Are we allowed to use fictional vignettes in cultural geographies?

Introducing fictional vignettes

This article discusses potential uses and limits of fictional vignettes in cultural geographies, as in the one just presented: a fictionalised story about the spatialities of domestic violence presented in a conference that never took place, but that might have. There is not a single definition of what a fictional vignette is and indeed a number of philosophical contributions have questioned the boundary between fiction and non-fiction. ¹ For the purpose of this article, we will not try to define fiction in terms of genre or narrative style; rather, we will just use a conventional and intuitive understanding of fiction, intended as a narrative material that is derived from the imagination of the author, in addition to, or rather than, from observed empirical facts or from secondary sources. ² The kind of fictional vignettes discussed in this article are short stories invented purposely by the authors of academic papers for a number of reasons, for example, enlivening a text, like the two geographers in the initial vignette.

Of course, the fictional is not a category standing in dichotomous opposition to the non-fictional, as there can be different extents of fictional elements in different stories. For example, changing the names of the persons mentioned ³ and other marginal details when reporting an observed story, in order, for example, to preserve the anonymity of the characters, to remove elements that may sound offensive to the readers, or to hide illegal acts performed by the researcher during her or his activity, implies a relatively low level of fictionalisation. Conversely, the invention of a story from scratch, in order to mobilise some elements of the narration in a metaphorical sense, implies a high amount of fictionalisation. But the boundary between these two cases is subjective and ambiguous, as emphasised in recent debates on the role of stories and storytelling in geography. ⁴

In order to clarify the terminology used in this article, we will use the expression fictional vignettes in strict relation to ‘ethnofiction’ (in this article being used as a synonym for ‘ethnographic fiction’) and ‘ethnographic novels’, terms that will be discussed later in the article. While fictional materials such as movies, novels and comics have been widely examined in cultural geographies, for example, in order to study landscapes, cultural discourses and spatial representations, the academic geography writer usually did not ‘invent’ stories, at least up to recent times. Recently, debates on the rise of creative expressions as disciplinary practices have started a new cooperation between artistic expressions and geographic scholarships. Geographers are more and more keen to speak other languages, to cross boundaries and to perform action in new terrains. ⁵ In this sense, it will be argued, fictional vignettes may play a role in developing analysis and texts in cultural geographies, given some risks that will be discussed in the final part of the article.

In order to present these arguments, the next section introduces the existing body of literature on fictional vignettes developed in other disciplines, particularly history and anthropology, and it is followed by a section discussing the crisis of the imaginary of ‘truth’ in social sciences. Subsequently, the section ‘Fictional Stories, Creative Writing and Creative Methodologies in Cultural Geographies. Problems and Possibilities’ situates fictional vignettes in the field of geography, particularly within recent debates on creative methodologies arising in cultural geographies. Then we will go back to the fictional vignette presented at the beginning of this article to introduce some concluding remarks and to summarise the potential benefits, limits and risks connected to the use of fictional narratives in cultural geographies.

From Hayden White to James Clifford. Questioning academic narrative styles

Debates about the role of fictional elements within social sciences have been developed in different disciplines. Broadly speaking, there are at least two ways of conceptualising the fictional. On the one hand, a large number of authors, particularly in the framework of post-structuralism, have stressed how every scientific representation is always, to some degrees, fictional; on the other hand, a more limited number of authors have explicitly embraced fictional techniques in order to develop their arguments and writings.

The first argument, which refers to the well known impossibility of building representations mirroring reality, has pervaded many disciplines, such as history, whose ultimate goal is commonly perceived as giving meaning to the ‘facts of the past’. ⁶ Many authors, during the 1970s, in fact discussed how history may have been intended as a narrative discourse. This is particularly the case of Hayden White, an author who has had a meaningful impact also in cultural geographies. ⁷ White investigated the role of tropes, poetic figures, metaphors and styles in building historiographical styles and approaches, in order to argue provocatively that there is no possibility of establishing absolute ‘scientific’ knowledge concerning the past, and that history is ultimately ‘a form of fiction-making’. ⁸

Conversely, the explicit use of fictional stories has been particularly developed in the field of anthropology, and works of ‘ethnographic fiction’ were frequently written, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s. ⁹ Despite the fact that many anthropologists often discouraged novelistic writing in order to strengthen the ‘scientific’ status of the discipline, Clifford Geertz’s exhortation to produce ‘thick description’ and to ‘blur genres’ opened the way for a series of ‘literary turns’. ¹⁰ A key text that provoked huge debates inside and outside the sphere of anthropology has been the 1986 edited collection Writing Culture. In the introduction to the book, James Clifford wrote,

Ethnographic writings can properly be called fictions in the sense of ‘something made or fashioned’, the principle burned on the word’s Latin root fingere. But it is important to preserve the meaning not merely making, but also of making up, of inventing things not actually real. ¹¹

Clifford’s words should not be intended as a suggestion for anthropologists to ‘make up’ their data; rather, they have pointed to the creative interpretation inherent in any representation of society, and to the evident fact that – in a way similar to Hayden White’s argument for history – ethnographic truths are always partial, committed and incomplete. ¹² In this sense, Clifford and other anthropologists suggested that ethnographies are fictions. At the same time, some authors have pushed the argument in a different direction, suggesting that it is possible to produce ethnographies that are fictional, in the sense of entirely imagined fabrications more or less disconnected from fieldwork, mixing literature, poetic sensitivity and dense description. ¹³

A meaningful example along these lines is, in a different academic area, Bruno Latour’s Aramis; a highly experimental work described by the author himself as ‘scientifiction’. ¹⁴ The book includes a scientific discussion of interviews and elements of a detective story concerning the ‘killing off’ of Aramis, a personal rapid transit system that was supposed to be implemented in Paris. Here, the fictional elements are largely mobilised in order to produce intriguing and lively dissertations on abstract theories, such as Actor-Network Theory, and in order to draw a bridge between reflections on technology and culture:

What genre could I choose to bring about this fusion of two so clearly separated universes, that of culture and that of technology, as well as the fusion of three entirely distinct literary genres – the novel, the bureaucratic dossier, and sociological commentary? […] The hybrid genre I have devised for a hybrid task is what I call scientifiction. ¹⁵

A recent work explicitly playing with the hybridisation of academic and fictional writing is Marc Augé’s 2011 book No Fixed Abode: Ethnofiction; the book does not characterise itself as a novel, nor as ethnography in the strict sense. ¹⁶ According to Augé, it is an intermingling of the two, blending both ethnographic research and fictional narrative. In the book, no details are provided about the methodology at the heart of this blending, and Augé’s book is mostly a provocative critique of the idea that social sciences have to be detached, objective and unbiased, rather than a well-defined methodological alternative. ¹⁷

All these works emphasise the hybrid status of fictional elements; on the one hand, fictional vignettes may be imagined as methodological devices which allow for accessing and analysing specific social phenomena (such as domestic violence in the made-up paper presentation at the beginning of this article), and, on the other hand, as representational tools for describing and translating, in an effective and appealing way, the results of research. ¹⁸ In fact, the use of fiction as a style for presenting the results of analysis may enhance the interest of the reader or the audience, provide a deeper sense of participation, suggest open-ended alternative endings and conclusions, and widen the accessibility of research advancement outside the borders of the academia. ¹⁹

Mobilising fiction and decentring truth

In the previous section, we have discussed some works that can be considered seminal references in questioning the seemingly complete and unbiased ‘truth’ of certain styles of academic narratives. Similarly, decentring truth is at the basis of the hybrid character of fictional vignettes, since they stand in-between academic writing and fiction. But fictional vignettes have a hybrid status also for another reason; they are always in-between ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ worlds. Indeed, there is not a clear boundary separating the fictional from the non-fictional; all fictional works draw on the ‘real’ world’. ²⁰ According to Richardson and St Pierre, given the progressive blurring of genre and our contemporary understanding that all writing is narrative writing, the main difference separating fictional writing from scientific writing is the claim that the author makes for the text. ²¹ And the positionality of the author matters also for another reason: the fact that the situations at the basis of stories have been created from the authors’ imagination, strongly situates them in a position which is close to the boundaries of autobiography and autoethnography. ²² Fictional stories, in fact, must not be considered as cultural products that are ‘external’ to the author who produces them. The invention of a fictional vignette requires the mobilising of a mixture of personal memories, experiences, fantasies and imagination. Putting it another way, although fictional, the evoked stories and characters frequently resonate, at least partly, with experiences gone through or dreamt of by the author, or with stories that have been read or heard by the author. It is not a coincidence that many authors stress that their fictional vignettes have all been produced by the assemblage of personal observations, fragments of dialogues and other ‘real’ experiences. ²³ At the same time, common to both autobiography and autoethnography is the possibility of privileging the role of emotions, situated knowledge and perceptions, in ways, it can be argued, that are not too distant from fictional writing. ²⁴ The point here is that, in order to clearly operate a conceptual distinction between autoethnography and fictional vignettes, it is necessary to mobilise the quite controversial concept of ‘truth’. In fact, as anticipated, the ‘truth’ is conventionally the fundamental distinguishing factor between fiction and other genres, such as the social sciences and journalism, which are supposed to present accounts of ‘real’ people, places and events. Looking at the intersection of literature, writing and social sciences today, this simple binary opposition is being eroded. ²⁵ The ‘truth’ is indeed slippery: as anticipated, it is relatively easy to argue, from a theoretical point of view, that there is no single ‘truth’ to be discovered, ²⁶ that science is an interpretative social practice, ²⁷ that any kind of knowledge is embedded in discourses and, ultimately, in power relations, ²⁸ and that there is no ‘nature’ except a nature that is subject to human classification. ²⁹

Autobiography and autoethnography are methodological tools and practices specifically emphasising the role of situated forms of knowledge, subjective perceptions and interpretations, and access to emotions and commitment. ³⁰ With their theoretical emphasis on issues of positionality and reflexivity, autobiography and autoethnography stress the partial, negotiated, processual, relational and representational nature of truth and knowledge. ³¹ This does not mean that researchers do not need to be rigorous and transparent in their works: the literature on qualitative methodologies commonly stresses that one of the challenges of qualitative writing consists in the ability of the author to explore and make explicit assumptions and research agendas, and to write a text that somehow gives voice to what has been observed; reflexivity and openness to scrutiny by readerships would establish the validity, credibility and trustworthiness of a research text. ³²

Fictional stories, creative writing and creative methodologies in cultural geographies. Problems and possibilities

Geography has a long history in mobilising stories as part of its repertoires. ³³ However, it is just in recent years that stories, storytelling and fictional styles have gained a renewed centrality. According to Hayden Lorimer, ‘geographers can make some reasonable claim to having rediscovered the power of the story’. ³⁴ This is particularly visible in the field of cultural geographies, which has been recently characterised by important and meaningful debates on creative methodologies ³⁵ and creative forms of writing, often going beyond a mere binary opposition between fiction and non-fiction, as well as truth and untruth. In the framework of what he calls ‘non-representational ethnography’, Phillip Vannini ³⁶ reflects particularly on the various possibilities that researchers may adopt to emphasise the momentary, viscous, spirited, embodied, more-than-human, precognitive and non-discursive dimensions of spatially and temporally lived experience, by building on empirical narratives that ‘make sense’ within the world encountered. At the same time, these narratives shall underscore the situatedness, partiality, contingency and creativity of that sense-making. In order to do so, Vannini refers to authors such as Latham, Dewsbury and Thrift, ³⁷ and calls for a fight against ‘methodological timidity’, for the disruption of research habits and for the experimentation with novel expressions of creativity.

Among these novel expressions, and crucially for the arguments of this article, some recent contributions have focused on fictional stories and fictional narrative techniques in order to develop their arguments. Derek McCormack, for example, writing in a special issue of cultural geographies on ‘Excursions – Telling Stories and Journeys’, assembled various stories concerning the excursions of ‘atmospheric things’, mixing different styles, autobiographical narratives, narrative approaches, in order to stress their ‘circumstantial’ qualities. In the same issue, Parr and Stevenson analyse the touching story of Sophie, a missing person. ³⁸ The story is partly fictional, partly based on real facts derived first from interview transcripts, and still ongoing, and it allows the authors to develop arguments about crisis-led mobilities, traumatic stories and the possibility of transforming traumas, also by the means of telling stories.

What probably first strikes the reader – actually, what happened to us – is the highly touching and fascinating construction of these articles. Put it simply, they are far from ‘boring’; on the contrary, they are lively, moving, provocative and challenging. But, more crucially for the arguments of this article, they largely build on fictional elements, hence leading to question if the fictional and narrative elements are secondary elements in these essays, or rather if they are the most crucial ingredients of the texts.

This consideration is central for the recent contribution of Fraser MacDonald ‘The ruins of Erskine Beveridge’: ³⁹ it is a narrative essay concerning the story of a Scottish archaeologist and his family. MacDonald’s work aims at challenging ordinary conventions of writing papers in academic journals, particularly by suggesting that issues of form and style deserve the same attention commonly attributed to methodology. In this sense, he proposes a text that is primarily a fictional narrative, but that at the same time has to be considered as an example of a style of writing that might be useful for performing and for reporting geographical research. In MacDonald’s intentions, his essay, while being a fictional narrative, is analytical in its scope. Indeed, the analysis is not always explicit, but it can find expression in allegory and can be ‘tucked away in the shadows of significant narrative detail’. ⁴⁰

Despite brave experiments like these, it is clear that the explicit mobilisation of fictional stories as research strategies is still quite uncommon in this discipline. A possible explanation may be that the ‘truth’ is, by and large, a moral category. In the initial vignette, at the beginning of this article, the listeners at the conference felt upset by acknowledging that the story was, to a certain degree, ‘fake’. In a similar vein, it is not that unusual to suppose that the more data adheres to a supposed and conventional truth that is external to the researcher (‘objective’, ‘positive’ data), the more the research is considered ‘good’ or even ‘useful’. Indeed, the accuracy of data is a very important aspect of research, but ‘untruth’ and ‘fictional’ materials are arguably ‘real’ materials that can also provide interesting insights on social phenomena.

Most theories in the social sciences are developed on the basis of the observation of evidence and case studies. Specific and situated phenomena are often described in order to let the reader imagine larger ‘social facts’. ⁴¹ Fictional vignettes have to be considered in this latter framework: the fictional story may be so explicative as to be a sort of Weberian ideal-type, which is an assemblage of characteristics and elements of the given social fact, without a direct correspondence to all of the characteristics of any one particular case. ⁴² Used as a descriptive device, the fictional vignette works therefore as a metaphorical tool: it describes something by the means of describing something else. However, metaphors are by definition ‘false’: their use is to stimulate the production of knowledge through the search for analogies. ⁴³ In the same vein, fictional vignettes may not be true, but they may be useful in order to detect working mechanisms in social facts; they can evoke a sense of place and work ‘nonrepresentationally’ in order to express sensuous geographies. ⁴⁴

This emphasis on the potential role of imagined elements in research processes obviously has to be handled with caution. Fraud and misconduct are just around the corner, and issues of trust and reliability are at play. Critical debates originated in other disciplines may be useful. Roger Chartier, for example, notes that the ideas of Hayden White, and particularly his thesis that historical knowledge is not conceptually different from the knowledge brought by fiction, raised a number of objections: by holding history to be a form of fiction-making, an absolute and highly dangerous relativism is implicitly supported, one that denies all possibility of establishing ‘scientific’ knowledge concerning the past, ultimately losing all the capacity to choose between the true and the false, to tell what happened, and to denounce falsifications. ⁴⁵ This position echoes the kind of critique that has been raised, in the opening fictional vignette, by the girl with many piercings.

In the field of anthropology, Kirin Narayan ⁴⁶ has argued that for ethnography to become too much like fiction is to lose clarity, so that readers have to puzzle along, trying to guess what is the point of the text and how likely such events would happen. In different terms, it means losing the power of disciplinary shorthand for situating lives, to take potentially dangerous liberties in attempting to speak from within other minds, and to undermine the importance of close, respectful attention to the lives of other actual people that characterises most empirical research, also in geography. This position resonates with the kind of critique that has been proposed, in the vignette, by the man with the red beard.

Given these reasonable problems, the question of how to set up the boundary between ‘creative’ inventions and useless distortions is evidently a difficult one. While a clear, definite, answer would be nonsense here, it sounds reasonable that, in producing fictional vignettes, their logics and rationales have to be fully discussed, the balance between the fictional and observed data has to be clearly stated, and the overall result has to be judged in terms of its effectiveness and usefulness, rather that realism or, even more, adherence to a supposed reality. ⁴⁷ In this sense, they need as much crafting skills as reporting ethnography, even if they may or may not be based on participant observation or a ‘true’ fact of somebody’s own life but on an imaginative effort.

Fictional vignettes may be particularly important for our discipline. Geography, emphasising the role of heterogeneity and diversity, ⁴⁸ is generally sceptical in regarding to essentialism, reductionism, universalism and ‘grand narratives’. Any way of reporting research is a way of ‘telling a story’, but there are a variety of ways to produce this story, or – in the words of the commitment beyond this act – to tell facts about socio-spatial phenomena. ⁴⁹ The production of fictional vignettes may be a strategy for opposing universal claims.

Consider, for example, a sentence like ‘in heterosexual families, women are subjugated because of their particular position regarding waged work and, above all, the non-waged activities they carry on in the sphere of reproduction’. This is a general idea, but it is far from a universal law. Is it possible to propose a counter-argument, without an empirical observation of a couple, where the woman is not in a marginalised position but, rather, the man is in a subaltern position? Fictional vignettes allow us to explore the universe of possibilities. By assembling ideas from social sciences, personal observations and personal imagination, it may be possible to describe the hypothetical case of a woman who is in a more powerful position in comparison to her partner, and in that position she explicitly or implicitly assumes paternalistic (should we say maternalistic?) attitudes towards her partner, for example, ‘helping’ him in advancing his career, and he in turn becomes depressive and dominated. The case is not strictly real; the author might not have had the possibility of having an interview in this sense, but the vignette, in general, presents a plausible case for counter-argumentation. A fictional vignette like this may also offer interesting insights on the authors, their cultural frameworks and their sensibilities as writers. An experiment that may be considered here refers to the recent ‘Future Fossils’ exhibition, which has been curated and organised by Beth Greenhough, Jamie Lorimer and Kathryn Yusoff. ⁵⁰ The exhibition focuses on an imaginary group of future earth-writers, in 5000 AD, in an exhibition of specimens from their recent Earth expedition, dating from the period informally known as the Anthropocene, that is to say our contemporary age. The images, fragments and discourses provocatively exhibited tell many stories about the various authors involved in the exhibition, about the way we imagine the future, ultimately producing knowledges and sensibilities strictly connected to geographical speculations. In this sense, fictional materials may have a highly communicative and even educational potential. A good and informative fictional film may be much more effective than a boring documentary and, similarly, well-constructed fictional stories can be catchy and emotionally touching. The aim of fictional vignettes, in fact, is not so much about representing a stable reality ‘out there’, or developing an argument in a conventional sense, but rather to engage in a form of play with possibilities.

Finally, it has to be noticed that some stories, spaces and geographic materials exist only in the mind of the researcher. Consider the example of research on the spatialities of dreams and daydreaming, or the imagined geographies of the Afterlife: ⁵¹ Is it really possible to make a distinction between fictionalised and real stories in cases like these? Maybe mobilising the fictional would be strategic for entering into the sphere of such phenomena, which challenge conventional understandings of observation, realism, factuality.

Conclusion: fictional vignettes and geography

Later, that day, Sophie and Paul were having dinner together in a fancy restaurant by the waterfront. They started discussing their afternoon at the conference. Paul seemed to have overcome the stress he had shown during the presentation:

Ok, it has been sort of funny, and this episode will probably give us enough material for a paper or two, but next time – if there is a next time – you’ll be the ‘baddie’ in the drama.

Paul was joking, but Sophie thought it wasn’t that nice. They had actually invented the story after a terrible row about some work issues they had had in the yard of the university where they both work. They had continued arguing in their office in a very inappropriate fashion considered where they were, and the role they each covered. The thing they were arguing about was stupid, but the row was terrible and violent and had marked her. It was just sometimes after the episode that she had been back to Paul and told him how she had infused her research materials into an imagined story.

Recalling that episode, Sophie was still agitated, but she liked the presence of Paul next to her, in that particular moment far away from their work place or the meeting. Sophie thought about the role of space in shaping emotions and relations and she concluded that yes, geographers are right in placing such an emphasis: things with Paul work differently depending on whether they are in their office, they are in a conference room, or they are together in a fancy restaurant by the waterfront:

It’s not possible. You know, in a story like this the guy has to be the ‘baddie’; it doesn’t work as well with a ‘female baddie’. But if you invent a completely different story where it works to be a female baddie, that’s fine by me.

Mmm let me think . . . What about the drama of a male academic who is not so well thought of at work, and who is in the shadow of his prestigious wife, who is also an academic? Let’s hear this: the man has been hired as professor in a department, solely because the head of the department wanted to hire his wife, but has been forced to hire both of them, because the wife enforced it as a sort of ‘binding condition’.

Sophie knew that there was something ‘real’ behind that joke. She heard about a story like that, although it wasn’t verified, only stupid gossip. She decided to keep on chatting:

Yeah, great idea! Maybe the prestigious wife explicitly told the head of the department, in front of his husband and a couple of colleagues, something like ‘We go together: if you want me, you have to take him, too. Sorry, it’s a complete package, take or leave it’. What a humiliation for him!

They shared a smile. Yes, they were having a good time together at the restaurant. Then, Sophie started to think back to the situation in the room where they had presented their paper. Since her experience with psychoanalysis, she has developed an attitude towards the description of her feelings and her free association. She started thinking about the room where they had presented the paper as a hostile, dark and dusty set of walls populated by unknown creatures; none of these latter elements being at all factual. By now, was it possible anymore to distinguish which space was ‘real’ and which was ‘unreal’? Did it really matter?

The main thesis of this article is that there is space, in cultural geographies, for the mobilisation of fictional vignettes. Different kinds of fictional stories may serve to communicate research outcomes, to explore specific topics and to build meaningful arguments, in ways that effectively take into account and connect multiple events, diverse perspectives, non-linear chronological structures, downplaying ‘grand scholarly stories’, in favour of small stories and everyday lives. ⁵² Such stories may perform pedagogical, emotional and taxonomic work. And fictional vignettes also allow the exploration and representation of problems and spaces that only exist, or can in any case only be accessed, in the minds of the researcher. This is the case of the fictional vignette which was mobilised in this story; it is fictional, but we think this story may stimulate questions and emotional reactions concerning issues of honesty, credibility and the reliability of the authors, and the kind of relation that is built up between the authors and the readers.

It is an easy task to stress what fictional vignettes cannot do. Invented stories cannot substitute conventional research approaches. They cannot be analysed in order to detect regularities and recurrences in social phenomena and, ultimately, as materials for a hypothetical-deductive model of geographical explanation. ⁵³ Building on Gayatri Spivak’s famous reflection on the subaltern, ⁵⁴ fictional vignettes definitely cannot ‘speak for’ the subjects and spaces represented, and neither ‘speak of’ them. Surely, they tell something about their authors. And fictional vignettes can also ‘speak around’ the subjects and spaces they talk about, as they may help to describe, bring up, report, test and challenge specific aspects of social and cultural phenomena or theoretical problems. But, at the same time, we have to be aware that the fictional has to be mobilised wisely because the excessive and non-explicit use of fictional elements may confuse the reader, in a way that is not necessarily constructive and provocative. As stressed by Patricia Price, the devil of dilettantism is dangerous, at the crossroads between the fictional and cultural geographies, and hence serious critical reflections are needed in order to ‘push our stories’. ⁵⁵