The Anxiety of Paper-Writing

I'm done! I'm done. Done, done, DONE. I am so exhausted and relieved. For the last two weeks, I've felt like reciting John Donne's "A Hymn to God the Father":

"When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,
For I have more."

Ach, it was never ending. First I wrote Isobel's 15 pager for Romantic Poetry and Theories of the Sublime - not that many pages, per se, but an enormous task, considering we had only a week and a half to research and write as well as other readings/classes and a presentation to prepare. We were required to choose an attribute associated with the sublime - e.g., creation and destruction, fear, awe, solitude/isolation, unity, nature, the gothic, knowledge and ignorance, thrill - and examine that attribute in the works of three poets and two theorists, incorporating at least three secondary texts into our paper.

Well - I can write one ten-pager on a single poem and poet, so to incorporate THREE plus more was nigh impossible...needless to say I did quite a bit of cutting and slashing from the final draft. In order to discuss Anna Laeticia Barbauld's "A Summer Evening's Meditation," I needed to find out as much as I could about Unitarian beliefs in England in the end of the eighteenth century - particularly their conceptions of their relationship to God and the immortality of the soul - and fast, because I needed to be able to use that information when reading and analyzing the poem. Harder than you'd think to find a text analyzing English Unitarian belief around 1800.

I'm often asked why it takes me so long to write a paper when, after majoring in English, teaching the subject, and taking graduate courses, I should be able to pop out one of these babies without a sweat. The above should provide something of an answer: the more advanced I get in my studies, the more complex the assignments and the more research is required before I can just "sit and write." More and more I am required to engage with "secondary sources," which is what we call critical writing and theory that concerns the literature we're discussing. For example, I will find a book of essays that concern Salman Rushdie and read through them all to get a sense of the current critical reception of Rushdie and the issues in his literature that are being debated.

I finished my essay, "The Anxiety of Isolation: Can the Subjective Sublime Be Communicated?" Friday morning, literally just before class, and now turned in a second for my Indian prose class entitled "Identity as Fiction: Self-Authoring in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines" today at 2 p.m., once again editing up until class time. An essay is never really "finished" here as far as I am concerned; it's really a revised draft, because in the real world essays would go through several editing stages before being submitted; here we have only the one for a grade. Lots of anxiety riding upon that!

So I haven't gotten a lot of sleep these past two weeks, and was up until 2 am last night with most of my Indian Prose classmates having a "paper party" in the library (i.e. going a little insane trying to figure out how to articulate extemely abstract concepts). Yesterday morning my Romanticism group also read and performed six Romantic poems interpretively. For those of you who understand my fear of acting, that was quite the feat.

In the tradition of last year, I'm going to post the first two paragraphs from my Indian prose paper, should you care to read them. I've been told that my blog is too literary (pshaw!) and that no one knows what the heck I'm talking about most of the time, but hey - my little brother wanted to know what I'm doing, so here you are. And I'm proud of it!
Enjoy.

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The title of Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines contains levels of metaphorical meaning that reflect on concentric narratives within the text itself. The "lines" the unnamed Bengali narrator of the novel eventually refers to are, literally, borders between nations on a map and lines he draws with a compass, measuring relative distances; metaphorically, they are the lines that are meant to separate nations and therefore identities, but which ironically often cause those nations and identities to become interdependent by heightening tensions between them. The lines drawn on maps are fictions that we come to accept and even help to create, reinforcing “nationhood” through language and acts of patriotism. In this sense, lines—as in poetic lines or an actor’s lines—are also stories, the fictions we create that shape our identities. These lines are shadowy (as in shifting or indistinct) or shadowing (as in imitative) or, more frequently, some combination of shifting and imitative. In The Shadow Lines, Ghosh suggests that the only means of stabilizing identity is to consciously author oneself, recognizing identity as a social construct. He comments on the act of storytelling as part of identity formation in its meta-structure. Ghosh’s narrative technique in the novel is to present an event that then triggers many others, investing the first event with resonance and meaning. This reveals that the fictions of memory and history shape one’s identity as much as does the fiction of nationality.

All the central characters in the novel tell stories: Tridib, Ila, May, Robi, the grandmother and of course the narrator himself, a first-person limited narrator with powers of memory that occasionally make him seem omniscient. The novel is something of a Buildungsroman, in which the narrator comes to understand his own story by re-telling others’ stories and by consciously adjusting his own self-authorship in reference to theirs. He admires his erudite and mysterious older cousin Tridib, who seems to have achieved some level of wisdom, while he loves but pities his egoistic second cousin Ila, whose cosmopolitan upbringing has confused rather than expanded her sense of self. Thus he privileges Tridib’s stories and emulates them; they are more fluid, containing, but not confined to, Indian subjects and Indian influences and incorporating scientific detail along with wild feats of imagination. Ila’s stories, on the other hand, are less fulfilling to the narrator because they are rigid and keep her consciousness static.

While the narrator and Tridib consciously readjust their understanding of the world and their relationship to it, Ila less consciously divides the world into polarities of Western freedom and Indian restriction. Barely cognizant of other modes of perceiving, she is rarely the agent of her actions. Thus, though opposites in their way of storytelling, Ila and Tridib are arguably the most important influences on the narrator’s construct of his own identity.