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UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI _____________ , 20 _____ I,______________________________________________, hereby submit this as part of the requirements for the degree of: ________________________________________________ in: ________________________________________________ It is entitled: ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ Approved by: ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ THE BEAR BRYANT FUNERAL TRAIN A dissertation submitted to the Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTORATE OF PHILOSOPHY (Ph.D.) In the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the college of Arts and Sciences 2001 by William Bradley Vice B.A., University of Alabama, 1994 M.A., University of Tennessee, 1997 Committee Chair: Josip Novakovich Abstract The Bear Bryant Funeral Train is an original work of fiction that also contains a scholarly analysis of the British novelist Wyndham Lewis, entitled Wyndham Lewis and the Time Cult. Within the scholarly portion of this dissertation, the author examines several “swerves” in the writings of both psychoanalytic and structural critics in regards to Lewis’ depiction of self and race, especially within the little read novel The Apes of God. The author’s own collection of short fiction is broken into two parts: Stalin and Other Children's Stories and The Bear Bryant Funeral Train. In part one the author attempts to marry existentialism with imagism in hopes of using vivid images to encapsulate man’s complicated relationship to history. In the second section, all stories are set in the author’s hometown of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. These intertwining stories attempt to reconcile the seemingly incompatible movements of Southern regionalism and international postmodernism by using the famous college football coach Bear Bryant as their subject. Acknowledgments: The stories in this collection appeared in the following publications: “Stalin” in Hayden’s Ferry Review, “Mojo Farmer” in The Georgia Review, “Artifacts” in The Southern Review, and “Drunk at the Zoo” in The Greensboro Review. “Mojo Farmer” was reprinted in the New Stories from the South, 1997 anthology published by Algonquin Press. The author would like to acknowledge his appreciation for those friends and teachers who helped make this book possible: Tim Parrish, Ted Solotaroff, Allen Wier, Kent Nelson, Josip Novakovich, Erin McGraw, Andrew Hudgins, Tom LeClair, Jim Schiff, John Drury, Don Bogen, Will Allison, Dick, Lois, and Gilda Rosenthal, and the entire faculty and staff of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference past and present (especially Wyatt Prunty, Pinckney Benedict, Barry Hannah, Claire Messud, Cheri Peters, Phil Stephens, Greg Williamson, Danny Anderson, Leah Stewart, Leigh Ann Couch, Liz Van Hoose, and Ron Briggs.) Very special thanks goes to my wife, Juliana Gray Vice, without whose love and support I would be totally lost. Thanks also to my family, both the Vice and Dyer clans, and friends old and new: Scott Hamner, Lance and Sharon Hopenwasser, Ricky Groshong, Mike Everton, Jim Murphy, Brad Quinn, Lynn Shaffer, Michele Griegel, Ann McClellan, Cate Marvin, and Shawn Sturgeon. Thanks most of all to my father and mother, Leon and Dot Vice, for all they’ve done. Shout out to Tom Franklin, Elwood Reid, and all the SOB’s and DOB’s. Dedication This book is dedicated to my father, William Leon Vice, the man who gave me the two things I needed to write: discipline and love. Table of Contents Wydham Lewis and the Time Cult The Politics of Personality /2 The Unreadable Wydham Lewis /20 The Bear Bryant Funeral Train Stalin / 53 Mojo Farmer / 70 Lotus Garden / 77 Artifacts / 79 Drunk at the Zoo / 95 Little Strangers /115 The Music of Strong Drink /126 Chickensnake /127 Tuscaloosa Knights 1935 /145 Report From Junction /165 Demopolis /186 The Bear Bryant Funeral Train /218 1 Wyndham Lewis and the Time Cult Wyndham Lewis and the Politics of Personality For much of the twentieth-century Wyndham Lewis has been virtually ignored by scholars of high modernism who prefer to examine the careers of his contemporaries: Pound, Stein, Joyce, Eliot, etc. Not only was Lewis's Blast group (of which Pound himself was a member) one of the early voices of vorticism, Lewis was also one of the century's most prolific authors who proved himself adept in every genre from the novel, to philosophy, to political analysis. Wyndham Lewis was at once a scholar and an artist of the first rank, a self- fashioned Renaissance man equally skilled in sculpture and painting as in the belles lettres. But if Lewis has been excluded from the modernist pantheon, he has no one to blame but himself. Lewis's 1927 book, Time and Western Man, is an insightful philosophical and cultural critique, but ultimately proves to be a gross over-simplification of the issues that define modernism, reducing the most complicated relationships between history, politics, philosophy, and aesthetics into the inadequate binary oppositions: space vs. time. Lewis aligns himself with the former and his peers with the latter, and prompts the reader on every occasion to choose between the two. While it is difficult to accept Lewis's black/white portrait of modernism, it would be fair to say that modernism, from its very origins, is compromised of a dualistic rationality. Two thinkers, Nietzsche and Bergson, are instrumental in delineating the boundaries that will define modernism. Both choose to frame 2 reality into general categories of flux and chaos. In Friederich Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, the author contends that there is an epic struggle between two opposing forces, which he identifies as the Apollonian and the Dionysian. For Nietzsche reality consists of the arbitrary human need to order which is represented by the Greek god of light and plastic arts Apollo, and the natural universe's tendency to remove order, to dissipate structure, personified as Dionysius, god of music and intoxication. For Nietzsche each significant epoch of civilization is little more than children's sand castles washed away by the sea, and then rebuilt the next epoch by another group of children. The sea is the ultimate Dionysian reality, and the sand castles man's Apollonian attempt to impose order. The primacy of Dionysian flux leads Nietzsche also to assert that not only are all systems of government and religions illusions, but so are the concepts of a unified self, logic, and all scientific causal relations. Though Nietzche is rarely mentioned in Time and Western Man, his depiction of existence as "power struggle" has a formative influence on Wyndham Lewis. Nietzsche says that the only time the Dionysian and the Apollonian forces have come to rest in concordance is in the Greek art of tragedy. According to Nietzsche tragedy ends because of the pre-scientific rationality of Socrates, who Nietzsche sees as a "type of theoretical man" devoid of any Dionysian music. English critic Toby Avard Foshay identifies Nietzsche as Lewis's "silent antagonist" as well as the "foundational intellectual influence on Lewis's early career" (Foshay 60). Lewis attempts to invert the value that Nietzsche places 3 upon Dionysian music by choosing "Socrates as a model" in an "attempt to turn Nietzsche's call for a revaluation of values against him" (Foshay 60). Foshay sees Lewis's early involvement with the Blast group and vorticism, and later his essay "Physic of the Not-Self," as an attempt to locate the unified self in the deep structure of personality, in other words an attempt to find a vorticist- self. After the dissolution of the Blast group, Lewis becomes disillusioned with the idea of pure form, pure abstraction. Because of this Lewis, like Nietzsche, abandons the possibility of a unified self. the ground of supposed uniqueness and authenticity is an illusion. The self becomes the locus of an aporia, a contradiction in terms. It is a self that in its dependence upon other as "Not-Self," is equally a self and a not self; or rather neither in an absolute sense. (Foshay 53) The not-self Foshay refers to describes Lewis's belief that identity is formed by a physical negation. Subjects negate objects in order to carve out a self; self is not table, self is not chair, self is not other, not even former representations of the self. Therefore the self/not self is perpetually changing, relocating the center of personality. It requires a physical, plastic image to tell it what it is not. This accounts for Lewis's privileging of the plastic arts over music. Even though Lewis claims in Book II of Time and Western Man in the chapter entitled "Spatialization and Concreteness" that he "knows nothing" of music, there is much evidence that Lewis associates the very nature of music as Dionysian force capable of dissolving the self. 4 You move round the statue, but it is always there in its entirety before you: Whereas the piece of music moves through you as it were . .When you are half-way through the piece of music, or it is half-way through you, if you did not remember what you had just heard you would be in the position of a clockticking away its minutes, all the other ticks except the present one no longer existing: so it would be with the notes. You have to live the music in some sense,in contrast with your response to the statue. (Lewis 175) Lewis prefers the Apollonian representation of the statue because it give the self/not self a solid surface to negate, a springboard to give it a boundary. The major purpose of Time and Western Man is to prove that man is a creature of limitations, confined and manipulated not only by the dictum of geometry and physics but the stratification of society as well. It is modernism's failure, and particularly the failure of those labeled the"time cult" to recognize these boundaries.