Narrative, Blogging, and the Truth About Reality

In which Blurt moves from grading to the interesting narrative question of truth in blogging, invokes New Kid, then sidesteps into dragon slaying and kickin' it lazy-style like Zizek. In the name of research, of course.

I am a terrible grader.

When I say this, I don't mean that I am mean (though probably I sometimes am) or that my comments aren't helpful. They are. This is part of the problem: it's tough to prevent myself from getting all into it, writing little essays, rehearsing many formal issues the writer could attend to and explaining just how one might attend to them, asking a gajillion questions aimed at prodding the writer into examining the implications of what she is saying.

Needless to say, it can take me forever to grade a paper. And after two or three, I'm pooped.

The problem with my grading, the thing that makes me terrible, is that I am an avoider. I am slow and overly detailed. My mind is so active that focus is hard for me (and this is even with the drugs and the meditation, which have helped bunches). Thus, I know, when I see a stack of papers, that it's going to take me forever . That while I'm doing them, I'll have to think of nothing else.

So I put off starting.

Usually, I put off starting until about four hours before the class period in which I really, absolutely must return the papers. (And yes, this holds even when the class begins at 8 a.m.) This strategy, I think, is a holdover from early grad school, when I really could grade 20 papers in four hours, mostly because I didn't understand the curriculum myself and had no idea what was going on. I still seem to need the waking-up-to-grading, the absolute cutthroat necessity of grading, for motivation. (And my attempts to psychologize myself into a more healthy relationship to this has resulted in, instead, a laissez faire condition where I can think "oh well, what's three more days?" over and over, until it's been weeks.)

Thus it happens that often, the story I tell myself is that I am a terrible grader. A bad person. Bereft of morality -- after all, everyone else hates grading too, but they approach it in a more sensible and disciplined way than I.* I am a fool and a counterfeit. I allow myself selfishly to continue to occupy the (teaching) position that someone else would operate so much more responsibly, and purely for my own selfish aims. I am a faker and pretender, a little-degree person (MFA) pretending she can hack it in the big-degree pond (PhD) just because she thinks she can handle the scholarly part. There's more to the job than that, little sister, I imagine my readers clucking.+

Other times, the story that I tell myself is different. It goes, Once there was a girl who wanted to be a writer. As is the case in all good tales, this heroine is pure and virtuous and wins out in the end. She slays dragons, in this case, the dragons of losing control of the story.

Because stories are strong. I'm thinking of an entry from New Kid a while back. It's an entry that touched a chord and made me totally crush on New Kid, and I'm going to quote at length:

When did I turn into someone who does nothing but complain about grading and her insecurities? How incredibly boring! And whiny! And yet I will post this anyway...is it because I'm simply sucking for comfort and validation from you, my blog people, and I know that expressing distress brings out the niceness in you people and gets me sympathetic comments? Or because I feel some kind of responsibility or compulsion to present myself honestly in this blog and not just offer some kind of prettied-up smug successful facade? Or just that writing it down helps me see that this isn't as bad as it feels? (Except it's not.) You'll notice I've remained purposefully vague about the actual length of time that I've had these papers...so that I can't face actual REAL disapproval from you. Me saying "I'm handing these back so late" in this case comes across the way my college friends and I talked about grades: "I did SO badly in class X" meant getting a B or B+. In the real universe that's not a bad grade and we probably knew it. So you probably think that when I say I'm handing these papers back SO late, I can't really mean they're that late. I promise you, they are.

The thing I loved here is the insistence on the real dire terribleness behind the narrative. About questioning ones own narrative motives.

I've been thinking about why it is that narrative control implies power. I think it's because a narrative is a kind of equation -- things are set into relationship; cause and effect are implied. And if one understands the causes, and can correlate them with effects, and can furthermore seduce readers somehow into witnessing the transaction -- well, in some sense one has created reality. At least at the level we can percieve it, can hold it in our memories, act on it, respond to it.

By creating a narrative about being behind in grading, a narrative whose causes and effects triggered recognition in readers, New Kid was proving her facility with creating reality. Except that narrative makes this smoothed-over reality, deliberate, reflective of artistic choices. So New Kid's narrative of being behind in grading offered a recognizable and convincing reality to readers, only she herself felt lthe ragged edges that were left out:

No, I really mean it, I suck. If you could see it all you'd have to agree.

Of course, this is my interpretation rather than hers.** And paradoxically, it's the invocation of an extra reality beyond narrative that makes it good narrative. It's what caught me, made me say: finally, this is what I am looking for. Someone else like me, someone else who hides this terrible reality of failure even while trying to make it plain as day. Someone brave.

Narrative hides things. Even, paradoxically, when it tries to reveal them. This is part of narrative's power, I think. And it's part of what makes blogging so interesting. Especially, maybe, when it's anonymous.

Because when one turns anonymous, one reduces reality to concepts. No longer a named subject, I am instead a characteristic action -- blurt -- and my acquaintances are reduced to narrative functions (eg. Exam Director, Writing Friend).

Let's turn it back to today. It's a sunny day, and though it's only 3 my time I'm drinking a beer. The day doesn't feel much like December at all.

The narrative of the afternoon could go like this:

A terrible person, a horrible grader, sat at the table typing. She was typing instead of what she should be doing, which was grading.

But as the writer, I have the power to make it go like this. At least for you, potential readers:

The girl who had always wanted to be a writer sat at the table typing. The girl had been deterred by dragons, dragons who pointed out volubly that the girl already had a profession, which was grading, and that the girl had credit cards, which were clamoring. The girl knew these things already and had bought off the dragons for awhile so that she could see how the other storyline came out. And now she was typing. She was typing what she wanted to type, and she was typing a blog. She was typing and thinking and thinking and typing were physical processes. They were also practice, practice for what she wanted to do, which is to think a novel through her fingers, her typing fingers. The fingers were typing even though there was grading to be done. The fingers knew it was they, and not the grading faculties, who would have to produce the novel. The typing scared the girl because the girl didn't know how the story would turn out. (Would she be punished ? Or would she be rewarded? ) But she kept going, because she didn't have a choice. And because maybe someday her story would lose its guilt and the proccesses would look like happily ever after.

I may have gotten sort of far afield with the dragon slayer thing. But is this the case? Does truthful blogging really just point out the difficulty of telling the (unvarnished, unplotted) truth?

Are bloggers the world's revealers? Or are we the world's mystifiers, cloaking and hiding what we can't omit?

By writing and rewriting every day, by seizing reality and distilling it into the parameters of a narrative -- or of a blog -- can one effect reality? Can I write myself into a happy ending?



*Except that actually, I didn't realize everyone hated grading. I thought that professors must come to like it, since how else to explain their willingness to join the profession? I thought I must be the only professor who couldn't suck it up and stop hating it. I wish I'd read academic blogs at the time.

+Though this entry (titled "Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy") quotes from Zizek watch, in which Zizek explodes the hidden agenda of relaxation programs -- "If you look closely at their leaflets... they tell you first that we are hyperactive and should learn to withdraw. But next, the second paragraph, they always say: 'This way you will relax and be even more productive". He also says this of combining professorship with a life devoted to research:

"I don't teach... Why should I teach? I'm not crazy."

**Of course, it made me think she must actually be terrific, since she was like me and I want to be terrific. Actually, I'm convinced all the bloggers I read must be terrific. Why aren't more of the people I know in "my day job" as thoughtful as y'all? Or is it the case that many people are this thoughtful?