Speculating about Fiction as a Systematic Experiment

I’ve been thinking about the role of fiction, and unlocking the idea of what fiction is capable of doing, and the process of visiting and revisiting the fiction that is ‘God’s Country’, and this revisiting has helped develop my thinking – in fact revisiting The Fiction (note the capital letters) has taken me into critical areas I wouldn’t have entered. I don’t think of this writing here, that I’m doing now and you’re reading now as ‘reflection’ or a ‘commentary’, which implies an ‘after the event’ post-mortem of the creative piece. I prefer to think of it as speculating, not so much an ‘afterword’ because I’m not in the ‘after’ of this writing, in fact, to coin a psychogeographical idea, I’m still journeying through the process. This is, after all, a project based on creative practice and the resulting creative product. Lyle-Skains has much to say about this idea of creative practice as research, and practitioner research: ‘In some fields, particularly music, practice-as-research is also common, wherein the research consists entirely of the creative practice, with no explicit critical exegesis deemed necessary. The creative artefact is considered the embodiment of the new knowledge; emphasis is placed on creative exploration and innovation in the given artistic practice.’ (Lyle-Skains 2018, p. 85) He refers to ‘post-textual examination’ of critical artefacts (p. 96) being inherently unreliable but instead, his mention of auto-ethnomethodology (the cognitive engagement of the practitioner at work) calls for ‘the employment of a self-directed form of ethnomethodology during the composition of the texts, in the form of a research log (which can later be analysed as in situ utterances. Together, these methods of documentation constitute a “creative analytical processes (CAP) ethnography” in which the creative process and products, and the analytical process and products are deeply intertwined, offering opportunity for insight and nuance into the creative practice through a necessarily subjective record.’ (p. 87). So, I am still ‘in the process’, and the process of revisiting ‘God’s Country’ has led me to develop my thinking about the philosophical role of fiction (or Fiction) and the way in which psychogeography and psychogeographical flow is bound up with it.

There is some relevant work already about the role of The Novel. In Philosophy of the Novel, Margaret Doody (2009, p. 153) https://www.cairn.info/revue-internationale-de-philosophie-2009-2-page-153.htm?contenu=article says ‘everyone knows philosophy is “high” and the Novel, “low”.’ (Here, I could say that this contradiction aligns itself with the culture, geography and linguistics of the Black Country. This mix of ‘high’ and ‘low’ is something Matthew Stallard has been researching, more of which later.) She goes on to say, ‘Yet there is truth in what Nietzsche says, in that both philosophy and the novel in their different ways think that words and thinking will get us somewhere.’ (p. 154). In this way, Doody quotes Frances Burney’s idea that The Novel is a form of ‘intellectual survey’ and that whilst ‘philosophy lives, wherever it does live, in the pleasant walks of aristocratic men of leisure, or the classroom equivalent…The Novel, however, lives in the kitchen, the bedroom, the street and the marketplace…its strength is in what it is accused of – that it is a bundle of lies.’ (p. 154-5). Consequently, according to Doody, because of The Novel’s position as something that is morally transgressive, it cannot give firm answers, instead, she suggests that its relationship with philosophy is that of a ‘distressed lover’ (p. 155) and her argument is that The Novel wants to offer more than philosophy can by itself, and that what it offers by way of length and characterisation is an ‘irritating aberration for the philosopher’ but ‘the breath of life’ for the Novelist. (p. 155.)

What Doody is saying is that The Novel is a philosophical form, and one that teaches us about human behaviour, and the way in which aspects she refers to as ‘socio-political mechanisms’ are likely to ‘warp’ the ‘individual personality’. (p. 158.) I am, of course, writing and thinking about writing a novel which is ‘Black Country Fiction’ and some time ago, I wrote a post called ‘Psychogeography and Black Country Writing. An Ongoing Reflection of the Writing Process’ in which I referred to Matthew Stallard’s assertion that literature was at least partly responsible for the invention of the Black Country, and that the origin of the name 'the Black Country' was achieved and 'implanted into the popular consciousness' by the 1850s, and with its growing popularity, 'its status as a "shock region" [was something] that literate people were expected to know about, have an opinion upon, and to have witnessed themselves.' In a more recent email communication with Stallard, the idea of ‘Black Countries’ was discussed: ‘…particularly fascinatingly, by the late nineteenth century the phrase “pays noir” and associated connotations had migrated into the French language, offering us a chance to further re-evaluate the invention of the “original” Black Country through the reflections from this dark mirror.’ (Stallard, by email, 20th September, 2021). It is Stallard’s contention that references to the Black Country (or Black Countries) of other countries can be found as far back as the early 1800s in places such as France and Belgium. Of Pennsylvania, USA, he says, ‘While the Times writers pick up on this American usage, it is notable that they additionally chose to also project the idea of the Black Country onto the region to convey a sense of its landscape, society, and industrial activities to a British audience.’ (Stallard, by email 20th September 2021). In this way, ‘the invention of the idea of the Black Country in Victorian literate public discourse was a product of the deep preoccupations of bourgeois society with the negative impacts of industrialisation, how the region and its “shock landscape” became a go-to shorthand at the fingertips of commentators, its reputation tightly bound with the connotations imposed onto it from the outside.’ (Stallard, by email, 20th September, 2021). Of course, I mention this to fend off attacks (or questions) about ‘what’ the Black Country is or where it is, or why it might merit any consideration creatively or otherwise, and why there might be (a) such a place, and (b) such ‘fiction’. Perhaps, as Stallard says, referring to the industrialisation of the region in the 1800s, ‘As people sought to construct a psychological framework in which to understand these transformations…In literate and popular imagination of nineteenth century Britain, the Black Country was the archetype, the original, the standard that other extractive and metalworking regions across the UK and the world were compared to.’ (Stallard, The Blackcountryman, Vol. 54, No. 4, 2021, p. 18). Which brings me back to Doody, who points out that the form of The Novel, from a philosophical point of view, offers limited room for free thought because elements she calls a ‘thousand little Lilliputian ligatures of time, place, birth and expectations’ (p. 159) act as constraints. To link this to my creative piece, in ‘God’s Country’, the narrative style – something which I am more and more convinced is what I am calling psychogeographic flow (‘Alison will say/Alison will tell/She might say) implies an unnamed omniscient narrator, judging, providing a further narrative layer with perhaps an uncanny effect of questioning, and making the reader question the omniscience itself. The farm in which the family live contains the ritual of preparation for the character, Ivan’s, funeral and there is a significance to the farm, being a symbol of the post-pastoral existing in the post-industrial Black Country. That it is run-down, under threat of being demolished to make way for an arterial road emphasises its role as a relic of the past in existence (just) in the present. When Guy challenges his father about the upkeep of the farm, Flood retaliates and the conversation plays out:

‘ “… have you forgot what it’s like, tending sheep?”

“I haven’t forgotten.” Guy was talking over him, Alison will say. He was leaning over the table. “I’ll never forget. How could I?”’

The implication is of stasis, and later, Flood says:

‘ “See out here. See. There’s everything, chap.” His mouth was wet, his lips were. “Spiders, beetles, caterpillars, voles, mice. Snakes an’ all.”

Alison will say it might have been the light, but she was sure there were beads of sweat on Flood’s forehead. He didn’t stop looking out of the window. He said, “This place ‘ere, though, now, it’s getting’ torn apart. Houses, bypasses, ring roads, stuff bein’ built over.” His cigarette was unlit between his fingers. “I used to stand ‘ere – and my Dad did, and his’n – and we’d think nothin’d ever change. Nothin’.”’ (my page 54.)

Paul McDonald (2020, p. 32), speaking about Joel Lane’s writing in Smell, Memory, and Literature in the Black Country says there is a sense that ‘while the landscape may alter superficially, the dark heart of the region, with its violence and bigotry, beats on.’ And I think that when I revisit those sections in God’s Country, that sensation of superficial change, of a palimpsestic cover-up, overlaid with a sense of topoaesthesis was what I am trying to convey. Doody’s point that ‘Nobody is free’ in The Novel (p. 159) as a philosophical standpoint is also exemplified in my extracts above, where Flood’s view of the changing Black Country landscape reveals his own inflexible, fixed mindset. The landscape – a symbol of its own perceived decline – is reflected in him and the narrative characterisation of him, but this contradiction of fixed thinking set against inescapable change is happening simultaneously as if one depends on the other, or is propelled by the other. McDonald (p. 34) regards the idea of the Black Country in noir fiction as ‘an inexplicably malign environment’ and that there is a ‘binary opposition of the urban and the rural.’ For him, ‘The spirit of the Black Country is both violent and perverse.’ Speaking about my own narrative style, McDonald suggests that the sense of the story being told by an absent character-narrator ‘has the effect of distancing us from the action, but also creating the impression of an unstable, unknowable world.’ (2020, p. 35). This distance, created by the use of qualifiers ‘will say/will tell/might say’ that underscores a sense of subjectivity is, I think, of philosophical importance to this novel – and specifically the importance of this novel as ‘Black Country fiction’ – because (McDonald again) the darkness of the Black Country ‘cannot easily be rationalised – it is a dehumanising Black Country that lacks a moral centre.’ (p. 35.) What I think McDonald is talking about here is a Black Country asymmetricality that is part of its own psychogeographic identity which is necessarily hard to pigeon-hole, perhaps because it refuses to stay still or conform. Phil Smith, in his talk at the Fourth World Congress of Psychogeography in 2017, spoke of ‘The Spectacle’ being something that ‘seeks to make everyone victims of “imposter syndrome”, to drive everyone back upon a fundamental identity, by which we all can be commonly differentiated, competing with each other over the same narrow version of selfhood.’ Perhaps ‘Black Country fiction’ experiments with, or, no, exposes this idea. More particularly, perhaps God’s Country does, in which the symmetry of Guy and Ivan being identical twins is set against the asymmetry of their lives, and of the Black Country itself. The idea of Guy having left, or having tried to leave, the Black Country, working in the media, and writing a novel can be related to Phil Smith’s ideas about the Spectacle which he says is ‘an old machine…but it’s working in a new way now…The term itself is misleading – “Spectacle” implies a theatrical production of illusions that distracts us from ‘what is really going on’ when what is really going on…is the “Spectacle”.’ Smith refers to ‘flows of images and information’. The psychogeography of both the character and the place are ripe here, with the Spectacle of the character, Guy, appearing or returning back into the Black Country as ‘reality’ and the fiction itself being in session with the resulting morality and philosophy. Being back in his home town, Guy experiences, through walking familiar paths a kind of oneironautics which perhaps the novel requires of the writer (and the reader) conducive to psychogeographic ‘alert reverie’ (Sinclair 2003 [1997], p. 4 in Loffler, 2017 p. 38).

It seems apt to conclude this short ‘speculation’ with quotes from Michel Butor in The Novel as Research (1970 in The Novel Today, 1977, p. 49) who says the novel ‘…is the phenomenological realm par excellence, the best possible place to study how reality appears to us, or might appear, that is why the novel is the laboratory of narrative.’ Alluding to psychogeography and the triple O theory, he says, ‘Not only the creation but also the reading of a novel is a kind of waking dream…The novel tends naturally towards its own elucidation, and so it should [consequently] any fruitful research in this realm can be situated only within a transformation of the concept of the novel itself…within a transformation of the very notion of literature, which begins to appear no longer as a simple pastime or luxury, but in its essential role within the workings of society, and as a systematic experiment.’ (p. 51-53)