Cry Havoc and Let Slip
Cry Havoc and Let Slip

Summary/Abstract: Cry Havoc and Let Slip has been adapted from a chapter in my doctoral thesis, Closer to Home. It is an ekphrastic depiction of creative process: reflexive, analytical and unique in its experimental use of graphics to demonstrate some of the drafting decisions, theoretical influences and personal reflections that went into constructing the story. This short piece is part of a wider, experimental exploration into what forms autoethnography can take. In brief, influences informing the interpretation and representation of pain and violence include Bataille’s Literature and Evil (1957) and Amery’s At the Mind’s Limits (1964); with Csikszentmihalyi’s Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (1997) and Finke’s “Geneplore Model of Creativity” from Creative Cognition (1992) informing my reflections of process. The nature of the reader’s participation with a violent text is as much a part of the text’s potency as the subject and the prose. By troubling layout and highlighting process, the reading of the violence in the text does not become what Tanner in her book Intimate Violence (1994) calls “mere consumption.” The victim’s body does not disappear beneath narrative abstraction: instead it is constantly highlighted as being as physical and vulnerable as the reader’s, just as the technical construction of the prose is emphasized.

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