Parsing an ethics of seeing: interrogating the grammar of a creative/critical practice

ABSTRACT

This paper considers the nexus between creative and critical thinking in the making of original work as it relates to what Susan Sontag calls ‘an ethics of seeing’. In particular, it examines a way of expressing this thinking in terms of grammar and method (syntax, vocabulary, drawing, inventory, cartography), and how the structure or genre of the work emerges from, or out of the act of writing, both critically and creatively. ‘Parsing an Ethics of Seeing’ posits and presents possible approaches where the form of writing is in keeping with subject matter, in this case, an interrogation of absence and presence as poetic response in concert with what Roland Barthes calls ‘that-has-been’. It begins with the tongue and a drawing of a mother in ICU as referenced in the novel-cum-memoir Bite Your Tongue and ends with photographs of a father's body the day before he dies, which forms part of a ‘mer-mer’ or memoir-in-progress. Through language and grammar, the to and fro of sound and silence as Hélène Cixous thinks of it, and in a digressive and circumambulatory manner, this paper probes ‘what to look at’ and ‘how to think’.

KEYWORDS:

• Memoir
• ethics
• cartography
• drawing
• exegesis
• ekphrasis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Dr Francesca Rendle-Short is an associate professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, co-director of non/fictionLab and WrICE (Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange). She is an award-winning novelist, memoirist and essayist, author of the critically acclaimed memoir-cum-novel Bite Your Tongue (Spinifex, 2011). Recent scholarly work has been published in NANO, TEXT: Creative Writing as Research, The Essay Review (University of Iowa), Axon, New Writing, and Life Writing. Her creative work has appeared in numerous literary journals, online and in exhibitions including Best Australian Science Writing, Killing the Buddha, Just Between Us, Overland, Bumf, Rabbit, Queensland Historical Atlas, and Hecate. Francesca was an International Writing Fellow at the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 2013 and was showcased in the 2015 Outstanding Field: Artistic Research Emerging from the Academy at the VCA in Melbourne.

Notes

1 Thanks to Dr Merlinda Bobis for relaying a reading of this chapter from a prose workshop she did on this book with first year students at the University of Wollongong, such an intelligent reading reflecting back my original intentions when writing this passage.

2 Thanks again to Bobis's class notes for pointing this out in so many words.

3 Thanks to the double-blind reviewer of this paper and my non/fictionLab colleagues who helped me articulate and expand some of the themes and tropes of this paper to make it into what it is today.

4 All images by the author.