addressing the ‘anCient quarreL’the creative medium is written language, creative writing does not readily permit
the exploitation of performative or gestural research methods (such as those mostly
associated with dance and music; see haseman 2006a). nor is the focus on tactility
and materiality (mostly associated with the visual arts; see Carter 2004) particularly
relevant to the more ephemeral, less tangible mode of creative practice that is writing.
Thus, while creative writers do draw on the main body of literature on practice- led
research, we have had to adapt and adopt other methods and modes of approach.
embodied and material thinking must be ‘translated’ if it is to be useful within the
more silent, less tangibly gestural practice of writing. This means that much of the
recent discourse around practice- led research lacks a comfortable fit with the methods
and approaches that suit writing. Conceptualizations of research that are based on
non- linguistic ‘seeing’ and ‘perceiving’, for instance, do not fully take into account
the actualities of practice for writers. nor do the conceptualizations of research in
the humanities, with their focus on the critical, and often a posteriori, investigation
and interpretation of textual content, provide a sufficient research methodology for
creative writers.
however, despite the differences in specific modes of research, creative writers share
with other creative practitioners, and with most humanities scholars, a rejection of the
position that the world is finally knowable, that data is fully testable, that ‘truth’ can be
uncovered, and that there is a stable source of knowledge. Roland Barthes identifies that
(presumed) source as the ‘author- god’, and points out the dangers involved in relying
on an approach that anticipates the discovery of a ‘single “theological” meaning’, and
fails to pay attention to the actual messy, multiple space of research (Barthes 1977:
147). Barthes is not, of course, writing here about practice as research; his point is
one that is applied to critical research more generally. however, in writing, as in other
creative fields, the approach tends to be Barthes- ian: less systematic, less easily reduced
to an interpretive framework, less likely to offer its findings in a transparent mode and
less susceptible to rational argument than is conventionally accepted as a research
methodology.
one of the more convincing expressions of this comes from a letter written by
poet John Keats to his brothers, where he outlines (in frustrating brevity) his concept
of ‘negative Capability’, or (as he writes) that condition ‘when a man is capable of
being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact
and reason’ (Keats 1817). any research paradigm involves processes marked by
ambiguities and uncertainties rather than precision, or confidence – this is the basis
of experimentation. But, in creative work this uncertainty is particularly evident
because – touched as we are by divine madness – creative artists are not afraid of
what Bate calls ‘an imaginative openness of mind and heightened receptivity to
reality in its full and diverse concreteness’ (1963: 18). due to this, we are less likely,
perhaps, than a humanities researcher might be, to become irritated when facts and
reason are not immediately evident, and are instead likely to be willing to drift for a
while, making work, feeling our way into a question or an idea that may lead to an
original contribution to knowledge. We know that we do not yet know; we know too
that knowledge can never be full or final; and so we are perhaps more willing than
other researchers to linger at the point of analysis, and to accept gestures and notions
rather than facts.