Fictocritical Innovations

Coast to Coast Infrequency (Part I) (2013)

Coast to coast infrequency, continentally settled or perhaps ‘submerged’, I play the role well, but not well enough to suppress the cravings and desires to leave and situate myself on mirrored coastal plains, snow-coated peaks, to swim in torrential rivers in great seeping valleys, engage depravity and isolation amongst the mass of alienating strangers and to feed my hunger and thirst, absorbing the (dis)comfort and solace made from and in the cusped hands of an inverted host.

The plan was to seek out, find and embrace redemption, to refuel the empty, twittering gauge, to reset the cycle, bring vibrancy back to my sagging face and bring lustre back into my drooping eyes; tired but restlessly racing underneath the same and similar skies of the day-to-day and day-by-day drone, I holler (ever so quietly)! The desire was real, sincere.

Instead, I (counter) intuitively fixate myself in the overly frequented corners, dark places and strobing, conniving lights of discotheques that were made in these watering holes and the artificial oases overseas for the abuse and suppression of personal growth. But these places merely highlight the familiarity and mediocrity of my own coast.

Stagnated and alone, I feel the quaking thunder and the waves swelling and crashing. They physically manifest themselves on the beach as well as in the depths of my brain, the pressure in my skull and the conflicted pains I feel in my mind; my obsessive compulsion, my paranoia, my fatigue, my cynicism, my angst, my jealousy and my spite all bubble to the surface, swelling and crashing in a cyclical rotation that reverses and contrasts the purity and beauty of the waves before my eyes. I sabotage myself, knowingly, consciously—the pattern or patent of my youth.

I lie dejected, finally, by the seaside in the paradise that I sought out. The experience has been violated. No more sincerity spills forth. My original pure intention is all but gone. Instead mere toxicity and chemistry and a sweat tainted by an egocentric and awkward fear courses through my veins and the drains of my silent delirium and the Incan(tantory) street. I dream of the other coast, my coast, the foreign yet familiar tones—herein lies, my quiet defeat, but I will celebrate at home, and to others, nonetheless. The coast to coast infrequency will ebb and flow again.

[A]n inner compulsion to move on—it was still not clear to him where to—troubled him. (Mann 12)

Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd and the forbidden. (Mann 19)

Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice can relate to the darker side of ‘travel’, and the often superficial pretentiousness of it. We always feel compelled to convey the ‘travel’ experience to others as having been positive or revelatory, whereas this isn’t always the case. Instead we often subject ourselves to the grotesque depravity in dark places on the other side of the world whilst we formulate a fake romanticised version of what actually did or did not happen to ‘us’ over ‘there’.

Travel (for a youth) can be about pushing oneself to uncomfortable limits in order to ensure we have ventured as ‘far out’ as possible, but really all we do is destroy ourselves and forget our experiences. And all we remember is the regret and suffering and frustration, and the need for love and respect in the eyes of others to whom the exact same thing is happening (sometimes) when they are abroad. So, really it is a dishonest farce and façade that we tell ourselves and others to keep the perpetual ‘frequency’ going, to and from different coasts and shores and lands and continents.

Coast to Coast Infrequency (Part II) (2013)

Coastally and inwardly focused once again

Solitary journeys, an accentuated tic of time spread out

And attempts at deprecating and appreciating the self more

Not so much needing others, and then finding that others gravitate

And circulate more easily and at ease

Jarring attempts at stinted and jolted-stagnant communication

And dialogue still exists

Trying just as hard but for only half the time

A course, of course, of plenitude:

Pick and choose your moments … better

Is there a need to?

Coughing and scoffing followed by a disarming sincerity

And a smile that could actually change you

The niceties, vice-less and true …

A casual mantra along the lines of ‘being alone, and that being okay/fine’ could be applied here in an attempt to gain a psychological stability that stems from a simple desire to be alone and be comfortable with that. Sometimes there is no need to engage and be engaging with others in social settings all of the time—the tired and restless self with an act or need to portray energy and enthusiasm.

The imagery and ‘daze’ of the coast continue to be prevalent metaphors for a state of mind, being undone.

Ghouls (2014)

The coast seems quiet today, though. Deafened, silenced—no hum. Gentle murmurs, maybe. Nothing is happening. The population has been subdued or otherwise has subsided. Everyone looks mildly suspicious, but no one will venture to voice his or her concerns. It’s a weekend weakened, but it seems more like a weak end to the plain planetary cycle. Entire systems have shut down, but maybe this is all a result of the volume being turned down for my own selfish reasons or my own reasoning, unjustifiable dystopia, with eyes reddened and sore from the sensory exposure to my ghoulish thoughtless selves ramming themselves, against the grain, outside my bedroom wall, the night before.

End of the Weekend (2014)

Intense temporary bonds and relationships. Difficult to justify? A steep ascent as opposed to a gradual climb; a disappointed overworked air carries us through to the end of the weekend. Paradise sorrows—it is a tense, terse humiliation that we choose to embrace or to ignore. Others notice it more in us. But that could also easily be the dysfunctional, ill-equipped, undisciplined, stifling goggles that we wear. Stake your future on or in these reckoned experiences, forcing the soul to expand as the dust never seems to settle, and we ignore certain choice cuts, words, shabby looks or commentaries being made, whilst continuously shedding skin.

Going Home (2014)

Canyons of thought whisper through the stillness of their depths and predicate a secondary madness.

You need time to stop, and then more time to stop again, in order to then have the free time to actually think for a while—to process everything: homogeneity. The vagabond sits and stews, desperate to get away from the slow-paced cluttered group.

Something ‘funny’ happens and some fit, clucky middle-aged women come along asking me to take photographs of them. At least they’re not taking ‘selfies’. I like this generation. I don’t think too much truly fazes (or ever fazed) them. They belonged to that whole Fleetwood Mac era, after all.

Finally, a focus comes in like a stream, and all plans come together as I sit atop this mountain, sniffling, in the sun, momentarily happy because I can see where I am, and I like it. I can also literally see where I am going, headed back down the coast this time.

I am a boy. I grow up in the southeast. I travel from east to north to west, and now I’m headed back down those southern plains, to the end, to the finish. I am “hurtling towards it” they tell me.

This is what I came here for. The end is near. The directions and the internal compass are making some chronic and chronological sense for once. As you may know, my personal compass hasn’t always been on par with my intentions, directions, focus or attempts at control.

But now we are headed on course together. There will be a detox, there will be sanctity, and there will be closure and clarity and no more destruction. It is time to climb south, downwards, back, finally, before I die.

I may not necessarily uncover a “Key self” (Woolf 397) in these meandering motions, but I may complete a cycle at least, and close a chronological loop in the form of a written …

Tiers and Towers (2014)

To reach the ultimate and final tier—a Babylonian tower, where no one sits or stands. There are but two champions on the tier beneath the final one. One old and one young, and they stand and compete against each other, drawing in/on every single game, for years, until a true victor wins and can ascend to that final highest lonely tier-podium.

To reach the second last tier, one cannot climb there but rather one must walk through its gates and up the stairs hand in hand with a lover, a soul-partner. When one does so, the world is crushed and flattened so that the tiers fold, recess and the next become accessible.

As soon as one enters the second highest level one of the two champions takes you and handles you and throws you around absent-mindedly but in a professional manner, and you swerve and fold and fall and spin back and forth, becoming a pawn in these rolling games that are being played, but/though not being an actual player.

The sky here is always dark and overcast, smoky and steamy and stewing in ominous colours of dark grey and a hellish blood orange tinted with magentas, purples and maroons.

Our visit was not long. The place was nonsensical: the inaccessibility, the foolish champions, the brooding sky, the pointless matches and games.

Though, I have all but forgotten the lowest tiers. This tower is a high one (obviously, as it reaches the skies), and a fall would certainly shock and kill and neutralise. I can’t even recall how many levels and layers there were, and what kind of games and players belonged to those lower functioning and neutralised boundaries.

What keeps me here is an intrigue and a fascination. Still, it doesn’t hold me there long, but long enough to recognise a riddle being painfully played out ad infinitum.

THESIS ONE
Examining the Fictocritical Value of Journeys: The Author Meanders

This entire exploration/study took an initial general stance that in any fictional writing or narrative there would always exist traces of an author’s autobiography. However, essential autobiographical writing would often attempt to demonstrate a duality and writerly polyvalency (double-voicedness) towards fiction or metafiction. This book planned to invest the writer’s creative self in a series of creative works emotionally and psychologically, through a set of themes that encompassed and embraced various thought processes and experiences experienced at different times throughout the conscious (or subconscious) of a young man’s creative writing. The methodology of fictocriticism seemed ideally suited to the storytelling intentions of this erratic, adventurous and juxtaposing way of writing about the ‘self’ in relation to one’s context (Gibbs 309; Kerr 94; Smith 1001-02).

In relation to the complex topic of the ‘self’, this study makes no claims of discussing the subject as it relates to seminal, historical and philosophical positions, such as Nietzsche’s conception of subjectivity or “The Subject as Multiplicity” (Booth 1985), Heidegger’s views on selfhood, authenticity and inauthenticity (Mansbach 1991) or Sartre’s works on Existentialism and Humanism (1947) or Being and Nothingness (1943). Rather, the ‘self’ or diverged ‘selves’ here relate purely to the creative self and the analytical self and their association and exploration of the four themes in these four theses and folios. Any higher philosophical theories applied in this work are primarily of a literary nature as they relate to fictocriticism.

The fictocritical mode and methodology entered into this project one year into the original PhD study. It was at this point that a major and entirely unexpected writing disengagement became visible, between the abstract, hyperactive and autobiographical elements initially implemented into these stories and those stories having a legitimate undercurrent of social commentary. The creative writing component was fluid, impulsive and the stories were easily written, though it might be argued that such ease might have been, in itself, a warning sign. The social commentary, or the way in which the pieces were to be made fictocritical, was planned to arrive much later, after the creative work was complete; the research or theoretical component of this project was originally hybridised with the creative folios. These two elements had become separate, requiring thematic research components to be injected back into the creative pieces in order to make them more authentically fictocritical and double-voiced. In hindsight, this realisation was the true experimental beginning of the explorative study.

This first theoretical thesis aims to clarify the fictocritical underpinnings of Folio One. With relevant parallels drawn from the Australian landscape, the stories explore the notion of travel and journeys and the way in which other (fictocritical) Australian authors write about Australia’s landscape, national identity, context, romanticism or lack of ‘settled’ romanticism (Fergie 195; Morris 115-19; Rowe 102).

In “Autoethnography as a Research Method: Advantages, Limitations and Criticisms” (2013), Mariza Méndez suggests that writers must risk themselves and become vulnerable and even insecure to free up meaning and form in their writing, to reveal “the broader context of that experience” (281). Statements like this can be considered a truism in almost all writing, including fictocriticism. Indeed, it could be argued that autoethnography and fictocriticism are cut from a similar methodological cloth. Both are generally written in the first-person, and both were considered and investigated as appropriate methodologies when approaching my doctoral project. Fictocriticism, however, seemed to have the least amount of research behind it, and the most untapped potential to develop and grow in conjunction with the development of the creative artefact in this study. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Tendencies (1993), Weeda-Zuidersma’s PhD “Keeping Mum” (2007), Naismith’s “Emily Coughs” (2009), Raine’s “Essaying the Self: Ethnicity, Identity and the Fictocritical Essay” (2009) and Villalobos’ “My Name Is/Mi Nombre es” (2012), to name a few, all demonstrate how fictocriticism can help writers become vulnerable, honest and open in their writing, even when that openness involves “personal trauma” (Pattinson 6). This chaotic, “mosaic … emotive” (Pattinson 6) mood and methodology worked for the creative self when initiating a folio on journeys and the notion of ‘meandering’.

This first thesis attempts to engage and experiment with the tools of fictocriticism in portraying a restless train of thought, constantly in the act of (creative) authorial speculation and wandering. There is also little formal editing occurring in the creative work, allowing a sense of the freeform structure so aptly demonstrated in many fictocritical narratives. What this offers the reader is a form of narrated disruption and inconsistency, using incomplete or improper sentences and ideas that do not fully develop or come to fruition. Stylistically, and ironically, this approach demonstrates a ‘writerly’ impatience, and perhaps displays an unfair disregarding or inconsideration towards the reader. It invites a restless Kerouacian excitement or state of “exalted exhaustion” (Charters, Introduction viii) to the work. Some of the fictocriticism in this study seems to utilise a fusion of various French philosophies such as existentialism and the inspiration derived from a somewhat Rimbaudian way of life to adhere to a form of “lifelike art” (Kaprow 41) in which there was an intertwining of the psychological self in a form of “contemporary performance art” (During 183). This led to the impulsive way in which one’s life could be infused with the presentation of art as life, and vice versa. It was only during subsequent discussions with academics that it became clear this approach was insufficient for this purpose and that a much more critical engagement with the creative work was needed.

The way in which the creative work in this text was initially planned was not, in hindsight, fictocritical. When first embarking on this doctoral project the proposal and title of the creative writing was “Investigating the Polarised Characteristics of Autobiographical Creative Writing”. This nebulous topic was based upon the author’s innocent belief that any form of a narrative, creative writing or novel which has been informed by a writer’s own life or autobiography, will by default, trace the tideline of a fluctuating ‘spirit’.

Prior to beginning the planned fictocritical creative writing, the author’s thinking was influenced by a number of writers and their texts. Initially, there was a desire to create a type of bildungsroman, in the vein of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1850) or James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), as extracts from these texts may elucidate:

I am a straw upon the surface of the deep, and am tossed in all directions by the elephants. (Dickens 1053)

New thoughts and hopes were whirling through my mind, and all the colours of my life were changing. (Dickens 1284)

the mode of life or of art whereby your spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom. (Joyce 237)

When a man is born ... there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets. (Joyce 171)

The poetry of Shelley, Byron and Keats, which is thinly veiled autobiography written creatively, provide a framework for how the creative folios enact various thematic constructions for a developing sense of self. Many of the creative self’s pieces such as “A Daze to Come True” (to be referred to as “Daze” from this point) and “An Apple on a String Swings in Front of Me” (to be referred to as “Apple” from this point) have been written in the first-person as an account of a young man in the twenty-first century. Other texts that provide an influential framework for this project are Raimond Gaita’s Romulus, My Father (1998), A Million Little Pieces (2004) by James Frey, Marching Powder (2004) by Rusty Young, Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man and Life’s Greatest Lesson (2004) by Mitch Albom and Shantaram (2005) by Gregory David Roberts. These are contemporary autobiographies, biographies or memoirs by and about young men in the last few decades. They are thinly veiled true stories and personalised accounts, some sold as fiction, while others are ostensibly fictocritical. It is the form and function of these texts that have shaped the original creative elements of this research.

The first section of this book is about journeys and the movement between places, both real and imagined. It is about interrogating fictocritical stories and theorists and how they relate to the creative works presented in the folios of this exploration, essentially a search for the ‘self’ and for relatable social truths (Kerr and Nettelbeck 9; Naismith 12; Gibbs 1). Thematically, they correspond to one another as some of the fictocritical pieces selected here are about a quest, ambling, or a contextualising of oneself within a particular zone, that zone often being an Australian landscape (Fergie 188). Moreover, the majority of these fictocritical writings and articles are earlier texts, from the 1990s, and are essentially all Australian because, after all, most fictocriticism was ‘coined’ and taken up in Australia in the 1990s, though it originally began in Canada (Muecke and King 13; Flavell 3-4).

The philosophies and approach of Roland Barthes in Mythologies (1957), Roland Barthes (1975) and A Lover’s Discourse (1977) are also considered, as well as several forms of autobiographical/creative non-fiction and metafictive writing, as seen in the multiple-authored fictocritical works in The Space Between (1998), Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) and Josephine Rowe’s Tarcutta Wake (2012). This book will explore how some autobiography, but more specifically metafictional autobiography, is a fundamental predecessor or catalyst to the fictocritical form (Dawson 141) and how the many different voices from around the world have found a space to tell their stories within the interpretation of fictocriticism.

The first fictocritical piece to be investigated here is Hamish Morgan’s paper “What Can Fictocriticism Do?” from Altitude: An e-Journal of Emerging Humanities Work (2012). Morgan’s paper directly relates to first-person travel and fictocriticism in Australia. It is much more of a story than criticism, which is greatly relevant to the opening creative piece in this folio, written in 2013 and entitled “At Some Point Reality Needs to Become a Part Of …” (to be referred to as “Reality” from this point) as they are both quite similar. Both pieces are about finding oneself or a ‘self’, passively, outside of one’s comfort zone, in a foreign, though still Australian, location. Morgan finds himself writing in Sydney—whilst “Reality” is about arriving in Rockhampton, Queensland for the first time in 2013. Both pieces respectively attempt to absorb the detail and attention paid to ‘life’ and the generalised tedium, simplicity or ‘mundane’ rolling by. The thought process undergone when planning this piece dwelt on Josephine Rowe’s writing and the detail she pays attention to her scenes in her short story “Tarcutta Wake” (2012) in an anthology by the same name—this will be elaborated upon later as Rowe’s writing and depiction of Australian landscapes and imagery relates more directly to pieces in Folio One such as “There’s a Road Train Going Nowhere”, which from here on will be simply referred to as “Road Train” (Rowe 102). Moreover, the thought processes, which may or may not be conveyed in the creative folios, aim to allude to Barthes’ sentiment, also expressed in Robyn Ferrell’s fictocritical piece “Hemingway’s Typewriter” (1998) in the seminal fictocritical anthology The Space Between, regarding how a writer can never in fact be on holiday. For the writer is always thinking and reacting to their environment and the impulsive workings of their inner mind—their writing is, therefore, often on the brink of potential outburst as their mind is constantly moving, or anticipating the act of writing, whether they choose to want it or not (Barthes 30; Ferrell 27).

Both creative pieces “Reality”, and more specifically Morgan’s “What Can Fictocriticism Do?” (2012), set a superficial scene and an opening ‘space’ for fictocriticism:

People stare at me writing. I am a strange presence, still and observant in this free flowing space. Mums and dads walk by pushing toddlers. I look, missing my kids back in Geraldton, Western Australia, feeling a little unanchored in this place. A mother, a young thirty-something smiles at her daughter as some observation is murmured on the little one’s lips. The mother smiles in honest fostering of her daughter’s intelligence and being-towards-the world, but she also smiles for herself, her own acceptance and love of the mundane extraordinariness of parenting, for those uncanny and strange articulations that form in the minds of pre-schoolers. Concepts get mixed up, or appear as they truly are, infinite and momentary in their assemblage. Love, compassion, the tender human experience, is all mixed up, strolls by, and is an event itself. (Morgan 1-2)

Here is an extract from “Reality”:

And in between these moments of intermittent comprehension and the incoherent babbling drool of language I sat there, eyes fixed, glued to the barstool, and listened. I listened, and I sat there transfixed. I had no idea what especially I was trying to look and listen out for, but I felt that this was extremely important. This was communion, and a real genuine integration with a new place, with a real emergence existing in a chasm within myself … I’m here, this is now, it’s new, and yet it is part of something older, more mature, settled, stubborn and fixated than what I can really grasp or understand. It’s subjective, but it has no context, so I have no ideas that I can really cement in anything. I’m simply meandering along in this new environment, drifting within a distilled dam until hopefully my foot can latch on to something, at which point I can start simulating and generating algae in a pool of water, a pond of my own.

The deeper fictocritical hypotheses, or “rich synthesis of rumination, memory, reflection” (Hancox and Muller 149), in the Morgan narrative comes much later in the work. The creative self’s extract, on the other hand, appears to be almost stream of consciousness. Morgan later incorporates descriptions and explanations of fictocriticism in his dialogue with locals within his piece, where he talks about it being “like a new writing style in the social sciences, a new way of engaging in the real world reality of things” and “it observes life but does it through a story” (3). A fictocritical piece such as his can be analogised to Meaghan Morris’ “Uncle Billy, Tina Turner and Me” from The Space Between, which encapsulates the same sense of nostalgia, whilst being based in Sydney also. Morgan’s extract was identified as a suitable comment in this first thesis precisely because it does not commence with the typically double-voiced form of fictocriticism. Rather, it initiates with “personal journey and storytelling”. The fictocriticism and social observation comes into play later (Morgan 3). Hence, the piece is more fragmented than layered.

Though fragmentation, of course, is another significant trait of fictocriticism (King 272; Kerr and Nettelbeck 10; Walker 254; Robb 99). Similarly, this thesis and the stories presented in its correlating folio, commence with more literal and/or abstract “personal journey and storytelling” elements, whilst the denser theory comes into play later. In general Hamish Morgan’s piece captures the essence of both observation and self-analysis within the context of ‘journeying’ or travelling whilst, ironically or incidentally, sitting still as he writes, or metafictionally writes about writing (1). The sentiment or mood of Morgan’s piece is analogous to the one in “Reality” and in the creative pieces in this folio in general. Additionally, in The Space Between, Linda Marie Walker’s piece “Speed Kills, Comma” (1998) includes similar experimental literary strategies to the ones incorporated in the works “Apple”, “A Train Ride to Russia in 2007” (to be henceforth referred to as “Train Road”), “Coast to Coast Infrequency”, “Tiers and Towers” and, in fact, most, of the creative pieces in Folio One. These strategies, as demonstrated by Walker, involve the implementation of sporadic, stinted language with numerous parenthesis and words or single letters within words, one-word sentences, incomplete sentences and the excessive use of forward dashes and hyphenation: “standing it (then) in air” (253); “A (col)lapse” (253); “f(r)iction” (254); “a/originating” (254); “It seems End, Fullness. The memory of dream is waking life. The dream, the nothing, rescues nothing” (255); and “Sociably. Body (every) which-way” (256). The decision to write in such an overtly (or overly) concise and objectively jarring way is best explained in the creative self’s piece “A Literary Mitosis (On Form)” (2014).

The intention behind this approach was also highly personal/ised and intentionally jarring in order to convey a Joycean effect of the kind of free-association demonstrated in Finnegan’s Wake (1939) and that text’s “literary allusions … dream associations … [a] dismissal of conventions of plot and character construction … [representing the] fall of man from grace” (Coupland 110) in contemporary society. It is a relatively original or unique technique adopted in much of the writing in this book, which explains a lot about the creative self’s style. For the creative self has often been criticised for writing in a style which incorporates brackets with words within words, excessive hyphenation, inverted commas, slashes dividing different words or synonyms, and other abstract or experimental writing techniques that could alienate some readers. “A Literary Mitosis” attempts to explain or justify some of these practices. This form (or lack of form) is derived from and also inspired by the lack or disruption of punctuation seen in the exuberant style(s) of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759), Henri Michaux’s Miserable Miracle (1956), Jack Kerouac’s novels (1922-69), Samuel Beckett’s The Unnameable (1979), Pi O’s 24 hours (1996) and Danielewski’s experimental novel House of Leaves (2000). These texts in particular venture into the metafictive and experimental realms that have helped to inform the work, ‘style’ and voice of this book. Interestingly, like in the creative self’s “A Literary Mitosis”, Haas performs/writes in a very similar manner in his theoretical explorations in Fictocritical Strategies also: “per/form/ative aspects” (8); “in/forms fictocriticism” (12); and “If fictocritical writing is de/territorialising” (17).

Walker’s piece “Speed Kills, Comma” is thematically similar to “Road Train” also, as she extrapolates on the symptoms or effects of being in a car crash (253), whilst “Road Train” is a commentary on the tension felt by the characters of the story regarding a potentially impending collision with a road train in the context of the Australian outback. What “Road Train” does not do, however, which Walker’s piece does, is draw on and clarify its metafictive and fragmentary form and style, whilst doing so fragmentarily, in what Hazel Smith, in “Erotics of Gossip” might call a writing of juxtaposition or reverberation (1001-02):