The Bastard's Back
As most of my primary readers know, Dr J suffers from what has for some time seemed an incurable disease: ABD. ABD is a horrible disease that can disfigure its victims. It ages them prematurely, and it generally leads to a series of confidence-assailing consequences that can push its victims toward a kind of misanthropy (or perhaps dis-anthropy) that is ultimately more self-destructive than destructive. ABD victims can end up feeling isolated, irrelevant, and even idiotic, because unlike other diseases, ABD is a disease one acquires wilfully. Yes, it is the dreaded disease of PhD candidates known as 'All But Dissertation.' *shudder*
(For those with tin cyber-ears, I should caution everyone to read much of this entry with tongue firmly in-cheek, though you'll know when to remove it. Good rule of thumb for those bothering to read this blog: more often than not, Dr J is an ironist, though his unpressed clothes might suggest otherwise. ;-) Hell even the moniker 'Dr J' is more ironic than most tend to realize.)
The dissertation is, among budding academics, the great Nobodaddy, the spectre at the end of a long road that can seem insurmountable. The problem is, there's no consensus as to whether or not the dissertation is actually something to be feared or not. According to some, the dissertation is merely another project to get done, admittedly the biggest one, but one that one should just push through and get done-- it is, for these people, an exaggerated myth, to which one might heed FDR's advice that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. According to others, however, including many of those who have completed the damn thing, it
is a beast, a multiple-headed monster that can keep driving one back to one's beginnings, a beast made more terrifying by the fact that it has to be defeated in a certain way, and not simply defeated. All of us within the academic world have heard different stories of the dreaded dissertation: some aver that it's nothing finally of which to be afraid, that it's the Green Knight to an individual's Gawain, more a trial of one's commitment than anything else; others aver that it's like a Joyce novel into which begins with promise but never escapes, as extra chapters suddenly demand writing, as new texts creep into the writing and consideration, as various expectations (theoretical, sociological, verbal) seem to demand the candidate be all things at once, even things one is not given to being. Of the latter: all academics have heard the horror stories, of supervisory committees that suddenly demand new chapters on subjects not originally thought to be part of one's project, as projects become larger and larger and larger to the point they become, like the forementioned Joycean novel, the behemother, to use Thurber's word, of one's imagination and one's studies.
I'm writing about this now not just because this is something with which I live every day, but because of a recent conversation I had with the Chair of my department about the mythopoeia of the dissertation. According to the Chair, the dissertation is a project like any other, something to be gotten done: it doesn't have to be the most brilliant piece of work, it doesn't have to be the
summa of one's academic career, and it doesn't have to be all things to all people, an impervious work of intellect and scholarship. I have to admit that my chat with him was comforting, and that I'm taking some solace in his urgings to step away from the expectations of perfectionism that can niggle one into self-defeating silence.
Don't believe the myths, just get everything done, was the gist of his warning, and it's one I'm taking to heart. It's one I'm sure he wants me to take to heart, too, because he admitted to me the stunning numbers about PhD candidates, that more do not finish than do finish, and it is the dissertation that tends to derail most from completion, and for most, that derailment is the result of the stories that candidates hear. 'ABD' has become an academic disease that threatens the academy as much as it does an individual candidate. And he's right, of course.
But it's worth remembering, too, that the horror stories I've heard-- and that many of my colleagues have heard-- aren't lies or myths: they came from nightmarish
experience, from people whose committees or supervisors made the dissertative process at the very least
seem insuperable. I've known several colleagues who watched, almost impotently, as their committees allowed their dissertations to bloat from 300 pages to 600 or 700 or even a 1000 pages. (I've seen the finished dissertations: they're real.) I'm sure the Chair of my department (he's new to the position this year) regrets such things, instances where committees and supervisors basically used PhD candidates as the mouthpieces for their own arguments, for their own presumptions and assumptions about scholarship and about individual theses. In a way, such committees become like soccer- or stage-parents, living vicariously through the labour of others, without much due consideration of the effects of their vicarious living. Apolitical critics, for example, are forced to write intensely politicized documents; honest intellectual investigation can become hijacked by compulsions to include theoretical positions very often antithetical to the individual's own position; in short, the 'diss' becomes the committee's document, and not the student's. And the result can be a kind of persistent terror: that what one actually writes will never be good enough, that any project will inevitably become an exercise in academic palliative rather than genuine examination, that the project will become like the Sisyphian rock, rolling back down, and very often over Sisyphus, to be pushed back up the hill again.
(This is not undermine committees that question their candidates: I'm speaking only of those committees that make life impossible for their candidates.)
The long and the short of things is this, that ABD is an unfortunate disease that more often than not goes unaddressed, untreated. Many of its victims are left to wander, usually alone, in the wilderness, and eventually to withdraw from their programmes; part of this is just myth-making, part of it is academic uncertainty by the candidates, and another part of it is the surprisingly common tendency of supervisors and committees to make the dissertation as terrifying a project as the myths have suggested (and, indeed, to make the dissertation more someone else's project than one's own). Many of its victims, in sum, are taught to ignore their own instincts, and without one's instincts, one becomes paralysed and nothing gets done. And, I admit, I have fallen into this trap, and have been in it for some time, and my conversation with the Chair yesterday did a great deal to remind me, and to give me sanction, to trust again in my instincts and to do
what I need to do, and not merely to treat the process like an inexhaustible chess game in which every move one might make will eventually lead to an unseen or, worse, seen check. It's one of the saddest things, I've realized, is that the disparity of thought within the academy about what a dissertation ought to be has led me, and a great many of my colleagues, to disavow their instincts, and to become overwhelmed by a panoply of potentially disapproving voices, especially when, in humanities-related circles especially, there will be more voices of discord than accord.
For the first time in some time, I'm feeling more confident about the idea of the dissertation, and about actively making situations work to fit me rather than trying to bend myself to fit other people's expectations and the expectations of myth (and rememer that the word 'myth' has nothing to do with fact or fiction; it merely has to do with 'story'). I can do this. I can break this disease. I will break it. I will not be yet another victim in the long line of people beaten by it. My instincts have never failed; my greatest errors have always been when I distrusted them and tried to put reason (rationality) ahead of instinct, basically when I haven't trusted myself.
I wonder how many of my colleagues over the years have been in the exact same position. Probably most of them.
Years ago, when I was doing a comprehensive examination, I ran into an old professor of mine who had supervised my BA thesis. I told him who my supervisor was, to which he said, "You? You don't need supervising." Which was, in fact, the truth. Both my BA and MA theses went largely unsupervised; I did both of them, to general acclaim, with only the barest of supervision, as I let my instincts do what they had to do (which included, with the MA thesis, abandoning everything I had done, over twenty pages worth of writing, when an epiphany suddenly occurred). With my MA thesis, I remember being fretful of my committee, and expecting the worst, until I eventually just did what I had to do, expecting the worst but resigning myself to accept whatever slings and arrows got fired at me. They were surprisingly few. My committee wound up asking me to change one word in over a hundred pages. Instinct. Admittedly terrified instinct, in part, but also determined instinct, the instinct of the man with something to prove and, it seemed, very little left to lose.
There's a larger point to all this, one of which one can all too easily lose sight, that eventually sometimesone has to say 'fuck it all, I'm doing what *I* have to do,' and stop caring about 'what I *have* to do.' The strange thing about the academic world is the extent to which it, without even trying to do so explicitly, can disable more than it enables, to which myriad possibilities can, in effect, engender impossibilities.
The time has come. Fuck it all. I'm doing what *I* have to do, and damn the consequences. Fuck the cultural materialsts, and fuck the super-theorists. Fuck the politicists and fuck those who would like to deride me as naively old-fashioned or even antiquated. Fuck those that are less interested in literature and poetry than they are in their own sociological, political, and philosophical agendae. Fuck the idea of appeasement and playing it safe. Fuck the nigglesome doubts that can cloud one's mind. And fuck, too, the myth of the beast around which I've trod too lightly too long. Those that know me, that have known my work and have worked with me, know my commitment to that which I study. My field, my work, has always been larger than I will ever be-- and, bureaucratic stuff aside, I love what I do. I
love it, the whole beautifully yet intractably entangled lot.
I love what I do. Maybe that's something more of us need ultimately to remember.
Bring it on. I'm ridding myself of this disease. I'm doing what I have to do, and I'm removing myself from the shackles of doubt and self-negation. And as some of you reading this well know, this is, and will be, Dr J at his strongest; some of you, I'm well aware, have been wondering when this side of Dr J-- the determined, hell-bent little bastard who's never let
anything beat him, and who's always come back to surprise the hell out of even the most skeptical-- was going to come out to play.
Well, he's out, finally. And some of you know what this means. The tide is turning.
Thanks, Ross.
In the words of Jack Nicholson's The Joker, "Wait til they get a load of me."
