My name

(Or, notes from Dissertation Boot Camp.)

I named myself when I was 15.  It was a private name – a secret identity for the nefarious purpose of logging into AIM without the whole world knowing I was there.  When I got to college, and wanted to shed my skin as I do every so often, I abandoned my old public screenname and brought my secret identity forward.  “Tangle what?” people would ask.  I told them it came from some angsty teenage poem I’d written and forgotten.  This is half a lie.  I did not forget, and the poem was the name itself, a phrase that entered my mind unbidden.  I liked it; it sounded defiant, both a call and response.  Just try it, this name seemed to snarl, implying a recalcitrance and inscrutability that my adolescent self was not fully capable of.

I did not know that years later I would be saying this name over and over.  I need a concise thesis, but I got tangled up, I say.  I’m going to try to write my way through this tangle.   I also say, interconnected.  Intersubjectivity.  These are more or less the same.  Tangled is the natural form of this thought that I am trying to subdue and comb into straight lines of literary discourse.  Word connects self to world.  Word is shaped by world.  The self’s words change the world.  Over and under in loops, back and forth. 

If I write about literature – even (or especially) if I only write about scenes of eating in literature – then I am writing about race, about gender, class, all of it, all at once.  I know that systems of power do not layer like a cake but meet and part like strands of a web.  But I also know that particular identities have particular discourses, histories, controversies that can (should?) be addressed.  How do I force a book of chapters – they go in order, step 1 to step 5 – to describe intersectionality?  I could address class-specific issues in one chapter, race-specific issues in the next, give each problem a close reading and utterly undermine my committment to intersectionality by sectioning off.  I could arrange chapters by types of food scenes – alone in the kitchen with an eggplant? Bakhtinian banquet? – and allow the interplay of identity narratives to do what they do. . . a chapter like a skein of yarn in a kitten’s paws, structurally an embarrassment to a teacher of composition.  How do you textually represent clusterfucktastrophe?  It would be the most realistic realism ever written, and it would be as incomprehensible as the culture we’re swimming in.

I almost named this post “Untangling this.”  But this is not what I want to do.  My job is to describe, inscribe.  I remind myself that the map is not the territory.  But I know that maps and metaphors are equal parts useful and dangerous.