I've completed the three main chapters of my dissertation. It's now time to write the introduction and conclusion, and make any revisions. Things are going well, if slowly. Tentative title: Narratives of Zero: Writing Upon Nothing in Modern and Postmodern Literature.
I think I'll actually be sad when it's over. I've really grown to have faith in my topic, instead of becoming tired of it.
But even better, I have enjoyed figuring out "what I know" about nothingness in literature through the process of writing. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty says, “The writer’s thought does not control his language from without; the writer is himself a kind of new idiom, constructing itself. […] My own words take me by surprise and teach me what I think.”
This last statement has become my motto in recent months. I often take a fearful joy in the act of sitting down to write while not knowing exactly what I'm going to say - surprising myself by the course my words take me. Writing is epistemology, not just a recorder of knowledge/narrative; it constructs thought, produces the author and her authority, and retroactively generates the writer who knows what she thinks before she sets down to write.
Writing precedes thought, consciousness, the author, the writer, and the knowing being: to reiterate the narrator of Beckett’s Unnamable, “I know no more questions and they keep on pouring out of my mouth.”
Writing is a craft. It's intuitive, but the end result is thinking which is the opposite of intuitive: conscious, reflective, propositional. It's really interesting. Mom was telling me about a friend of hers who teaches kids to read, and she said that she doesn't think there's any one thing she does that makes kids learn to do it. They try and fail and try and fail and then all of a sudden, one day they read. Like spoken-language acquisition.
ReplyDeleteWill you be posting excerpts when it's finished? It sounds fascinating.
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