Yesterday evening I made my second "month in review" list, and, as when I did so the first time, found that despite some misgivings, quite a bit was getting done. Numerically, certainly, I've reviewed a lot of dockets at the archives and gone through much digitized content, downloaded a lot of papers and PDF files, and made huge lists of books and call numbers.
I can say without too much embarrassment that I have been putting time to good use, especially this month. My roommate and I dutifully left the house at 8:30 or earlier to arrive between 9:05 and 9:15 at the archives; once or twice, I left before 4:45 pm, but most days I stayed right up until 5:00 (though the advertised hours are until 5:15, by quarter to five the place is very much in the "shut down" phase, the equivalent of the fifteen seconds or so when one's computer desktop turns black-and-white and the mouse stops responding). Then, after commuting home and visiting the gym like the exercise addict I know I am (admitting it--the first step toward recovery?), and often picking up some provisions for dinner or for the next day, I typically arrived at home around 8:30.
Even the days I did something different--visiting the National Library, talking with a contact's student about her application to American grad programs--I'd be out of the house for 8 or 12 hours at a stretch. Compared to the first month, which I mostly spent at home, this has been a very intense way of life. If I was getting weary and guilty of working at home after month 1, I think perhaps now I have reached a second "plateau." There have been a few "breakthrough" moments this month, especially regarding a couple of exciting possibilities about source materials. In one case, a body of rarely-used files that I thought would be totally inaccessible to me here in Ol' Peking and thus reluctantly left out of my project turns out to be available (though in what reduced form, who knows?) as a reprinted set of books in Taiwan. In another instance, a whole genre of folk performance art turns out to have had virtually no attention paid to it in Anglophone scholarship; what there is in Chinese and English is also mostly literary analysis and musicological studies.
The "plateau" isn't really about what I've been finding, though, of course! It's a conceptual one, a matter of my limited mental capacity for variegated facts and figures and whose rickshaw ran into whose chickens. It simply feels like there is too much sloshing around in my head. My research topic is a huge, amorphously defined one to begin with--I was told that it might not be a bad thing to have it stay that way as I plunged into fieldwork--and now, it may be time to take some of the equally hither-and-thither bits I've collected magpie-like and look for something to bind them together. Unfortunately, not being an actual magpie, spit probably won't cut it. No, maybe it's time to open a .doc file an save it as "draft1.doc"!
Just a couple of more long-winded notes to myself about two narrower aspects of the sloshy-head problem: first, it's clear that I need to grab onto cases or events as exemplary instances to prove my point--or to put it more pragmatically, future chapters. Right now, though, aside from the obvious events from the turbulent political history, there aren't a whole lot of novel "events" to choose from. In a previous paper I had talked about some case studies-- cf my post on "Dr. Sex"-- but these feel so hackneyed and "done." The folk performance art certainly could be a source of case studies: they're a fixed, large body of material, and I could take a few very specific examples from the corpus to discuss in detail. But, how to bridge the gulf between illiterate singers and French-educated Ph.D.s? I have only the vaguest of inklings as of right now, but (overly optimistically) I feel like that bridge would practically build itself if I started actually trying to cross the river and put down something in "draft1.doc". But actually that bridge is the terrifyingly tenuous, controversy-ridden key to all historiography: the diffident bond between trend and exception, between environment and individual, between longue dureé and the cheese and the worms! It is a monkey bridge I am very frightened to even look upon, much less try to cross...
Another part of the sloshy-head problem is the constant anxiety that I'm "doing something I shouldn't," that is, bothering to read and take notes on materials that will prove ultimately useless. That's the huge pitfall of fieldwork, I guess-- on one hand, one is so very free to do anything and everything. On the other, one's only in the field for a purpose, and time, money, and The Future are all separate Swords of Damocles dangling over one's bared neck. I guess that, if trying to tell a big story with little stories is the One Ring to Bind Them All of historical writing, then the psychological and material struggles of the historical writer between her own "big story"--degree-getting, job-finding, becoming a Real Adult--and the "little stories"--the pure pleasure of finding the un-looked-for, the delight of acquiring knowledge--is the One Ring that rules historians' lives.
And we can't just lob these guys into a giant (vulva-like) volcano and "un-birth" them, either. (That'd be nice.)
