The Perishing

University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 5-2017 The Perishing Matthew Randall Brock University of Tennessee, Knoxville, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the Appalachian Studies Commons Recommended Citation Brock, Matthew Randall, "The Perishing. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2017. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/4386 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Matthew Randall Brock entitled "The Perishing." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Margaret Lazarus Dean, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Christopher Hebert, William Hardwig, Mark Hulsether, Micheal Knight Accepted for the Council: Dixie L. Thompson Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) The Perishing A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Matthew Randall Brock May 2017 ! ii Abstract The Perishing is a novel set in 1980s-2000s southern Appalachia that explores the relationships between religious faith, family, trauma, and opiate addiction. It chronicles nearly thirty years in the life of the Brass family through family members’ narratives in order to present an overall picture of the family’s struggles through time. Central to the novel is the question: How do the things that go unsaid in a family—the secrets, the unsayable—affect the family dynamic? ! iii Table of Contents Introduction 1 The Perishing 25 Works Cited 272 Vita 273 1 Introduction I imagine most all creative writing students have heard mentioned in workshops the T.S. Eliot quote: “Good writers borrow, great writers steal.” For a long time, I considered the act of “stealing” as a writer to mean doing so unintentionally through the osmotic process of reading great literature, and I never consciously stole from a writer or anyone else for my own material, that is, until I wrote my novel, The Perishing. It is likely no secret to anyone who has read Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury that my own novel is structured identically. Faulkner divides his novel into four sections that encompass three decades, the first three sections narrated by members of the Compson family and the fourth section told through a third person narrator who closely follows Dilsey’s point of view. When asked in The Paris Review interview why he made this choice, Faulkner said that after beginning with a “mental picture . of the muddy seat of a little girl’s drawers in a pear tree,” he tried to tell her story through the family members who surrounded her: I had already begun to tell the story through the eyes of the idiot child, since I felt that it would be more effective as told by someone capable only of knowing what happened but not why. I saw that I had not told the story that time. I tried to tell it again, the same story through the eyes of another brother. That was still not it. I told it for the third time through the eyes of the third brother. That was still not it. I tried to gather the pieces together and fill in the gaps by making myself the spokesman. It was still not complete, not until fifteen years after the book was published, when I wrote as an appendix to another book the final effort to get the story told and off my mind, so that I myself could have some peace from it. It’s the book I feel tenderest toward. I couldn’t leave it alone, and I never could tell it right, though I tried hard and would like to try again, though I’d probably fail again. Though the impetus of my novel is not located in a single symbolic image, I had known for a number of years that I wanted to write about the Brass family. I tried to write this novel when I was an undergraduate, writing fiction for the first time in my life. However, I could never quite figure out how to structure the novel in order to tell the overall story of this family, nor 2 could I find the “silver bullet” as Barry Hannah called it, the central conflict that propels a narrative forward. It wasn’t until I read The Sound and the Fury that I fully understood that the “silver bullet” could be a character him or herself. Similar to Caddy in Faulkner’s novel, James in my novel is at the root of his family’s despair. Also similar to Caddy, the role he plays in his family’s dysfunction is not entirely his fault. Unlike Faulkner, I did not structure my novel like his necessarily in order to tell James’ story. What I was interested in are the effects traumatic events such as the sexual abuse of a family member can have on an entire family, even if the other members of the family are unaware of the event. If there is an image similar to Faulkner’s “muddy seat of a little girl’s drawers” in my novel, it is of a small airplane landing at an airstrip in rural East Tennessee behind a gas station blue-collar workers frequent each morning for gas and each evening for food and beer. I began my novel with this image, and though I did not realize it at the time, the opening paragraph is somewhat similar to Faulkner’s, in which Benjy “could see them hitting” (3); James “can see it coming.” He is, however, nothing like Benjy, whom Faulkner described as an “animal” incapable of feeling. When asked in the interview if he felt any emotion for Benjy, Faulkner replied, “The only thing I can feel about him personally is concern as to whether he is believable as I created him.” Though I readily admit that Faulkner has influenced my own writing and that I stole from him in terms of his narrative structure, this statement is where my thoughts about my character James and literary characters in general, and perhaps the creative act as a whole, diverge from Faulkner’s. I cannot, however, proceed to address this issue until I first confess to another theft on my part. This time I did not steal from a writer. I stole from a family member, my Uncle Firman. 3 It happened in the summer of 2012 when my father, Elmo, my cousin, Jeff, and Uncle Firman met for lunch at a Fuddruckers off the interstate. I was set to begin the Ph.D. program in English and Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee that August. In the interim, I was working, along with Jeff, for my father and Uncle Jim, Jeff’s father, who own a house painting company in Knoxville. Uncle Firman was in his late sixties at the time and retired from his job at the Oak Ridge Y12 facility. On Fridays, in order to spend time with his brothers and nephews, he would drive into Knoxville and buy us lunch. Every time he met us, he told stories of his and his brothers’—my father’s and uncle’s—childhood, but it wasn’t until the time we met him for lunch at Fuddruckers that I recorded him telling a story. It was my first time at Fuddruckers, and it was obviously nothing spectacular in terms of the venue. You order the food you want and wait at a table until a staff member calls your name over a loudspeaker. I had ordered first that day and was the first one at a table. I knew what lunch would entail, Uncle Firman the center of attention like always as he told his stories, so I decided on a whim, truthfully, I would turn on my phone’s recorder and leave it on the table during lunch. I don’t know exactly why I chose to record his story that day, so I cannot claim that I had some profound reason, but I’m glad I did. I had heard Uncle Firman’s stories my entire life. At holiday gatherings, at family reunions, anytime he was in the company of my father and/or Uncle Jim, also good storytellers but not quite as skilled as Uncle Firman, which they would readily admit. Uncle Firman was a tall, big man with curly hair. My father and Uncle Jim described him humorously and often to his face as looking “sickly” throughout most of his youth. He was the oldest brother, my father the second oldest, Uncle Jim the third and their sister, Aunt Paula, the youngest. The four of them grew up in East Tennessee, twenty miles from Knoxville in a place called Bull Run Valley. 4 The farmhouse they lived in, “the house on the creek” as they called it, stood in a hollow, or “holler” as I would call it around them, beside a stream, overlooking the valley of pastureland and bottomland below. Their childhoods were difficult, to say the least. Their father, a man named Randy, had psychological issues.

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