EXAMINING THE VALUE OF

FICTOCRITICISM:
THE MEANDERING NARRATIVES OF A CREATIVE
WRITING PHD STUDENT

Pawel Cholewa | CQUniversity

A BSTRA CT

This article reflects on the construction of a doctoral project

relating to the ‘self’, with attempts made to contextualise the
author’s work in the vein of autobiographical writing. The
methodology of fictocriticism is implemented into the paper in an
attempt to contribute to knowledge within the discipline, both via
the inclusion of original creative writing pieces and a revisiting of
the usefulness of fictocriticism as a creative writing strategy. A
brief overview of fictocriticism is given also. This paper questions
if fictocriticism can be innovated on, and contends there is a
paradox between the theory surrounding fictocriticism suggesting
how ‘freeform’ it is, and how non-freeform it still seems to be due
to its lack of theoretical boundaries. The theme of journeys is used
as a strategy to convey the methodology of fictocriticism overall, as
an untapped way of writing both personally and theoretically, with
a unified and engaging ‘double-voice’. Attempts at pushing the
threshold and parameters, in differing experimental creative
works, advocate for what fictocriticism could be, and if it can be
reinvented or innovated on, into something more stable, yet still
evolve into a mode of writing that is engaging, identifiable and
prominent within the academy.

BIOGRA PHICAL NOTE

Dr Pawel Cholewa completed his PhD in the Creative Arts and

Writing at CQUniversity Australia in 2019. His first book
Fictocritical Innovations: A Millennial Perspective was published
in 2021. Since 2011 he has worked as an English Teacher, a
university lecturer/tutor and freelance editor, intermittently
producing music under the moniker Outside The Academy.

K EYWORDS

fictocriticism—creative writing—autobiography—genre—methodology—subjectivity
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Fictocriticism is a hybrid-style of writing that is naturally theoretical,

personal or personalised and professional, fictional and critical
(Schlunke and Brewster 2005:393). For quite some time it has been
considered a bit of a ‘buzzword’, on the fringe, ‘meta’ and postmodern in
nature and form, format and execution or delivery. It has also been
referred to as ‘a refusal of any steady border between genres’ (Trottier
2002:1), a mode (or collage) of thought ‘gently flapping, between
experience and interpretation’ (Kerr and Nettelbeck 1998:109), ‘a textual
no-man’s land’ (Dawson 2002:139), ‘a writing of compounds and
mutations, a hybrid writing which is not just any one thing, but not any
one thing’ (White et al. 1990:10-11), an ‘inchoate category’ (Schlunke and
Brewster 2005:393) that allows or permits one to really disperse oneself
and the ‘I’ – a potentially liberating or hindering issue/concern with
which I will be engaging in this essay. Hence, within the context of
examining the value of fictocriticism as a creative writing PhD student,
some research questions posed are: does fictocriticism work? And can it
(still) be innovated on, or at least become more classifiable?

Though perhaps it is easier to merely think of fictocriticism as a way to

process thought – ‘a strategy for writing’ (Kerr and Nettelbeck 1998:4).
The majority of accounts of fictocriticism are somewhat equivocal. To my
mind, they either overcomplicate the idea or the language used to
describe the idea is too figurative or metaphorical. Hazel Smith’s
explanation in ‘The Erotics of Gossip: Fictocriticism, Performativity,
Technology’ is well-balanced in this regard, and probably the best
description I have found so far to explain the concept:

fictocriticism juxtaposes creative and academic writing environments,

and breaks down their separation and autonomy. Fictocritics may, for
example, insert, imply, or elucidate theoretical ideas within creative
work without feeling the pressure to transform those ideas into entirely
fictional or poetic texts. Such texts can take many different forms, but
may often be experimental and discontinuous: for example, fictional or
poetic sections are juxtaposed with theoretical interjections so that
they reverberate with each other. Or, fictocritical critics may attempt
to disrupt the formality of the academic essay with strategies such as
crossing of genres, collage, non-linearity, wordplay, anecdote, or use of
the first person (Smith 2009:1001-02).

It is clear that it is very difficult to dictate any kind of authority over a

form of writing that is so inherently freeform. I have seen it referred to as
a genre that is about ‘personal journey and storytelling’ (Hancox and
Muller 2011:149) and that ‘the form is part of the message’ (Flavell
2004:186). To continue explaining it or locking it into any kind of
parameters, I want to argue, goes against the grain and meaning of its
intention as a literary form of writing or device – a tool for the (erratic)
construction and personalised investigation of journal-like meaning.

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Fictocriticism is for me a rule-breaker, so it is understandable that its

impact in the academy has been fleeting and sporadic – ‘fictocriticism has
come and gone…It came and went’ as my academic supervisor remarked
in 2017. Still, perhaps it is now time for a change.

I once took a stance that almost any creative autobiographical or semi-

autobiographical writer could write themselves into a fictional narrative.
However, much of the autobiographical writing I encountered would
attempt to demonstrate a duality and writerly polyvalency. My doctoral
writing project planned to invest the writer’s ‘self’ in a series of creative
works emotionally and psychologically, through a set of themes that
encompassed and embraced scattered instances and experiences littered
throughout the conscious (or subconscious) of a young man’s creative
writing. The methodology of fictocriticism seemed ideally suited to the
story-telling intentions of this erratic, impulsive, contradictory and
juxtaposing way of writing about the ‘self’ in relation to one’s context
(Gibbs 2005:309; Kerr 2013:94; Smith 2009:1001-02).

I began using the fictocritical mode and methodology one year into my
PhD. It was at this point that a major and entirely unplanned writing
schism became visible, between the abstract, hyperactive and
autobiographical elements initially implemented into my writing and any
semblance of it having a legitimate undercurrent of social commentary or
academic critique. My more creative writing practice was fluid and
impulsive and it might be argued that such ease might have been, in itself,
a warning sign. The social commentary, or the way in which my
writing/pieces were to be inflected academically/fictocritically, was
planned to arrive much later, after the creative work was complete; the
exegetical component of my project was originally hybridised with the
creative artefact. These two elements were separated, and then relevant
thematic research components were injected back into selected creative
pieces in order to make them more fictocritical or ‘double-voiced’ (Kerr
2013:93). In hindsight, this was a complex task rendered more difficult
by the demands of any lengthy exegetical structure and, in the final
analysis, was not an efficient method of creative writing. An
example/excerpt of this style of work is featured later in this paper.

In any case, fictocriticism is seen as a highly reflexive ‘embedding’ literary

form, incorporating a framed-narrative method to story-crafting in which
there is often a ‘story within a story’ (Herman, Jahn & Ryan 134), as can
be seen in ‘The Use of Frame Story in Kashmira Sheth’s Boys without
Names’ (Alobeytha, Ismail & Shapii 2016:105-11) and in ‘One and “I” in
the Frame Narrative: Authorial Voice, Travelling Persona and Addressee
in Pausanias’ Periegesis*’ (Akujärvi 2012:327-58). These novels’ authors
alert the reader to the fact that they are writing (or have written) a novel,
a narrative of the sort that Roland Barthes might call ‘writerly’. The
seminal example of such a work is Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy

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(1760–7), in which the reader comes to understand that the story is about
a writer, writing an autobiography in which the author experiences
almost nothing new. Sterne uses reflexivity among other literary devices
to illustrate the ‘disconnect’ between ‘real life’ and the life of the subject.
There are a number of other notable reflexive narratives written in the
same period, such as Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones
(1749). It became fashionable in the mid-1700s to experiment and craft
such narratives in different structures. Such texts can be considered the
precursors to the more recognisable metacriticism seen two centuries
later. It becomes clear early on in the reading of the texts mentioned in
this paragraph that these authors are fully cognizant of their
experimental approach, an attempt at shaping a chaotic reality into a
reproducible narrative form. This is especially notable in James Joyce’s
Ulysses (1922), American feminist author Marilyn French’s The Women’s
Room (1977) and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1980) which
won the Booker Prize in 1981. These works could be considered quite vital
in their inherently fictocritical nature and form. Of course, fictocriticism
could/should be considered as existing on a spectrum, ranging from more
creative fictocritical works to more theoretical, academic or discipline-
specific fictocritical works. This could be one of its innovations: the
classification of fictocriticism as constituted by a spectrum.

It was anticipated that the creative writing in my PhD might be

considered similarly reflexive as I attempted to create an
autobiographical record of lived experiences in a fictional, self-reflexive
form. Other fictocritical texts that exist within this tone, style, structure
(and spectrum) include Ania Walwicz’s ‘Look at Me, Ma—I’m Going to Be
a Marginal Writer!’ (2013), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Tendencies (1993),
Anna Gibbs’ ‘The Gift’ (1998) and ‘Writing and the Flesh of Others’ in
Australian Feminist Studies (2013).

However, what transpired in my creative writing was not quite the

intended outcome, as mentioned earlier. My original project proposal
deviated into fictocriticism from a basis in pure autobiographical works.
The difficulty was in reconciling that deviation and retrieving the/a
necessary double-voiced fictocritical form (Kerr 93).

An example of a successful and accessible fictocritical narrative is

Hamish Morgan’s ‘What Can Fictocriticism Do?’:

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

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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. (2012:1-2)

Morgan’s writing is successful in conveying all of the facets of

fictocriticism he lists more broadly in this piece: ‘character’, ‘setting’,
‘story’, and ‘social commentary’ (2012:3), all of which come in the form
of a story about interacting with Sydney-siders, and then later through a
more specific anthropological (disciplinary) lens:

the study of human cultures … Like, now, I’ve been working with these
artists as they develop concepts for some public art sculptures in
Bayton-West, you know that new subdivision in Karratha ... (Morgan
2012:6)

In contrast to Morgan, some of my experimental fictocritical pieces have

character, setting, a story (though all generally based around dialogue
within one primary scene), but, upon reflection, no real social
commentary or research, unless, for instance, a biased, anecdotal
autobiographical account of the drinking/pub scene in Rockhampton,
Queensland, from the perspective of a 20-something year-old white
Melburnian male counts as social commentary or research? Hence, in the
process of my meandering journey/narratives it is/was clear that my
writing was not yet fictocritical. This possibly resulted from a method still
in development. The form does need to be able to ensnare some of the
bias and anecdote mentioned, but it should also put pressure on itself to
be scholarship too. So, perhaps I needed to frame this as a process of
discovering an appropriate fictocritical method. A journey, for instance?
That frame wasn’t set yet.

Here is an extract from a piece of mine written in 2013 entitled ‘At Some
Point Reality Needs to Become a Part Of…’ – an autobiographical account
of the drinking/pub scene in Rockhampton from the perspective of a 20-
something year-old white Melburnian male:

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 …

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… 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.

This story, and others like it, although difficult to convey in a short
extract, were found to work as pieces of autobiographical creative
nonfiction with some examination and analysis of initial impressions of
the drinking/pub scene in Rockhampton in 2013, but they were not yet
fully-fledged fictocriticism. For fictocriticism demands a double-meaning
in order to make the narrative ‘work’. Fictocriticism requires a double-
sidedness or ‘double-voicing’ (2013:93) as Heather Kerr suggests in her
text ‘Fictocriticism, the “Doubtful Category” and “The Space Between”’ in
which it does two things at once: observation but also critique.

Double-voicedness is a key feature within the context of fictocriticism –

it is about subtext: the voice on top and the voice on the bottom, or the
voices of the writer speaking side-by-side.

My piece ‘The Mission Man’ (extracts of which are featured below) does
support some claim to being a fictocritical work, due to its double-voiced
creative and analytical elements, which reverberate against/within the
narrative relating to not being capable of living in the moment, or feeling
like an erratic, restless entity (Kerr 2013:93).

The Mission Man (excerpt)

Though it can also be a speedy transition; a mission of sorts. For I am,

can be and have been the mission man, where things irregularly flow
from one to the next.

In fact, there is no flow, so much as there is an immediate changeover.

As much as I love the ‘in-between’, I attempt to eliminate as much of
the time between the ‘in-between’ as I can, in order to be moving on to
the next thing.

Unable to grapple with the overly ambient or vague concepts in ‘self

help’ books like Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, I – the mission man
– liken or align myself moreso with the notion of Jack Kerouac’s falling
(failing, or flailing) star idea in On the Road: ‘I like too many things and
get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another
till I drop’ (1957:113).

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Because as the psychologist Daniel Kahneman indicates, there is a

‘conflict between your experiencing self and your remembering self’
(McRaney 238): the experiencing or ‘current self is the one
experiencing life in real time’ (McRaney 236); the remembering self,
on the other hand, has to make ‘all the big decisions. It is happy when
you sit back and reflect on your life up to this point and feel content’
(McRaney 237). There is a serious imbalance between these two
different selves and the reality that is formed in one’s mind about one’s
life as a consequence of this imbalance (McRaney 238). These two
differing selves or perspectives have to be a well-balanced combination
of one and the other. ‘You have to be happy in the flow of time while
simultaneously creating memories you can look back on later’
(McRaney 2012:238-39).

Like an eccentric ass, I roam and stumble on in a daze, as the figurative

apple (of life) swings on a string in front of me.

It is commonly agreed that the first Australian article to have the term
‘fictocriticism’ appear in it was Stephen Muecke and Noel King’s ‘On
Ficto-Criticism’ in 1991 in the Australian Book Review (Hancox and
Muller 2011:148, Brook 111). Muecke and King’s article appears to be the
catalyst for the perceiving of Roland Barthes as the ‘godfather’ figure of
fictocriticism. Barthes is fondly cited in Noel King’s ‘My Life without
Steve: Postmodernism, Fictocriticism and the Paraliterary’ (1994:262),
Kerr and Nettelbeck’s The Space Between: Australian Women Writing
Fictocriticism (1998:4), and Monique Louise Trottier’s Masters thesis ‘If
Truth be Told…’ (2002). Paul Dawson in ‘A Place For The Space Between:
Fictocriticism And The University’ says fictocriticism is ‘a mode of critical
writing which echoes the work of Barthes and Derrida’ (2002:141), Simon
Robb in ‘Academic Divination is not a Mysticism: Fictocriticism,
Pedagogy and Hypertext’ states ‘[central] to current theorising of the
fictocritical is Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse’ (2013:98), King claims that
Barthes, along with Derrida, ‘[blur] the distinction between literature and
literary-critical commentary’ (270), which is the precise underlying mood
of fictocriticism, and exactly what many of Barthes’ texts (A Lover’s
Discourse, Roland Barthes, Mythologies) are.

Following in this vein, Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse (1977) was one of the
most influential postmodern and metafictional works in the development
of my creative work(s). Furthermore, the style of ‘automatic writing’
(Barthes 1977:144) that Barthes alludes to in ‘The Death of the Author’
led to the kind of writing experiment performed in my creative works
(extracts of which I have included here). These works are more
impulsively written, which reverberates with/against the Barthesian
approach. So, again, does/can fictocriticism work? Can it be innovated

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on? And is further experimentation in fictocriticism warranted? Is it

possible to innovate upon the form successfully, or does it in fact simply
fail, as Scott Brook suggests in ‘Does anybody know what happened to
‘fictocriticism’?: Toward a Fractal Genealogy of Australian fictocriticism’:

So, as a general reference to a much touted ‘hybridity’ in Australian

contemporary writing, I want to suggest the term [fictocriticism] is
potentially not only redundant, but that it also obscures the fact that
genres are never as stable as they seem. One of the ironic effects of
thinking about [fictocriticism] as a transgressive, hybrid form of
writing might be to shore up the differences between its constitutive
parts. Instead of thinking of genres as essentially different – that is, as
different in type for being based on historically discrete discourses, and
therefore capable of monstrous coupling in the ‘space between’ –
perhaps we should think of genres as already monstrous (Brook
2002:113)

Monstrous or not, my early fictocritical writing attempts had minimal

restraints or limitations put upon them. They were uninhibited. Thus,
they also rejected many fictocritical ‘norms’, if there are such things.
Ironically, such freedom can sometimes be paralysing to a PhD student –
like venturing out into nebulous waters. Parameters, boundaries, and
indeed, innovations can serve as catalysts for creativity after all.

The way in which my creative artefact was initiated, the plan behind it
and the cautiously grasped model of fictocriticism that was initially held,
turned out to be something less than fictocritical. In my work I hope to
uncover (or discover) ways in which fictocriticism can be innovated on, if
it can be innovated on at all, or if any attempts to innovate on it are as
futile as any attempts to physically surmount something as elusive as an
horizon.

When first embarking on my doctoral project the proposal of the creative

writing project was called ‘Investigating the Polarised Characteristics of
Autobiographical Creative Writing’. However, my proposal was not put
into any kind of methodological or fictocritical practice or framework
because, to begin with, the project had no real methodology aside from
some vague allusions to creative non-fiction and autobiography.
Fictocriticism was implemented into the creative artefact into the
project’s inception later. Yet once the literature surrounding
fictocriticism had been reviewed it was my belief that the mode of
fictocriticism could still be innovated on. Yet there was a major paradox
between the theory surrounding fictocriticism that suggested how
‘freeform’ it was, and how ironically non-freeform it becomes in practice
due to its lack of theoretical boundaries and parameters. The
theme/idea/concept of journeys for me is/was an appropriate way to use
the methodology of fictocriticism overall as an unbridled, untamed, yet

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still untapped way of writing both personally and theoretically, with a

unified and engaging ‘double-voice’ (Kerr 2013:93). Hence, I would like
to carefully find ways to push the threshold and parameters of what
fictocriticism can be, if it can be reinvented and innovated on into
something more (or less) concrete, and still become or evolve into a mode
of writing that is engaging, identifiable and prominent within the
academy.

This paper reflects on the difficult and meandering nature of exploring a

large creative writing PhD project at the postgraduate level, via a
fictocritical lens – a genre/form that requires some further attention,
clarification and innovation. I attempted to consolidate some of these
avenues for attention in 2021, in a book I was fortunate enough to publish
called Fictocritical Innovations: A Millennial Perspective. In this book I
attempt to provide a new understanding of fictocriticism as both an art
form and as a vehicle for higher theory and criticism, exploring key
question such as: can a writing method still be fictocritical if one does not
intend it to be so? Can the hunt for form and knowledge be retrofitted to
fit into the/a fictocritical form? What allows the author to think
fictocritically? And to provide new and expanded reading tools that both
explain the subjectivity and context of fictocritical writings, while
simultaneously innovating on the form.

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