You may be wondering why I have been silent for over a fortnight. (I have been jotting things in my physical journal but not onto the blog site).
It is that time of the PhD candidature. The last roll of the dice. The final write up before returning to the novel.
My latest supervision session was another twist in the plot of the scholarship narrative. All throgh my candidature I have assumed that I actually had a defined path, a clear way ahead.
There were of course moments when I have felt completely lost within the maze of pathways and data trails tand at other times I have found myself lost in the academic language of the 'big theorists' of the C20th. At times I have felt that writing the novel is problematic, both in practice and actual performance, for a novice fiction writer particularly in the realms ethics of storytelling and story ownership.
Then of course I have been lost in the structure. How do I use and control the data I have gathered? The reading notes, journal entries, personal reflections on the frustrations wrought by writing within an academy, the Conference presentations, mind maps and diagrams. How to pull it into a co-hesive whole? And how to merge the disparate voices and styles? Indeed do they have to merged into one, or can they all exist within the one piece of text? If so, how will this work? Add to this the tension, for one about to be tested, examined, put on display and found wanting.
A sense of stability and equilibrium is not often the dominant emotion within the three years or more.
These last two weeks have perfectly illustrated the worst swings between confidence and despair. Having pulled out all my academic and exgestical writing from the previous three and a half years I began to feel confident that the research data was virtually at my fingertips on my HDD. It seemed to me that from this 75,000 was the very kernel of the exgesis and I needed only to re-frame and construct the 30,000 word piece. With great care I referred back my 'safety net'. My supervisor had provided all candidates with her model for the construction of the exegesis. I have used this document since 2007 and all the key questions have been driving my reading. All my notes from the articles and texts have been chosen with a subconscious eye on these key questions.
Thus by laying these questions out as the 'bones' for the final draft, I began feeling at once relieved and energised; confident that I have the academic capacity to bring it all together.
Well that was great up until my last fateful PhD supervision meeting.... 10th June.
This date is now etched in blood red ink on my calendar. With one simple phone conversation suddenly everything was now chaos. My supervisor queried my central 'question', my thesis statement if you prefer the academic term. Logically all hypotheses and points drawn to answer my original question now seemed so far off track as to be totally useless.
There is also an issue of cross-cultural communication. My supervisor, although brilliant, writes with English as a second language. Forma academic writing presents no problems but informal colloquial speech becomes problematic with degrees of misunderstanding arising from subtleties of nuance. What she often intends as positive feedback is inevitably received as destructive. Even after ensuring that I write down her words verbatim, feed back the core concept as I am hearing it, and gaining what appears to be agreeance on shared meanings. As a validity test, I show my written notes to a trusted colleague and friend and am reassured that my interpretation of the actual words is correct.
This meant that I was way off track, and seemingly have been for a number of years. Two key academic terms were foregrounded in our discussion. Notions of mediation and mediatization of text. I suddenly felt 'at sea'. I needed to be sure that I understood these concepts and theories as obviously what I had believed I had been writing did not answer these challenges and concepts.
Next I felt that i was being pushed right back into my supervisor's core area of expertise, psychoanalyisis and postmodern literary theory.
How can I be needing to read again at this late stage?
How can it be a productive use of my time?
But above all, how can I have missed any central theorizing?
Just to compound my despair, I realised that she had in mind a core concern for the reader's 'safe space' for interacting with what she described as 'confronting' material in my novel!
Confronting? For the reader? Come on.... these are the same readers who watch real crime and Underbelly on free-to-air-TV and buy every Twilight instalment from KMart.
I was also under the impression (now misconception) that my research and practice was to investigate the development of a 'safe writing space', a place where the real life events and tragedies can be harnessed and reconceptualised as fictional plot decisions.
As an author writing about women with degrees of mental instability, who herself is similarly afflicted on a daily basis, I am using the writing practice as both therapy and research. I am in need of the 'safe space' not the reader.
Obviously the result of this supervision session was a toppling down the mood scale towards severe depression. I managed to stay afloat by becoming very angry.
Adrenaline was my saviour this time.
I was/am angry that my work is supposed to meet my supervisors perception of what is important in my research and practice and not what is important to me, the scholar and writer; the very energy that has driven me through the ups and downs of the candidature. It is my work. I want to own it... and that looks like I will need to defend this position in my formal submission. It is as if I am now faced with countering the dominant theorizing of the late C20th.
My instinct tells me that, a colleague and playwright from the UK, Mike Harris is correct when he states that in Europe, the theory debates have moved on from the "French Theorists". I am now seeking to find what exactly is this new thinking. I hate the term post-post-modernism (or even post-post-post) yet this is currently the discourse that suits my work. I want a to find a sort of neo-humanism, one that acknowledges that in storytelling at least, there are indeed 'meta-narratives' and 'universal truths' and that these are based upon a 'universal aesthetic' and 'core humanity with moral and ethical clarity', rather than post-modern uncertainties and truth claims.
How can I possibly argue this point sucessfully? Especially at this stage of the candidature with only two weeks to go?
I am still angry. At least this anger, has stopped my fall into the paws of the black dog. It will drive me on, even if I am throwing up, gnawing on finger nails, not sleeping and feeling strung out and despairing. I will conquer this task... and I will attempt to avoid the inevitable crisis point and hospitalisation.
I will not go there because of this one conversation. Read my cyncicism.... I am so pleased she has had a pleasant an generative holiday in Paris over these last days. I definitely have not.
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