How a fifty-two-year-old prison guard named John Darwin vanished one afternoon in 2002 while canoeing in the North Sea near his home in Hartlepool in northeast England.

 

How he was himself and then that changed.

 

Neither here nor there.

 

Neither this nor that.

 

How a provisional definition of at least one version of experimental narrativity might suggest that it is the sort that includes a self-reflective awareness of and engagement with theory.

 

A discomfort I had always suffered from, Roland Barthes once described: the uneasiness of being a subject torn between two languages, one expressive, the other critical.

 

How Raymond Federman coined the term critifiction in the seventies. Thirty years ago.

 

How critifiction exists intentionally in the world as a hovering profoundly concerned with the nature of authenticity and privilege.

 

The will to a system, Nietzsche once wrote, is a lack of integrity.

 

An imaginative restlessness. An aesthetics of uncertainty. The performance of theory collapsing into its object, inhabiting it, ghosting it.

 

Language is a skin, Barthes once wrote. I rub my language against the other.

 

How, a few weeks later, the shattered remains of John Darwin’s red kayak were discovered washed up along the shore.

 

Wittgenstein: Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

 

The same perhaps being the case concerning the innovative.

 

The avant-garde artist and writer, Lyotard once wrote, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done. Hence the fact that the work and text have the character of an event; hence also, they always come too late for their author.

 

Beyonding art, Robert Sheppard once called it. Beautifully.

 

How in 2003, following a police inquiry, a coroner declared John Darwin dead.

 

R. M. Berry: The avant-garde writer undergoes, succumbs utterly to, what in other writing exists as frustrated, ignored, incomplete.

 

Nietzsche: How do we compromise ourselves today? By being consistent. By going in a straight line. By meaning fewer than five things at once. By being authentic.

 

How in 2003, following a police inquiry, a coroner declared John Darwin dead, but how he wasn’t.

 

How, instead, his wife, Anne, had been hiding him at the family home.

 

How, when visitors called, John fled through a passage in a wardrobe with a false back into the neighboring flat, which, the police later discovered, the couple also owned.

 

Jean-Paul Sartre: Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.

 

How a provisional definition of experimental narrativity might suggest that it is the sort that asks the questions: What is narrative? What are its assumptions, limits? At what flashpoint does narrative translate into something other than narrative, and what might that other thing look like, read like, if it looks or reads like anything at all?

 

The politics of hesitation, one could say.

 

A Heraclitean practice.

 

When we are not sure, David Shields once wrote, we are alive.

 

How, toward the end of his career, Wittgenstein became increasingly obsessed with trying to articulate what we might be able to know about the world with anything like conviction.

 

How the more obsessed Wittgenstein became, the less sure he felt about anything.

 

But what about such a proposition as I know I have a brain? he once wrote. Can I doubt it? Grounds for doubt are lacking! Everything speaks in its favor, nothing against it. Nevertheless it is imaginable that my skull should turn out empty when it was operated on.

 

Plato: The Republic. Kathy Acker: Blood and Guts in High School. Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra. Lydia Davis: Varieties of Disturbance.

 

For me, Don DeLillo once wrote, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

 

Sartre: I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

 

The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking, Heidegger once wrote.

 

Delany: Dhalgren. Joe Wenderoth: Letters to Wendy’s. Barthes: Camera Lucida. Diane Williams: It was Like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted Nature. J. M. Coetzee: Elizabeth Costello.

 

Neither here nor there.

 

Neither this nor that.

 

Each in its own way, each for a different purpose, yet each a fiction termiting through theory that is a theory termiting through fiction. An industrious boring. An incessant friction.

 

Ultimately, Barthes once wrote, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.

 

What is thinking? he thought.

 

How, in November 2007, five years after his apparent death at sea, John Darwin walked into a London police station, claiming to have been suffering from amnesia.

 

How Kathy Acker’s work couldn’t have arrived as what it is without Bataille’s and Deleuze’s and the French feminists’, R. M. Berry’s without Wittgenstein’s, Ben Marcus’s without Derrida’s, Derrida’s without Nietzsche’s, Yuriy Tarnawsky’s without Sartre’s and Kierkegaard’s, Federman’s without Beckett’s, Beckett’s without the seventeenth-century Flemish philosopher of radical solipsism and intellectual impotence Arnold Geulincx’s.

 

How Nietzsche once wrote in a gorgeously sad letter, in which he enumerated the various agonizing ways his syphilitic body was conspiring against him, that he had to keep living a little longer so he could keep thinking.

 

How for him thinking, and thinking about thinking (which implies a thinking about embodiment, a thinking about thinking in and through and about the leaky spacesuit we wear called a body), was what constituted being, what constituted being awake.

 

Anne Darwin claiming that she didn’t know that her husband was dead.

 

How, one sunny day a year after his disappearance, John Darwin just turned up at their house, she said, disheveled.

 

Anne telling police: I didn't even recognize him at first.

 

Because the opposite of thinking is what, exactly?

 

To think with any seriousness is to doubt, David Shields once wrote. To be alive is to be uncertain.

 

Derrida: No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn’t understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.

 

Barthes: Literature is the question minus the answer.

 

Nietzsche: I’m afraid we’re not rid of God because we still believe in grammar.

 

Carole Maso: Learn to love the questions themselves. The spaces between words. Between thoughts. The interval.

 

John Barth. Jorge Luis Borges. Hélène Cixous. Mark Danielewski. Eduardo Galeano. Michael Joyce. David Markson. Patrick Ourednik. Vladimir Nabokov. Ronald Sukenick. Steve Tomasula. Lidia Yuknavitch.

 

The stunning queering of the distinction between privileged and subordinate discourses. A synthetic indeterminacy. A multiplicity of appropriation, pla(y)giarism (with a “y”—another coinage by Federman), renovation.

 

One author pilfers the best of another and calls it tradition, Bacchylides once wrote. In 450 B. C.

 

There’s nothing to say that hasn’t been said before, Terrence once wrote. In the second century B. C.

 

Picasso: I do not care who it is that influences me as long as it is not myself.

 

How, it turned out, John Darwin’s life insurance and work benefits had been paid to his wife in order to clear his family’s debts.

 

How the couple moved to Panama, but how Darwin invented a plan to return from the dead because he missed the two sons he left behind.

 

How he was himself and then that changed.

 

Both here and there.

 

Both this and that.

 

How narrativity was itself and then that changed.

 

How it didn’t.

 

The way, in a sense, the story I just told you is one-hundred-percent true.

 

 

The way, in a sense, it is not.

 

How in the critifictional moment we acknowledge—along wth Husserl, along with Heidegger, along with Merleau-Ponty—that thought isn’t about the world but about itself contemplating the world, about the attentive inspection of its own processes.

 

How theory is always-already spiritual autobiography, fiction always-already a subset of theory.

 

Critifiction: a relatively recently named way of speaking about (and thus seeing) a narrative mode that has always-already been right in front of us: a way of writing, of looking, of reading, of mining.

 

The continuous avoidance of taking a final position, for every final position risks an act of intellectual arrogance.

 

Because the opposite of Not-Knowing is what, exactly?

 

Wondering what expression filled John Darwin’s face as he reached for his doorbell.

 

Thinking about the hammer that was his heart.

 

How he had walked out of himself and hadn’t walked out of himself.

 

How the future kept coming at him.

 

The violent blueness of the sky.

 

 

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