EL DECRETUM Y LA DÓCTRINA DE LOS DERECHOS

Pablo Neruda in a poem, cited by Weick, 1995, pp. 19-20, says

While I am writing I 'mfar away and when I come back, I ’ve gone. I would like to know i f others go through the same things that I do have as many selves as I have, and see themselves similarly;

and when I've exhausted this problem, I'm going to study so hard

that when I explain myself, I'll be talking geography.

7 will change my logo to a teabag, as I only work when I am in hot water ’ Comment gathered from a newspaper and germane to my condition.

My ipsative inquiry relates to my purposes and impulses for doing this work, which have been introduced in the first chapter. However, beyond my interest in the topic and the participants in the research, is the use of my own experience as data, or rather as rich sources of meaning, to illuminate the topic of my inquiry. What I think and how these thoughts grow and build towards emerging purposes is crucial to what I find and what tales I have to tell. It is also the case, as Neruda’s poem testifies, that if I am able to connect with and convey my depth candidly to the reader, then it can contribute, as no other experience can, to an understanding o f the phenomena that I am studying.

As Laurie Lee (1977) suggests:

The only truth is what you remember. No one else who was there can agree with you because he (sic) has his own version of what he saw. He also holds to a personal truth of himself, based on an indefatigable self-regard.... ‘You hit old Tom off to the life, but why d’you tell all those lies about me?’ .... The truth is, o f course, that there is no pure truth, only the moody accounts of witnesses, (p. 52)

‘Indefatigable self-regard’, ‘the moody accounts of witnesses’: there is no wonder that poetic reminiscence sells better than social science accounts - it speaks so directly to the human condition and to the messy problems of living or giving an account of a life. As Weick, 1995, suggests, ‘A dry word-hoard is your best resource to make sense of sensemaking.’ (p. 197) But Lee also warns of the risks o f autobiography:

perhaps the widest pitfall in autobiography is the writer’s censorship of self Unconscious or deliberate, it often releases an image of one who could never have lived. Flat, shadowy, prim and bloodless, it is a leaf pressed dry on the page, the surrogate chosen for public office so that the author might survive in secret. With a few exceptions, the first person singular is one of the recurrent shams of

literature: fruit of a failure between honesty and nerve, (p. 52)

Many months before I found these quotations, I had read another book of Lee (1971) which illustrates these pitfalls beautifully. In my research journal for 14/6/19961 wrote:

On R oy Campbell, the poet, h e s a y s (p. 125) ‘He told m e how much m oney h e ’d b ee n paid by various publishers for books h e would n ever write. This a m u se d him too. And s o did his autobiography, Broken Record, which h e ’d recently published and which he said w a s largely a sp o o f to co n fu se his e n e m ie s .’ O f co u rse Campbell w a s, according to Lee, drunk w hen h e said this, s o it m ay not b e a reliable accou n t of his purpose. Furthermore it is reported s p e e c h in th e autobiography of another poet - Laurie Lee, written a s though it w ere yesterday, but in fact published 30 y ears after the ev e n ts. S o it is a n ice reminder of the am biguities and unreliabilities of ev en

autobiographical a ccou n ts.

But he also says in the essay on ‘Writing autobiography’ (Lee, 1977) that:

The autobiographer’s self can be a transmitter o f life that is larger than his own - though it is best that he should be shown taking part in that life and involved in its dirt and splendours, (p. 53)

Weick, 1995 also has advice about the use of autobiographical material:

The use of personal experience (Ellis & Flaherty, 1992) makes sense as a starting point in inquiry if

1. That experience is used for constant comparison with other experiences, 2. The social and contextual properties are carefully explicated,

3. Attention is paid to how that experience enlarges and diffuses and has effects beyond the time and place of its occurrence, and

4. That experience is treated as a particular in search o f a prototype.

My use of the ipsative in this research needs to be examined against these four criteria, and using the more poetic criteria offered by Lee - that it displays honesty and nerve in order to expose both dirt and splendour, rather than offering merely self-censorship.