Scholarly Faction: A New Genre?

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

             Scholarly Faction

                 A New Genre?

         Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju 

                        Compcros

     Comparative Cognitive Processess .                                 and 

                          Systems 

"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos

            in Search of Knowledge"

The expository account flows smoothly.

The right tone is struck, the relevant register is developed, references are invoked and duly signposted, the logical progression lucid and possibly compelling.

But some aspects of the text dont sit quite right, certain absurdities seem 

accepted fact, improbabilities, likelihoods and known truth cohere.

That is an example of what I tentatively call scholarly faction, the deliberate conflation of fact and fiction in scholarly writing but shaped to betray its own non-factuality even as it is constructed to project an earnestly composed piece of writing.

I do this kind of writing in the name of taking a break from the delicate tensions, the balancing act defining scholarly expression, particularly in the humanities and social sciences where I belong.

The latest example of such a production created by me is "The Rediscovery of Kamala Shastri Yoni Yoga  as Scholar Offers Rare Text for $1M". 

Is this style of composition not risky for the reputation of a scholar?

It was so sweet surrendering to the creative drive leading me into imagining what does not exist, through the inspiration of a video dramatizing the kind of dexterity the essay seems to describe.

This expressive form may also suggest a degree of pride in the fact that the writer has so skilled themself in scholarly conventions they can play with them, leading the reader on like a marsh light guiding the unsuspecting wayfarer deeper into the groundless space, following something alluring that turns out to be something else.

Will readers feel misled, made fun of or become sceptical henceforth of the work of the scholar in question?

I have long enjoyed the strategy in fiction of creating imagined scholarly cultures, dramatizing the lure of learning, explorations at the intersections of texts and the interpretations of those texts, my favourites in that genre being the magician scholars of H.P. Lovecraft's fiction, emblematized by the infamous magical text, the Necronomicon, which loyal Lovecraftians have brought into printed existence from.the writer's imagined world, J.R.R. Tolkien's universe of imagined scholarship framing his awesome Lord of the Rings magical fantasy, the library of arcane texts constituting the scriptic universe of Harry Potter's magical world in J.K. Rowlings novelistic series.

Underlying these examples is a fascination with the power of writing, of texts as cosmos, akin to the sutra, an Asian textual form, expanding to the breadth of the universe, as one Buddhist image goes.

Underlying the fascination with written text is the primordial force of speech, humanity's primary means of communication, resonant in accounts of the creation of the universe, from Hebrew to Yoruba mythology, converging for me in the image of oro, the complex of wisdom and  knowledge through which the universe was created by Olodumare,  flung to earth to roam the world naked, forbidden to the naked gaze but approachable through owe and oriki, forms of metaphorical expression, being one of the most compelling images I know of the creatively deadly potency of human expressive powers, encapsulated by oro, speech, as described in Rowland Abiodun's Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art.

Will I one day wish I did not write such a piece as that on the fictional yoga practice, or post it on the gathering of scholars represented by the USAAfrica Dialogues Series Google group, as well as on Facebook?

I don't know, but it was fun for a short time dancing in a sky in which truth and untruth, fact and  fiction, became companions.

Great thanks to the theologian, philosopher and economist Nimi Wariboko for inspiring this piece of reflection, an effort at self understanding and explanation of self, by questioning the logic of what I am calling my experiments in scholarly faction.