Case Study #2 Reflection
This chapter and reflection is embarrassingly late and for that, I want to apologize. But I’m not going to because my entire thesis project felt like the peak of my abilities both academically and emotionally, and, to be honest, it was something I needed to do, but it was not easy. It drained me and I needed a major break from that heavy lift. I needed a rest. I needed to remodel my bathroom and marvel at my daughter’s art and try out new recipes and get back in sync with the moon. I needed to go to bed early and organize my digital files and watch an entire sentimental tv show on Netflix and work in a lot of breath work and yoga.
So I did all those things. Self-care is not easy to prioritize, but I did my best.
And now I’m back. Because if I am anything, I am a summer writer, and it’s more than time for me to return to my craft. So without further ado, I’d like to present my second case study from my master’s thesis, and goodness gracious, this one dazzles, my friends.
The second case study focuses on Maggie Gallant’s virtual play, Betwixt & Between, which debuted at the Adoption Knowledge Affiliates’ annual conference in 2021. Once again, the stars aligned so that I was in attendance for the debut and got to meet Maggie at that critical time of the beginning of my project when I was choosing case studies. She was the first one who saw the finished chapter and I’m so very honored to have had the pleasure of working with her and her work. Much like the preceding case study which looks at Brian Stanton’s film @ghostkingdom, this one also directly engages with Lifton’s work and her theory of Ghost Kingdoms.
Additionally, I’m very pleased to share with you a gorgeous song called “To Say Goodbye” by a fellow adoptee, Ferera Swan which I think pairs with this chapter quite nicely. I’ve embedded the song on my chapter page and I hope you take the time to enjoy some of her other excellent pieces, too.
This chapter was the most heavily edited of the three case studies I produced during my thesis because 1) the narrative structure turned out to be a dream and 2) my advisor was obsessed with the implications of what I’d found here because it helped her (and me!) realize that my thesis could turn into a theory. This was also the chapter I borrowed from to present at my first ever Narrative conference (which, fittingly, was in England). You could say that it’s probably the most coherent chapter and, personally, it brought an element of whimsy to the otherwise deep and traumatic emotional work I was doing with my thesis project as a whole (because I am a nerd and portal fiction is FUN!).
The most important thing that came out of this chapter (which, of course, I somehow mentioned zero times in the chapter itself) is the way that the main character’s cognition is laid bare for the viewers to immerse themselves in. This is precisely the bridge I needed to help me cross over (hahaha get it?) from Lifton’s psychological theory of the Ghost Kingdom towards a place where I could analyze the narrative strategies that make a Ghost Kingdom. In other words, saying that adoptees have a unique situation that prompts them to fantasize as a coping method is one thing. Constructing such fantasies in a fictional form opens up a whole new conversation about the interplay of fiction and reality as cognitive functions that help us interpret the world and our place in it.
Our brains are devastatingly driven towards the narrative form for all kinds of reasons (memory, sense-making, imparting social mores, purpose, etc.), but what’s interesting about the Ghost Kingdom is that, especially here in Maggie Gallant’s piece, we can see how, with the absence of factual information, the brain proceeds to fill in all the holes with possibilities. These possibilities manifested as counterfactuals, once Lucy’s considered them, allow her to exercise more control in her waking life. So even if those counterfactual characters and scenarios aren’t part of her “textual actual” world, they are still real and serve an important purpose: giving her narrative structure where there would otherwise be empty chaos.
And all of this talk about Lucy’s portal into her imagination versus the actual world her story begins in? That narrative structure exists in all kinds of other stories you’ll recognize. Like so many. The Ghost Kingdom is what we have to describe the fantasies of those in the adoption constellation, but this story structure is bigger than that. It speaks to the way our brains are structured to lead us down the rabbit holes of what-if queries and come out the other side of the thought experiment changed.
You’ll eventually hear more about this structure once we get to talking about my narrative theory, Phantom Worlds, but for now (until I can get something published with my name on it), just enjoy stepping through the portal into Lucy’s daydream and seeing for yourself the ways in which our imaginations can help us heal.
