On the Potential for ‘Research-Based’ Creative Writing in the Humanities
J.T. Welsch – Centre for New Writing, University of Manchester
Ideally, I would begin from the premise that there is no difference between creative and critical writing. On the day-to-day level, the only distinction I’m aware of is mostly a matter of form; and even that can often feel less substantial than the difference between two poems’ forms. I wouldn’t assume such blurring is an aim or experience common to all writers working within academic frameworks, but I also wouldn’t assume my experience or ambitions are unique. Nor would I claim to have experienced a unique frustration when circumstances have had me negotiate a divide maintained by others, whichever side of it they fancy themselves lying on.
Whether or not creative writing programmes are, in general, more or less guilty of exceptionalism than their umbrella faculties are guilty of structural bias against practice-based learning is not really my concern. It might help to re-think the assumed conclusiveness of critical work as merely another mode of open-ended practice, and I do believe this is an important first step. However, as some of you may have found, evangelizing how much ‘they’ – the ‘academics’ – are deep down really just like ‘us’ – the so-called practitioner’s – is actually quite hard to do without reinscribing that division and hierarchy. To avoid this, we need to simultaneously pose the reverse question: To what extent might we re-think so-called creative practice as a mode of critical thought?
Of course, treating creative writing as a mode of criticism is hardly a novel idea in the grand history of literature, and my instinctive response is that there really isn’t anything that can be proposed and assessed by a piece of criticism which can’t also be proposed and assessed by a piece of creative writing which makes that its ambition. The inclusion of a practitioner on an academic conference programme needn’t be a token gesture. And on the part of creative writing, I don’t think there’s anything token about a critical ambition. Why house creative writing within an academic structure, if not to engage with and be recognized as an essential part of that structure?
The place for creative writing staff within that structure may be quite variously defined, so, to be a little more pragmatic about this, we might consider the relatively well-circumscribed structure of postgraduate creative study. Without resorting to it as a final authority, I find that the Arts and Humanities Research Council funding guidelines address these questions of integration and legitimacy quite pointedly. According to current guidelines, ‘Creative output can be produced, or practice undertaken, as an integral part of a research process.’ To me, this definition has what seem like productive resonances with the more general notion of ‘practice-based research’ beyond creative writing programmes. The roots of that model in the UK stretch back to the Council for National Academic Awards’ changes to research guidelines in the polytechnics prior to their amalgamation into the university system. As such, the idea of ‘practice-based research’ still seems to be more frequently applied to programmes which wouldn’t normally include creative work – various technical or scientific degrees, for instance – as a way to open up the possibilities for incorporating creative output into the research process. However, I don’t see any reason why that logic can’t be inverted and applied to a programme in which the focus is already on the creative practice, as a way to open up the possibility of that practice performing some more critical role.
To test this model of ‘research-based practice’ in as concrete a way as possible I’ve brought along a short poem from my own thesis. Of course, I’m obliged to make the disclaimer that I certainly haven’t chosen this poem because it’s the best or most finished in my thesis portfolio. Its advantages are primarily to do with its limited field of reference, which will hopefully provide the most clean-cut evidence possible of legitimate critical thinking by way of creative practice, if such a thing exists. I’ve also chosen it because it was researched and written within the specific context of a critical theory reading group at my university in order to be presented subsequently beside other postgraduate research in literary studies and visual cultures.
Lastly, I’m obviously not suggesting that verse is a better medium for critical discourse. At the same time, however, I hope it becomes clear that the critical prose of this commentary doesn’t quite supersede the work done within the creative piece, and in this case can never be more than a reading of a reading.
O, green wife,
diffused, meter
by medium—
you-of-myself,
relic of a will’s
last drop mis-
spoken by this
depthless air
into the latest
synthetic oils,
an orifice of it
traced in these
unsound terms
of landscape—
The title of the poem is that of Claude Monet’s painting, ‘Camille sur son lit de mort’, or ‘Camille on her death-bed’. It was painted in 1879 as his 32-year-old wife lay dying of tuberculosis, and, as you can see, hangs in the Musee d’Orsay, where I first saw it thirteen years ago. My renewed interest was stirred by the publication this past year of Ruth Butler’s Hidden by the Shadow of the Master, in which Professor Butler attempts to piece together the missing biographies of the wives/models of Cezanne, Rodin, and Monet. However, this short, straightforwardly ekphrasitc poem draws on a selection of critical theory for a close reading of the single painting.
As its first and last lines suggest, the poem’s reading of the painting focuses on the way the death of the subject corresponds to the move away from figuration towards landscape within the broader scope of Monet’s work. Various scholars have put forward various paintings within Monet’s catalogue as emblematic of this shift away from figure painting, but the poem puts forward this particular painting also for its unique resonances with a psychoanalytic and poststructuralist understanding of that shift, as we shall see.
The opening line of the poem references Monet’s earlier portrait, ‘La femme en robe verte’ or ‘Woman in the Green Dress’. This painting, from thirteen years earlier, was the first and only painting of Monet’s to be accepted for exhibition by the influential Salon de Paris. When that portrait was accepted in 1866, however, after he spent only four days painting it, the recognition gave him his first foothold into the Paris art-world of that time. Beyond that, the ‘Woman in Green’ portrait also served as the artist’s introduction to Camille Doncieux, whom he would marry four years later, and who continued to model for him until her death.
In order to lay the groundwork for its argument, the poem brings this bit of contextual material into play. By compiling it into the terse ‘green wife’, however, it also immediately adds its critical comment while acknowledging the intertextual strain across Camille’s first and last sittings for Monet. The conflation in the phrase ‘green wife’ of the body and identity of Camille with her clothing and the title of the earlier portrait, should also appear more poignant in a moment.
Now, reading further down the poem, you can see that ‘green wife’ constitutes the first of at least three labels applied to Camille throughout the poem, including the ‘you-of-myself’ rhymed with it in the last line of the first quatrain, followed by the compound label which comprises the following six lines, beginning with the word ‘relic’.
This brings up an important general point about research-based practice, which is that for it to be worth the trouble, the creative work must employ its constitutive values to the purposes of the broader argument. In the case of lyric poetry, this means that the work’s form, as well as mimetic and dramatic structures, must act as interpretatively as its ‘content’.
Therefore, the dramatic structure of those three invocations must relate to the overall argument about the disappearance of the figure from Monet’s painting. I would argue that it does. The entire poem’s status as an invocation is flagged up by the preliminary ‘O’, and from there, we can see that there is no part of the poem which doesn’t participate in the attempted interpellation of the addressed subject. With the initial signifier ‘wife’, the poem also establishes its own voice as that of the husband-artist. Therefore, in terms of mimesis, we can expect this poem to re-enact, as it were, the defeat of figuration from the artist/author’s point of view, in order to make some critical assertions about the mechanics of this defeat.
And, with regards to form, the poem, as you may have noticed, is in the vague shape of an Italian sonnet. Even without strict use of that form’s rhyme and meter, its connotations help to structure the poem’s assertion about the interpellation performed by the painting, and the relationship this naming gesture might have to the death of the subject therein. Before getting to the further details of the speaker’s invocation, we also might consider how its isolated, incomplete, and ultimately failed syntactic structure also serves as comment along those lines. The voicing and address of this poem have everything to do with its attention to the death of the figure in Monet’s work. By paraphrasing the painting in this way, the poem is able to map its hypothesis about the death of the figure onto the image itself, establishing a space in which to consider the details of that process of de-figuring.
If that serves to structure the poem’s argument, we can turn now to its specific content. The main road we can gather about the poem’s reading of the de-figuring process is that the once-coherent or once cleanly-drawn subject of the ‘green wife’ is now being ‘diffused’ into the material of her representation – ‘into the latest synthetic oils’, as the poem has it. To develop this idea of the subject’s diffusion into the medium, the poem draws on two other pieces of contextual evidence, which are, broadly speaking, principles of the Impressionist movement and the cause of Camille Monet’s literal death.
The facet of Monet’s Impressionism in which the poem appears most interested might be summed up as the aesthetic primacy of the medium. Though perhaps not to the extent of later formalistic work and Cubism, Impressionism was a movement deeply invested in the immediacy of color, rhythm, and shape itself, as opposed to outlined figuration and representational narrative. Again though, in its inclusion of this bit of context, the poem must go one step further. At several points, the primacy of the medium over represented figures is not only referenced, but related to the tension between the distinct signifiers referred to before and the more basic materiality of language. In addition to later puns on ‘unsound’ and ‘terms’, the phrase ‘meter / by medium—’ argues for this parallel movement from signifier to language medium with its own foregrounding of materiality in the soft echo between the homophonic roots of ‘meter’ and ‘medium’ as well as their alliterative projection through the ‘myself’ of the following line. The half-rhyme mentioned before between ‘wife’ and ‘self’ also serves this critical purpose.
Along with the privileging of medium over figure, the poem suggests another parallel between the abstract process of the green wife’s ‘diffusion’ and Camille Monet’s tuberculosis, with the choice of the participle ‘diffused’ and reference to the ‘last drop’ of the literally and symbolically liquefied subject. Furthermore, we see the metamorphosis from wife to paint achieved just at the sonnet’s turn. Again though, we can see the poem relating this metaphorical and biological consumption back to the diffusion of signifiers into the material of speech by describing that last drop as ‘mis- / spoken’ into the paint itself.
The triangulation between the liquefaction of the wife’s body and the diffusion of the subject into the medium of paint and both movements’ relationship to the tension between distinct signifiers and the language medium is shamelessly Lacanian, I confess. And within that theoretical framework, the poem, through a combination of mimetic and formal remarks, asks us to re-read the failed invocation of the wife as the failure of artist to incorporate that figure into the symbolic order of the painting.
According to the poem, this failure occurs in three clear syntactical stages, which correspond to those three attempted invocations noted before. First the artist’s image of the desired other – the ‘green wife’ – misses its mark. Following that, in the form ‘you-of-myself’, we see the speaker fail to apprehend the abstract ‘otherness of the other’. And finally, we see the elusive kernel, the objectivity of the other’s subject, described as the ‘relic of a will’s / last drop’, unavoidably misspoken by this chain of signifiers. It is on this level that the symbolic medium fails to incorporate the Other. And yet, on another level, the poem engages with the paradoxical difficulties of this post-structural reading, alluding to the ‘unsound’ or unstable ‘terms / of landscape’, in which the mark of the ‘orifice’ lingers as a Derridean ‘trace’ of that lack, i.e. the evidence of that gap which the language of the painting cannot close.
The significance of this orifice sends us back to what we can read now as the pun of that opening ‘O’. Where before, it served to hollowly invoke the act of invocation, this ‘O’ now reveals itself as the primary interpellative label for the ‘green wife’. And to some extent, we see that, as a trace matching the outline of the disembodied face and mouth in the painting, its contained emptiness is more successful than any of the more descriptive labels which follow it.