Showing posts with label PhD thesis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PhD thesis. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 12, 2023

PhD Days


John Ashbery: Houseboat Days (1977)


Despite all he did and wrote subsequently, I'm still probably most fond of John Ashbery's rather dreamy poetry collection Houseboat Days, published shortly after his Pulitzer-prize winning Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror:
The mind
Is so hospitable, taking in everything
Like boarders, and you don’t see until
It’s all over how little there was to learn
Once the stench of knowledge has dissipated
In this case, as my last PhD student completes her oral examination, it's interesting (for me, at least) to look back over more than thirty years of involvement with the institution - or the qualification - or whatever exactly it is ...

At times it feels more like a lifestyle choice than anything else.





Matt Groening: Life in Hell (1987)


The cartoon above - by Simpsons-creator Matt Groening - may strike you as a little cynical, but it does seem like a good place to start when discussing my own engagement with the degree we call the "Doctorate in Philosophy": both the one I did myself (University of Edinburgh - 4 years: 1986-1990), and my subsequent experiences as supervisor / co-supervisor of dozen-odd more (Massey University - 15 years: 2008-2023).

Not only that, but I also acted as the examiner of another ten or so (Australia & NZ - 13 years: 2008-2021), which entailed reading and annotating each thesis, writing a comprehensive report on it, and - in most cases - attending an oral exam (what used to be called a "viva voce" [with the living voice], but is now usually shortened to a viva).

Rather than Groening's "life in hell", though, I'd prefer to see it as something more akin to Ashbery's poetry collection: a strange, kaleidoscopic drift through the bazaar of world culture, albeit with an at times disproportionate emphasis on gamesmanship and the arbitrariness of academic conventions - rather like the rules of metre and rhyme, I suppose: there to be broken.

Houseboat Days


In my dream I was talking
to a group of students
about the genesis

of Poetry NZ
back in the day
in Palmerston North

I asked them to write me 
a haiku 
– making sure they knew

what that was –
then collected all their emails
for next time

so loud was the din
of the next class
invading

I could hardly hear myself think
let alone make out 
the crabbed scrawl

on the notes they gave me
I suppose it’s a reaction
to hearing of Bronwyn’s workmate

who
when told we were going to see Emily
asked 

who’s Emily Brontë?
have I started teaching again
in my dreams?

a relief then to be woken 
by clattering dishes
this morning

the old life done






Doctoral Catechism:

  • What exactly is a PhD?

    Well, Wikipedia, as ever, provides a wealth of information on the subject:
    A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: philosophiae doctor or doctor philosophiae) is the most common degree at the highest academic level, awarded following a course of study and research. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields.
  • How do you get one?
    Because it is an earned research degree, those studying for a PhD are required to produce original research that expands the boundaries of knowledge, normally in the form of a dissertation, and defend their work before a panel of other experts in the field.
    That point about an "original contribution to knowledge" is the crucial factor here. A Masters degree in any subject also - often - requires a thesis, but this can be a summary of other people's work in the field: it doesn't have to (though it certainly can) make an original contribution to the field.

  • Why do people do them?
    The completion of a PhD is typically required for employment as a university professor, researcher, or scientist in many fields. Individuals who have earned the Doctor of Philosophy degree use the title Doctor (often abbreviated "Dr" or "Dr."), although the etiquette associated with this usage may be subject to the professional ethics of the particular scholarly field, culture, or society.
    In my experience, insisting on the title "Doctor" in casual conversation generally causes more trouble than it's worth. Most people - quite rightly - associate the term solely with a medical qualification, so explaining that your expertise in (say) literary criticism doesn't really extend to offering them health advice is a bit of a waste of everyone's time.

  • How long does it take?

    In the New Zealand Academic system, still mostly based on the British model, it will probably - depending on your field and the topic you've chosen - take you at least three or four years. It's extremely rare to finish under three years. It's pretty common to go over four years, in fact, though these days institutions are trying very hard to discourage indefinitely protracted Doctoral research projects.

    In the American system, which harks back more to the Germanic paradigm, I gather it can take from five to seven years to achieve much the same end (I myself did mine in the UK, so that's not something I can testify to personally). In the USA a substantial amount of course work needs to be completed, over a period of years, before you can even start on your dissertation. In the UK, NZ and other Commonwealth countries, by contrast, the initial preparation and the composition of the thesis are all one journey.

  • Is it expensive?

    Doctoral scholarships are increasingly difficult to get. There's a good deal of competition in virtually every field, and very few of them will fund you completely for the entire length of your degree. Even getting admitted to a Doctoral programme can be hard sometimes. Unless you got Honours in your Masters degree, or have a very strong professional background in your area of study which can be regarded as equivalent, you may not be allowed to enrol at some institutions. It simply isn't true that tertiary institutions are only interested in the fees students pay them. They're far more interested in results: which in this case means successful completions.

    I've successfully supervised (or co-supervised) six PhDs now. But I've started on at least six other supervisions which were unsuccessful for one reason or another. For the most part people drop out of their Doctoral programmes for personal reasons. It can take a heavy toll on your personal life, as well as your finances. Sometimes, too, there are clashes of personality or expectations, which can entail the student switching to another supervisor or even another institution. But all that really matters is that holy grail of successful completion.

  • Should I do one myself?

    Not until you've thought through all the pros and cons associated. Do you have a research project in mind which can only really be accomplished with institutional support and advice? If so, then yes indeed, it could be a good fit for you.

    Or, if you have a strong desire to work as a university teacher, Academic institutions increasingly require a PhD as a minimum qualification for appointment. So in that case, again, yes - it's your best way forward, and you can probably pick up some tutoring along the way which will increase your professional experience and thus your eventual job prospects.

    If, however, there's a subject which really interests you, and which you are already researching already on your own time, with your own resources (online sources, the public library, etc.), it's worth asking yourself whether it might not be better simply to write an article - or even a book - on the subject and eliminate the middleman?

    The university will certainly charge you for any professional advice they offer. And if you don't really need that for this particular project, why not just try approaching some publishers yourself? It's where you'll probably end up at the culmination of your degree, so you have to be very sure that that end result is a lot better than it would have been if you'd simply followed your own star.






  • My God, these cartoonists! It may seem at times as if everyone's trying to talk the qualification down, but I don't think that's really the case. As with any obsession, you have to try to see the dark and light of it when you're trying to convey what it's actually like.

    The theses I read as an examiner included topics as various as Jorge Luis Borges' relationship to the Pragmatism of William James, Children’s Fantasy Fiction, Indonesian Postcolonial Politics, Contemporary Scottish Writing, the Semiotics of Modern Poetry, Australian Settler Fiction, the Poetics of Joan Retallack, Pasifikafuturism, New Zealand Local History, and the Poetics of Photographic Ekphrasis.

    Do I know much about any of those subjects? Well, some of them, yes. I wrote my own thesis, back in the 1980s, on South American literature, so Borges was pretty familiar to me - as (by extension) was the question of Postcolonial representation in general. Some of the others I learnt about just by reading the dissertations. My job was to judge how effectively they communicated the specialised information each of them contained - and the cogency of the writer's overall argument.

    It's a bit different from just reading a book on some subject you'd like to more about - different even from writing a book review. Examining a thesis involves grappling with a topic to which someone has devoted years and years of careful and painstaking labour. You have to treat that with respect, but not to the extent of refusing to identify flaws in the work as it stands.

    What about the ones I supervised myself? Again, not all of them were on subjects I knew well going in - though of course they did have to be in the general field of creative writing and literary criticism which were my professional area of teaching and study. I won't go through them all, but suffice it to say that each one of them was an education in some very precise field of research.



    Matt Groening: The Grad School Dropout (1987)


    I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
    Perhaps this quote from Newton is a better way to think about it than the mordant sarcasms of Matt Groening et al. I know it's absurd to compare myself to the founder of Modern Physics, but no matter where you're starting from, you can always improve on your own state of ignorance. My own blindness before what he calls "the great ocean of truth" may be far greater than his, but that doesn't mean that I'm not just as keen to learn.

    So, no, true though it undoubtedly is in some cases, the above is definitely not the whole picture. It's a useful warning to keep in mind - but, as the saying has it, verbum sapienti sat est [a word to the wise is sufficient].




    University of Edinburgh: PhD Graduands (2022)


Friday, July 24, 2020

Shirley



Josephine Decker, dir.: Shirley (2020)


Bronwyn and I have an annex of our DVD collection which we devote to movies about writers. It contains most (though not all) of the titles included in my 2016 post on the subject. It can be matched up with two other categories: Movies about Creative Writing Teachers and Movies about English Teachers.



Andy Goddard, dir.: Set Fire to the Stars (2014)


Truth to tell, these labels have a tendency to bleed into one another - certainly in the case of Set Fire to the Stars, a film about Dylan Thomas's disastrous 1950 tour of America. It's told through the eyes of John Malcolm Brinnan, the poet and teacher who facilitated his visit, and whose subsequent book Dylan Thomas in America: An Intimate Journal (1956) was one of the essential documents of mid-century poetic confessionalism.



The reason that I mention it here is because it contains a memorable cameo by Scottish actress Shirley Henderson as a rather stylised version of American horror novelist Shirley Jackson.



You have to admit that they didn't do a bad job of converting the rake-thin Henderson to the somewhat blowsy Jackson:





All that pales into significance now with Elisabeth Moss's electrifying performance - or should I say embodiment? - of Shirley Jackson in the just-released semi-biographical fantasia Shirley.



Stephen King: Danse Macabre (1981)


Mind you, the resemblance between actress and subject is the least of the merits of this extraordinary and terrifying film. I guess I've been a Shirley Jackson fan ever since I first read Stephen King's short history of the horror genre, Danse Macabre, which contains a vivid account of her most famous novel The Haunting of Hill House, sometime back in the mid-1980s.



Susan Scarf Merrell: Shirley (2014)


The film is based on a novel, rather than either of the two biographies I compared in my blogpost Two Versions of Shirley Jackson a few years ago, so I should perhaps stress that it's not to be trusted as an accurate reflection of events.



Shirley Jackson: Hangsaman (1951)


I've also read the novel Hangsaman, which is one of the main pegs the plot of Shirley hangs on (pun intended). As I watched it, though, it did occur to me that there might be quite a bit in it which didn't make immediate sense to a non-American viewing audience.



Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House (1959)


American High School students (or so I've been led to believe) are generally forced at some point in their educational careers to read and discuss Jackson's notorious story "The Lottery," if not one or other of her two most famous novels, The Haunting of Hill House - recently travestied in a dreadful netflix TV series - and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, also filmed recently.



Shirley Jackson: We Have Always Lived in the Castle (2019)


In fact, though, Jackson wrote six novels, together with the opening chapters of a seventh, published after her death by her husband (and literary executor) Stanley Hyman. They are, in order:

  1. The Road through the Wall. 1948. Foreword by Ruth Franklin. Penguin Classics. New York: Penguin, 2013.
  2. Hangsaman. 1951. Foreword by Francine Prose. Penguin Classics. New York: Penguin, 2013.
  3. The Bird's Nest. 1954. In The Magic of Shirley Jackson: The Bird’s Nest / Life among the Savages / Raising Demons &c. Ed. Stanley Edgar Hyman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966.
  4. The Sundial. 1958. Foreword by Victor LaValle. Penguin Classics. New York: Penguin, 2014.
  5. The Haunting of Hill House. 1959. New York: Penguin, 1984.
  6. We Have Always Lived in the Castle. 1962. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.
  7. Come Along with Me. Ed. Stanley Edgar Hyman. 1966. New York: Penguin, 1995.




Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories
Shirley Jackson. Novels and Stories: The Lottery / The Haunting of Hill House / We Have Always Lived in the Castle / Other Stories and Sketches. Ed. Joyce Carol Oates. The Library of America, 204. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2010.


I've often felt that the Library of America missed a trick by not reprinting all of them in their otherwise fine edition of Jackson's Novels and Stories. Was it snobbery, perhaps? Did they feel that a 'genre' author of this type should feel complimented by being included in the series at all? Carson McCullers - to my mind a writer of approximately equal accomplishment - got two volumes, one devoted to novels, the other to stories.

All six of these novels are brilliant is the point I'd like to emphasise here. They are not mere precursors, or prentice works, dashed off before the supreme accomplishment of Hill House and Castle. One reason I feel particularly grateful for this new Shirley Jackson movie is that it attempts to disentangle the dark roots of her second novel, without belittling it in any way.

There would certainly have been enough material for an entire volume of collected stories, too. She only published one book of short stories in her lifetime, hot on the heels of the immense success of "The Lottery."



Shirley Jackson: The Lottery and Other Stories (1949)
The Lottery: Adventures of the Daemon Lover. 1949. London: Robinson Publishing, 1988.
This is reprinted in the Library of America Novels and Stories. Unfortunately, that leaves an overlapping series of posthumously published collections, none of which entirely supersedes any of the others. Shirley Jackson completists are therefore forced to include all of the following in their collections:

  1. The Magic of Shirley Jackson: The Bird’s Nest / Life among the Savages / Raising Demons &c. Ed. Stanley Edgar Hyman. 1954, 1953, 1956. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966.
  2. Come Along with Me. Ed. Stanley Edgar Hyman. 1966. New York: Penguin, 1995.
  3. Just an Ordinary Day: Part of a Novel, Sixteen Stories, and Three Lectures. Ed. Laurence Jackson Hyman & Sarah Hyman Stewart. 1997. Bantam Books. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., 1998.
  4. "Other Stories and Sketches." In Novels and Stories. Ed. Joyce Carol Oates. The Library of America, 204. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2010.
  5. Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings. Introduction by Ruth Franklin. Ed. Laurence Jackson Hyman & Sarah Hyman DeWitt. New York: Random House, 2015.
  6. Jackson, Shirley. Dark Tales. Foreword by Ottessa Moshfegh. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 2017.




Shirley Jackson: Dark Tales (2017)


To say the least, this has left her legacy in a somewhat untidy state, not least because the editorial policies of some of these volumes have been a bit on the inclusive side. Jackson wrote for money, and published a good deal in magazines that she might not have liked to have seen perpetuated in book-form.

It's hard for an obsessive such as myself to argue that I shouldn't have access to all of this material - after all, the same could be said of that wayward spendthrift F. Scott Fitzgerald - but it would be nice to see it reduced to some kind of order, given her immense accomplishments in this form.

Coming back to Shirley, though, it's rare for me to watch a movie that ticks all of the boxes with such relentless precision. True, it's a little arty in places, with drifting out-of-focus vignettes glimpsed through windows.



It's also completely inaccurate, given the decision to edit out the brood of children that infested Jackson and Hyman's house, and which must have made it a kind of Bedlam to spend any time in - for further evidence, see her books Life among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1956), which cover precisely the period this story is set in. Those titles do rather speak for themselves.

It's hard to imagine a more flattering portrait of a writer, though. Shirley Jackson comes across as neurotic, manipulative, unpredictable, drunken, lazy, greedy, and obsessive - all at the same time. Above all, though, she's genuinely terrifying! Surely there's not a scribe alive who wouldn't like to be described in those terms?

I suppose that there was an extra treat for me, though, in the film's portrayal of Academia. A while ago I started writing a blogpost on the subject of writing a PhD. Central to the piece was the cartoon below, by Matt Groening, composed before he achieved worldwide fame with The Simpsons:



Matt Groening: Life in Hell (1987)


As Professor Stanley Hyman, Shirley Jackson's husband, tortured and mocked his new assistant, an aspiring young Academic whose wife is being simultaneously tormented by the mercurial Shirley, who needs her to act as a kind of double for the hapless "lost girl" protagonist of her new novel, I felt a vivid sense of déjà vu about the whole thing.



Those "little favours" asked for by the Professor which can never be turned down for fear that he won't put in a kind word for you when the chips are down (of course he won't); those repeated requests for him to "read your dissertation," or let you give a guest lecture, or show any signs of human charity at all ...



So, while it certainly doesn't need me to promote it, I do suggest that you treat yourself to an excursion to see Shirley if you have any interest in writing at all. She may have come down in folklore as a kind of mad witch, scribbling Gothic fantasies on the kitchen table, but in fact Shirley Jackson was a literary virtuoso with a Jamesian level of control.

The Haunting of Hill House can certainly be paralleled with "The Turn of the Screw," but it's worth remembering generally that an obsession with ghosts and haunted spaces was almost a given for all the great novelists of the nineteenth century. It's only in the modern era that such topics have been associated with pulp or popular fiction.

Shirley Jackson's work certainly constitutes formidable proof that psychological horror can coexist with the supernatural to create great writing. She's one of my literary heroes. It's nice to see her books back in print (thanks to Penguin Classics), and her genius finally beginning to be vindicated at last.



Shirley Jackson: We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)



[Postscript (12/12/20)]:

Well, clearly great minds think alike. My comments above how "I've often felt that the Library of America missed a trick by not reprinting all of [other novels] in their otherwise fine edition of Jackson's Novels and Stories" only anticipated by a few months the appearance of the following:



Shirley Jackson: Four Novels of the 1940s & 50s (2020)

Shirley Jackson. Four Novels of the 1940s & 50s: The Road Through the Wall / Hangsaman / The Bird’s Nest / The Sundial. 1948, 1951, 1954, 1958. Ed. Ruth Franklin. The Library of America, 336. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2020.


Once before this happened to me, when I remarked to a fellow Melville enthusiast that I was looking forward to the day when the Library of America decided to complete their complete 3-volume edition of his fiction with a volume of collected poems, including Clarel and the other three books, as well as his posthumous and unpublished work in that genre.

Sure enough, a few years later, out it came:



Herman Melville: Complete Poems (2020)

Herman Melville. Complete Poems: Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War / Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land / John Marr and Other Sailors with Some Sea-Pieces / Timoleon Etc. / Posthumous & Unpublished: Weeds and Wildlings Chiefly, with a Rose or Two / Parthenope / Uncollected Poetry and Prose-and-Verse. 1866, 1876, 1888 & 1891. Library of America Herman Melville Edition, 4. Ed. Hershel Parker. Note on the Texts by Robert A. Sandberg. The Library of America, 320. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2019.


Nice to feel vindicated in that way, particularly when the books themselves are so useful and beautiful.




Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Fifth Anniversary (Wood)



I started this blog on the 14th of June, 2006, so this is The Imaginary Museum's fifth anniversary. I'm afraid that the traditional material for a fifth anniversary present is wood (though modern gift-givers have replaced that with silverware, apparently). For myself, I'm sticking with the wood.

Why? On the one hand, because it's rather shocking to look at all those posts and see just how much time I must have spent typing away in these little blogger text boxes. What a woodenhead! On the other hand, though it's nice to think how much wood-pulp I must have saved by not printing it all out ...

This blog is only part of the story, though. From the very beginning I saw this as a project space: somewhere where I could try online text experiments. The very first thing I did with it, in fact, was to put up a bunch of topographical poems about Auckland, Roadworks, linked to a game-board with twin axes of time and space (okay, maybe that one wasn't all that successful, but I was looking for a three-dimensional way of arranging texts outside the conventions of the book-codex ...)

Quickly, though, I realised that the best way to use a single centralised site, like this one, was as a crossroads to other websites, each one of which could be adjusted to display different techniques and materials. The sidebar over there will testify to the sheer number of these experiments I've done over the past five years. Basically, though, they've boiled down to one big project per year - I'm not quite sure why. Every time I complete one of these things I tell myself Never again ...

So here they are, the "big five", in rough chronological order:


    2007:


  1. (November 6-December 3, 2007) Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive: Bibliographical Aids for the Use of Those Consulting the Waiata Archive (1974) and the AoNZPSA (2002-2004) - Audio Recordings available in Special Collections, University of Auckland Library and in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington.

  2. This website serves as an index to the contents of the:

    Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive. Compiled and edited by Jan Kemp and Jack Ross, with assistance from Edmund King and Mark King. Materials collected by Jan Kemp, Elizabeth Alley, David Howard with Morrin Rout, and Richard Reeve with Nick Ascroft. (Special Collections Dept, Auckland University Library). [40 CDs Audio / 2 CDs Texts].

    which is a project I worked on pretty intensively from 2002 to around 2008, when the last of the three linked audio / text anthologies I edited with Jan Kemp (Classic, Contemporary and New New Zealand Poets in Performance) was issued by Auckland University Press. We still get quite a lot of hits. There are 200-odd poets' pages included on the site, and I update it periodically with new information (on request).



    2008:


  3. The R.E.M. [Random Excess Memory] Trilogy (2000-2008):
    • (January 19-30, 2008) [The R.E.M. Trilogy, 1]: Nights with Giordano Bruno: A Novel.
    • (January 20-February 13, 2008) [[The R.E.M. Trilogy, 2 - The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis]: Who am I? Automatic Writing.
    • (January 20-February 13, 2008) [The R.E.M. Trilogy, 2 - The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis]: Where am I? Cuttings.
    • (August 15, 2006-September 3, 2007) [The R.E.M. Trilogy, 3 - EMO]: EVA AVE– Inheritor of silence / shall I be? / Black mass below us / above us / only sky …
    • (August 16, 2006-September 3, 2007) [The R.E.M. Trilogy, 3 - EMO]: Moons of Mars – Welcome / to the new reality / Nothing’s stranger / than the will / to survive …
    • (August 15, 2006-September 3, 2007) [The R.E.M. Trilogy, 3 - EMO]: Ovid in Otherworld – Wild geese draw lines / across an amber sky / fish bask / in frozen rivers / generators die …

  4. Between 2000 and 2008 I published a trilogy of novels, which are now available in their entirety on these six linked sites: one for Nights with Giordano Bruno (Wellington: Bumper Books, 2000), two for The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis (Auckland: Titus Books, 2006), and three for EMO (Auckland: Titus Books, 2008). Of course, they're still a lot easier to read in their original print copies, but one must continue to experiment with new formats (I suppose).



    2009:


  5. Academica (1984-1995):
    • (April 14-August 22, 2009) John Masefield: Early Novels 1908-1911. MA Thesis (University of Auckland, 1984-86).
    • (April 14-July 22, 2009) Versions of South America: An Elusive Identity: Versions of South America from Aphra Behn to the Present Day. PhD Thesis (University of Edinburgh, 1986-90).
    • (August 22, 2006-September 26, 2007) Scheherazade’s Web: The Thousand and One Nights and Comparative Literature.

  6. This is an obeisance to the amount of time I've spent bumbling around in Academia: a complete online version of my MA & PhD theses and my post-Doctoral research (respectively: Auckland University, 1984-85 / Edinburgh University, 1986-90 / Massey & Auckland Universities, 1991-95). Since most of this stuff was composed in the transitional period before the digital age (the Masters thesis on a typewriter, in fact), it had to be scanned and re-edited before I was able to put it up online. Was it all worth it? Who knows? At any rate, there it all is, awaiting the curious ...



    2010:


  7. (June 1, 2009-July 4, 2010) A Gentle Madness: A Catalogue of My Book Collection: Geographical by Locations & Indexed by Categories.

  8. It may not sound like much when you put it like that, but this was definitely the most laborious of these projects. It does seem worth all the time and trouble it took now, though - it's awful not to be able to locate a book you know you own when you really need it ...



    2011:


  9. (February 17-June 11, 2011) Leicester Kyle: An Index to the Collected Poems of Leicester Hugo Kyle (1937-2006).

  10. And, last but not least, a work in progress: the online edition of my old friend Leicester Kyle's Collected Poems which I've been engaged on since the beginning of this year. It's just a tease at present, as the site is not yet complete. All you can access for the moment is the overall index, which lists all the works which will you eventually be able to consult in their entirety. This portion of the site does include a bibliography and reprints of all the secondary literature on Leicester I've been able to locate to date, however.

At times I despair at the magnitude of what still remains to be done on this project, but I suppose I can just continue to chip away at it gradually. Watch this space, though. I'm hoping to put out a limited edition of some late poems of Leicester's later this year, and the full text site should be online - albeit only in part - by July or so (I hope).

(By the way, any help in identifying the other person in this photo of Leicester Kyle in Auckland in the mid-90s - and the venue, and the photographer - would be greatly appreciated:)


Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Memories of Overdevelopment


[Gerald Martin: Gabriel García Márquez (2009)]

There's some interesting stuff in the preface of this biography of Gabriel García Márquez, which I bought in Borders the other day with one of their special email discount offers. The author, Gerald Martin, reveals that he's been working on it for the past twenty years (ever since his previous book, Journeys Through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century came out in 1989, in fact).

It's a fairly hefty tome, but he also mentions that it was originally much longer - roughly two thousand pages long - only he began to despair of finishing it after first he, then "Gabo" (García Márquez's official nickname in the Spanish-speaking world) came down with cancer. Both did eventually recover, but it reminded him that while our studies may have no end, our bodies do. Hence the hasty compilation of this truncated, greatest-hits version of the biography.

I can't help feeling that Martin was wise to take this approach. A striking example of an author who didn't truncate the literary expression of his Herculean labours is Norman Sherry, the biographer of Graham Greene. The first volume of his mighty work (published while Greene was still alive) is informative enough, but after that, in the next two volumes, he goes thoroughly off the rails. Footnotes begin to breed on the borders of the text, replete with strange fancies which appear to have less to do with Greene than with Sherry's own advancing mental illness (I swear there's one that speculates what kind of a news report Greene would have written if he'd present at Christ's crucifixion - hard-hitting, to be sure, but basically true to the facts. It's not that I dispute that Greene might well have written a cogent eye-witness account of Calvary - just what on earth this has to do with anything in particular? Why stop there? What might he have written about the creation of the universe if he'd been present at that? Or about the miracle of the loaves and fishes? Who the hell knows or cares?)

Gabo (or "Gabito", if you want to sound even more unbuttoned) is a writer whose path has intersected with Greene's on many occasions. I'm not sure that it's important to know exactly when or where each of their meetings took place. Martin clearly does know, but he mercifully spares us the details. What's more important is that both are deeply controversial, rather dodgy characters, with an equivocal relationship to tyrants - or men and women of power - throughout the world (Fidel Castro for Gabo, Omar Trujillo for Greene).

Martin's, then, is a fascinating and immediately indispensable account of the Nobel-prize-winning García Márquez's career (indispensable because it fills in the holes in his very partial and self-serving half-autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale - then goes on to tell the rest of the story). The complete version will no doubt see the light of day sometime -- probably after Gabo's death - but it doesn't really matter. This is the book, and it must have been profoundly satisfying to see it finally appear after twenty years.

[Gerald Martin: Journeys Through the Labyrinth (1989)]

Which brings me to the real subject of this post. I guess the real reason I couldn't walk past Gerald Martin's book when I saw it sitting on the shelves there in Borders was because of my vivid memories of its predecessor, Journeys through the Labyrinth. It came out when I was in the last stages of my Doctoral thesis, on portrayals of South America in English literature, and offered me, then, a number of vital clues to my own self-created labyrinth.

Basically the problem was that my series of readings of novels such as Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688), Joseph Conrad's Nostromo (1904), & W. H. Hudson's Green Mansions (1904); natural histories by Humboldt, Darwin, Bates & Wallace; poems & translations by Kathy Acker, Elizabeth Bishop & Angela Carter - all of which went to make up the composite picture of "South America" in the European imagination - had to be somehow reconciled with the works of Latin-American visionaries such as Miguel Angel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier, Mario Vargas Llosa, and García Márquez himself.

I didn't want to retreat onto the then-prevalent notion that all "outsider" views of indigenous cultures were automatically spurious. It didn't seem to be a problem for the locals themselves. García Márquez actually remarked in a book of conversations with his old friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza that "Graham Greene taught me to write about the tropics." The Post-colonial, postmodernist version of Latin America offered by the Magic realists seemed to be acting, rather, as a self-reflecting mirror, echoing back the technical innovations of Joyce and Faulkner to a continent and culture which could now proceed to make new sense of them.

Joseph Conrad spent a total of roughly eighteen hours on the soil of South America, which doesn't seem to have prevented him from composing a towering masterpiece, Nostromo, about the complex politics of Colombia, Venezuela and the Panama canal region (albeit renamed Costaguana and Sulaco for the purposes of the narrative). Was his work automatically inferior to (say) García Márquez's own political Dictator-novel Autumn of the Patriarch, also set in a composite country of the imagination? Was it necessary to be from a place, or know it exhaustively, in order to evoke it imaginatively?

What is South America, anyway? Geographically it makes sense to draw a line across the isthmus of Panama, parcelling it off physically from that other huge landmass called North America. Culturally, however, it makes much more sense to draw that line at the Rio Grande, dividing the Norte-Americano United States and Canada from the complex Hispanic-language-speaking melting-pot referred to as "Latin America" - incorporating (as it does) those vast identities known as Mexico, Central America, Brazil, Argentina, and even a considerable portion of the West Indies and the Caribbean.

Yet "South America" was the name which constantly came up - in European literature, at any rate. That composite region of Amazonian Indians, Lost Andean cities, condors, gauchos and conquistadors definitely had its own place in the Western imagination beside the equally equivocal "Darkest Africa," the "Wild West," the "South Seas" or the "Frozen North."

I'm not sure that I ever solved the logistic problems involved in studying so vast and amorphous a subject: no less than a roadmap of a central region of our cultural unconscious. I had a jolly good try, though, and I owe a definite vote of thanks to Gerald Martin's illuminating book for extricating me at the last minute from even worse abysses of uncertainty.

Twnety years, though! I did wonder what he was doing - why the only book of his I'd seen since was an elegant annotated translation of Asturias's classic proto-Magic-Realist novel Men of Maize. It's a long time to be stuck on just one project.

And then came the thought that it's been twenty years (give or take a few) since I last took a good look at my thesis! The subject started to sicken me long before I'd finished it (is it the same with all Doctoral students? Some of them seem to go on to Post-Docs, wallowing round in the same citations and authorities for another couple of years, attempting - sometimes successfully - to turn their vast beached whales into readable books). For myself, though, I felt my mental health required that I change tack completely, start to fixate unhealthily on something else.

That something turned into a five-year flirtation with the 1001 Nights (I call it a flirtation rather than an affair because it had such meager results: a few published essays and conference papers. You can check them all out online here if you're curious why I found the book so fascinating. If it is a book, that is - more, perhaps, like the iceberg-tip of a whole submerged literature ...)

That, in turn, led to my own series of labyrinthine, Nights-inspired narratives: the trilogy of novels that began with Giordano Bruno in 2000 and ended with E M O last year - there's a good ten years of work in there, too.

But twenty years! The thing is, Gerald Martin's hero-quest has inspired me to go back to my own roots and take another look at that great carcass of a PhD thesis. I approached some publishers at the time, but nobody was biting, and of course a lot has happened since in that field, and (indeed) in the whole area of literary criticism and theory. Some of it still seems of interest to me, though - an honest expression of perplexity at the magnitude of an impossible task, but one which perhaps carved a few tracks through the jungle of Western visions / versions / distortions of the Other.

Anyway, whether it interests anyone else or not, I've decided to transfer the whole thing to a website here. It's unfinished as yet. One of the things about that two-decade gap is that it makes me realise how much we've all had to live on the cusp of technology throughout those years. I did write the thesis on a computer - whereas my Masters thesis (1985) was tapped out laboriously on a manual typewriter - but it was the Edinburgh university mainframe, and there was no obvious way to save the data on any kind of floppy disc or other encoding device at the time.

My "thesis", then, consists of three-hundred odd loose-leaf sheets of paper which I'm gradually scanning and collating into an electronic file, and thence putting up online. I'm resisting the temptation to rewrite it too much, but I am replacing footnote references with inline citations,and making various other hopefully labour-saving alterations. The bibliography, appendices and introduction are all up, though, and I imagine by the end of the year (at the latest) that the rest will have followed them into cyberspace.

I conclude this post for the moment, then, with two pictures. One comes from the 1968 film-adaptation of Edmundo Desnoes' classic novel about growing up poor in Cuba, Memories of Underdevelopment - albeit linked to an extremely artful book and film, I guess this image might be said to stand in for the reality of Latin American poverty and political turmoil.

The other, Antonio Ruíz's "El sueño de la Malinche" [Malinche's dream] has fascinated me since the first moment I saw it (on the dustjacket of Gerald Martin's Journeys through the Labryrinth, actually). Malinche (or Dona Marina), as you no doubt know, was the Indian woman who acted as an interpreter to the conquistador Cortes, thus greatly faciliating his otherwise virtually-inexplicable conquest of the Aztec Empire. Interpreter and mistress - she bore him a child, also, who has been described as "the first Mexican" - the first human being to suffer that particular and peculiar imbalance between Old World and New World, Spanish and Indian, Coloniser and Colonised, which has since afflicted so much of the globe we all live on.

Malinche's dream of spires and churches might be seen, then, as more of a nightmare - but was the colossal, merciless violence of the Spanish conquistadors really worse than the monotonous diet of human sacrifice and warfare which the Aztecs imposed on their somewhat more peaceful neighbours? Who knows? Who can possibly say? Weighing up oppressors and miseries against each other can be a rather fraught procedure.

One thing is certain. Ruiz's painting (for me, at any rate) perfectly portrays this point of balance, the single woman on whom the fate of Empires and whole cultures rests - a Indian Madonna with the first Latin-American growing in her womb. It reminds me that I'll never regret having spent five years of my life looking for some answers to the questions posed by such images of colonial (and post-colonial) identity.

To a New Zealander they have a certain everyday relevance which is perhaps a little difficult to convey to Europeans. Finally, though, Conrad, Hudson, Darwin, Bishop and the others still seem to me have vital contributions to make to our understanding of this conundrum of the divided self - the need to feel remorse for a rapacious, violent past, and yet the equally strong necessity not to be paralysed by such a crippling mountain of guilt.

In each case, it seemed to me then and now, they took a worthy place beside the magicians of the Latin American literary "boom" - Jose Donoso, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and of course Gabito - by dint of the sheer "intensity of attention" (the phrase is W. H. Auden's) each of them paid to this adopted country of their imagination: call it "South America" or what you will. Intensity of attention ...

"or, less pompously, love."


[Antonio Ruíz: El sueño de la Malinche (1939)]