Towards a Poetics of Creative Writing

Dominique Hecq

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781783093243
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book offers an in-depth study of the poetics of creative writing as a subject in the dramatically changing context of practice as research, taking into account the importance of the subjectivity of the writer as researcher. It explores creative writing and theory while offering critical antecedents, theoretical directions and creative interchanges. The book narrows the focus on psychoanalysis, particularly with regard to Lacan and creative practice, and demonstrates that creative writing is research in its own right. The poetics at stake neither denotes the study or the techniques of poetry, but rather the means by which writers formulate and discuss attitudes to their work.

1 What Poetics for Creative Writing?

Best would be to think in a form one had invented.

Paul Valéry

Inherent in practice-led research is the dialectic between practice and research. For some time, this dialectic has been problematised in varying ways and to varying degrees across the creative arts in terms that are reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘disjunctive synthesis’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004: 14).¹ Nowhere is this more obvious than in the discipline of creative writing, which often defines its position within the paradigm of practice-led research and the theoretical associations linking practice and research with models historically defined by the visual arts, consequently obliterating its own ‘domain specificity’ (Baer, 2012). Creative writing is a craft. But its writerly component also highlights that it is a way of apprehending, knowing and being in the world. More specifically, creative writing functions simultaneously as a perspective, an epistemology and an ontology specific to writing.

This chapter makes the case for a new – though old – discourse which distinguishes the discursive frameworks used in discussions about what the future will understand as ‘creative writing studies’ (Donnelly, 2012), or more broadly ‘writing studies’ (Fisher, 2012). I argue that our conceptual tools need to be made over in order to fit creative practice in writing. These tools should enable us to deal specifically with writing in relation to the experiential and to subjectivity – that is, from the inside out. I ask what the epistemological thrust of creative writing might be and propose a poetics which takes into account the process of knowledge production from within an experiential practice that mobilises intellectual, emotional and unconscious processes. I do so by pointing out that creative writing is in thrall to a regime of images and by seeking answers to this question in a dialogue with philosophy regarding text and image. I then explain why creative writing needs its own poetics, highlighting its affinities with, but also difference from, criticism and philosophy.

Mirror, Text, Image

Creative writers in the academy have been seriously debating the relationship between theory and practice for over a decade, and the deployment of practice-led research has both extended and restricted the boundaries in considering how practitioners contribute to research inquiry. The debate has been vigorous in the UK and in Australia, particularly since the publication of Paul Dawson’s influential study Creative Writing and the New Humanities (Dawson, 2005). In the USA, the issue has been reluctantly and sporadically addressed, although the Association of Writing Programs has been more alert to the state of the arts in that domain in recent years due to a more global conversation in response to cross-national demands and incentives. In that regard, Dianne Donnelly’s Establishing Creative Writing Studies as an Academic Discipline (Donnelly, 2012) has been a major contribution. Journals such as New Writing in the UK and TEXT in Australia have been critical to this debate, as they have brought practitioners from diverse backgrounds into the conversation and paradoxically focused the debate more sharply on creative writing. This is also reflected in essays which have appeared in collections with an increasingly international appeal (e.g. Harper & Kroll, 2008; Krauth & Brady, 2006; Kroll & Harper, 2013; Smith & Dean, 2009; Webb & Brien, 2012). However, what is striking from this now global debate is how much creative writing has been linked to the visual arts in terms of theorising the relationship between practice and research. Perhaps this is due to the impact of studies written by scholars or practitioners with a background in aesthetics, the visual arts, design and architecture (e.g. Barrett & Bolt, 2007; Biggs & Büchler, 2007; Bolt, 2004; Chalmers, 1996; Sullivan, 2005). Nevertheless, as creative writing continues to grapple with the appropriateness of the term ‘practice-led research’, highlighting the relevance of other topoi (Brook, 2012; Magee, 2012; Williams, 2013), it is clear that the dominance of the visual field in research paradigms hinders the way we think about creative writing research.

The apparent effacement of writing does not necessarily betray cultural biases. After all, Western culture has long privileged written representation over images. There are deeper psychological and philosophical reasons for this uncertain state of affairs, and these reasons are translated by the linguistic choices that we make. As Freud showed, the eyes carry an unusually high affective charge for human beings (Freud, 2001 [1915b]). The eyes also regulate perception, our way of understanding and interpreting the world and, if one were to interpret Lacan’s mirror stage rather literally, access to the symbolic order of language (Lacan, 2006 [1949]). The eyes are close to the brain, by virtue of their location in the body; they may even control or structure the secondary process. But as Martin Jay has shown in Downcast Eyes (Jay, 1993), vision is by no means the prevailing sense in comprehending Western culture. Instead, Western culture comprises a plurality of scopic regimes (Jay, 1993: 48), particularly in postmodern discourses. If Jay is right, Western culture is in fact dominated by a certain ‘antiocularcentrism’ (Jay, 1993: 27) from Plato through to modernity and postmodernity – Plato himself being responsible for this development due to his profound ambivalence towards images (Jay, 1993: 29).

There are those who argue that writing is also a visual phenomenon. The British linguist Roy Harris is a case in point (Harris, 1986). Harris urges us to take a harder look – consider the visual metaphor I cannot help but using – at the nature of writing as visual sign. He designates writing as ‘scriptorial sign’, and image as ‘pictorial sign’, going on to say:

Where the boundary between pictorial and scriptorial signs falls will patently be one of the contentious issues to be resolved. Consequently, it will also be necessary to have a term which is neutral with respect to that particular distinction; and for this purpose it is proposed to adopt the term graphic sign as referring to pictorial signs, scriptorial signs, or both. (Harris, 1986: 56)

Fair enough, but the kind of writing Harris has in mind is all a matter of surfaces; it neither addresses the experience of writing or writing as discourse. What Harris is interested in is how we perceive writing. But writing and visual image actualise antithetical views of perception in Western culture.

‘Well, Protarchus’, Socrates tells his interlocutor in Philebus, ‘the alphabet which was the basis for your education is a clear example of what I’m talking about, so use it to see what I mean’ (Plato, 1982b: 61). Plato proposes the alphabet as a model for teaching abstract moral principles, and not simply as a utilitarian means of communicating. Images in Philebus have a much more ambiguous, even negative character, and they are secondary to writing. Socrates says:

When memory coincides with perception, it and other faculties relevant to these experiences seem to me to write words, as it were, in the soul. When this experience writes the truth, it gives rise to true belief…. [There is] another member of the soul’s work-force on these occasions…. An artist, who turns the secretary’s words into images in the soul. (Plato, 1982b: 100)

Writing here is a substitute for, a flight from, visual image. By its rhetorical tropes – ekphrasis, description, hypotyposis, metaphor and other figures of speech – writing attempts to substitute itself for visual images. Yet this occurs only after having despatched some profound truth.

Writing, it must be said, also elicited suspicion from Plato. In fact, it elicited suspicion from others as well, right through the Middle Ages (Stock, 1983). A close look at some of the famous passages denouncing writing is highly entertaining, especially when the focus is on the graphic quality of writing and its putative status as a picture of the spoken word. In Phaedrus, for example, Socrates remarks:

You know, Phaedrus, that’s the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly analogous to painting. The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive, but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with the written words; they seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing forever. And once a thing is put in writing, the composition, whatever it may be, drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it; it doesn’t know how to address the right people, and not address the wrong. And when it is ill-treated and unfairly abused it always needs its parents to come to its help, being unable to defend or help itself. (Plato, 1982a: 521)

The ambivalence towards the image, and towards writing as image, reveals a certain distrust of texts and their authors. It also signifies a deep cultural cleavage at the heart of writing itself.

The cultural cleavage between word and image is responsible for the rupture between the pictorial and the linguistic in a text. Socrates helps us understand why. In the Phaedrus excerpt above, he says that rendering ideas in graphic form liberates words from their discursive context. Meaning may not be controlled since anyone may have access to the words to interpret at their own whim. What Socrates offers here is a concept of the image as an indeterminate sign whose meaning may be discontinuous from the discourse in which it is meant to participate. Instead, the image detaches itself and ‘drifts all over the place’, at the risk of falling into the wrong hands (Plato, 1982a: 521). Socrates, then, identifies a rogue property of the image, a transgressive element capable of turning back on the discourse that produced it, to propose new, unsettling meanings by exposing what the narrative has repressed.

Having referred back to philosophy, let us pause before turning to poetics. To be fair, it must be acknowledged that Aristotle had a more optimistic view of writing than Plato. This optimism is matched by Part II of John Carey’s controversial book What Good Are the Arts

(Carey, 2005).² In it, Carey argues that literature is the only art capable of argument and criticism, including self-criticism (Carey, 2005: 177). This, he suggests, is because writing is an art form that has reasoning accessible to it in a way that the other arts do not. While it is true that literature makes use of reasoning’s tools, that is, words and the art of putting them together, it is rather contentious to say that it is closer to reason. But would it be so of thinking

If, as I suggest in the Introduction to this volume, David Malouf is right in saying that ‘the act of writing… makes articulation possible’ (Malouf, 2008: 78), then creative writing has nothing to do with thinking. Creative writing is thinking. Psychologists Keith Oatley and Maja Djikic demonstrate this with aplomb in their paper ‘Writing as thinking’ (Oatley & Djikic, 2008). In it, they analyse writing as thinking that utilises paper or other media to externalise and manipulate symbolic expressions. They explore four methods to identify how established writers externalise thoughts and interact with them, namely laboratory experiments involving two groups of writers, interviews, biographical analysis and exegeses of notes and drafts. They find that writers often use paper to extend their thinking and to devise frameworks of cues that establish forms of communication between authors and readers. They conclude that creative writing augments thinking and promotes empathy:

Imaginative prose fiction, the product of long and deep thought by its authors, has enabled empathetic understanding of emotions, the honing of irony, and possibilities for the growth of consciousness, that we suggest would have been far more difficult to accomplish without the augmentation of thinking by writing. (Oatley & Djikic, 2008: 24)

Thinking is language – embodied language, and it takes place as we write. It is an experience ‘situated between perception and consciousness’ (Lacan, 1986 [1964]: 45) because creative writing is an experiential form of practice involving an intertextuality which is first and foremost intratextual, that is, played out from within.

Having located the significance of the word, what are the implications for creative writing

I argue here that we need conceptual tools tailored to the domain specificity of writing rather than taken off the rack of a germane domain such as the visual arts. We need a poetics of creative writing which enables us to articulate the experiential nature of writing; a poetics that underscores the aesthetic and human subject of creative writing in its historical, conceptual and social dimensions. In what follows I consider the tools that may be useful to that effect; these tools are conceptual and theoretical frameworks paired with an attitude of self-consciousness or self-reflexiveness.

Paratextual Poesis

But what poetics

Traditionally, ‘poetics’ is an overarching term used to incorporate multiple discourses in literary theory. As such, it encompasses the theory of literary forms and literary discourse. It may also refer specifically to the theory of poetry and poetic techniques or, as used by the French literary theorist Gérard Genette, it may refer to theory itself (Genette, 2005: 14). This definitional breadth is, as we shall see shortly, due to the etymology of the Greek term poesis, meaning making, and thus allowing for a certain confusion between what we now distinguish as ‘poetry’ and ‘poetics’, with the latter term still being applied to other arts or cultural practices.

Aristotle’s Poetics (c. 335 BC) is considered to be the first work of dramatic theory and the first treatise to attempt a general theory of literature. As a consequence, poetics has comprised prose, drama and poetry from Plato through to the 19th century. But it has been discussed in various discursive ways, including as a sub-set of rhetoric and philosophy, as an artistic practice and as a cultural practice. In the field of literary studies, poetics has long been appreciated as a sub-set of rhetoric. Since Aristotle’s conceptualisation of rhetoric as the art of persuasion, poetics has evolved to include the prescriptive manuals of rhetoricians such as Cicero (1952), Quintilian (1921) and Nicolas Boileau (Boileau-Despréaux, 1966). In modern usage it extends to the rhetorical hermeneutic and structural linguistics of the late 20th century. From Russian formalism, the Prague school, French structuralism and poststructuralism, there was a certain appeal for a science of literature which would devote itself not to the piecemeal criticism or interpretation of specific literary works, but to identifying the general properties which make literature possible (Culler, 1975). The focus thus shifted from ‘literature’ to ‘literariness’ in the quest for general laws underlying texts (Das, 2005: 78). The contemporary global condition of poetics tends to be experimental, usually offering theoretical frames for looking at the continuities and discontinuities between print and digital forms (Armand, 2007). Today, the word ‘poetics’ seems to promise some sort of systematic analytic rigour, a kind of afterglow of the structuralist interest in systematising, universalising and scientising poetics, not only as it applies to the study of poetry but also as a general intellectual principle capable of laying bare the semiotics of the whole of human culture, indeed human activity (see for example Jimenez, 2012). So why use the word

Through its etymological and historical origins, the term ‘poetics’ implies not only scientific rigour but its putative complement – emotional sensitivity, aesthetic self-consciousness and an acknowledgement of the constructedness of all human cultural artefacts and discourses. This, especially the last, is the sense in which scholars in the field of literary and cultural studies, in reaction to the atemporal stasis of the structuralist model of poetics, came to use the word ‘poetics’ to mean precisely the plasticity, changeability and dynamic, interactive nature of social and cultural phenomena.

Moreover, poetics takes care of the formal and the affective realms of a subject under inquiry. In contradistinction to the structuralist association of poetics with analytic rigour, poetics nowadays implies a somewhat different engagement. Poetics becomes the interactive aspect of the researcher’s task – how do researchers handle and make explicit the relationships informing the work assumed by their discipline, especially with regard to their subject matter, their own subjective spin on things and their subjects, for example the characters they make up or the subjects they interview

This kind of poetics, i...

Table of contents

• Coverpage
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Making of a Poetics
• 1 What Poetics for Creative Writing?
• 2 Critical Antecedents, Theoretical Directions
• 3 Obituaries, Contestations, Proclamations: The Theory Question
• 4 Craft, Knowledge, Theory and the Designing of Poetics
• 5 Styling the Subject of Creative Writing
• 6 The Ego in the Mirror
• 7 Between Thought and the Real in Creative Writing and Philosophy
• 8 Inking the In-Between
• 9 On Experiential Knowing as Creative Writing Research Mode
• 10 Dramatic Encounters: Language, Craft, Theory
• 11 Food for Thought: Investigating Aesthetic Care
• 12 Poetics of Auto-Genesis: On Becoming and the Canon
• Afterword: Poetic (A)Topos
• Bibliography
• Index