Words Like Glass Windows

Words like Glass Windows A thesis presented to the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Art Suzanne M. Evans June 2012 © 2012 Suzanne M. Evans. All Rights Reserved. 2 This thesis titled Words like Glass Windows by SUZANNE M. EVANS has been approved for the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences by Dinty W. Moore Professor of English Howard Dewald Interim Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3 ABSTRACT EVANS, SUZANNE M., M.A., June 2012, English Words like Glass Windows Director of Thesis: Dinty W. Moore “Words like Glass Windows” is a collection of essays written and edited during Suzanne Evans’ study at Ohio University. The collection includes seven essays in total. Four longer, memoir-based essays speak to the author’s experiences with belief, religious faith, her father, and Bruce Springsteen, and three shorter essays of meditative reflection focus intently on the entities central to the longer essays. Though it visits a range of topics, the collection as a whole speaks to the singular yet universal nature of human experience and presents the essay as a window that both reveals and reflects. The collection is preceded by a critical introduction in which Evans discusses the driving theory behind her own work—a theory established through the metaphor of art as window—and situates that metaphor among popular historic metaphors, including art as window and art as lamp. Approved: _____________________________________________________________ Dinty W. Moore Professor of English 4 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I must begin by thanking my mother, the one constant of my life, for her encouragement, her love, and for igniting the fire within me to keep moving forward, even in the bleakest of circumstances. I must also extend my enduring gratitude to Dinty W. Moore who opened the door of creative nonfiction to me when I was yet a shy and reserved undergraduate and, over a span of years, taught me the layout of each one of its rooms. Without his guidance and encouragement this work would not be possible. I express my most sincere appreciation to Dr. Eric LeMay and Dr. Marilyn Atlas who have helped to shape me as both writer and scholar and who have been gracious enough to work alongside of me at multiple places in my journey. I am indebted to my friends and colleagues at Ohio University—Zachary Oden, Jeffrey Yeager, Sarah Einstein, Sarah Green, and Melissa Queen, among others—for their careful consideration and response to my work as well as for their unwavering encouragement. Finally, I must thank my dear friend and colleague, Cameron Kelsall, for sharing with me his beauty, talent, and determination, without which my journey would have been exponentially more difficult. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract ...........................................................................................................................3 Acknowledgments ...........................................................................................................4 A Window between the Mirror and the Lamp: A Discussion of the Historical Tradition of Theory through Metaphor in the Context of "Words like Glass Windows" ...................6 Works Cited .................................................................................................................. 19 Words like Glass Windows ............................................................................................ 21 Growin' Up Springsteen: Three to Thirty-One Down Thunder Road .......................... 22 On Fathers ................................................................................................................. 39 The Encyclopedia of my Father as I Know (of) Him: 1969-2011 ............................... 41 On Believing ............................................................................................................. 60 When I was Little, I Believed ..................................................................................... 62 On Faith .................................................................................................................... 77 The Black and White ................................................................................................. 79 6 A WINDOW BETWEEN THE MIRROR AND THE LAMP: A DISCUSSION OF THE HISTORY OF THEORY THROUGH METAPHOR IN THE CONTEXT OF “WORDS LIKE GLASS WINDOWS” A few weeks ago, as I was deep into the process of writing, revision, and thought that would bring the creative portion of this thesis together, one of my most valued mentors asked me, as part of a seminar on the form and theory of nonfiction, to write, using metaphor as a springboard, the driving theory behind my own writing. The assignment was aptly linked to M.H. Abrams’ notion, presented in great detail in his text, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, that metaphor plays an important role in the criticism and theory of art (“Preface”). In the preface to that text, he writes: I have attempted the experiment of taking these and other metaphors no less seriously when they occur in criticism than when they occur in poetry; for in both provinces the recourse to metaphor, although directed to different ends, is perhaps equally functional. Critical thinking…has been in considerable part thinking in parallels, and the critical argument has to that extent been an argument from analogy…a number of concepts most rewarding in clarifying the nature and criteria of art…seem to have emerged from the exploration of serviceable analogues, whose properties were, by metaphorical transfer, predicated of a work of art. (Abrams “Preface”) 7 I fully appreciated the importance of the metaphor in informing and describing art, as Abrams eloquently describes, and had been exposed this method of theory in past study. However, I had yet to consider the application of theory through metaphor to the creative nonfiction essay, and, more specifically, to my own work. I appreciated the challenge of the assignment as well as the potential it provided and so I pressed on in my search for the metaphor that would best present the theory of my own art, my own writing. What follows is an account of my methods and thoughts in responding to the assignment. This account visits the prominent historical metaphors of mirror and lamp, establishes and situates my own metaphor—the essay as window—among those historical metaphors, and considers the application of my metaphor to creative nonfiction that I admire, as well as to my own work in “Words like Glass Windows.” The most appropriate beginning seemed to exist in first revisiting the historical tour of art’s past governing metaphors of mirror and lamp. Looking to the earlier of the two, I began with a closer look at the metaphor of art as mirror, a review that focused specifically on Plato’s Socrates and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. As Abrams rightfully points out, an understanding of the theory at work behind the metaphor of art as mirror leads certainly to Plato’s dialogues, “where [mimesis] makes its first recorded appearance” (8), and more specifically to Plato’s presentation of Socrates in book ten of The Republic (8). Using the example of beds, Plato writes: Beds, then, are of three kinds, and there are three artists who superintend them: God, the maker of the bed, and the painter?...But would you call the painter a creator and maker? Certainly not..I think, he said, that we may 8 fairly designate him as the imitator of that which the others make…And the tragic poet is an imitator, and therefore, like all other imitators, he is thrice removed from the king and the truth? That appears to be so. (Book X) Plato’s presentation here, as Abrams’ notes, clearly demonstrates a view that “works of art have a lowly status in the order of existing things” (8). Thus, if as artists we are only mirroring what has already been initially created by God and then physically created, in the case of the bed, by the carpenter, we are not only “at second remove from the truth” but also equal[ly] removed from “the beautiful and the good” (Abrams 8). Arthur Danto more succinctly expresses Plato’s view, as presented through Socrates, and provides a comparison to the differing thoughts of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Though, as a character, Hamlet may or may not be representative of Shakespeare’s own appreciation of mimesis. Danto writes: Socrates saw mirrors as but reflecting what we can already see; so art, insofar as mirrorlike, yields idle accurate duplications of the appearances of things, and is of no cognitive benefit what-ever. Hamlet, more acutely recognized a remarkable feature of reflecting surfaces, namely that they show us what we could not otherwise perceive—our own face and form— and so art, insofar as it is mirrorlike, reveals us to ourselves, and is, even by Socratic criteria, of some cognitive utility after all. (571) Though I don’t discount Plato’s contribution to an understanding of mimesis, my own interpretation of art’s function as mirror exists in closer proximity to the more positive 9 notions expressed through Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Though we cannot be sure that Shakespeare shares Hamlet’s sentiment, the positive interpretation of art as mirror does resurface in Samuel Johnson’s praise of the famous playwright. In his Preface to Shakespeare, Johnson writes: This therefore is the praise of Shakespeare, that his drama is the mirrour of life; that he who has mazed his imagination, in following the phantoms

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