Fiction as Research - The Insistent Narrative Motif in 'God's Country'

Before writing ‘God’s Country’, I wrote two previous ‘Black Country novels’, the first published in 2015, and the second in 2018. I spent nearly 20 years teaching English in secondary schools and university, several years studying creative writing as an academic subject, and 4 years teaching creative writing in university. During this time, there have been many often intense conversations about the nature of literature and creative writing, and the components and fiction from both a reader and a writer’s point of view. In addition, I was born in and have lived and worked in the Black Country for most of my life. Patricia Leavy (2012, p. 519) says of her work: ‘All that I learned within the academy linked up with my own informed observations of social life and my autobiographical experiences.’ And I could say the same. My belief in the Black Country as a unique place with a significant link to ‘psychogeography’ and ‘psychogeographical ideas’ and my desire to expose the topoaesthetic sensation of place within it, as well as subvert ideas about the Black Country as a fixed ‘place’ needs to be something that is conveyed through the medium of fiction. In the process, fiction is empowered, I believe, as a valid method of academic form. The resulting short novel, ‘God’s Country’, is in a psychological relationship with the Black Country as a ‘place’.

Writing a research-informed Black Country novel, I realise I am working in a tradition well-established by others (hence, in this research, the addition of the analysis of the other novels.) Those novelists who walk the thin line between Black Country fiction and non-fiction include Francis Brett Young, Anthony Cartwright and Joel Lane. As Patricia Leavy (2012, p. 518-9) says about her own research-informed feminist novel: ‘Who is to say their works are “just” fiction, or social research – might they be both at once?’ because ‘The beliefs of fiction writers permeate their work…Barone and Eisner (2012, p. 120) stress the importance of employing methods and compositional design elements that are likely to achieve your intended purpose.’

According to De Freitas & Truman (2020: 7) ‘Authors use unreliable narrators to create stories that are radically open to unravelling, breaking up the sometimes oppressive controlling nature of story to contain events… the unreliable narrator may be wilful in their deceit or simply ignorant of the larger forces that are at work in the storyworld.’ In ‘God’s Country’ however, the opposite is true, but the effect might be considered similar. To explain, there is an intended specific sense of reliability about the narrator, or the narrative voice, and it is a narrative style that draws attention to itself, to the materiality of writing, research and fictionality. The deliberate performance of narrative reliability through the narrative voice proposes or implies neutrality or even a facilitation of analysis from the reader, yet it sits ‘inside’ the text, knowledgeable, as if merging with the environment, both physically and textually, and could, in fact, be perceived as the voice of someone having carried out – or even be in the process of carrying out – qualitative research. The device of using the repetition of ‘she’ll say’ or ‘she’ll tell’ or ‘she would say’ becomes an incantation, an insistent narrative motif, an unrelenting reminder that the reader is observing, qualitatively, the consciousness of an ‘other’ (in this case, the character, Alison) a ‘consciousness [that] senses and perceives a space or location and attempts to manipulate it in some way.’ (Ross 2013, p. 106.) Patricia Leavy (2012, p. 518) says: ‘fictional devices have the potential to carry great “emotional capital” (Abbott, 2008, pp. 46-49). When qualitative researchers tap into these narrative components they have the potential to get deeper into the minds of readers…fiction allows readers into the minds of characters through “interior monologue” (Caulley, 2008). Put differently, fiction allows us to get at and express interiority (Banks, 2008) which is arguably a goal in all research, though seldom achieved.’ In this way, ‘God’s Country’ is the (or part of the) fictional ongoing analysis of psychogeographical flow in Black Country fiction, and the device of a narrative voice with authority gives a sense of an embedded quality of conflict between the thoughts and actions of the character, ‘Alison’, and the evaluative judgment of the narrator. In this way, the fiction represents the Black Country as a psychological construct, and its landscape and the main location of the novel (a farm) as allegorical diorama revealing the effects, caused by place, on characters’ emotions and behaviour. This marrying of research and creative practice or, as Webb & Brien (2008) refer to it as ‘skholè and, say, techné, in the interests of producing and interpreting knowledge in a different – but valid – way’ emulates the psychogeographic nature of both the research itself and the geographic liminality of the Black Country region. Through the novel, definite borders between fiction and non-fiction, then, become blurred in what Kent Chapin Ross (2013:100-1) refers to as the ‘fabula’, which he defines as ‘the real-life happenings (or invented backstory) from which “story” is then artificially and artfully created, then later fashioned into a physical “text”. “Fabula”…can be equated with the “geography” part of the compound term “psychogeography” and is a necessary part of fiction.’ Ross, quoting Bal, argues that the process of reading a text (he cites ‘experimental texts’ and ‘postmodern novels’) becomes the psychogeographical experience: ‘The reader “wanders’ through the maze of the text, which itself is spatialised and is either oriented or disoriented.’ (2013:104). This layering of psychogeographical experience represents a symbiotic connectedness between fiction and non-fiction, or non-fiction within fiction, or critical within the creative (or vice versa) and labels this novel as a psychogeographic entity in and of itself, which functions in excess of its analytical significance. Further, Matthew Stallard’s assertion (by email) that key to the creation of the idea of the Black Country as a ‘shock region’ in 1840, ‘as the first region anywhere in the world wholly expropriated and rearranged into the service of coal and iron’, is the construction of a psychological framework for the region which was appropriated by ‘the literate and popular imagination of nineteenth century Britain.’ The connection between the industry and environment of the Black Country and ‘the literate audience’ is significant here because it suggests that not only as Leavy (2013, p. 20) says ‘engaging with fiction in our research practice creates innumerable possibilities’, it makes specific the link between the Black Country and literature (specifically fiction). That is to say, the Black Country would not exist without fiction and readers of fiction. Added to that, the proposed link with psychogeography provides a sense of what Webb & Brien (2008) refer to as ‘what it is for knowledge to be generated through creative work.’ But, as Webb & Brien (2008) say, practice-led (or, arts-based, or in this case fiction-based research) ‘tends to be less systematic, less easily reduced to an interpretive framework, less likely to offer its findings in a transparent mode and less susceptible to rational argument.’ Webb & Brien (2008) refer to this as ‘agnostic research’, that is to say research for which the basic philosophical view is that ‘“truth value” is unknowable’, with a reliance on what John Keats referred to as ‘Negative Capability’, suggesting an acceptance of ambiguities and uncertainties. Webb & Brien say that ‘Negative capacity is like negative space: that which is available to be filled… it is not a refusal to establish meaning, but is rather “an imaginative openness of mind and heightened receptivity to reality in its full and diverse concreteness” (Bate 1963, p. 18).’

There is, then, more than simply a sense that fiction is capable of hosting this specific research effectively, and that the process of writing is the process of inquiry. The transformative nature of both the writing and reading of fiction is key here, psychogeographically, creatively and critically, and my focus is on the way in which my fiction piece pursues what De Freitas & Truman (2020, p. 3) refer to as ‘an ecological cosmic sympathy between human and nonhuman’. Webb (2015, p. 1) cites Martin Heidegger (1977, p. 184) and lists some of the components of fiction such as character, voice, point of view, focalisation, plot etc. as ‘tools for thought’ and that used well, mean that fiction can act as a ‘mode of knowing.’ James Wood (2009, p. 6) makes the point that ‘If the book has a larger argument, it is that fiction is both artifice and verisimilitude, and that there is nothing difficult in holding together these two possibilities.’ My assertion is that inclusion of the fiction text into this research will not only ‘allow scholars to think creatively about new kinds of inquiry’ (De Freitas & Truman, 2020, p. 3) but is an essential part of the exploration of psychogeographical flow in Black Country fiction (without which the research would be incomplete) resulting in what Leavy might refer to as the Black Country Academic Novel.

De Freitas, E. (2003). Contested positions: How fiction informs empathic research. International Journal of Education and the Arts, 4(7). [Viewed 20 October 2021]. Available from: http://www.ijea.org/v4n7/

De Freitas, E. & Truman, S., (2020). New Empiricisms in the Anthropocene: Thinking With Speculative Fiction About Science and Social Inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry [online]. 27(5), 522-533. [Viewed 20 October 2021]. Available from: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1077800420943643

Leavy, P., (2012). Fiction and the Feminist Academic Novel. Qualitative Inquiry [online]. 18(6), 516-522. [Viewed 13 October 2021] Available from: https://journals-sagepub-com.mmu.idm.oclc.org/doi/pdf/10.1177/1077800412442813

Leavy, P., (2013). Fiction as Research Practice. Short Stories, Novellas and Novels. London & New York: Routledge.

Ross, K. C. (2013). Developing A Method Of Literary Psychogeography In Postmodern Fictions Of Detection: Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy And Martin Amis’s London Fields. [Viewed 5th May 2017]. Available from: http://kentross.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/ROSS-DISSERTATION-4-15-13.pdf (also [Viewed 11 December 2017]. Available from: https://search-proquest-com.mmu.idm.oclc.org/pqdt/docview/1372812102/previewPDF/1E8F7670DDFB40F9PQ/2?accountid=12507

Webb, J. & Brien, D. (2008). “Agnostic” thinking: creative writing as practice-led research. Working Papers in Art and Design 5. [online]. Available at: https://www.herts.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0014/12434/WPIAAD_vol5_webb_obrien.pdf

Webb, J. (2015). Researching Creative Writing. Suffolk: Frontinus Ltd.

Wood, J. (2009). How Fiction Works. First Picador ed. New York: Picador