This week (and hopefully it’s still the same week this is uploaded—*it isn’t*) marks the end of my first year as a PhD student. And the best way I can describe the experience—with maximum pessimism, of course—is that a lot has happened in the absence of anything happening. A mouthful, I know, but allow me to explain.
When applying for a PhD, it can be pretty straightforward—in principle. There’s a question, you write up a brief (and guess-worked) answer to that question, and then you query some experts in your field at a desired university who will either think your question is good (and become your supervisors in principle) or feel they aren’t right for the question and direct you elsewhere (why on Earth are you sending this to me?). Within this whole process, the most important thing is that first initial question. You will do reading, dear reader, and create a proposal around that question, showing your initiative to do the research and that you can, basically, put together a competent argument and reasoning behind that question, all before sending that off to the university of your choosing (ideally where your supervisors in principles work, otherwise, what are you doing? Stop that now! Don’t push send!). The question is everything. It needs to be solid. It needs to be thought through. It is the center piece that holds your entire structure and intellectual inquiry together.
At least that’s what I thought, because after a year of working on my PhD, having gone through the whole rigmarole of putting it together, making the application, and then successfully being given a placement, I don’t know what my research question is anymore. Or, for that matter, whether I even had one to start with.
Now, dear reader, I know what you’re thinking, but you’re a year in, surely you would know by now? And as an amendment, I would like to add, and they accepted you in the first place. Well, here’s the thing—I’m just as stumped.
When my supervisors and I last met about my previous draft of my literature review—a document that is meant to surmise your field of study and reflect the current academic thinking within—it was recommended to me that I review my initial research questions as I might have gone too far afield. That’s how I interpreted the meeting, at least. So, I began a venture to do just that, pouring over my initial application and all the documents I had put together, but there wasn’t anything that I recognized as a, well, proper research question.
Therefore—the happenings in the absence of things having happened.
This first year has felt like me doing nothing but attempting to actualize the PhD. Both from a research standpoint, and a financial one, too. But by the end of this year, I would have manifested neither. So, where did it all go wrong? Has it even gone wrong? Let’s do some due diligence.
I originally got my taste of a potential PhD question when I started writing my current work-in-progress, and it revolved around how, textually, one could represent the writer at work—could the author physically appear in the text? Not like metalepsis—where the author openly enters their own text [1]—but more the specific act of writing, as in the guiding hand that provides shape and direction to the narrative. The best way I could think of it, and therefore why the book is a Gothic one, is through the act of possession. When someone is possessed, their actions are no longer their own—an unseen force drives them towards something or for a specific reason. With me? No? Well, think of the author (itself a dangerous term), or let’s say writer is a ghost, that possesses their characters to drive them to a narrative’s conclusion.
Seemed like an interesting concept to explore, and I already had a world and set of characters to explore it with. However, as you may have noticed, reader, there still is no research question to be found. Not really. Still, early days, and I shop this idea around to some trusted confidants who know of these things. Personal tutors, current PhD students (though in different fields—science, gross—but still knowledgeable of these things), and bish-bash-bosh I started putting together a whole proposal. At this stage, my proposal was exploring a notion of double-consciousness and text, and how that relates to a little thing called hauntology—the term created be Jacques Derrida in the study of presence and absence [2].
For the PhD I wanted to do, though, getting the theory down was only one aspect. The other was the creative component because ultimately, the PhD I wanted to do was a creative writing PhD. 3-4 years to produce a 80-70k-word creative text along with a 20-30k-word critical accompaniment that is as important that the proposal represented this split. I needed to ensure that there was more focus around the creative project as opposed to the critical.
With that under my belt, I ventured out into the world, researching and investigating creative writing PhD programs across the country. From Nottingham to Edinburgh, I sent my proposal in, and received a wide range of feedback. Some positive, some bafflement, but each piece let me adjust and shift my proposal as I became more accustomed to the system. But hey, I got a job once my Masters was finished, and that took a significant degree of focus away from my research. But in all of that time, sending my work out, I never actually applied anywhere. Towards the end of my masters up through my new job, I was just querying potential supervisors.
In the UK, it’s procedure to apply to a program once you have supervisors on board. Therefore, a significant degree of research and time is put into not just searching out who and where, but into convincing them that you and your work are worth their time. This can be daunting, as these individuals are experts in their fields, and especially so with a creative project considering you haven’t even done it yet. Now, this might not apply to someone who has an established record of creating work (I saw on one scholarship application that someone was writing their second novel as part of their PhD as their first was receiving publication earlier that year) but for someone—such as myself—who has had a rough go of putting work out there, this process is, and was, very daunting. Especially when you consider, dear reader, that the work is being rejected before it’s even had the chance to come into being. Which, writing this in retrospect, is once again good practice for “pitching” anything in a creative sense. Even then, there is a fully written textual form of some kind—especially when starting out.1 The most frustrating aspect of it is the inherent nature of the creative world—it’s subjective. And even though everything might be worked out and planned out, a no is a no. And it’s next to impossible to convince someone otherwise—very rarely are second chances given out.
As I started the new job, the next couple of exchanges were just back and forth between myself and perspective supervisors, ultimately getting no-where and the list finding itself narrower and narrower. I took some time to myself, to focus on the job, but I could never really strip myself of the nagging thoughts and notions surrounding the project. So, once I could see the storm clouds on the horizon in January of 2020, I started sending some applications out once more. And luckily found myself drawn to a program at University College London (UCL). However, there was one catch—it wasn’t what you might refer to as a conventional program. It’s hard for me to even attempt to describe it—which is, if I’m honest, what attracted me to it in the first place. If I was in a room full of people and asked each of them to describe what creative-critical writing is, I doubt I’d get the same answer. Still, what I knew then was that it was another writing program, and that was the important part. Though it would result in my proposal needing a few adjustments before applying.
With many of the programs I’d been querying previously, they had the aforementioned 70/30 or 80/20 split. This program, however, had no such split and luckily, the supervisors I was able to agree to work with me in principle (and have kindly remained my supervisors after the year), helped with the proposal’s adjustments. I was able to keep things broader with the proposal but when I read it there’s still no immediate question that jumped out. Perhaps, the question was about whether a Gothic novel could be a creative-critical work, or even what a creative-critical work was—regardless, I tried to focus on that element with some other bits worked in. Like, for instance, whether there was an authorial thread between Henry James and the works of Haruki Murakami, for whatever that was/is worth.
Clear as mud, right? You see, dear reader, at the time of my proposal’s initial construction, I was immensely interested on Haruki Murakami and his narrators. They had an ethereal nature to them, both near to their narratives but also rather detached. And it was during this time that the notion of double-consciousness in writing was introduced to me through the work of Henry James—the idea that James was a separate entity influencing the text while still, actively, being in it [3]. Got it? No? Good, let’s continue.
So, with one pandemic and an interview later, I got on the course. Now, I felt, I could activate my master plan—start part-time while I was furloughed and then, continue to see out my projects and investments at the company I was at before transitioning to full-time once they decided to be done with me. Frankly, if they had brought me back from furlough rather than let my contract run out, I would probably still be part-time now. I had a lot of unfinished things with them, that I wanted to do with them, but obviously that did not come to pass.
With that plan in the drink, all I could do was just get on with the PhD, which meant literature review. Now, as a disclaimer, I had absolutely no idea what a literature review was (and I might not still fully understand what it is meant to do), but what I did know was that it meant lots of reading. So. Much. Reading. I was ecstatic—there were so many things I wanted to read. So many things that I wanted to interrogate and make relevant. The more I read, though, the more I felt like I was drowning. That there was this deep sea of knowledge, filled to the brim with history, opinions and precedence. I thought that the more I read, the more I’d understand, or start to understand, but instead I just felt like I was grasping at anything that would help my thoughts make sense—authorship, monster theory, meta-modernism—I spent weeks reading about…*checks notes*…psychological anthropology because they were doing a significant amount of work surrounding hauntology and cultural impacts of ghosts and specters. Some things stuck though, like authorship, but everything else just felt like stop-gaps that might not take me anywhere.
It can be easy to lose yourself in all of that. Not just you as a person, dear reader, but other things—I often wonder given my submersion into all of this critical thinking hasn’t drained me elsewhere. In my criticism, in my creativity, for a long time I felt that I couldn’t be as creative, or that my heart wasn’t in the things that I was creating. I don’t know if that’s a consequence of the reading process, or just something shifting inside of me, but at least as I got my first literature review done, and the first meeting with supervisors about it out of the way, I felt a bit surer footed in my grounding. It seemed to be going well but a lot had changed since I wrapped up that initial draft and started working on the second one.
Murakami became side-lined, as I became unsure of what he brought to the overall project, and even the idea of the novel itself started to become distant. Any confidence that I had developed felt like it was slowly being whittled away by a little thing called impact. Towards the middle of my first-year, impact was the main antagonist of my days.
Ultimately, it’s about how the research you are doing impacts everyday life and people. But how that is supposed to happen, or actualize, isn’t entirely clear. It became clearer, though, as I started to work and interact with other researchers across activities like UCL’s first-year research presentations and my time with the Critical Poetics Research Group. As useful as these events were, they also helped to outline a bit more about what my work should be doing, and absolutely wasn’t doing. The continual exposure to other people and their work started to create a pit inside me. What it was, though, I really couldn’t say, but it only got deeper and more profound as the summer went on.
The summer turned out to be back-to-back presentations, many opportunities for me to present my research and what I had been working on. My plan, after a conversation about my second literature review draft and a revision to the vision of the novel, was to actually try and write what was in my head. To sort of give a taste of what my research question was. So, to do this, I decided to write a scene from the revised novel idea. A character, an actor, was arriving to their new home to escape their busy city life and roles that seemed to be haunting them. The idea was that the scene would be peppered with citations and footnotes—the critical “a non-present presence” [4].
How do you think it went dearest, kindest reader? Do you believe that I was lauded with praise and admiration? That I was patted on the back for my ingenuity and introspective insight? The whole idea behind it was to attempt an inference of the critical. Like one would allude to emotions and situations via intertextuality in a creative text. The blank stares and confused expressions were enough. Though the feedback I got was vocally assuring, there was an overwhelming feeling that to infer the critical wasn’t necessarily going to cut it. So, for my next presentation—just a week away—I decided to do something completely different.
Instead of my “reading”, I decided to present the concepts that I was trying to encapsulate and explore in my work. I did this through other people’s scenes, and creative-critical texts, like Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir, In the Dream House (2019) and Paul Ewen’s Francis Plug: Writer in Residence (2018). If one were to look at these two titles, and be immensely confused as to what they had in common, I would commend them for their astute observation. Because only in the confines of my twisted mind and research would they have anything in common—that being their authorial doubling and how each explored them differently.
Ultimately (and better put in my most recent literature review draft), I was attempting to demonstrate how contemporary metatexts—texts that are critical of themselves through their textual language [5]—represent the disarray that contemporary authorship is in. Though I wouldn’t commend myself for getting that point across, I did have a realization that gave a bit more context to that pit that was inside of me. And it was the fact that there was no framework for me to operate under (and let’s not forget the whole…you know…absent research question). There’s no defined way to do a creative-critical research PhD. Much of it seemed to be defined by the output—the thing delivered was the creative-critical part—but the actual means of that production? Unknown—error 404.
Others have utilized more established mythology and procedure in their respective fields–comparative literature, critical theory, translations studies, etc.—but me? Yeah, not so much. The research presentations were a wake-up call. I needed to get this thing under control. After those presentations it really felt like I was just slipping and sliding around this critical frozen lake, trying to find some break in the ice to create some creative foothold to steady myself on.
I spent a lot of the next few months trying to read my way to an answer. Predominantly this meant reading others’ works and more papers looking into the creative-critical. Through this process, I realized that my approach was leading more with the creative—what was the story I wanted to tell, the characters explored, and what would that all mean together? But was that even appropriate? Was that really what I was doing? All of my work had come from a place of critical theory, insight, and research—hadn’t it? Even a creative writing PhD starts with a critical question—what question is being asked, and of whom, and how does the story being written answer that question.
If anything, the term creative-critical can be taken rather literally, in that the critical is hyphened to be creative, which would mean that really, a creative writing PhD would be more appropriately dubbed to be creative-critical. Since, as in the proposal stage, the creative is entirely defined by the critical—at least in an academic sense. But that opens a door to a place that is an entirely separate research question in and of itself (look ma, a research question! But not a relevant one—too academic-focused I can hear the funding-committee members saying now). And that would also ask the ever expanding (and financially dwindling) question as to the critical, scholarly value of art. Which then would beg the question that if the study of art has (and is) been (being) imperative to certain academic fields, but we don’t assign scholarly value to the act of creating (or better phrased as producing) art2, then wouldn’t that nullify all academic insight derived from the arts (philosophy, psychology, etc.)?
It’s in the bowels of this spinning research filled void that I was struck by what my supervisor aptly identified as a research-existential crisis. The sign of a healthy PhD student, apparently, and one who emails their supervisors at midnight after not being able to sleep with a small dissertation about the short comings and problems of their project and why it should never have existed in the first place. It was August, and a whole week with nothing but my own thoughts camped out in the Scottish Highlands had brought about this existential consequential conundrum. Much to the chagrin of my partner who found herself discussing authorship, the Gothic, and Henry James at a Glaswegian Hotel Spa for ninety minutes—lucky lady.
Still, this extended collapse was met with some optimism outside of the aforementioned growing pains. It led me towards thinking about impact once more. But when I say thinking about impact, I mean making impact the be-all and end-all. This line of thinking brought me to Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom: 4 Songs of Care and Constraint (2021). Earlier in the year, after my research presentations, I had attended a reading of Maggie Nelson’s essay collection, and it, as well as the book, piqued my interest in regards to artistic care, and how, perhaps, a new form was needed in a contemporary sense. What would artistic care even look like? And what could it mean for contemporary authorship, which I was arguing, was in completely disrepair, and could use some care. I mean, have you been on Twitter lately, dear reader?
These ideas started creeping up in me, and are now at the forefront of my thinking. What can the creative-critical do to express a need for care? What is it about the haunted nature of authorship that would benefit from artistic care? But even as I have these question and feel justified in their importance and relevance, the sad truth is that it isn’t really up to me to decide if they are. That lies in the power and authority of the academic institution I am a part of. I have to convince them that not only are they relevant, but that the outcome that I produce will be too. But in writing this, I don’t even feel like I am capable of that.
I’m not a sales-man, and more often than not, my “justifications” feels more and more like a “sell” than I’m comfortable with. Yes, part of that process is citing evidence and providing insight, but in a world where even these things are more subjective than ever, it just feels like such an impossible task. Besides, it’s ironic that I’m still at the stage of convincing them of my relevancy since I’m still self-funding—let me tell you why you should be letting me continue to keep paying you. The pit, which had transformed fully into dread, which predated my research-existential crisis has been replaced by ambiguity. I don’t belong amongst the artists, I don’t belong amongst the academics, (and corporate kicks me out any chance it gets), so where do I go? Where do I belong?
It’s been a year since I’ve started my PhD and I feel nothing but ambiguity towards how it’s going and how it might turn out. It must be fate, then, that after coming back on a coach with new student card in hand, that I would come across a podcast talking about Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity (1974). It was a brief summarization, but from that I took away a specific thing: to find purpose, “the realization of concrete ends, of particular projects”, is to make purpose from within, and to escape, ambiguity [6]. And that, is true freedom. Well, if anything, there’s a lot of that going around. Ambiguity around authorship, ambiguity around the creative-critical, and ambiguity around myself, so perhaps there’s some hope for me, and my hauntological (present yet absent) research question. Sorry, I know it’s not much of an ending but in my defense, it is only the start.
References:
1. Hans Bertens, ‘Postmodernist Authorship’, The Cambridge Handbook of Literary Authorship, ed. Ingo Berensmeyer, Gert Buelens, and Marysa Demoor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) pp. 183-200
2. Colin Davis, ‘Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms’, French Studies, 59 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) p. 373
3. Eric Savoy, ‘Jamesian Hauntology: On the Poetics of Condensation’, in The Henry James Review, 38 (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2017) pp. 238-244
4. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, (New York: Routledge, 1994) pp. 9-10
5. Gérard Gennette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman & Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1997) p. 1
6. Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New Jersey: Citadel Press, 1948) p. 9
This isn’t Hollywood! You ain’t pitching an unfinished work in an elevator for millions of dollars. The author composes themself…
I mean we do, but only in the service of academia, but then it also needs to be culturally impactful too, but not too culturally impactful because academia has its own pursuits besides cultural zeitgeists, and…ummm, it also needs to be able to juggle, and ride a unicycle, and perform a pirouette while tap dancing.