The Drive to Dissertate...

So on Thursday I start my drive cross-country once more… My friend Eve, and her pup Raleigh, are opening up their home to Blue and me in Bloomington, and on Friday I’ll drive from Bloomington to Erie (8+ hours).  And it’s dawned on me that long-distance driving is a lot like dissertating.  You don’t want to do it, it’s sometimes mind-numbing and lonely, but you need to stick it out in order to reach your destination.  Okay, it’s a rather mundane simile, but today I had to delete 10-15 pages and all I can say is that it physically hurt! I was trying to formulate an argument about Thackeray’s criticism of the British consumption of Indian goods, illuminated through the character of Jos Sedley in Vanity Fair and the silver cocoa tree in The Newcomes, but it was truly an argument going nowhere.  Can you imagine the depths of postcolonial theory I’d have to probe to try support such a broad point, plus how do I prove this was Thackeray’s intent? That it wasn’t just another aspect of English gluttony/green in general that he was moralizing against? So I took a wrong turn, had to back track, and just deal with the fact that I lost a few days…

Instead I’ve been writing about how Thackeray is challenging the fictions and nonfictions of empire (which I’ve recently learned where mostly written by British soldiers and surgeons) which both worked to compose “rose-colored” visions of the empire and the military’s valor abroad.  He exaggerates it to such a point of absurdity to make the audience reconsider their initial preconceptions on India.  Kudos again to Douglas Peers for his article on the military abroad: he quotes a CPT who felt Arabian and Nights and Orme’s history were the two texts every young man with his eyes on India had read.  And Thackeray seconds the notion! Both young Dobbin and the COL Newcome’s son(Clive) see India through the goggles of the Arabian nights (all silk tents, elephants carrying castles on their backs, and ruby-coated palaces).  Thackeray mocks this in The Tremendous Adventures of Major Gahagan in which he asserts the Maratha camp is complete with 383 elephants, each with a 12-room, two-story tent upon its back.  He enters one of these tents and tells the reader: “I suppose that the reader, if he be possessed of the commonest intelligence, knows that the tents of the Indian grandees are made of the finest Cashmere Shawls, and contain a dozen rooms at least, with carpets, chimneys, and sash- windows...” (46).  He’s mocking the absurd but established conceptions of India in the collective British imagination.   I’m rambling, of course, but all I can say is it’s finally coming together.  And it needs to be! I have a week by week schedule to get me through to my imposed deadline, and this chapter needs to be complete, clean, and submitted by May 7!

On the home front, just more health drama with poor Blue.  For a “doggie-dental cleaning” they shave a ring around the middle of a front leg (presumably for an IV), and the poor guy can’t stop licking and biting it, which will inevitably lead to infection… so… we’ve found the following solution (see the picture below…)  Otherwise, besides being terribly behind in calling my friends and loved ones, all is well.  More soon, and from Pennsylvania!