In my PhD ‘The other side of silence’ I wanted to examine how a writer could write
the kinds of women
’s lives which have been omitted, silenced or marginalised in
discourses such as history, biography, auto
-
biography and fiction.
For me, fiction
seemed a logical way to tell such a story, since fiction had the ability to highlight those
lives and experienc
es which have been largely left untold within popular culture, or
deemed historically insignificant.
Yet, in reading fiction which focused on the lives of
women, I noticed that such narratives seemed to suggested that ordinary women’s lives
could be told,
only
if they were narrated in a certain way.
I found that fiction which
simply filled in the gaps about historically ‘unknowable’ lives carried with them the
suggestion that stories about women from the past could be retrieved and narrated.
In
writing a fi
ction about a woman from the past, I began to understand that the problem
lay in a deeper place: a place that was difficult to address within the generic boundaries
imposed by realism, which continues to maintain a tight grip on popular and literary
fictio
n.
To write about the silencing of women’s lives, I began to look at the
epistemological reasons for this silencing, and I realised that fiction imposed
conditions of its own.
Imagination was only going to take me so far, and my creative
manuscript began t
o falter under the weight and the limitations of conventional
realism.
Writing my fictional manuscript would have been impossible without engaging with
post
-
structuralist theory.
Literary theory became the spine that supported the shaping
of my creative t
ext.
It enabled me to rethink specific creative writing approaches and
techniques; to question the boundaries imposed by realism’s dependence on resolution,
revelation and closure; and to challenge generic conventions, which enable the telling
of some stor
ies, while inhibiting the telling of others.
In this paper, I will describe how
literary theory informed my own creative writing practice, and enabled the writing of
my fiction.
It is my contention that literary theory not only unpicks the seams of
fiction
, but, in doing so, presents writers with new ways to stitch those worlds together
again, subsequently enlarging our ideas about what is permissible and possible in
fiction.