Space, Place, and Fiction as Research

‘In epistemology we find fictions as presuppositions; in science they are hypotheses.’ (Iser, 1997, p.3)

‘Truth is hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.’ (Francis Bacon.)

In Storytelling: Narratology for Critics & Creative Writers (2014, p. 1), Paul McDonald says, ‘Fiction is fundamental to human experience’ and he quotes Joan Didion who said, ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live.’ The issue, as McDonald sees it, is that presenting a narrative as ‘non-fiction’ to a reader creates expectations about the material and the nature of it – the expectation being that it will be true and that the writer of such a piece should be held to account for the factual nature of the work. The expectation of fiction, however, is different; the literal truth isn’t expected, and, by extension, fiction writers aren’t held to account in the same way, even though they might be conveying controversial issues. In McDonald’s opinion, ‘As far as it’s possible for any narrative to deal in truths, you’re just as likely to find them in fiction as in so-called “non-fiction”.’ (p. 14).

Fletcher (2016, p. 3) says that ‘…scholars of popular fiction have much to offer geocriticism and the geohumanities more broadly,’ and that it is possible to approach the reading and analysis of popular fiction ‘as complicated systems of meaning, which have an immeasurable impact on our spatial awareness and imagination.’ (p. 4). But ‘practice-based research’, where (in this case) such fiction is both produced and analysed by the researcher presents, according to Webb (2016, p. 13) a potential ‘disequilibrium and hence discomfort’ because ‘Reflexivity requires a willingness to drop all the truisms of the field, and consider them again, from a point of view that is outside the logic of that field in order to defamiliarize and thereby reconceptualise the field.’ However, this disequilibrium can, in fact, place artist-academics in a privileged position of producing something new because of the fact of them having to apply a ‘reflexive gaze on both art and the academy.’ This reflexive gaze, being an essential part of the methodology emphasises the extent to which ‘imagination, chance and tacit knowledge actually drives research practice…a new kind of academic who is simultaneously a new kind of artist, making a new kind of object in a reconceptualised field.’ (p. 14.)

Bacon (2017, p. 236) goes further, and is more specific about creative writing as research, saying that creative writers’ capacity in terms of the tools they have of language technique and use, means that they construct meaning in a unique way. Their skill in using the components of creative writing to produce fiction, he says, involves ‘ “seeing”, “apprehending”, “making sense”’ which he asserts is research designed to answer research questions and is also literary work which, in the process of having been created, ‘reinvigorates the creative research.’ Further, the intensive nature of creative writing allows for ideas and approaches to be tested out, resulting in new ways of seeing. Referring to the academic-creative process, Bacon acknowledges that the accessibility to readers is a direct result of the crafting of the creative piece through ‘looking intensively, inwardly and outwardly, and offering a bridge – through a dissertation that addresses important elements of the investigation and reflection.’

Iser (1997, p. 2) says of fiction, ‘There is no single underlying world, but instead we create new worlds out of old ones in a process which Goodman describes as ‘Fact from Fiction’. Fictions, then, are not the unreal side of reality, let alone the opposite of reality… they are, rather, conditions that enable the production of worlds whose reality, in turn, is not to be doubted.’

The argument that arts and fiction-based research is viable and relevant is that the arts have the capacity to make connections with people in a different, sensory way, which reaches further, on what Leavy calls a ‘level of humanness’, that itself goes further to cultivate dialogue and understanding (p. 24). This development of a critical consciousness is cultivated through the fact of the allowance of a variety of meanings. Both creative writer-researcher and reader naturally bring their own perspectives, which results in the vital element of the presence of ambiguity.

A good example of the strength, power and reach of fiction are the growing and fierce debates in academic institutions in the UK and further afield by students asking political questions about why certain fiction writers aren’t included in reading lists, why some seem to be excluded and how we might be challenged in a different way by the books we read. If, as Williams (2021) says, there is a sense that some students’ expectations of academia are changing, and the expectation is that academics ought to use their job to create social change, and that methods of teaching literature are therefore different to the way they used to be, then this is an example of the way in which students and academics are engaging with fiction as intellectual material. The argument about what is ‘appropriate’ or ‘acceptable’ has risen to the surface, and issues of identity and politics in fiction are being analysed more closely so that perhaps there is an anxiety about what can (or ought) or cannot (or ought not) be said, but this could (or should) perhaps be seen as where fiction demonstrates a strength. According to Williams (2021) in academic institutions, ‘A big sea change is underway. Students are more alert to how reading fiction might impact on them.’ More than this, Williams asserts that ‘The novel has been recruited as a “weapon of war”’ and that the media (and particularly social media) allows, for instance, hashtags to trend about contemporary novelists which then create a ‘trend’, which, in turn creates more exposure, and perhaps more analysis. She cites Sally Rooney’s decision to boycott her Israeli publisher as an example of the way in which the novel, combined with social media response, is used to articulate broader politics. Essentially, this tallies with Leavy’s argument that fiction-based research seeks to create a deeper understanding of experiences in a language that is more accessible than research published in academic publications, and that the creative writer-researcher is able to create new knowledge and ‘disrupt dominant ideologies or stereotypes.’ (2013, p. 38) Additionally, Leavy says that as part of the continuum in fiction-based research, the process of writing fiction can also be a research act in and of itself and she mentions the vital reliance on personal experience and imagination to create research. (p. 54.)

This is an important starting point, as from my point of view, I use fiction as a scholarly endeavour in my research to explore the question and possibilities of psychogeographic flow in Black Country fiction, and to advocate further challenge.

Leavy’s work into ‘Fiction as Research Practice’ (2013) is, of course, pertinent. She explains that writers of fiction are qualitative researchers who engage in intensive and exhaustive research and use the components of fiction which create a ‘reality’ or ‘verisimilitude’, which are the keys to effective fiction-based research and traditional qualitative research ‘because both methods try to portray the experiences as true as possible.’ (p. 130.) She advocates engaging with fiction in research practice because of the possibilities it opens up. She quotes Cohn (2000 in Leavy, 2013, p 20) ‘Fiction is both a form of writing and way of reading’ allowing for access to and re-examination of imaginary worlds as well as the motivating (or unmotivating) psychological processes revealed through, for instance, characterisation, that convey ways in which such processes are shaped socially and culturally. Leavy, similar to McDonald, explores the idea of the blurred line between fiction and non-fiction by likening the way in which qualitative researchers go about shaping aspects of their investigations with the way in which the creative writing-researchers use fiction that comes from ‘genuine human experience’ (p. 21). Both, she says, imbue their investigations with their own unique fingerprint, both are examples of social research that are processes of knowledge-building, meaning-making and are expressing and negotiating ‘truths’ to relevant audiences. If fiction-based research practice, effectively, challenges the dichotomy between fiction and non-fiction, which, after all has dominated what is considered to be ‘research’, then my examination, here, of what my fiction-based research is, is not only relevant in a general sense, but also in the specific, psychogeographic sense because this notion of the blurry line between fiction and non-fiction seems to exemplify the psychogeographic nature of both the fictional work (the novel, ‘God’s Country’), and the subject matter (psychogeographic flow in Black Country fiction.) The fiction itself is a psychogeographic artefact which represents or demonstrates blurred boundaries, and it contains the psychogeographic entity of the subject matter: the Black Country.

According to Leavy, evaluating fiction-based research is something that should be done on an individual basis and it is not possible to evaluate it in the same way as traditional research. Some evaluative tools used in qualitative research, she suggests, can be applied to fiction-based research though. For instance:

Qualitative Research Fiction-Based

Validity and trustworthiness Resonance

Rigor Aesthetics

Congruence Structure

Thoroughness Ambiguity

Authenticity Verisimilitude

Reflexivity Writer’s personal signature

To examine this further, we need to look at Leavy’s initial list of considerations which she cites as an initial list for evaluating fiction-based research:

The creation of virtual reality (or verisimilitude.)

Sensitive portrayal of people.

Form, structure and narrative coherence.

The presence of ambiguity.

Substantive contribution.

Aesthetics.

Personal signature.

Audience. (Leavy, 2013, pp. 79-90)

Leavy also cites Cole & Knowles (2001, p. 215-7) who offer seven further elements of ‘arts-informed life research’:

Intentionality (intellectual and moral purpose.)

Researcher’s presence (signature or finger print.)

Methodological commitment.

Holistic quality (authenticity, sincerity, truthfulness.)

Aesthetic form (aesthetic appeal and adherence to genre conventions.)

Knowledge claims.

Contributions (theoretical, practical, transformative.) (p. 23-4)

Thinking about my own novel, ‘God’s Country’ in relation to Leavy’s ‘Substantive Contribution’ element: psychogeographic flow in Black Country fiction is an under-researched idea, crossing disciplinary boundaries that have psychogeopoetical as well as cultural dimensions. The fiction itself contributes to the pool of ‘Black Country fiction’. The novel uses a particular narrative voice in order for the reader to ‘hear’ the voice of the protagonist, Alison. I have called this the Insistent Narrative Motif (INM), a narrative style or voice which is intended to created what Leavy (2013, p. 256) refers to as ‘spaces for the readers’ interpretive process.’ For example: ‘She’ll tell how she had to pull hard at the door…’ and ‘She’ll say she hadn’t realised the river ran alongside the field’. It forms a series of psychogeographic encounters between writer/researcher and narrator, narrator and character, character and place, place and fiction, and fiction and reader/reader and fiction. McDonald (in Groes & Francis, eds. 2021, p.35) has suggested that with this style of narrative voice, the way in which the narrator qualifies everything, as if related to them second hand underscores their subjectivity. He says, ‘This has the effect of distancing us from the action but also of creating an impression of an unstable, unknowable world.’ This places the narrator on the boundary of the story as a narrator-novelist-researcher, as an entity both looking in and looking out of the narrative, so confirming the character, Alison, as a subject on which the gaze is focused within the place. Access to Alison’s thoughts and actions about the place, through this narrative style, also takes the reader on another narrative pathway, since her thoughts and actions are filtered through the ‘mind of the narrator’. This deliberate doubling, or double-voice effect could be considered an example of Leavy’s ‘intentionality’. It creates a sense of ‘ambiguity’, opening up possibilities for the reader to consider who exactly is telling this story. Which path ought the reader take? Whose voice is the reader listening to, or ought they listen to? The narrative movement towards Alison’s viewpoint, then refocusing back to the narrator’s (or the writer, or the writer as researcher, or the novelist as researcher) might be considered to be part of Ross’ (2013, p. 31) ‘psychogeographic narrative bundle’. Ross considers that ‘voice’ or ‘voices’ in fiction form part of the ‘universal psychogeographic bundle’ (p. 96). He says, ‘The reader suspends disbelief not only concerning whether the text is fictional in its entirety, but also concerning the details of the narrative in “believing” the narrator is “really there” and that the writer is not really a writer and yet is an astute “writerly observer”.’ (pp. 94-5.)

The narrative choice here is deliberately ambiguous, with the narrator performing a kind of narrative trespass within the novel. A work of fiction allows for this – or allows this – through the limitations and freedoms addressed by ‘voice’ choice, specifically in ‘God’s Country’ because, narratively, it implicitly evokes an amorphous liminality which mirrors the sense of the blurred boundaries of the Black Country itself. This blurred boundary between character, narrator and researcher results in a narrative voice which embodies a sensation of place (in this case, the Black Country) which doubles again as the ‘researcher presence’ and the ‘personal signature’ of the novelist. The experience and feelings of Alison, the character, become indistinguishable from, or enmeshed with, the experience and feelings of the narrator, and, it follows, the novelist-researcher. This mingling of feelings and perceptions about the ‘real’ place, within a work of fiction, provokes a sense of disorientation, perhaps even discomfort, in a narrative that aims to construct a psychological framework in which to convey an idea of the Black Country as a ‘shock region’, and to give a sense of the transformative nature of the Black Country on character, and character on the Black Country (so ‘real place’ on fiction and fiction on ‘real place’) despite the disconnect between what might otherwise be considered an unlikely topoaesthetic response to the region. This culminates in a narrative resistance to ‘resolution’ in terms of narrative structure at the end of the novel:

‘All that she’ll say she was thinking is that this place is more expressive than any of the people in it, that this place has its own mentality. She’s right. See, she felt it then, the sensation of it. You might be moving, wandering about, but it, this place here, seems to stay still in time and movement, seems to hold you within it, and that’s powerful. Godlike.

She’ll tell how she had to push hard at the door of the farm to open it. Inside, it was colder, and she’ll say she grabbed a coat from the hanger, one of Guy’s, and put it on over hers. And she’ll tell how called to him, Guy. She called his name. And then she called to him again.’

Here, readers may consider a variety of analytical options. Perhaps this ending suggests a static Black Country ideology, or, in Alison’s return to the Black Country farm at the end, a return from the post-pastoral to the pastoral. It may also represent the incongruity of the region, and an explication of psychogeographic enquiry in the region. From the point of view of ‘God’s Country’, the fictional format is the only form that allows exploration of the thematic content. It is a significant part of the whole. Indeed, Derrida (1978, p. 64) referring to Livre des Questions says, ‘…the book is indeed the subject of the poet, the speaking and knowing being who in the book writes on the book. This movement through which the book becomes the subject in itself and for itself, is not critical or speculative reflection, but is, first of all poetry and history.’ And ‘…within this book, which infinitely reflects itself and which develops as a painful questioning of its own possibility, the form of the book represents itself.’ (p. 65.) And, ‘Freedom allies and exchanges itself with that which restrains it.’ (p. 66.)

‘God’s Country’, as part of my fiction-based research, not only exemplifies a psychogeographic element in both the place and the writing, but the fiction itself provides a space within which the Black Country is approached from a personally highly intimate perspective. In this way, fiction and research here become mutually dependent, in a similar way in which Barthes (1977, p. 162) refers to reading and writing: ‘…the text requires that one tries to abolish (or at the very least, diminish) the distance between writing and reading, in no way by intensifying the projection of the reader into the work but by joining them in a single signifying practice. The distance separating reading from writing is historical.’ Barthes says that the collaboration on a text between reader and writer is vital, and suggests that the arrangement is bound by physical or intellectual pleasure (‘Jouissance’). He says that ‘…the text is that social space which leaves no language safe outside… The theory of the Text can coincide only with the practice of writing.’ (p. 164.). If we accept this idea, we are acknowledging the power of fiction – the reach of it and the effect of it on readers, we are accepting the responsibility it holds (through, say, its validity, trustworthiness and verisimilitude) and we have to accept that fiction therefore represents a substantive contribution to its audience. We also have to accept that some of the current debate about fiction is about the question of potential harm. Fiction is now under the spotlight and has become an element that contributes to ‘Cancel Culture’. Published novelists, it seems, have become so intrinsically part of their text, that publishers and literary agents are having to develop a heightened awareness about the threat of ‘cancellation’. Jonny Geller from literary agency, Curtis Brown (Radio 4: Pride & Prejudice: How We Read Now. Reading Novels. 2021) says, of the current ‘culture wars’: ‘This is not a modern phenomenon. Turns out we’ve been afraid of the way the novel might shape our consciousness for centuries.’ Further: ‘Right now, we’re in a moment when novels are controversial and their content is controversial and we’re concerned about what the effects of encountering particular types of material are on readers but…I’m so aware there’s a long history of concern about what immersing yourself a fictional world does to you, so in some ways, we’re back where we started with the novel that once again, we’re worried about what it does to us to locate ourselves within the middle of a book where there’s a very blurry line between who we are and what’s going on in the pages of a book.’

The current debate about fiction also tackles the notion that it gives you special access to people unlike yourself, and this, according to Roz Ballister (Radio 4, 2021) begs the question about ‘reading to be seen’ and ‘reading to see’. i.e. Reading to see yourself (reading the familiar) or reading to learn something about something or someone else (reading the unfamiliar) which further begs the question: should writers write about what they know or should they be free to write about what they don’t know but want to imagine into life? For many novelists (Nadia Mohammed, writer of The Fortune Men, for example, on the Radio 4 programme says that ‘Research… immersing yourself in the details of other people’s lives’ is the pleasure, or jouissance, in writing for her.)

This re-evaluation of art, and fiction in particular, brings the discussion closer to psychogeography and the way in which the fingerprint of the Situationist’s concern with the politics of urban space is present in fiction. Natalie Phillips (in Thompson & Vedantam, 2012, in Leavy, 2013, p. 261) has conducted research into literary neuroscience, specifically about reading fiction. She measured brain activity of those reading ‘casually’ and those reading ‘closely’ the fiction of Jane Austen. The findings suggest ‘readers were physically placing themselves within the story as they analysed it.’ This resonates with Ross’ (2013, p. v) research into literary psychogeography in which he refers to ‘the power of the human observer in space [which] elucidates the multiple and bundled nature of the fictional point of view, the importance of the body as part of the setting, the facile ability of the mind to switch between character, viewpoints and heterocosms, and the constructed, disseminated, fragmented and simulated nature of human observations of space.’ In fact, Ross pertains to fiction as an artefact of psychogeographic research, playing an important role in writing, as well as reading fiction, when he says, of writers of literary psychogeography, ‘…such writers explore the significance of geographic location, setting and spatiality for narrative and often include the relevance of modern theories of mind and the brain, beginning with an understanding of fiction as at least partially originating from a spatially located observing consciousness, or array of consciousnesses as being pertinent to theories of fiction creation.’ (p. 3). Indeed, Ellen Spolsky (2002, p. 56 in Ross 2013, p. 22) suggests a link between Darwinian theory and the post-structuralism, in that the ‘production of structures…[is] an activity that happens within and in response to a specific environment.’

Expanding on this, it is interesting to look at Hardy (2000, p. 86)) who cites Casey (1998, p. 150) ‘Place is a part of space which a body takes up.’ If we use this idea, we could consider ‘place’ as being a fictional component within the ‘space’, being the novel, which a body (i.e. the research) takes up. In other words, the novel could be considered a ‘space’ enabling psychogeographic exploration of place. When Joan Parker (see Tillotson, 2014 in Richardson, 2015, p. 242) said ‘Landscape is first and foremost a way of creating belongingness and tying us together’ she wouldn’t have (and none of us had) any idea that only a few years later, a pandemic would introduce us to the word ‘lockdown’, and prevent us from going out into our landscapes. Fiction, then – novels – as spaces, provided an unexpected way to explore a landscape that was out of bounds, effectively, it exaggerated what fiction allowed readers to do: to use a method of psychic travel instead of physical travel, and to explore using the imagination. Through fiction, research, then can be conveyed and read in the same way. Lefebvre’s (1991, p. 39) ideas about space are also relevant here: that space is socially produced and represented and that ‘representations of space’ is different to ‘representational space’ which ‘tend towards more or less coherent systems of non-verbal symbols and signs.’ The novel in my research, ‘God’s Country’, provides a space in which, from a psychogeographic point of view, the Black Country is portrayed as an ‘alternative place’, and the farm that is Guy’s childhood home to which he returns for his brother’s funeral is a further alternative place within it. It is the pastoral in amongst the industrial. This labyrinthian ‘otherness’ of place is psychogeographic, the kind of place that is unmappable, where walking is an imperative. The implication is that Guy has tried to forget, but his forgetting, his self-amnesia, is part of his new identity. The psychogeographic Black Country is even harsher to him on his return, and memories and sensations are accessed through walking, through his freshly mined un-forgetting. The network of his background is revealed as if the place is complicit with the events in his earlier life there, and the implication is that it will be complicit in any future event, too. The aim, in writing the novel, is to broaden the remit and meaning of psychogeography without obscuring its avant-garde origins in regard to its ambiguous role there. There is an ambivalence about the Black Country, and the narrative conveys a destabilising effect about the atmosphere of the region as a post-pastoral, late capitalist place, especially in the threat of the compulsory purchase of the farm to make way for a new road and Guy’s father, Flood’s, reaction to it. What psychogeography means or what it is, is itself ambiguous. Psychogeography is taken beyond its Situationist beginnings when intertwined with fiction, and into geopoetics, the humanities, urban studies. Reimagining psychogeography into the fiction of a region in the industrial midlands – not even a city, and certainly not London or Paris – takes psychogeography out of its existing literature. The psychogeographic flow, as present in ‘God’s Country’ as an example of Black Country fiction, underpins a sense of constant recalibration of the link between self and place in the changing representation of Guy, and of Alison. It is a way of seeing the alternative possibilities or ambiguous reality. Indeed, the term ‘Black Country fiction’ is in some ways a complementary one.

Fiction, then, has the power to elicit great emotion, opinion and critique. The modern novel has become a politized entity. Although the power of the novel and the fear of that power is not new, there are, today, more outlets through, say, social media and a variety internet resources like blog posts, websites and 24 hour news, and you might say through the publishers’ expectation of and call for, reviews. The literary scene is hyper-exposed at present and the industry is perhaps under more scrutiny than ever before. But there is also the potential for anonymity in audience opinion, and the sense that it is no longer acceptable to be a passive onlooker, that there is a responsibility for consumers of fiction (readers, academics and students) to act against what they perceive to be unfair, which, according to Abigail Williams (Radio 4, 2021) ‘means thinking anew about the novels they read and how they read them.’ It also means that the potential for, and appetite for, fiction as research is has a burgeoning responsibility to academia.

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