A Story That Made You Up: a Novel Rachel Haley Himmelheber University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
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University of Wisconsin Milwaukee UWM Digital Commons Theses and Dissertations August 2012 A Story That Made You Up: A Novel Rachel Haley Himmelheber University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.uwm.edu/etd Part of the Linguistics Commons Recommended Citation Himmelheber, Rachel Haley, "A Story That Made You Up: A Novel" (2012). Theses and Dissertations. 191. https://dc.uwm.edu/etd/191 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by UWM Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of UWM Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. A STORY THAT MADE YOU UP: A NOVEL by Rachel Haley Himmelheber A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English at The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee August 2012 ABSTRACT A STORY THAT MADE YOU UP: A NOVEL by Rachel Haley Himmelheber The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2012 Under the Supervision of Professor Valerie Laken A Story That Made You Up traces the dissolution of a long friendship between two women, Mia, the novel’s first-person narrator, and Jules. The focus of the novel involves the importance in women’s lives of having close female friends, and the devastation that occurs when those relationships end. The novel begins with the termination of the relationship and then moves backwards, in achronological fragments, to tell the story of the full twenty-five year friendship. ii © Copyright by Rachel Haley Himmelheber, 2012 All Rights Reserved iii TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. “Multiple Worlds, Multiple Selves: Formal and Perspectival Fractures in Four Novels” 2. A STORY THAT MADE YOU UP: A NOVEL iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation owes much to the amazing and widespread support I have received during its writing. I would first like to thank my generous and wise committee members: Liam Callanan, George Clark, Jonathan Kanter, Pete Sands, and especially my chair, Valerie Laken. I would also like to thank the wonderful English department faculty, administrative and janitorial staff, and graduate student colleagues, particularly Colleen Abel, Jennifer Kontny, Jill Logan, and Bob Martin. I am lucky to have friends who are family and family who are friends, and I want to thank both for their encouragement, advice, and cheerleading: Melissa Rock, Eric Moir, JodiAnn Stevenson, Carmen Gimenez Smith, Emily Clark, Evan Lavender-Smith, Izzy Himmelheber, Wanda Land, John Himmelheber, Virginia Himmelheber, and Sarah Himmelheber. v 1 Multiple Worlds, Multiple Selves: Formal and Perspectival Fractures in Four Novels My fiction has been influenced by contemporary novels that use their own materiality as constructed objects to expose multiple dimensions of their characters. This strategy of using formal fractures that call attention to a book as a tangible thing, such as the strategy of including repeated blank or white space between more typical blocks of prose text, is sometimes associated with postmodernism. Brian McHale contrasts “fiction in the realist tradition [which] has sought to suppress or neutralize” its own materiality “by conventionalizing space right out of existence” with postmodern fiction in which the “introduction of blank space has the effect of foregrounding the presence and materiality of the book, and of disrupting the reality of the projected world” (181). These disruptions create liminal space where the reader must fill in the blank. The novels I will examine use formal fractures that signify spatial/geographical and temporal fragmentation to underscore the perspectival shifts that force the reader into an active role as co- constructor of character. Of course, readers are always participants in the structuring of any given narrative: each reading experience of a single text is necessarily individual. While we as readers “do not reply to the writer, we usually feel s/he is addressing us [as individuals], and we bring a story into being by posing and answering questions (even if unconsciously) about what we read” (Martin 152). The difference I want to highlight in this discussion hinges on McHale’s definition of postmodern fiction as a departure from 2 the modernist tradition. He argues that the “dominant of postmodernist fiction is ontological,” as opposed to the epistemological dominance of modernist fiction, and that this ontological focus can locate the postmodern in the positive realm of possibilities of multiple selves and multiple worlds (10). Within this distinction McHale explicitly connects postmodern fiction’s materiality with its narrative content: he sees these texts as asking questions such as “What is a world?; What kinds of worlds are there, how are they constituted, and how do they differ?; What happens when different kinds of worlds are placed in confrontation, or when boundaries between worlds are violated?; What is the mode of existence in a text, and what is the mode of existence of the world (or worlds) it projects?; How is a projected world structured?” (10). These “questions bear either on the ontology of the literary text itself or on the ontology of the world which it projects”— in other words, the novel’s formal and narrative elements are both called into question (10). As Wallace Martin argues, drawing upon structuralist theory: “a character or person is not a fixed entity with an essence [and] that may be because self and world exist for us only as a project, a becoming” (120). He uses psychoanalytic theory to link this “becoming” with the activity of the reading experience: Character and plot, like self and world, derive their present significance from their position on a path that gathers together all the past and projects it toward a future. The conviction that characters are static entities can come only after reading, when the narrative cuts them off from the possibility of a future and they can therefore be fixed in retrospect. (121) 3 In a reading experience dominated by postmodern fracture (formal, spatial, temporal, and perspectival), this gathering of the past is a recursive process and the projection may be toward multiple, simultaneous futures. The novels I will discuss use their twinned formal and perspectival shifts to ask questions of the reader. What is the nature of this material object, and what is the nature of this story? These questions foreground the development of character trajectory in these novels as the reader must examine how formal breaks expose the multiplicity of selves within any given perspective 1. Carole Maso’s Ava , Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever , Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad , and Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End are easily identifiable as fragmented texts. Pick up any of these four novels and flip through their pages, and the formal breakages announce themselves immediately: the pages of Ava resemble stanzas of poetry, often only one line long, and the novel is separated into three titled sections— “Morning,” “Afternoon,” and “Night”; Why Did I Ever’s chapters consist of numbered (and occasionally, titled) sections separated by white space—45 such sections in the span of the first chapter’s 17 pages; A Visit from the Goon Squad’s chapters are separated into parts “A” and “B” and include chapters in the form of an article from Details magazine and a PowerPoint presentation; and Then We Came to the End’s fifth chapter is followed by an unnumbered interlude chapter and then a numerical reboot—on page 233, we begin again with chapter one. Ava and Why Did I Ever seek to demonstrate the different selves 1 Here, perspective may refer to a novel’s singular point-of-view character and the multiple selves within that point of view, as in the novels Ava and Why Did I Ever , or it may refer to a novel’s perspective on a character—which may encompass multiple point- of-view characters—as in A Visit from the Goon Squad and Then We Came to the End . In each case, the interest in this discussion lies in connecting this multiplicity with formal fracture. 4 from within the inherently complex unity of a first-person point of view, while both A Visit from the Goon Squad and Then We Came to the End utilize more radical perspectival fractures in the form of multiple points of view. None of these four texts employs broad historiographical fractures that seek to revise communal notions of historical truth, as in a text like Michael Cunningham’s The Hours , where we are asked to reconsider our previous understanding of both Mrs. Dalloway and Virginia Woolf. However, each of these four novels demands that a reader’s structuring of characterological history be recursive; as we follow the disruptions these fragments create, space opens for readers to revisit and reconsider our original impressions of who these characters are. In the first two texts I will discuss, Ava and Why Did I Ever , subtle fractures within unified first-person perspectives reveal the narrators’ most private selves. Despite similar formal strategies, the narrative distance in the two novels is quite different. Ava spans a single day, the last day of Ava Klein’s life. Ava is not telling her story to anyone, not even to herself. While the reader by the novel’s end can construct many events from Ava’s life, this construction is enacted entirely by the reader. The fragments of the novel accumulate, and the reader is free to make meaning from them. But what we read in the novel is not meant to be read as Ava’s conscious narration or an interior construction of her memories and thoughts, even as it includes fragments of speech that were obviously previously constructed or narrated. Instead, “Morning,” “Afternoon,” and “Night” are meant to be understood as a sort of unrestricted access to Ava’s most secret, unselfconscious self.