Last Friday (27th March) I attended the Creative and Critical Writing event at York St John. I have always admired Nicholas Royle’s fiction and academic work and this talk was a great insight into his creative process relating to his semi-autobiographical novel Quilt. This novel is so experimental in narration and filled with obscure ray references that I was dying to hear how it came into creation. The rays themselves came from Royle’s own interest in the creatures as he enthused greatly about his own fascination with them, stating that the novel is an experiment in how one can “describe their movements, their reality” and the narrators grappling with language is reflective of the “grabbling with the question of representation”.
However it is the Afterword in Quilt that perhaps explores the idea of reality fiction in a clearer manner than the novel itself. It is Royle’s brief mention of Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author that is enough to convince me that he is using Quilt as an example of how the text is inevitably an extension of the self and somewhat acts an internal discourse within the writer. Therefore the undecipherable nature of this novel comes from the fact that writing about oneself cannot come in an decipherable way. Even the title of novel itself is built up of layers that the reader may initially not see, as the term Quilt has three meanings, that of a bed cover, “to swallow” and as a “synonym in the Eighteenth Century for a manta ray”. This novel is so patched together with parts of Royle that it makes for a unique read, not only because he himself is an intriguing individual but also because he does not (like many other authors do) try to remove himself from the work.