Confidence

by Rowland Manthorpe

  ‘Fucking uni fascists! At my uni, one girl—’

  ‘Right. I’ve got to go.’ Ellie shoved the letter back in the envelope, ripping the plastic window. ‘Do you know what we’re doing with this?’

  ‘Scanning it and posting it online!’ cried Rose, excitedly. ‘Or I know, shitting on it and sending it back!’

  Ellie opened the fridge and stuffed the letter into the small, lift-up box on the inside of the door. ‘It’s going in the miscellaneous compartment. We aren’t mentioning it until I’ve finished this dissertation.’

  ‘You should get legal advice.’

  ‘Ssshhhh.’ Ellie closed the fridge and put her finger to her lips. ‘Now I’m going to pick up my rucksack and walk out that door and we’re never going to speak of this again.’

  Dr Longstaff’s room was right at the bottom of Humanities Two, a fluorescent-stripped warren of corridors lined with identical doors: B.31a, B.2.3, B.f. By the time she’d hunted the office down, Ellie was five minutes late and sweating.

  At Dr Longstaff’s call, she stepped into a tiny, coffee-scented cupboard. Piles of books and essays were heaped haphazardly on the floor. Computer cables snaked across the carpet, coiling ivy-like around the legs of the desk and chairs. Two other people – Chris from Ellie’s course, and a wispy, pale girl she’d never met before – were wedged between Dr Longstaff’s desk and the bookshelves, hunched over as if sheltering from rain.

  ‘Things have got a bit end-of-yearish in this office.’ Dr Longstaff held out her arms. ‘Here, Chris, pass me those.’

  Giving Ellie an ‘all right’ nod, Chris handed over a pile of essays, and Ellie sat down. Her heart was thumping. She knew it was an office hour, but somehow she hadn’t imagined other people being there – it was like going to the doctor (a real doctor, not a PhD doctor) with an embarrassingly situated sore you’d been denying for weeks, and finding yourself ushered into a group session.

  Dr Longstaff turned back with a cracked-lipped smile. ‘My office hours have been getting rather busy and there’s likely some crossover between you three, so I’ve put you together.’

  Ellie nodded stiffly.

  ‘You wanted to talk about . . . ?’

  ‘My dissertation,’ Ellie half-whispered.

  ‘Ah-ha,’ Dr Longstaff’s eyes narrowed. ‘But you are aware that we’re not allowed to discussion your dissertation at this stage? S’cuse me.’ She pulled a tissue from her sleeve and blew her nose.

  ‘Sorry?’ Ellie managed to say.

  Dr Longstaff blinked away a sneeze. ‘The module pack clearly states that fifth April was the cut-off date for dissertation supervision. You didn’t hand in a draft or arrange a meeting, so . . .’ She shrugged, not cruelly, but not encouragingly either.

  ‘Oh,’ Ellie croaked. ‘You . . . can’t help at all?’

  ‘Well . . .’ Dr Longstaff sighed, scanning her desk for inspiration. ‘We could talk very briefly in a very general sense. You have a draft?’

  The last time Ellie had opened the dissertation folder on her desktop, over a week ago now, she’d seen four documents arranged horizontally, their single-letter names spelling out F – U – C – K. Slowly, she shook her head.

  ‘You must have something approaching a draft though, because the deadline is . . .’

  ‘Friday,’ Chris chipped in.

  A pause mushroomed into a silence. For a second, Ellie felt she might black out with anxiety.

  Dr Longstaff locked eyes with her. ‘I may be stating the obvious, but at this point, the most important thing is to hand in something.’

  Ellie had an overpowering urge to explain that this wasn’t her – she was a natural shower-upper and hander-inner. She used to be a student with First potential, not one who didn’t read the module pack. But what was the point? Any explanation would sound feeble now.

  Dr Longstaff’s eyes bobbed up to the clock on the wall. ‘Am I right in saying that your dissertation is about Nietzsche?’

  Ellie nodded dumbly, still clinging to the hope that help was forthcoming.

  ‘Because Chris wants to discuss Paper Five, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century political thought. Nietzsche’s certainly relevant to that. So why don’t we discuss Nietzsche in the context of Paper Five.’

  It wasn’t a question. Dutifully, pointlessly, Ellie reached into her bag for a pen and paper, catching sight of all those useless notes.

  ‘So.’ Dr Longstaff closed her eyes. ‘What is the connection between Nietzsche and twentieth-century political philosophy?’

  Ellie knew this was going to be irrelevant, but going through the motions was strangely reassuring. She wanted to write something down. Oh dear, she jotted.

  ‘Why is Nietzsche, who many people believe doesn’t even have a political philosophy, on the paper at all? Hmm.’ Dr Longstaff put her finger to her lips. Having posed the question, she seemed surprised, almost captivated by it.

  Frowny face, Ellie wrote neatly, and then, automatically, Ellie.

  ‘How about this? Forget about political philosophy, all of twentieth-century philosophy is a post-Nietzschean project.’

  Nietzsche, Ellie added beneath her own name. She drew a love heart around them and then an arrow, carefully adding vanes to the feather.

  ‘Not explicitly. Nietzsche was ignored by the philosophical establishment for— Of course,’ Dr Longstaff interrupted herself. ‘This is all in the Nietzsche lecture notes on Blackboard.’

  At Dr Longstaff’s pivot, Heather saw her chance. ‘Can I ask a question about Paper Two?’

  That was it, Ellie realised, as Dr Longstaff began to talk about Rousseau. That was all the help she was going to get. Unable to think of some kind of social conjunctive to say before she stood up, Ellie stood up anyway.

  ‘Oh.’ Dr Longstaff stopped mid-flow to fix her bloodshot gaze on Ellie. ‘Are you leaving? Well, remember – something, yes?’

  Ellie yanked the door over the wrinkled carpet, and lurched out. In the smothering silence of the corridor, she leaned both palms against the wall. She had thought she was afraid before – she hadn’t known what fear was. This fear was so overpowering it was like being high. Adrenalin surged through her legs; her breath came short and constricted. She started walking, then running, down the corridor, not knowing where she was heading or what she would do when she got there.

  Nietzsche wrote on the move. Movement was the essential principle of his writing, so much so that in the second half of his life he arranged his entire existence around it. In 1886, a typical year, he wintered in Nice, moved to Switzerland for the summer, then stayed for a month in the Gulf of Genoa before travelling back to Nice for the winter. He had no home and very few possessions, and he travelled from hotel to boarding house carrying clothes and writing materials, and little else besides.

  For the act of writing, Nietzsche’s preferred motion was walking. After suitable weather, the first requirement for him in any new place was a plentiful supply of hikes. He was quite capable of walking eight hours or more in a single day. Spending summer in the Swiss Alps in 1881, his daily routine included three or four hours’ walking in the morning, followed by a similar stint in the afternoon. (After an early dinner he would sit quietly in the dark for two hours, conserving his ‘spiritual powers’, before retiring to bed at 9 p.m.) While he walked he thought and wrote, scribbling his reflections in pocket-sized notebooks. He walked alone, and as he moved, he talked to himself. His books, you might say, are a record of these conversations, the many parts of Nietzsche in constant dialogue.

  Nietzsche wanted his thoughts to romp, to caper, to frolic. Such ‘light-footed intellect’ could never be achieved sitting down. Walking served as a practical substitute, but dancing was the purest expression of free-spiritedness, of breaking free of inhibitions and affirming life – ‘the rapture of the Dionysian state, with its annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of existence’. ‘Thinking must be learned as dancing must be learned, as a type of dancing,’ Nietzsche wrote.
‘One must be able to dance with the pen!’

  The key to such writing was flow, although in many ways that word is too mild for what Nietzsche intended. The word he used was Rausch – ‘intoxication’ or ‘rush’ (‘a feeling of higher power . . . strength as mastery over the muscles, as suppleness and pleasure in movement, as dance, as lightness and presto’). Nietzsche wanted the words to pour out of him in a kind of musical ecstasy. At many points in his life he was able to attain this creative high, although he had a tendency to overestimate his powers of production and underestimate the boring work of drafting and editing. The book Nietzsche passed off as ‘the work of so few days that I cannot, with decency, reveal their number’ actually took at least two months to write; hardly sluggish, so why did he feel obliged to exaggerate? He wanted his readers to believe there was no work involved for him in writing, that his books were uncrafted extensions of his life and personality.

  The form of Nietzsche’s writing reflects its mode of preparation. Eschewing complicated structures, he wrote in aphorisms, short chunks of prose ranging from a few sentences to a few pages. Nietzsche recommended that his books were read in the same fragmentary way, preferably on the move. ‘A book like this is not for reading straight through or aloud,’ he wrote of Daybreak, ‘but for dipping into when walking or on a journey.’

  For Nietzsche, mobile writing was less a personal preference than a moral–physical ideal. Sitting was bad not only for your health – ‘Pinched intestines betray themselves, you can bet on that’ – but also for your spirit: it was nihilistic, because it promoted thought over instinct. Even the greatest writers could be caught in this trap. Nietzsche’s 1888 book Twilight of the Idols contains a characteristically kamikaze assault on the writing habits of Gustave Flaubert, who in a letter to a friend had made the apparently inoffensive statement: ‘One cannot think and write except when seated.’ For Nietzsche, this was a shameful admission of decadence. ‘There I have you, nihilist!’ he spat. ‘The sedentary life [das Sitzfleisch – literally ‘sitting meat’] is the very sin against the Holy Spirit. Only thoughts reached by moving have value.’

  At its most basic level, writing is self-conscious work. Self-doubt is part of the process: to make your writing good, you need to be self-critical. Nietzsche wrote, when in truth he wanted to dance. He walked and talked, because by walking and talking he could get out of his head and into the realm of movement and feeling.

  After the initial panic, after the paralysis, after the night in which she lost consciousness for no more than ten seconds and yet thought nothing, nothing at all, a lifetime of nothing, Ellie climbed out of bed with a single realisation, an epiphany that dawned with the morning: she had to get out.

  In first year, Ellie used to do her best work in the library computer room, often late at night. She found the constant chatter a useful distraction – she could bounce off it. Around midnight, when the room was mostly empty, she liked to print her essay and spread it sheet by sheet over a large table. Her fondest memories were of dramatic structural alterations that struck her about 2 a.m. If she hadn’t stayed up all night, she felt she hadn’t done the essay properly.

  Later, Ellie decided that was a sign of indiscipline. As her appetite for campus socialising dwindled, she took to working on her laptop in her room. Sometimes, when she was really on fire, she would put a beer in the fridge at the beginning of the day, knowing that it would be ready for her at 7 or 8 p.m., after she’d sent her essay off.

  But now, home had got weird. There was no way she would be able to break the pattern there. And the other methods she normally used – music, earplugs, sitting in Waterstones, smoking, not smoking, working in other faculties, talking to herself, running – they hadn’t worked either. Instead, they’d become their own independent, intricately constructed forms of weirdness.

  Before 7 a.m., Ellie trooped out of the house carrying everything she’d ever written or read about Nietzsche. Fuelled by fear, she was in the library computer room in under fifteen minutes, hoping that the ghosts of essays past would be on her side. As the automatic lights flickered on, she laid claim to a corner station.

  The trouble was how to begin. Ellie was keen on an arresting first line, something she could spring off and refer back to and question. It needed to be smart and compelling, but not clever-clever or irrelevant, not pointless wordplay. Perhaps she had a quote that would do . . . As the last computer station was snapped up and the smell of crisps and coffee filled the air, she started scouring through her primary material.

  That was day one. Only at 4 p.m. did it hit her that she had squandered one of four available days, crafting and deleting countless single-sentence openers. The airless room was suddenly unbearably hot.

  ‘Oh, hi, Ellie,’ said Chris, plonking himself in the neighbouring seat, which someone had clearly just vacated to go to the loo. ‘Dissertation?’

  Ellie grunted. Her eyes flicked from the note-spattered Word document to Chris’s monitor. He signed onto Facebook. ‘Aren’t you doing yours?’ she couldn’t help but ask.

  ‘Finished it,’ shrugged Chris.

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘To be honest,’ Chris lowered his voice. ‘I’ve actually finished my revision too. I’m kind of at a loss now.’ He clenched his teeth in an ‘eek’.

  Ellie had no idea how to respond to this baffling statement. At least she knew how little she knew – she knew nothing, in fact, but at least she knew that. It only occurred to her after Chris Liked a video of a man falling over, logged off and ambled away: some of the people handing in dissertations were like Chris. One of them definitely was. She didn’t need a work of art, for God’s sake – she needed 15,000 words.

  Ellie determined to start in the middle. Until late that night, and from 7 the next morning, she began bashing it out. It didn’t feel like creating something, it felt like smashing down a building. ‘Nietzsche thought,’ she launched sentence after sentence, each one landing on the page with a squelch, like toast dropped jam side down. ‘I would argue . . .’ she squeezed out the others, followed by some strained, clunky, nonsensical non-argument. She brought into the world some of the ugliest, most fractured phrases she’d ever read.

  This dissertation will go on to have argued that Nietzsche’s philosophy clearly demonstrated and explores a definite, yet conflicted, conception of individuality, as both socially situated in society and radically autonomous from his or her environment. It will do so first by analysing three of Nietzsche’s works of philosophy before going on to do a literature review of the secondary criticism in more detail, and finally end by concluding the argument.

  Grimly resolved not to look back, Ellie staggered onward with her galumphing prose, scrawling out words like a two-year-old with crayons.

  Early in the evening of the second day, she realised that she’d written 10,000 words – a new record in verbiage. She decided to print it out, assess what she had, and begin the uphill struggle of honing it. The computer-room regulars were winding down, the low-level chitchat crescendoing to loud laughter, and the tinny sound of music played through computer speakers. As she began to read, revisers were vacating for dinner and a group of second-year boys colonised her half of the computer room, all taking part in some kind of online role-playing game.

  Some of her stuff was plain gibberish, it all needed to be rewritten, and there were loads of gaps where she’d put ‘[EXAMPLE]’ or ‘[THAT QUOTE ABOUT . . .]’. And yet, hiding between the circumlocution and lacunae, there was some decent material. What she needed was to get out of this room so she could think. She left the warlords to it.

  And, like a fool, she dropped in at the library café for a cup of tea and a sandwich. Maggie waved from a corner, barely recognisable in thick glasses and some kind of headband, beckoning Ellie over. Maggie was one of those people Ellie had lost touch with this year, not because she didn’t like them, but because . . . Well, she wasn’t sure why, and now wasn’t the moment to find out. Ellie waved her printout apologetically
and made a panicked face.

  Social embarrassment drove her through the library barriers and outside. She began an aimless, yet super-fast, march around campus, taking the narrow, bush-lined path towards the business faculty at the top of the hill. Ten thousand words, she repeated, mantra-like, I’ve got ten thousand words. As she walked, the better elements of her argument whipped round her mind, making her face pulse and squirm – she must have looked like a madwoman. But the movement helped; she was forging connections, weaving arguments; she had a couple of decent linking ideas, and began to craft more elegant versions of existing points.

  Before she even knew what was happening, Ellie began to hope that her dissertation might not be such a piece of shit after all. Straying ever further from the draft in hand, the material in her mind began to look substantial, rather good, potentially . . . excellent.

  Ambition is a survivor. When the environment’s hostile, you can pretend it’s extinct, that you’ve outgrown dreams and are toughing it out on the coalface of reality. But one day, long before the conditions are right, you turn over a rock and find it’s lived on under there, a gnarly little shrub that will shoot up at the first touch of sunshine.

  Ellie found a cold, glassy corner of the business faculty lobby and furiously rewrote the first few pages of her work. She filleted the fatty prose; one by one, paragraphs became smoother, clearer, easier to swallow. At some point a man vacuumed, the wheezing buzz gradually homing in on her corner. With an apologetic smile, Ellie shifted to the opposite side, realising how sore her back was. She felt frantic, but also effective: moulding and cutting and rearranging – this was something she could really do. Ellie collapsed into bed that night safe in the knowledge that progress had been made.

  At the crack of dawn next day, she woke to a nightmare: her dissertation was due tomorrow. Fingers mauling the laptop before her eyes were fully open, she read through what she had (9,500 – a net loss). After two pages of decent prose, it fell apart. Unnecessarily drawn-out, self-explanatory points that might as well have read ‘[PLACE PADDING HERE]’ sat alongside long cut-and-pastes from primary and secondary works, and half-baked, ellipses-peppered brain farts: