holiday work: on writing for children and for the academy

Holiday Work: On Writing for Childrenand for the Academy

Charles Butler

Published online: 5 April 2007� Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007

Abstract There are numerous academics who have also been novelists, includingseveral prominent writers of children’s literature. Yet the relationship betweenacademic writing and the writing of fiction has not been systematically explored, norhave the kinds of knowledge gained from the experience of writing fiction always beeneasy to incorporate into the scholarly and institutional contexts of academic criticism.The author discusses some of the ways in which academic and fiction writing cancomplement and inform each other, drawing on his own experience in both fields. Healso argues that ‘the act of writing’ needs to be far more thoroughly integrated intoEnglish studies at both a practical and a theoretical level.

Keywords Academic criticism � Children’s fiction � Research-as-practice �Experiential knowledge � Fantasy

Charles Butler was a fiction writer before he was an academic, writing his first novel before he went toLondon University to study English Literature. He readily admits that his first and second novels remaindeservedly unpublished, the influence of other authors hanging too heavily over them. The Darkling(1997) was the first of his six fantasy novels published to date and, as he relates in this article, he has alsowritten a number of critical works. As Charles is one of that rare breed of writers who have managed tocombine these two careers (though he has some illustrious precursors, in Tolkien, of course, C.S. Lewisand Ursula Le Guin), we invited him to share his views on both the rewards and possible pitfalls of tryingto keep both activities buoyant.Charles Butler is a Senior Lecturer at the University of the West of England, Bristol, where hespecializes in children’s literature. He is author of Four British Fantasists: Place and Culture in theChildren’s Fantasies of Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper(Scarecrow/ChLA, 2006), and editor of Teaching Children’s Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). He isalso the author of six children’s fantasy novels, of which the most recent are Death of a Ghost(HarperCollins, 2006) and The Lurkers (Usborne, 2006). His web site is http://www.charlesbutler.co.uk

C. Butler (&)School of English, University of the West of England,St Matthias Campus, Oldbury Court Rd, Fishponds,Bristol BS16 2JP, UKe-mail: [email protected]

Children’s Literature in Education (2007) 38:163–172DOI 10.1007/s10583-007-9042-8

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Introduction

Longville: Have you ever tried in the water, sir?Sir Nicholas: No, sir; but I swim most exquisitely on land.

The Virtuoso (Shadwell 1966, II.ii.78–79)

One of the iconic moments of 20th-century children’s literature was that when J. R.R. Tolkien wrote the first line of The Hobbit. The circumstances have been muchquoted:

It was on a summer’s day, and he was sitting by the window in the study inNorthmoor Road, laboriously marking School Certificate exam papers. Years laterhe recalled: ‘One of the candidates had mercifully left one of the pages with nowriting on it (which is the best thing that can possibly happen to an examiner) andI wrote on it: ‘‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’’.’ (Carpenter 1977,p. 172)

My immediate interest in this account lies in its picture of Tolkien’s fiction writing asfundamentally distinct from, and in fact almost literally the obverse of, his academicduties. The two activities occur in close proximity, but there is no suggestion thatmarking exam papers inspired Tolkien to write The Hobbit, except in the negative senseof bringing about a state of thought-deadened boredom from which he soughtimaginative escape. The Hobbit sneaks into being through the interstices of academiclife, in a way that is moreover slightly surreptitious. Shouldn’t Tolkien have been gettingon with the work he was paid to do? Hadn’t even the paper on which he wrote beenprovided for official purposes, not for his private doodling? Of course, it has alwaysbeen recognized that The Hobbit’s dwarves, dragon and quest structure derive in partfrom the material Tolkien studied as part of his day job. But even if we see The Hobbitand the other writings set in Middle-earth as a natural outgrowth from Tolkien’s work inGermanic literature and language we may still be inclined to think of them, at least fromthe academic point of view, as a kind of superfluity—or, to borrow C. S. Lewis’sdescription of More’s Utopia, ‘a holiday work, a spontaneous overflow of intellectualhigh spirits’ (Lewis 1954, p. 169).

That description repays some scrutiny in the case of both texts. At its most literal,‘holiday work’ suggests work done during the holidays, in breaks from one’s mainemployment. Inevitably it also suggests a jeu d’esprit: More may have used the sameintellectual faculties in the creation of Utopia as in his work as a lawyer, politician, andtheologian, but he channeled them in a different direction, to produce a teasing andplayful text. Utopia is not the less significant for being a holiday work, however. In theevent, it has proved far more enduring and influential than the rest of More’s bookscombined, and is the only one now read by anybody other than specialists. A textwritten outside the formal bounds of More’s vocation, and in that sense only doubtfullycanonical, Utopia has become the ‘essential’ text in which his political ideas, rhetoricalskills, humour, and love of paradox and argument are all displayed to dazzling effect.And it has become so in part because the festive context created by its status as a holidaywork allowed More to range with a licence he could not otherwise have exercised. Theresult is a book that is not only still read for itself but has proved to be the foundation ofan entire genre.

The parallels with Tolkien scarcely need elaboration. Tolkien’s scholarly andeditorial works remain of interest, but for every reader who consults his comments on

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Beowulf or Gawain and the Green Knight, thousands more flock to his genre-foundingbooks, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings; and more than a few of these have in turnbeen led to an interest in saga literature and philology. As Tom Shippey and otherTolkien scholars have demonstrated, the expertise and interests Tolkien brought to hisacademic writing were always active in his fiction too: indeed, there is a constantinterplay between them (Shippey 2003; Gilliver et al. 2006). In attempting tocharacterise Utopia and the Middle-earth fictions’ relationship to their authors’ otherwritings, it may be less accurate to talk in terms of superfluities than to consider them asthought experiments. Each is a way of working through and developing ideas (politicaland social organization for More, the interaction of language and culture for Tolkien) ina more controlled environment than that afforded by the world at large. We might eventhink of Middle-earth as the philological equivalent of CERN—as an astonishinglyambitious apparatus for colliding linguistic particles. There can be little doubt that itsconstruction and the concomitant work Tolkien did in such subjects as elvish philologyboth involved and enhanced the skills he used in his academic studies.

In Tolkien’s case the connection between the two sides of his writing life is relativelyeasy to establish. But is Tolkien unusual? Other writers of fiction, and particularly offiction for children, may present a more difficult proposition. C. S. Lewis’s ownchildren’s books, for example (which did less than nothing for his academic reputationamongst his colleagues) do not so obviously offer a mutually-informing relationship withhis academic studies in mediaeval and Renaissance literature. It would be idle tosuppose that there was some kind of imaginative cordon sanitaire between the twoactivities; but to retrieve the manifold connections between them, many doubtless semi-conscious or entirely private in their operation, is no simple task.

It is scarcely easier to analyse my own practice as a fiction-writing academic, but hereat least I have access to privileged information, which may give my subjectiveexperience some interest as evidence. I began writing fiction seriously—by which I meanthat I produced my first, full-length, albeit never-to-be-published manuscript—in 1981,in the summer before I went to university to study English Literature. In that sense myacademic and novel-writing careers are coaeval; and the two activities have run intandem ever since. To anyone but myself they probably seemed for a long time to run inparallel too, for there is little overt connection between my study of Renaissanceliterature or my doctoral thesis on Spenserian allegory and the children’s fantasy novelsI was producing, except in the sense that both involved a close engagement withlanguage. Even after my academic focus shifted from the Renaissance to children’sliterature itself there was no indication that my career as a children’s novelist was seen,at least within the university system, as having direct relevance to my work as anacademic writer on children’s novels—a situation that has come to seem perverse.

Recently there have been signs that this institutional context may be changing. Thepanel for the English Unit of Assessment in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise(used by the United Kingdom Government and the Education Funding Councils toallocate funds for university research) has acknowledged that creative writing may beconsidered a form of research, where it leads to ‘new or substantially improved insights’(RAE2008 2006). Meanwhile, the latest revision of the English BenchmarkingStatement, which was published by the Quality Assurance Agency for consultation inAugust 2006 and attempts to define the nature and scope of the subject as taught inBritish higher education, highlights ‘the fertility of creative writing and its close andproductive affinity with English literature and language’ (QAA 2006). Even so, the casefor relevance still needs to be vigorously and repeatedly made. That it should be felt

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necessary to assert the existence of a connection between creative writing and Englishliterature is in itself rather telling, and it remains likely that producing this briefacademic article about my experience as a novelist will carry greater weight, in terms ofmy research profile, than writing the novels themselves. This is not the case in alldisciplines. It is quite possible for a composer to have a successful academic career in auniversity department of music without ever publishing a word in the field ofmusicological analysis. The intimate connection between composition and a criticalunderstanding of music is—rightly—assumed. In English studies, although it is acommonplace that every work of fiction involves a critique of and response to itspredecessors, the implications of this for the definition of ‘research as practice’ have notbeen seriously addressed.

From my own perspective, the distinction between academic literature and fiction,though real, appears relatively superficial. It is largely a matter of linguistic register, ofgeneric convention, and of rhetorical explicitness. The role of evidence also differs, asdo—usually—the context of the work’s appearance and the occasion of its writing. But weshould not let these considerations obscure the extent to which academic and fictionwriting are the same kind of activity. (I deliberately use the terms ‘academic’ rather than‘critical’ and ‘fiction writing’ rather than ‘creative writing’, since good academic writing ishighly creative, and writers of fiction are their own first critics.) Having written extensivelyin both modes, I would say that the differences between them are barely more significantthan many other genre distinctions. While no writer is able to work equally happily in everygenre, there is a large overlap in the skills required. Neither kind of writer will succeedwithout a degree of dogged curiosity, a willingness to speculate and to think laterally, andan interest in the precise use of language and its effective presentation.

Research is another common factor. In fact, I have repeatedly found that the samebody of research may feed both types of writing. My study of the folklore behind fetches,stocks and Doppelganger informed both my novel The Fetch of Mardy Watt, and myacademic discussion of Catherine Storr’s ‘‘Tam Lin’’ novel Thursday (Butler 2001, 2004;Storr, 1971). Similarly, when I wrote Death of a Ghost I needed to investigate the knottyinterrelations between various fertility myths, Wicca, and the Celtic deity Cernun-nos—research that also found academic expression in Four British Fantasists (Butler2006a, b, pp. 184–194).

I would go further, however. It is not simply that the processes of academic researchand fiction writing use a common set of skills, and may happen fortuitously to springfrom common preoccupations. They also support and inform one another, actively andcontinually. If I have anything valuable to say about fantasy literature in my academicwriting it is in part as a result of my own experience as a practitioner within the genre. Idon’t think this should be a surprising claim. It ought not to be controversial to suggestthat writers of fiction know things about fiction writing that others do not—or that an artcritic who is also a painter will, other things being equal, speak with greater authorityabout Van Gogh’s brushwork than one who has never held a brush. I am emphaticallynot saying that knowledge gained through practice should enjoy primacy over othervarieties, but I believe that learning-by-doing is an important route to understanding,and one that has been too long neglected within the academy.

This leads naturally to the question, why has it been neglected? The intellectual’slingering disdain for the artizan may be one factor. The voice of Shadwell’s Virtuoso isstill sometimes to be heard in universities [‘I never come upon the water, sir... I contentmyself with the speculative part of swimming; I care not for the practick [sic]’ (Shadwell1966, II.ii.81–85)]. But it is also true that the very context-specific insights generated by

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the practice of writing can be difficult to translate into the more generalized intellectualcurrency in which the business of academia is carried on. As Plato’s Socrates pointedout long ago, poets can be poor explicators of their own work—a stick with whichwriters have been regularly beaten ever since (Plato, Apology 22b). This does not,however, mean that poets know little about poetry, or even that they lack awareness oftheir own working processes. If academics find little of value in what poets have to say, itmay be that they are asking the wrong questions—or the right questions in the wrongwords. And we know, as perhaps Plato did not, how much more there is to literary studythan the explication of textual meaning.

In writing this article I too have found that something is lost in the translation frompractice to theory. A certain defensiveness has corralled me into too functionalist anaccount of the relationship between fiction and academic writing, as if my purpose wereto justify the existence of the former by proving how effectively it could facilitate thelatter. This may be the agenda implicit in the RAE’s criteria, but it is not mine. Despitemy earlier comments about thought-experiments and physics laboratories, I do not wishto imply that I or others use fiction in a cold-bloodedly ancillary way, in order to ‘workout’ academic problems. Neither, on the other hand, do I see the working out ofacademic problems as a side-effect of writing fiction—as another kind of superfluity.Rather, when a subject interests me I try to approach it from every direction of whichI’m capable—if possible, from the inside as well as the outside. Fiction and academicwriting provide two possible angles of attack. In the remainder of this article, I willattempt to convey some aspects of this process, by mapping a few of the areas wherethese two kinds of writing have cross-fertilized in my own work.

Questions of Interpretation

We can begin by way of my latest book, The Lurkers (2006), in which a 10-year-old boy,John Forster, meets a spirit-creature whom he calls Galder, who appears to be able tomake his desires become reality. At first, John has a lot of fun as a result; but there is acost. John must let Galder into his mind to see what desires lie hidden there, and slowlyGalder begins to take over. The story is told from the point of view of John’s elder sister,Verity, who has to fight to save John’s life and being.

What are the connections between this book and my work as an academic? The mostobvious is that I have for many years taught Marlowe’s Dr Faustus to undergraduates,and (like Marlowe before me) shamelessly plundered the Faust legend for my ownpurposes in constructing my plot—with Verity playing the part of John’s good angel.That makes it sound as if the direction of travel was all one way; but writing The Lurkersalso forced me to reconsider explicitly many things about Dr Faustus. One is the natureof desire, and how (as Faustus too finds) it is often inchoate and incoherent. Are themiddle acts of Dr Faustus, in which Faustus is seemingly at the height of his power butuses it for nothing but slapstick japes, an artistic blemish or a masterstroke ofpsychological insight on Marlowe’s part? This is a perennial question amongstMarlovians, and has been answered in many ways; but the bottom-up approach offeredby writing my own Faustian story gave me a vivid sense of the forces within thenarrative that make such a trajectory almost inevitable.

The Lurkers also made me focus on the theological-cum-dramatic slipperinesswhereby Marlowe makes hell both a physical location, to which Faustus can be dragged

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at the end of the play, and a spiritual state, defined in terms of separation from God. Ifone is writing a story such as The Lurkers, in which minds and perceptions aremanipulated, analogous ambiguities are necessarily raised. What is the relationshipbetween subjective experience and objective reality? At one point, John Forster isvisited by admiring simulacra of his friends—including an imaginary friend he inventedin early childhood. Are these friends real, or concoctions of Galder’s, just as Marlowe’sHelen of Troy was actually a disguised devil? Is it even meaningful to ask whethersomeone can be a real imaginary friend? These are questions Verity has to ponder, andwhile Galder himself dismisses the ontological debate as irrelevant [‘The physical, themental, what’s the difference? What matters is who’s running the show’ (Butler 2006c,p. 131)] his cannot be the last words on the issue.

My conscious use of the Faust plot in The Lurkers makes the connections betweenthese texts easy to point out, if at the price of appearing somewhat reductive. Lessobvious is the fact that variants on the same underlying problem—that of finding ways tointerpret experience—have run throughout my intellectual life as a novelist, as anacademic, and indeed as a human being. Twenty years ago my doctoral thesis consideredthe relationship between two methods for interpreting meaning in Spenser’s The FaerieQueene (Butler 1989). One was his use of exemplary storytelling (as in the parable of theGood Samaritan, where the actions of the Samaritan demonstrate by example what itmeans to be a good neighbour); the other was his use of isomorphic allegory (as in theparable of the Sower, where the various correspondences between the sower and God,the seed and the gospel, and so on, must be decoded). In The Faerie Queene, I argued,both methods are always potentially available to readers, and the process of reading thepoem is often one of negotiating between them. I noted the techniques Spenser used toencourage or discourage different types of reading, or to hold both in suspension, or tosmooth over the differences between them, or induce readerly discomfort by highlightingtheir contradictions. The same preoccupation resurfaced when I began to write aboutchildren’s fantasy literature, and particularly the roles played in it by myth and magic.How far was the fantastic to be taken on its own terms, as a manifestation of the wonderpresent in life generally; and how far was it a metaphor for something else—such ashuman potential or self-expression? Was magic ‘the star of the show or just a kind ofstunt double for the everyday?’ (Butler 2002b, p. 6; see also Butler 2006b, pp. 183–256).

I write about this in academic texts such as Four British Fantasists; but I write through itin fiction. My second novel, Timon’s Tide (1998), is a ghost story in which the protagonist,16-year-old Daniel, is haunted by his elder brother, Timon, whom he believes to havebeen murdered several years previously. For much of the story I wished to keep thereader, and Daniel, uncertain as to whether Timon is a ghost, an imposter, a hallucination,or the real Timon (who may not have been killed after all). In Timon’s Tide I wasparticularly concerned to find what kind of evidence would constitute an effective ‘tippingpoint’ to push interpretation in one direction or another. Only by having some idea of thiscould I avoid being either too explicit or too obscure—both courses that would havedefeated my purpose. What leads the reader to choose a particular interpretative path?What are the implications of that (not entirely conscious) choice? Why shouldinterpretative doubt be an attractive feature of a text at all? Whether I am writing myown fiction or reading other ambiguous texts, from The Turn of the Screw to Diana WynneJones’s Fire and Hemlock, these are rich and challenging questions.

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Representing the Past Through Language

I have long been intrigued by the different methods exploited by writers of historicalfiction for representing the speech of the past, whether it be the stylized gadzookery ofHarrison Ainsworth, the more flexible (but never entirely relaxed) manner of RosemarySutcliff (see Stephens 1992, pp. 218–227; Phelan 2006, pp. 120–122) or the estranginganachronism of Alan Garner, who in Red Shift (1973) had his 2nd-century Romanlegionaries speak a variant of Vietnam-era GI slang. This remained an academicquestion in every sense until I needed to write scenes set in the 15th century and theIron Age for my young adult novel, Death of a Ghost (Butler 2006a). Again I found that,instead of thinking around the problem, I had to write through it, and also (by the way)to recognize and account for my own slight resistance to historical fiction.

In practice, I found Iron Age speech much easier to write. Because there is no sensein which the language of Iron Age Britain was ancestral to modern English, I felt lesspressure to be consciously archaic in my grammatical and lexical choices. However, Ialso surprised myself by avoiding obvious anachronisms at the level of metaphor. Forexample, in an early draft one of the Iron Age sections contained the followingparagraph:

It was less than half a whisper and everyone heard. The entire village was gatheredbehind Ossian now. The other two boats were landed and their oarsmen had set afuse of rumour. The smith’s forge was silent. The people had run from hearths andyards, left fish to burn on the fire, the bucket to fall glittering at the spring. Theystood mute as winter, as the leaf in the moment before its fall. (compare Butler2006a, p. 148)

On consideration, I found that I was uncomfortable with the word ‘fuse’, and in the finalversion of the book I changed it to ‘tinder-fire’. Why? Largely because I knew that fuseswere unlikely to be familiar to people in the society about which I was writing. Yet thiswas not a first-person narrative, nor was I writing this passage from a specific character’sviewpoint. In fact I was writing as an omniscient narrator—and why shouldn’t anomniscient narrator know about fuses? It was a question I hadn’t consciouslyencountered before, and although I had a critical vocabulary to hand which seemeddesigned to deal with it (including such terms as ‘focalization’, ‘narrative voice’, ‘impliedauthor’, and ‘free indirect discourse’) it did not offer much help in analysing my curiousreluctance.

Clearly that reluctance had something to do with my rendering the illusion ofhistorical time. In a book such as Death of a Ghost, which is set in three differenthistorical periods (and one ahistorical one), it seemed important not to confuse peopleabout history—or at any rate to confuse them only in ways that would serve the story.Narrative vocabulary became one tool through which to inform readers of historicalperiod—along with more obvious external props such as clothes and housing materials. Ialso found that there were other ways to use direct speech in the service of this kind ofsubliminal suggestion than through the introduction of archaic grammar or vocabulary.At the beginning of the first Iron Age section, for example, the protagonist’s fatheradmonishes his son as they enter a sacred enclosure to ‘Be brave, devout, and pleasant’(Butler 2006a, p. 123). In modern English that final word, ‘pleasant’, reads just a littleoddly. ‘Pleasant’ is a bland, even bathetic word, compared with ‘brave’ and ‘devout.’ Byplacing it in that conspicuous final position I intended to suggest that this was a society

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where appearance, social skills and cheerfulness (assumed, if necessary) were morehighly valued than in our own—and more generally, to induce a slight sense ofskewedness and estrangement in the reader. Cumulatively, such touches were meant toreinforce the otherness of the Iron Age setting, without the necessity of reconstructingthe patterns of ancient Brythonic speech. (This was a technique I had already used in anearlier book, Calypso Dreaming (2002a), which is set in a slightly alternative, futureBritain—something that needed to be communicated by similarly oblique methods.)The introduction of fuses would have upset this delicate work, and that, I now realise, iswhy I rejected them. Here, a fiction writing problem led to a critical insight into my ownpractice as a writer, but one with much wider applications, as I am finding in my currentproject, on the uses of history in children’s fiction.

Exposition and Allusion

Finally, we may consider the problems and opportunities created by exposition andallusion. Contextual knowledge is fundamental to the appreciation of any literature—buthow much readerly knowledge can a writer, and particularly a writer for children,reasonably assume?

Exposition poses the problem in its bluntest form. A satisfactory reading of AlanGarner’s The Owl Service (1967), for example, depends on the reader’s having aknowledge of the story of Lleu Llaw Gyffes and Blodeuwedd from the Fourth Branchof The Mabinogion. Since that myth is not widely known either to children or adults ithas to be recounted, either by way of an Appendix or (as in Garner’s book) within thetext itself. This kind of ‘downloading’ is extraordinarily difficult to achieve grace-fully—and in fact The Owl Service suffers in consequence, as its author hasacknowledged (Garner 1970, p. 29). But even where contextual knowledge is notabsolutely necessary to an understanding of the plot, the problems of allusion remainacute. Many children’s books allude to ideas, myths, and other literary texts, with whichtheir child readers are likely to be unfamiliar, and which the texts themselves do notexplain. What is the function of these allusions? Presumably the authors do not feeltheir recognition to be prerequisite to a satisfactory reading of the book. But if they arenot necessary, why include them at all? Are they a way of showing off, a wink over theheads of the ignorant to the more sophisticated (probably adult) reader? Or do theysimply act as a kind of scaffolding for the writer, as the legend of Faust did for me whenI wrote The Lurkers? Perhaps, indeed, they can be read more positively, as one way ofbuilding a text that will gain in depth and significance as the reader learns to place itwithin broader literary culture; or as evidence of writers’ craftsmanlike determinationto work their material as thoroughly as possible, whether or not that work will ever berecognized by others. Nor should we underestimate the extent to which allusions maybe unconscious, even for the writer, and subject to retrospective rationalization. Despitethe deliberate way I set things out earlier in this article, the truth is that I was halfwaythrough writing The Lurkers before I realised I was using the Faust narrative. Only thendid I begin to make conscious use of what was already a de facto literary relationship(compare Jones 2004, pp. 380–382).

Exposition is normally seen as a technical problem of small interest to critics, whileallusion (as an aspect of intertextuality) is far more academically fashionable. As awriter of fantasy, however, I see the two simply as tools with which to sculpt textualmeaning, and the distinction between them is subordinated to this purpose. Death of a

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Ghost is a highly intertextual book. Its range takes in mythological figures (Venus andAdonis, Actaeon, Ishtar and Tammuz, Isis and Osiris, Cernunnos, Sulis, and Oisin), andliterary texts including ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, The Idylls of the King, Alice inWonderland, the Book of Ezekiel, and Spenser’s ‘Prothalamion’. It also draws on somerelatively obscure areas such as alchemy, bog bodies, and the legend of Roger Bacon’sbrazen head. Many of the allusions act, I hope, as harmonics, adding resonance andtexture to the book for those readers in a position to recognize them; but very few needto be recognized, in the sense that the book will otherwise be rendered incomprehen-sible. Perhaps no single one of them is necessary, in fact. But to read the book withoutpicking up on any of its intertexts would be to have an impoverished and probablyrather confusing experience, since cumulatively they do provide a guide to its reading.For this reason, I developed a range of techniques (varying in the insistence with whichthey called attention to themselves) for indicating the book’s various intertexts. Thesetechniques formed a spectrum running from oblique allusion to outright exposition.Probably few of my readers will have noticed the single line from Cymbeline I droppedlike a votive offering into an Iron Age bog towards the end of the book (Butler 2006a,p. 182), but occasionally I cross the line into exposition, as in this description of a groupof art lovers admiring a painting:

Catherine’s house guests were talking about gods. The walls of the saloon werethick with them. Her great-great-uncle had toured Italy at a time when prices werelow and brought back a job lot, packed in wooden crates. Ossian found Catherineand the others examining an oil of the hunter Actaeon, stumbling between greenbushes onto the bank of a lake. There, by the light of her own immortal face, thegoddess Diana bathed naked with her maidens. The deer Actaeon had beenchasing could be seen, its hind flank at least, leaping out of the scene stage right,forgotten. The hunter’s face was all surprised embarrassment, delight and fear. Ifhe guessed what punishment the goddess would ordain for his intrusion—to beturned into a deer, chased and eaten by his own hounds—that handsome andrather stupid face betrayed nothing of his knowledge. (Butler 2006a, pp. 41–42)

This mythological excursion, if it works, does so because Catherine’s character as acollector of art and artists has been firmly established, so that a description of a paintingdoes not appear too jarring; but such tactics cannot be often repeated without becomingobtrusive and distracting. In a book such as Death of a Ghost, the problem ofinformation-release is a fundamental and profound one, with serious implications forthe relationship between author and reader.

These examples might easily be multiplied. I offer them simply as representativeindications of the close connections that exist in practice between the writing of fictionand the production of academic criticism. More desirable would be a systematic map ofthe areas in which academic work and fiction-making intersect, in the minds of bothwriters and readers. Even this, however, will be of limited value unless we develop amode of academic writing that can integrate the kind of experiential knowledge writershave to offer, and allow that knowledge to appear without its customary shabby garb ofthe anecdotal and the ad hoc. For too long, experiential knowledge has stooddisregarded at the gates of the academy, and the act of writing has been a strangelyneglected and under-theorized element of English studies. To find a way to welcome itin is a challenge worth the efforts of the most creatively critical of us—and the mostcritically creative too.

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