Synthesizing
I’m at the point where I just have to stop reading and focus entirely on bringing together the hundreds of notes I’ve made toward the thesis.
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This is insanely difficult.
The trouble is that I’m pulling four things together: Hayden White’s ideas about the emplotment of history; Kenneth Burke’s ideas about Myth; Claude Levi-Strauss’s ideas about Myth; and T.S. Kuhn’s paradigms. But I’m not just pulling them together – I’m pulling modified forms of them or incomplete pieces of them together. I’m using White, for example, only so that I can step beyond him, knocking down the barrier he draws between history and the sciences. But for the reader to follow along with me in knocking down that barrier, he has to be familiar already with Kuhn’s work. And what I want to say about Kuhn depends upon a familiarity with Burke. Et cetera.
To throw in the final twist, I’m using Cormac McCarthy to tie them all together. See, for me the principle “argument” running through the Border tetralogy is that all the sense we can make out of the world comes through the construction of narratives – that “All is telling” (The Crossing 155). This all-inclusiveness bridges the divide between the sciences and humanities. Burke restricts himself from applying his uses of myth to any science and White, as I’ve said, believes that history cannot ever be a science. On the other side scientists are loath to get anywhere close to anything that could be called myth (even people like Kuhn who are quite willing to undercut the sacrosanct status of science. But what’s to stop us from saying that all fields are essentially mythic – they all work to generate the narratives we use to order the world. Science places particular limits on the types of elements one can place into the narrative but that does not make it exceptional – all mythmaking has rules. Science is a form of mythmaking that is incredibly well adapted for application to the manipulation of our environment. …But I’m digressing into my theory stuff.
I’ve been bashing my head against this introduction for two weeks and I still have a tangled mess of these different strings. I know the theoretical knot that ties them together is mythic narrative, and I know that McCarthy provides the light with which to view those connections. But untangling them such that the reader can follow one thread without having to know all the others is killing me.
