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Ethics of Writing: Writing To Tell
Cixous (1991) talks about “coming to writing”
as a coming through death, a tearing of the veil from her
throat (p. 36). The ground of my own academic and autobiographical
writing rests on a narrative, similar to Cixous’s, of
writing as disclosure. Another ground of my writing I identify
as intertextuality, the fact that the texture of my voice
is woven out of others’ words using juxtaposition. This
intertextual technique reminds me of interlacing in medieval
manuscripts, in which intertwining threads form a design integral
to the eye, yet the lines on the surface remain distinct.
I am also reminded of the interlacing narratives in medieval
romance, the topic of an earlier unfinished master’s
thesis. I find it fascinating that, fifteen years later, these
same themes and images are surfacing in my writing.
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The ethics of writing autobiographically as research emerges from the
tension between these two observations about my writing: that the coming
to writing is as a tearing of a veil from my throat, in other words,
a liberation, and also that the writing is intertextual and, in autobiography,
intersubjective, explicitly implicating other selves in its composition.
The intersection of these two elements creates ethical dilemmas peculiar
to using autobiographical narrative as or in research. By research,
I mean the public realm of the spoken and written communication of ideas.
I have described as “furtive”
my own coming to the writing of autobiographical narrative
(Email to A. Oberg, October 17, 2001). I define autobiographical
narrative as a story composed out of the memory of my real
life experiences, but done so from the viewpoint of a writer
aware of writing as a craft. Both elements (personal writing
and writing as a craft) give rise to furtiveness. I feel furtive
as I engage in the writing of autobiographical narratives,
when I ought to be (as I tell myself) doing more serious work.
Awareness of boundaries separating personal from serious writing
harkens back to my writing of English essays with a cloistered
view for clarity of thought. Excised were purple prose, metaphor
or personal allusions. The argument held dominion. The pleasure
that I take in composing the texture of the writing likewise
feels illicit. Inhabiting this world feels like an unwarranted
escape from the world of academe, for the only explanation
that I as writer provide for why the story is written this
way rather than any other way is contained in more words or
different words, but not words about what I am narrating.
Instead, I am remembering, and in allowing myself to write
remembrance, I am permitting a learned facility with words
to flow through skin and sense and not constraining the movement
of words to what the “I” (as controlling author)
wants to say. While in this place, I am writing to tell, not
to know.
At the
same time as I am engaged in this furtive activity, I am aware that
I am likely producing autobiographical narratives that will later be
submitted to my detached scrutiny. That scrutiny does not feel furtive
at all, but is saturated with purpose. It is in the interstices, the
cracks, between my academic and autobiographical writings that, to borrow
Grumet’s (1981) phrase, the light shines through. Remembrance
cannot help but begin with an attachment to particular stories and a
belief in the curative properties of not only “telling tales”
(Grumet, 1988) but of telling these particular tales of family and
formation, tales that often trespass on prohibitive topics like flesh
and intimacy. I am trying to pull on some pants, some stretchy pants,
and they’re not budging, they’re refusing to climb over
the hills and valleys and troughs of my skin, which buckles and folds,
as first I attempt the improbable and then cold hands intervene, painfully
wrenching, tugging, bloodless tears falling on unrepentant flesh. Flesh
touching flesh. Fleshes flinching. I am being corseted and my prospects
for marriage are becoming slimmer the more difficult it is to find an
appropriate pair of stretchy pants to fit me. The
alternative is to collude in their suppression. The experience of “telling
tales” is one of disclosure, an act that implies exposing that
which would otherwise remain hidden, as well as invisible and taken
for granted. This feeling of vulnerability has been, for me, characteristic
of all my writing, even of my academic writing, which feels like an
unwarranted intrusion even while it craves the light of day.
I deliberately chose the word tale
because, while on the one hand synonymous with story, it connotes a lie, something made up (Frye, 1976;
Grumet, 1988). The particular connection of “telling tales”
to writing research autobiographically is of challenging and transgressing
prohibitions against, or at least deep reservations about, representation.
It is not even only the disclosure of particular others that is at stake
but the very act of disclosure itself, of excess, of traditionally invisible
groups like women “being too much” (Munro, 1971) or “having
already said too much” (A. Oberg, Email communication, December
1, 2001), that constitutes a potential act of betrayal against readers’
sensibilities and societies’ expectations of the proper subject
matter of educational research.
The ethics
of representation cuts across the life-affirming impulse to tear the
veil from one’s throat and let words spill out untrammeled. After
all, representation is about how persuasively writers write, or so Geertz
(1988) would claim. However, writing as responsible only to itself (to
its own impulses and longing for integral design) is insufficient for
writing as research, as a being in the world. “Bad writing,”
says Maracle (1992), reproduces stereotypes, or perpetuates the lie
that it is all right to take another’s words and put them for
one’s own (p. 15). Writing autobiographical narratives as research
also implies accepting responsibility for the fictions that I, as a
writer, create through my thickets of words. This acknowledgment can
exist within the curative properties of storytelling, by reconceiving
the formerly autonomous “I.”
Intertextuality
If what makes writing unimaginable
is disclosure (Cixous, 1991), what makes writing imaginable
is also disclosure. Within my writing, this act of appearance
is based on an act of disappearance: In writing I disappear
so that I can appear differently and more . . . In writing
I can move, I can fly, I can dance, I can play. In disappearing
into the writing, the “I” becomes identified with
writing. If writing is thought of as the product of an author
(Foucault, 1977), then the “I” is projected as
remaining in control of the writing process. On the other
hand, if the “I” rests on a fiction, then it is
the texture of the writing, with all of its intertextual threads,
that disperses the “I” into multiple selves, directions,
and possibilities, as in Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of
heteroglossia. The “I” becomes intersubjective.
The “I” can finally move because it is not confined
within a modernist, colonial, or parochial framework, but
dispersed through words into a space filled with multiple
voices. This is Greene’s (1995) vision of public spaces
in education in which we imagine ourselves differently by
being open to plurality, or multiple voices and perspectives.
Within my own writing, this intersubjective space occurs in
the interstices between memory work and excavation while the
intertextual texture of my writing comes through remembrance
of things that I have read, heard, seen, and thought on.
Method of Living/Working Autobiographically: Memory Work and Excavation
The ground of my autobiographical narratives, their method, is their
claim to truthfulness. The truthfulness relates to a grounding equally
in memory as in nonmemory. Powerful sensations can serve to activate
memory, as in Virginia Woolf’s (1978) reminiscence of lying half
asleep, half awake in the nursery with the sounds of waves breaking
beyond a yellow blind. If life is a bowl that one “fills and fills
and fills,” she says, then her life finds its “base”
in this memory (p. 75). Morrison (1987) calls evoked things “rememory,”
which Edgerton (1996) interprets as meaning that “sense of having
been struck by a glimmering of recollection, of something that has happened
but has since been long lost to consciousness” (p. 141). Woolf
talks about how strong emotions leave traces and even though the specific
details of incidents may seem to vanish, impressions remain, reattaching
us to memory (p. 78). Many of my autobiographical narratives begin with
outer landscapes semiotically inscribed with a meaning of inward significance,
one to be worked out through autobiographical narrative writing, as
in the following instance: A sudden gust of wind tears a piece of
paper from its nesting place and deposits it in the middle of the hallway
floor. This happens as I’m beginning to compose words in my head
about that scratchy sound of the branches. I turn slowly to look at
the paper on the floor, and wonder idly where these words are coming
from except it’s too late and I dash to the computer. It is the inner landscape that the writing—and
writer—is really attending to, as in the following beginning to
a narrative piece: The wind is pushing against the walls of
the house; it pushes and pushes, winding itself up and colliding against
any surface that stands in its way, whipping up the sources of its strength
and smashing them, once, whoosh, twice, rush, three times, crash. The
walls groaning. The wind’s
howling reminds me of sensations constitutive of subjectivity. The wind
becomes a force against which I must resist or risk becoming a vacant
vessel through which external influences can freely pass. There
is only a certain amount of air within this tiny cubicle of the cabin
of this small truck that is raging, snorting like a bull speeding down
the highway as the driver’s face contorts in rage and my breathing
becomes shallow to conserve energy, to continue to live beyond this
moment that stretches.
Things remembered are equally as important as things not remembered,
those sundry details that recede into everydayness. “A
great part of every day is not lived consciously” but
in the “cotton wool” of habit and routine, or
“non-being,” says Woolf (1978, p. 81). To leave
autobiographical narratives in a pristine state is to reify
their familiar details (Grumet, 1981). Instead, we need to
bother them, to cast doubt on their reassuring familiarity.
An attitude of suspicion can dispel the myth that autobiographical
writing can be only personal. Capable of being “excavated”
from autobiographical narratives (Grumet, 1981) are the social
minutiae of everyday living that obscure partial cultural
perspectives, perspectives that are nevertheless felt, through
memory, as whole formations. Also discernible are the larger
myths that sustain society’s inertias, like the story
of the autonomous self, the “leaving home” story
(Taylor, 1989). As I write my autobiographical narratives,
I self-consciously invoke my awareness of social myths, as
when I identify the “journey” trope in my “contact”
story (Wilson, 2000): Accounts of teachers journeying to
outlying communities follow certain conventions. They begin
with a trip through difficult terrain, a laborious route that
entails more time and energy than “civilized”
people would tolerate. But then, I nevertheless rely on
the journey trope, because it is what allowed me to conceive
of teaching in a First Nations community; without the existence
of the implicit social mythology of a White teacher traveling
to a rural First Nations community and participating in a
transformative experience, I would not have gone. A further
excavation of the same piece disclosed a preoccupation with
landscape and the embeddedness of the journey metaphor in
my own landscapes of learning through my familiarity with
Canadian curricula and literature (Wilson, in press).
Conclusion
If writing is conceived of
as disclosure, then its fitting method and mode of presentation
consist in transgressing prohibitions on disclosure. Such
writing demands to appear publicly in a space beyond the preserve
of the writer’s formation. That is part of the story.
Grumet’s (1981) method of “excavation,”
which is intended to not let lie unexamined narrative, but
to awaken stories to their positioning within an already constructed
public world, shows how autobiographical narrative orients
itself, even propels itself, towards a public light of day,
but so as to reconstitute public space differently. Writing,
far from being private and like Vygotsky’s (1962) notion
of inner speech, is thought of as already always social.
It is through the cracks that lie between autobiographical narrative
and the excavation of a critical discourse that glimmers come. The glimmers
highlight the cracks. Both light and cracks remind me as writer and
thinker of the insufficiency, taken alone, of either tale—narrative
or academic. The tales themselves, however, comprise that ground to which
I keep coming back.
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Autobiographical
Research Writing As a Way of Proceeding
“The only aim of writing is life” (Deleuze &
Parnet, 1987, p. 6). Something resonates deep within me, and
I seek to articulate my response. I notice that Deleuze did
not say, “The only aim of writing is understanding life.” Instead, Deleuze adumbrates the connection
between writing and life; understanding does not stand between
the two. There is writing before understanding
arrives and separates subject from object. Before separation
of knower and known there are acts of knowing. Before definitions
and categories take hold, there is writing and knowing. Before
concepts and theory become dominant, modes of knowing other
than the rational-cognitive have free play, and it is possible
to proceed purposefully and productively without conventional
notions of method.
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My writing in this paper articulates a process of researching
in this place where there is no conceptual map and no method
that guarantee results. I rely on my own resources, proceeding
autobiographically. Proceeding autobiographically in research
means simply that my life is the site of articulation of an
enduring interest, the site where, through writing, my research
topic takes shape. My life is not the eventual topic, nor
is the eventual topic in my life in the usual sense
of “contained” within it. However, the fact that
the site is my life makes a difference. My life is
not a neutral site; not just any topic configures in that
site. Nor is my writing a neutral process that describes a
topic that is already there. Rather the topic configures as
it does through my writing. However, although the topic constellates
from my life and through my writing, the topic is not particular
only to my life. Paradoxically, the process of autobiographical
research writing I describe here produces topics of general
interest within the larger social/political context of life
in general.
Writing autobiographically as research
Writing with neither conceptual map nor conventional method
in a process, or way of proceeding, claimed to be research
requires releasing oneself from the norms of standard research
discourses that both presume and demand a separation between
researcher and topic and a clear statement of topic before
research can begin. One releases oneself into the flux of
the hermeneutic circle (Caputo, 1987) where, by circling attentively
around and around that which is closest and most familiar,
it is possible to spin out into awareness of something more
general. Heidegger called this paradoxical relationship between
the particular and the general the paradox of proximity where
that which is closest is a source of insight into a generality
(Steiner, 1978, p. 27). The circularity of the movement is
reminiscent of Kierkegaardian cycles of repetition that move
forward by looking backwards at what has already happened
(Caputo, 1987, p. 11). Hindsight revises the past and thereby
produces a forward movement of new understanding, from which
position hindsight revises the revised past in an unending
series of re-visions that continuously move forward by looking
backward. The distancing that affords a new perspective is
temporal distance rather than the illusion of separability
of researcher and topic.
In this cyclical process of moving forward through revising
and expanding understanding, the direction of movement is
not dictated by fulfilling a goal. In research terms, it is
important to note that the momentum that keeps the circle
in motion does not come from a desire to produce a research
topic, although a topic is eventually produced. Rather, the
goal of the process is to keep the re-searching process going.
In this process, the goal of writing is a living engagement,
a statement which harks back to Deleuzeês (Deleuze & Parnet,
1987, p. 6) statement that the aim of writing is life.
I take up this process of a living engagement through writing
by directing attention to a deep-seated, enduring interest.
In its strong sense, interest means “that which
we are in the middle of” from the Latin inter esse,
“to be in the midst of.” Interest is the site in
the flux of my life where my attention is riveted and I am
passionately curious, where the flow of my life burbles over
large or small obstructions, and, as in the physics of flow
dynamics, spirals form, repeating the circular movement of
the hermeneutic circle. The places where these spirals form
are sites where, articulating my interest through writing,
I carry understanding forward in cycles of repetition/revision.
Staying in the place of perturbation and writing and rewriting
intensifies the spiraling. Suddenly the spiral spins out into
a larger orbit and a research topic of general interest takes
shape.
In practical terms, articulating an enduring interest is putting
into words what captivates my attention in those places of
disruption in the flow where spirals form. In theoretical
terms, articulating is a process of carrying forward understanding
through writing in cycles of repetition/revision. The writing
is structured not by conventions of academic writing, but
by the imperative to write where the burbles are in whatever
form is least restrictive, which often turns out to be free
writing. The primary requirements are the courage to go where
the burbles are most persistent or rambunctious and to stay
there with full attention. The temptation in a research process
is to stop too soon and to impose the form of an impersonal
research topic before the writing has built up enough momentum
to make the leap of its own accord from the purely personal
to the social/political. Paradoxically, the more deeply inward
into my interest I follow the spiraling, the more forcefully
it moves outward when the time comes.
Spiraling inward through an opening in the surface of the
flow of life is hard work and the challenges are numerous.
A brief listing includes maintaining the integrity of the
spiraling process in the face of the time pressures that always
accompany research projects; letting go of the frustration
that arises when I think Iêve come far enough and then realize
I havenêt; reopening the blockage that occurs when I allow
my cognitive controller to have the upper hand; resisting
the temptation to legitimize by injecting foreign material
into the process, forgetting the lessons already learned about
how imported concepts can lure my attention away from the
spiral; checking my tendency to presume too much and thus
say too little; and resisting my hesitation to reveal publicly
a research process that occurs largely in the domain of the
personal and is therefore occluded and dismissed in the dominant
discourses of research methods. The resources for meeting
these challenges lie within me and not in any methodological
precepts.
Writing in the site of my own life is a research process without
a conventional research method. The research writing I describe
here depends instead on particular practices of engagement
with an enduring interest. Practices develop over time (through
practice) without expectation of perfection. One never culminates
a practice; one only practices. One must accept the incremental,
fragmented, unpredictable, unordered form associated with
practicing this writing.
The particular practices of engagement that compose the process
of research writing I am describing are opening to the unexpected,
holding the intention to articulate an enduring interest,
and paying attention. Opening refers to opening to the unexpected
with more than the conscious rational mind. The mindês desire
for predictability and closure must be suspended, as must
tendencies to judge what is happening in terms of criteria
made available by conventional discourses of research methods.
Holding refers to holding the intention to articulate an enduring
interest even when the going gets rough, when the way becomes
blocked, when the path gets slippery, when what seemed like
a place of arrival turns out to be a cul-de-sac. Paying attention
refers to paying attention to everything that happens as if
it were related to my enduring interest. For example, overheard
comments, books on seemingly unrelated topics, dreams, radio
commentaries, casual conversations, among myriad other things,
can reveal rich insights into the nature of a topic-becoming.
These practices of opening to the unexpected, holding an intention,
and paying attention must be released from the control of
the rational mind. In place of rational control are strategies
for cultivating the modes of engagement (practices) of opening
to the unexpected, holding an intention to focus on an enduring
interest, and paying attention. An effective strategy for
cultivating these three modes of engagement is writing informally
and repeatedly about an enduring interest. This writing is
not a method that leads to engagement. Rather, the writing
is an act of engaging. In the act of writing I come
forward in a state of not knowing, released from the usual
requirement to know before writing, and thereby open to the
unexpected. Thus writing without prescribed structure and
goal about something that interests me deeply is a way of
cultivating the ongoing practices of opening to the unexpected,
holding an intention to focus on an enduring interest, and
paying attention that move the hermeneutic circle.
The process of writing and rewriting in the site of my life
about an enduring interest is not only self-directing; it
also produces a research topic of general interest beyond
the life in which it is articulated. This movement from the
personal to the social happens of its own accord, oftentimes
taking the researcher by surprise. As in hermeneutic circling,
realization comes in retrospect: I am suddenly aware that
a topic has been articulated that has social relevance.
Writing this paper, I am doing what I am writing about. I
began writing about my interest in my own autobiographical
writing and, through writing and rewriting, produced an articulation
of an autobiographical research process that has currency
beyond my own life. The process of spiraling in the places
of perturbation is eclipsed in the writing presented here,
which shows a topic already having taken shape. Below I share
some writing that affords a glimpse of writing producing a
research topic near the time of the leap from the personal
to the more-than-personal. This writing was done by a graduate
student researcher in the midst of an autobiographical research
writing process and is shared with her permission. My interpretation,
based on eight months of reading excerpts of her writing,
is inserted into her text, which is italicized. I shall call
the student researcher J.
The interest on which J initially focused her research writing
was her own position as an advocate within her profession
of a policy adopted but not implemented to supplement a traditional
model of service delivery with a community-based one. She
was frustrated at the obvious lack of interest among her colleagues
in this model of service to which she herself was fervently
committed. She wrote about her desire to overcome the resistance
she perceived among her colleagues through an education program.
In the eighth month of her research writing, by way of assessing
where her work to date had brought her, she wrote:
I have noticed the tension and conflict that saturate
my inquiry. It can be seen in the many layers of what I say
and do and feel around my topic, and even how I choose to
investigate it. I guess you could say the discourse of my
inquiry is very much a discourse of conflict and contradiction.
The layers J refers to are the cycles of repetition through
which she has carried forward her understanding of her interest.
In an early cycle, she identified her own distress at the
contradictions between policy and practice she perceived in
her profession. Whereas she initially located the contradictions
in the actions of her colleagues and interpreted her feeling
of tension and conflict to be a response to these actions,
later she realized contradictions also characterized her own
feelings as a member of her profession. I notice too that
my profession is generally about conflict and that even my
affiliation with that profession has taken on that adversarial
and contradictory stance. In the cycle of repetition
to which she refers here, J realized that it was the very
business of her profession to deal with conflict and that
she herself had conflicted feelings about that focus. Last
semester I wrote about taking a leave from my job and the
emotion that went with that. Even though I really wanted to
pursue my education, had the financial opportunity to do it,
and felt I needed to get away from the job for a while, I
hesitated. In my writing I tried to express the conflict between
the logical assumption and expectations that I would go back
to active duty one day, and my inner voice saying I would
never go back, the conflict between logically knowing that
this was a minor thing and feeling somehow that it was a big
thing. I still struggle with this question regularly and feel
differently about it each day. Here she begins to identify
the conceptual structure of the conflict she experiences:
logic and emotion are at odds with each other. With this insight,
her interest begins to spin out beyond the personal. Leaving
active duty, even for a short while, is frowned upon. (This
may be another expression of the isolationist aspect of the
culture of my profession.) Before I left, I had several supervisors
advise against taking educational leave, as it was bad timing
and would ruin my chances of promotion. They said, “Why
would you need another degree to do this job?” (This
is perhaps an expression of what is valued in my profession.)
Part of my conflict is that I understand that my decision
to leave, compounded by my criticisms of the culture, could
very realistically jeopardize chances of advancement for me
in my department. My writing practice has allowed me to notice
that even though I want to be beyond this, I am still very
affected by the potential loss of favor my opinions could
incur in the organization I have been successfully associated
with. In recognizing the depth and breadth of my conflict
I gain insight. J has again carried forward her understanding
of the nature of the conflict she experiences. Her emotions
signal that what is at stake in her rational decision to take
a leave from her profession is her ego identity as a successful
and respected member of her profession. Here the leap from
the personal to the more-than-personal is foreshadowed. What
is at stake for J is also at stake for her colleagues, though
the details of their situation within the profession is different.
Whereas Jês ego identity is threatened by the prospect of
leaving her profession, her colleaguesê ego identities are
threatened by the prospect of the move from traditional to
community service. The insight she refers to in her last sentence
was made explicit in earlier writing in which she described
the high social status associated with traditional roles in
her profession contrasted with the low status associated with
community-based service. As J has been interpellated into
the dominant discourse of her profession, so have her colleagues.
Her topic of resistance to community-based service is becoming
not just a matter of new skills and information, but a matter
of identity and status within the culture of her profession.
Jês approach to further study of her topic changed accordingly.
She abandoned her early ideas about developing and assessing
educational programs, as if the issue were simply lack of
understanding of community-based service, and decided instead
to study the culture of her profession and how it valorized
some roles over others.
Ground, intertextuality, disclosure
The concepts that are central in Teresaês text on the relationship
between autobiographical writing and research appear differently
in the research process I have described. These concepts are
ground, textuality, and disclosure.
In the autobiographical research writing process I have described,
ground is a verb. Grounding oneês interest is articulating
the ways that interest is connected in oneês life. Jês writing
grounds the sense of conflict in her own life in two places:
in the tension generated by the lack of congruence between
emotional investment and a rational decision to take educational
leave and in her ambiguous feelings about her professionês
preoccupation with conflict while she is committed to a nonconflictual
community model of service. In Jês writing, grounding her
interest in her own life enabled her to articulate the conceptual
structure of the contradictions she observed in her profession.
She came to see that failure to implement a policy of community
service was based in resistance to loss of status within the
profession. Grounding her interest in her own life enabled
J to speak authoritatively about her research topic, that
is, from her own ground.
The concepts of textuality and intertextuality tempt me to
forsake my own grounding in the autobiographical research
process I have described here for the realm of conceptual
abstraction. These terms prompt me to attend to a text not
for what it does to/in/for life, but for how it is
connected with other texts that are not explicitly identified.
Textuality and intertextuality are features of text that are
produced by reading (Silverman, 1994, p. 85) in what
I would call a metareading. In other words, instead
of reading what a text says, a reader reads for how
a text says what it says by looking to see how it incorporates
other texts not explicitly identified. I call this metareading
because it works at a theoretical level on the surface of
the text rather than, as in the process I describe in this
paper, carrying understanding forward while situated
in engaging text writing and rewriting.
There is an implied connection between openness and disclosure
in the autobiographical research writing process described
earlier in this paper. Heidegger claimed that disclosure occurs
in the place where man [sic] is, by which he meant
where man is open and paying attention (Anderson, 1966, p.
32). As Heidegger believed, disclosure is not of something
already there, but rather is produced by our openness and
attentiveness (Steiner, 1978, p. 66). Both what discloses,
and when, depends on the practices of opening to the unexpected,
holding the intention to focus on an enduring interest, and
paying attention.
Acknowledgement
The image above, one from a series called “Reflections,”
captures on film the evolving and unpredictable interactions
of reflective objects, color, and light. Although it employs
the materials of everyday life, including ordinary camera
equipment, the process by which this image was produced exceeds
the bounds of conventional approaches to photography to the
extent that the process, carefully guarded by the artist,
remains a mystery to even the most expert observers. The artist
is Antoinette Alexander, my mother. It is included here with
her permission. |
