ABSTRACT Title of Document: WHAT FALLS BETWEEN Neela Vaswani
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ABSTRACT Title of Document: WHAT FALLS BETWEEN Neela Vaswani, Doctor of Philosophy, 2006 Directed By: Dr. John Caughey, Chair American Studies Department This is an interdisciplinary dissertation--in construction and content. It is an exploration of in-betweenness in text and selfhood. Increasingly, as craft, pedagogy, and scholarship evolve and change, a wider space opens for the blurred areas between genres and categories. From “pure” history texts, to highly subjective examples of 'life-writing,” narratives cross borders, blurring lines (such as “true” and “false”) that once appeared stark and rigid. Ethnography, life-writing, and fiction all concern themselves with creating meaningful representations of “self” and “other” through narrative. Language, structure, and voice--aspects of craft frequently corralled with creative writing--are in fact equally important to, and co-dependent on, the “objective” reasoning of “fact”- based writing and scholarship. In its widest definition, this dissertation is a self-reflexive ethnography, inhabiting various genres, crossing borders both creative and scholarly, that consider the author's own blurred identity, and the borders of culture negotiated as an individual and writer. At the core of this thesis is the assumption that personal experience is a form of valid research. The value of the "I" is an overarching, organizing principle of this text. Each chapter addresses particular aspects of categorization: identity, genre, and their interrelations, while certain key themes and questions (gender, ethnicity, place, identity, the politics of words, language, craft, pedagogy, and aesthetics) resonate throughout. WHAT FALLS BETWEEN By Neela A Vaswani Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2006 Advisory Committee: Professor John Caughey, Chair Professor Myron Lounsbury Professor Sheri Parks Professor Maud Casey Professor Jaimy Gordon © Copyright by Neela A Vaswani 2006 Preface There is no pure dissertation Humans categorize. Everything around us, everything we are and produce. Categorization is the methodology of our minds. We are incapable of doing otherwise. It is biological We know the result of sulfur and carbon mixed in a test tube. We predict earthquakes. We locate a book at the library using Dewey’s decimals. We belong to the American Studies Department at the University of Maryland, College Park in the United States of America in the Northern Hemisphere, latitude 38 ° 59’ 12.77” N, longitude 76 ° 56’ 31.05” W. Categorization breeds meaning, community, knowledge, systemics. It is also hierarchical. It breeds power and despair. One must believe and participate in a system in order for it to continue functioning. To question systems is to question reality. To question systems is to revolt. I am investigating this most human of things: categorization. The desire to impose order on the world, on language; to classify trees, rainclouds, butterflies, behavior, ourselves. I am exploring the longing, impulse, necessity for categorization in order to better understand my craft and pedagogy (Literature, Cultural Studies, Creative Writing) and my own identity. Michel Foucault had a laughter that shattered. I picture him on an exercise ii bike, reading Borges, in French. One slug of laugh, and the window behind him (framing the limb of an oak tree), breaks into sharp cantles of glass that sparkle and embed in a cropped, white carpet. Michel does not stop pedaling. He is used to such occurrences because he abhors the sheen of Plexiglas and laughs frequently. In the preface to The Order of Things, he begins: "This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered as I read the passage..."1 What caused Michel to erupt--a fellow writer, Borges, describing, "a certain Chinese encyclopedia," in which: "Animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies."2 Words that shatter—this, the power of narrative. What was shattered for Foucault? Preconceived notions of order, meaning, language, and thought. So, what does it mean to categorize a person? Imagine if Borges had written; Human beings are divided into (a) age at which one's mother died, (b) over 10,000 dollars in bank account, (c) neat, (d) birthplace of great-grandfather on father's side, (e) month in which first tooth appeared, (f) favorite song, (g) love a woman, (h) skin the shade of a wild cherry tree, (i) once-a-month bleeders, (j) kneel when praying, (k) nail biters, (l) afraid of cats, iii (m) vaccinated against polio, (n) having a bellybutton. Categories are always imperfect, mutable (and slightly absurd). The walls of categories, seemingly solid, are as permeable as the membranes of cells. When writing, one flows through walls of genre. When writing, whether consciously or not, one enacts genre-osmosis. There is no “pure” ethnography, “pure” fiction, “pure” autobiography, “pure” history, “pure” science, “pure” dissertation. The values and methodologies of each genre mingle and mix, dodge and weave. And so the notion of category is complicated and illusory. As Trinh Min-Ha writes: "Despite our desperate, eternal attempt to separate, contain and mend, categories always leak.”3 Within all disciplines, scientific or otherwise, categorization exists. It is necessary and restrictive. Vital and reductive. The antithetical nature of categorization creates a flexibility and elusiveness which can be most accurately (comfortably?) described in the language of contradiction or the language of metaphor. Wendell Berry has described genre as “both enablement and constraint” 4 Madeline Kadar says: “Like water, genres assume the shape of the vessel that contains them. Like water, genres tend to exhibit certain properties. But if you empty the containing vessels, the better to see what’s inside, you are bound to be tricked. Like water, the shape of genres does not really exist, and their essence can never really be captured.” 5 iv This is an interdisciplinary dissertation--in construction and content. It is an examination of genre-blurring. It is a self-portrait. It seeks, as its thesis, to wander across borders of genre and personal identity. It is an exploration of in-betweenness in terms of text and selfhood. I am half-South Asian (Sindhi, refugee), half-Irish American (County Kerry to Hell’s Kitchen, third generation). I entered a PhD program in American Studies at the University of Maryland with an MFA in Creative Writing (fiction) from a nontraditional program: Vermont College’s brief-residency MFA. After I had finished my coursework and comprehensive exams, my collection of short stories was published (Where the Long Grass Bends, Sarabande Books, 2004), and I began teaching at Spalding University’s brief-residency MFA in Writing Program (fiction). So, during the course of my PhD in American Cultural Studies, I was writing fiction and thinking about how to teach it. These interwoven aspects of scholarship all came to bear on my dissertation. Because of my bicultural, bilingual, bi’racial’ identity, because I float between creative and academic realms, because I write in numerous genres, this dissertation, as a reflection of its author, is a creature in-between. In form and content, it straddles genre categories: ethnography, memoir, photography, poetry, fiction, essay, lecture, biography, literary criticism, and so on. The hybrid form of this dissertation mirrors v my own experience of moving in-between cultural categories as an individual. The hybrid form of this dissertation is the point. Although each chapter is a stand-alone essay, certain themes and questions resonate throughout. For example, gender, ethnicity, place, and identity are taken up in the form of a “traditional ethnography” in Chapter I (“Six of One, Half Dozen of the Other,”) while they are approached through an imagined (part fictional) literary criticism in Chapter X (“What Hands Are These? (I)”). The politics of words, language, and aesthetics are taken up pedagogically in the form of a craft lecture (delivered to MFA in Writing students at Spalding University) in Chapter III (“Words, Words, Words”), and these concepts are revisited in Chapter IV (“Political Flappings”) in the form of a personal-research essay that includes mini-biographies, interviews, poetry, and photographs. Throughout the dissertation, ideas explored in one chapter (and one genre) are picked up and examined in a different chapter (in a different genre). The form of this dissertation, I hope and intend, serves as both map and example of how aspects of our separate genre methodologies can intermingle, cross- pollinate, and lead us to a more inclusive version of narrative. Life-writing (autobiography, memoir), ethnography, and fiction are all concerned with constructing meaningful representations of “the self” and “other” in narrative form. This dissertation attempts to explore the possibilities of interconnection between these genres (and others), through a self-reflexive, creative, critical thinking “I.” I have attempted to lay the self upon the page, and to treat it as other. Throughout the construction of the thesis I paid close attention to language, vi structure, and voice, “experimenting” with all and treating them as equal to the content, ideas, and scholarship of the piece. This bears repeating, as it is both a central theme and motif of the work: language, structure, voice--aspects of craft frequently corralled with “art” and “creative writing”--are herein equal to and co- dependent on “fact” and “scholarship” (a note—I believe craft and art to be scholarship, and scholarship to be craft and art. I see no divide between them). In thinking through the topic of categorization, I considered both how it is taught (to me, to children, to adults), and how to teach it—in its contradictory complexity.