Body Composition
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Body Composition A dissertation presented to the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy Kelley E. Evans June 2008 2 This dissertation titled Body Composition by KELLEY E. EVANS has been approved for the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences by Joan C. Connor Professor of English Benjamin M. Ogles Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3 ABSTRACT EVANS, KELLEY E., Ph.D., June 2008, English Body Composition (232 pp.) Director of Dissertation: Joan C. Connor Kelley Evans‘s dissertation consists of a collection of personal essays, which foreground the experience of the body. In four sections—Sensation, Chaos/Control, Movement, Inward/Outward—she considers her body and the bodies of loved ones in states both elevated and debased, in social space and in the mind. In her critical introduction, ―Canon(icle) for the Personal Essay,‖ Evans proposes a reflexive and constantly reinvented personal essay canon as a corrective for the hegemony of memoir in the field of creative nonfiction. Examining texts by Eliza Haywood, Margaret Fuller, Jamaica Kincaid, and Etel Adnan, Evans seeks to add diverse voices to the canon and to add innovative techniques to discussions of craft. Approved: _____________________________________________________________ Joan C. Connor Professor of English 4 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ―And you will be consumed‖ was originally published in Harpur Palate in Summer 2007. ―Body Composition‖ is forthcoming in the Spring 2008 issue of Fourth Genre. I wish to thank my professors at Ohio University and beyond for their exacting attention to my work. Thanks to the members of my committee, Joan Connor, Dinty W. Moore, Janis Butler Holm, Pepo Delgado-Costa, and David Lazar. Joan Connor encouraged me in my desire to write about my experiences as a woman, while reminding me of the essentials of good prose. Visiting professors Carla Harryman and Eloise Klein Healy awakened me to new possibilities in prose and poetry. Thanks especially to David, who taught me that I had been following Montaigne‘s winding path all along. Thanks to my parents, Jan and C. Stephen Evans, for their encouragement and wisdom. This manuscript would not have been possible without my husband Jamey Bouwmeester, whose unflagging support and sound editing were indispensible. Thanks, finally, to my daughter, Imogen Pearline Evans Bouwmeester, who birthed me as a person and a writer anew. 5 For Jamey 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract ............................................................................................................................... 3 Acknowledgments............................................................................................................... 4 Critical Introduction ............................................................................................................ 8 Canon(icle) for the Personal Essay ......................................................................... 9 Sensation ........................................................................................................................... 42 And you will be consumed ................................................................................... 43 El Malpais [The Badlands] ................................................................................... 56 On Touching and Not Touching ........................................................................... 70 Body Composition ................................................................................................ 82 Chaos/Control ................................................................................................................... 97 Say A Prayer ......................................................................................................... 98 On Birth Control ................................................................................................. 112 I Want to Drive a Bus ......................................................................................... 128 On Absence ......................................................................................................... 140 Movement ....................................................................................................................... 142 In Which I Move Again ...................................................................................... 143 On Rest Areas ..................................................................................................... 155 In Transit ............................................................................................................. 173 Inward/Outward .............................................................................................................. 185 Feet ...................................................................................................................... 186 7 Side Effects ......................................................................................................... 188 Betrayal, Betrothal .............................................................................................. 204 8 CRITICAL INTRODUCTION 9 Canon(icle) for the Personal Essay Discussion among creative writers of nonfiction, in conferences and in corridors, often steers toward the issue of what can be claimed as truth. Witness the ongoing debate about the factual misrepresentations in James Frey‘s memoir A Million Little Pieces, or only slightly further back, the uproar about the conflation of characters in Vivian Gornick‘s autobiographical work Fierce Attachments. Oprah and large publishing houses raise objections to their work, sparking national debate and intensifying the argument already present in classrooms. Writers wring their hands and ask, what is the limit? Where is the line? And how can I get around it? Recently on the Diane Rehm show I heard Molly O‘Neil discuss myth and story in her memoir Mostly True: A Memoir of Family, Food, and Baseball; she champions ―emotional truth‖ as well as factual truth (―11:00 Molly O‘Neil‖). On the other side of the debate, Aaron Hamburger writes in Poets and Writers, ―A memoir is a serious attempt to reconstruct true events, or else it is fantasy. Not both‖ (28). I think they could both agree that the fact v. fiction celebrity boxing match will be dominant for years to come, largely because memoir as a subgenre of nonfiction is so popular, and memoir brings the issue of truth in storytelling to the forefront by its very nature. One may speculate about the larger cultural significance of the current truth(s) debates, but I will not. You probably are thinking that I will take a stance or side, but I do not wish to do that either. I do want to talk about what this conversation means for the larger field of creative nonfiction. I believe that the constant attention on fact versus fiction indicates that something is lacking in current studies of creative nonfiction— 10 namely, a knowledge of the history of the personal essay. If we give more attention to the study of the personal essay from Montaigne to the present, this dominant discourse about the blurred line of truth and fiction will develop into a more productive conversation about the craft of creative nonfiction. Furthermore, in studying this history, we have the rare opportunity to create an inclusive and elucidating canon, one that can enlarge our expectations of creative nonfiction as well as the smaller subgenre of the personal essay. Though I doubt my suggested course of action will change the larger public obsession with the reliability of memoir, it can improve the texture and depth of discussions among creative nonfiction writers, and, ultimately, help us to be better writers. First, a description of this slippery genre is in order. My provisional (brief) definition is derived from Montaigne (and to be revised below). The personal essay is a piece of writing where the author‘s self is apparent, usually through the use of ―I,‖ in which the author explores his or her mind and/or larger issues through his or her experiences. The author allows, even embraces, self-contradiction, and lets ideas unfurl in a digressive manner which, while highly sculpted, appears close to the way in which those ideas are thought. Certainly a personal essay would be an apt entry into a discussion of memory and its construction. However, when we discuss whether or not memories are true, or if the author has told the truth in recounting them, we immediately focus on nonfiction‘s commonalities with fiction, or how a story is being told—how the writer has employed scene, character, and narrative arc. The facts in question—those nails that snag the cuffs on the frayed jeans of truth—are the facts of the story: where, with whom, how many, 11 and so on. What went through the author‘s mind at the time, and what the author is thinking now, cannot be subjected to a fact-finding mission. It is precisely the author‘s mind that Montaigne sought to display. When story is employed in his work, he aims to discover what it means, not simply to recount it. The distinction of the personal essay is its ability to comment on the action of the past. While current creative nonfiction has done much to incorporate for its benefit the best of fictional techniques, it has ignored its biggest strength—the ability to tell rather than show and get away with it. In the larger field of creative nonfiction, storytelling for storytelling‘s sake