Nowhere in time

‘Nowhere in time’ is concerned with notational forms of writing. It seeks out to explore the boundaries between fictional, biographical and essayistic forms of writing. It addresses questions of shared memory and the representation of experience in writing that blurs the factual, historical and fictional. An explan- atory note on the text and a list of references have been included at the end of the piece and has been included here.‘Nowhere in time’ adopts a notational form and is intended to be a reflection on the writing process as much as a critical exploration of literature and memory. My understanding of the nota- tional is informed by works reflecting on the uncertain, or vulnerable, temporality of the writing process such as Kate Briggs’ This Little Art, Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes or Kate Zambreno’s To Write as If Already Dead. I like to think that, rather than writing about Annie Ernaux’s work, for instance, I am writing beside it, or in collaboration with its material. This comes from what I think of as the ‘infra-biographical’ rather than the auto-biographical, a movement into the spaces between a given author’s work, the surrounding discourse and the mythical construction of the so-called ‘life of the artist’. As such, the text experiments with critical positioning and the uncer- tainties of fiction writing rather than the certitude of factual accounts. In terms of its reflections on memory, ‘Nowhere in time’ is informed by what Georges Perec called ‘fictive memory’ – the way in which the memories of other people become part of our own. ‘Nowhere in time’ is an ‘essay fiction’, a composite of the two forms, one refracted through the other – what I hope is a form of critical creative practice. The year 2023 was the 50-year anniversary of Robert Smithson’s death and it is perhaps fitting to return to his work in this context. A previous essay on Robert Smithson’s writing within his wider art practice was published by JWCP in 2008. ‘Nowhere in time’ is similarly concerned with writing in creative practice. Here, it takes the work of writers such as Ernaux, Bolaño and Smithson, not simply as a subject of study but as an expanded form, as a set of collaborative and generative operations within which inquiry, encounter or exploration can, I hope, take place.