Fictocritical Sentences

)9.2..oL Fictocritical Sentences Simon Robb English Department, Universify of Adelaide. Muy, 2001,. Thesis Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of philosophy CONTENTS Abstract J Statement and Acknowledgment 4 Introduction 5 Academic Divination 27 Alien Sick 35 Family Values - transcript 42 Greetings from Adelaide htÞ, / / e*emble.va.com .aú table aa / simon Naive and Sentimental Writing 52 Nostalgic Moments 55 Loving Writing 59 Reforming the Boy - trarucript 90 The hulk P¡eface 98 Joumal (R) 100 Conesspondence 714 Scrapbook 722 ]oumal (W) L42 Interview 752 Letter L57 References 766 Illustrations 168 Appendices A. Fanily Values [CD] Back Cover B. Greetings from Adelaide [map] . 769 C. Reforming the Boy [CD] Back Cover ABSTRACT 'Fictocriticism' refers to writing that performs yet also problematizes the key manoeuvres of both fiction and criticism. Fictoc¡iticism is a term that has been taken trp in Australian academic contexts to describe writing that is concemed with an interplay of writing 'positions' and with the specific or local contexts that enable the production of these'positions,. Fictocritical Sentences primarily enacts a fictocritical mapping of local cultural events. The 'events' are essentially concemed with crime and trauma in Adelaide. They include the disappearance of the three Beaumont children in 1966, the 'Family'murders of the 1980s, the 'Truro'murders of the L9z0s and the ,reforming, of 'c¡iminal' and 'neglected' boys cn the Fitzjames, a hulk moored off the metropolitan coast of Adelaide, during the 1880s. The fictocritical treatment of these events simulates their unresolved or traumatised condition. Differences between'invention'and 'explication' matter most at times of personal and public trauma. A problematic yet important use for the unstable combination of both the literary and the critical can be found in the mapping of trauma events. A secondary concem is the relationship between electronic writing (hypertext) and fictocriticism. The mapping of significant (and virtually uncharted) Adelaide trauma events and the relationship between fictocriticism and hypertext is presented in print and hypertext works. Fictocritical strategies can be used to simulate rather than synthesise the textual field of a given event. Fictocritical strategies are effective in dealing with competing truth effects and their desire for mastery. Fictocriticism can be a way of documenting the textual or discursive field of the local envi¡onment in a way that encourages the reader/user/listener to negotiate his own path through that landscape. hr reviewing my fictocritical work I have come to realise that fictocriticism is ,presence,. concemed both with producing and destabilising the effect of of equal importance is the mapping of a particular textual field in such a way that the play of difference produces a multiplicity of reading positions. 3 STATEMENT AND ACKNOWLEDGMENT This work contains rp material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma i. a.y university or other tertiary institution and, to the best of my knowledge and beliel contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference has bee¡r made in the text. I give consent to this copy of my thesis, whm deposited in the University Library, being available for loan and photocopFng. I acknowledge the kind assista¡rce of my supervisor, Heather Kerr, in the completion of this thesis. SimonRobb 4/5/01 4 INTRODUCTI This introduction discusses my fictocritical writing from 1995 to 2000. It describes the aims and methods of that writing and attempts critically to assess it. The fictocritical pieces are discussed in ch¡onological order of production. The term 'fictocriticism' has been circulati.g it the Australian acad.emy at least since the late 1980s. In an article published in 1991 ('On Fictocriticism,) Noel King and stephen Muecke suggest ,fictocriticism, that the origins of (a term they use interchangeably with the 'parariterary,) could be located in the work of Fred (L987) Jameson and Rosalind lGauss (1981). Jameson uses the term ,fictocritical, and Krauss term ,stable the 'paraliterary' to describe a writing where the and separate bodies of "fiction" and "criticism,, [are] replaced by compor:nds, mergings, mutations and mistakes' (Muecke and King 13). Amanda Nettelbeck suggests (along with King and Muecke) that fictocriticism is yet another 'symptom' of postunodemism. what perhaps differentiates fictocriticism from simply being postnodem fiction (the example used by Muecke and King ts White Noise) , or poststructuralist wrifing (Derrida for example) is that is it an unstable combination of both the literary and the critical. ¡r both Muecke and King, and Krauss, the fictocritical (or paraliterary) refers to a process where fiction and criticism become 'part of a single device for the generation of a new kind of text' (Nettelbeck 4). This 'single device, is described by Nettelbeck as producing hybridized writing that moves between the poles of fiction ('invention'/'specuration') and criticism ('deduction'/,exprication), of subjectivity ('interiority,) and objectivity (,exteriority,). (4) 'Fictocriticism' refers therefore to writing that enacts yet also problematizes the key manoeuvres of both fiction and criticism. rn1992 Hodge and McHout suggested that fictocriticism was one possible sftategy for opening up a positive ,truth and self-reflexive politics, meaning the effect, of commentaryisopeneduptocritical scrutiny. Hodge and McHoul cite Reød.ing the country (co-authored by Muecke) as an example of a fictocriticism that 5 INTRODUCTION interrogates its own mode of production and whose self-reflexive politics re_ configures conventionar the relationship between the white acad.emic and indigenous 'other'. Muecke has continued to deploy fictocritical practices. Ír No Ro¿d there is an unstable mix between ,theory,. t¡avel writing, personal anecdote and Each gmre is used as both an object and method of writing: The becoming of writing is its preparedness to ailow a completely different medium to infuse the text, to take words which are supposed to function in one way in one domain, to bonow words f¡om this domain and let them reproduce and play havoc in a new one. (230) The aim of this method is to construct new cultural spaces for the subject to inhabit (231'-2)' As Nettelbeck points out however, self-consciously hybridised writing practices have always beerr a part of the westem literary tradition. The fictocritical tum is not ,knowing, then a new form of but rather the move of a certain form of writing into the academy (6-z). This move into the academy has besr assisted ,My particularly by Noel King (see also his Life without steve..., and 'occasional Doubts...') and stephen Muecke. hr terms of the circulation of 'fictocriticism' in academic publications Nettelbeck notes that Recently established Australian joumals, such as Llrs Reaiew [co_edited by Muecke], wedge and the erectronica[y circurate d, øntimony, invite fictocritical submissioru....Longer established Australian joumals such as southern Reaiew and westerly, arso increasingly provide space for fictocritical work. (10) Perhaps the most significant and recent example of the ,visibility, of fictocriticism in Australia has been the publication of the antholo gy The space Between: AustrøIian Women Wríting Fictocriticisn. Nettelbeck describes the collection as being'a series of investigative writings connected by their agonistic relation to the interpretive gesture' (13). Fictocriticism is therefore a term that has been taken-up in Aust¡alian academic contexts to describe writing that is concemed with an interplay of writing 'positions, and with the specific or local contexts that enable the production of these ,positions,. This brief review of the circulation and visibility of fictocriticism contextualises my fictocritical work f¡om 1995 to 2000. The location of each wo¡k is indicated in brackets after its title. The two audio works are located. in the appendices and are 6 INTRODUCTION also reproduced in print version. The trtemet address of the hypertext work is given in addition to a map of that work in the appendices. 'Academic Divination' (p. 27) concenìs itself with the proposition that fictocriticism and hypertext are both technologies that promise to prod.uce a particular and 'desirable' posbrodem subjectivity. They are both technologies of the self, and this idea owes mudr to Ian Hunter's work cn critical practice as an ethics of the self and to Noel King's reading of Hunter's work with respect to fictocritical practices (see King 1994;Kerr). Ethics here refers to a fonn of 'life conduct'modelled in the English classroom whereby the student is encouraged towards oscillating self-expressiveness and self-scrutiny. while engaged in the process of reading texts students are simultaneously engaged in a process of reading themselves via the text. (Hunter'Aesthetics' z64-lï; 'Anxieties'6). This has the primary effect of producing a self which is both critical and expressive, despite the apparently ideological setting of the classroom. [rdeed Hunter eschews the idea that 'English' is essentially ar, ideological tool either imparting ,false consciousness' or delivering liberation ('Anxieties' 12). The important point for Hunter is that he is not talking about ethics as a 'moral' discipline, but as series of techniques of self-making, some of which may be in cont¡adiction to the moral code associated with that ethic (Hunter 'Aesthetics' 368). Indeed

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