explication and justification. Examiners expect argument, even if it takes the form of imaginative or narrative logic. The inability to express oneself can be expressed clearly and, indeed, can form part of a project’s subject matter. Barthes disempowered the writer and privileged readers, asserting that “writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning” (1977: 147). Arguably one of the first postmoderns, Beckett understood the century’s challenge to texts “to mean”. Instead of choosing paralysis, he chose immersion in the problem: “Two old maladies that should no doubt be considered separately: the malady of wanting to know what to do and the malady of wanting to be able to do it” (1965: 109-110). Masters and apprentices, supervisors and professionals, tend to suffer from the same afflictions. It is ironic that Beckett’s oeuvre, which focuses on the artist’s dilemma—“…that to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion…” (1965: Three Dialogues, 125)—was awarded the ultimate literary marker of success, the Nobel Prize. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, many celebrated authors have pushed boundaries over the course of their careers, knowing that they will never achieve perfection. Another way, however, of conceiving of this predicament, and one that doctoral graduates must face, is to turn the tables and say that they have accomplished this much, if no more at the time; to recognise that there is always tomorrow and the possibility of another draft. They too will be able to contribute their survivor stories. As the Unnamable says at the conclusion of Beckett’s Trilogy, “…you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on” (1965: 414).

Notes 1. The Flinders University’s introduction to “Examination of a thesis” states: “If the degree is awarded, the candidate will become the peer of the examiners” http://’www.flinders.edu.au/current-students/rhdstudents/examination-of-athesis.cfm 2014 2. The PREQ consists of attitudinal statements based on a 5 point Likert Scale ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”. In 2011, another major national survey was administered by the Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations (CAPA). Called “The Research Education Experience: Investigating Higher Degree by Research Candidates” Experiences in Australian Universities’ (online 7 May 2012 http://www.capa.edu.au), it was funded by the Australian Commonwealth. 3. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Gaud%C3%AD_buildings for complete list. 4. Gaudi was once arrested for speaking Catalonian to a policeman. See any

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biography of the architect for this incident. Catalonia’s national day, known as the Festa Nacional de Catalunya or La Diada (see http://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/spain/catalonia-day), celebrates a defeat in battle (1714), just as ANZAC day celebrates the Gallipoli defeat.

References Arron, GP, DA Day, SD Grover et al 1978 ‘Effect of ethylene on respiratory response of isolated sweet-potato mitochondria’ Australian Journal of Plant Physiology 5: 3, 239-48 Atwood, Margaret 2002 ‘Communion: Nobody to Nobody’ in Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 123-51 Austin, AE 2002 ‘Preparing the Next Generation of Faculty: Graduate School as Socialization to the Academic Career’ The Journal of Higher Education 73: 1 (Jan/Feb), 94-122 Bacon, Francis 1627 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2434 Bair, Deirdre 1978 Samuel Beckett: A Biography, New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Barthes, Roland 1977 Image Music Text Essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath London: Fontana Paperbacks Beckett, Samuel 1965, 1955 Three Novels by Samuel Beckett: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, New York: Grove Press. Molloy translated from the French by Patrick Bowles in collaboration with the author. Other novels translated by Beckett. —. 1965 Proust and 3 Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, London: Calder and Boyars 97-126 Boden, MA 2004 The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, London and New York: Routledge Carandell, Josep M 2003 (photos Pere Vivas) Park Güell: Gaudi’s Utopia, Barcelona: Triangle Postals Carayannopoulos, G 2012 ‘Measuring Research Student Satisfaction in an Era of “Students as Customers”’ Proceedings of the 10th Quality in Postgraduate Research Conference, Adelaide, 17-19 April, 59-69 —. 2011 ‘The Efficacy of Higher Degree Research Discussion Checklists on Research Candidate-Supervisor Communication’, in Krause, K, Buckridge, M, Grimmer, C & Purbrick-Illek, S (eds.) Research and Development in Higher Education: Reshaping Higher Education 34: 72-82 Chase, Richard (ed.) 1963 Herman Melville: Selected Tales and Poems, ‘Introduction’, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations (CAPA) 2012 The

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Research Education Experience: Investigating Higher Degree by Research Candidate’s Experiences in Australian Universities, Canberra: Department of Industry Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education (DIISRTE), 1-81 Csikszentmihalyi, M 1999 ‘A Systems perspective on creativity’ (edited extract), in R Sternberg (ed.) Handbook of Creativity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 313-35 Day, David 2014 Email to Jeri Kroll, Flinders University, 24 April Enright, Anne 2013 ‘Falling short: seven writers reflect on failure’, The Guardian Books section, 22 June, at http://m.guardian.cok.uk/books/2013/jun/22/falling-short-writersreflect-failure (accessed 1 July 2014) Foucault, Michel & Gilles Deleuze 1972 ‘Intellectuals & Power: A conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze’, at http://www.libcom.org/library/intellectuals-power-a-conversationbetween-michel-foucault-and-gilles-deleuze. Identified as ‘transcript of a 1972 conversation …’ ‘This transcript first appeared in English in the book Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: selected essays and interviews by Michel Foucault edited by Donald F. Bouchard’ (accessed 1 January 2009) Good Practice Framework for Research Training: Steering us in the right direction towards research training quality, Joe Luca, 2011 Office of Learning and Teaching Grant, Edith Cowan University and the Council of Deans and Directors of Graduate Studies (DDoGS), at http://www.ecu.edu.au/centres/graduate-research-school/goodpractice-framework (accessed 17 August 2013) Halberstam, Judith 2011 The Queer Art of Failure, Duke University Press, Durham, California, USA Holbrook, Allyson, Sid Bourke, Terry Lovat & Hedy Fairfair 2008 ‘Consistency and inconsistency in PhD thesis examination’ Australian Journal of Education 52: 1, 36-48 Humphrey, Robin, Neill Marshall & Laura Leonardo 2012 ‘The Impact of Research Training and Research Codes of Practice on Submission of Doctoral Degrees: An Exploratory Cohort Study’ Higher Education Quarterly 66: 1 (January), 47-64 Kearns, Hugh & Maria Gardiner 2006 Defeating Self-Sabotage: Getting Your PhD Finished, Adelaide: ThinkWell Knowlson, James 1996 Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, New York: Simon & Schuster Kroll, J & K Finlayson 2012 ‘Transforming creative writing postgraduate and supervisor identities: Ways of becoming professional’ TEXT 16: 2

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(October), 1-12, at http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct12/xxxxx_finlayson.htm (accessed 8 August 2013) Kroll, J & J Webb 2012 ‘Policies and Practicalities: Examining the Creative Writing Doctorate’ New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, at http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmnw20 (accessed 1 June 2012) Kroll, J 2010 ‘The Supervisor as Practice-led Coach and Trainer: Getting Creative Writing Doctoral Candidates Across the Finish Line’ TEXT Special Issue Website Series: ‘Supervising the Creative Arts Research Higher Degree’ Donna Lee Brien & Rosemary Williamson (eds.) (October 2009), 1-20, at http://www.textjournal.com.au (accessed 1 November 2010) Melville, Herman 1963 ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’, in Richard Chase (ed.) Herman Melville: Selected Tales and Poems, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 92-131 Morley, Louise, D Leonard & M David 2002 ‘Variations in Vivas: Quality and equality in British PhD assessments’ Studies in Higher Education 27: 3, 263-73 Mullins, Gerry & M Kiley 2010 ‘It’s a PhD, not a Nobel Prize’: How experienced examiners assess research theses’ Studies in Higher Education, at http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cshe2010 (accessed 23 May 2013) Newman, John Henry 1958 ‘The Idea of the University’, in William E Buckler (ed.) Prose of the Victorian Period, Boston: The Riverside Press Cambridge (Houghton Mifflin), 179-225 Regas, Ricard, Carlos Giordano & Nicolas Palmisano (Redaction) Giordano & Palmisano (project management), James Knight (art director), Cerys Giordano Jones, Lucia Giordano, Oliver Giordano & Dylan Giordano (trans.), 2012 Visual Guide to the Complete Work of Antoni Gaudi Barcelona: Dos de Arte Ediciones, SL Sawyer, Keith 2006 Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation, Oxford: Oxford University Press Sennett, R 2008 The Craftsman, New Haven and London: Yale University Press Shriver, Lionel 2013 ‘Falling short: seven writers reflect on failure’, The Guardian Books section, 22 June, at http://m.guardian.cok.uk/books/2013/jun/22/falling-short-writersreflect-failure (accessed 1 July 2014) TEQSA 2011 Higher Education Standards Framework (Threshold Standards), at

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http://www.comlaw.gov.au/Details/F2012L00003/Download, Section 4. 4.2: 20 of pdf (accessed 1 January 2012) Universities Australia 2013 An Agenda for Australian Higher Education 2013-2016, Licensed under a Creative Commons AttributionNonCommerical-NoDerivs.3.0 Unported License. Canberra: ACT Veitch, Kate 2014 Byron Bay Writers’ Festival session Walker, GE & CM Golde, L Jones, A Conklin Bueschel & P Hutchings 2008 The Formation of Scholars: Rethinking Doctoral Education for the Twenty-First Century, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass (The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching)     

CHAPTER TWELVE OVID’S ARTISTS AND MYTHIC FAILURE JEN WEBB

Starting and failing: an introduction Each year, new PhD candidates in a creative field arrive on university campuses around the world, ready to make work, ready to make it work. Some are serious academics who intend to use practice-led methodology to build knowledge about the question they’re asking. Some are serious artists who have little interest in academic research—they’re here to revive their practice. Some aren’t entirely sure what they’re doing or why, but think it would be interesting (1). All of them are up for a wild ride; even more so than new PhD students about to embark on a project in, say, literary theory or sociology, since candidates in those areas have a wellestablished roadmap to guide them through the process of their candidature, while those doing creative practice are frequently directed, by their art, down blind alleys or into oceans of red herrings. You can’t win every time. No one catches every green light; there’s no one who always gets it right. And dress it up however we may, not winning feels like failing. Bruce Barber explains this, describing “the deep cultural ambivalence we harbour, particularly in the school system, against failure” (Barber 2005: 71)—to fail is to go against the social norms. Though it may be true that “nothing succeeds like success”, it is also true that “nothing fails like failure” (Barber 2005: 72). And studio practice, like writing practice, is always, inevitably, a process of one failure after another. For the working artist or writer, failing is a part of the practice. In the research project on which—with Kevin Brophy, Paul Magee and Michael Biggs—I am currently engaged, we are interviewing a range of poets from across the Anglophone community. To date, none of those we have interviewed claim consistent success in their practice; most acknowledge that failure is a part of their world. As Andrew Motion said, in one of these

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interviews, “I feel haunted, as nearly everyone does, by Beckett’s advice to keep failing better (2). That’s all we can do, fail better” (Motion 2013). But none bewail this state of affairs. They keep going; as poet Philip Salom said in another of the interviews, the inevitable failures have “the strange upside of making me fight even harder to establish my various visions and explorations” (Salom 2014). And the keeping going can involve working and reworking a piece, sometimes over the course of a few days and sometimes, as poet Jill Jones said, for weeks, months or even years (Jones 2014). Many poets and other artists report similar experiences; but for those who are enrolled in a creative PhD, there is no time to be sanguine about the long slow process of failing, failing again, failing better. They have only four years (if enrolled fulltime) to get it right, and get it done. And yet, as histories of various forms of art practice demonstrate, that is not necessarily enough time. A creative PhD may include a wonderfully realised and resolved art work; it may, however, include a work that gestures toward its possibilities, but has not yet attained its full identity. These candidates also face a problem that, for Pierre Bourdieu, is inherent in structured education: the tendency to reproduce, rather than transform, practices and values (see Bourdieu & Passeron 1977), and thereby to exclude or depreciate those who do not play the game by the established rules. I suggest it is incumbent on us as supervisors and examiners of the candidates and their creative projects to be alert to these and other sources of failure; and to failure itself in all its variants, its vicissitudes and its delight. Having done this, then to lay out some steps our students can follow in the dark moments of their candidature, when failure seems to be all they have, all they will achieve.

Why fail? Daniel Siedell opens his essay, “Art and failure” by writing: Failure is an inescapable part of the human condition. It is also an inescapable part of extraordinary human achievement. In fact, it is because failure is woven so deeply into their fabric that makes certain endeavors, like the arts, philosophy, science, and even sports, so extraordinary, so compelling, and ultimately so meaningful. There is therefore a close—but often underexamined—connection between extraordinary achievement and failure in the history of the arts and culture in the West. (Siedell 2006: 105)

Siedell’s claim is repeated across the literature of practice, and of creativity more broadly. Klaus Ottmann (2004) traces a line through widely-read

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philosophical texts to show the imbrication of thoughts of failure—indeed, of “the certainty of failure”—in the works of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein. We must fail, in art, not least because so much of art is an attempt to render the ineffable in a form. But creative practitioners are not the only ones subject to the certainty of failure; in disciplines from neuroscience to sport to business management the same lesson is rehearsed: innovation emerges from failure. Physicist William Shockley states quite explicitly, in an essay on the research approach he named for this issue—Creative-Failure Methodology —that failure triggers or tricks the brain into coming up with creative solutions to discouraging failure and hence “failures become stepping stones on the path to creativity” (Shockley 1998: 27). Henry Ford said something very similar; and Samuel Beckett said it too, in his own way. All are remarkably successful in their fields; and all have, one might guess, experienced the failure–success nexus often enough to feel confident that they will find a way through every new disaster. Me, I don’t want to try, try again. I don’t want to fail better. But the history and the theory of practice are convincing: I will fail, as will we all, all of us creative practitioners; as will our new bright and enthusiastic PhD students, who may find this experience rather shattering. Friedrich Nietzsche’s “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” (3) offers few consolations for those who identify more closely with the comedic inversions: “What doesn’t kill you, doesn’t kill you”, “What doesn’t kill you is just biding its time”. Ovid was a great artist; but he ended his days in exile, far from Rome and all its pleasures and artistic/intellectual stimulation. It was not a crime, he insists, that led to his downfall, but carmen et error (a poem and a mistake), so that his experience of failure was not of failed drafts or lack of recognition, but of the wrong sort of poetry directed toward the wrong readership (Claassen 2008: 123). It is most unlikely that any of our PhD students will end up in trouble with the law due to carmen et error, but there are many ways in which an art practice can trip up the practitioner, or in which a life and all its errors can interrupt the process of a career in the arts. In his The Metamorphoses, (more or less) completed after he went into exile, Ovid provides vignettes of a surprising number of artists and shows them failing in their art, or in their lives. The appeal of these stories has endured down through the millennia; and I suspect this is due not only to their charm, violence and humour, but also to the fact that they gesture toward something that might be of value to other artists. Other writers from the ancient world treat the same stories, but few offer such insights into the role of art in the ruin of lives—or in their

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triumphs. Because of this, I am limiting my depictions of the stories to Ovid’s version; and from the range of possible stories in the Metamorphoses, I have selected just eight. Four of the characters of these stories are identified in the literature as artists, but I read them as failures in art as well as in life; the other four are incontestably artists in work and life, and their failures emerge more from approaches to practice or engagement with the social context than with poverty of technique or imagination. I read these vignettes as object lessons for the emerging artist: a list of things to do, and not do, in order to avoid ending up banished to outer Romania, or turned into a flower, or torn to shreds by angry Maenads—or the contemporary versions of these dire outcomes. They may offer, too, reasons we should not lose heart, even in the darker moments of our creative careers.

Fail well The first set of artists I have extracted from Metamorphoses are those Donald Lateiner identifies as key “artistic failures”. This group includes Narcissus, the lover of beauty (especially his own); Niobe, the creator of children; Polyphemus the poet; and Midas the accidental alchemist. For these artists, whom I designate “amateurs”, creative practice is somewhat peripheral to their lives; but the failures that their art produced had overwhelming effects. All four are vain and self-interested; none possess much in the way of technical skills, training, or practice. They seek selfgratification, but do not have the skills or the drive to produce a work of art that is immanent—fully present, “a life”, in Deleuze’s terms, that is actualised in the things and events that comprise the artist, rather than in the particularities of the artist himself or herself (Deleuze 2001: 28). Rather, they want the achievements of art, and its satisfactions, without having made the investment of effort, failure and despondency. Narcissus is the obvious candidate for the accusation of, well, narcissism. His creativity was his own beauty, and his impulse was to make an other/lover out of his own reflection (Bk III: 402–73). He has no empathy, no sense of connection with other people: ‘both boys and girls looked to him to make love, and yet that slender figure of proud Narcissus had little feeling for either boys or girls’ (BK III). Not that making love to others is either necessary or sufficient for art, but I suspect that the ability to connect, to find others interesting, to see beauty in all kinds of forms, is indeed necessary. How can we produce works that move others if we are ourselves unmoved by the world? Narcissus is moved only by himself; when he falls in love with his reflection, he demonstrates capacity for lyric

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poetry, but he is his own, and only, audience. What this suggests is a failure to understand the domain of practice—that there is a difference between reflection and reality. For him, the image in the water is a real person who reaches out to him in love, but can never be grasped (4). Nor does he understand the materiality of art, and therefore he lacks the skill that comes only from practice and experiment. No experienced artist would, as Narcissus does, fail to recognise that it is his tears and his hand that stir the water, and not the actions of the boy in the water. And finally, I suggest, Narcissus lacks a true aesthetic, values only himself, and possesses neither reflexivity nor the capacity for objective distance that is at the heart of creative practice and creative research. Having dismissed Narcissus, let me move on to Niobe, daughter of one of the Pleiades. Like Narcissus, her self-interest and self-love set a critical block in the path of her being able to achieve. In her case, her “art” is the creation of many children—she had produced fourteen children—and Ovid writes, dryly, that “She would have been the happiest of mothers if she herself had not been sure of it” (Bk VI: 146–203). Lack of critical distance? I suspect so; after all, the making of a child may seem extraordinary and wonderful, but it is also a very normal act that requires no skills, training, or aesthetic capacity. For Niobe, her sheer output is extraordinary: fourteen children, generated by a woman who, she reminds her neighbours and the gods, is also the descendent of remarkable individuals. The gods, though, are unimpressed; it takes more than arrogance and a family tree to be worth this much attention. In their heartless way, they first kill her seven sons—whereupon her husband commits suicide—and then they massacre her seven daughters. Finally, she achieves the status she desires but it is not through her making art, but becoming art: she is transformed, in her grief, into a marble statue. Equally vain, though less appealing than the former two, is Polyphemus the Cyclops, a man who is literally and metaphorically oneeyed. He presents himself as a poet, and woos Galatea by reciting a rather long, and not too bad, lyric poem. However, given that most of the lines are either about his charms and his possessions, or about the violence he will enact upon her true love, Acis, his art fails to capture her heart (Bk XIII: 789–869). He may be relatively accomplished at turning ideas into art, at putting words into lines, but he does not understand the genre in which he is operating: a love poem, after all, more typically focuses on the wonders of the one loved than on the splendour of the poet. Like both Narcissus and Niobe, he lacks the capacity for self-reflexivity and for a genuine aesthetic drive. His poetry is, after all, not for poetry’s sake, but in order to add Galatea to his collection.

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The last “failed artist” I discuss is Midas, primarily because he is in fact no artist: his capacity to turn objects into gold is just a trick (Bk XI: 85–145). And like many tricks, and like perhaps all divine gifts, it provides him not pleasure, not a sense of accomplishment, not wealth and not applause. Though everything he touches may indeed immediately become a glorious golden artefact, he can make nothing productive out of this gift. Indeed, had Bacchus not taken pity on him, he would have died of hunger and thirst, surrounded by golden versions of all the necessary and delightful things of the world. His failure was, like that the other three, an insufficient (or entirely lacking) technical capacity; insufficient aesthetic drive; and inability to employ the creative impulse and all its joys and anguish. Though Lateiner identifies these four as artists—albeit failed ones—I see them more as artist-manqués: those who, to quote Martin Amis, “because they cannot make art out of life, make their lives into art” (1992: 117). Lacking sufficient curiosity about others in the world, lacking the patience to build the skills that might lead to the sorts of outputs that would give them the rewards they desire, and lacking a deep passion to create for its own sake, these four are unsuccessful artists. Their personal qualities include beauty, family, wealth and social position; but this is insufficient to deliver the creative outcomes they might desire, and so they remain unfulfilled.

Fail better The second cohort of artists is those who are more appropriately, or more conventionally, labelled “artists”. All are serious practicing artists who have their own personal flaws, or demons, that lead them away from the triumphs they might otherwise deserve. I include here Orpheus the musician, who carelessly left his love to languish forever in the underworld; Arachne, the greatest weaver in history (well, in mythology); Daedalus, the great artificer; and Pygmalion the sculptor, who transformed his love from statue to human being. Lateiner asserts that each of these, along with the failed artists above, “in his or her own way is an artist, each creates art which is, for the artist, a heightened reality” (1984: 12). I do not read the failed artists as having sought a heightened reality; the four in this section, however, all adopt an approach to the world that includes observation, touch, and production. Each is manifestly talented and trained; for each, the pursuit of their creative work is a central compulsion of their lives. They can be labelled successes because they moved even the gods by the power of their art. But they can equally be labelled failures

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because they were unable to achieve their deepest desires, or to live lives that were ethically and aesthetically satisfying. Orpheus, identified by Eleanor Winsor Leach as “chief of legendary artist heroes” (1974: 118), is the first, and perhaps the most romantic, of these. His tragedy starts with the loss of his bride, Eurydice, who on their wedding day trod on a snake and “tripped, falling, stumbled into Death” (Bk X: 269). Unable to bear the grief of this loss, Orpheus begged the rulers of the underworld to restore his bride to him. His song reduced even the Furies to tears, and all the shades of the underworld were ‘charmed by the spell’ of his music. The story that follows is well known: having achieved his desire through the exquisite force of his art, he then broke the contract he had made with Persephone and Hades, and turned to look back at Eurydice. She then had to return to death—apparently without resentment, as Ovid seems to assert: “This was her second death—and yet she could not blame him (Was not his greatest fault great love for her?)” (Bk X). Leach considers that Ovid takes more account of Eurydice than does Virgil, in whose Georgics “she is a function of his mythical power, at once the ideal towards which art aspires and the muse that draws it forth” (1974: 120). At least Ovid positions her as a woman, albeit a remarkably forgiving one. But though Eurydice may have been sanguine about her second death, Orpheus was inconsolable; “he ‘cried against the gods’, rejected women in favour of the love of boys, sang into being beautiful forests filled with ‘trees of miracles and wonders’”, and of course was finally slaughtered by the Maenads (Bk XI), which was not so terrible, because Ovid records that as a result of this death he was finally reunited with Eurydice, and “today they walk together, side by side”. For Lateiner, “Orpheus personifies the pain out of which the artist can create” (1984: 14); though of course it is Eurydice who bears the main force of that pain, and whose double-death is the material from which Orpheus draws his perfect art (5). So yes, Orpheus was a musician of extraordinary talent, and achieved extraordinary creative success; but it seems to have brought him little satisfaction, little sense of achievement. Arachne’s story is, of course, her famous competition with Athena, a battle between two textile artists: one a god, and therefore perfect; the other a human, and therefore doomed to failure. While the goddess controlled all that was in her domain, Arachne had nothing but her artisanal and creative abilities: “The girl had neither family nor proper place; her art alone had given her rewards”; and though she was wretchedly poor, the inhabitant of a poor village, Arachne “was famous for her art in Lydian cities” (Bk VI: 1–25). Everyone assumed, because her

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weavings were so beautiful, that she must have been trained by Pallas Athena. But Arachne, who clearly knew already what twentieth-century researchers were to discover—that creativity is “merely” an “attribute of the human brain” (Andreasen 2011: 52); that it “belongs to being alive” (Winnicott 2001: 91)—insisted that there was no divine foundation for her art, and challenged the goddess to a weaving duel. Athena’s glorious weaving reproduced the authority of the established order; Arachne’s depicted the violence of that order, the repeated acts of rape and deception imposed by the gods on human women (Bk VI: 129– 45). Her work was demonstrably superior to that of Athena, writes Ovid— “Not even Pallas nor blue-fevered Envy could damn Arachne’s work”— but because she elected to speak truth to power, when she herself had no power, she set herself up for failure. Hers was, like Ovid’s, one of carmen et error rather than a failure of the art. Athena could not deny its technical skill and beauty, so the goddess shredded the weaving and assaulted the young woman. Arachne promptly tried to hang herself, and was instead transformed into the eternal spider. Her fault, Laetiner writes, was a lack of tact (1984: 15): though she succeeded formally, she overlooked the context in which she was operating. You do not beat the gods, and especially not at their own game; and so she was changed from skilful human artist to spider, facing an eternity as “the tenuous weaver of an ancient craft”(6). Daedalus appears across the literature as the greatest artist, architect and designer of the ancient world. His many inventions and artworks, including those of site specific work (the temple doors at Cumae, the Labyrinth), and his sculptural innovations (crafting statues that appeared to be alive), as well as his biography, present a man who was creative, skillful, fearless, and remarkably inventive. But perhaps this was as much PR as art: how much of what he made was actually a successful work? How much of it was actually his own work, rather than that of others— after all, he murdered his apprentice, his own nephew Calos (or Talus or Perdix) simply because the boy showed genuine inventiveness (Bk 8). His own name warns us to be careful about his claims: Daedalus translates as “cunning artificer”. Virgil, along with other writers from the ancient world, presents him as a true artist, but Ovid is more circumspect. In his account, Daedalus was never really on top of his game, never fully in control of his materials or his product. For Lateiner, “His skill is out of control” (1984: 17); for Leach, the stories “suggest the artist’s inability to predict or control the consequences of his own art” (1974: 118). He nearly trapped himself in the Labyrinth he built, for example, and the wings he crafted failed in

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flight, causing the death of his son. Much as his work spiraled out of control, so too his relationships were frequently disastrous: as Andrew Melrose and I observe in an earlier essay, it was not a good idea to be close to Daedalus: virtually everyone with whom he had dealings “died as a direct result of, or association with, his art/artifice and his ability to convince others of the validity of his vision” (Melrose and Webb 2011). Perhaps he truly was an extraordinary artist; perhaps the legend was overstated; or perhaps his failure was rooted in how he engaged in his practice. Unlike Arachne or Orpheus for whom, it seems, the making of art was an autotelic practice, he worked for cash; he took on contracts to produce work for kings. Ovid, differs from many of the other writers of the ancient world, in being a touch dismissive of Daedalus’ art, presenting him more as an artisan than an artist and perhaps this diminishing of the man’s status foreshadows Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of the field of cultural production, in which the inversion of economic logic means that commercial success equals artistic failure (Bourdieu 1993: 30). But in any event, Daedalus has gone into history as an extraordinarily productive, but supremely flawed, artist. The last of these artists is Pygmalion, an artist who improves on Daedalus’ sculptural inventions, making statues so perfect that, like Arachne’s embroidered beings, viewers would think they were real. They fooled even him, perhaps in an instance of how easily sexual desire can trump creative drive. Because Pygmalion does not like human women— “Even if he closed his eyes, his instincts told him he’d better sleep alone” —rather than form an intimate relationship with a woman, “He took to art, ingenious as he was, and made a creature more beautiful than any girl on earth” (Bk X: 243–97). In fact, the statue was so beautiful that it fooled even him: he fell in love with it, and was distressed that it did not respond to his caresses. Horace Gregory, introducing Book X in which Pygmalion’s story is narrated, depicts it as “a miracle of self-love … that of the artist who falls in love with a work of his own creation, which is one of the finest examples of Ovid’s intuitive wit”. Ovid though, is kinder, depicting the artist as diffident, rather than as self-loving, not the least because he was unwilling to ask the goddess of love to transform his statue into living form. Ovid’s story has him saying, “‘May the very Gods in Heaven give me a wife’—he could not say outright, “Give me the girl I made”.’ Venus, though, knew precisely what he meant, and she brought the statue to life. And they lived happily ever after. Where, then, is Pygmalion’s triumph, where his failure? He plays the game correctly: knows his craft and art, applies the sorts of measures

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necessary in any creative career, produces his finest work, and wows the gatekeepers. Unlike Arachne, he does not challenge authority; unlike Orpheus, he does not forget himself and make serious mistakes; unlike Daedalus, he is quite transparent about his being and (to less extent) his desires. For Leach, then, this story is the one that is closest to Ovid’s own biography: rather than the usual Ovidian story of love “as a fatal impulse verging on death”, Pygmalion’s experience is simply “a tale of love and an artist” (Leach 1974: 122). But as she notes later, there is a hint of incest in the story; the descendants of Pygmalion and his statue bride include a father-daughter dyad, Cinyras and Myrrha, who are in an incestuous relationship, mirroring the love of the “father”-artist for his “daughter”bride. But perhaps a more damaging outcome, for the identity of the artist, is that he rejects the object-art and thereby his own creative impulses as an artist to become, instead, a lover. As an effect of this over-identification, Pygmalion cannot achieve the objective critical distance that is so important for effective creative work, for Donald Schön’s reflectivity, for Pierre Bourdieu’s reflexivity: the distance that allows the artist to take editorial control over the object made, and to learn from the process, leading to better and ever better work.

Failing and fading: a conclusion For Winnicott, creativity is integral to being human, and to being well as a human. It is about “the search for the self”, and therefore, he writes, it is “only in being creative that the individual discovers the self” (2005: 72– 73). All human beings are (at least potentially) creative, but Winnicott distinguishes the creativity of the artist from that of the population in general as being one of a search for the self: If the artist (in whatever medium) is searching for the self, then it can be said that in all probability there is already some failure for that artist in the field of general creative living. The finished creation never heals the underlying lack of sense of self. (Winnicott 2005: 73)

This, I suspect, offers some clues to the difference between the artistmanqués and the artists in Ovid’s account. In the case of the first four artists, there is little evidence that their lives were driven by exploration, by a creative impulse to make and to know. They do not seem to lack a sense of self, but present as being pretty satisfied with who they understood themselves to be. The second cohort are more driven individuals, eager to know more and better, to force their way into the

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world, to compete with their creative skills in a field of creative, social and political endeavour. Their art is unquestionably of fine quality; their lives are less successful. Orpheus can move even the dead to pity, but he cannot achieve his deepest desire. Arachne weaves a more splendid work than the goddess herself, but she doesn’t know how to play the game of politics. Daedalus is no better, though his political clumsiness was directed toward a temporal rather than a divine power. And Pygmalion, whom Laetiner designates the perfect artist because he wins and is enriched by his practice, remains (I suspect) limited in his capacity to appreciate art for what it is, and human beings for what they are, his greatest achievement being closer to a Stepford Wives endeavour than to great art. But why might these stories of failure be consolatory to a PhD creative writing student who is maybe twenty months through the project, facing the submission milestone, and still uncertain of whether the shape, tone, voice, perspective, mood, genre, context, or even form are working? Primarily, it is because the four genuine artists model high-level creative practice, with personal and professional characteristics that fit neatly with those listed by the psychologists, psychiatrists and neuroscientists who have studied creativity (see especially Csikszentmihalyi 1996). They are inquisitive, imaginative and willing to take chances: as ready to duel with the gods or enter the world of the dead as to take on such massive contracts as building an underground labyrinth. They did not emerge into the world able to write fine poetry, compose and perform glorious music, weave sublime tapestries, or carve statues that came to life, but were trained, and then practiced their art throughout their lives. They also found ways to live that suited them: Arachne staying put in her village, Daedalus and Orpheus on the move, and Pygmalion remaining at home in his town. And they did not make just one fine piece of art. They worked steadily, building up a body of work, learning their form, failing often, failing better. They were socially connected: each lived in an environment where creativity was valued; each was acknowledged by their communities as an artist of note (see Csikszentmihalyi 1996b: 6). But they did not rely on others for their critical engagement with their own work: they spent little if any time working collaboratively, or paying too much attention to what people said about them: they imposed, and trusted, their own judgment. What this models, for early career researchers who are still building confidence in creative practice, is the value of maintaining links to their own community of interest without investing their all in that community. What we might take from that is the counsel to find a university where creative research is acknowledged as a valid approach; find a supervisor

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who believes in your approach; build links with other doctoral candidates in creative practice; and remember that even the greatest artists get it wrong, a lot of the time—picking unnecessary fights with authorities, forgetting that other people are part of the wide world too. It is possible to extract models from the failed artists too: such as, ensure that your energy and self-praise are focused on your art, and not on your possessions, appearance and family; don’t rely on tricks—be prepared to do the hard and often boring work of building skills, and seeing a project through all its phases, from beginning to end (see Andreasen 2011). These are useful tips, though hardly radical, here in the informed 21st century. But what particularly compels me in these stories is not the good advice, but the image of the fearlessness of the artists: they do not restrict their practice, limit their imaginations, or allow their tragedies and personal incompetence to stifle their work. They make, and keep making; they fail, and keep failing. Henry Ford insisted that this is the basis for success: “One who fears the future, who fears failure, limits his activities. Failure is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again” (Ford 2012: 18). Ford is speaking as a manufacturer, but researchers support this view: that those who do finally achieve an output of value are those who reject fear of failure, accept the tedium of learning and perfecting the necessary skills, are willing to persist no matter the odds, until they find a way through. We will fail; our students will fail; but if that failure is woven through with what Shockley calls “the will to think” (1998: 27), then we can be confident that the failure will contain within itself the necessities for success (7).

Notes 1. I rarely hear, any more, that the PhD stipend has replaced the arts grant, and was the reason for artists enrolling in the degree. It may not have been true even when it was presented as the core reason. 2. From Samuel Beckett 1983 Worstward Ho, London: Calder, p. 7. 3. Paraphrased, of course, from Friedrich Nietzsche who, in his ‘Aphorism from life’s military school’ announces ‘What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger’ (1997: 6). 4. In fact, this may suggest that Narcissus did understand subjectivity more fully and earlier than he ought, since his experience resembles that of the Lacanian subject, predicated on lack; or perhaps the Foucauldian one, which is never in the place one might expect. 5. Lateiner rather hardheartedly overlooks the fact that had Orpheus been a little more self-controlled, Eurydice would not have been forced back into death. I find it difficult not to think of this story as one of a self-indulgent artist who uses someone else’s loss as the motivation for his own art but perhaps I am being

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unkind. 6. Perhaps she can be said to have won, since her descendants are still weaving their webs, all across the globe, while Pallas Athena has gone into story. But what a price to pay. 7. The research for this chapter was supported under the Australian Research Council Discovery Projects funding scheme (Project Number DP 130100402).

References Amis, Martin ‘Lolita Reconsidered’, The Atlantic 270 (September 1992): 109–20. Andreasen, N.C. ‘A Journey into Chaos: Creativity and the Unconscious’ in A.R. Singh and S.A. Singh (eds.), Brain, Mind and Consciousness: An International, Interdisciplinary Perspective: MSM 9.1 (2011): 42– 53. Barber, Bruce Trans/actions: art, film and death (PhD thesis, European Graduate School, 2005). Bourdieu, Pierre The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (Cambridge: Polity, 1993). —. Pascalian meditations, translated by Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity, 2000). Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean-Claude Passeron Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (London: Sage, 1977). Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly Creativity: The Work and Lives of 91 Eminent People (New York: HarperCollins, 1996a). —. Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention (New York: HarperCollins, 1996b). Claassen, Jo-Marie Ovid Revisited: The Poet in Exile (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2008). Deleuze, Gilles Pure immanence: Essays on a life, translated by Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001). Ford, Henry My life and work: an autobiography (New York: Snowball Publishing, 2012 [1922]). Jones, Jill, interviewed by Jen Webb, 6 March 2014. Ethics approval number 13-08. Lateiner, Donald ‘Mythic and non-mythic artists in Ovid’s Metamorphoses’, Ramus 13.1 (1984): 1–30. Leach, Eleanor Winsor ‘Ekphrasis and the theme of artistic failure in Ovid’s Metamorphoses’, Ramus 3 (1974): 102–42. Melrose, Andrew and Jen Webb ‘Intimacy and the Icarus effect’, Axon: Creative Explorations 1.1 (September 2011), http://www.axonjournal.com.au/issue-1/intimacy-and-icarus-effect.

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Motion, Andrew, interviewed by Kevin Brophy, 4 June 2013. Ethics approval number 13-08. Nietzsche, Friedrich Twilight of the Idols, trans. Richard Polt (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997 [1889]). Ottmann, Klaus The Genius Decision: the extraordinary and the postmodern condition (Putnam: Spring Productions, 2004). Ovid The Metamorphoses, translated by Horace Gregory (New York: Signet, 2001 [c8CE]). Schön, Donald The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action (New York: Basic Books, 1983). Salom, Philip, interviewed by Kevin Brophy, 30 July 2014. Ethics approval number 13-08. Shockley, William ‘The invention of the transistor—“An example of Creative-Failure Methodology”,’ in H Tsuya, Howard Huff and U. Gösele (eds.), Silicon materials science and technology (New Jersey: The Electrochemical Society, 1998), pp.26–68. Siedell, Daniel ‘Art and failure’, The Journal of Aesthetic Education 40.2 (2006), 105–17. Winnicott, D.W. Playing and reality (London, UK: Brunner-Rutledge, 2001 [1971]).

CONTRIBUTORS

Denise Beckton has a background in public health and education, and is currently a higher degree by research student at Central Queensland University in Noosa, Queensland, where she is writing a fiction novel and a related dissertation that explores the use of constructed languages (both written and pictorial/glyph-based) and their use, in fiction, as a narrative component. Donna Lee Brien, BEd (Deakin); GCHE (UNE); MA(Prelim) (USyd); MA (UTS); PhD (QUT), is Professor of Creative Industries and Chair of the Creative and Performing Arts Research Group at Central Queensland University, Australia. A past President of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs, her biography John Power 1881-1943 is the standard work on this expatriate Australian. Donna is co-author of the bestselling trade Girls Guide series for Allen & Unwin, and author of over 20 books and exhibition catalogues and over 150 refereed book chapters and journal articles. Donna is currently Commissioning Editor, Special Issues, of TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, and member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Aeternum: The Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies, the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture and Locale: Pacific Journal of Regional Food Studies. Diane Comer is a graduate of the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Program, where she studied with the founding director Carl Klaus. She has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in the USA, and her personal essays have appeared in AGNI, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Fourth Genre, The North American Review, and Gulf Coast, among other journals. She has been a bridesmaid five times in Best American Essays and is ready to catch the bouquet anytime now. Believing what is good should be given back, she has taught at universities and in community outreach programmes in New Zealand, Sweden, and the USA. Diane completed her PhD at the University of Canterbury in 2015.

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Thom Conroy is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Massey University, where he coordinates the Masters of Creative Writing degree. He is also a fiction writer whose historical novel The Naturalist was published with Random House in 2014. His work has also appeared in various journals in the US and New Zealand, including Sport, Landfall, New England Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Kenyon Review. His fiction has been recognised by Best American Short Stories 2012 and has won various other awards, including the Katherine Ann Porter Prize in Fiction and the Sunday Star-Times Short Fiction Competition. Thom is the founder of the Aotearoa Creative Writing Research Network. Dr Shady Cosgrove is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Wollongong. Her novel What the Ground Can’t Hold was published in 2013 by Picador and her memoir She Played Elvis (Allen and Unwin, 2009) was shortlisted for the Australian Vogel Award. Her short work has appeared in Overland, Southerly, Best Australian Stories, Antipodes, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Age. Dominique Hecq is Associate Professor at Swinburne University of Technology. She has a PhD in literature and a background in French and Germanic languages, with qualifications in literary translation and psychoanalysis. She has published in the areas of literary studies, translation, creative writing, psychoanalysis, and pedagogy. She is the author of thirteen books of fiction and poetry, the latest being Stretchmarks of Sun (Re.press). Towards a Poetics of Creative Writing is in press (Multilingual Matters). Dominique edits the online journal of writing and creative research Bukker Tillibul (http://bukkertillibul.net), which especially welcomes submissions by postgraduates and early career researchers. Professor Jeri Kroll is Dean of Graduate Research at Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia. Past Chair of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs, she helped to found the Creative Writing Program at Flinders. She has published over forty refereed essays, thirteen book chapters and two co-edited books (with Graeme Harper), the most recent being Research Methods in Creative Writing (Palgrave Macmillan 2013). A writer for adults and young people, she has published more than twenty books; the most recent are Workshopping the Heart: New and Selected Poems (Wakefield 2013) and Vanishing Point (2015). A staged reading of that verse novel took place at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts ‘Page to Stage’ Festival in 2011 and a full production at George

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Washington University in 2014. In 2015, it was a regional winner in the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival. Gail Pittaway is Senior Lecturer in the School of Media Arts at the Waikato Institute of Technology in Hamilton, New Zealand. She is currently an advisory editor for TEXT journal and a founding co-editor of Meniscus literary magazine, having also been a member of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs executive committee since 2004. She has edited several anthologies of student writing, and a historical collection of writings associated with gardens, as well as regularly publishing poetry, papers and articles for TEXT and Great Writing journals. Jessica Seymour is an early-career researcher with a PhD from Southern Cross University. A recipient of the Australian Postgraduate Award, her research interests include children's and young adult literature, textual analysis, fan studies and transmedia narratives. She co-edited Fan Studies: Researching Popular Audiences, as well as a special issue of TEXT Journal titled 'Why YA? Researching, writing and publishing YA fiction in Australasia'. Her published articles and book chapters include analyses of power relationships in YA fiction, memory and identity in Doctor Who, and dwarvish ideals of beauty in The Lord of the Rings. Lisa Smithies is a third-year PhD student in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne. Her research examines human behavioural biology, in relation to cognitive literary theory and creative writing theory. In her own creative practice, she writes short fictional pieces that mix science with fiction, but aren’t necessarily science fiction. She runs the blog Creative Writer PhD. James Vicars writes fiction, poetry and nonfiction, and has conducted extended research in the areas of biography and fictional biography. He has academic interests in hermeneutics, critical and literary theory, media and communication studies, and in continental and Indian philosophy. His literary interests are in the contemporary novel, life writing and twentieth century English and Australian literature. He is an Adjunct Lecturer in the School of Arts at the University of New England. Jen Webb is Distinguished Professor of Creative Practice, and Director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research at the University of Canberra. Her research focuses on the relationship between art and

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society; she is currently working, with Kevin Brophy, Michael Biggs and Paul Magee, on an ARC-funded project that investigates creativity through a case study of contemporary poetry. Her recent book publications are Understanding Foucault: a Critical Introduction (with G. Danaher, T. Schirato; pub Allen & Unwin: Sydney and London: Sage 2012) along with the forthcoming Researching Creative Writing (Professional & Higher, Cambridge) and Art and Human Rights: Contemporary Asian Contexts (with Caroline Turner; Manchester University Press). Jen also writes poetry, and produces artist books.

 

      

INDEX a posteriori languages, 82 a priori languages, 82 academic creative research, 9 alcohol, 27 alcohol-based memoir, 28 Alcoholic Memoirs, 33 Andresen, Øystein, 63, 73 Anne of Green Gables, 108 apprenticeship, 137, 145, 148 Arachne, 161 archetypal narratives, 55 Artemis Fowl, 88 artist-manqués, 160, 164 Athena, 161 atmosphere, 81, 88 Austen, Jane, 105, 110 Barber Bruce, 155 Beckett, Samuel, 136, 149, 157 border, 58 Bourdieu, Pierre, 156, 163 Brew, Margit, 68, 70 Brien, Donna Lee, 19, 71 Brontë, Charlotte, 109 Burroughs, Augusten, 35 Butor, 11 Chandler, Daniel, 29 character development, 86 characterisation, 81, 88 Cheever, Susan, 35 Cixous, Hélène, 54 cognition, 118 cognitive gaps, 120 cognitive information processing, 128 cognitive linguist, 125 cognitive literary theory, 117 constructed languages, 83 contact zone, 55 Couser, G. Thomas, 29

creative nonfiction, 64 creative practice, 10, 155 creative process, 93, 94, 101 creative research, 15, 165 creative writing process, 118 Creative-Failure Methodology, 157 creativity, 164 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 165 cultural memory, 54 Daedalus, 162 Davis, Lydia, 117, 121, 126, 128 Delillo, Don, 8, 9 delineation, 86, 90 Derrida, 28 Dieffenbach, 47, 49, 50 discourse, 96 discursive practice, 98 distance, 53 Doctoral candidates, 141 Drinking A Love Story, 35 Dry A Memoir, 35 Ellis, Cath, 12 Emma Approved, 110 ERA, 9 erasure, 57 essayist, 53 ethical implications, 7 ethical obligation, 13 ethics, 7, 10, 12, 14 ethics clearance, 7 ethnicity, 59 Eurydice, 161 fact-checking, 8, 9, 12, 15 failing, 155 failure, 135, 138, 140, 147 family, 55 fan interactions, 111 fan practices, 107

174 fantasy, 81 fear of failure, 166 fearlessness, 166 female agency, 111 fiction, 7, 43, 44, 46, 48, 49, 81 fictional biography, 18, 19 fictional languages, 81, 86 field, 17 film, 81, 84 Fisher, Carrie, 34 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 109 Fodor, Jerry, 118 Ford, Henry, 166 Forest Homes, 72 Foucault, 106 Frame, Janet, 93, 96, 99 Friberg, Bror Eric, 68, 70, 75 frontier, 58 Furst, Lilian, 11 Gaps in Nature, 118 Gaudi, Antoni, 144, 148 gender, 59 genre, 28 Google+, 105 Green Gables Fables, 107, 108 Gregory, Horace, 163 Gutkind, Lee, 64, 71 Ha Jin, 54 Hampl, Patricia, 53 heavy drinking, 27 heterotopia, 106, 110, 112 heterotopic space, 107 High Sobriety, 37 history, 43, 44, 46, 47, 51 Home Before Dark A Biographical Memoir of John Cheever, 35 host country, 59 hybrid, 137 identity, 60 imaginary, 43, 44, 46, 47, 49 imaginative writing as biography, 21 immigrants, 67, 75 indigenous, 59 inhabit gaps, 23

Index innovation, 22 invented language, 83, 85, 88 Jane Eyre, 109 Johanna’s World, 63, 66, 73 John Barleycorn, 33 Karr, Mary, 35 Kierkegaard, Søren, 56 King, Michael, 65 Kingsolver, Barbara, 8, 14 Knapp, Caroline, 35, 36 ‘knowing in practice’, 23 knowledge-producing, 13 Krauth, Nigel, 28 Kriegel, Leonard, 55 language, 83 language acquisition, 59 language theory, 90 Lateiner, Donald, 158, 160 Leach, Eleanor Winsor, 161 Levinas, Emmanuel, 58 likeness, 22 linguistic features, 87 Lit A Memoir, 35 literary interpretation, 120 literature, 43, 44, 46, 48, 49, 81, 83, 84 Lizzie Bennett Diaries, 108 Lobanov-Rostovsky, Sergei, 7, 9 local culture, 59 Lohafer, Susan, 124 London, Jack, 33 loss, 57 MƗori, 54, 63, 68, 75, 77 map, 56 Margan, Frank, 31 Martini A Memoir, 32 masters, 137, 147 McEwan, Ian, 13 McGovern, George, 35 McKinnon, Catherine, 10, 12 McKinnon, T. D., 13 memoirs, 27 mental illness, 28 Midas, 160

Minding the Gap: Writing across Thresholds and Fault Lines Migration, 53 Miller, Carolyn, 29 mind the gap, 20 modularity, 120 Modularity of mind, 119 Montaigne, 53 Montgomery, L.M., 108 Moorhouse, Frank, 32 Morgan, Marlo, 12 Morris, Pam, 11 Motion, Andrew, 155 Mutant Message Down Under, 12 Myles, Eileen, 29 Narcissus, 158 narrative, 54, 81 narrative elements, 86 narratological position, 95, 97, 101 native, 55 navigation, 53 netnographic, 106 New Zealand, 54, 63, 74, 75, 78 Nietzsche, Friederich, 157 Niobe, 159 nonnative speaker, 59 Norse mythology, 64 Norsewood, 66, 69, 76 Norway, 74 objective biographies, 18 optical illusions, 122 Orpheus, 161 Ovid, 157 personal essay, 53, 56 Petersen, George Conrad, 72 PhD, 147, 154, 155 phenomenology, 43, 44, 46, 47, 49,50 plot, 81, 86 poetics, 94, 102 point of view, 96, 97 Polyphemus the Cyclops, 159 popular fiction, 83 postmodern novel, 20 postmodernism, 102 practice as a site for, 21 practice-based research, 18 practice-led methodology, 155

175

praxis, 23 Pride and Prejudice, 105 publication, 14 pure fiction, 20 Pygmalion, 163 Ray Castle Column, 31 readers, 14 Realism, 44 realist fiction, 9 realist literary fiction, 7, 15 realist novels, 11 realistic, 49 representation, 7, 11 research, 7, 10, 15 research of producing new knowledge, 9 Ricoeur, Paul, 22, 24 roleplaying, 110, 112 roots/routes, 54 Rushdie, Salman, 58 saga, 64, 72 Sanditon, 110 Scandinavian, 63, 66, 67 Schön, Donald, 164 self-sabotage, 137 setting, 81, 86, 88 Shockley, William, 157 Siedell, Daniel, 156 Smashed Story of a Drunken Girlhood, 35 social media, 105, 107, 112 Spolsky, Ellen, 117, 130 Stam, Robert, 28 Stark, Jill, 37 storying, 126 Storying, 124 subjective and personal understandings, 22 subjective engagement, 24 subjectivity, 18 success, 137, 138, 141, 142, 145, 147 Sweden, 58 Tartt, Donna, 14

176 Terry: My Daughter’s Life-andDeath Struggle with Alcoholism, 35 textual agent, agents, 86, 90 textual bodies, 107, 112 textual engagement, 112 The Autobiography of Jane Eyre, 109 The Call of the Wild, 33 The Carpathians, 93, 95 The Grape and I, 31 The Great Gatsby, 109 The Hunter Valley Its Wines, People and History, 32 The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, 105 The Naturalist, 46, 47, 49, 50 The Nick Carraway Chronicles, 107, 109, 112 transmedia, 105, 107, 110, 112, 113 truth, 11

Index Tumblr, 105 Turner, Mark, 125 Twitter, 105, 107, 110, 112 unknown, 54 verisimilitude, 7, 10 very short stories, 117 Virgil, 162 Vogel, Julius, 67, 72 voice, 86 Vollman, William T., 7, 15 voyaging, 64, 66, 77 vulnerability, 55 Watership Down, 86 Welcome to Sanditon, 107, 110, 112 whakapapa, 64, 73 White Fang, 33 Winnicott, Donald, 164 Wishful Drinking, 34 YouTube, 105, 107, 110 Zailckas, Koren, 35