Narrow and Winding Channel[s]

The enrolment requirements for doctoral students have tightened all over the country since I was such a one.  My more-than-four years spent spelunking in various imaginative destinations productive and less so was made possible by generous funding, an indulgent supervisor and a postgraduate office that would not, in my experience, scrutinise what students were doing too closely unless their supervisor(s) abandoned their support.  (The vulnerabilities of students working within a system are not the subject of this post).  This left me free, in the time-honoured fashion of the humanities, to follow research hunches until such a time as I had an argument that hung together.  Not everyone I worked alongside was so fortunate; some did the former without achieving the latter.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the trails I took that eventually led nowhere in my research, those tens of thousands of words I wrote that didn’t make it into the final document.  In the early days this was usually because of irrelevance: like many before me, I wrote as a researcher in search of a subject for longer than my tightly-cast proposal suggested would be necessary.  I spent six months or more, for example, revisiting previous critics’ comparisons of the two Mulgans, convinced that a cultural studies-style rehabilitation of the elder, at least, would thicken the critical context in which one could read Robin Hyde.  This left me as one of the few contemporary writers to have repeatedly read A Pilgrim’s Way in New Zealand (for which I maintain a critical soft spot) and generated a cool title for a conference paper (I think it was “Polyandry, Irony and Nation-Building: Interpreting the Mulgans”) but took me otherwise no further.

It was fortunate that in that same year (1998) I spent the rest of my research time chipping away at the task that would later form the foundation of my thesis, but which seemed at the time to be too much fun to be of any use.  You can see here the large bay window in which most mornings I sat at my desk in my first flat, annotating all of the poems of Robin Hyde.  It was a while before I would realise that labours of love were more productive for my research than labours of something like fashion.

The work I did the following year suffered from the same petering out as the work I had done on the Mulgans; you may imagine me, perhaps, as a farmer unable to get the dogs to bring the sheep back round as they head to the fence line and then scatter along the boundary.  I had happened on some critical assertions from F.R. Leavis that were the same, structurally and metaphorically, as Allen Curnow‘s famously hieratic utterances in our own country, and had discovered not long after a link to the writing of E.H. McCormick, the literary historiographer who had been advised at Cambridge by Leavis and was celebrated locally by Curnow.  One of the heirs of McCormick seemed both to me and 1940s-Curnow to have been M.H. Holcroft, whose writing resembled in its focus some of Robin Hyde’s.  The significance of that was the extent to which Hyde was excluded from the “good writing” classificatory systems that evolved out of cultural nationalism.

I lined up the textual evidence in a minor conference paper and pointed to what I saw as its significance, but I couldn’t manage to finish where I started in the fashion I wanted.  This was largely because I was arguing by resemblance, a risky critical practice in that it relies almost completely on the reader accepting the resemblances for themselves.  (It was also, I see now, a kinder gentler version of what Leavis himself did.)  I continued this method throughout my thesis but never quite had the range of sources, or perhaps the critical chops, to bring the material on the Leavis-herd home.

This summation of what I did and why it didn’t work is not the younger thesis-writing me speaking, but her present-day heir, arising out of the happy realisation that there is now, coincidentally, another researcher Doin’ It Right: different context, different texts, better disciplinary positioning.  This motivated me to dig out my original conference paper, more than ten years old now, for review.  When I read it now, I feel not so much nostalgic as kindly; sentimental even.  It loses focus at its end much in the way that Holcroft’s essays themselves lacked focus (I am still, as you can see, arguing by resemblance), and yet it seems to me nearly there in terms of what I was trying to say.

The argument would come out in other ways, within fewer than two years, and as a result of the careful annotations I had made of those numerous poems over the two years preceding.  When push came to shove, I did far better by close-reading at the print-face than moving sources around like Scrabble tiles, hoping for an insight to appear (as I do in that paper), but I can’t regret those unfruitful trails, nor the time they took me.  The fact that my funded research time allowed for time to fail made me a better researcher when eventually I did succeed.  I can imagine with closer scrutiny and greater pressure of time I would have produced work inferior.  My current union role means that such an assertion immediately sets me to political musings, but those I can reserve for spaces other than this.  You may meanwhile enjoy as I do this elegantly-turned example from one of Holcroft’s essays of the 1940s, whose nostalgia-as-insight has since swamp-blossomed into something like the Pakeha national character:

Sometimes, too, the Takitimu are dissolved in memory, and I see again the lakes which lie beyond them: Te Anau, deceptively placid on a clear day, but with a mysterious light in the vapours that cling about the peaks where the lake turns deeply into the ranges; Manapouri, with a blue mist over the forest that grows to the water’s edge; and Wakatipu, unspoiled by generations of tourists, its wide waters unfolding to the northward traveller that sudden vision of Earnslaw and its attendant giants, clothed in white against the reticent green of native beech in the valleys. Further south, and of little repute among tourists—who scarcely know it—is the narrow and winding channel of Monowai.