Current Project: The "Institutionalization" of the Lebanese Republic, 1920-1946

The original draft of this 75-page monstrosity was completed in November 2004. It is the biggest disaster of my career as a writer. The difficulties were:

(1) Any imaginative person has myriad theoretical ideas about a subject which he or she is passionate. A good theorist must approach this myriad mess and distill a portion of it into a theory. My MS short-term recall problem made it difficult to see the whole picture at once (more on that type of problem here), so I wound up writing the whole mess. It’s time to slay the dragon.

(2) I was trying to show the reader where the idea for the theory came from and which texts had influenced it, as a sort of a literature review. This was a disaster. The journey a thinker takes to develop an idea is not the same journey the reader needs to take to learn the idea quickly. In fact, as the journey the thinker took is often a series of very idiosyncratic imaginative responses to many different texts, that journey, without extraordinary narration, must be by and large meaningless to the reader, whose imagination must perforce work differently that the writer’s. The intellectual journey is deeply meaningful to the thinker, but the thinker is unlikely to be able to contextualize the journey for the reader unless he or she happens also to be a novelist. The point is to bring the reader to the new theory as quickly and painlessly as possible. The intellectual journey is not a literature review. This was not multiple sclerosis. It was simply self-indulgence.

(3) Foucault is right about story telling. We don’t recreate the seamless story from the shambles that are the documents. Rather, we impose order on the documents, excluding some details and inferring others. Our story is always more incomplete than the documents. Now, if done properly, this is hardly a tragedy. Every series of events can be narrated at a more concrete or a more abstract level. I was having trouble moving up and down the ladder of abstraction in order to pitch the story properly for my page limit and theoretical needs. This is a normal graduate student problem. It is not embarrassing that I suffered from it, but it is annoying.

(4) I don’t draw on enough secondary sources for the history. I knew that going in. I was desperate at the time to simply give birth to the idea. The paper was desperately out of control. Getting it into publishable shape was the least of my worries.

The new goal is 12,000 words.