Reviewing the Unwritten Dissertation
Review of “Political Violence in Modern China and the Creation of Modern China: A Dissertation.” By Niall Chithelen. 2029.
By Niall Chithelen*
I made the choice to read Niall Chithelen’s dissertation, and it does not pay in life to live with regrets. But, if you are looking to do the same, I should inform you of some things. In truth, Chithelen has achieved an astounding feat here; his work, despite being well-organized and framed around provocative research questions, has actually created a gap in multiple scholarly fields. This four-hundred-and-sixty-eight-page plod is a black hole of scholarly inquiry, a swirling interdisciplinary vortex. You approach cautiously, call into the void and hear not an echo but a garbled voice speaking of Republican-Era Shanghai and political violence and those mysterious truths that only scholars of China know (though not, of course, all the other scholars of China). This voice will chill you. Here you must listen to your gut. Perhaps the dissertation is relevant to your current project. Perhaps the author is your student or former student. Perhaps — less likely — your friend. It is ok. Your project will be fine if you do not cite (Chithelen, 2029). Less so if you do.
The dissertation took ten years for Chithelen to produce, an unusually long time, but the extra work shows in the final product. Paging through it, you grow up with the author. It is as though a decade of your life has passed too. This is a terrifying feeling. Technically speaking, Chithelen has not yet defended his work, as he and his committee agreed that the product was indefensible and spent the rest of the meeting drinking heavily and eating the homemade “chicken” sandwiches that Chithelen had provided. When the session adjourned, one committee member suggested that the manuscript be destroyed, and all toasted with fatefully empty glasses.
Those familiar with the final form of this work trace its origins to the day on which Chithelen arrived for seminar and responded to an innocuous comment with ninety-three uninterrupted minutes of discourse, stringing together his thoughts with “which brings us back to what you were saying,” “and that actually makes me think of,” and “that’s also interesting because.” No one knows for sure what he said during that time.
Should you start reading Chithelen’s work closely, you will happen upon a few key oddities. In order, one supposes, to fend off any counterarguments in advance, Chithelen uses an extreme quantity of footnotes. These peak on page 323, which contains seven-hundred separate references, one of which is a gripping short story about a detective in 1930s Los Angeles and the moral dilemmas of taking in more stray chickens than one can provide for. (It may actually be a true story, but when I made to flip to the endnotes for that footnote, the manuscript became unbearably hot to the touch.) Furthermore, identical footnotes appear in different places with different typographical errors, which suggests less that Chithelen plagiarized himself than that Chithelen unknowingly had the exact same thoughts more than once.
Chithelen also allows for considerable slippage in his use of terms. Although he spends much of the introduction defining “Marxism,” “disciplinary institutions,” “political violence,” and “true conservatism” — the last of which never appears anywhere else in the text — he later invokes concepts like “Marxism-Leninism,” “disciplinized institutions,” and “discourses of poeur” with no definition. It is not clear that Chithelen himself knows what he means with these, as we see in chapter six, with phrasings such as this one: “the rise of Marxism-Leninism (or something) within the Communist Party allowed those favoring coercive practices to ascend to positions of prominence.”
The most effective part of the work by far is the literature review, which is concise and often insightful. Chithelen does especially well to note the archival materials used by some of the most directly relevant secondary works, and he describes how his own research allows him to open new areas of discussion. The only abnormal part of this section comes in Chithelen’s references to his earlier work, where he describes himself as an “unserious scholar,” a “fool and occasional doctoral candidate,” and a “socially anxious pianist.” At least one of these comments makes more sense given the photo on the author’s page of Chithelen trying to force a smile with his hands about eight inches above the keys of a large piano.
This is all well and good, but it is followed by a litany of inexplicable scholarly choices. Chithelen’s theory of violence involves a number of words that, as far as I can tell, do not exist. He describes China as a “big place of a civilization,” and “pretty damn old if you think about it long enough.” Whenever he quotes a source in German he leaves it untranslated (he cannot read German). The third chapter is blank except for its title, “In This Dissertation, I Will Argue the Following.” After that, the reader begins experiencing time at an abnormally fast rate. I paused reading this dissertation to read a novel that I have since found out is not published yet.
When Chithelen was first accepted into graduate school, no one had any idea all this would happen. He seemed promising, if a bit taciturn. He had a few intriguing ideas for the direction of his research. His proposals were ambitious and foolhardy around the edges. He was not in touch with his emotions, but he was working on it.
Chithelen still seems personable, but he has created a heartless work, and it shows on his socially anxious face. How did he end up here? It may be that Chithelen had too much insight into the secondary literature in his field and could not say anything productive anymore. He might have applied too many analytical lenses and blinded himself. He could really have no idea what he is doing. Or perhaps this is a work borne of a debilitating fixation on mediocrity, world-shakingly destructive for fear of being banal. All is possible; nothing is possible. There is something dialectical about this failure, but I am not sure what it is. Do not assign this for a class. Read it as privately as you can, try to forget it, and realize that, for better or worse, you cannot.
*Niall Chithelen is a first-year Ph.D. student in History at the University of California, San Diego.
