narrative, confessionalism and reflective practice / ALAN BLEAKLEY (1)

 

Writing With Invisible Ink: narrative,
confessionalism and re?ective practice
ALAN BLEAKLEY
Cornwall Institute of Professional Studies (in partnership with the University of
Plymouth, UK), Cornwall College, Penhaligon Building, Pool, Redruth, Cornwall
TR15 3RD, UK; e-mail: a.bleakley@cornwall.ac.uk

 

ABSTRACT Re?ection on practice through the medium of creative writing offers a narrative
mode challenging instrumental approaches to re?ection as logico-scienti?c knowing.
However, such creative writing may be dominated by a discourse of personalistic humanism
and the personal?confessional genre, with attendant internal contradictions, such as
unre?exive accounts of personal `discovery?and `growth?. A counterargument is offered
drawing on social constructivism. Subjectivities supposedly revealed by personal?
confessional modes of writing may be constructed by the genre, as confessional practices
producing confessors. Alternative paths to writing critically re?exive praxis are suggested;
and aesthetic, erotic and ethical issues arising out of a critique of personal?confessional
writing are discus sed. Writing is seen as homage to language itself, where language offers
the very ambiguity, uniqueness and value con?ict that Donald Scho?n characterises as the
`indeterminate zones of practice?that we must inhabit effectively in establishing practical
artistry as the heart of re?ective practice.

 

 

Through Wittgenstein’ s notion of differing `language games’ , Lyotard (1984) also
distinguishes between narrative and scienti® c modes of knowledge, where scienti® c
logic relies on privileging the language game of denotation, to the exclusion of other
discourses. Narrative knowing is stereotyped as unscienti® c and underdeveloped,
and as not offering a legitimate basis to inquiry. For Lyotard, the postmodern
moment is characterised as a crisis of such legitimacy, in which a challenge is
mounted to the dominant metanarratives of rationalism that characterise scienti® c
language games: explanatory closure and certainty. In a postmodern climate, local
narratives, or `little stories’ , proliferate, as a return to a kind of tribal storying,
accounting for the explosion of interest in local or ethnic identities (Blake et al.,
1998).

 

 

 

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To `narrate?(from the Latin narrare, `to know?) is then to give an account in story
form, even where content may be `factual?. Narrative knowing is an aesthetic
apprehension offered through a variety of genres and their admixtures: social-realist,
dirty-realist, surrealist, magical-realist, epic, tragic, comic, lyric, tragi-comic, confessional,
biographical, autobiographical, psychobiographical, detective, soap, erotic,
romantic, fantastic, feminist, heroic, picaresque, historical, travel, macabre, postmodernist,
hypertextual, and so forth. These varying genres provide a background
against which practices may be articulated and understood, or re?ected upon. In
writing as re?ective and re?exive practice, and as narrative inquiry, practice identities
can be seen to be socially constructed by various privileged language games,
in?ected through differing genres.

 

 

 

Paradoxically, where writing as re?exive practice
turns to examine subjectivities and identities, the privileged genre appears to be
personal?confessional, with its introspective gaze, and anecdotal, value-laden ｅxpression.
This genre of writing is identi?ed with `confessional practices?(Usher et
al., 1997) that may be seen to constitute a generic identity: practitioner as confessor.

 

 

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