I've stopped wanting to give up on this chapter. Perhaps that's not true, but I'm going to write that out and keep it to assure myself that, indeed, I am not going to stop. I am going to press on. I suppose. But ARG. Fucking shit. This is so damnably hard. So incredibly gut-wrenchingly hard. I don't know if I have whatever it takes to write a dissertation.
In the past, my writing relied on serendipity (which I can't spell without the help of spellcheck). Now, I just steamroll through stuff, writing out whatever it is that comes to mind. I have apparently lost the ability to distinguish between important and unimportant, useful and unhelpful. I'm trapped in this awful spiral of self-doubt and depression. I've ceased being a good partner to my boyfriend, because I'm not as smart and capable as I should be.
Holy shit. Where is this rant going? Seriously, I went from enunciating my inability to write effectively on this chapter to questioning my ability to be in a relationship. I suppose one needs to take a break from the grind and do something else. But today, I'm not going to stop writing. I'm going to keep at it and work until I write something good and brilliant and true. What that is, I know not what it'll be. Close readings of a particular narrative? Sure, why not. It helped me in the past.
I'm reminded of this bizarre Walter Benjamin quote from his “On the Concept of History” (alright, I'll confess, I'm not reminded of it so much as it's the current opening quote to my chapter and I told myself I'd at least do a quick reading of it in this blog post): "The chronicler who narrates events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accord with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost to history."
If this is true, then I suppose I have my rationale for working on Jeffrey Brace. Nothing should be lost to history. All things should be considered. Nothing left out. But then that honestly leaves a writer or a critic with an impossible task of considering an infinitude of associations, contexts, allusions, and environments. No stone unturned in this type of historical writing, but all stones hide more stones that hide more stones. And so what fortress or what walkway will I build with the things I assemble? I suppose that's the important question I need to ask myself.
I also need to ask myself some pretty tough questions about why I have chosen to think about this particular individual. I remember as I was trying to finalize my prospectus, I found myself wanting to find some early national slave narrative, feeling it would make the perfect inclusion in my critique of republican political ideology and the early United States. That's some pretty fucked up shit. I mean, setting up a research question that requires locating a text that speaks at some pretty challenging socioeconomic conditions. I suppose I need to step back a bit more and ask myself why I'm working on what I'm doing and the implications for doing so.
(What's up with this spatial metaphor of stepping?)
Ok, I'll continue the thought. And I'll do it by thinking up a rationale for why I'm working on Jeffrey Brace. I'd say that Jeffrey Brace emerges in my project as a figure of exceptionality--a black Revolutionary War veteran who joint-authored his own life narrative. His writings are called "memoirs" because of their relation to his memory, in that the occasion of composition was Brace's telling of his life and Prentiss compiling them in writing. There's little unique to this situation. It's a common occurrence for these relations in nineteenth-century abolitionist writing. So what's interesting is to trace out how and where Brace emerges to seek to control the narrative's significations. There are multiple of such moments in the text. But even that isn't the real reason I'm focusing on him for this chapter. I suppose I need to go back to the drawing board for that.
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